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Archives for April 2016

B2B Social Media: do’s and don’ts

I invited Adrian Cordiner (who founded DigitalRhinos) to write a post about B2B social media for us today.

Do’s and don’ts of social media for B2B companies

b2b social media
For business to business marketing campaigns, you really want to get it right the first time. How you engage with your audience online shows how much or how little you actually understand your audience. Social media for B2B takes analysis and strategy, and like everything else in marketing, it must continuously evolve. The best way to make better marketing decisions is by using real data. Here are a few tips on how to (and how not to) approach your audience and create content they want to click on.

Know your audience

You have to determine where your audience is and decide if your account is going to be global or localized to specific country/location – this is extremely important, as audience location will determine the time of day you share content. Learning when your audience is tuning in, and therefore when to post, is mandatory for any successful campaign. You can easily access all of these details through the analytics sections of your Facebook Business Manager, Twitter and YouTube accounts.

Choosing the right content for your audience

Content creation is easily the hardest thing to get right when it comes to marketing. A slip up in the content creation can cost you an entire campaign. Your content marketing has to be tied into the core marketing efforts of the company as a whole, so before you can expect to nail B2B content marketing successfully, you need to know why you’re doing it. What are your goals in content marketing? Lead generation? Sales or brand activation? Define it. Write it down, and then roll out a content marketing plan that supports those goals. Once you have those goals set, choose your content.

DO Use Imagery – A great photo provides a great opportunity to illustrate and promote your company’s culture, values, and philosophy and to showcase important events.

DO Use Video – not just video, but GREAT video footage. Don’t allow bad videos or imagery representing your brand or product to go online. Quality is the key to success.

In your video content – be straight to the point. Don’t tell the story you think people should hear, tell the story that people want to hear.

Know what is trending socially

Knowing what is trending is one of the most difficult tasks for a marketing department, and especially when your marketing budgets are done annually, you might fall behind rather quickly if you don’t have some sort of marketing clairvoyance. A great tool for monitoring trending content is Buzzsumo where you can search for currently trending content by keyword searches or set up alerts for competitors’ activity and your own content.

Apart from the obvious, and already touched on video content, one of the latest trends for B2B marketing online is live video broadcasting. Two of the apps which make livestreaming possible are called Periscope and Blab – and both are currently creating a ton of buzz in the online world. These two apps are extremely valuable for platforms like e-Learning (creating a live ‘classroom’ for viewers).

Make your campaign easy to access

Mobile devices are currently being used more than any other form of media viewing, so make sure your campaigns and content are easily viewed in mobile format, and don’t forget your website. There’s nothing more tedious than clicking to a seller website, and not being able to navigate on your mobile phone, except maybe not being able to get there at all. Don’t forget to ask yourself “Can people find you?” Optimise your social profiles so that you can be at their thumb tip with ease.

The ultimate goal for a marketing campaign is to brand build, and brand build as effectively as possible, (leading to sales). Don’t lose track of that long-term goal. Always remember the importance of B2C in your B2B campaigns and don’t be afraid to use these techniques that worked before.

Adrian Cordiner accidentally stumbled into digital marketing after starting an online travel company and realizing there was a whole world out there of SEO, SEM, Analytics, CRO and so on that he knew absolutely nothing about. Many years of reading, researching, testing and making lots of mistakes along the way have lead him to where he is today, running his own digital marketing agency (Digital Rhinos) and founding a content marketplace startup (Prozely), still reading, still researching, still testing and hopefully making a few less mistakes.

Promoting CSR & Employee Volunteer Programs

I invited Hattie James to write a post for us about employee volunteer programmes. Hattie has experience in building an employee volunteer program, and is interested in how they can help with recruiting as well as corporate social responsibility.

Over to you, Hattie!

volunteers

The concept of social responsibility is key for corporations. For many organizations, it can make or break public relations, profits, even the company’s existence. Today, corporate social responsibility (CSR) is just as important to the people in the organization as it is the people who support it.

There are many facets of CSR and ways of promoting it. Typically, CSR is seen as the corporation’s responsibility with its business practices, from how sustainable its manufacturing might be to how it reacts to a global crisis. However, CSR is bigger than that.

Larry Parnell, director of the George Washington University’s Strategic Public Relations Program, differentiates between traditional CSR and strategic CSR in his presentation Corporate Social Responsibility. According to Parnell:

“Strategic social responsibility is this concept of doing well by doing good. That’s both operationally, in terms of how you manage your resources. And your people, but also in the community and in the world at large, what kind of activities, programs and undertakings are you involved in that benefit the market that you are hoping to serve. An example of this would be IBM or other technology companies donating used recycled computers to homework centers in cities where access to computers is hard to get for economic or other reasons. And training students on how to use computers and use computers to do science, technology . . .”

Under Parnell’s model, IBM uses employee volunteering to do more than just serve its community. The donations are paired with employees training students how to use the hardware and software, thus making the impact on the community greater and benefiting the company by encouraging the students to use computers.

How, then, do you go about promoting CSR through employee volunteer programs (EVPs) like IBM’s?

Find Your Experts

Chances are, you already have a number of employees who have spent years doing volunteer work or giving their time to a nonprofit. If you don’t know, or don’t know who they are, put out a call via internal communications, letting your organization know that an EVP will be built.

Seek out the employee volunteers who do the most but seek the least personal publicity. These are your true EVP ambassadors. When your EVP is built, these are they people you want to be the face of your company.

Their participation in the EVP serves a dual purpose. It builds participation by drawing like-minded employees to the program, and it builds external PR through the example set in the community by the participants.

The expertise of these volunteer ambassadors is also needed to build the EVP because they are the ones most experienced with this type of CSR, even if they don’t realize it.

Find Their Skills

Once you’ve identified your volunteer ambassadors and created your EVP planning committee, it’s time to decide how you’re going to structure how employees give their time. Corporations that are large and niche-based, like IBM in Parnell’s example, are set up for large-scale volunteer days, or even weeks.

Private organizations that can offer employees paid time off for volunteer days can partner with a single nonprofit. This deeper relationship with a charitable organization is a great way for your business to get involved, as it can last years.

However, if your organization is smaller or encompasses multiple business units, building a skills-based EVP can prove more beneficial for your employees and your community. Skills-based volunteering matches individuals and groups of individuals with charitable endeavors that match their personal or professional skills. If you’re a large engineering and architecture firm, you can, for example, encourage one business unit to volunteer with Habitat for Humanity and another to complete environmental clean-up.

This model EVP will attract more employees to the program, as pairing your EVP with one nonprofit partner can alienate employees who would otherwise participate. Employees want to care about their volunteer experiences as much as their jobs. Letting them choose how they interact with the community. Suggest to the legal team that it volunteer with community justice programs. If, however, they choose to use their skills for a different nonprofit, herein lies the beauty of the model.

Find the Recognition

Employees participate in an EVP for a variety of reasons, but they’re rarely about recognition. Just building an EVP in your organization can go a long way to recognizing their efforts and to boosting CSR within the company.

However, that doesn’t mean your EVP should be without recognition or reward of any kind. Leaving it at, “They do it because they care,” is not enough. Incorporate participation in the EVP into the corporate reward program. Look to the example of how nonprofits recognize their volunteers, and begin a Volunteer of the Month award in your company. Publicize this internally and externally.

If your organization can afford to do so or is allowed to do so, offer employees paid time off to do their charitable work. Offer the financial reward of matching any monetary donations made by the employees. Not only are these matches tax write-offs, they can be communicated to the public as a sign of CSR.

Find Your Voices

Once your EVP is built, it’s time to roll it out within the organization and the community. Plan your roll-out strategically. Depending on your location, find out when volunteers are celebrated nationally, and use that as your rollout month or week. In the U.K., National Volunteers Week is being celebrated for an extended period this year: June 1-12. In the U.S., National Volunteer Month is celebrated every April. Create your own organizational volunteer week to highlight both facets of the EVP and volunteer opportunities within your community.

Share any information via social media channels so that your community can see what you are planning. Once employees begin volunteering as part of the EVP, encourage them to share with Public Information Officers their own pictures and stories.

During large-scale volunteer days, media officers should be made available to document the efforts of employees. This documentation is key to the promotion of CSR among employees and to the community at large. Without it, no one knows what efforts are being made.

Writing for inc42, Kevin Kruse defined employee engagement as, “People give loyalty and discretionary effort to those who foster growth, show appreciation, share a compelling vision and are trustworthy.”

This extends to efforts to engage customers as well as potential employees. Both customers and recruits care about how corporations are impacting communities, not just about products and money. Planning a thorough EVP will be key to CSR and employee engagement.

Thanks Hattie!

Hattie James is a writer and researcher living in Boise, Idaho. She has a varied background, including education and sports journalism. She is a former electronic content manager and analyst for a government agency. She holds an MBA and enjoys local ciders and the outdoors. Follow her on Twitter: @hejames1008