Without going into too much detail - since I do not want to turn this into me trying to promote anything on here - I am looking for advice from professionals or anyone that has unique insight in the industry of Digital Marketing, specifically when it comes to working with a B2B IT company. To give a little background, I have been tasked in my job to develop a strategy that will ultimately achieve two goals for our company: 1) Increase brand visibility by driving more people to our website. (Increase Website Visitors) 2) Create a digital atmosphere that will support a future sales team by providing leads. (Generate Leads) Our company has recently undergone a website redesign in which we took multiple websites and consolidated them into a single website presence. Essentially we had separate websites for each country that we operate out of and have since changed that tactic to having a single website for all of our operations. In addition, we have done the exact same thing with all of our social media presences. Multiple Facebook pages merged into one, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. The new website is OK – we have made significant changes in terms of including “Calls to Action” on each of the services pages, which make it significantly easier for people to reach out to us when they want more information or have questions regarding our services. The layout is colorful and the information is good – could be much more – but it is there. However, our difficulties lie in exposure. Getting people to know about us and reach out to us for services and projects. Right now, we are pulling in roughly 10,000 hits to our website a month, which I want to grow immensely. What I have done so far: 1) I have gotten us set up on Google Analytics and Google Webmasters tools. 2) Also, I have set up an account with Google AdWords with an initial first campaign. The Adwords keywords will need a good bit of massaging, since I am just now starting to get data for them, but I believe this will be a decent avenue to at least start growing our traffic a good bit. 3) I have revamped all of our social media pages – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ Right now I am working with a budget of 500.00 a month. This is low at the moment but can be grown pretty significantly, however I will need to know exactly what it is growing for. I wanted to keep it kind of low for this month, seeing how I am more in the collecting data/set up stage of it all and didn’t want a lot of pressure with a high budget since there wouldn’t be too many results being seen yet. I have considered, doing some paid advertising on LinkedIn – seeing how our business consists of B2B IT services, LinkedIn seems like a good route for exposure for us. Though I don’t know a ton about it, I do know that it is very focused on industry and location. I guess what I am looking for is any advice or tips that people may have when it comes to building a digital marketing strategy for a company like this. Any experience people have, good tactics, etc. I have to give a presentation next week that outlines a plan out, so any and all advice is GREATLY appreciated. I have some experience in this area, but not nearly as much as I could have and definitely do not have much experience putting these plans into practice – but hoping that I can call on the internet community to some extent to help out – because hey there is no such thing as too many fishing lines right?
Going or running next to your business takes few centimeters, So without seeing the site...I guess you should... Going with a deep analysis and figure out if: (A) you don't know enough about what prospects want to achieve (B) you are doing a poor job of explaining the offer/s (C) visitors don't trust your business (D) bringing in visitors who aren't looking to buy (E) the site has usability problems (F) Potential Ads Which Are Not Set Up Correctly (G) Use Ads That Reflects Targeted Keywords. Ads That Don’t Reflect Target Keywords (H) Using Enough Ad Groups (I) Using Low Quality Score Column If you need more assistance PM me. Sincerely, Matt
A rule of thumb I'd use for ANY organisation in ANY industry is thus: - Mission statement/corporate goals - Marketing strategy/plan - Digital marketing strategy So as the mission sets everything a firm is supposed to do, then the marketing and then digi marketing plans must follow from that. If the marketing plan is in place, you just have to focus on identified target markets, profit and loss plans, market analyses, any market research, etc. and mold it around that. For B2B (I presume in this case between wholesalers and distributors) not sure if social media would be worthwhile. Your customers would have Twitter pages, but then would you get enough hits to warrant that? If it were B2C, then yeah, it makes better sense IMO. The website is a good start, but then a Facebook and perhaps Youtube page may suffice. I'd say again as a rule of thumb, you have to figure out what digital tools your target market would visit and use these to engage them. Not saying my view is the absolute view, but then Twitter doesn't make sense IMHO because you won't get many hits if it's just firms and not end-users. Twitter makes best sense IMO for mass market goods.
I assume that you have IT certifications for various manufacturers? Be sure to become a registered partner with your most important manufacturers and then get involved with their channel sales and marketing folks. The big manufacturers are moving heavily into digital marketing and they will have free or low-cost programs for their partners. Many, for example, have set up email marketing systems for partners that include excellent content and tools for creating and sending out email communications to your clients and prospects. You will need to supply the list, of course, though they will likely also be able to point you to approved vendors of appropriate lists. They also may be willing to provide MDF funds to help finance your other marketing efforts. You can also get assistance from the big distributors in this regard. Here's another more specific tip: if you become a Cisco partner, you can then actually run banner ads on the Cisco forums web pages. Pretty cool exposure to data center people who typically go there looking for solutions to problems that they have and the right offer to solve their pain could be quite successful. They have an outside agency handling the ads, but you have to be a registered partner on the Cisco site for your ads to be approved.