Fix your digital: Email marketing, analytics, and social media for B2B
Fix your digital: Email marketing, analytics, and social media for B2B You’re overstretched. You conduct your business in digital environments, but still feel like you haven’t mastered even the most basic tools. Digital trends come and go like money-sucking bandwagons. You’d rather allocate your time and funds elsewhere. Like Tahiti. You’re not alone. This ebook is the result of a vicious cycle: The more frantic we are to deploy “what’s next” in digital, the more we fail to master what we’re using today. And failing at the fundamentals is really what hurts us. Fortunately, three digital tactics affect B2B companies in every sector: email, analytics, and social media. Once you’ve got these as a foundation, you can stretch into more ambitious digital territory.
The three things:
Email marketing
Analytics
Social media for B2B
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CHAPTER 1 | CHAPTER 2 | CHAPTER 3 | CONCLUSION
Email marketing It’s difficult, expensive, and utterly necessary. There was a time when email marketing was essentially free. You remember, back in 1998 – the baggy clothes, clunky desktop computers, Polaroids. Compared to print pieces and postage, this whiz-bang electronic mail was amazingly cheap. I can send to the whole world for free! Instantly! Except no. Given the mind-numbing prevalence of email today – and its continued relevance – managing cohesive, effective campaigns requires serious work and expenditure. If you want business gains, you need management, automation, and strategy. Otherwise, you’re just shoveling messages into the digital ether.
How marketing automation works (or how it should) Comprehensive automation platforms allow you to plan, deploy, test, and track your email campaigns in one spot. No mere mortal can do these things alone, especially if your company sends more than a couple emails a quarter. So, invest in a good tool. (Burns can provide recommendations and further information at any time – we obsess over these things.)
Some tips: Don’t automate a process that already sucks. Marketing automation is a wonderful way to deploy lead-gen processes you’ve already refined – but make sure you’ve spent enough time on strategy first. Automation doesn’t mean opening the floodgates. You still need to plan your content delivery and lead stewardship thoughtfully. Hitting people with the wrong offerings is no more appropriate when it’s automated for you. Watch your database carefully. Automation highlights a familiar vulnerability: Sending emails and content to a million spam folders and nonexistent inboxes. This can kill effectiveness without you knowing, so do maintenance and list cleanup on the front end. Use a human to evaluate your leads. Marketing automation can create a slew of apparent leads – but go through them before you pass them onto sales, ensuring they’re valid.
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Email takes time. Writing, designing, and creating a deployment strategy – these elements of email marketing demand time and thoughtfulness. You can have the best system in the world, but if your messages seem like they’re written by a 5-year-old, it won’t matter. Likewise, nobody’s going to see your writers’ flowery prose if you send every message at 4:59 on Friday afternoon. Here are a few starting points for managing your email. This list is by no means exhaustive, but these tools belong to the same species of marketing automation platforms. Today, solid marketing automation is no longer a bonus; it’s an ante. ++ Marketo ++ Salesforce Marketing Cloud ++ Oracle Eloqua ++ HubSpot Marketing automation is important because it frees you up for more important strategic thinking and innovation, which is what you should be doing anyway.
Subject:
Fix your damn subject lines.
Offer value.
Make it fun.
Your audience members are protecting their time – so deliver something that improves their lives.
Your jargonny nonsense puts people to sleep. Act like a human. Crack a joke.
Say what’s inside. No need to be secretive – if you’re offering something good (which you should be!), tell the world up front.
Be short. Use 45 characters or fewer. This line is 44.
...and don’t forget the preview text. Many of your recipients will see pre-header (preview) text along with the subject line. This is something you can control, so make it count. Ensure that email clients won’t default to pulling your mailing address or a “Is this email not displaying correctly?” message into that preview line – because that could be all someone ever sees.
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Template for an email strategy
Before you start your next email campaign, answer the following questions. They’ll seem elementary, but that’s okay – odds are you’re not currently addressing them on your own. 1. We think email is the right medium because___________________________________________ . 2. We want these emails to accomplish________________________________________________ . 3. Our call to action (CTA) will be_____________________________________________________ . 4. Our CTA maps to our broader strategy because________________________________________ . 5. We can make emails creative and engaging by________________________________________ . 6. Before deployment and testing, we’ll need to sort out___________________________________ . 7. We will run and use analytics to discern______________________________________________ . 8. Afterward, we will look to improve___________________________________________________ . 9. We completed this email planning worksheet like bosses and will now reward ourselves with____ .
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CHAPTER 1 | CHAPTER 2 | CHAPTER 3 | CONCLUSION
Analytics Raw numbers don’t lie. They don’t necessarily tell the truth, either. Raise your hand if you spend too long obtaining analytics and not enough time acting on them. (We’re guessing you’re raising your hand.)
Data isn’t what improves your marketing; insight is. That’s why your analytics practices should err toward meaningful analysis rather than creating new buckets of raw information. You should only collect data to the extent that you can use it. Spend the rest of your time being creative and blowing minds. In contrast to what you might hear on the blogs, your own staff are more important to creating these insights than the digital tools they use. Software can provide you raw information – starting with our old friend, Google Analytics – but it takes people who are familiar with your company and your needs to discern what actions to take. Human management allows you to prioritize, organize, and execute.
Data isn’t what improves your marketing; insight is.
Only collect data to the extent that you can use it. Spend the rest of your time being creative and blowing minds.
That said, don’t collect data in fits and starts. Establish analytics practices that can remain stable over time – that way, you can glean real insights that will shape behavior. If the real purpose of analytics is to learn and improve, you’re going to need to spend some time on it. For any given priority – say, email marketing – that means at least six months of solid, continual data extraction and interpretation.
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The two key ideas:
Groupthink
Impermanence
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SEO in 2017 and beyond SEO still plagues everybody. Today, one of the best ways to think about it is through the lens of social science. If you think of web users as communal groups, often with overlapping goals and shared behavioral habits, you can understand how SEO really works. The two key ideas are 1) groupthink and 2) impermanence. On one hand, people – in B2B or otherwise – are predictable, which is the premise of Google’s search algorithms. They search similarly and need similar things. But their searches also evolve constantly, so knowing how Google drives traffic in any given month can be the difference between showing up above the fold and never showing up at all. In other words, SEO is not a “set it and forget it” practice. Sorry about that. Fortunately, there is an army of delightful geeks who thrive on deconstructing Google’s mysterious practices for us. One of them is named Rand, and he lives and plays at moz.com.
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CHAPTER 1 | CHAPTER 2 | CHAPTER 3 | CONCLUSION
Social media for B2B “Director of social media” is no longer a pretend job. That director might replace you, actually.
In B2B, succeeding in social media means adapting to the media – not trying to adapt the media to you. That means behaving differently than you do elsewhere. It’s hard, yes. ++ Structurally and thematically, social media is meant to be energetic, casual, and quick. ++ Nobody on your social channels has time for a 10-paragraph post. If they want your product specs listed in front of them, they’ll go find them on your website. ++ Risk is a natural part of social media. If you fall flat, the next days’ social stream will (usually) wipe it all away. If you crush it, you can repurpose that post forever. ++ Social media promotes skimming. Give people little morsels they’ll remember.
A word on jargon: You might think that using buzzwords is expected of you in your market space, but go easy. When you fall back to say-nothing industry terms, your audience moves on. (Google can tell when you’re keyword-loading, too, so focus instead on writing and posting content that is actually valuable.)
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You’re so impressionable. One of the most overrated metrics in social media (and advertising in general) is impressions. Although impressions can give you an idea of how widely you’re spreading your message, they aren’t business outcomes. Focus on whether those impressions are translating to conversions. Fewer targeted impressions can be better for business.
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The business case for social in B2B Businesses in B2B have always lagged in social media. That won’t surprise you. But once and for all, they need to get on board, and the reasons why go far beyond “it’s inevitable.” There’s a specific and compelling argument for investing in social, which means hiring for this purpose, not tacking social media on to some existing job’s description. ++ Many B2B businesses rely on a smaller customer base, and higher price points, than our B2C cousins. That means we need to personalize and engage over time, luring leads with daily doses of who we are and what we stand for. ++The reliance on word-of-mouth in B2B means social media victories travel quickly, and companies can position themselves not just as solution vendors, but as helpful advisors. Nail a wellcrafted social campaign and your market will notice. ++ Most of all, well-researched B2B buying decisions come from multiple sources of information over time – not just your website or brochure. People aren’t just buying your solution; they’re buying your unique brand of partnership.
A warning: In social media, people’s B.S. detectors operate on full blast. They can smell your key messaging and marketing jargon from a mile away, so dial it down and advance your marketing by not marketing so heavily.
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You might have to wear the guerilla suit. If you’re in charge of the company’s marketing, but you’re smothered by strict messaging and style guidelines – or simply a culture that prefers sterile, “safe” communications (even though what’s perceived as safe is often the opposite) – then social media can be your salvation. These channels are often less monitored by leadership (who often thinks they’re worthless), and they can provide many small chances to show your company’s personality. You don’t have to be overtly subversive, but you can venture beyond the usual corporate speak to humanize your company and energize your audience. When your engagement results spike … well, then you can tell the C-suite.
Advice from a 14-year-old ++ Surprise people every now and then. They want to be entertained! ++ Act like you enjoy learning things. Your own sense of wonder can earn trust and a following. ++ Have fun. Nobody follows the lamest company in the industry. You sure don’t. ++ Humanize your company. Take the chance to be relatable, even if you sell black boxes full of hardware.
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A few B2B companies that do their social really well Raytheon (Twitter): When was the last time a leading defense contractor was this… spirited?
Intel (Facebook): The future of tech, with dog pictures.
Cisco (various): How the hell do you humanize the Internet of Things? They did it.
General Electric (Instagram): “7,000 acres of beautiful machines.” Moonwalking in front of a jet engine. Gorgeous.
Callaway Golf (LinkedIn): A fantasy foursome comprising your business contacts – and a chance to win custom gear. We’ll just put that on the company card, thanks.
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CHAPTER 1 | CHAPTER 2 | CHAPTER 3 | CONCLUSION
Time to get started You’re in luck: Most companies like yours struggle with even the most fundamental digital practices, let alone the newest advancements. It’s always been that way. That means you can stand out by mastering the basics. We hope this eBook has given you some starting momentum – and maybe the confidence that such a thing is within your reach. Want more? Burns obsesses over digital best practices, and we can help companies in any field hone their approach.
Interdependent wheel of (mis)fortune: Pin this on your wall so you can remember the endless cycle of digital communications and optimization. This is not a set-it-and-forget-it enterprise; it demands continual attention and tweaking. But if you devote what you need to it, you’ll soar.
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Let’s get fixing We’ll help you fix your digital and dominate your market. Expect nothing less. Info@burnsmarketing.com | 970.203.9656
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