LinkedIn continues to add functionality to their new Companies profiles, which has soft-launched but is officially still in beta mode. These cumulative changes might have you asking an important question – does LinkedIn Companies offer value to a B2B marketer?

Here at Canyon we’ve been looking at these same things, and the short answer is yes – the changes made to LinkedIn can help. The long answer? LinkedIn can help you reach your customers, but only if you combine the changes they’ve made to their website with your B2B strategy.

Here’s how.

Today there are four tabs in your LinkedIn Companies Profile, but only three have B2B Marketing mojo:

1. Overview
2. Products & Services
3. Analytics

The Overview tab is where you can feature a high-level introduction to your company, and call out your Unique Sales Proposition (USP) in the dynamic list of specialties. The integration of blog feeds and tweets are featured front and center (when working that it is – it is in beta, people). Interestingly, news feeds appear on the lower right sidebar, right below a featured YouTube video. Is that a social statement on the value of news today? However, notably absent is Facebook integration; don’t they know Mark Zuckerberg is Time’s 2010 Person of the Year? 

The Overview tab is also where visitors have the opportunity to follow you on various social media platforms, and join your publicized volume of followers. Here, people in your network associated with the company profiled will also appear, which may become far more powerful in the future as sophisticated data miners begin to triangulate relationships, interests and spheres of influence, a trend predicted by Derek Gordon in response to Facebook’s largely favorable coverage on 60 Minutes this past weekend.

The Products and Services tab is also growing and becoming more valuable since being rolled out to all users in November. You define your products and services by name, description and up to eight bulleted features. You can also specify three points of contact within the company for each product, which offers you the chance to engage potential customers right away. The cool feature here is the ability to feature product -specific ‘network-aware recommendations’, which has hockey stick growth potential written all over it!  These recommendations make your product (or service) ‘likeable’ in a professional network, making your organizations Companies profile a great on-line asset.

Now we’ve done it.  Calling your Companies profile an asset begs the proverbial question of ROI.  As with most things social media- and even professional social media- a mandate of demonstrating value is a requirement for B2B marketing.  LinkedIn is beginning to provide a framework for identifying key metrics as displayed on your Analytics tab. 

Admittedly, LinkedIn Analytics (and Canyon’s results) has a way to go become an actionable, vital tool in your marketing portfolio.  However, after just one day since building out our Companies profile, we’ve already seen new followers and expanded our proverbial reach.

Later we’ll tackle segmenting Canyon’s services by audience demographics, creating custom display ads, adding service-specific images and dig into the technicalities of the LinkedIn Recommend Button.  Follow along on our journey by following Canyon – on LinkedIn, B2B Fishbowl blog, Twitter, or Facebook – because there is more to this story – potential privacy pitfalls to avoid and the bigger picture of LinkedIn’s plans for our Company information assets.

Search engine optimization (SEO), the practice of placing key words and phrases to better improve a web page’s visibility to search engines, is all the rage today (ironically, a Google search for  the phrase yields a staggering 54 million+ hits). Businesses are constantly looking for ways to appear higher in search engine rankings to help their customers, both potential and otherwise, find them.

But, finding the perfect balance of SEO strategies, keywords, key phrases and best practices can be a challenging exercise. SEO is a moving target, with the proprietary alogrithms each search engine uses changing constantly (even daily), and a mis-step resulting in the dreaded “blackhat” that could potentially move you to the bottom of the search rankings. Canyon Communications recognized this challenge and responded to it by adding a digital strategy manager to its team, and we were thrilled to have Dara Schulenberg fill this position this past November.

Some of you might have read Dara’s take on SEO in the December issue of In Business Magazine. The article titled, “Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Don’t be SOL (Sadly Outta Luck)” discusses SEO keyword and key phrase selection, myths and misconceptions regarding SEO as well as the ranking creditability. It also cautions readers against trying to outsmart search engines with tactics like word stuffing to appear higher in the ranks (again, the dreaded “blackhat”).

One of Dara’s key insights is that when it comes to SEO there really isn’t one, single best practice. Search engines are constantly changing their algorithms, which means it’s more important than ever to have a partner dedicated to helping you stay on top of the ever-changing world of SEO.

Are you looking for a partner to help you analyze and modify your SEO strategy to help you get the most bang for your buck? Give Dara a call at Canyon – she’s the perfect person to help point you in the right direction, and help your customers find you sooner.

The Art of Persuasive Copywriting

Imagine you are in a fancy hotel room and you stumble across a towel re-use card in the bathroom. Which of the following two messages would have more of an impact on you?

Help save the environment by re-using your towels.

or

Help save the environment.  The majority of guests in this room reuse their towels.

According to the Journal of Consumer Research article “A Room With A Viewpoint“, authors Noah J. Goldstein, Robert B. Cialdini and Vladas Griskevicius argue that the second message, which includes a descriptive norm, would increase the likelihood of your re-using your towel by nine percent.  Now nine percent may not sound like a large increase, but in marketing terms, that additional nine percent could have massive impact. For example, in the case of targeted e-blasts, a click-through increase of nine percent would be considered a great success.

The change in wording between the two examples personalizes the meaning and provides context to reasonable societal expectations (if the majority of guests do one thing, I want to do it too). It also goes to show how influential language, and subtle variations in that language (we’re saying essentially the same thing) can be when it comes to the art of persuasion. Semantics are especially important in B2B marketing communications, where ads and collateral pieces tend to be more informational and content-heavy. At the end of the day, effective marketing depends on finding interesting and effective ways to communicate features and benefits to consumers, with a subtle persuasion factor built in to drive consumer behavior. 

So the next time you are creating an e-blast or whipping up a white paper, don’t underestimate the power of good copy (including the power of semantics).  The way your messaging is worded could make or break the success of your communications.

Would the second message listed above have more of an influence on you?  Why or why not?

The driving force behind innovation is problem solving. A person or group of people has a challenge and they come up with a brand new idea, or a different way of applying an old one in order to overcome that challenge. That simple formula enabled a host of firsts like fire, the wheel and GPS Navigation. But what happens when the solution is not so much new or different but more or less the same? Maybe it has a different color, operating system or touch screen, but the net benefit is the same.

Welcome to the current world of marketing. How do you create value for our product or service if it looks, acts and sells the same as your competitors? In B2B, the fallback strategy is to tag and affiliate the word “solutions” to your offering. Need a new enterprise software platform? You’ll find lots of ‘solutions’. Need a new home security system? Again, plenty of ‘solutions’ exist. Need a new thing-a-ma-jig for your wathcha-ma-call-it. We’ll, you’re likely to find a solution for that too.

Is simply having a solution enough? The answer is no. Your customer or prospect assumes you have a solution or can address a particular need, otherwise they wouldn’t be coming to you in the first place. What really matters is the HOW? Tell them how you can more uniquely solve their challenge. How will they benefit from what you have to sell? How will that benefit be more valuable to them than other alternatives in the marketplace?

B2B organizations need to place more emphasis on creating a compelling message so it stands out among those alternatives that simply claim to have a solution. As you work hard to get your marketing and communications plans together, spend less time worrying about how much of your budget is going to website tactics, offline tactics or the next iteration of social media. First think about what you have to sell, and determine how you can present that offering in a way that has more impact. Don’t just be another solution, have an actual answer to a problem. Your customers will see you as being more innovative, and you’ll convert higher rates of new customers as a result.