European company, Baseone Buyersphere, released their 2011 report on the new B2B Buyer Behavior.  I read it and you can, too.

Tony Ambrito with Customer Think provides a great recap of the report. I really enjoyed reading it and would like to conclude with my own pressure points for B2B marketing professionals:

Buyers Take their Appetite for Information Online

Supplier websites and web searches tested highest for most frequently used source of information overall. They’re searching, which means when your website pops up, whether from a direct, referring or organic hit, it needs to be immaculate.

Satisfy their Hunger with More Content

Not too far behind Supplier websites and Web searches were Industry press, Press Advertising and Online Events/Seminars. Which begs the question – are you pumping out valuable, relevant content in the right channels?

The report also detects that buyers are looking for issue-based content – solutions to issues they’re experiencing, not necessarily a new supplier. Some are even saying that intent and context is the future of e-mail marketing.  Content, content, and more content!

Offline Events Still Influence

Although offline events and seminars received a drop in use, it reported still as the most “influencial”. Meaning in-person experiences are just as important as online user experiences.

Tradeshows shall live on!

Bottom line: perfect your content marketing strategy and everything else will fall into place. Is your B2B content marketing strategy up to snuff?

image credit: Buyersphere

Did you know that the first online, clickable display ad appeared in 1993 for a now-defunct Silicon Valley law firm? Now, in 2011 display ads are on almost every site we visit and have evolved from a clickable image to formats including video and rich-media. These ads are critical to the success of the internet and have become a cost efficient way to engage your target audiences. Businesses continue to realize the importance of online and the proof lies in the increase of 2010 internet revenue growth to second, only behind TV.  

In B2B, display ads play a critical role in brand awareness and can be used to promote lead nurturing activities. Display ads drive traffic to webinars, support promotions and encourage prospects to download whitepapers and case studies. Like any marketing tactic, success of your display campaign relies on identifying and reaching your target audience with content that connects with them.

Thanks to a fellow Canyonite, I recently discovered Bizo. For those of you who haven’t heard of Bizo, it is a company that specializes in targeting business audiences through display advertising and offers an analytic platform called Bizographics. They analytics provide detailed insight into who is visiting your site by industry, company size, title and more. Bizo allows you to target a specific business audience through display advertising based on the segments you choose to target. Combining display with search will increase reach of your target audience and can increase your search conversion by up to 31% (salesforce.com).

If you have a success story with display ads, share it with us! If you have a favorite display ad, we would love to see it. If you are looking for a way to put display to work for your organization, contact Canyon.

With B2B marketing budgets reported to increase in online areas this year, we can expect to see a lot of web site improvements, more regular SEO updates and significant growth in the presence that businesses have in social media.

Web sites, SEO and social media all have one successful driver in common…content.  And while individually they have best practices for tone and format, the content must be engaging to your target audience.

As you are investing in your online resources, here are a few steps you can take to ensure your content stays relevant.

1. Research – Engage in quarterly research with new, existing and lost clients. Use your clients as a resource to gain insight into key decision factors and how the industry is changing based on their needs. Use this information to generate content for your web site, as a guide for discussions in social media and for SEO.
2. Test & Measure – Test and measure content to see how your target audience reacts to it. Google Analytics is just one great resource to measure web traffic, page views, click through rates and time spent on your web site. There are also analytic tools to measure the impact of your social media efforts.
3. Update – With content management systems like MODX and WordPress, updating web content is easy, so you can keep content relevant and engaging. When your web content calls for updating, don’t forget to update your SEO so that your audience can find you. Whether you are using Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter or a blog, successful social media also calls for consistently updated content. 
4. Repeat – Set a schedule and stick to it. Continue to evaluate, test & measure and update your content as needed so that your audience stays engaged longer and you are generating higher quality leads. 

Looking to get the best results from your online assets – contact Canyon today.  Our PR team and a digital team are ready to make your assets work for you!

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.