Online marketing for businesses and marketing to end customers is different. A person buying a product for their company has different “buying standard” compared to a person buying something for himself. There are profound differences and one of them is the emotional experience. These points should be remembered when developing online marketing activities.

B2B and B2C marketing is used to differentiate the internet commerce business. There are companies that sell primarily to businesses while others sell primarily to end customer. Marketing programs are the same for each type of business but they differ in executions and the outcomes of the marketing activities.

B2C (Business to Consumer) marketing campaigns are concerned with the transaction. They are usually shorter because they need to capture the customer’s attention immediately. These campaigns usually offer special deals such as discounts and vouchers that can be used both online and in the store. Their goal is to get their customers to buy immediately. B2B (Business-to-Business) marketing process is longer and is more involved. Although its goal is to turn prospects into customers, a B2B company needs to focus on building long-term relationships with their clients. They use marketing to educate their customers about their products. In an email campaign, you usually see contact information for offline transactions and contain more information on the features of the product, benefits and the prices. This marketing strategy is usually the first step, and it usually includes direct mail, telemarketing, and newsletters and follows up by a sales representative who will discuss the business’ requirement in more detail and walk the prospect through the sales cycle.

The main difference between the B2B and B2C marketing comes down to the buyer’s emotional perspective about the purchase. Consumers buying decisions are based on status, security, comfort and quality. On the other hand, business buyers base their decisions on increasing profitability, reducing costs and enhancing productivity.

In online marketing, if you are offering products and services to businesses, it is wise to invest on a marketing budget that focuses on marketing programs and materials that offer your target market what they need in order for them to make a rational business decision. Help them determine the value of your products and services through quality materials, testimonials and other activities that builds your credibility. If you are offering your products and services to end consumers, understand the motivation of your buyer and the emotional aspect of the decision. It is best to create compelling materials that build awareness of your brand and project the quality service and best price. Always remember what is important to your target audience and create an online marketing program that will reach out to them and convince them to buy your products and services.

At Generate UK we can help advise you to optimise your Online Marketing Strategy to reach your desired target audience. Our consultants are specialists in online marketing and can help focus you campaign on either B2B Marketing of B2C marketing. If you would like to discuss your Online Marketing further please do not hesitate to get in contact with us, we’d love to talk with you.

Twitter, love or hate it its here to stay. So, we either shy away from it or we understand it, embrace it and maximise its business potential.

The three main reasons we find why people do not use Twitter are:
1.    They don’t know how to use it
2.    It sounds silly and they don’t understand the concept
3.    They don’t think anyone in their organisation will have time to use it or embrace it

The concept of Twitter is simple, it’s a place to chat, share information, check the latest news, let people know what you’re doing, highlight latest achievements, promotions and to demonstrate why people should come and talk to you. If you think about Twitter from a ‘business perspective’, this is what most businesses are trying to achieve every day.  Twitter represents a great online vehicle to be able to build a community and reach out with a click of a button.

The trick to Twitter is to work out the best ways to maximise its potential and to integrate it into your everyday business processes. Once you have a number of followers you can communicate to an audience on an instantaneous basis and you’ll wonder why you didn’t start tweeting earlier!

Below is a whistle stop tour of how and why Twitter should be used as a Marketing tool.

Why consider Twitter?
A few quick reasons why you should seriously think about Twitter:
1.    The sheer volume of users - Twitter has over 75 million users you could connect with
2.    Its speed - Twitter is a real time social media platform
3.    Networking facilitation - The ability to network with people and companies within the same industry as you
4.    Mobile Marketing usage - Twitter is accessible on mobile phones meaning you get your message to them at all times

Use it to increase your traffic.
Twitter is a great way to drive traffic to your website.  Twitter is a fantastic environment to make people aware of your brand, share their thoughts, understand your products and services which in turn will drive targeted traffic. You can constantly update, change and post new services and products you offer and drive those who are interested to your website through promotions and quality literature. If you are aware of link building, then twitter provides a very strong reputable link for your site, if you are not aware of link building please have a quick read of our older posts link building.

Increase your reputation.
Twitter is a platform where you as a business can demonstrate your knowledge and expertise to a large audience. By posting interesting tweets, posting links to news articles and even links to your blog, you can show your target audience as well as other businesses in your industry that you know what you’re talking about and that you’re an expert in your field, increasing your reputation online.

Live News Feed.
Twitter is a real time social media platform. So what does this mean? This means that every tweet is immediately posted to your followers. This means that you can get your company’s news into the public eye in a matter of seconds. It has recently been seen that large news stories have been posted on Twitter before reaching respectable news sites such as the BBC. This means instead of having to plan weeks in advance to for you to appear in magazines and papers through press releases, product reviews or feature articles, through Twitter you can post immediately to access customer reaction and feedback.

Networking.
Twitter also has a sophisticated networking facility. This means that you can directly communicate with other businesses or suppliers. You’ll find that a lot of people have a business Twitter account as well as a personal one, giving you the opportunity to directly communicate with CEO’s or Directors of companies. This also means that people will be able to contact you. A business searching for related services can read your profile then message you to register their interest.

These are but only a few reasons of how and why twitter can be a powerful marketing tool. In 2010 it has almost become a necessity for a business to be on twitter, but it’s up to you as a business to maximise the opportunities the platform offers.

So now we’re all being told we’re in a deep recession, come on people…..it’s now time to start understanding how to make your budget work harder! 

Gone are the days when you threw as much as you could at the wall hoping for something to stick or you position your meta data and keywords in their rightful places and hope for the best, let’s start thinking a little bit beyond the stale old marketing techniques and start embracing the new online world. The quicker you do it and understand it the quicker you’ll get to where you need to be. Some might say you’ve already missed the boat? Personally I completely disagree, I speak to many companies daily and 70% of these companies are still nowhere near where they need to be in terms of technology, skills and knowledge so you still have time. 

We’ve reported in past blogs that online marketing is set to increase dramatically over during 2009 and the reason is ‘The Stats Don’t Lie!’ 

Let’s look at things in a simplistic manner, would you go out and buy a new Mini without test driving it first? Read a review or two? Listen to a mate who raves about how good his Mini is? No of course not, because you want to know that you’re not wasting your money and let’s be honest there’s obviously a few spare Minis out there at the moment so you’re bound to pick up a bargain. 

Thinking about the above scenario within the marketing spectrum any sensible business owner, marketing manager/director will want to be able test, track, analyse and basically understand the metrics. This will enable them to see if the activities they’re looking to invest into are going to provide them with the desired return which inevitably is sales, or switching back to the above scenario an enjoyable and reliable drive that’s not going to be a waste of your hard earned cash. 

I used to sell advertising and while I still love magazines and buy into the whole print media industry from a marketer’s perspective it’s a gamble. You can place numerous promotional codes on the advertisement however you can never really understand the full mechanics and your exact returns.  When I used to sell advertising I always dreaded the renewal process. Having to present to an advertiser, who the year before spent £30k with me on a repeat half page colour ad on page 7, why they should sign up for another year without any hard core facts and figures, barring the fact that our circulation had increased by 3000 was always a challenge. 

Spending money on marketing always represents a gamble however marketing online represents far less of a gamble as you can test and measure. I love that ability, test and measure! It makes everything a lot clearer and my decisions a lot easier. 

Online Marketing needs to be embraced and if you haven’t yet fear not, there is still the window of opportunity.  I spoke to a company the other day who basically was bragging that they had x amount of traffic to their site and x amount of back links which was true, however where this company failed in the online spectrum was the analytics and measuring part of equation. As, when we looked into the traffic 80% of it came from America and Google.com not Google.co.uk and the fact that they only sold to the UK was quite concerning and in relation to their links 60% came from one source which isn’t bad but isn’t really helping their SEO cause. 

Whatever online activity you feel is going to help your business, take a step and trial it as the Stats Don’t Lie! Good luck and if you need any advice call 01635 550 431 and speak to the Generate UK Team.

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For a while now, there has been something about search engine optimisation that has been bothering me. It’s not the practise of SEO in general, it’s not even the multitude of companies popping up with their “New SEO services” conveniently added to their portfolio as the hot new thing to talk about. What is bothering me is that there are too many companies out there offering SEO in a market that does not offer an industry quality standard. They are offering a service in a market that has not really been defined.

This means that there is potential for customers to get ripped off and for SEO in general to be given a bad name, some will argue that this is already happening. I don’t have a huge amount of sympathy for companies who sign up with SEO firms without doing their homework, usually the better SEO firms benefit in the long term as companies who have had their fingers burned understand the true value of what SEO is and will make better decisions next time. The lesson they learn is that SEO should form a portion of their wider marketing objectives, SEO alone is only part of the story. A defined Internet marketing strategy that incorporates SEO and a whole host of other digital marketing techniques is where the magic happens.

This view and these comments are not typical of our industry, but they are a key mantra for us at Generate UK. This is because if you look at the average SEO key performance indicators, they do not sit pretty with what the company business goals might be. Let’s use keyword ranking as an example; this is a great metric that your SEO company will use to demonstrate to you that they have had a positive impact on your rankings. They have a clear before and after picture that can not be doubted. This is absolutely true, however would you use this metric when measuring the success of your site? If you were a business owner, would you prefer to measure the success of how high you rank for a specific keyword or how many new orders you have received? I know you could argue that the higher you rank the more targeted traffic you receive, but this asumes keyword research. More importantly, it assumes that you have a super landing page that is making the most from your visitors. Put another way, high rankings does not necessarily mean conversations.

Hopefully, this arguement is allowing us to make our point. SEO alone is not enough anymore, the real value from a digital marketing agency is that they should know how to deliver targeted traffic to your site, traffic that converts and is delivered within your budget. SEO absolutely forms a part of that, but it is not the total solution that is being pitched in our market space. Let’s look at another example, SEO firms will point to a growth in traffic via the search engines as a result of their work, it’s a straightforward to measurement and is undeniable. The question is whether or not that increase in traffic meant more sales for you, did it convert, did you receive more sign ups, if the answer is no, then is the increase in traffic worth it?

We maintain that the only way to measure your digital marketing agency, regardless of whether they are providing just SEO or the full spectrum of search marketing services is via conversions. Only then are they adding true value to your business and working in line with your marketing objectives. By understanding your marketing objectives, they fully understand what constitutes success, therefore the SEO companies can then provide you with metrics that actually mean something to you. SEO alone is a tool that might help you towards your goal, a digital marketing strategy will enable you to exceed it.

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I’ve been on-site a lot during the last couple of weeks in talks with one of my clients about their Internet marketing strategy. I enjoy these types of meetings because they are a great opportunity to throw everything at a whiteboard, no idea is too outlandish and everyone has an opportunity to be involved in the growth of their business.

There were some really inspired ideas, some were easy to implement while others required a little more thought and some understanding of the business processes. This is not unusual, what you want when you’re thinking about your Internet marketing strategy is a selection of ideas; some of which can be introduced immediately and have an immediate effect, whilst others you can work on in the background.

We’ve been working with this client for a number of years now, fortunately we know what their objectives are for their site and we can try to ensure that whatever is formally entered into their Internet marketing strategy has a direct impact on this. However it is an interesting point, how often do you see conversations about strategy before the objectives have been agreed.

In our opinion, the question of “Why do you have a web site and what do you want to achieve from it?” is fundamental to Internet marketing. As once you know this anything in your Internet marketing strategy can be linked to achieving these goals. Most companies we speak with understand this, what they are looking for from their digital marketing agency is for them to earn their money and come up with ways to get the most from their site.

So now that you know what you want to achieve from your web site, the question is what does one do from a marketing perspective to meet these goals? The short answer to this question is lots, including the usual SEO/SEM and keyword analysis all the way through to creating video content and content. In fact there is an enormous amount that you can do, so much so that this can be counter productive. There’s so much that can be done, that nothing ever gets done.

This is especially true the mid to large companies where there a sign off is required to implement changes. Often the Internet person is still developing their career so they do not have the experience or knowledge to be able to justify their ideas or validate them with research.

We all aspire to have the perfect Internet marketing strategy, unfortunately we believe that there is a short window to be perfect. The Internet changes, what was perfect 2 years ago might be considered out of date today, rather than stick with what we know there is a whole host of opportunities to try other ways. The great thing about the Internet is that if these new ways do not work; you have the opportunity to fine tune them, tweak them slightly or in the more extreme cases… hit the delete button.

If you would like to talk to us about your Internet marketing strategy or discuss how we can boost the traffic or profile of your web site, please do not hesitate to contact us.

What do you think? Please feel free to comment below.