Web Business Marketing Blog

Two must-have resources for any business marketer

Thanks to Jon and Joe, we now have 2 ‘ultimate lists’ of business marketing blogs, which complement each other very nicely.

Many of you will already know Jon Miller (Marketo)’s big list of b2b marketing blogs. With its recent addition of 50, it lists 138 b2b blogs. But best of all, Jon also offers an up-to-date OPML file allowing you to subscribe to this list in your reader with a few clicks.

Big List of B2B Marketing Blogs | Modern B2B Marketing Blog | Marketo
50 New B2B Marketing Blogs | Modern B2B Marketing Blog | Marketo

Complementary to this, Junta42 has just launched its list of top and upcoming content marketing blogs, which lists 82. The additional twist is that registered Junta42 users can vote on the blogs listed, adding a user ranking to the Junta42 rank.

The bloglist of Junta42 is only one of the site’s features. Mainly, Junta42 is a vertical social bookmarking site for content marketers. Registering for a free Junta42 account not only allows you to vote on your favourite marketing blogs, but also submit your favourite bookmarks, or vote and comment on others’ submissions.

So if you’re a professional marketer, involved in business marketing, the following actions should take less than an hour, and offer the best return ever on your time invested:

• get Jon’s OPML listing, and subscribe to the ultimate list of marketing blogs in your reader
• register for a Junta42 account and vote on the recent bookmarks and top blog listing

Blogged with Flock

Welcome to the sixth edition of the marketing carnival. Reflecting on the first 6 editions in this carnival experiment, I think the jury is still out on their use for business marketing. A few observations with mixed feelings:

1. Carnivals attract many contributions - for example this carnival attracts about 60 submissions per month.
2. The quality of contributions on average is low. Some bloggers appear to use carnivals for massive self promotion. Some submit up to half a dozen articles per month. Many contributions are off-topic. Some even have broken links. It takes time to filter contributions.
3. At the same time, carnivals have helped me to discover some good blogs flying below radar.
4. And 3 of the 6 carnival editions appear among the top 10 posts on this blog.
5. A carnival positions you to deliver a regular digest of content on your niche.

So in conclusion, carnivals are not silver bullets. From this edition, I’m following a different approach, posting the carnival edition in 3 parts:

1. Top articles, selected from carnival contributions
2. A digest of the marketing blogosphere since last edition
3. A selection of contributions from the blogosphere, with minimal edits

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Ardeth Albee from Marketing Interactions blog-tagged me to share 8 random things, imposing me to a small dilemma. While I’m usually game for trying new experiments on the web, I’m also a rather private person. So here’s the result of my struggle: Continue Reading »

Custom content marketing offers tremendous potential for corporations and associations to strengthen brands and reputations, while broadening and deepening relationships with customers and members.

Simply defined, custom publishing is “a targeted publishing program delivered to key audiences with a goal of increasing brand perception, improving brand loyalty and influencing or improving the overall decision making process”.

Many business marketing organisations already have a long tradition of using custom publishing to support their marketing activities. A series of new technologies are developing to reshape marketing as we know it. In particular:

• the emergence of novel tools for productive marketing
• the potential of the web to create corporate branded channels
• the possibilities for customer / member interaction

Therefore, I’m pleased that the Custom Publishing Council announces the first-ever but very timely conference in this emerging field, to be held in New Orleans March 9-11. The conference targets practitioners and solution providers alike and covers both strategic and practical aspects.

The custom publishing council also publishes a blog and a magazine.

Check out the conference website. Here’s the page to register for the conference.

Links
[1] What Is Custom Publishing?
[2] Custom Publishing Council
[3] CPC Magazine
[4] 2008 Industry Conference
[5] Custom Publishing Council Blog

Blogged with Flock

Another year’s gone, and the time-sheets are processed. Hereby a few benchmarks for our blogs at Leonardo ENERGY.

The length of our posts varies between 100 and 500 words, and takes us between 0.5 and 6 hours, depending on the amount of fact checking needed (as well as insight checking) and how straightforward it is to structure the story. Taking a median of 2 hours per post and 2 weekly posts consumes half a day per week for content.

Added to this comes scouting for new stories. We monitor a number of RSS feeds through Google Reader. Clearing these takes about half an hour per day, but not all this time should be allocated to blogging. Keeping up to speed on your sector has value and you probably should do it, even when not blogging.
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Recipes for web usability

Steve Krug’s book on web usability reads in half a day, but changes your perspective on websites forever.

With lots of practical advice, you can use it when preparing or developing a new web project, as well as for auditing and improving a running site.

Offering guidance on language, buttons, banners, navigation and home page design, this book is useful if you’re a participant in a web development team, or a manager commissioning and approving web development.

My favourite chapter is the one with hands-on advice on setting up usability testing, including a sample script painting a vivid image of a session. It enables you to get started immediately.

Navigation is a challenge for any website, and one of the longer chapters in the book. According to the author, navigation isn’t a feature - it is the website. And it serves a variety of purposes:
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Specific rather than generic calls to action are a means to stand out in business marketing.

A recent exchange on Marketing Profs [1] discussed calls to action for B2B trade magazines, resulted in generic answers such as ‘free gift’, ‘free sample’, ’subscribe to our newsletter’ etc. But everybody else uses these same calls. As with bacteria and antibiotics, users become rapidly immune against them.

For business marketing, here are 7 specific calls to action.
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Inspired by an article from Junta42 [1], hereby the ultimate list of web-based methods to provide relevant content to users. These can be used for business development, non-profit marketing or to build strong reputations and brands online.

Continue Reading »

We know the internet saves us trips to the library and to bookshops. It helps us in doing research. And we can no longer imagine communications and networking without it.

To know how big exactly is the internet, and who is using it for what, the Pew Internet project provides good information for USA. Although there seems to be an education, income and race bias [1], internet use is pretty big across all demographic strata.

Business uses are relatively lower than typical private uses, but that’s just because they address a subset of population. I’m impressed to note that [2]:

• 91% of internet users (71% of American adults) use search engines
• 78% use internet for product information
• 51% use internet for research for their job
• 28% use internet for searching information on someone they might meet
• a staggering 19% create content online
• 12% download podcasts
• 12% take online classes for credit

Some of above metrics date back from 2005, others are more recent.

A wealth on more specific trends on internet use and its broader ramifications can be found on the site.

References

[1] Demographics of Internet Users
[2] Internet Activities

Blogged with Flock

Since Kotler, marketing has been about the 4 Ps: Product, Price, Place, Promotion. But for content marketers, the actual 4 Ps are Planning, Production, Publishing, Promotion (see PodWorx ‘the 4 Ps of podcasting‘), bringing the total to 7. A recent question at MarketingProfs asks about the 7 Ps of marketing, adding Policy, Partnership and Politics, bringing us to 10.

Wikipedia’s 7 Ps add People, Process and Physical evidence. And new marketing’s 4 Ps are Personalisation, Participation, Peer-to-peer and Predictive Modelling. But marketing is also rePutation, Packaging, Perspective, …

An article at MarketingProfs this week covers woman’s buying power, defining Pearls, Pumps, Purses and Power as the current 4 Ps.

I guess marketing is all these 21 Ps and much more. For each marketing challenge, some, all or none of above concepts will be relevant. Let’s think about each problem on a case by case basis, irrespective of whether its dimensions start with a P or not.