Rachel Levy: Social Media & Marketing

Last week, I attended one of the best seminars I’ve been to in a long time, the Learn24 B2B Content Marketing Summit. I attended for two reasons: to learn more about B2B marketing, and to learn more about Webinars, given my newly launched WebinarListings business.  What was great about the seminar, is that it was short (yes, that’s important!), and had speakers from different companies who were experts in their area, and were NOT SALESY.  Good for them.  As Patrick Cahill says, it’s important to build trust in order to sell in the long term, and that’s exactly what they did.  Below are some of my tweets from the morning, or you can search for #learn24 on Twitter (or I was incorrectly using #ten24 for a bit too):

“Content Marketing from Strategy to Execution”, Stephanie Tilton, Ten Ton Marketing

• Companies that can become a resource by just promoting their content will become an ally with the customer
• Buyerpersona.com is a great site to help better understand and describe your customer
• Best in class B2B companies are 5x more likely to maintain a library of content that maps to their prospect’s buying stages
• If you create a white paper, think about how you can repurpose it — blog posts, webinars, etc
• Press releases are no longer just for new products. They can be for new content also.
• Progressive prospecting – no registration for 1st piece of content, ask for a bit of info, next time ask for even more
• Think of your content as being your early buying cycle sales person. So, that would also include competitive comparison on your site.
• Content sources – partners, customers (interview for blog posts), analysts, industry thought leaders
• Don’t forget to pull in content from other sources on Internet.
• According to David crouch and Emerge PR, market wire is the BEST (vs PR wire, business wire)
• Don’t forget about guest blog posts as a source of content

“Marketing Content Through SEO and Social Media”, Derek Edmond, Komarketing Associates

• In order to get listed in Google News, one of the important things you can do it to have a 3 digit ID in your post titles.  Not just the title. (see Derek’s comment below for clarification)
• When people see video results in search results, they click on them… good point — create keyword centric PR
• Content syndication tips – keywords in Browser title, headline, 1st paragraphy, body (use http in 1st reference)
• Google’s video guidelines
• Good content throughout the buying cycle:
  • Beginning – ebook, white paper
  • Middle – webinar
  • Later – newsletter
• Have only one call to action per content piece (after ebook, blog post, etc)
• Lookout 4 easy-to-find places that links can be created (profiles, etc) – even if no-follow, still has SEO value (promotion, traffic)
• How do you know if it’s a no-follow link? SEOMOZ or Firefox plugin
• Embed links in each video description on YouTube, not just in your Channel profile
• Use statistics to see where your video is referenced
• The profile website link on Twitter is no longer no-follow (see Derek’s comment below for correction)
• Postrank provides lists of bloggers by categories – sounds great

“How to Hit Your Growth Goals by Running Webinars”, Patrick Cahill, Rally Point Webinars

• Use a webinar to generate trust, not just as a sales pitch
• Same marketing budget is supposed to cover double the leads in this year
• 90% of companies’ #1 focus this year is generating leads
• Those who receive a voicemail about a webinar are 2x more likely to open newlsetter
• Those who received a voicemail and then a newsletter about the webinar, received 8% response rate! Good to combine tactics
• The secret to “guided voicemails”… “Sorry I missed you, I’ll send you an email in the AM”. And make the email look like a personal email, not a template
• The phone service Patrick uses is Box Pilot – $2/call
• #1 way most brands can get in front of prospects is through case studies and testimonials, to develop trust. Not sales.
• 5% of webinar attendees ask 100% of questions… so try to make it more interactive for the people not asking questions
• People feel more uncomfortable in a 1:1 selling situation… group sales are better (i.e. webinar)
• Repurpose your webinar content
  • split it up into 5 minute video chunks and upload to video site
  • make a blog post or newsletter with all the unanswered questions (blog post or email)
  • blow out one question in a blog post
• The average professional attends 4 webinars per quarter
• Give 6 weeks to plan for your webinar:

1. 1. plan
   2. build marketing and content
   3. create alignment
   4. social media and email and personal invites
   5. practice
   6. phone, eblast again

• Webinar tips
  • ensure they are thought-leader based
  • put your short sales pitch at end (not beg)
  • practice
  • ensure your webinar objectives are covered
• Assume 2% of your list will register for the webinar
• 50% of ppl register for a webinar will attend
• 80% of people who register will eventually see the webinar (recorded)
• 25% of those leads generated from your site will turn into short term leads (6 mos)
• 50% of leads generated on your site will become long term leads (6 mos to 2 years)
• Rain Today did a great study on using webinars for lead generation purposes
• Good idea to test your subject line as a tweet and see how many clicks you get for each
  • Good subject line – Hurry, register today OR Register today with webinar name

All the presentations are available online at the ten24 website, and here’s a list of resources from Stephanie’s presentation.

Random thought:  I realized something powerful after the seminar.  During the breaks, almost every person I spoke to was because we connected on Twitter during the seminar.  Just goes to show how powerful Twitter can be at developing relationships, and taking the online world to offline!

If you were there, do you have anything to add?  If not, do you have any questions or comments?

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