According to a report by eMarketer only 14% of senior marketing managers consider their business to be fully integrated with social media. With that in mind, and as the 2012 trends for marketing all refer to the continued growth of social media as a platform, it is vital that marketers have a structure in place to fully benefit from their social offerings.

The most important thing to remember about social is that it might not be suitable for everyone (there I said it!), you don’t have to dive right into a social strategy if your organisation isn’t going to benefit. To see if your company could benefit from a social strategy, and whether that strategy stands a chance at success, we’ve put together this simple checklist:

1. Do you and your company have clear goals for your social strategy?

The more specific your goals the better. It’s a lot easier for the people taking on the task of growing and implementing the strategy if a clear set of goals is awarded to it. Keep in mind why you are doing it. Is it to increase conversion rates, build brand awareness or improve customer service?

2. Do you have the manpower to fully commit?

Social media is about the personal touch. Having a dedicated team providing content and real-time responses will stand you in good stead. Involving people from various areas of the business provides you with greater exposure to a wider audience. Using their collective experience will help to shape the approach going forward, driving an uplift in visits to your site or your blog. In the long run this strategy will yield impressive results.

3. Do you have the content?

The most important part to social media is having the content to ensure you can deliver thought-leadership, build trust and increase credibility. A good place to start is by looking at your existing material and deciding what can be recycled for social. As you create new content it’s important that the material is optimised for social. Use eye-catching headlines and visuals, as well fresh new ideas to make sure your content drives customers to find out more about you.

4. Do you understand where your audience is?

Research at the beginning is essential. There is no point placing all your content on Facebook if all your potential clients are on LinkedIn. Make sure your attention is focused on the right areas.

5. Does your company website engage with new prospects?

It seems like an obvious one but it can so easily be overlooked. It is important that traffic driven to your site can be assessed. Where are the leads coming from? Once you can establish the reasons people are coming to your site, and from where, you can use this information to direct future social strategies. Make sure you have prepared your site beforehand. Make sure it is a site you are proud of, and above all ensure you have a strategy in place for dealing with any lead generation (contact forms for example).

6. Are you able to ensure your social media is useful at every stage of the buying cycle?

It is vital to customer retention that your social brand remains consistent throughout the buying process. Make sure you have steps in place to both monitor and track your customer’s conversations, supplying them with the content they need at the right time.

The bottom line is social media is important to a modern marketing strategy, but done badly it can be damaging. The difference between social media and more traditional marketing is that it takes time to build momentum and provide a visible ROI. However, by making sure you have all the above steps in place you can ensure a great foundation for social marketing success, and by maintaining a long term strategy it can deliver real business benefits.

Search engine optimisation (SEO) has always been reliant on the location and frequency of keywords within a webpage, but as the Internet continues to grow and develop that isn’t all there is to it.

The ranking position of pages searched by an Internet user is decided by what happens off the page, in the form of links from other sites. The complexity of SEO is getting those links to form organically. The emergence of social media marketing has helped to define a new era of SEO by creating an appealing and natural way for these links to evolve. However, if your content fails to attract these natural links your social media can’t do its job.

So what can be done to enhance your social media and effective SEO? Content, content, content. The more valuable the better. Your content needs to tune into the needs and wants of your target audience. Before you begin writing for SEO understanding your audience is key. Simply asking “What creates value for my customers?” can help to focus your online marketing efforts.

Understanding search engines
Most of us use search engines everyday yet many don’t understand the basics of how they work. Taking a look under the search engine hood and discovering what makes the engines tick is the best way to focus your SEO and achieve the rankings successful businesses need.

Search engines use three techniques to rank your web pages.

1. Crawling
Search engine “spiders” are perhaps the most widely recognised search engine tool, they effectively “crawl” around the web sifting through content. These computer codes find information on a web page, “reading” it as they go and following the links from your pages to others.

If your site isn’t “crawable” then your ranking capacity is already disadvantaged. As search engine spiders crawl the links of your site, they make copies of the pages – and using additional analysis – give your site a score for the page, and the association of the page to certain words.

The search engine spiders regularly return to re-evaluate your content but if it can’t see your content, or doesn’t understand it, it will fail to index you correctly. So with this in mind easily accessible and fast-loading code is vitally important.

2. Indexing
The job of the crawling spiders is to not only browse but to also store the content in a database.

This indexing system allows searches to become faster and more efficient, constantly checking how relevant content is to the search terms being used.

3. Ranking
The most important element of search is the way in which the relevant results are delivered to users. These occur through complex and closely guarded algorithms. That said they follow a set of rules that allow your content to battle with other content to satisfy a user’s keyword search, delivering what the search engine feels is most relevant.

Effective SEO copywriting

So what can you do to make sure that you’re making the most of your web pages? Well, complicated as it sounds, search engines are relatively simple in their needs. All they require is for the information to be delivered to them in a way that they can understand. The complications arise when you’re trying to deliver keyword friendly and searchable copy with genuine reader appeal. This is where the SEO Copywriter can add significant value to your site. Ensuring that the balance is right is vital to success, of course you have to have research your keywords and phrases, that’s SEO 101, but you also need to remember that the search engines aren’t your customers. Ultimately copy needs to sell and persuade, not just tick the search engine boxes. Do both and the results can be staggering.

Here are our top tips for ensuring your content is optimised:

1. Use research tools
There are many SEO tools and a lot of SEO software available online to help you find the best keywords; Google’s Keyword Tool is a great place to start. You can also give your SEO a boost through Sponsored Ads, paying for design and usability to give you a great start.

2. Be specific
Keywords are key but keyword phrases are just as important, base your keyword terms on geography and specialty, as well as synonyms.

3. Research the popularity of search terms
Pay attention to popularity of search terms associated with your businesses or sector. You can also enhance the success of your search terms by behavioural-targeting and using long tail keywords (a keyword phrase used when the website wants to refine searches to the web page, or when the user is searching for a specific term)

4. Make sure you’re relevant
Your search terms should be highly relevant to your service, product or end goal. Keyword relevance measures how well your keywords match what a potential customer is searching for. By analysing your keywords through online tools you can replace poor-performing keywords with more relevant ones, keeping your web pages featuring highly.

5. Build up content resources
Keyword phrases and search terms are what are valuable to your potential users; use them as a foundation for your content. It’s essential that your content is up-to-date and fresh. Regularly reviewing your content helps search engines pick-up on the date of when a page was last updated, and can give you an opportunity to review and tweak your keywords and phrases.

6. Link, link, link
Search engines are able to analyse the popularity of a site through the number of links back to it. Using this analysis, the ‘spiders’ can discover how pages are related to each other, and in what ways, and because trustworthy sites tend to link to other trusted sites this method provides a vital cycle of sharing that can provide a great way for search engines to identify useful sites.

SEO doesn’t, or shouldn’t, stifle your content. The most effective SEO is when creativity and these tips build a foundation together, creating an easily searchable and valuable site. Getting these simple steps right is a great basis for reaching your target audience more effectively now and in the future.

EMC Corporation, the world’s leading information management company, has appointed independent London agency The Crocodile to lead global campaign development in IT Transformation and Big Data, following an international five-way pitch.

The Crocodile has been an EMC roster agency for some years, participating in project-based campaigns at global, EMEA and UK level. The pitch, which took place in late December, has coincided with the creation by EMC of a new internal campaign team with a brief to drive EMC growth in the rapidly developing ‘IT as a service’ market. The win hands The Crocodile a key strategic agency role working alongside campaign teams in Boston and London.

EMC’s pitch brief required a fully integrated results-based approach using digital, social, email and direct mail to drive leads through to sales qualification via an internal CRM platform. Additionally, participating agencies were required to demonstrate clear understanding and experience of the global technology market and the dynamics of both direct and indirect sales channels.

“Working with EMC plays to our core strengths as an agency,” explains Adam Wooff, founding partner and managing director of The Crocodile. “We bring informed strategic focus and cut-through creativity to the table, along with a clear perspective on the mix of activities that will genuinely impact the buying behaviour of EMC’s customers and prospects. These days there’s simply no room for tokenistic marketing – anything we do has to prove relevance, tie in to sales activity and make a measurable contribution.”

Chris Blaik, senior director, Global Campaigns at EMC commented, “The Crocodile has a proven track record in not just building world class, award winning campaigns but an ability to truly understand the go-to-market priorities of our business and channel, crucial to driving value in today’s end to end environment”

Question: What do PG Tips, Travelodge, Birds Eye and Comparethemarket.com have in common?
Answer: A love of cuddly toys.

With varying degrees of success an increasing number of B2C brands are choosing to adopt cute, stuffed animals as the face of their brands. Since hitting TV screens in January 2009 as the ‘face’ of price comparison website Comparethemarket.com, that cheeky meerkat Aleksandr Orlov has become nothing short of a marketing phenomenon.

Comparethemarket.com is now one of the most popular UK price comparison sites, hundreds of thousands of people follow Aleksandr on Facebook and Twitter, and now the brand is cashing in on ‘pester power’ in the run up to Christmas, giving meerkat dolls away to anyone who buys insurance through the site and flogging 5,000 talking Aleksandr dolls at Harrods.

Before Aleksandr there was PG Tips’s tea-guzzling Monkey. Now joining the ranks are Mr Sleep and the Zzz squad and Clarence the chilled out polar bear. The cuddly toy marketing strategy, when executed well, can create a deep connection with a brand and a rich dialogue with customers across multiple channels. Which leaves us asking is there any room for soft and cuddly sentiment in the B2B world?

There is undisputed value in establishing a dialogue with customers, yet no one has much interest in thinking about let alone talking about insurance or frozen food. Introduce a quirky Russian meerkat or a cool-as-ice polar bear, however, and you have yourself something worth tweeting. But could sensible, rational IT directors have their buying-behaviour swayed by a knitted monkey?

At The Croc we’ve had some success with anthropomorphic characters. Mr Click, a character we created for longstanding client EMC, embodies ease of use and brings a friendly face to a crowded unified storage market. The challenge was getting the balance right between appealing to fact and logic as well as emotion. All too often B2B brands overlook the emotional aspects of the brand, and how it can deliver an enduring ‘stickiness’ that can establish a level of depth and connectivity with target audiences.

As is the case for any good campaign, cuddly toy or not, it’s crucial to know the right touch points to reach buyers and how to tickle them. It’s also important to remember that in the B2B world buying cycles can be long and arduous. Lightness of touch can ease the pain and give a brand a boost in a competitive marketplace but remember to think long term not flash-in-the-pan.

Simples!

The best B2B marketing strategies no longer stop at the door of the sales department. In fact, marketing professionals should be insisting on shared ownership of revenue objectives with sales colleagues. We believe the starting point for that process is the simple question: How many sales do we need for business success?

To help you make the most of your B2B marketing, as well as making the role of marketing clear, we’ve put together a bite-sized guide:The Slide One Principle. Find out about our approach to asking the most important question in marketing.

Thought I would share something I was reading from the clever chaps at nef (the new economics foundation). They have summarised behavioural economics and contrasted it with neoclassical economics where the assumption is made that humans are rational and maximise their individual self-interest. Cue puff on pipe and re-adjustment of wide-rimmed spectacles.

The pursuit of better B2B marketing models that positively influence buying behaviour often requires pulling ourselves out of our self-contained, safe little bubbles and trying to view the world through a different lens.

The seven principles:

1. Other people’s behaviour matters: people do many things by observing others and copying; people are encouraged to continue to do things when they feel other people approve of their behaviour.
2. Habits are important: people do many things without consciously thinking about them. These habits are hard to change – even though people might want to change their behaviour, it’s not easy for them.
3. People are motivated to ‘do the right thing’: there are cases where money is de-motivating as it undermines people’s intrinsic motivation, for example, you would quickly stop inviting friends to dinner if they insisted on paying you………no really you would!
4. People’s self-expectations influence how they behave: people want their actions to be in line with their values and their commitments.
5. People are loss-averse and hang on to what they consider ‘theirs’. This can lead to what could be described as irrational decision making to avoid any perceived loss.
6. People are bad at computation when making decisions: people put undue weight on recent events and too little on far-off ones; they cannot calculate probabilities well and worry too much about unlikely events; and they are strongly influenced by how the problem/information is presented to them.
7. People need to feel involved and effective to make change: just giving people the incentives and information is not necessarily enough.

Next time you’re writing a brief or planning next quarter’s activity consider things such as point 5 and how this could support free trials instead of discounts or how point 1 could influence a social media strategy. We should all also constantly remind ourselves of point 2 – it’s crucial to deliver clear strategies that will genuinely effect the greatest change in customers’ buying behaviour – at The Crocodile we never lose sight of this.

Read the full paper – nef Behavioural economics: seven principles for policy-makers.

The landscape of B2B marketing is changing. Marketing can no longer stop at the door of sales, and collaboration is now essential for success. It’s about time that B2B marketers started realising that marketing works best when it shares the commercial objectives of the business – and can make a measurable contribution.

To help you navigate the changes taking place in the B2B marketing sector we’ve put together one of our bite-sized guides entitled Reconnecting Sales and Marketing. From prospect generation and lead nurture, to lead scoring and onto converging data into single lead profiles, this paper is a starting point for B2B marketers getting to grips with one of the most important current issues for the profession. We hope you enjoy it.

I was intrigued recently to come across an idea that has been used by an English school in Brazil that asked children what they wanted to be when they grew up.

They took the responses and created photo business cards for the children. The result – more kids had a clearer focus of their aspirations and their parents were more enthusiastic about them learning English and signed them up at the English school.

Applying a creative approach to the information available, and making it personal, made all the difference.

With all the different ways marketers can collect and use data these days – it’s when we team it with clever creative thinking that we see the most effective results.

You should never overlook genuine creativity if you want to truly capture your audiences’ attention. Here are two ideas I’ve seen done recently that have managed to surprise, and achieved results.

Intel made it personal brilliantly with their museum of me. What a thrill to walk through your own gallery that is simply all about you. With your permission, they collect all your photos, friends and information from your Facebook account and turn it into your very own personal gallery. Then they take you on a 3D journey through your gallery room by room. All your pictures and thoughts are used to take you on a compelling journey of your life.

(Take a look)

With a more down to earth approach, KLM caught our attention recently delighting passengers with little acts of kindness to brighten a traveller’s day. Using Twitter and Foursquare the team were able to find passengers travelling with KLM, and from their public profiles they could find out a little bit about their life to help them choose an appropriate personal (carry-on sized) gift to brighten up their day. Like an apron for the passenger on route to a food blogging conference, a Spanish dictionary for the traveller on his way to Spain, or the Dutch souvenirs for the couple going back to Singapore. This creative way to reach audiences proved a real smile is better than a virtual smiley icon….oh, and it generated 1,000,000 Twitter impressions!

There may not be much that feels genuinely new these days. But there are certainly new ways of doing things to surprise and delight – it just requires a bit of creative thinking, something we at The Crocodile have a bit of an obsession with!

No. 1 – Localisation.

Over the next few weeks and months we will be searching out and commenting on the outlook for social media marketing in 2012. This post will be looking at The Crocodile’s own prediction that localisation will be a key trend.

Localisation means moving away from a one size fits all global approach and adapting social communication to suit different audiences. An example would be targeting a specific offer or discount at customers based in a certain region. You wouldn’t advertise a great offer available in Spain to a customer in the US so why treat social communications any differently?

Localisation can also mean the consideration of different social tools and approaches for different countries and cultures. Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are by far the most popular social networking sites in the Western world but barely register in China where sites like QZone and Baidu dominate.

In Japan, Facebook lags behind sites like Mixi and Gree but Twitter is hugely popular, perhaps because in Japanese it is possible to express the equivalent of 260 English characters, an increase of over 85% on Twitter’s 140-character limit. Conversely, in the Philippines a staggering 93.9% of the country’s online population (roughly 25% of the overall population) has signed up to Facebook but only 16% have embraced Twitter*.

Something else to factor in is the different ways people use social networks. Understanding different behaviour profiles is key to the effective planning and delivery of social marketing activity. This infographic from GlobalWebIndex gives an overview of the global state of social networking in 2011 and shows how users differ in their use of social networks around the world.

What’s great about localisation is the focus it puts on the individual. Ultimately social media is all about the individual and the key to success is to engage with people on a personal and meaningful level. In this new hyper-social world what’s needed is a totally organic and flexible approach that can be adapted on an almost a case-by-case basis.

This might seem daunting, particularly to any time poor B2B marketer lacking resource and struggling to define success metrics, but there are plenty of tools out there to help. The key is to spend time getting to know your audience – wherever they may be – and to adapt your communications accordingly.

Have you got your own forecasts for social media marketing in 2012? If so we’d love to hear them. Watch this space for further predictions.

*SOURCE: http://asiancorrespondent.com/54475/philippines-named-the-social-networking-capital-of-the-world-indonesia-malaysia-amongst-top-10/

In 1999 a group of authors, intellectuals and journalists came together to write a thesis on the need for businesses to adapt to a more communicative network of customers. The Cluetrain Manifesto, written by Rick Levin, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls and David Weinberger is a set of 95 ideas and observations on the way businesses and their consumers interact.

The manifesto’s call to action was for all businesses operating within a “newly connected marketplace” to stop faking it and start talking to their consumers as individuals and humans. The authors took a predictive look at how businesses could use the Internet to focus on their customers’ real needs rather than deploying marketing for purely financial gain.

Over ten years later and The Cluetrain Manifesto is still impressively relevant, yet many B2B organisations still struggle to realise the importance of many of the fundamental ideas put forward.

The most successful marketing is now gained through the implementation of free flowing, personalised strategies. The focus has moved away from campaigns aimed at ‘target markets’ and onto communicating with individuals. Consumers are looking at marketing in a different way too, focused on the value of communications to them and not necessarily the product being sold.

What is interesting about this personalised style of marketing is that consumers are increasingly aware of their power as an individual, demanding so much more. Consumers can insist on answers to questions from people that previously hid behind a hierarchy or marketing mask. Simply being told by a company that their product is the best just isn’t enough, and if a product isn’t living up to expectations then get the product designer out to talk about why!

Over the last 100 years advertising and marketing has shouted at consumers, insisting their product is a necessity. However, as the Internet has opened up conversations, consumers have been able to find more value and openness in talking to each other. As these communities formed they began to unravel business jargon and speak to each other in their own, more accessible voices. The Cluetrain Manifesto established that in order for B2B marketing to succeed in this world of honesty they needed to drop their jargon and corporate mystique. Thesis 15 of The Cluetrain Manifesto states:

“In just a few more years, the current homogenised “voice” of business – the sound of mission statements and brochures – will seem as contrived and artificial as the language of the 18th century French court.”

~ from Thesis 15, “The Cluetrain Manifesto” (1999)

The reason that even today this approach is still not being fully embraced by B2B companies is perhaps that this seemly-disorganised way of marketing cannot be controlled. The success of this style of marketing is in the freedom of its voice. By tentatively – rather than wholeheartedly – moving towards this method of marketing, companies are in danger of unwittingly stifling its success, leading to even more of a reluctance to proceed, creating a cycle of ineffectiveness.

In order for B2B businesses to flourish through evolutionary and fast-paced marketing they must have transparent and credible values that are not there to hide behind, but are there to shout about. Instead of worrying about potential customers seeing the inner workings of their business they should have great pride in their companies, employees and products, sending them out into the world to be advocates of the brand.

The communities are out there and they want to talk. This open communication cannot be stopped and B2B companies can truly be invigorated by grasping the opportunity to fully open up and join the conversation.

Our top five Cluetrain Manifesto ideas to boost your marketing:

1. Converse with your customers, don’t just talk at them
2. Deliver communications in a human voice – drop the jargon
3. Try not to control the conversation – its power is its freedom
4. No tentative toe-dipping – go for it and open up your business!
5. Be accessible, proudly allow your employees and products to be brand advocates