Ten Ways to Improve Your European Marketing

European Marketing

European marketing is an challenging task for the uninitiated. This blog is devoted to business to business (‘B2B’) marketing, so although we are not delving into the challenges of labelling a chocolate bar in fifteen languages, nonetheless, European B2B marketing has its own complexities.

Here are some top ten suggestions for getting European marketing right.

10 Tips for Improving Your European B2B Marketing

1. Start with the company name –  conduct research in every country in which you wish to operate. Check how it sounds, what it could mean, and whether it can be pronounced.

2. Register your internet domain names in every country in which you either operate or wish to operate as soon as possible.

3. Take a lot of trouble with your website or websites. There should be a dedicated area for each country.

4. Employ search engine optimisation (SEO) specialists to optimise your website for each country. Start with individual keyword research by country – do not just automatically translate your English keywords. Notwithstanding that, take into account that the US and UK use very developed online marketing compared to some other European countries.

5. Translation is not the same as localisation. Have everything rewritten by an specialist translator so that it resonates in each country.

6. Keep a glossary of industry terms, job titles, and terminology for each country so that your communications feel as if they have been written by the same person. Decide on the gender of your company (for languages where this is a consideration.)

6. Empower your local teams but work closely with them too so that they understand the priorities of the business as a whole. For example, they might have a lucrative business line that they want to prioritise when it might be more important for the company as a whole to deliver a small order early to one of your biggest global customers.

7. Ensure that pricing is managed carefully across all your European facilities.

8. Work with a branding specialist to develop branding which is both consistent but flexible enough to reflect local differences.

9. Keep in close contact with your colleagues, sales agents and contacts across Europe. Learn how the business works in each territory and ask their opinion on key decisions. Be prepared for surprising marketing campaigns and social events to be suggested by local staff. Listen to the reasons why they want to do this activity before making a judgement.

10. Roll up your sleeves and get out there! Understand how the business works by meeting local customers.

Enjoy – have lots of fun – and make the company lots of money too!

The Essentials of Business to Business Marketing

Marketing is the Path to Growth

This blog is devoted to Business to Business (or B2B) marketing. It’s not meant to sit at the bleeding edge, but to offer some home truths and practical steps for those who need to promote their company without wasting money, hopefully achieving a suitable return on investment for their efforts.

It’s a big topic but I hope that the following tips will get you started, or at least help to create a brief in order to recruit additional specialist help in the form of a Marketing Director or Marketing Consultant.

How to Win New Clients

• Perform a full audit of your website. Make sure that it explains your services clearly and that you would be proud for potential customers to see it. Second, look at where it appears in the search engine rankings. To improve its positioning, read my blog on search engine optimisation, ‘What’s the Importance of SEO?’ to get you started.
• Identify your existing and potential clients. If you’re in business to business marketing, the customer base may not be that large. In some industries, and for some products, the potential target client base could be as low as 500 people, yet those people have the ability to make or break your sales figures.
• Once you know who you should be talking to, make sure that you have up to date information about them. Even three month old data will need rechecking. This is quite a big job, but be careful who you ask to check the data for you. Whoever contacts the companies should be prepared to speak on behalf of your business, so don’t just see it as a job for the tea maker. You can also check client data by visiting online sites such as LinkedIn.
• Decide how best to engage with your target market – do some of them know you already? What are their views on your company? Which services do you need to promote? Be prepared to segment your target list into even smaller groups. If each target is worth a lot to you, think about personalised mailings combined with very good telesales follow up.
• As part of this, you’ll need to consider whether you use email marketing or conventional direct mail. Approach this with an open mind, depending on the target market, the message and the best way to explain your product or service.
• Where possible, try to engage your targets further with an invitation to an event, a gift of some industry data, or anything else that helps you to open up a dialogue. This is where sales and marketing need to work in absolute harmony. Sales calls need to follow marketing activity on precisely the right day and time. Don’t even consider starting this until you have the Sales Director’s absolute commitment to work alongside you.
• Start blogging and tweeting. They are now essential routes to raising your profile the Web 2.0 era.
• Think about industry events where your clients are likely to be in attendence. Consider sponsorship, hiring a booth or at least buying a ticket. Be active, be vocal.
• Develop relationships with the trade press and industry websites. Issue regular press releases and consider advertising in trade magazines.

This is by no means every part of the strategy you could adopt to increase your presence, but it’s a good starting point. If you’d like to discuss your requirements in more detail, I’d be happy to buy you a coffee and talk some more – here’s where to find me.

Why Blog?

Easy Blogging for Business

There’s so much blogging taking place these days that it’s got to be worth asking why it’s suddenly so popular.

There are many reasons for a corporate blog post and the following is a brief explanation which will hopefully shed light on the reasons that so many of us are now involved in this activity.

Why We Blog

Apart from the admittedly enjoyable aspect of blogging, here are the more practical reasons for writing digestible sized posts on a regular basis.

• Blogging is a great way to tell customers more about your views and services. I write this blog as it is another way to explain marketing issues in more detail to clients and people I meet. It’s great to be able to send links to people on subjects we might have only had time to half-discuss in real life.
• Search engines are becoming increasingly fond of new content. Even if you use a separate blog engine, the content should also appear on your company website, thereby helping your website in its crawl up the search engine rankings.
• Believe it or not, writing will help to get your thoughts in order. It will help you focus on what is of interest to your clients and the wider business community and awill help you answer questions in a straightforward way.

How to Blog

• Decide on the days of the week that you’re going to blog and then stick to your plan. You cannot expect people to follow your posts if you are not consistent with your publication dates.
• Create a blog strategy where you work out what you are going to cover in each post. This will make your posts read in a coherent style, from one to the next, and will also enable you to reference future, as well as past, content.
• Don’t feel that your posts always need to be long but keep them in line with your readers’ expectations  – you are trying to build a following, after all!
• Write from the heart. OK, you might be blogging about oil pipelines or yeast allergies, but care about your subject and the words really will flow.
• Even if you have the budget to integrate your own software into your website content management system, use a blog site – it’s much better for search engine optimisation and you can always reskin your blog to match your corporate branding.
• Be sure to make use of the categories and tags in the blog software to help your SEO.

I hope that these tips on blogging have been useful. It would be great to hear your comments.

Why Link Building is so Essential

Link Building should play a vital part in SEO strategy

In my last post, I outlined the importance of SEO to businesses. In it, I mentioned that link building is a key component of search engine optimisation strategy. I’d like to explain in more detail why it is so important.

Amongst the millions of webpages and millions of websites viewable through the internet, the search engines need ways to judge the importance of your webpage. A major way to judge the importance of a webpage is by counting the links that other websites  make to your webpages and also by judging the quality of the websites linking to you. With this in mind, a link from The New York Times will score highly compared to a link from an unknown entity.

It is important, therefore, to try wherever possible to obtain these valuable links from suitable websites. Here are some of the simpler ways that you can achieve this:

1) Talk to all companies that you do business with, from clients, to partners, to trade bodies and journalists and try to obtain links where at all possible.

2) Build up your profile on internet industry forums so that you can eventually include links in your posts. This should be done carefully and only when you have established credibility.

3) Create a blog and Twitter account from which you can post links back to your main site.

4) Publish press releases to digital news distribution sites that contain links to your website.

In all these cases, links should be a meaningful part of your communications strategy and not a superficial attempt to boost your search engine rankings. This is for two reasons: first, the search engines spend a lot of time trying to spot inappropriate SEO behaviour and will block websites that adopt this type of strategy, and second, your clients and industry partners will spot shallow tactics and it could damage your reputation.

There are a large number of strategies that can be employed to improve the number of links to your website. If you are serious about your brand and maintaining its credibility, these need to be done carefully and well.

It is also important that when a visitor clicks on a link, that they reach a page that is meaningful to their area of interest (the reason that they clicked on the link in the first place!) A key part of link building strategy, therefore, is to ensure that your website content can support active link building. A good landing page should deal with the exact idea that led someone to your website in the first place. Once you have established credibility, it will then be possible to refer them on to your next objective – whether it is to make a purchase, subscribe to a newsletter or become a donor, for example. None of this is automatic, but it’s certainly easier if you have established trust with your audience.

In summary, there are a myriad of link building strategies available. It is important to use them well and I would recommend employing specialist help where needed. Link building should be an important part of your SEO strategy, but cannot work effectively without good and directional content on your website landing pages. This takes a lot of planning, and again, some extra help and good SEO copy will help achieve better results.

I hope that this article has been a useful introduction to link building. Keep an eye on further posts for more information on helping your business increase its online presence. Have a great weekend.

The Importance of SEO

SEO Helps Users Find Products and Services

To those in the marketing and digital community, the following article might seem too obvious to write. However, as marketers, we’re guilty of assuming that everyone has their head in the digital marketing space on a day to day basis. For some very successful companies in a variety of fields, SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation to use its full name, is a new and relatively unknown field.

Put simply, if you have a website, it is now the shop window for your business. No other single piece of marketing communication is as effective or important. So would you rather your website is in the digital equivalent of Park Lane or Little Common Lane? At the top of an imaginary pile of papers on someone’s desk or somewhere near the bottom? What if a new company, that doesn’t know how to serve customers or deliver product as effectively as you is at the top of the search engine rankings, while you are languishing somewhere on page 25? It’s time to set the record straight. It’s time for search engine optimisation.

SEO encompasses a number of different techniques to help you reach the top of the search engine rankings with Google, Yahoo, Bing and the other search engines. The most important of these techniques is to help search engines recognise the importance of your website to someone searching for a specific keyword. This is achieved by adding the right keywords in the right frequency to your website. Too little mentions and the search engine will judge your site as irrelevant. Too many references to keywords and search engines are likely to delist your site. Achieving the right balance of keywords is critical to reaching the right ‘page rank’, or positioning within the search engines.

Second, a site is judged by its popularity amongst other websites. If your site contains a lot of links from respected websites, it will be judged to be popular and this will help its search engine rankings. Linkbuilding should be the second keystone in your SEO strategy.

Finally, the actual design of your site can seriously influence its success with website visitors. A great deal of research has been conducted into improving results by changing the use of colour, copy, offers, images and content. SEO also involves experimenting with the design of your site to help retain and convert visitors.

This is only a very short summary of the reasons that SEO is so important to websites. There are of course many other strategies which make even more impact. However, for those who have never seriously considered SEO, I would strongly urge a full SEO audit of their site compared to competing websites. Make sure that your business gets the recognition it deserves  – it’s a crowded marketplace and SEO helps you stand out.

How To Use Twitter as a Marketing Tool

Twitter as a Leading Form of Social Media

Twitter marketing is a valuable tool for Social Media Marketing. Whilst  it might seem that Twitter would work mainly for business to consumer (B2C) marketing, it is just as powerful when used for business to business marketing (B2B).

The main reason for this is that Twitter marketing provides exposure of your product or brand to Twitter’s wide circle of readers. Get them to follow your Twitter feed, and you have people engaging with your brand and learning about your products.

It’s not really the number of followers that it important (people worry overly about this) but the profile of your followers – how relevant they are to the services that you are selling, and how you engage with them in your Twitter marketing.

A priority of successful Twitter marketing is to post regularly (but not too often). The right amount of tweets per day is about 3. Any more and your followers might feel a little bombarded. Any less and people might feel that you’ve got nothing to say and lose interest.

Be an active follower as well. Seek out companies that are relevant to your services and follow their tweets. Mention their Twitter address where relevant in your tweets, prefixed by the @ symbol.

Use your Twitter feeds to post about your company news, events you are attending, your company’s views on relevant topics and where possible, try to involve your followers in your tweets. The best way to do this is to throw questions out into the audience and always reply to sensible replies. Try to get a debate going if at all possible.

If you are attending any live events, such as trade shows, think about covering the trade event from your booth. This will give a great ‘live’ character to your Twitter marketing. Even better, mention the event organisers in your tweets prefixed with the @ tag. This will attract more of the right kind of followers.

If you decide to tweet on industry issues as well as hot news, you can use a Twitter management software to compile and schedule your Twitter marketing. Software such as Hootsuite enables you to put all of your tweets into one place and schedule when they are released.

Twitter marketing is great for increasing your presence on search engines too, as you can include links in your tweets back to your website. Links are important in improving your Page Rank which will help with your search engine optimization.

Think about the style of your tweets carefully. The style really should reflect your brand. If your brand is very informal, you should reflect this in your writing style. If you are marketing a more business focused brand, your twitter style should be relaxed but businesslike. Even though your tweets may only be a line, you should give them the same attention as a press release. Are all product names and trademarks correctly spelt? Have you accurately reflected the aspirations and brand values of your product? If you are talking about a client or business partner, do you have their permission to mention them? Twitter marketing really is just another form of marketing – just in miniature.

Why Social Media? And Which Social Media?

How Social Media forms a cloud of communication - good and bad

The world of marketing is rocking and rolling to the sound of social media, and with it the need to publish something, anything across the chattersphere of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and all the other forums of modern communication. Before you go any further, stop. Take a long, hard look at your target audience and really think about who you are trying to contact, what you are trying to say to them, and the type of noise that you want to surround your brand.

So first of all, which social media platforms should you use? This blog is devoted to business to business marketing specialists. To those working in B2B, I would advise a heavy note of caution in using certain types of social media as a forum for client communication. Let me give you an example. My Facebook profile has pictures of me with my friends and family, notes about my favourite music and some frankly silly comments and jokes that I share with my friends. Nothing that I’m ashamed of, but not exactly my professional, 9-5 face with the make-up on. More Face-unbooked than Face-booked. This world is a private world, and not necessarily a world that I want to share with business associates or possibly even with consumer brands, unless I really like them. So why are there so many calls to use Facebook as a business to business marketing tool? Approaching someone about professional services on Facebook is as bad as trying to sell cladding to someone in their dressing gown on a Sunday morning as someone tried to do to me last week. Needless to say, we didn’t buy the cladding.

I’m not trying to be flippant and suggest that social media should be ignored. For business to business marketers, I would highly recommend using LinkedIn. Here you are approaching contacts when they have their professional goggles on. They are ready to engage with someone who seems to have something interesting and relevant to say. Try joining focus groups and blogs and publicising events through your profile. Become a thought leader. Twitter is also turning out to be a surprisingly effective tool for business to business communication.  In my next blog, on Friday 6th August, I’ll be talking about why and how Twitter can be used to promote your company’s messages and help you build your online presence.

This brings me to the second question. What are you trying to say? You should only post information of relevance to your audience. They are busy people. Don’t waste their time. I believe that this includes aimless retweeting of industry facts unless you are sure that they will be of relevance to your audience. There’s too much noise out there already. Say less, mean more.

Lastly I’d like to focus on the type of noise that can so easily surround your brand. It’s very easy to draw attention to your brand before considering the implications. Make sure that every tweet, every post, is written with the same degree of caution as a press release. Make sure it is safe to release any company news, no matter how brief the mention. Also, think about how you will deal with any negative criticism that could arise. Have a policy in place to monitor all responses to your posts and to respond to both positive and negative comments.

So I guess the overall message is that social media, while it might seem like good fun, is a discipline like any other form of marketing. Have fun by all means, but remember your company’s reputation is on the line too.