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- B2B Online Marketing And Networking: 3 Activities That Get You Clients
- Mice, Dolphins, Inter-Galactic Highways And Innovation
- A Well Defined Competitive Set Is A Competitive Advantage
| B2B Online Marketing And Networking: 3 Activities That Get You Clients Posted: 09 Oct 2012 07:20 AM PDT B2B online marketing and networking is a different animal to B2C. It requires a subtler set of strategies and often a more creative approach. In this post, I will give you examples of activities I have used to get to results and new clients. I should warn that being authentic is important here. For these approaches to work, you have to want to build relationships. If you are only carrying out these tactics to generate customers - business people will see through you!
# B2B online marketing activity 1: master LinkedInLinkedin is one of the most valuable tools available to the B2B business professional. Why?
Any B2B professional who ignores LinkedIn doesn't deserve to be called a professional, in my opinion! Also, if I'm honest, my experience of how the average business person uses Linkedin wouldn't inspire me. Make a LinkedIn time investment
Learning to become a proficient, efficient and smart LinkedIn user is no longer about choice, it's a must! Become a Linkedin superstar like Frank HanniganThe following interview is a stunning example of how smart business people can leverage Linkedin. Frank Hannigan (one of the best users of Linkedin I know!) describes how he used the platform to raise over 200 thousand dollars in less than 2 weeks. Click here to view the embedded video. # B2B online marketing activity 2: content marketing"Content marketing is an umbrella term encompassing all marketing formats that involve the creation and sharing of content in order to attract, acquire and engage clearly defined and understood current and potential consumer bases with the objective of driving profitable customer action." wikipedia.org Plan to create REALLY great contentCreating content that your customers want is proven to be one of the very best ways to engage with new clients but only after you plan:
The content marketing "chicken and egg" problem.The online content game is a very competitive environment and many B2B content creators struggle to make their content work for them. This happens primarily because of a kind of chicken and egg content marketing problem:
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| Mice, Dolphins, Inter-Galactic Highways And Innovation Posted: 09 Oct 2012 06:26 AM PDT "Good luck and thanks for all the fish", the final communication between the Dolphins and Mice just prior to Planet Earth's destruction. This was to make way for an Inter-Galactic Highway, in Douglas Adams' "five part trilogy" The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy. What has that got to do with Management and Innovation? In this post I have taken the liberty of equating Adams' book with management's fear of change and innovation. As the book explains, the People (Management) believed they were in charge but of course the Mice (Customers) were the most powerful species on the Planet, followed by the Dolphins (Middle Management) and they were really running the Planet (the Business). The People had a fear of change and were not leveraging the innovation around them (Social Business Model), the consequence was traumatic for all Planet Earth's inhabitants. Total wipe-out.
Fear of change in Management of Innovation.Interestingly the planning permission notice for the destruction of Planet Earth had been on view in another Galaxy for all to see. The people had not learned to harness inter-galactic travel (innovation) and so were unaware of the changes that were taking place in their own universe (the market). Seven billion lives lost due to fear of change - only two people survived. All the Mice and Dolphins were wiped out in the destruction of the Planet; they were collateral damage - nothing new there I'm afraid. How could this unfortunate misunderstanding have been avoided?In Adams book the people (management) had been ignoring the changes taking place around them, they were not listening to the Mice and Dolphins. They had also ignored all the innovation surrounding them, they had failed to embrace change. Collaboration was not encouraged between the various species. A siloed mentality by the people ignored the Mice and Dolphins and all the experience these species brought to the table. Simple analytics would have saved the world. Simple listening devices would have raised the issue of the proposed planning application. The raw data of the planning notification would have surfaced if the correct listening techniques had being applied. The people do not have all the answers. Collaboration and cooperation could have saved the world populations obliteration. The keys to the innovative Social Business Model are listening, digesting the data, developing a strategy and add in internal and external collaboration among all species on the planet. ConclusionIf the people had taken all the information available to them, listened to the other species, leveraged their collective knowledge and adopted a healthy attitude towards innovation they would have being aware of the planning application of the Intergalactic Motorway Commission to upgrade the motorway network in the Milky Way galaxy. The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy is an example of what is happening among the 40 year old+ management in Irish and World business. Ignoring the innovative Social Business Model will lead to the sight of a wrecking ball outside your business's door one morning seemingly without notice. The innovation planning applications are on notice boards all over this planet, the Mice are now in charge, management have to recognize that innovation in the form of the Social Business Model has placed the power firmly within the hands of the Mice. If management does not adapt to the change the consequences will be dire for their businesses. Can your business continue to ignore innovation and end up like the Planet Earth in Adams' book? Did you like this article? Sign up for our RSS and/or Follow us on Google+ Images: "Comet passing in front of planet earth/ Shutterstock.com" The post Mice, Dolphins, Inter-Galactic Highways And Innovation appeared first on Tweak Your Biz. |
| A Well Defined Competitive Set Is A Competitive Advantage Posted: 09 Oct 2012 06:03 AM PDT In a recent article entitled "3 Questions You Must Answer To Stop Your Company Going The Way Of Stagecoaches", I spoke about how to ensure that your business and brand survives over time with competitive advantage. I suggested there were at least 3 key challenges your strategy needed to pass to ensure that your company does not go the way of stagecoach companies. Once stagecoaches were the only way to travel from "A" to "B", but now they are things of museums and characters in wild west films and books. In this article I wanted to discuss how critical defining your competitive set is in determining how you, your teams and your company will focus and operate and gain competitive advantage.
Defining your competitive set is a major and critical decision that you need to make about your business.It will drive everything that you and your people do and focus on, sometimes without realizing it. It will be critical on determining what your business will become. What you decide may even take you to places you did not know that you needed to go. Deciding who is your competitive set may sound simple, but it is a critical decision that will have a massive ripple effect across the organization and your competitive advantage. For example, Coca Cola could set its competitive set as any of the following: • Other carbonated cola drinks. If you were working for Coca Cola you would think and act differently based on each one. Take a look again at each of the possible competitive sets defined above and think about the implications of each. It would influence what products you developed, which consumers you targeted, where you sold the products and how you advertised and promoted them. The impact of your decision on the competitive set ripples across everything you do, building up to a tsunami effect over time relentlessly driving you in one direction with a momentum that can be hard to change. Learn from stagecoaches, ferries and Eurostar.If stagecoach company owners defined their competitive set as other stagecoach services, they would have been focusing on things that would help them to out-perform other stagecoach services. Perhaps looking at more comfortable stagecoaches, or having better schedules and lower prices through investing in logistics and efficiencies. However, if they had set their competitive set as all forms of transportation to get people from "A" to "B", they would have been focused very differently. It would have been more likely that they could have evolved into companies that would still be providing transportation from "A" to "B" today. The cross channel ferries running between the UK and France faced a similar dilemma with the advent of low cost flights and the Channel Tunnel. They seem to be focused, though, on a competitive set of other ferry services. On the other hand Eurostar clearly have a broader view of their competitive set. You always see them reporting and talking about their share, cost and benefit differential and the performance of transporting people and cargo from London to Paris and Brussels. They see airlines, ferries and presumably any other forms of crossing that may emerge, as all being in the competitive set. In fact, they are trying to enter the ferry business to build their share of transporting larger trucks that their trains cannot carry on the route. Make sure you measure what you do that way too.One major, and telling, indicator of how a company sees its competitive set is how it measures its share performance. For example, when I worked on Johnson's Baby we used to measure our market shares in the total category of shampoos, powders, oils and lotions. We would also look at the baby product shares as well, but we saw the competitive set as the total category. As a result, the people managing the brand were focused on how to get more people to try and use Johnson's Baby products on themselves, not just on babies. SummaryDefining your competitive set is a critical decision that will drive where you and your teams focus their attention - often without realising it. It will determine how and where your business evolves. You need to measure your share and performance within that definition to help to keep that focus. Action to gain competitive advantage.1. Ask yourself if your company or brand is clear what your competitive set is? One clue, if you are still unsure, is look at how you measure your performance in the market. Who are you comparing results with? 2. Is your competitive set well defined, but is it a growing and big enough segment that can sustain growth for the long term? Did you like this article? Sign up for our RSS and/or Follow us on Google+ Images: "Background concept wordcloud illustration of business competitive advantage glowing light / Shutterstock.com" The post A Well Defined Competitive Set Is A Competitive Advantage appeared first on Tweak Your Biz. |
The Ahain Group uses reports to talk with new customers
Sian Phillips and Nellie R. Akalp
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