B2B Marketing Promotions

Business promotion is getting easier and cheaper, thanks to social media. However, don’t mistake cheap and easy with ineffective or a waste of time.

Many experienced businesspeople are still married to traditional marketing and business promotion techniques. They still think in terms of advertising in broadcast and print media. They still think about eyeballs, open rates, and CPMs (cost per thousand views). They’re thinking about impressions, drive time, and prime time. But business promotion has grown beyond traditional marketing and advertising, and moved online.

Why Is Business Promotion Changing?

It’s because of Generation Y and the explosive growth of social media. There are 82 million members of Generation Y (compared to the 78+ million Baby Boomers), and 96% of them are on a social network of some sort. Whether it’s Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, or other networks, these online tools have reshaped business promotion as we know it.

If you want to reach Generation Y through business promotion, consider social media as your best bet. It costs less than traditional advertising, can be targeted to reach only the people you want, and can easily be measured. The problem with traditional advertising is that you can’t effectively measure whether it was your TV commercials or billboards that resulted in increased sales, and even if one of them was more effective.

How Can I Use Social Media for Online Business Promotion?

Social media is all about communicating and building trust through relationships. By speaking to your customer base on their terms and their turf, you can earn their trust a lot more easily, which can make your business promotion much more effective. Generation Y spends a lot of time online, getting their news and entertainment from the web. They communicate via text messages on their cell phone. And they are the biggest consumer of mobile videos of any generation.

Social media is becoming more popular and widespread. The biggest demographic on Facebook may still be Generation Y, but the fastest growing one is women 50 and over. If that was your biggest customer base, how would you reach them? You could advertise during shows that women over 50 typically watch, but you’re not going to necessarily reach them. Plus, you need to repeat those ads many times, which will get expensive. But with Facebook, you can create fan pages and groups specifically for your target audience. You can even purchase ads that are served only to women in their 50s. You can’t do that with traditional advertising.

Your online business promotion campaign should consist of Twitter, Facebook and/or MySpace, and blogging. Set up accounts, fan pages, blogs, and communicate with your potential customers about the things they want to talk about. Don’t tell them what you do, talk to them about what they do, like, and enjoy. Become a resource for their interests by forwarding articles, providing tips, and telling people about other resources that meet their interests and needs.

Whenever possible, use online business promotions to support your offline promotions as well. If you’re attending a trade show, are sponsoring a special event or team, or are still using traditional marketing, tell people about it through your social networks.

If you’re at a trade show, encourage people on Twitter to stop by your booth. If you’re sponsoring a special event, talk it up on your Facebook fan page. Or if you’re sponsoring a sports team, consider setting up a fan page for that team. Put your Twitter account and Facebook URL in your advertisements, and encourage people to follow you or become fans. There’s no reason these two business promotion methods have to be separate.

While we’re not predicting the death of traditional marketing methods, we are encouraging you to add social media as a big part of your business promotion toolbox.

Reverse SEO’s importance never became more apparent than it did a couple of weeks ago. I got a call from a potential client — we’ll call him Ken H. Block — who had a Google problem.

Ken was a former sports anchor, well-known to sports fans in his area, and has been online for years. He does video marketing for a couple of very large, multi-national companies, as well as some smaller clients. He banked on his name, but hadn’t done very much to promote it. The problem was that there was another man — Ken S. Block, a convicted felon and scam artist — who had the same name. The problem became obvious when the CEO of one of the companies had Googled his name, and found Ken S. He knew Ken H. was not Ken S., but he couldn’t resist teasing him about it. During a phone call with other company executives.

Ken H needed some reverse SEO badly.

What is Reverse SEO?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of optimizing your website so it appears at the top of search engine results. Conversely, reverse SEO means you push down unwanted, negative results by piling your pages on top of the negative one, pushing it right off the page.

Most people only have to worry about name doubles stealing their thunder, but Ken H. had a problem with people confusing him with a convicted felon. While it wasn’t an issue for the people who knew Ken, it could be a problem for the people who wanted to hire him. And short of paying for a Google Ad that said, “Ken S. Block the felon is not to be confused with Ken H. Block the video marketer,” reverse SEO was going to be his best option.

What can Reverse SEO do for me?

Since Ken H’s search results were a single blog post, it doesn’t look like it will be that difficult to knock from the top rank. But it is not always this easy. We know people who share names with other notable people, and they have worked hard to maintain a top search ranking. One friend shares a similar name with a Big Ten running back, which can sometimes lead to some interesting search results.

There are only a few steps we would need to take for Ken S, but we need to do them many times until we achieve the desired result.

• Blogging is the primary tool in our reverse SEO toolbox, and should be the hub in your social media campaign. Ken H should blog about anything and everything related to his work. He should also write about the Ken S./Ken H. confusion (“I am not Ken S. Block”), and try to focus on getting that as a featured post so people will find it during future searches. By winning searches with that post, he can reverse SEO the Ken S. Block page down from the top position.
• YouTube videos are a great reverse SEO tool. And since Ken H. is a video marketer, he needs to use video to promote his work anyway. And as videos become more popular, easier to access, and available on mobile devices, this will become more important in reverse SEO campaigns.
• Backlink to your website. This is a practice for regular SEO, so you know it’s going to work for reverse SEO too. Basically, the search engines put more stock into websites with a lot of links going into them (that’s a backlink). The more you have, the higher your site appears. In Ken H’s case, if he were to increase his backlinks, his blog will rise to the top of the rankings, which will push Ken S’ name down.

Reverse SEO is not that difficult. It’s just time consuming. You can’t just do a couple of optimization tricks and sit back and relax. These steps need to be repeated many times, and in the right places, if you’re going to have a successful reverse SEO campaign.

The consumer loyalty promotion is still a way for companies to earn repeat business from customers. Whether it’s a coffee shop giving you your 10th latte for free, or an airline miles program that gives you a free ticket after 25,000 travel miles, consumer loyalty promotions are an effective way to bring customers back time and again.

Some of you may be old enough to remember the Green Stamps consumer loyalty promotion in the 60s and 70s and earlier. These consumer loyalty promotions actually started in the 1800s as a way to reward customers who paid with cash. Later, stamps were given to everyone who made a purchase. The stamps could be redeemed for store discounts, or for merchandise. The S&H Green Stamps were very popular in the 1960s and 1970s, and anyone in their 40s and older can remember their parents’ or even their own collections of the green stamps.

Nowadays, rather than giving stamps, many stores just give discounts, but only if you’re a member of one of their consumer loyalty promotions. You show your little card — usually kept on a keychain — when you check out, and they give you a discount on your groceries. Spend enough money, and the reward is usually a discount on their gasoline, in addition to the initial savings. Most people, about 75%, carry at least one of these consumer loyalty promotions cards.

The upside of a consumer loyalty promotion is that you can amass all kinds of purchasing information about your customers with their permission. Want to know how many people have recently begun buying diapers? Or cat food? Or prefer certain brands of beer? Direct mail marketers love to know this kind of information, and will pay for your consumer loyalty promotions lists just to find out new ways to get your customers to buy their products.

But consumer loyalty promotions are not just about selling mailing lists. They’re marketing tools. They encourage people to come back again and again, to earn the rewards you’re offering after 10 cups of coffee, 25,000 miles, $100 spent at a grocery store. The rewards in consumer loyalty promotions are there for you to continually show why your customers need to keep coming back. They’re not just a trick; they show your customers again and again why you’re their provider of choice.

In fact, that’s the point about a good consumer loyalty promotion: you can keep track of your customers, reward loyalty with prizes and discounts. You can also figure out ways to convert your occasional customers to loyal customers, and your loyal customers to raving fans.

Back in the 1990s and early 2000s, travel consumer loyalty promotions were all the rage. You got airline miles for flying a certain airlines, miles for staying in allied hotels, and could even double and triple those miles if you paid for the flight and night with your miles-earning credit cards. Some days it seemed like you needed a Ph.D. in customer loyalty management just to keep track of it all, but there were news stories of people who would take unnecessary flights just to reach the 500,000 mile platinum level for the next year.

If you’re thinking about setting up a consumer loyalty promotion of your own, be sure you give your customers something they want. It’s not enough just to give a discount, or a cheap piece of merchandise no one wanted in the first place, like the proverbial toaster for opening a new account. Figure out why your customers are there in the first place, and give them that. Sandwich shops give free sandwiches, airlines give free travel tickets. Give your customers something for free when they spend a certain amount of money or buy a specific number of items.

Referrals are another great form of consumer loyalty promotions. Customers are not just coming back themselves, they’re bringing their friends. If a customer comes to your store once a week and brings a friend who now comes once a week, that customer has actually doubled their value. They’re already fans, and by bringing in their friends, they will actually become more loyal to you and your company.

consumer loyalty promotions are a great way to not only thank your customers, but to market your company at no additional costs other than the rewards you gave out for your efforts.