10 Great New (Mostly) Social Selling Tools

Gabe Villamizar, director of social selling at HireVue, gave a great presentation at the AMPlify conference in Waltham, MA this morning about “10 Social Selling Apps & Tools Your Sales Reps Need to Have.” I hadn’t heard of most of them, but I will try them out. These tools go beyond simple monitoring and filtering. They actually make sense of what’s going on in social media and put information in a format that’s useful in the sales process. Here’s his list. Brandr –  Create ready-to-post messages and images bearing your corporate brand and design. Pablo by Buffer - Search a library of 50,000+ royalty-free photos and f…

Social selling – get on the bus or be flattened by it

If you think “social selling” is just the latest marketing buzzword, then spend a half hour checking out the websites of the startups covered on TechCrunch on VentureBeat each day. Every one of these dynamic young technology firms, which are raising millions of dollars in venture capital funding, has one or more blogs and multiple social network accounts. This at a time when the most recent research by the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth finds that blogging among the Fortune 500 is actually on the decline. What these growing companies understand that many big corporations apparently don’t is that the terms of engagement wit…

The Power of Bottom-Up Branding

Every marketer should read the recent Harvard Business Review article, “Branding in the Age of Social Media,” by Douglas Holt. The former Harvard and Oxford University professor asserts that most businesses are failing with social media because they’re using the same tactics they used in the days of mass media. This familiar strategy is called “branded content.” The idea is to create memorable content that people come to associate with a brand. It's not a new idea. Back in the 1950s brands sponsored popular TV shows, and legendary advertising campaigns like “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing” were based upon the same id…

25 B2B Marketers Sound Off on 2016 Priorities

I was delighted when B2B Marketing Zone – a website and newsletter that I devour - asked me to be one of 25 contributors to its "B2B Marketing Trends for 2016" e-book. I love this content concept, and it’s an idea more B2B marketers could adopt. Contact influencers in your market – or even your own customers or subject matter experts – and ask them for short paragraphs on a topic, then combine that content into an e-book. Then do what Tom Pick and Tony Karrer of B2B Marketing Zone did – make it easy for people to compose posts like this one and share the book through their social networks. Your contributors will be flattered …

What’s next for B2B social media in 2016

By Paul Gillin,  January 2016 I was recently contacted by a B2B publication looking for some thoughts on what’s coming up in the next year. I thought some of the questions were interesting and worth sharing here. What trends are gaining momentum in B2B social media right now? B2B marketers are finally realizing that merely throwing content into the ether is both expensive and wasteful, so they’re trying to target their content better to the audience and purpose. Marketers realize that buyers are people, not demographic segments, so they are appealing more to the motivations that influence human behavior. That’s one reason we s…

5 Tips for Social Selling

Conventional wisdom these days says that social media is a poor lead generator. Conventional wisdom is wrong. While social media doesn’t lend itself to the hard sell, it provides some excellent opportunities to find and qualify buyers who can become leads. Here are five ways to do that. Research prospects Nothing is more flattering to prospective customers than showing interest in them personally. The Web is the greatest prospect research tool ever invented. Look up the LinkedIn and Twitter profiles of prospects before you contact them. Google them to see if they have online bios or blogs. Look for connection points. Was your prospect…

Struggling to find content for your content marketing program? Our Oct. 21 e-seminar is for you

By Paul Gillin  October 2015 U.S. companies will spend more than $4 billion on content marketing this year, and an estimated 90% of B2B marketers currently have content marketing initiatives. In the age of search and social referrals, attracting prospects with high-quality content is no longer a luxury; it’s a necessity. But creating content that’s relevant to sophisticated buyers is no simple task. The most successful content marketers enlist subject matter experts (SMEs), or the people who design, build and support the products, to tell their stories best. “My job is to get engineers talking to customers and then get out of the…

Dos and Don’ts of Employee Advocacy Programs

By Paul Gillin, September 28, 2015 With Facebook logging its first billion-user day and LinkedIn closing in on 400 million members, many savvy companies are realizing that their most credible marketing resource – their own employees – are quite literally staring them in the face. That’s why they’re adopting employee and business partner advocacy programs to tap into the social networks of their own people to spread messages at a grassroots level. But making these programs work isn’t necessarily cheap or simple. Here are some do’s and don’ts to consider if you’re thinking of launching an employee/partner advocacy initiati…

How to Get Subject Matter Experts Active In Your Content Marketing Program

Getting subject matter experts (SMEs) to support a company’s content marketing programs can be one of the most fulfilling experiences a B2B marketer can experience. Unfortunately, it’s also one of the most difficult to achieve. SMEs are the core of the business. As a result, they’re expensive and their time is precious. Some – usually a majority - are not skilled communicators and fear that they will embarrass themselves or the company. Their managers may also guard them closely, fearing that their own organizations will suffer the loss of an SME’s time or believing – with some justification – that spotlighting will make the…

Yes, you can, too, publish on LinkedIn

In 2014 LinkedIn opened its formerly exclusive publishing platform to everyone.  On your homepage you might have noticed the button “Publish a post”.  This creates an exciting new opportunity to broaden the audience for your content, with very little downside. Content posted on LinkedIn is automatically shared with your connections and visible to everyone.  LinkedIn’s built-in sharing features also make it easy for others to recommend your stuff to their networks on LinkedIn and elsewhere. If you already contribute to a blog on a regular basis, consider cross-posting the content to LinkedIn.  Vary headlines to measure impact,…