1. SOCIAL MEDIA

According to an article by Gary Halliwell on iMediaConnection , a wider range of employees and departments will be representing brands on social media in 2012. The employees and departments will increase as companies find broader uses for social media beyond sales, marketing and brand recognition. Some potential broader uses as mentioned in an article on Search Engine Watch could include problem identification, lead management and recruitment.

A survey conducted by StrongMail as noted in an article by Quinton O’Reilly on SimplyZesty.com found that more than half of B2B marketers will be increasing their social media marketing budget by 55% in 2012. Similarly, an article from MarketingProfs referencing the same survey, notes that two-thirds of business leaders (68%) say they plan to integrate social media with their email marketing efforts in 2012. Facebook marketing programs are seen as the most important venue.   Additionally, Merlin Francis with LeadFormix  predicts that the social media focus in 2012 will be on sharing expertise in groups and forums, participating in group discussions and subtle promotion.

2. MARKETING AUTOMATION

According to articles from the Marketing Leadership Council, iMediaConnection and LeadFormix, a priority will be placed on marketing automation solutions in 2012 for better targeting and segmentation results. Gary Halliwell predicts that solutions will be made more accessible and reach beyond Fortune enterprise organizations into medium sized companies – and real-time marketing will be a reality in the New Year. Merlin Francis also predicts that the companies who had adopted a marketing automation system in 2011 or prior, will optimize their investments in 2012 by ensuring their marketing and sales teams are getting the most out of the platforms they are employing.

3. CONTENT MARKETING

According to articles from the Content Marketing Institute, B2B Marketing Insider and the Marketing Leadership Council, content marketing will also be priority in 2012. Based on a survey completed by the Content Marketing Institute, budgets will increase significantly for content marketing initiatives 2012. This includes outsourced content marketing solutions. Michael Brenner with B2B Marketing Insider predicts that senior positions for Content Strategists will become common place within marketing organizations. In addition, LeadFormix foresees that beyond corporate blogs and keyword driven articles, content marketing initiatives in 2012 will emphasize high quality research reports, presentations, video-logs and infographics.

Now that we’ve narrowed down the top three predictions, it’s time to start thinking about what your business is accomplishing within these areas in 2012. Can you find additional business uses for social media? Do you have plans to automate your marketing processes? Are you expanding on content marketing initiatives in 2012? It’s not too late to incorporate these tactics in your 2012 strategy, don’t let your competitors get a head start in the New Year!

1. Only 25% of leads are legitimate and should go to sales.  50% are qualified but not ready to buy. (Source: Gleanster Research)

Nearly half of your leads will not be ready for a sales call immediately after their first conversion.  But that doesn’t mean you should just ignore these leads or throw them right out the window along with the bad leads.  A key component of a good lead management system is implementing lead nurturing, which allows you to develop relationships with your leads in a timely and effective way by setting up targeted email campaigns.  By following up with these leads and providing valuable content to further educate them about your industry, company, and product or service, you move them farther down your sales funnel until they are ready to become customers.

2. Lead nurturing emails get 4-10 times the response rate compared to standalone email blasts. (Source: SilverPop/DemandGen Report)

The true power of lead nurturing lies in its two most important features – timing and targeting.  You should plan the timing of your emails based on your typical sales cycle, and experiment with different times to see what resonates best with your audience.  Arguably more important, though, is the targeting of your emails.  You should place your leads into appropriate campaigns based on their previous actions on your website, and send them content that is relevant to that topic.  The more precisely and effectively your emails are timed and targeted, the higher your response rates will be.

3. 35-50% of sales go to the vendor that responds first. (Source: InsideSales.com)

One of the many benefits of lead nurturing is that you can establish contact with your newly converted leads immediately.  This is crucial because response rates decline rapidly as the age of a lead increases.  By setting up your lead nurturing emails to run automatically, you no longer have to worry about forgetting to follow up with your leads right away, and you make the whole process much simpler and much more effective.

4. 66% of buyers indicate that “consistent and relevant communication provided by both sales and marketing organizations” is a key influence in choosing a solution provider. (Source: Genius.com/DemandGen Report)

Another important benefit of lead nurturing is that it allows you to maintain consistent communication with your leads.  Oftentimes, it takes more than one email to effectively bring your lead from being unqualified to ready for that sales call.  With lead nurturing, you set up your emails to send automatically at strategically determined times.  You can then collect data about the behavior of each lead and the actions they take with respect to each email they receive, and use this information to plan the next steps of your email strategy.  The idea is to not lose contact with your leads unless the likelihood that they can be nurtured to become qualified for sales is severely reduced.

5. Segmented emails get 50% more clicks. (Source: MarketingSherpa)

The importance of segmenting your leads into appropriate nurturing campaigns cannot be stressed enough.  Find segmentation opportunities based on the lead intelligence data you collect, such as their first conversion event (i.e. did they become a lead by downloading your ebook?  Signing up for your free trial?), what parts of your site they have visited, and so on.  Figure out what topics or aspects of your product they seem most interested in, and send them content that reflects that topic.  By closely mapping your content to your leads, you increase the likelihood that they will click through in your emails.

6. Nurtured leads have 9% higher average deal sizes and 23% shorter sales cycles. (Source: Market2Lead)

By adequately preparing your leads through nurturing campaigns, you are refining the list of leads you hand over to your sales team to include only those that are qualified, or sales-ready.  This makes the sale easier on both sides, since the lead is already educated on your company and product, and presumably ready to buy, which of course makes the sales pitch easier.  This reduces the sales cycle, thereby making your sales team and your entire funnel far more efficient.

7. Only 33% of B2B marketers say they have an effective lead nurturing process. (Source: Executive Benchmark Assessment Survey/DemandGen Report)

Most marketers aren’t nurturing their leads, and many of the ones that are aren’t doing it right.  Lead nurturing is an extremely powerful tool.  After all, with all that effort you put into generating leads for your business, why would you want to put half of them to waste?

Start building better relationships with your leads, stay ahead of the competition, and turn more of your leads into customers with effective lead nurturing.

Are you using lead nurturing?  What would you say is the most critical part of your lead management strategy?

Many marketing organizations use lead volume as the primary way they evaluate program effectiveness.  This metric is too limiting.  Here’s a common scenario to help illustrate why marketing organizations need to use metrics beyond lead volume when evaluating program effectives and marketing’s contribution.

Imagine you have two new customer acquisition programs in play:  Program Excalibur produces 100 qualified leads and Program Camelot produces 50 qualified leads.  At first glance, it might appear that based on volume or the quantity of qualified leads, that Excalibur is the better program.  For the moment, let’s place whether each program met its performance target aside and explore why just tracking the number of qualified leads may lead you down the wrong path by pursuing Excalibur and terminating Camelot.

Most marketers would agree that cost is an important metric, so let’s add cost to the illustration. The cost per lead for Camelot is $5/lead and it is $15/lead for Excalibur.  Again, ignoring for the time being whether these costs were within the target zone, it might now seem that Camelot is worth further investment because while it didn’t produce as many leads, it produced quality leads less expensively.  Do we have enough to make the decision?  Maybe, but what if we added conversation rate as a metric to the equation?

Of the 100 qualified leads produced by Excalibur, 25 convert to sales (25%) accepted opportunities and for Camelot only 10 convert (20%).  To keep things simples, let’s say both programs have the same close rate of 10%, (2 deals for Excalibur and 1 deal for Camelot).  With this additional color Excalibur once again looks like the champ.  What if we add velocity to the equation? Upon analysis we learn that it took only 15 days for

Camelot leads to convert to prospect stage and another 45 days on average to convert these prospects to customers. But for Excalibur leads it took 30 days on average to move them to prospect stage and 90 days on average to customer stage.  This means that the time and cost to close is less for Camelot deals than Excalibur deals. So now Camelot is squarely back in the game.

Now let’s weave in another bit of information.  The average order value for the Camelot deals is $50,000 while the average order value for the Excalibur deals is $75,000. Excalibur is once again back on top.

Lastly, we can consider the performance targets which were set for each program. These were 200 qualified leads from Excalibur at $10/lead with a 30% conversion rate and 50 qualified leads from Camelot at $5/lead with a 30% conversion rate.  If we can improve the conversion rate for Camelot deals and understand why the average order is lower, then Camelot is actually performing better and worth additional investment compared to Excalibur.  However, if we had made our decision solely based on volume of leads then we might have prematurely dismissed Camelot.

We can use the chart below to illustrate the example. This example identifies several important pipeline metrics beyond lead volume. Cost/lead, lead velocity, average lead value, time to close, and win rate are all important metrics for analyzing the success of programs and making investment decisions.  In addition, the performance targets set in advance provide valuable insight because they reflect how well Marketing executed the program. As you evaluate Marketing’s contribution to the opportunity pipeline, we hope you include these metrics in the analysis.

Photo Credit:  Some rights reserved by rcbodden

Photo Credit:  Some rights reserved by rcbodden

Many marketers who have discovered tips or tricks about their field keep those items close to their chest. It’s understandable why they would want to preserve these secrets, whether for competitive advantage, job security or simple jealousy. They use these strategies to help create leads for their sales teams, and watch their secret tools or methods mature over time and find ways to improve them or get a little more out of them. A lot of these hidden tools and tricks are around finding ways to pull in more leads to the top of your marketing funnel, whether to increase your social media reach, list size, or any other attribute that you are being measured on as a marketer. Here are five steps that you should be doing to make your B2B marketing efforts more effective online.

Network More Efficiently with Followerwonk

Followerwonk is a Twitter networking tool that helps you identify other Twitter users with specific interests, sorted by how popular they are. There are a number of tools out there that do things that are similar to this, but Followerwonk is better than them for a few reasons: You don’t need to sign in or give it information about yourself, it’s very fast, and it doesn’t just do the basics like “Find users like me”. As marketers, we usually aren’t trying to find more people who are just like us, but instead trying to find people in certain segments or topic areas.

Their sorting and ranking is also useful because it places the likely influencers and predictors of the field at the top of the rankings very reliably, and so you can quickly assemble the list of 10 or 15 primary people that you would like to reach out to. You can reach out to them directly from Followerwonk once you’ve established who in a specific field that you want to contact, and engage with them. If you’re instead just trying to build followers, you can also do a search for the people who follow the most people, and then follow them from Followerwonk – They are the people most likely to end up following you back.

Make Sure Your Social Media Presence Has Forms

This is a mistake that a lot of marketers make when using in social media – Forgetting to include the lead form. We frequently get caught up in the other parts of social media like “conversing” and “engaging” and “joining the conversation” that we forget to include our own motives in our work. Make sure that some of your tweets go to landing pages on your site or refer back to content offers that you have. A good rule of thumb is that if you’ve made ten tweets but haven’t linked to something that could generate leads for you, it’s the perfect time to do so. Some marketing automation software packages can also help you track this and handle it for you. If you have other interactive tweets and actions happening, that means that you have the engaged following that you need to be successful with this.

Special Offers To Your Unengaged Recipients

Build a mailing list segment of people who haven’t been responsive to your last five emails to them, and then send them a special offer and ask them what they are looking for but haven’t seen. You can get very valuable feedback and advice, and generate leads that were otherwise unresponsive. Consider this a different type of lead nurturing campaign, customized to an unresponsive set of leads or prospects.

In one test, a re-engagement email was sent to otherwise inactive contacts that included a final offer and asked them for feedback on what they’d received so far. Almost 5% of those emailed “woke up” and became actively engaged in some way, by responding to the question or following through on the offer. While that may not seem like a great number, these were previously inactive subscribers, and so were basically dead weight on the mailing list. By getting some action out of them, they were more valuable than before, and the marketer was able to remove the other emails from the list, maintaining list health and reducing the cost of future campaigns.

Make Sure Your Website Is Optimized

This can feel like an obvious item to be aware of, but it’s tricky – It’s too easy to lose track of old pages and outdated offers on your website when you’re a busy marketer. Twice a year, take a quick inventory of your offers and their conversion rates, and then check pages on your site that haven’t been changed in the last six months. If they’re displaying offers or forms that are not converting well anymore, consider switching them out with newer offers or ones that are proving more effective. By getting into a regular six month cycle of this, you will be more aware of what is succeeding or flopping on your website, and better able to turn around pages that aren’t delivering on their potential value to you.

Check Your Historical Analytics

Finally, hand in hand with the previous point, make sure that you are consistently examining your analytics, not just against the previous month, but also against last year’s month and the year before that, if available. Look at your growth, accomplishments, and the milestones that helped set you along that way. If business hasn’t been as strong as the past, carefully review what different segments of traffic and activity looked like in past years. Is it traffic or leads from a particular source or type of source that has decreased? This can help you better understand where you need to focus your efforts to grow again, or where your real problems lie.

What other tips or ideas do you have for success in lead generation?

Photo Credit: Flickr: Some rights reserved by boklm

A recent Gartner survey asked the question “Who is leading social media initiatives in your business?”. 35% of the respondents answered “Marketing.” 10% said “PR.” Nobody said “Sales” or “CRM” teams. The immediate conclusion to this is that companies are still falling short of using social media, and the web to listen. While marketing departments are getting much better at tracking brand in the B2C space, most B2B organizations would most likely hold their hands up and say they still ‘don’t get it.’ There are several reoccurring themes as to why businesses claim they’ve fallen behind:

• It’s all new and fairly daunting; we get good results using the old methods.
• We banned social media early on and haven’t got round to reassessing it.
• There’s no time in the day to use it.
• It’s not business orientated.
• It’s too public a place to share info.

If you agree with any of the above statements as an account manager you’re not looking at social business in the right light. As an account manager social business should say several things:

• It can help build my customer relationships even stronger.
• It can help me identify when somebody has a need I can help with.
• It’s publicly shared information that means I don’t have to dig for it. It should SAVE me time.
• It keeps me informed with what’s happening with my customer and makes me look like I’ve done my homework.

I recently spoke to an account manager who had seen a new corporate video released on his customer’s Twitter feed. This was a fairly low profile customer in terms of media, so that kind of information would never make it into mainstream news channels, be it local or national. Within the video the key directors spoke about their future plans and strategy. Just calling to congratulate them on the video impressed them. Speaking about how he could help with their future direction of the company won him a deal. One tweet. That’s all it took, seeing something at the right time, showing an interest and calling to share it with them. At no point did that involve doing anything particularly complicated. He didn’t need to become a Twitter guru or learn the ins and outs of hashtags etc. He just spotted a bit of information, listened to it, and made contact regarding it. Not bad for a day’s work really.

The point I’m trying to make is that while social business is exceptionally hands on it doesn’t have to take all hours of the day to be successful. People are reluctant to use it because they fear the time it’ll take out of their already busy day. But you don’t have to tweet every 5 minutes or understand every last concept to make the most out of what’s available online. At the end of the day, social sources online are just methods of communication. Nothing is stopping you from seeing a tweet and *calling* the customer about it. You don’t have to tweet back necessarily and you don’t have to commit yourself to sharing your thoughts online. You can sit back and take in what’s happening around you and use the knowledge to engage in ways that suit you.

In the same way marketing teams are using the information to effectively shape their campaigns, you can use the information to shape your dialogue with a customer. Ignoring what’s being said is not a solution, it’s an oversight. Letting somebody else potentially see that information and act on it is letting a competitor steal a march on your position. Ignoring a method of communicating is not the answer, getting to grips with the fundamentals and using it to improve your workflow most certainly is.

Photo credit: Flickr Some rights reserved by ky_olsen

If you have value to offer, you have a story to tell. The story you tell about your business—the words and images you choose—can make the difference between being lost in the messaging noise or capturing your customer’s attention, interest and imagination.

You may already be creating material, online or in print, that tells your prospects and customers about the value of your products and/or services. But what if you could easily deliver your messages in a more dynamic visual way? What if your story hit the page with the emotional, aesthetic, and tactile impact of a professional-quality print magazine?

A great example of a large company that utilized their own branded magazine is AAA. When AAA started distributing their own magazine, filled with customer testimonials and travel advice, the company was able to more easily reach their audience in travel centers, hotels and information centers all over the country, further positioning themselves as a leader in the insurance and travel industries.

A branded magazine can really jump start your company as a thought leader in your industry or marketplace.  However, what if your audience demands the choice of both print and digital communication?  How can you tell your story in both online and physical worlds, and meet your customers wherever they happen to be?  New digital publishing and distribution technologies are creating opportunities to stand out from the crowd in both print and digital formats, without additional overhead or creative skills.  With these new services you can simply create your marketing material once, and have it formatted and distributed in both eye catching print formats, and easy to share digital formats.

Ask LIVESTRONG Quarterly, a new print, online and print-on-demand magazine.  Designed to create global awareness for the fight against cancer, they offer their community a variety of articles, profiles and resources in both a beautiful quality print magazine, as well as iPad and PDF digital versions, available across their readers’ device of choice.

So how do you get started with your own branded publication?  It used to be that bringing your brand story to life on the printed page required a daunting commitment.  Mass printings, upfront costs and press checks were the only way to create and even remotely justify the per-piece cost of a brochure or newsletter.  Too many storage rooms housed stacks of unused collateral, and ever evolving marketing messages made these materials quickly outdated.

Today, using a self-service, on-demand model, it’s simple and affordable to build a professional-quality print piece, that is printed, shipped and delivered to customers worldwide in days. Storage? There is no inventory. You order what you need, when you need it, from a handful to a truckload of copies, which are then printed on demand.  You can offer it in PDF format, link print to digital with urls and QR codes, and instantly refresh both your online and your print material whenever you need to.

There have long been promises around “print on demand” models—but the tools were never quite in hand, as they are now. As the digital transformation brings profound change to the industries of printing and publishing, what’s here today can have immediate positive effects on small business: professional collateral, both print and digital, easily within reach.

A great resource to explore is MagCloud (http://www.magcloud.com), a self-service publishing website from HP. Mainstream and independent publishers have used MagCloud to produce a remarkable array of magazine titles, which can be browsed in their online newsstand. And here’s the thing: small business are using the same high-quality printing and distribution services for their business needs—brochures, portfolios, event programs, annual reports, branded magazines and more.  In fact LIVESTRONG Quarterly is published and distributed through MagCloud.

There are no upfront costs or minimum print runs, and it’s a painless process to turn a PDF file into a professional-quality print publication without ever leaving your desk.  Digital PDF versions are also created that can be read on any desktop or mobile device, and there is an iPad app as well.  You pay only for what you need, with costs as low as twenty cents a page, and materials can be shipped to you, your colleagues, and customers around the world in just 3 days.  Upload your content once and print copies as often as you need to! Updating your content is easy too, with the latest version always available via your personal landing page on the MagCloud service.

It takes creativity and focus to give your business a marketing edge and get your story out there. Online versus print is yesterday’s question. Today’s question is, how can you get your unique value and story in front of the right customer, at the right time? Advantage goes to the business that takes advantage of the ways digital is transforming the print industry, and uses new tools in new ways to rise above the noise level.

Let’s take a look at three of the key factors that you need to check regularly to improve your marketing automation campaigns.

1. Too Many Messages

Is your marketing automation campaign sending your prospects and leads to many messages? It is important to view your leads as the human beings they are. Look at your results and the performance of messages over time for the individual people on your campaign lists. Are these messages getting opened? Are people clicking on your offers? If someone isn’t showing a positive response to the emails they’re receiving, have a backup plan that will further engage them. “Maybe the next message will motivate them” isn’t a good plan. Your messages must be useful, informative, and relevant.

Equip yourself to recognize when a lead isn’t responding, and handle the unresponsive lead accordingly. If someone doesn’t click on a link in three messages in a row, consider them “disengaged.” This type of disengaged recipient needs further qualification. Either you are sending them too many messages or your messages are not properly targeted.  Test new targeting strategies as well as a lower content frequency to determine how to maximize engagement. Also consider sending a special monthly email to the disengaged recipients on your list and ask for feedback or if they’d like to be removed from your list. Ultimately, when it comes to frequency in messaging, the goal is to treat your future customers the way they want to be treated.

2. List Expiration

Leads don’t stay at the same company forever. Job changes are one of the biggest challenges to maintaining a quality email marketing list. As a marketer it is your job to create proactive solutions to this problem.  This means actively pursuing strategies to have leads re-subscribe with their updated contact information.

The key to encouraging re-subscription is fresh content. As a marketer you need to provide a reason for a person to come back and reconvert. One way to do this is to create fresh blog content and use calls-to-action on your blog to reconvert visitors, and to make sure that you invite your visitors, leads, and list members to engage with you in other avenues, like social media.

3. Campaign Maintenance

Marketing automation isn’t like a Ron Popeil Rotisserie. You can’t simply set it and forget it. Campaigns need regular maintenance.  Create a monthly checklist for your marketing automation campaigns. Evaluate your marketing analytics data to determine performance. Based on the data determine how your content or message targeting needs to be adjusted. The most important part of this step is to schedule the time regularly to ensure that optimization is consistent and opportunities aren’t missed.

Don’t take your marketing automation for granted. Automation doesn’t mean touchless. Use these check points as well as other marketing automation best practices to improve your lead to customer conversion rate and drive more revenue for your business.

Is that true though?

Not based on recent research conducted by Readex Research. In a Media Usage Studies survey of 2,095 professionals between September 2010 and May 2011, when asked which media is used regularly in their work, respondents shared that:

• 77%  regularly use of search engines,
• 74% regularly use print publications,
• 74% regularly use e-newsletters,
• 55% trade/industry publications websites.

Furthermore, the survey revealed that “Of the nine forms of media listed, 55% indicated they used five or more, and only 5% indicated they used only one.” What we learn here is that instead of one media form (digital) replacing another (print), individuals are increasing the number of media types they are using in their work.

Translation: To increase the strength of your marketing, your message needs to permeate all the media channels being used by your customers. And according to this survey, PRINT must be one of them.

Marketing has the main responsibility for achieving profitable revenue growth derived from acquiring and retaining profitable customers.

Marketing jointly and equally shares the responsibility for generating revenue with our very important partners in the sales organization. I confess. I’m confused by the recent emphasis on Marketing being focused on revenue.  We now have blogs, websites and roadshows dedicated to the topic of marketing and revenue. Hasn’t Marketing always been focused on revenue?  I mean, isn’t that the job, growing the top line?  Did I miss something over the past 30 years?

Maybe the reason for the recent surge is that so many marketers have focused on generating awareness and leads without real clarity around how investments in these efforts drive revenue.  Today’s executives expect more than awareness and a higher number of qualified leads from marketing – they want a measurable return on their marketing investment and they want marketing to be able to communicate how it is relevant.  Perhaps, the microscopic scrutiny on marketing that has put marketing in the hot seat has also brought the topic of revenue generation into sharper focus.

But here’s the rub and the trap.  As a marketer, when was the last time you marketed to a bucket of revenue?  This is not the question you should ask.  The questions to ask are: how many customer “deals”, both net new and additional business from existing customers, constitute this number?  And how many of these is Marketing expected to drive?  Why?  Because as marketers our job to help the company acquire, keep and grow the value of profitable customers. This approach allows Marketing to help the organization take a customer-centric approach rather than focus on an internal revenue number.

To make this approach work, Marketing needs to translate the revenue number into how many customers and which ones. Ideally marketing should be informing our respective organizations which customers and prospects to target because as marketers we are the ones who are supposed to identifying the best customer and market opportunities from our customer and market segmentation and sizing efforts.

Armed with information about the state and size of the target market, their needs and wants, and how our offer best meets these needs and wants, we can develop strategies and programs designed to connect with these customers, increase and accelerate their consideration, and motivate their conversion to purchase.

Now as a marketer, you can go about setting marketing key performance indicators and program performance targets that will enable you to measure Marketing’s impact on revenue.  For example, let’s say you need some number of net new customers for a business unit by the end of the year.  Before you can set a target for the number of customer deals Marketing will generate, you will need to know the typical sales cycle type and cost to acquire a net new customer for this business unit.  This information can then be used to establish a target number for marketing qualified leads, the cost per lead and a target conversion rate for how many of these will be accepted by sales. And before you establish these numbers you will most likely want to set a performance range for how many customers/prospects a program will enable you to connect with and a target conversion rate and cost for these.

Driving revenue for the business takes working the numbers, then tracking and reporting on the performance to the numbers. Taking a customer-centric view rather than an internally oriented revenue-centric view and “doing the math” facilitates creating a marketing organization that is relevant, can measure its value, and more importantly affect revenue.

What do you think? Do we need a return to the fundamentals? Or are you as surprised as me about all this talk about something that should not need to be said? What do you think is happening to our profession?

Photocredit  Some rights reserved by balanced.crafts

So, how do you effectively market your Internet videos on social media platforms? The following article looks at the most effective approaches businesses, brands and bloggers should take to marketing their Internet videos on the top 5 social media websites.

YouTube

YouTube is not only a great video platform to host your content, but it’s status as a video ‘sharing’ site makes it one of the most popular platforms for online users to engage with video content.
Socialising on YouTube is always a win-win situation. Commenting, Video Responding, Messaging and Liking/Disliking other users content encourages those other users to interact with you, your YouTube Channel and your YouTube video content. By doing this you can start to enjoy an increased viewership for your Internet videos, and a raised social profile on this particular social media platform.

For those of you with a few pennies in your back pocket you can make use of YouTube’s Promoted Videos feature, which works on a very similar basis to Google Ad Words. This particular tool allows your videos to appear more frequently in certain search results, helping to grow your contents viewership even further.

It’s always worth remembering, YouTube has been a very social platform from the outset. As a website it has always made it possible for users to Friend one another and Subscribe to each other’s content. YouTube is not a ‘dying’ social media, but it is certainly an underused asset online, making it an incredibly viable and untapped social media marketing resource for any brand, business or blogger.

Facebook

Facebook really is the talk of the town lately. Zuckerburg and his gang have been churning out updates and changes that have resulted in more ups and downs in Facebook’s popularity than the entire global economy.

For those of you Facebook buffs you’ll immediately be aware that you can of course upload your video to Facebook, (much like on YouTube) tag users in it and encourage likes and comments, but that is a very ineffective and laid back approach to marketing your video on Facebook.

You should aim to make YouTube your videos only upload point. This means you can use other social media websites like Facebook to rack up more likes and more YouTube activity. The issue with making multiple destinations for your video on different social media sites is that it could begin to start splitting up and fragmenting your audience.

So how should you use your video on Facebook?

Your essential plan of attack should be to post your video in your status, share it with Friends interested in the same niche as you (never spam uninterested users with your content, that’s a big no-no), post it in relevant Groups and Pages and try to encourage users to Subscribe to your content. The new Subscribe function Facebook has introduced is a great way to keep Friends, thought leaders and interested users up to date with your video content.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn has and always will be business as usual. Sometimes it’s a place to engage in that slightly social after work mentality, but more often than not it’s a place for B2B social media buffs to interact with one an another, and chat about their work.

With that in mind, you wouldn’t think LinkedIn is really the place to try and market a video right? Well you’d be surprised. LinkedIn is full of Groups and Discussions that could be relevant to your videos topic or subject area. You’ll never be able to throw out a sales pitch on LinkedIn, but you can try to evoke feedback, thoughts and discussions around your video content. Just like on Facebook, only try and share your content with individuals and Groups relevant to your video, spamming is never the answer.

It’s worth bearing in mind that LinkedIn allows you to post status updates for a reason. There’s no reason why you can’t attach your video to a status update once in a while to try and stir up some interaction with your Connections. Statuses are perhaps the most socially interactive part of LinkedIn, where users operate in more of a ‘Facebook’ mindset. Your Connections are far more inclined to dish out ‘Likes’ and ‘Comments’ on your status than any other post, as it will appear in their news feed without them having to put in any effort to track your post down.

Twitter

Twitter to many online users is the home of automated posts, blanket re-posts and of course ridiculously lazy ReTweeting. I’m not going to be the one that says “don’t do it”, but when you see a user post the same personality deprived Tweet (complete with link) 4 times in succession, it doesn’t  quite show your Followers that you’ve actually put much effort into making a connection with them.

I will admit Twitter is a hard social media to crack. That pesky bird doesn’t allow much in the way of thumbnails and no matter how much you try to shorten a link on Bit.ly or Hoot Suite it still looks vastly uninteresting to the Following masses. The difficult nature of cracking Twitter is why so often many Internet marketers throw automated posts (typically sent from more ‘prosperous’ social media platforms) at their disinterested Followers.

The key to marketing a video on Twitter is to become an engaging user. Just like on every other social media you need to put the effort in. Build relationships through personalized @’s and Direct Messages to your Followers, become a Follower of interest in their Twitter feed and maybe even make the occasional thought provoking ReTweet of their work for good measure.

The secret with Twiter is it doesn’t matter if you post a link, a joke, a topical piece of news or even photo, if you’re not a user your Followers know about or care about, they’ll never read what you have to say. Become an active and engaging Tweeter to your Followers, and they will Follow what you have to say. Like the old saying goes “if you build it, they will come”.

*Lazy Tweeter’s Tip: If you really don’t have the time to create a Twitter community and build a following, you can always try to make your Tweets as curious, persuasive and as inviting as possible. Doing so will help to improve your click through rate and increase engagement with your Profile, but there really isn’t a substitute for good old fashioned hard work.

Google+

Google+ is the new kid on the block. Well actually Google+ is like that rich kid at school that practically has everything imaginable yet they still go out and buy a hover-board with matching jet pack just because they can. In terms of social media features Google+ realistically offers the same marketing approaches as Facebook, but with a slight twist.

You’ve got your standard social media marketing abilities such as status updates, messages, likes (+1), friend-ing, sharing etc, but with one very powerful addition – sector specific marketing opportunities.

Okay, you might call them ‘Circles’, but let’s face it, if you take an Internet marketing perspective what Google has effectively created is the ability to create sector specific marketing opportunities for you to cater towards. This basically means that you can steer the marketing of your video towards that specific group. If it’s users interested in your niche you ask their thoughts, if it’s potential clients you can send them a bit of sales spiel or if its business contacts you can aim to encourage discussion in and around your videos subject area.

Google+ is certainly still getting sussed out by marketers and the general online masses alike, but there are fantastic marketing opportunities popping up with each and every new development. If you want to be the first to make the most of such new marketing additions to Google+ you’re definitely going to need to keep your eyes glued to those forums.

Summary

Social media platforms give video and Internet marketers the opportunity to reap the staggering power of universal ‘word of mouth’ promotion. Obtaining this in any capacity is utterly priceless, yet fantastically prosperous.  By dominating social media marketing for your Internet video content you could not only start enjoying increased conversion rates, higher website traffic and increased brand awareness, but you could also achieve that prized viral status for your video that every marketer dreams of.

Photo Credit: (CC) Gavin Llewellyn. www.onetoomanymornings.co.uk