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Vendor blogs: Change your all-about-me blog into a business-generating blog

26.08.2011 - Martin Smith

 

When a service provider peruses your blog, do they find genuinely educational content or just poorly-disguised sales pitches and information about why you’re great?

If it’s the latter, it’s time for a wake-up call – your blog is failing on two counts.  It is not pulling new prospects in and it is not converting browsers to followers.  The humble blog is all too often a mis-used tool in the mobile PR and telecom PR armoury.

Today, the “sales cycle” is being replaced by the “buying cycle”.  Buyers reveal themselves much later in the process, having undertaken research to find answers and educational content to guide them.  If your blog is all about you and not all about your customers and their pain points, you’re mis-interpreting the blogging opportunity.

Blogging gives you the opportunity of being an expert content publisher, which brings two  major benefits.

Firstly, because service providers are constantly Googling niche questions about technology and business processes – your blog posts can attract the perfect target audience of service providers who have the exact problems you can solve.  Google typically treats blog posts extremely well and allows the expert content publisher to be found easily, pulling in a “long tail” of self-selecting prospects.

Secondly, while it occurs to every vendor to service providers to put details about their products on the website, it does not occur to everyone to make their blog content on the website so damned useful that you’ll be bookmarked and actively followed from now onwards.

Thankfully, you can easily re-direct your efforts to make your blog vastly more useful to the business.  There are two simple ways to re-direct your efforts and create a blog content plan that will attract (and retain interest from) a self-selecting audience of hungry prospects.

1. Ask the sales team what the top ten questions that they get asked are.  That is the quickest way to discern what your slice of the service provider market is concerned or confused about.  These ten questions can be the stimulus for ten great blog posts addressing exactly what your market cares most about and needs to learn more about.  Don’t worry that if you answer those questions publicly, then the salespeople won’t be contacted any more.  The exact opposite will happen.

2. Also ask yourself what ten things your company does better than anyone else.  What technology do you understand better than anyone else?  What markets do you understand better than anyone else?  What business processes and best-practices do you know better than anyone else?  These areas can be the inspiration for ten detailed, educational blog posts, which single you out as the expert resource.

Educational blog posts do not necessarily take any time to write than sales-y or boastful blog posts, but can be many times more useful.  Following the simple two-step process can deliver you a very respectable 20 posts a year, more than enough to start to dominate the expert content in your market.

Categories: Blogging, Content Creation, Mobile PR, Telecom PR, Telecoms PR

How to use LinkedIn to reach service providers

19.08.2011 - Martin Smith

 

One of the most frequent questions we get from clients and prospects is what to do about social media.  In the b2b world, there is still a lot of confusion about which social networks to prioritize and where the ROI of social media activity is hiding out.

In our world, many vendors to mobile operators and service providers “have a presence” but don’t quite know what to do beyond that.  Here’s a quick snapshot about the value of social media marketing, but for now, I wanted to get started with the first of a series of posts which point out very simply where the value lies, and what you should be doing with each social network.

I’m kicking off with LinkedIn, because this is the social media platform that has the most immediate value when aiming to reach service providers.

LinkedIn’s strength is the ability to find people, whether it’s for sales or for recruitment. That’s why Light Reading’s survey of people in the communications industry showed that LinkedIn is by far the most useful social network for helping them do their job, way ahead of Twitter and Facebook.

Just because the communications industry finds it useful to do their job, it doesn’t necessarily follow that LinkedIn is a good platform for marketing to service providers.  However, when you realize that through LinkedIn you can reach the 1180 listed employees of Orange Romania, for instance, you can start to see some of the potential.

To get going, here are four things that every vendor should be doing:

Sharpen up your company profile page.  LinkedIn typically creates a company profile page without any input from the company’s employees, so it may even come as a surprise that it is there at all.  It’s a blank slate for you to write your company profile and upload information about your products and services for any curious service provider to peruse.  Any employee of that company should be able to make changes to your company information.  Think of it this way, if your website is your company’s home on the Internet, your LinkedIn profile is your second home.

Technical difficulty: low

Time requirement: low

Respond to questions in LinkedIn Groups.  Businesspeople, service providers included, are turning to the thousands of LinkedIn Groups to find answers to their questions.  There are a lot of groups set up for service providers.  They need information and vendors often have the right expertise to help them out.  There is great scope for carving out thought-leadership through intelligent responses.  From your company, in my opinion, this is an activity best owned by product marketing managers or technically-minded sales people.  That is, people who have enough technical knowledge to know enough to help, but who also have a vested interest in impressing prospects.  Like with any knowledge-based forum, coming across as too sales-y turns prospects off quicker than you can say “lost opportunity”.  Subtlety required.

Technical difficulty: low

Time requirement: high

Try out LinkedIn Ads.  For a b2b audience where you have a niche audience (say, messaging portfolio managers at North American wireless carriers), LinkedIn Ads are scarily good.  You can specify the exact companies and the exact job titles within those companies that you want to reach.  If you haven’t actually checked out LinkedIn Ads yet, just hover over the “Home” link and in the drop-down menu, select “Advertise on LinkedIn”, put in some dummy data on the first page and prepare for your mind to be blown by how detailed, granular and big-brothery the targeting can be.

Technical difficulty: medium

Time requirement: medium

Add your blog feed to your LinkedIn company profile.  This means every time you have a new blog post, the people that choose to follow updates from your company will be able to see it on their LinkedIn homepage.  You can also set up Twitter updates in the same way, but that’s not always wise, as it can start to get a little spammy.  Expect your company’s updates to be “hidden” from view if there’s too much coming from your company.

Technical difficulty: medium

Time requirement: low

 

Categories: Mobile PR, Social Media, Telecom PR, Telecoms PR

Ignoring the 800-pound gorilla in your market

12.08.2011 - Martin Smith

Over the years I have seen a lot of companies plugging away with their marketing as if the 800-pound gorilla in their market did not exist.

Marching ahead, head held high, thinking that if they can just get the next PR or advertising campaign out the door then maybe, just maybe, that damnable 800-pound gorilla would just go away and stop winning all the business.

There’s a reason the 800-pound gorilla is going to win most of the time.  His sales force is 200 times larger than yours, he has a marketing budget larger than the GDP of Algeria and he’s the equivalent of a household name in the service provider industry.

BUT, dynamics in a market can and do change through the actions of one company.  The point is that they don’t change through force of will or from failing to address the presence of your larger simian friend.

Think judo.  Use your competitors own strength against them.  Do your large competitor’s procedure-led approach have a downside of inflexibility or slowness?  If so, how can you use that?  Do they have a reputation for sending an overwhelming army of engineers?  How could you use that?  What about the areas that your competitor isn’t addressing because he’s too big?  How could you use that?  Does their strength in one technology mean you could establish yourself as the solution for a different technology?

You get the point.  In a straight fight, the 800-pound gorilla will squash smaller competitors.  You won’t win by ignoring the 800-pound gorilla.  You can win however by taking stock of its strengths and weaknesses and positioning yourself as the alternative choice to them – and not just a copycat, tiny version of them.  Being different can become your story, allowing your telecom PR and mobile PR efforts to become orders of magnitude more effective.

Categories: Mobile PR, Positioning, Strategy, Telecom PR, Telecoms PR

Telecom PR: Why your start-up doesn’t need a local French, German or Swedish PR agency

05.08.2011 - Martin Smith

First of all, let’s qualify my feisty title.  We’re talking about the world of B2B mobile and telecom PR, PR that increases visibility among operators and service providers.  PR for enterprise mobile and consumer mobile play by entirely different rules.

So with that said, let’s explore why the title is true, with a typical example.  You are a French start-up, you have an amazing new technology and you want to sell it to mobile operators, starting with Europe.  The problem is that your company has virtually zero visibility among the service provider community.  So, the phone is not ringing and your lack of credibility is making every potential sale difficult.  You make the leap that you need to increase your profile through PR.  You know a friend of a friend who does PR so you talk to them, find out how much it costs and decide to give it a try for a few months.

So, what’s wrong with this picture?  Everything.  Even assuming you’re ready for PR, the PR agency’s value is their expertise and their proven ability to increase your visibility in your market, not how close they are to your office.

Seven out of the top eight publications with the greatest service provider reach in Europe are based out of the UK. They are pan-European and English-speaking.

Maybe your local agency knows this fact already and knows the editors well.  Probably not.

Maybe your local agency speaks perfect English like the editors they should be communicating with.  Probably not.

Maybe your local agency has deep experience of the service provider market.  Probably not.

So, more than likely, your local agency doesn’t have the right experience, is based in the wrong country and is speaking the wrong language.  It is little wonder that I hear the same phrase over and over again, through the years: “We’ve been using a local agency for a few months, but I’m not sure it’s working out so well.”

If you have a rare heart condition, you don’t ask your local General Practitioner to operate.  That will get you killed.  You find the specialist and you get the benefit of their years of expertise.  The same principle applies to finding the right agency.  You don’t go where you just happen to already know someone who “does PR”, you go where the expertise is.

Categories: Media Relations, Mobile PR, Public Relations, Telecom PR, Telecoms PR