With a perhaps over emphasis of company marketing spends being placed on Google and driving traffic from it, there are a large number of different platforms and techniques that B2B marketers should be investing in to widen their marketing activity.
Relying on a single or a very few sources of traffic is not a good way to protect your future business needs.
Here are a few ideas to get your B2B marketing juices flowing.
Writing for other sites
The idea is to take guest posting (which has been excessively used to SEO and game Google, to actually forgetting about the Google link building benefits) and use it as a tool for showing your expertise in a field as well as attract direct traffic for the site your content features on.
Write with a view to educate and link as necessary – don’t force the content to fit an SEO Strategy, in fact make all outbound links no follows. The idea here is to drive direct traffic from the content to your site or social media activity so people can follow and engage with you.
You can easily find relevant sites to ask if they will accept a post from you. You possibly already subscribed or follow a lot of them. Check your social media accounts and those you follow, what are they reading – reach out to existing clients and ask them their top 5 sites. You will be amazed and what gets turned up. Visit each site and see if it has the right audience – it doesn’t have to be huge, just relevant and interactive.
LinkedIn – Groups
Actively take part in Google groups that your customers will be using. The key is engagement not sales. Look to help and provide practical advice where you can. If you have multiple client areas, why not split the tasks amongst staff members? Maybe you have specialists in different areas, so use them.
Even with a free account you can join up to 50 groups on LinkedIn. If you don’t think there are many groups where your customers hangout then think again. Start by joining as many related groups as you can, then slowly over time you will see the more active groups, letting you weed out those that are not active. For example:
A bonus tip: Sharing a group with someone you are not currently connected with is also a way of reaching out with them.
The second element in LinkedIn groups is to build your own. Again, group building in LinkedIn is free and simple to setup. By running your own group you can easily attract relevant members. Groups allow you to email members to update on the group and those that signup can also receive a joining message – this will need to be about the group but can include a bit about you as the owner.
http://www.linkedin.com/createGroup
LinkedIn – Advertising
LinkedIn as well as most other platforms have an advertising service. Working on a pay per click basis, LinkedIn Ads allow you to profile and target your audience on LinkedIn by role, job, company and/or industry. In our experience it is better to drive any spend in this area into a signup process. Usually a report or whitepaper full of useful, actionable information is a good method. You can try the hard sell approach, but it doesn’t seem to convert as well in our experience. Once you have them signed up, they will enter your marketing funnel.
Slideshare
Slideshare allows you to share presentations online, and as we all know most presentations are created for the purposes of conducting business, hence the Slideshare audience tends to be highly professional and business oriented. It is no surprise therefore to learn that it is owned by LinkedIn.
There are several ways to drive traffic from Slideshare – simply upload any business presentations you may have tucked away on your hard drive. These can be Powerpoint or PDFs.
Or you can take this one step further and create specific content for a presentation that can be added.
Bonus Tip: Slideshare will show or render web links inside a presentation so you can look to attract clients to sign up to your newsletter, get them to connect with you on social media, any number of things, directly from the presentation.
Trade Journals
Within your industry there will be a number of trade journals, some print, some online. There will be opportunities to work with these journals:
- it could be as discussed above, with you providing editorial pieces for them to publish;
- or it could be more than that – you could partner with them to offer your service to their readers at a discount and offer to share revenues with them;
- you could power a section of their site to make their site more appealing and useful to their visitors.
These can all be great ways to secure a relevant traffic source.
You will already know some of the main journals in your space, but there are a few online resources where publications can be hosted online. Searching through these could highlight some you have not seen before.
Bonus Tip: this is particularly good for finding trade bodies’ own publications to, so if you are not a member you could still get to see what they are sharing in their publications.
Summary
As you can see, there are a number of ideas and easy to implement strategies to help drive traffic to your business without reliance on Google. In this way, you can protect your business if you do fall foul of Google in some way, as your business will be able to cope due to existing avenues of traffic and customers.
Source: B2C_Business
Driving B2B Traffic Without Using Google
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