Favorite Marketing Tools

Remember when sitting through a slide presentation meant watching bullet point after bullet point fly onto the screen with some over-jazzed animation and sound, accompanied by a cliché stock photo? Thankfully, those days are long gone people!

It seems like Pinterest has practically exploded onto the social media scene and has quickly garnered attention both from users and from folks in the marketing space. I first took note of Pinterest when I started seeing many of my friends sharing their “pins” of fashion, food and decorating ideas on their Facebook accounts. I found myself wondering what exactly Pinterest was, as you may be thinking too. Pinterest is a social network that lets people organize and share interesting visual content that they find on the Web. People can use “pinboards” where they can “pin” ideas around a particular topic. Users can also browse pinboards from other users to get ideas and inspiration on a particular topic or subject matter. It seems that part of the reason Pinterest has become such an instant hit, it its simplicity and ease of use.

Last month, I explored and wrote about the topic of content curation and how it supports the content marketing process. I also profiled a handful of tools that can help you with this process.  As I mentioned in my previous post, we have really seen content marketing take off in the past year or so. We have found content marketing and content curation to be excellent marketing tools both for Marketri and for our clients and these concepts have become essential components of our marketing plans.

Creating and sharing content that contributes to thought leadership is an invaluable tool for building your business and drawing in potential buyers. As marketers serving B2B professional service firms, we often find ourselves explaining the importance of establishing thought leadership to our clients. So what exactly is thought leadership and why do you need it?

Although there have been countless reports of the benefits of using social media for business, it is not uncommon for us to run into clients who are resistant to the idea of getting involved with social media, especially in the professional services space. Some of the common fears cited are losing control of their message or being unable to manage their image through social media. There seems to be a fear that if you go online, you can lose control. The truth is that you can lose control of your message in any medium, but social media sites offer a great way to keep track of your company and the message that you are communicating. Using social media is one of the best ways that a company can engage with potential customers and communicate their message in real time. Not only this, but there are countless tools that can help you manage and control your online presence. One that I’ve enjoyed investigating recently is Twylah.

Blogging has become a ubiquitous tool for sharing opinions, whether in the personal or professional arena. Not only is blogging fun and easy to do, it is a great tool that can help improve the success of your  B2B marketing plan. We’ve previously explained the why and the how-to’s of B2B blogging, which I highly recommend if you are just getting started. For those of you who have already started to dabble, here are some tools to help you increase the viewership of your blog. Enjoy!

Triberr

Triberr is a free tool that allows you to multiply the reach of your blog posts. This is accomplished by joining Tribes, which are communities of bloggers that share an interest in your blogging topics and/or style. For example, a few Tribes that I have my eye on at the moment are B2B Marketing, Social Media for Law Firms and Minute Marketing. Once you are a member of the Tribe or Tribes, each member of the Tribe will retweet your newly published blog posts. As a member of the Tribe you do the same for the others. This allows your blog posts to be amplified across the social media space and allows you to achieve a reach that would be hard to do on your own.