How to become a confident B2B marketer in five days or less: Day 3

Day 3: the long and short of successful B2B marketing

Yesterday our Instagram (Now_Comms) went live, Twitter was inundated with links to the first blog, and another widely anticipated post went up. But did it make a difference? Today is the day to evaluate the success of this blog and increased social media in the B2B marketing world of NowComms. Apparently, it did.

The hits to this blog significantly increased, nearly half of which were Entrances – people who went directly to the blog page rather than through other areas of the site. There was also increased activity on social media – more followers on Twitter, and activity linked to the tweets put out there. I have to admit, this is mostly from a colleague sharing a blog link, which was  immediately favourited multiple times, while mine all sat untouched. Clearly I have a bit to learn still.

To manage these increasingly hectic sites, I was introduced to Hootsuite, from which I will be carefully letting it do all the work for me in managing where posts are sent, to who, and when.

In even more exciting news, this blog is the first that appears when entering the (perhaps rather specific) title of it into Google. Although this was very exciting for me, it is a slight niche, and so I set about trying to increase its search return with slightly broader search terms.

In doing this I’m working on the basis of The Long Tail principle, proposed by Chris Anderson probably as a way to make small time bloggers etc feel better about themselves. Although there are a couple of web pages that get a large number of hits (here it’s The 100 best eLearning websites chart), the large number of small hit pages are just as important; a few hits on many pages brings just as much traffic as many hits on few pages. The top hit page for NowComms brings in just over 57% of the traffic, while the smaller pages bring in about 0.1-2.0% of all traffic each, amounting to just under half of all traffic.

This is valuable – if people are looking for something specific, they are likely to find it because there’s less competition. And Google likes new material, making it likely to appear higher in searches. It’s also more likely that these may convert to sales compared to a more general search. And although I would love this blog to be the top hit website, this reassures me that I am indeed contributing in – nearly – just as significant a way to the hits to this website.

So on only my third day on the job in B2B marketing I can confidently say I’ve learned a few things. Watch this space for a full review of why a B2B marketing internship is undoubtedly worth doing…let’s just say my CV has suddenly filled up.

What I’ve learned:

• The Long Tail is approach in marketing allows most content to be valuable in some way
• Social media is an invaluable tool for B2B marketing for spreading the word
• An internship in B2B marketing is worthwhile – and I am safely on my way from clueless to competent as a B2B marketing expert.

Read my previous instalments here:

https://www.nowcomms.com/how-to-become-a-confident-b2b-marketer-in-five-days-or-less/

https://www.nowcomms.com/how-to-become-a-confident-b2b-marketer-in-five-days-or-less-day-2/

And my next here: https://www.nowcomms.com/how-to-become-a-confident-b2b-marketer-in-five-days-or-less-day-3-3/