Ever ask yourself where your company stands when it is compared by a prospective customer to others? Well it is more than likely that even your customers are asking these same questions. And if you’re not savvy to what they learn and how you compare against the competition, you are laying yourself “open” for lost business – or – worse, a compromised market position.

It’s a proven fact, today, that social media marketing has become one of the most important marketing tools influencing buying habits, company/brand visibility, and the size of the client/customer universe.

This news is NOT NEW! For larger companies, social media marketing has been aggressively pursued for years – ever since Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn came into being.

WHO IS EFFECTIVELY USING SOCIAL MEDIA AS A MARKETING TOOL?

There’s marketing and there’s sales, and each has its pros and cons. To ensure your marketing and sales people work in concert with one another as teammates, like they should, you need a Marketing Machine.

A Marketing Machine combines the strengths of marketing and sales to create a powerful business development system – a combination of technology and process!

Marketing Pros & Cons

Marketing allows you to deliver compelling communications at the lowest possible cost per impression to a large audience via a variety of different media. Through repetition, marketing can build brand awareness and increase the odds of reaching a prospect with the right offer at the right time.

But marketing generally doesn’t consider the sales cycle; it hits target audiences all at once with the same communication. Many salespeople wonder what marketing really does to help them sell. Yet, when marketing does its job, salespeople can do a better job!

Whether you have a wonderful business idea – or – you are investigating business opportunities for yourself or a client, it is critical that you put each idea through a “reality check” – an analysis to determine if they are truly valid and worthy of further effort. All of your ideas must have a demonstrated need, ready market, and ability to provide a solid return on investment.

Is the idea feasible in the marketplace? Is there demand? Can it be done? Are you able to pull together the persons and resources to pull it off before the window of opportunity closes? These questions must be considered and answered.

Content rules. Whether you’re tweeting, writing blog posts, or contributing to a LinkedIn group discussion, it is content that drives conversations and connects your professional services firm to its social network. But creating content that your audience will want to read can be challenging.

Imagine you’re reading this paragraph in a consulting firm’s blog:

An organization’s business architecture revolves around five broad areas viz. the customer segment, scope of products or services, geographic coverage, strategic differentiation and profit pools. During the course of an M&A, organizations tend to alter one or more parameters of their business architecture which will impact their IT strategy needed to enhance customer reach, add efficiencies, reduce cost, add competitive advantage or enable business processes that could bolster any of the aforementioned.

Difficult to read*, isn’t it? Too often, B2B firms create excruciating content just like this and push it out to their social media channels. Then they wonder why they get so little engagement in return.