Don't Discard Twitter for B2B Marketing

Marketing Eye is always the last to market ourselves, but having put together some 'hairy audacious goals' for 2010, we are looking at every possible avenue to market our business to small to medium sized businesses.

There are so many ways to market a small business in the b2b environment and so the choice is limitless however, when you have limited budget and not alot of time, it's integral that the marketing platforms that you use are in fact the best 'bang for your buck' and the least amount of effort.

To me, unless you are doing consumer based marketing, Twitter can be very time consuming.

With writing ongoing tweets, finding people to follow and to follow you, replying to direct messages and in general keeping up to date with what's going on - it's pretty time consuming.

What really is twitter? Wikipedia does an apt definition that is easy to understand
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter)and most people don't need to look too much further than this to understand exactly what twitter is.

Last Friday, I did an experiment. Time limit on twitter was 2 hours from start to finish and I had to achieve something - anything - that was relevant to my lead generation requirements.

So I found a few people who had twitter accounts that had a similar demographic to Marketing Eye and followed people following them. A tongue twister - I know! 200 in total were followed for the sake of this experiment.

I then wrote a few tweets about marketing including some interesting marketing stories that I found online.

Additionally, I added a few personal tweets - to ensure that the tweet followers got to know me as well. "Hugh Grant is coming to Australia on 22 December to promote his new movie". I am a huge fan of Hugh Grant and desperately want to play a round of golf with him. I am hopeless and he is really good. Almost at a level of being a professional! Needless to say, it would be one long round all in my favour!

THE RESPONSE

Within a couple of hours, I received direct tweets;

- From a journalist wanting to write a story on me
- A small business wanting to know more about Marketing Eye's marketing services
- An individual wanting a website that is cost effective
- Reconnection with an old client
- 100 extra people who are relevant following my tweets!To me, this is an amazing response! 2 hours work and no added costs other than time -and this was my result.

To all those people who slam twitter as a waste of time, think again!

IF YOUR TARGET MARKET IS B2B, HERE'S SOME TIPS:

1. Set up a twitter account immediately
2. Tweet about relevant topics, opinions and offers your business has
3. Follow people who are relevant to your business
4. Find people who have the same demographic as your client base and go through their list and follow their followers
5. Make sure you respond to all direct messages
6. Make sure you thank people who are following you. It's the first touch point of many to come
7. If someone following you is relevant to your business, follow them back
8. Don't waste time on Twitter. Use this time as a direct marketing effort to engage your audience, communicate your unique selling proposition and position you as an industry leader
9. Add the odd personal tweet so people get to know you
10. Make sure your Twitter account is giving your business a ROI.

Marketing Eye is a leading national marketing consulting firm for small to medium sized businesses in Australia. All Marketing Eye consultants are trained on web 2.0 to ensure that if your business can benefit from social networks, then you are leveraging this medium.

Find out more on Marketing Eye's new website www.marketingeye.com.au