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A study of US and UK business executives unsurprisingly found that word of mouth (WOM) is far more influential than any other communications channel in B2B purchasing decisions.

But did you know WOM is on average twice as influential as advertising, direct mail or press coverage in B2B circles? So how can you get the best from personal recommendations?

One way, of course, is to make the most of your opportunities online.

As a starting point you could check out Dell’s recently created Facebook community called Social Media for Small Business. The site features advice on how to use blogs, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, ‘crowdsourcing’ and other social media channels.

Of course there are hundreds of other excellent sites with plenty of information on how to get the best from social media - a topic that SmallBizPod itself covers regularly.

The popularity of LinkedIn is also gradually taking off with over 1 million UK registered users announced in October last year.

As of May 2008, it had more than 24 million registered users, spanning 150 industries. Imagine the networking opportunities! Get yourself registered and start making connections.

If you haven’t taken part in much B2B social networking you might be a little unsure of how exactly to make the most of services like LinkedIn. Fear not, advice is on hand.

Guy Kawasaki the managing director of a venture capital firm has written a great blog post on how to give your LinkedIn profile a makeover.

With all the positive elements that word of mouth can bring, don’t take your eye off the ball. It’s just as easy for a negative recommendation to have the reverse effect.

This is a very real concern in an age of online forums, social networking sites and blogs.

If you can afford it, you could get yourself a PR agency to monitor and manage the reputation of your business, although representing yourself and your own business in this highly connected world is vital too.

If your budget doesn’t stretch that far, sign up for Google Alerts. These are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, blogs, etc.) based on your choice of query.

Your inbox might look like it’s thrown up on itself as the e-mail alerts start to filter through, but it’s a great way of keeping up to date on pretty much everything that’s written about your business.

Personal recommendation is the biggest catalyst for making a purchase not only in the consumer market place but also in the business arena. But unlike consumers, businesses don’t do retail therapy.

Business decision makers want the reassurance that their intended outlay comes with a trusted recommendation, so make sure your target market is talking about you.

In my last blog post I wrote about the unforgivable use of so-called ‘buzzwords’ in the office. They drive us all nuts, especially when our colleagues wheel them out at every possible opportunity. Try as we might we can’t avoid them.

But this time around I’ve been thinking about the opposite end of the scale. Consumers have become better at filtering out the the omnipresent marketing and sales messages they’re bombarded with.

This can mean small businesses find that their products or services get lost in the crowd and they often find themselves trying to shout louder than all of the other competing products available.

So how do you avoid the same old clichés in your marketing messages?

Earlier this year Nikki Sandison wrote an article about how celebrity endorsement is struggling in a saturated market where the Beckhams and Britneys of this world attempt to sell a number of high profile brands. These affiliations increasingly suffer from a lack of individuality or are simply over-shadowed by the personality of the celebrity in question.

Clearly most SMEs are not in a position to use these types of endorsement but they can still learn the same lessons.

In Nikki’s article she refers to a new phenomenon where the product manages to take on a persona of it’s own as in the case of the iPod and iPhone. When the consumer thinks of these items a clear brand concept is easily brought to mind.

Stop guessing

Therefore knowing who your product or service is aimed at is a critical factor in getting the marketing right. Iconic advertising promotions are the ones that appeal to the target audience as with the racy car advert or the family centered food campaigns.

You could even argue that the recent Heinz salad cream debacle was caused by a failure to consider the range of consumers who would buy such a product.

Tailoring

Once you’ve established whose attention you’re trying to grab, it is essential to adapt the marketing to suit them. Research and good data sourcing will essentially give you the upper hand.

If you understand that selling to huge corporations may be less about the cost and more about finding the best product, then your message will become more relevant. This is a crude example but the point is nevertheless an important one.

As the old saying goes…

Knowledge is power. In a saturated marketplace standing out is no easy task. Gimmicky marketing can only go so far.

If you want your business to be in it for the long game, effective research which helps you create and market a unique service or product is always going to be critical to the success of the campaign.

I’m sure we’ve all been subject to a torrent of cringe-worthy office clichés at some point in our working lives. I mean how often have you sat in a meeting and heard someone utter one of these unforgivable words or phrases

‘Moving Forward’

‘Leverage’

‘Facilitate’

‘Touch Base’

‘Close of Play / End of Play’

‘Blue sky thinking’

‘No idea is a bad idea’

‘Ball rolling’

And possibly my all time favourite most hated phrase ‘great stuff’! This is possibly the most heinous of all as it sounds so unsympathetic, insincere and like you haven’t really been paying attention. For example ‘yeah, yeah, yeah, great stuff let’s touch base on this by close of play to work out all the actionable points to get this moving forward.’ What??

Where did these phrases originate and how did they evolve into such exhausted clichés? Lucy Kellaway, started a campaign against office jargon recently. Unfortunately the dark side of office lingo was too strong for the force of articulate speach. She has admitted defeat by saying in her article on the BBC News website:

For the last few months I’ve been on a mission to rid the world of the phrase ‘going forward’. But now I see that the way forward is to admit defeat. This most horrid phrase is with us on a go-forward basis, like it or not.

She goes on to say that she reached this sad conclusion when listening to Farming Today and a man from the National Farmers’ Union uttered the phrase ‘going forward’ three times in the space of 28 seconds.

All in all words may be fashionable, but you really do need to know when your proverbial bell-bottoms should be consigned to your nearest Oxfam shop.  That’s another blog post done, so I’m off to challenge the restrictions of receptacle thinking …

Mobile communications - bind or benefit for business owners? I believe it’s a double-edged sword. Yes, being able to stay in touch with the office while out and about is now crucial to businesses, however being contactable all the time means there truly is nowhere to hide! And as this mobility is now a necessity for businesses, the current market for telecommunications is an increasingly noisy place.

So how can the big telco brands compete in such a saturated marketplace? What do they need to know to keep their businesses relevant in the digital age? And most importantly do they really know what makes the SME market tick?

(First off) I’m a business owner, hello. I’ve got a Blackberry and it goes everywhere with me – yes that’s right my name’s Simon and I’m a ‘Crackberry’ addict. Thinking back to when I made that step into the world of mobile communications, I wasn’t approached by a service provider, oh no, I was the one that went running around researching the best deals. Where were the service providers when my business was at the stage to make the commitment? There is a dearth of relevant mobile business offerings, which explains why I am now a “Crackberry” addict as this brand is the exception.

My decision wasn’t based on price of course, it was also dependent upon my experiences with my personal mobile service provider, and the history I’ve had with a handset manufacturer. For example I wouldn’t have gone with a business comms provider if I had poor reception at home, it just wouldn’t have made any sense. Likewise if I have had a bad experience with a certain manufacturer of handsets, I wouldn’t decide to sign up with that brand again, simply because the speed and ease of using a handset is all important to me. 

So to all those telco brands out there who want to tap into the lucrative, but under-serviced, SME sector here is your check list; know what makes us tick, don’t call us during the day (as that’s when we’re most busy), consider our personal experiences and demonstrate to us that you know our businesses and our business needs. There is nothing more frustrating than speaking to a salesperson that clearly has no idea about your business while expecting you to be bowled over by them. 

Following on from my first post on B2B marketing, broadly speaking there are five main elements to consider when creating your marketing campaign.

1 Create a single view of your customer

Sound complicated? Its not really, this is a term commonly used to describe the end result of having as much information as possible about your existing customers and prospective new ones. Just knowing what a business does isn’t enough to contact them and intelligently demonstrate that you understand their business. Let me put it into context for you. The chances are that your organisation has lots of different systems that hold information about customers – whether billing, provisioning, customer services or products.  Sometimes these systems hold lots of different accounts for customers too.   The chances are also that these systems don’t talk to each other – but wouldn’t it be great if you could get a holistic view about customers by combining all of the information you have about customers into one view.  Doing this places the information into a context that allows you to understand their behaviour more easily.

2 Build a prospect database

Don’t be put off by the word ‘database’ this doesn’t have to be a horribly complicated piece of software that only those qualified to work at NASA are able to comprehend. A database is a simply a place that is used to store information about future customers, in a format that makes it easy to interrogate, retrieve and manipulate details. A prospect database – or prospect pool - will require some up front investment, but this will more than payback in delivering new business to you over time.

3 Develop customer and prospect insights

Your customer database – now in a single customer view - will intrinsically contain a greater value than before. It actually contains a wealth of information that will answer all of the questions you, as a marketer; if you know how to unlock it. This information will give you a crucial understanding about customers from purchasing behaviour, to which customers are the most valuable, what they buy, which others will become the most valuable over time and which are the customers that are likely to defect. This intelligence helps you to understand which prospects to target and what to expect when you do.  When you start to implement your marketing campaign, build on this information with the responses from the marketing material you have sent out (direct mail, e-mail, telephone, etc.) as this will help you identify and target existing customers and prospects with far greater relevance (in B2B marketing relevance is king!)

4 Formulate a retention and acquisition programme

When talking about retention and acquisition you’ll often come across the phrases CRM (customer relationship management), PRM (prospect relationship management) and/or CEM (customer experience management). You might be reading and think you have absolutely no idea what it all means, which is totally understandable so don’t panic. The best thing you can do is to use the information and insight you’ve already collected to work out what your existing clients want, what your prospects want and how you can satisfy their needs.

5 Maximise the return on investment (ROI)

ROI, otherwise know as the holy grail of marketing. This is the bit that really matters to your business’ bottom line. How can you make sure that the time and resources you’ve put into planning pays off? Knowing which medium / channel will have the greatest impact e-mail, direct mail, telephone, mobile, sales promotion, field marketing, experiential marketing, events. The fact that B2B marketers are now starting to realise the potential the internet is presenting is allowing SME’s a truly cost effective way of marketing products and services.

I’ve only just scratched the surface of B2B marketing but I hope this has given you some food for thought to grow successful and, most importantly, profitable businesses.