Extend Your Online Profile

Your website used to be king. Driving traffic to it was your top priority and appearing high on search engines was essential. All of that is still true to some extent but let’s look at this from a BtoB perspective. More than likely you aren’t actually selling something on line — if you are, it’s probably not your core business. Most BtoB companies sell very high-priced, high-value products and services. They might sell some parts on line but their core business is still about relationships with customers in person, over the phone or through email. In the past, this left their web strategy with some gaps. Sure, you could offer information on line and collect leads but that’s where it ended.

Today, however, there are more than a few ways you can build relationships on line and extend your on line profile. You no longer have to depend solely on your website to build a presence on line. Here are a few ways:

LinkedIn: This is an on line social network for professionals that’s really taken off. The site also has a way to create a company profile. Connecting your employee’s profiles to your companies profile just extends your brand further.  Join, create a company profile and encourage other employees to link to it.  It is another place to connect to people, announce news, and drive traffic to your own site.

YouTube: Traditionally this is the place you go to see kittens running on treadmills. But it has the capability to be a repository for your presentations. You can create a page that is essentially a mini-website for you company. Put up presentations, product demos or executive speeches and embed them on your website and promote the landing page on YouTube itself.

HootSuite: This application lets you tap into blog posts and feed them into a twitter account. What does this mean? It means that you can have more extensive entries from multiple sources go to one place. What does this mean? OK, basically Twitter lets people enter messages that are 146 characters long and was originally used for such scintillating messages like “Eating a pizza at Joe’s” The community has grown, however, and some are using it for business communications. That can be tricky, however, because BtoB tends to be more complicated than 146 characters. But let’s say you had 5 people blogging about different trends and products within your company? You could funnel that information into one or two Twitter accounts with HootSuite. Twitter is a growing community of people that you can tap into for possible partnerships or prospects.  Giving yourself a solid platform within that community helps build relationships and discover opportunities.

There are certainly more resources out there, but these are just a few ways to start.  Remember, you don’t need to just depend on your website and SEO to build relationships 24/7

Advertisement