On March 20, 2013, Arketi and the Technology Association of Georgia (TAG) launched the 2013 State of the Industry website as well as the 2013 Technology Tweet Tournament. The launch date coincided with the annual Georgia Technology Summit.

Arketi Principal Rory Carlton and former TAG COO Melanie Brandt were recently interviewed by BtoB magazine’s Charlotte Woolard for the article, “Association uses Twitter competition, redesigned website to drive Web traffic,” about the interactive website and social media competition.

Most notably, the number of unique visitors in the month after the March release of the report climbed 85 percent compared to the same time period last year, while page views rose 16 percent. Additionally, visitors stayed on the website longer and returned to the site more frequently than they had in the past.

To read the full BtoB magazine article, visit http://ow.ly/lVRmv.

“Know your stuff”

The last three of our nine words relate to delivery. When it comes to giving the presentation, what matters most is knowing what you’re talking about. If you know your stuff – not just your speech but the subject – that will create the confidence to carry you through.

Even seasoned presenters can suffer from pre-presentation anxiety. The key to overcoming it is practice, practice, practice. Aim to know the presentation so well you can deliver it without referring more than occasionally to the script. If you’ve chosen good images for the slides, they will provide visual clues to each point you want to make.

Other than rehearsing, a good night’s sleep is absolutely the best preparation for any presentation. Don’t overdo the caffeine, and if you’re feeling nervous, take a quick five-minute walk and some deep breaths.

As we said at the start, the best presentation is not a lecture or a speech, but rather a conversation. So if you can – and it can take some time to get used to this – just talk normally, as if you were discussing the topic with a friend, rather than a room full of strangers. One trick is to talk more slowly than usual. This helps reduce the tendency to “speechify,” helps reduce the “umms” and “ahhs,” and sends a subtle signal to the audience that YOU are the expert.

Be upbeat about your topic – enthusiasm is contagious, and helps keep your audience engaged. Keep your voice elevated, smile, make eye contact, come out from behind the podium and move about the stage. All of these things help you connect with the audience. Remember, too, that the audience wants you to succeed. They’re not there to see you fail – they’re there because they want to hear what you have to say.

In conclusion
Giving a presentation is rewarding, but it isn’t necessarily something that comes easily to everyone. The fact is, even if you’ve been giving presentations for many years, it can still be hard. Some people find it easier than others, but for everyone, it gets a little easier every time. So hang in there and keep doing it.

Have a conversation. Keep it simple. Know your stuff. These nine words provide the foundation for building more effective presentations. A great talk is the most powerful way to persuade, encourage and even excite people. It’s the key to unlocking business success.

This is the third and final post in our blog series on how to give effective presentations. We hope you found these tips easy to practice and even simpler to remember.

“Keep it simple”

Once you have your outline including your flow and arguments worked out, let three words, keep it simple, be your guide when fleshing them out into slides. The point is, the slides, and the words on them, are not the presentation – you are the presentation. The presentation is a conversation and that means it’s about you, not your slides. In fact, without you there to present them, the slides alone should be somewhat hard for someone to follow.

Think of it this way: if everything your audience needs to know is in the slides, why do they need you to present it? They can just read it. For this reason, one good way to start is to take everything you wrote in your outline, and copy it into the Notes section of each PowerPoint slide. This becomes your script.

Each slide should support a single key point from your outline; and for each slide, you need only a single powerful image, or perhaps a few key words taken from the script, to represent the point you are making. The pictures and keywords don’t try to tell the story; they support the script you will be speaking, and add visual interest.

Too many words on a slide actually hinders your audience’s ability to understand your presentation. If the language-parsing part of your brain is busy parsing words on the slides, it can’t take in the words you are speaking. But the visual-parsing part of the brain works independently from language, so the audience can take in a picture and your words at the same time.

When it comes to choosing images, we get the best results by sticking to a single image on each slide, and trying to use a similar style throughout. You don’t have to be a Photoshop guru – stock images are easily found online these days, and are certainly preferable to the clip-art that comes with PowerPoint. Don’t be afraid to inject a little humor either, for a change of pace.

This is the second post in a blog series on how to give effective presentations in nine words. Be sure to check out the third and final post next week.

All communications professionals are called on to give presentations from time to time, and for many, the prospect can be daunting. But it doesn’t have to be hard. The secret to a great presentation can be summed up in nine simple words.

“Have a conversation”
Start by thinking of your presentation as a conversation. It’s not a lecture, and it’s certainly not a stump speech. To get into this frame of mind, imagine the topic of your presentation is something important that you want to explain to a friend.

One successful technique is to sit down with a friend and explain the topic to them. If that’s not practical, pretend you’re talking to a friend and record yourself. Ask the question, “If I was going to talk to someone about (fill-in-the-blank) topic, what do I think you would want to know?”

The point of this exercise is to identify the main ideas: the big “take-away” of your presentation. Keep in mind that, however compelling your delivery, the amount of information your audience can absorb is limited. If you can get them to remember one main point, you’ve done a great job. Write out your big idea on a single sheet, and use that as your focal point as you begin to develop your outline.

To write your outline, step away from the computer, silence your phone, and grab pen and paper. We find that ideas flow better without constant interruptions from emails and text messages – or the temptation to update Facebook!

Once you have the big idea and your outline, add in detail and supporting points. At this stage, it’s about the ideas: avoid the temptation to start thinking about graphics and layout just yet. A presentation isn’t about great-looking slides – it’s about great-sounding IDEAS that win people over. Refine your point, work out what’s important, and make it matter to the other person.

This is the first post in a blog series on how to give effective presentations in nine words. Be sure to check out the remaining six words next week.

With more than 50 marketing and PR executives, the sixth annual Technology CMO Roundtable revealed best practices, learnings, questions and – most importantly – actionable insights. Attendees completed a survey about their marketing plans for 2013, and were asked, “In 2013, do you expect to do more, less, or about the same of the following?”

Categories included video, lead generation/nurturing, content marketing, thought leadership and website enhancement, and the majority of respondents plan to do more of these activities. See the infographic below for all the responses, and for more information, download your free copy of The Outlook for Business-to-Business Technology in 2013.

Here are the top 10 business-to-business PR and marketing articles from this week. Enjoy!

Building a Successful B2B Speakers Bureau
from B2Community
Ever wanted to see the words “Industry Expert” in front of your name? In the quest for thought leadership, the speaker circuit can, if executed strategically, drive both brand awareness and lead generation.

Rules of SEO Content Engagement
from CommPRO.biz
Create engaging content, and the users and search engines will come. Sounds simple, right? Well, it actually might be. If you can develop a piece of content that your audience finds useful enough to want to share with friends and colleagues, then you are on the right path.

Branding is key in filling the sales pipeline
from BtoB Magazine
Companies are increasingly tying marketing activities to leads and revenue. But marketers feel frustrated with their ability to drive enough leads to meet the demands of sales departments, according to a new study by BtoB.

How to Use Twitter for Business and Marketing
from Social Media Examiner by Charlene Kingston
Is Twitter a part of your social media marketing? Or have you let your Twitter marketing drop off lately? In any case, with the latest Twitter updates, trends in multi-screen usage and real-time marketing, you’ll likely want to take a fresh look at what Twitter has to offer.

Digital Is Changing Marketing And Changing Business
from B2B Marketing Insider by Michael Brenner
It’s clear that digital is changing marketing, but we also see that digital is changing business.  That’s a big opportunity for marketers who get this right.

Why Your Keyword Strategy Is Incomplete Without User Intent
from HubSpot’s Inbound Internet Marketing Blog
‘User intent’ is a concept that’s known to most SEO professionals, but unfortunately, used by too few. I say unfortunately, because it’s the key to improving the very foundation of SEO campaigns, while driving content strategies that yield better conversion rates, clicks, leads, and sales.

Online Marketing: 4 sources of customer insight on your website
from Marketingsherpa Blog
In this MarketingSherpa blog post, hear from Taylor Kennedy, Senior Research Manager, MECLABS, on how to gain customer insights using 4 sources on your website.

Tech marketers expect to increase budgets 3.7% this year
from BtoB Magazine
Technology companies expect to increase their marketing budgets 3.7% this year over last, according to IDC’s “2013 Tech Marketing Barometer.”

4 tips for building reporter relationships on Twitter
from PR Daily
For me, this joyful moment happens when three elements come together in unison: a great pitch, a solid relationship with a reporter, and the right timing. There are, in my opinion, four major ways PR professionals should be taking advantage of Twitter to help create media coverage opportunities:

12 great benefits of video marketing
from Ragan.com
If you’re having trouble convincing your marketing team, business partners, clients, boss or even yourself that online video marketing is worthwhile, then read on.

Here are the top 10 business-to-business PR and marketing articles from this week. Enjoy!

Top 50 B2B Marketing Influencers On Twitter
from B2B Marketing Insider
Who are the top B2B Marketing influencers on twitter? To answer this question, I looked at a variety of factors including twitter followers, profiles that included “B2B marketing,” the focus of their tweets including the hashtag #B2BMarketing, as well as a variety of social scoring tools using the keyword.

B2B Marketing: 74% challenged by generating high-quality leads
from Marketingsherpa Blog
On the latest episode of Marketing Research in Action, Milap Shah, CEO, NexSales, discusses research from the MarketingSherpa B2B Marketing Benchmark Report. Watch Milap discuss the challenge of generating high-quality leads, as well as generating quality versus quantity of leads.

Traits of a solid PR professional
from PRWeek US
Having been around the block a while, I believe I have a good understanding of the personal characteristics that are commonly found in a successful PR professional.

B2B Marketing: What the Organization of 2017 Will Look Like
from Social Media Today
Hard to say what will really happen for B2B marketers in five years, but based on the evolution of world-class B2B marketing organizations now, as well as where they’re likely headed, here’s what I believe those same market-leading marketing groups will exhibit in 2017.

It’s a Buyer’s Market, So Why Do Marketers Think Like Sellers?
from Business 2 Community
About everyone I know today is competing in a buyers’ market. Buyers have exponentially more choices and virtually instant access to information about them. Long before they talk to a sales rep, buyers are conducting research and making up their own minds about what’s important to them, eliminating companies on the basis of whatever information they can easily discover.

5 keys to jumpstart your content marketing
from Ragan.com
Are you having trouble producing enough content? Want to do more with less staff? Need to develop a long-term plan for your efforts? Here are five things you can do in 2013 to help you answer your burning content marketing questions.

26 Tips for Getting Started With Social Media Marketing
from Social Media Examiner
Are you looking to get started with social media marketing? Do you want to reexamine how you’ve been using social networks? In this post, I’ll cover 26 tips, an A-Z guide, to help you understand the backbone of successful social media strategies.

How to Overcome the “I’m Not an Expert” Fear
from Business 2 Community
According to Wikipedia an expert is “A person who has a comprehensive and authoritative knowledge of or skill in a particular area.” OK, that’s pretty impressive. What if we replaced the word “expert” with “specialist?” My clients seem to prefer that! It’s not as exclusive, and if someone calls themselves a specialist, it tells me that they specialize in this topic, and has valuable knowledge and skills in this area.

5 subject line mistakes to avoid when emailing a reporter
from PR Daily
One of the most important parts of any email is the subject line. With so much riding on your subject line, it’s important to make sure you get it right, and to do that you need to avoid these big mistakes.

How to Make Sure Your Website Passes the Dreaded Blink Test
from HubSpot’s Blog
Visitors judge the value of your website in a matter of seconds. Hours and hours of hard work are distilled into one glance, when they decide whether or not your website is worth their time. This, of course, is what we marketers call “The Blink Test.”

At Arketi, we certainly have a lot to be thankful for… including employees that know how to cook! This year, we celebrated Thanksgiving early with a potluck lunch. Everyone brought a dish to share on Tuesday, and we had quite the feast! (Let’s also give thanks for leftovers!)

Check out the pictures below from our Thanksgiving lunch and be sure to read what our employees are giving thanks for this year. Happy Thanksgiving from all of us at Arketi!

Your company’s website is its face to the world – the whole world – not just customers and prospects, but also journalists, partners, employees, investors, friends and family. It’s the first place anyone, and most everyone, goes to understand who you are and what you do.

Arketi clients often ask us what features and functionality they should incorporate into their BtoB websites. While there is no one-size-fits-all answer, we have pulled from our web development experience – plus some other sites that are “getting it right” – to create our top 10 must-haves for a buyer-centric BtoB site.

1. User-focused Marketing guru Seth Godin encourages marketers to ask themselves, “Why do you have a website? What’s your goal? In other words, when it’s working great, what specific outcomes will occur?” People come to your site to accomplish something, so it should be built such that they can complete that task quickly and easily. An informal survey of site visitors, and some brainstorming, can generate a good list of possible user objectives.

2. Great content = good SEO In the BtoB space especially, strong, fresh, relevant content is key to keeping prospects engaged and moving through the sales cycle. On the one hand, great website content boosts your search performance, which helps bring in new prospects. On the other, regularly renewed content gives those same visitors a reason to keep coming back.

3. Useful, sharable information Offer valuable information and encourage visitors to spread the word by making it easy for them to do so. And we’re not just talking white papers – in fact, there’s evidence of “white paper fatigue” in some BtoB markets – so consider adding other content types to the mix: videos, demos, ROI calculators, surveys, product trials, and interesting blog posts.

4. Content management system A CMS empowers the marketing team to make updates without having to involve IT or an outside web firm. If making changes is too difficult, time-consuming or expensive, the website won’t be kept as fresh and relevant as it should be.

5. Analytics We know you have Google Analytics installed, but that only has value if you look at the analytics and make adjustments accordingly. Part of the problem is, you can slice the data so many different ways, it’s hard to know what to look for. Our suggestion: pick five metrics that matter and focus only on those. (See our webinar Does Your Marketing Measurement Map To What Matters?)

6. Marketing automation system In BtoB, where sales cycles can be long and multiple players contribute to the buying decision, keeping track of prospects – who’s visiting and what they’re looking at – is valuable information. Integrating a marketing automation system with your website gives you this visibility and more, helping you nurture prospects’ interest in your product and close more business.

7. Responsive web design A hot topic these days, responsive design means, at its simplest, a site that looks good and adapts to the visitor’s device, be it a laptop, tablet or phone. At a more complex level, responsive design means a site that remembers who you are, learns what you like, and serves up content accordingly. That may sound ambitious today, but it’s a trend worth watching for the future.

8. Home page as landing page Speaking of trends: notice how some home pages these days have big images, big headlines, and short copy in a big font? The theory is, everyone’s skimming, so you should grab attention with a single, easy-to-grasp call-to-action that engages the visitor immediately – take a trial, watch this video. A related trend is the long home page that scrolls on and on… and on… Scrolling is easier and faster than waiting for a new page to load, especially on a mobile device.

9. Infographics These sophisticated diagrams are a great way to present complex information in a simple and visually appealing way. Plus, infographics are highly sharable – which ties back to our third must-have.

10. Blog On many sites we know, blog posts get read more than most static content pages, which stands to reason since regular posting keeps the content timely and relevant. By involving multiple authors from across your company – not just the marketing team – you can showcase the breadth and depth of your expertise.

Our last thought is this: if your website isn’t converting visitors to leads, then what exactly is it for? Incorporating some, or all, of our must-haves for a buyer-centric BtoB site, will engage more prospects, encourage them to identify themselves, and enable you to foster relationships – which will ultimately lead to more sales.

Traditionally, marketers have used printed collateral to communicate key messages and build a consistent brand image among customers and prospects. Now that email and the web are our primary means of information exchange, there are new considerations for what we used to call “collateral.”

In the first part of our series on tips to consider when developing effective collateral pieces, we discussed quality and convenience. Check out our first few tips here (http://arketi.com/blog/archives/1122) and continue reading for more helpful hints.

3. One page at a time
This one can really hurt but makes perfect sense. When a potential customer prints a collateral piece, they will likely view it one page at a time. Few if any will read it in “facing pages” like a traditional printed piece.

This is causing marketing professionals to rethink spreads. It’s not that you cannot use them, but the challenge is to consider how the information could be presented. By not taking into account the single-page format, you could be hurting both your design and your message.

PDFs can be arranged to be viewed in spreads, rather than a page at a time. The user can make this choice, but a best practice is to assign the PDF’s properties to the layout you want it to be viewed in. Setting the “Fit to page” property is a good idea while you’re at it.

4. Remember content is still king
No matter how good your design, if your content is weak, your collateral will perform poorly. Ultimately, content is what the business reader is looking for. Structuring the content to be accessible and easily digestible is essential.

Today’s business reader is really more of a “scanner,” looking for items of interest that will cause them to stop and then actually read. Knowing this, here are some tips for content:

• Break the content up with headings and subheads
• Embrace short paragraphs (even one-sentence paragraphs)
• Put key information into bulleted lists (but try to limit yourself to 5 or 6 bullets per list)
• Highlight important words or phrases in bold and/or color

Simply applying these four tips when developing digital collateral will increase the readability of the resulting piece.

In some ways, digital collateral may be different from traditional, but the same over-arching principles of good communication apply: ensure your content is relevant and well-written; adapt your design to the user’s environment (whether on-screen or on a desktop printer); and communicate as simply and directly as possible.