Continuing with our How Did They Do It? series, where we interview and spotlight companies who are successfully marketing their brands online, we had the pleasure of interviewing Yan-David Erlich of ChoiceVendor.
Providing real-world ratings and reviews of business-to-business service providers in more than 70 categories across the United States, ChoiceVendor is passionate about providing businesses with the resources they need to make the best vendor decisions.
On the ChoiceVendor blog, there are articles on how to find and select vendors, tips for running a business, and best practices for using word-of-mouth marketing to promote your firm. Vendors who list their firms on ChoiceVendor benefit from free, authentic word-of-mouth marketing; any firm with business clients can create a free listing on the site.
In the below interview with Yan-David, founder and CEO of ChoiceVendor, Yan-David shares his online marketing strategies and successes.
Below is the interview:
1. ChoiceVendor is similar to a business to business form of Yelp for startup and small businesses. How are you using your blog, Twitter, and Facebook pages to illustrate this image?
ChoiceVendor is a site by and for business professionals, and we’re developing content that speaks to that core audience.
On our blog, we have articles on how to find and select vendors, tips for running a business, and best practices for using word-of-mouth marketing to promote your firm (vendors who list their firms on ChoiceVendor benefit from free, authentic word-of-mouth marketing). Service providers who are experts in their field often provide guest posts with actionable advice for business owners.
We also maintain a presence on Twitter to connect with business owners seeking answers and advice about vendors, B2B marketers, and service providers who could benefit from listing their business on ChoiceVendor.
Currently, our Facebook page is primarily for outgoing messages to our fans, such as links to the company newsletter and featured reviews. We have plans to develop more interactive dialogue with fans.
We are also planning and actively developing features to more deeply integrate valuable content and community from ChoiceVendor with SMB’s existing networks on Facebook, using Facebook’s recently announced OpenGraph technologies. Although these features won’t be available immediately at our public launch, look for these to come out soon after.
2. ChoiceVendor is an interactive website. How are you using Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and your blog to drive traffic and bring the online conversation to the ChoiceVendor website?
The original and authentic content on our blog—whether written by our in-house staff or our expert guest bloggers—addresses timely and important questions for SMBs, whether looking for new vendors or new business customers. As a result, our article pages are getting noticed by the business community and starting to rank highly in web searches for the appropriate topics of interest, which drives direct traffic to our blog. In turn, our blog is integrated—both philosophically and structurally—with our site, thus driving traffic to the main ChoiceVendor service.
On Twitter, our conversation with business owners and B2B marketers spans a wide range of topics, from high-level discussions about the state of affairs for the business environment to tactical best practices for finding a vendor or new business customer. In some cases, though not all, the right answer is to make use of our service, either to look for a vendor or claim one’s company profile to attract new business. In those cases, our followers and friends on Twitter find their way to our service. That said, we consider Twitter to be less of a marketing channel and more of a forum for conversation with the B2B ecosystem as a whole, so many of our tweets aren’t directly related to the specific features of the ChoiceVendor service, but rather more broadly display our philosophy of wanting to help businesses succeed.
Currently, our Facebook page is primarily for outgoing messages to our fans, such as links to the company newsletter and featured reviews. Our fans who interact with these outgoing messages tend to make their way to our site to interact with more content. We are also planning and actively developing features to more deeply integrate valuable content and community from ChoiceVendor with SMB’s existing networks on Facebook, using Facebook’s recently announced OpenGraph technologies, which we plan to release a bit after our public launch.
We’ve underutilized our LinkedIn presence to date but are working on some features to engage with the community on LinkedIn more actively and will announce these in the near future.
3. What online marketing efforts have brought in the greatest results for your business? What are those results?
No single online marketing effort has stood out as being the bearer of “greatest” results for the business. We really believe—for ChoiceVendor as a business and foremost as a community—in engaging with businesses and B2B marketers in a multichannel / multimodal fashion. As such, our blog, newsletter, Twitter, and Facebook presence coupled with more traditional online channels like SEO work, SEM, and even email outreach has helped us engage with the business community at different times, on different topics of interest, and using the medium they felt was most appropriate at the time. Though it’d be easier if a silver bullet existed, we believe our long-term marketing strategy will continue to be an integrated one.
4. How have your online marketing efforts impacted the relationships you have with your current and prospective customers?
Our online marketing efforts have given us the opportunity to engage directly with our members to find out which issues are most important to them, and then respond with useful content. We want the blog to be a hub of useful information about all aspects of running a business, and we regularly reach out to vendors and reviewers to write guest posts about their area of expertise.
Similarly, we view the conversations with our community on Twitter, Facebook, and through our email newsletter all as steps to building a relationship with the ChoiceVendor community and enabling us to address their vendor and customer finding needs.
5. How has your blog and social media platforms shaped the way your customers and prospects view your brand?
We want our members to view our brand as a place where vendors and service providers connect, and we try to provide useful content for both of these audiences. A lot of our blog traffic has come from keyword searches looking for more information on vendor selection—e.g., our all-time most popular blog article is about comparing between payroll providers.
Another high-traffic topic is social media and word-of-mouth marketing, which is of particular interest to service providers who list on ChoiceVendor. Many small businesses are just getting started with tools like online business reviews and Twitter, so we try to provide educational content about how to use these tools to grow their business.
In general, we’ve honestly enjoyed the conversation with the business community, both on the business decision maker and vendor front and have found the community to respond to this. We’ve invited several business owners and marketers to write guest posts on our blog and found that they’ve been delighted with the opportunity and the honor. We definitely plan to continue this type of deeper conversation with the community as well as extend it to other channels like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
About ChoiceVendor and Yan-David Erlich:
ChoiceVendor is an online community of business decision makers who share their first-hand experiences with service providers through ratings and reviews. Through this community, well-reviewed vendors receive more business and poorly reviewed vendors can engage with their existing customers to address the complaints.
And, as Yan-David so eloquently puts it, “As for me, each time I choose a ChoiceVendor-rated service provider, I’m satisfied in knowing that the wealth of experience of other business owners is on my side—so I can spend less time worrying whether I picked the right vendor, and more time building my business.”
Prior to ChoiceVendor, Yan-David was an entrepreneur in residence at Battery Ventures and the founder and CEO of Mogad / Social.IM, acquired by iSkoot in 2008.
On the ChoiceVendor blog, there are articles on how to find and select vendors, tips for running a business, and best practices for using word-of-mouth marketing to promote your firm. Vendors who list their firms on ChoiceVendor benefit from free, authentic word-of-mouth marketing – any firm with business clients can create a free listing on the site https://www.choicevendor.com/claim_your_business/
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