Web Analytics for B2B Marketers - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #89
Tuesday, April 15th, 2008In today’s world of new media, search engine marketing is perceived as a necessary tactic in the B2B world. The challenge with online advertising is that we, as B2B marketers, take a B2C approach. We build PPC ads under the guise of “if we’re out there they will come”. The problem is that B2B buyers are different from B2C buyers. When you are shopping for new tennis shoes, you search in Google for “red nike running shoes”. Various sponsored and organic results appear, you click through and pull out your credit card.
B2B sales cycles are measured in months not minutes, so why are we trying to use the same tactics? B2B marketers instead need to do whatever they can to drive leads to their website, be that SEO, PPC, links from blogs, etc. but because their business is less transactional they must capture those visitors so that they can control the marketing messages and proactively target interested buyers throughout the buying cycle.
You may be thinking, “Well I capture web visitors through landing pages and forms.” The thing is that only 3% of web visitors fill out a form and according to MarketingSherpa, only 50% of those fill it out completely and accurately. The #1 name filled in on forms is Mickey Mouse (although cute, I don’t think he is the buyer you are looking for). Also, did you capture contact info for the right buying roles? How many college interns did you have filling out information?
You know there are unannounced visitors on your website, the challenge is to identify those visitors so that you can turn a passive visitor into an actionable lead. There are several web analytics tools out there that can help you on your way to identifying these unknown visitors. You should look for a tool that:
- Identifies the companies visiting your website
- Offers data services to find the right buying roles within those companies
- Analyzes those visiting companies to determine trends in the industries and sizes of visiting companies
- Allows you to set up business rules to score visitors based on pages visited and time on site
Also, be sure to ask for a free trial so you can test the power of the tool and see results before you have to buy.
Google Finds Nirvana Through Second Life - Marketing WTF?
Tuesday, April 1st, 2008In a bold move designed to fortify itself as THE King of All Advertising in both the real world and the virtual world, rumor has it Google will be announcing an exclusive agreement with Linden Research, Inc. (aka Linden Lab), the creators of the wildly popular online world Second Life, to become the premiere advertising medium within the virtual world. Code-named “Narnia”, the agreement details a two-pronged advertising strategy that will enable Google’s PPC-based AdWords technology to be ascribed to any assets within Second Life, including the Avatars themselves. The second and most interesting component of the agreement provides for the ability to “bridge” PPC advertisements and landing page interactivity between the “real world” and Second Life. Imagine an Adwords-enabled billboard in Second Life promoting a new sports car that, when clicked on, draws the user back onto the advertiser’s web site on the Internet, and vice versa.
What’s next? Is salesforce.com going to start tracking virtual leads? Are marketing automation vendors like Eloqua, Marketo, Vtrenz, and LoopFuse going to start allowing you to track virtual marketing campaigns to Second Life Avatars? If so, how will all of this integrate with our tracking and social media tools?
This is perfect timing for ReachForce, as we just announced our Convert software-as-a-service enabling businesses to turn web visitors into active leads, whether traditional or virtual.
Social Media is Not One-Size-Fits-All - Blog Master…NOT
Monday, March 31st, 2008Last week, we hosted a B2B Marketing Roundtable in Austin on Social Media. It was great to see what other marketers are doing with social media. Some were very advanced with huge customer communities while other were still trying to figure out how best to integrate social media into their overall marketing strategy. It seems, overall, executives are aware of social media but do not completely understand it. If you are feeling pressure from your bosses to start a blog or user community because it is the hot thing right now, you should really sit back and analyze what tactic would be best.
One attendee said she was supposed to be starting a user community but they only have 70 customers. For most companies a user community is a lot of time, effort and money for only 70 customers especially when you consider that only a fraction of customers will actually be active in the community. Knowing your customer is also something to consider when deciding to start a blog. Some companies believe that blogs today are what websites were 5 years ago, you just have to have one. The truth is they are a lot of effort. If your customers and prospects are not active online, starting a blog is probably not a good idea. The point? Research and know your customers’ behavior before launching any social media program.
Website Visitors - Leads or Just Impressions - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #85
Wednesday, March 26th, 2008We all know that as B2B marketers we must manage our online presence well. The first step is having an easy-to-navigate and information-rich website. Then we try to find new ways to drive traffic by investing in banner ads, Google AdWords, SEO or by using sponsored whitepapers and participating in social media through Facebook or LinkedIn. In addition, we have all spent real dollars on landing pages. Many of us have also taken on a company blog to indirectly promote our agenda and promote ourselves as thought leaders. We do all of these things with the feeling in mind of “if we’re out there they will come”. What happens once you get them to your home page or landing pages? We try our best to capture as many leads online as possible, but with only 1% of web visitors filling out a form and only half of those being accurate, don’t you wonder about the other 99%?
My view is that AdWords and other PPC marketing techniques are B2C optimized and that we as B2B marketers have to work harder (in new ways) to try to monetize these investments – not just stop on impressions but on the entire value chain of the investment as it translates to real revenue.
As more and more marketers are having to show real results for marketing dollars spent, is measuring web traffic enough? Seeing a spike in your website traffic is exciting and being able to correlate that spike to a press release, change in a Google AdWords/PPC program, or an email campaign proves that your tactics are working. But are website visitors any different than people driving past a billboard? Are they just impressions?
I want to capture the people not just visiting the homepage, but the ones who spend time on my product pages, looking at my case studies and reading my white papers. And I want to weed out those that just look at my careers page or press releases. To me, online marketing is important but lead generation that drives real revenue is priceless, so how can I convert more web visitors into actionable leads?
Want Bloggers to Write About You? Make Sure Your Website is Blogger-Friendly - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #83
Wednesday, March 19th, 2008Attention Conservation Notice: The following post shares a few counter-intuitive tips for getting bloggers to write about you.
Cory Doctorow – the genius behind Boing Boing, and the inspiration behind ReachForce’s attention conservation notices–has shared more of his brilliance in 17 TIPS FOR GETTING BLOGGERS TO WRITE ABOUT YOU.
If you can get past the InformationWeek’s annoying, in-your-face advertising and survey requests, you will find several great nuggets in this post. Many of which will really throw most marketers for a loop. Here are a few of the more interesting suggestions:
- Have a permanent link. Don’t just change the front page of your site every time a new speaker for your speaker-series in announced. A blogger who links to the front page of your site today in a post about the upcoming address by Philo T Farnsworth, wants that link to stay good for in the future,
- PDFs stink. It’s not a Web page (see “Have a link”). It’s hard to copy and paste out of. It doesn’t show up in browsers half the time. The Web is made of HTML.
- Put your URL on your images. If you’ve got cool photos or other images up on your site, stick your URL in unobtrusive type at the bottom of it.
- Forget the “copyright protection” Javascript. Some sites have bizarre Javascript that pops up snotty little copyright messages when you try to right-click on an image to save it. OK, we get the point: you don’t want people to copy your images. We’ll just move on. Enjoy your obscurity.
- Enough with the legal boilerplate. If every page on your site ends with “(c) 2008 Paranoid Co Inc, all rights reserved. No part of this site may be reproduced without permission,” then bloggers may just take you at your word and write about someone else’s site.
The world of Marketing has changed drastically in the last few years and it’s time for B2B Marketers to question the status quo (and their legal counsel) and make some changes to thrive in this new world.
Trade in an Bad Addiction for a Good One - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #80
Tuesday, March 11th, 2008Are you a Stumbler? I must admit, I find myself neglecting family and friends for my nightly StumbleUpon fix.
For those of you scratching your head, StumbleUpon is–according to Wikipedia – a web browser plugin that allows its users to discover and rate webpages, photos, videos, and news articles. These webpages are typically presented when the user—known within the community as a Stumbler—clicks the “Stumble!” button on the browser’s toolbar. StumbleUpon chooses which new webpage to display based on the user’s ratings of previous pages, ratings by his/her friends, and by the ratings of users with similar interests. i.e. it is a recommendation system which uses peer and social networking principles.
And, for B2B Marketers, a StumbleUpon addiction could actually be a good one. Here are a few cool articles and tools I’ve found while Stumbling:
And, a few of the more fun finds:
Now for the really good part. Turns out Marketers can pay to have their sites featured or served up to Stumblers. It’s called Stumble Upon Advertising and it’s really powerful, especially if you have the type of product or service that seems to be most popular with the StumbleUpon crowd. For pennies per view, you can target an audience with your website or blog. StumbleUpon then brings users directly to the page you specify and they rate your site. It’s a great way to drive web traffic and leads.
Find Your Niche in the Corporate Blogosphere - Blog Master…NOT
Tuesday, March 4th, 2008All marketing initiatives need to be targeted. Spraying your message to as many people as possible and praying that it will resonate with the right people just won’t cut it. This is no different when you are planning to start a blog. And for a corporate blog to be successful, you do need to plan ahead of time.
- Determine your focus and have a good grasp of what you are all about.
- Ask your customers what they would like to hear about, and the answer is probably not just your latest product updates (unless you are Apple).
- Find that niche where you can stand out from other blogs in your space (namely your competitors) and don’t try and be everything to everyone.
- Learn about your customers and cater to their needs.
You don’t need a lot of readers; you just need the right readers.
Boost Your Google Juice with Link Bait - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip#77
Monday, March 3rd, 2008Attention Conservation Notice: The following post provides a list of different types of link bait and key considerations for making sure the link bait is effective.
Encouraging inbound links to your website is a sure-fire way to improve your SEO performance, in other words, to boost your Google juice. One of the best ways to build those high-value inbound links is to produce “link bait” by delivering valuable content that encourages others to link to you.
Nick Wilson, a contributing writer for Search Engine Land, recently wrote about the various forms of link bait that web marketers use to drive inbound links to their web site content. Here’s a summary of the three types of link bait according to Wilson:
- Textual Linkbait: … any kind of page content that takes no more technical skill than being able to type. This kind of link bait is very accessible as the only real cost is time. With good imagination and research, you can quickly devise a series of posts designed to attract links.
- Site Based Tools & Software: … functional scripts that run on a website. These vary widely in nature depending on the site. A good example in the search marketing world is the NetQoS network latency calculator.
- Widgetbait: The holy grail of link baiting in 2007 will be the widget. In late 2005 and early 2006, I came up with a linkbaiting concept to put my previous company, Performancing, on the social media map. That idea was the Performancing Blog Editor Firefox extension that has achieved nearly half a million downloads on Mozilla alone.
I would also add to this: visual or graphics link bait. Bloggers and journalists love visuals and diagrams that help communicate a point. A popular example of this is the Social Media fatigue visual Andrew Shuttleworth created using Mind Manager flow charting software.
Here are a few tips on making sure your link bait is effective:
- Make it relevant and useful to your target audience to drive the right types of links and web traffic.
- Make sure it supports your brand.
- Don’t require registration to use it, but do embed offers for more (this requires a conversion strategy).
While link baiting can be controversial, it seems to me that it has resulted in so many new free tools available to users. How can that be a bad thing?
Corporate Blog URL - Blog Master…NOT!
Tuesday, February 26th, 2008While I may be the blog master of ReachForce, I am definitely not the most technically savvy. I let my web guys handle the technology side of our blog. But, as a marketer, there are some technical decisions that need to be made when starting a blog. There are many great applications like WordPress and TypePad that make starting a blog easy but have you considered what the best url is for your blog? Mike Volpe at HubSpot dives into the advantages and disadvantages of each choice. This is great information I wish I would have had when I was making this decision.
Originally, The B2B Lead was a folder in our corporate site, but we wanted to make it distinctly clear that it is a thought leadership blog and not a sales pitch. We soon moved it to its own url. While I think we did gain points for differentiating it from the corporate site, Mike is right that it is a lot of work to build inbound links. In retrospect, I think I would have also considered making it a subdomain of our site. The point of starting the blog was of course to help boost SEO but more importantly to create great content that would be appreciated by other smart B2B marketers.
Virtual Trade Shows – Are They the Better Alternative? - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #74
Friday, February 22nd, 2008With travel costs continuing to go up and events getting more and more expensive to put on I’m wondering if all events will soon move into the virtual world. We, here at ReachForce, have signed up to sponsor and exhibit at MarketingProf’s B2B 2.0 EXPO, a virtual trade show this year. I’m REALLY interested to see what kinds of people attend these events and are they possible leads for us. We’re building our booth this week – any ideas or recommendations? If you’ve attended or participated in an event like this I’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback on the event. I must admit, as a marketer scarred by the live trade show circuits, I’m really hoping this event delivers and that more and more continue to pop up.
