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.
Need We Say More? - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #69
Tuesday, February 12th, 2008MarketingSherpa just posted the results of ad:tech’s Fifth Annual survey of ad:tech attendees. They surveyed 421 Internet marketers on the online Marketing tactics that worked and those that didn’t work over the past 12 months.
Good news for ReachForce Customers: ad:tech found that “House lists top paid search: More marketers reported success with house email lists than paid search ads — a reversal from a year earlier.” That’s a good indicator that B2B Marketers should keep their house database clean and continue to invest in demand generation programs targeting those lists.
Other important findings include:
- SEO is generating high ROI
- Paid search continues to perform, but is down steeply from 2006 possibly due to intense PPC competition.
- Viral marketing is still popular as 93% of marketers said agencies recommend either an increase in spending or begin spending on viral video.
- 87% plan to increase viral marketing on social networking sites.
When Investing in New Media Programs Track the Metrics That Matter - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #66
Thursday, February 7th, 2008I have a confession to share with you. And, to most readers of The B2B Lead, this will come as no surprise. I am a metric-aholic! My professional life is ruled by metrics. Metrics help me plan my day. They buy my credibility and expedite decision-making. They inspire my competitive spirit and drive me to produce more. They help me justify the purchase of $30,000 worth of t-shirts without a song and dance. Best of all, they empower me to utter the dreaded “No” when asked to use resources unwisely.
So, when it comes to B2B marketing techniques, I rarely invest in programs that do not result in a demonstrated return. Leigh Anne recently posted that she struggled with social media and its effect on lead generation and asked the question “Is social media like traditional PR? You have to do it but there is no way to measure results?”
Well, Leigh Anne, I’m happy to tell you that you can track and measure the results of social media. My post on viral video marketing provides a real world case study of those metrics in action. But the post did not include all of the metrics I track. Nor did it include the tools I use to track these results, some of which may break the average startup budget. In this week’s post, I’ll share a few metrics for determining if your Web Site, blog and social media marketing techniques are working for you.
Here are a just a few of the metrics I track weekly:
Website Traffic: Ensure unique visitor trending is “up and to the right.”
Top Referrers: Monitor the sites that are contributing the most traffic to my Website. Hopefully, your blog is in the top 5.
Unsolicited Inbound Leads: Provided you use Salesforce.com, track the source of all inbound leads using Salesforce.com web-to-lead tracking codes. This will give you insight into your campaign results. Track all leads without a campaign separately and monitor the trend. You can attribute growth in these leads to a combination of PR and social media.
Blog Rankings: Monitor your Technorati ranking and authority rating. This will enable you to monitor your position in the blogosphere.
Conversions from Blog to Website: Is your blog converting readers to your Website? This is critical. If you are providing valuable, relevant, and actionable content on your blog, you should see a high rate of conversion to your website. If you are tracking web-based lead growth, you should be able to make some correlation between an increase in blog conversions and inbound leads.
RSS Subscriptions: Monitor your Feedburner stats to see how many people are signing up to receive your RSS feeds. Once again, make sure that number is growing and experiment with promoting your feed to fuel growth.
Inbound Links to Website and Blog and Link Value: Social media is a wonderful tool for search engine optimization (SEO). And, when it comes to SEO, there is nothing better than a large number of high value optimized inbound links. So make sure you are tracking an increase in inbound links that use the proper anchor text.
Google Page One Listings and Weighted SEO Exposure: Sadly, page one search engine listings don’t just happen with a call to Google. Monitor and measure performance of target keywords and your exposure for both search engine marketing (SEM) and SEO.
That’s probably enough to get started. In my next post on The B2B Lead, I’ll share insight on a few of the tools I use to track these metrics and assess the value of NetQoS search engine marketing and new media programs.
B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #57 - Dive in and Jumpstart SEO With a Quick Start Plan
Wednesday, January 16th, 2008Attention Conservation Notice: The following post provides quick tips for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and six-step plan for getting started.
You might call me a fast-follower when it comes to Search Engine Optimization. I resisted for some time because the prospect of researching and sorting through hundreds of keywords and applying techniques to outwit Google’s ever-changing algorithms seemed so daunting. I can barely spell algorithm, after all. Then a slew of industry surveys showed that anywhere from 80 to 90 percent or more of B2B tech buyers start their research and buying process on Google.
Well, that was a wake-up call. So, last year I made SEO a higher priority. I shifted the funds from online advertising into SEM and a ReachForce role-based database build. (That way, I could cover both my Inbound and Outbound bases.) I also maintained my investments in PR and some key sponsorships to cover the brand awareness and drive Inbound traffic. Then, I pulled resources and funds that had been spent trying to keep up with endless campaign design and development, and re-focused them on social media and SEO.
It’s truly amazing how quickly you can get results like Page 1 Google rankings when you focus resources on boosting a particular page ranking. Here are a few tips to help you do the same:
- Invest in the right tools: There are literally dozens of free and low-cost SEO tools that you can use to get a lay of the land and assess your best SEO prospects. Of course, Google provides several like Google Suggest and Google Trends. Another one of my favorites is WordTracker. And, a new tool I am using right now is HubSpot. HubSpot’s CEO Mike Volpe makes a great case for SEO in the HubSpot Inbound Marketing blog. More about that another time.
- Don’t just go for the highly competitive popular terms. Consider niche or long tail keywords terms. There are dozens of keywords with significant search traffic that have little competition. Optimize for all of them and the numbers add up.
- Integrate your PR and SEO efforts to ensure inbound links from press releases support your strategy.
- Make sure your “anchor text” on in-bound links is optimized to provide the greatest SEO value.
- Optimize with a conversion strategy in mind.
- Leverage your “educational” assets for landing pages and social media sites like hubpages.com, scribd.com, flickr.com and others.
Here’s a quick plan for getting started:
- Information Gathering Session: Just like data cleansing, it can be difficult to know where to start when it comes to SEO. Pull together a team to discuss and prioritize objectives and scope your initial project.
- Research: Review your marketing objectives, competition, and your web site and blog to get a lay of the land and identify low-hanging fruit.
- Produce a plan and guidelines for optimizing your top five web or blog pages. This should include recommendations for URLs, internal link building, meta tags, page content updates, blog cross-linking and a conversion strategy for each of those pages.
- Then begin to build your inbound links to those pages by leveraging other sites, partners, blogs, social media sites, portals, and other high-value (not spam) paid link directories like Yahoo.
- Review and Revamp: After the pages have had sufficient time for Google Indexing review the project and results, and adjust the components of the program if necessary.
I realize this post presents a fairly simplistic view of SEO. It is, in reality, a very complex and overwhelming discipline. But this is a quick plan for hopping on the moving train. You will, of course, learn more through trial and error and there are numerous online tutorials that will help you hone your skills.
Extreme Makeover - B2B Style
Monday, January 14th, 2008What do you do when you know that your company’s current logo and branding are no longer a fit? There are many costs and challenges associated with revamping or reinventing a corporate brand but do the benefits outweigh? At ReachForce, we decided the timing was right for an allover makeover for our brand. We launched a new website today! You can check it out at www.reachforce.com.
For us, the timing made sense as we also made a big announcement today of our Series B Financing. With this announcemnt, we are proving that ReachForce is a more established company. We felt like the old look and feel just did not fit our new growth.
Would love to hear your feedback on our new look!
Marketing WTF? - This Marketing Geekout Moment Brought to You By StomperNet
Thursday, January 10th, 2008Quick – how can understanding the science of vision and cognitive psychology help you boost B2B Marketing leads and revenue?
The Click Fu Masters at StomperNet just posted this intriguing video tutorial to help B2C and B2B Marketers boost their “Click Fu.” The team explains that understanding the function of the human eye and brain can help you improve marketing results and drive more revenue.
First, the eyes: StomperNet advises Marketers to understand the function of the eye and visitor blind spots to improve landing page design. Well, that’s a no-brainer. But, they go further explaining that primal man’s eyes were designed for two purposes: to eat and avoid being eaten. The FOVEA, designed for finding food to eat, is sensitive to fine details and color. The Periphery, designed to avoid being eaten, is tuned to motion and contrast. Understanding how to make appropriate use of color, organization, and design details while employing the right structure to the page can help Marketers boost conversions by more than 25 percent.
Now, the brain: StomperNet advises you to understand the link between vision and behavior so that you understand why a #10 result on Google will get you more clicks than a #6 or 7 position. Basically, their cognitive psychologist advises that: Easy wins out over Good or Better. Make user feel it will be easy to get what they want and they’ll stay longer and learn more. Understand your visitors’ goal and what they need to achieve the goal.
But that’s just the beginning. This is definitely a video that is worth watching.
B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #53 - Web Marketing from Jeremiah Owyang
Thursday, January 3rd, 2008As the new year begins you may want to take a look at your web strategy. For many companies this is the most important medium used to reach their customers. Jeremiah Owyang offers an extensive list of Web marketing tactics that might help you better hone your online strategy.
Marketing WTF? - The B2B Lead Practices Green Marketing
Monday, December 3rd, 2007Attention Conservation Notice: The following post contains quick tips for blogging best practices
including a link to a video interview on the subject.
Concerned with the increasing level of noise pollution in the blogosphere and inspired by this wonderful video interview of Cory Doctorow about blogging best practices, The B2B Lead is going green—green marketing, that is.
Long time readers of The B2B Lead know that our mission is to provide snack-size tutorials and tips. That’s about all busy B2B Marketers can take in these days. Of course, sometimes it just isn’t possible to communicate critical information in a short post. For example, in B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #59, we wrote about using Twitter to drive B2B blog readers and the post was much longer than traditional posts. Pondering the Future of B2B Marketing was equally lengthy.
So, for those of you who still want in-depth content along with your snack-size tips, we will now include Attention Conservation Notices to help you conserve your precious attention resources. As Doctorow advises in his video interview, we will lead off our blog posts with a short summary of key takeaways so that readers can decide whether they would like to invest their time in reading the entire article. Let us know if you find them useful.
B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #40 - Monitor Your Company or Product in the Blogosphere
Thursday, November 15th, 2007In a recent post on The B2B Lead (Manage You Company’s Reputation with Google Alerts), we wrote about how to use Google Alerts to manage your brand reputation. Now, MarketingProfs is listing a round up of paid services and a few free tools such as Blog Pulse (www.BlogPulse.com) which features conversation tracking, and visual trends. Marketing Profs advises readers to:
“Set up a Google Alert so that every day, or as it happens, you get an email that shows you who is talking about that keyword (which can be your product or brand name). The challenge with simply using a tool like Google or Technorati Watchlist is the sheer volume of information. You need to either task people with manual assessment or use better tools (many of which are paid services) or contract with an outside provider.
An alternative to Alerts, which hit your email inbox, is to setup an RSS Reader (Google, Bloglines, etc). Then you can check it as needed, versus filling your email inbox to the brim. The risk with an RSS Reader, though, is that you don’t look often enough. “
