If you’re like me, you pour a lot of time and effort into wordsmithing press releases. It’s important to get the message just right. Then you go back and forth with executives and/or partners to make sure all parties are happy with the messages. It can take days or weeks and become frustrating.
Sadly, if you’re not taking advantage of new ways to publish your own content online, chances are nobody’s reading the results of all of that hard work. Or, so says David Meerman Scott. In his recent post entitled Top 10 PR tips, Scott’s #1 piece of advice is “The old ways to get noticed were to buy expensive advertising and beg the media to write about you and your products. The best way to get noticed today is to publish great content online.”
At BreakingPoint, we just completed a major agreement with a strategic partner. Of course, we wanted to get the broadest possible coverage for the news. And, we didn’t want to count on just the traditional methods for getting the word out. So, Kyle (www.engageinpr.com) and I sat down to brainstorm all of the ways we could get the word out about the news and build nice inbound links for SEO. All of the ways beyond traditional media, that is.
Here’s what we came up with. Did we miss anything?
Messaging is critical to how you communicate your benefits and your product to your audience. Your messaging follows you throughout your communication and no place is it more applicable than your main website. This is the spot where your prospects must make a fairly immediate decision whether to stick around and gather some more info (and hopefully make a purchase). When you find the proper messaging you will ultimately be able to provide customers, partners, media, analysts and even internal owners your core value proposition:
Who are you?
What do you stand for today?
Tomorrow?
How do you explain your main benefits?
Your first step to consistent and powerful messaging is to have your internal and external constituents answer the above questions. If done properly you’ll have a tremendous amount of data. In a recent scenario at my last gig, we were able to gather information from more than 1,500 survey responses from users, partners, executives and investors. Often you simply comb through all the data and make various hypothesis based on a thorough scrub of the data. It is great to have so much data, but with too much data comes the fear that we won’t be able to get to the core of what people actually thought of the company and its solution. Also, we would need hundreds of hours to sort through it all properly.
One thing we have noticed as we sifted through data were the patterns in the answers that were receiving. The ability to quickly view these patterns is critical to discovering how your audience views your company and your product, thus starting to form the messaging that will most resonate with prospects. The most simple and effective way for you to visualize the patterns of your data is to create a tag cloud. A tag cloud will help represent the words that appear the most; the larger the font the more that word appeared in the results. Very quickly you will see if your prospects will respond more to particular words and phrases. Fortunately there is the ability to automate tagclouds using tools such as TagCrowd, which allow you to input data and create a tag cloud; this could be a URL, a file or just paste in the text to be visualized. It then gives you options for how many tags to show, ignore common words (‘and’, ‘the’, etc), grouping of similar words (innovate, innovation, innovating) and whether you want to show the amount of times each word appears. You can then grab the HTML or take a screen grab and you have a great visual way to demonstrate data.
Reviewing these tag clouds is highly effective and can lead you to terrific conversations about your company and your final messaging…which of course is the goal. But the power of the tag cloud goes beyond simply helping to create the proper messaging. Use it to visualize what each of the pages of your site actually say about you, critical for SEO/SEM, but also to determine if you are actually saying what you mean to say. It can be surprising to find out that not only are the words you are using on your homepage not resonating directly with your prospects, but often we are using hypocritical verbiage. The same can be done for any marketing campaign you are gearing up to drive leads. Just remember you may not be saying what you think you’re saying.
In 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.
Need a little entertainment with your SEO tutorial? Check out this little ditty by the Poetic Prophet (AKA The SEO Rapper). Poetic, or should I call him Prophet, raps about how web design affects the ranking and conversion of web pages. Yo MTV raps SEO and shares these bits of wisdom “use a clear call to action to cause da temptation.” “Design and code right man, can’t you get wid it?”
We 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?
Attention Conservation Notice: The following post contains ideas for helping B2B marketers secure multiple page one listings on Google and Yahoo.
More tidbits from SMX West have been posted to Web Pro News by Jason Lee Miller. Apparently, digital omnipresence was the hot topic at the event. According to Miller, “the discussion surrounding search is no longer just about securing your place in a same-for-everybody top-ten list of search results. The discussion is about being everywhere; it’s about establishing a case for digital omnipresence.”
Now, I wasn’t there (unfortunately), so I don’t know the full story on digital omnipresence, but it sounds very similar to the concepts promoted by the folks at StomperNet. As a B2B marketer and a follower of StomperNet strategies, I have experienced the results first hand and am hooked. Today, it’s not enough to have one listing on page one of Google. I’m driven to secure multiple page one listings. And that is made far easier by posting valuable, actionable content in a multitude of formats – web pages, blog posts, video, podcast, etc.
When you look at the research on B2B tech buyer behavior, it’s easy to see why. Research from numerous sources, including Marketing Sherpa, indicate between 85 to 98% of B2B technical buyers in North America use the Google search engine. Yahoo dominates in other areas of the world. And, reports published by StomperNet, Enquiro and others show that a double listing at the top of Google not only boosts brand affinity but generates more than 2X the leads of a single listing. Difficult to argue with those odds.
And, it’s not enough to secure organic listings. Enquiro Research suggests that B2B technical buyers start their research in the organic or Search Engine Optimization (SEO) listings of search engines and their purchase process in the Search Engine Marketing (SEM) or pay-per-click (PPC) ads. What’s more, Marketing Sherpa reports that organic listings draw 75% of the click through traffic, while SEM draw 25%. Clearly, when targeting the tech buyer, it is vital to be in both places.
To succeed online, B2B marketers are going to have to learn how to present their brand and their corporate and thought leadership messages everywhere, in many different formats. We will have to drive demand, build brand awareness, establish thought leadership and a community of interest using social media, traditional media and Search Marketing techniques.
One way to do this is to optimize a variety of different types of content for broadly searched/highly competitive terms. However, securing a top listing for competitive terms requires a significant time and resource investment so it is not an option for many B2B marketers. Even with the longterm commitment required for success here, I’m not advocating that B2B marketers avoid these keywords. Just the opposite. Go ahead and optimize for those terms, but use SEM programs such as Google AdWords and contextual PPC advertising to fill in gaps and “be there” when both researchers and buyers are searching. Then, leverage new media program elements including your blog and social media/Web 2.0 sites to secure high value inbound links. A steady investment in these programs will help move these listings closer to the top of the search engines.
A far faster approach to top listings, is targeting “long tail” terms—keywords that have moderate search volumes and are relatively easy to dominate quickly.
Targeting these terms should enable you to secure a double or triple listing at the top of page one of Google or Yahoo. At least until Google changes its algorithm again! Once again, it is important to use social media program elements such as a blog, social media, social bookmarking, PR, and high value link-building to secure the best results.
Didn’t get approval to fly to London for last week’s Search Engine Strategies? Never fear, Susan Esparza kindly live blogged from the event and shared a number of wonderful lessons including this super post from Ian Lurie’s presentation on Search Marketing & Persona Models.
When explaining the concept of personae, a topic we blogged about on this B2B Lead post a few weeks back. Ian provided a very “sticky” definition: “A persona is your brand’s imaginary friend.” He also shared these wonderful words of wisdom for building a campaign to woo your persona:
Pick the persona you want to start with
Refresh yourself with their needs, motivations, wants, fears, limitations, etc.
Become empathetic to that persona - really put yourself into their head.
Too hard? Get a team together to act the parts…but be careful in your casting choices. (Don’t cast a competitive person as a competitive persona. It’s cross contamination.)
Attention 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?
MarketingSherpa 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.
In my last post, I shared a few of the metrics I track each week to assess the performance of my social media programs. In this week’s post, I focus on the tools I use to track results. Because I’m a metrics-aholic, I have racked up a rather expensive habit over the years. But, I have found the insight these products provide is well worth the investment.
Here are a just a few of the products I use to track social media and traditional marketing program results:
Website Traffic:Google Analytics helps me track web analytics basics. And, it costs nothing!
Top Referrers: Once again, Google Analytics has my vote for the best info at the best price.
Unsolicited Inbound Leads: I use a combination of salesforce.com and Eloqua to track inbound leads. Eloqua, while one of the most expensive tools in my tool chest, actually gives me details on a one-off basis so can monitor the click stream of a user from our blog to our web to a lead form. And, it helps me automate lead processing which can come in handy when you have a viral marketing success. I have been able to identify enough leads that came from our blog and converted to closed deals to more than justify it’s expense (including the salary of my full-time blogger).
Blog Rankings:Technorati posts blog rankings and authority ratings. Once again, the price is right: Free.
Conversions from Blog to Website: Google Analytics shows me the conversion rate from our blog to our website.
RSS Subscriptions: If you use Feedburner for RSS you can easily get this data for free.
Inbound Links to Website and Blog and Link Value: I use a wonderful SAAS service from Hub Spot to provide this data and more. And, it’s not really that expensive.
Google Page One Listings and Weighted SEO Exposure: This is a tricky area because web traffic data can often lie. But I’ve found another somewhat expensive offering that gives me a good idea of our company’s weighted search engine exposure –both paid and organic– on the keywords that matter. The service is called CIRadar. Compete.com can also give you an idea of your web site traffic trends compared to the competition provided you have enough volume to show up on their radar.
I’m also intrigued by the possibilities of other tools that help measure share of voice and analyze the value of coverage. Products like Meltwater and Factiva. Have any experience with these products? Are they worth the price? Would love to hear from readers about their value for the small and medium size business B2B marketer.
