B2B Web Strategy Blog

With this checklist, you can build a compelling landing page

It may be the most critical component of your pay per click (PPC) program. It’s where your visitor decides either that there’s something here worthy of further evaluation …or that she’ll just click on over to YouTube (or somewhere).

Yes, it’s your landing page. Much has been written about how not to do one; there’s even a webinar from Google, which we summarized here awhile back. Some of those no-no’s include:

distractions, a confusing layout, and especially multiple headlines
making the offer / call to action unclear or difficult to find
using excessive explanation or difficult prose
requesting too much information
encouraging navigation away from the page

So how to develop a good landing page? Posting in iMediaConnection, Mason Wiley presents a number of best-practice “dos” that his firm (Hydra Networks) uses with clients, sometimes helping them increase conversions by 100% or more. These include:

Use a people picture: make it a real photo, not ClipArt, and zoom in tight on the face. Ideally this shot can also show the product or the result of its use, or the service being delivered. Make the product or offer the star.
Use a photo caption: after the headline, it will be the most-read copy on the page.
Big headline: a single, big, bright headline should dominate.
Lead the eye to the conversion button: place the photo in the upper left, with the headline just to the right; place the form lower on the right, but starting above the fold. This placement best leverages people’s natural eye movements.
Critical info above the fold …like your key promise/benefits/value. Whatever readers see when they first land needs to be convincing and motivating enough to make them want to scroll down for the rest.
Make text easy to read: Long copy blocks should be on white (easier to read), at least 12 pt, flush left, and not more than 50-60 characters across. Use bullets vs. paragraphs wherever possible. Highlight the gist of your message with subheads or bolding; it may be all that some people will read.
Make it quick-loading …even by dial-up.
Brevity: You should be able to do everything on a single page. More pages simply create more opportunity for prospects to fall out of the funnel.
Simple form: Keep it as brief as possible, and design it for the ease/convenience of your visitor, not your IT group; that means few fill-in fields (pre-populated, to the extent possible), using check boxes or radial buttons – but not both! – where possible, and saving info to prevent start-overs in case of errors. Make the Submit button impossible to miss (red or orange helps), and try putting some wording on it that ties to your offer (vs. the generic “Submit”), like “Download my free trial now!” or “Yes, send me your white paper”.
Finally… a great offer: OK, it’s not exactly part of the landing page, but it is why you have a landing page. As Mason says, “Not following the rules can kill a good offer. But nothing can save a bad offer.”

Of course, the only way to ensure optimal conversion performance is by testing …with real prospects, under real market conditions. For B2Bs with typically low volumes, that can take awhile; so you’ll probably have to keep it to the big items that you suspect can actually swing the result. But by simply following the recipe above, you’ll definitely be helping to improve your conversion rate.

March 11th, 2010 Posted by: Bill Gadless

Try using seed nurturing to reel in those anonymous prospects

Gotta admit it: we hadn’t heard the term yet, either. But as soon as we saw Jon Miller’s definition…

Seed nurturing is the process of building relationships with qualified prospects before you have their contact information.

…we knew exactly what he was talking about; and chances are you do, too.

You see their trails in your analytics: those visitors that swoop in and view maybe 5 or 6 pages – some of them pretty meaty – before riding off into the sunset without filling in a registration form or downloading a blessed thing. You know what they’re doing: educating themselves on your company and product set while remaining anonymous to you, so they can avoid premature influence by some slick-talking salesperson. And you can be sure… if they’re doing it on your site, they’re also doing it via third-party resources, word-of-mouth recommendations and social media sites.

As Jon says, “Just because you can’t identify these individuals doesn’t mean they aren’t qualified prospects — and because of this, you must nurture them just as you would the known contacts in your database.”

How to do this? In his recent post on the Modern B2B Marketing Blog, Jon provides a couple of best practices…

Personalize their interactions with your site. OK, not as in, “Hello, John Smith”… but you can certainly put them in a small group with others who have searched on your company name, visited your site 3+ times, and viewed the “Convertible frammis” page; and this group can get a different offer or promotion than groups on a different track. By doing this over a number of different visit categories, you can in effect be running multiple tailored drip marketing campaigns, without knowing anyone’s email address.

Make valuable content freely available, on your site and via social media. The silent, anonymous prospect is the strongest argument for scrapping that registration form (or making it optional). Not everyone is willing to part with their contact info to get your white paper; but everyone who reads your paper will probably be influenced by it. (For additional rationale for this recommendation, see David Meerman Scott’s provocative post, “Say NO to squeezing your buyers.”)

Use social media to build credibility and trust. Buyers act irrationally during the purchase cycle because of perceived risk. Establishing a mantle of thought leadership – through social media and other means – increases prospects’ trust and correspondingly reduces that perception of risk. So too does building a solid reputation among a base of cheerleading fans on the social networks; it’s the next best thing to a personal referral.

It may be a departure from traditional lead nurturing, but these techniques will serve you well with those self-directed prospects who will engage only on their terms.

Add comment March 9th, 2010 Posted by: Bill Gadless

Proper use of analytics can pump up your website’s effectiveness

Here’s what we know about our clients with regard to website analytics…

most of them have Google Analytics (or an alternative package) installed
most of them use it insufficiently, incorrectly or not at all

As Google’s Avanish Kaushik told Search Engine Land: “Numbers are hard to come by on this, but in my humble experience, a tiny fraction of people who should use data productively access it, and a tiny fraction of that actually ends up using data effectively. We, as a universe, have a long way to go.”

As always, you know who you are (unless perhaps you’re one of those that’s using it incorrectly). It’s a sad state of affairs, considering the tremendous value that such packages can bring to the diligent.

Another dismayed observer of this scene, Jason Prescott, recently blogged on this topic for iMedia Connection. As Chief Exec of several vertical search engines and directories, Jason knows a thing or two about website effectiveness. His post provides three hints that will help you to get your analytics working for you:

Set your website goals first. Identify what you’re looking for in terms of conversions per week or month; Google Analytics enables you to set such benchmarks. If you aren’t meeting those goals, you’ll need to study everything in your conversion funnel: ad creative, landing pages, offers, touch-&-go pages (land & leave), etc. The good news is that often fairly minor improvements can make an enormous difference in conversion rate.

Understand hits, visits, conversions.

A hit is a server request for something on a specific webpage, which could be simply copying an attractive image or animation. Such “curiosity” hits are outside the realm of desirable traffic and conversions.
A visit is a user landing on one of your webpages, and perhaps navigating to other pages before exiting. Your analytics can tell you how many visitors come to your site and how many items were requested from each page, as well as distinguish between new and returning visitors.
A conversion is a visitor to your site who completes some pre-defined action (download, purchase, registration form, etc.); clearly, this is your most important metric.

Monitor page views and time spent on site. In general, you want users to visit more pages on your site and stay for as long as possible. Analytics can tell you which pages are helping that cause, and which need work to become solid contributors.

Monitoring these metrics can tell you quite a lot about what your website visitors are doing, so you can tweak your site to increase visitors, page views, and time spent on the site. This will ultimately translate into more visitors and – what you’re really after – more conversions.

Add comment March 4th, 2010 Posted by: Bill Gadless

Rules for writing white papers that create “ready to buy” prospects

OK, so you’re convinced that your B2B needs a good white paper – or two or three – to help nurture prospects through your sales cycle. Problem is, no one in your organization even remotely claims to be an expert in writing them.

The good news is that, with the help of Michael Stelzner’s recent post, your people don’t need to be experts; they just need to follow his “10 Essential Rules.” You’ll have to click on over to find all ten, but here are quick summaries of roughly half…

Nail the title. It’s the front door to your paper; you should spend significant time crafting and testing it, ensuring that it resonates with your target readers.
Use the movie trailer open. Craft an opening that creates a compelling drama in readers’ minds, without giving away the whole plot. Remember, your first words matter most.
Talk about their interests first. Write about your prospects’ fears and frustrations; then tell them how those challenges can be solved.
Fire your silver bullet. Whether you call it that or not, incorporate a “shopping guide”: i.e., a checklist of requirements that only your company can meet.
Tell them what to do next. The last line of your work must include a specific, compelling action for readers to take, moving them from “That was a good read” to “OK, I want to do this.”
Make it easy for readers to promote your work. Social media is hot. A simple “Retweet” button at the end of your paper can do wonders; if readers like your paper, they click the button and instantly make their fans aware of your work.

I thought it was perhaps an oversight that the list didn’t include my personal favorite: Don’t just start writing; build an outline first. But then I discovered a guest post by John White on Michael’s blog from around a month earlier: “4 steps to successful white paper outlines.” So check that one out too, and you’ll be well on your way to a killer white paper.

Add comment March 2nd, 2010 Posted by: Bill Gadless

Does your site provide too much stuff, but too little information?

Perhaps it’s because B2Bs are getting the message that they need substantial content in order to make their sites adequately visible to the search engines. Or maybe it’s just a feeling that “bigger is better.”

Whatever the reason, we’re noticing lately that some clients are throwing lots of content up on their sites, though perhaps not with sufficiently careful consideration of what each page of it will do for their visitors (if anything). We’ve started thinking of it as the “too much stuff, too little information” syndrome.

Also noting this trend – with some alarm – is Susan Fantle; in a recent post over on her B2BMarketingSmarts blog, she suggests that “to have value to the reader, content should include one or more of these types of useful information:

A better understanding of the causes of a specific business problem.
Some best practices for solving a specific business problem.
What peers or experts are saying about the problem.
Some kind of self-assessment of how the prospect’s company is handling a specific problem.
Industry advances being made to make solving the problem easier.”

Note that the overriding flavor is educational, not salesy …although there’s certainly no problem with putting a related sales story and/or offer at the end of each content piece.

Readers may want to review the hints in our post of a couple years ago, “Is your B2B website educating? …or simply boasting?” In addition, Susan offers four tips in her post that will help ensure that the content you’re offering has real value…

Provide content information that matches the specific needs of each pipeline lead. Here’s a great use for your nurturing emails: send a short survey to your pipeline asking them to identify their 3 biggest challenges; then target the next content you send or offer them (white paper, webinar, etc.) to the specific issues they identified.
Create content that has how-to takeaways that can be implemented without buying your product or service. Taking this tack demonstrates your thought leadership, and that you truly care about solving your prospect’s problem, whether or not it involves selling them your widget.
Offer a mix of some content that is available without registration and some that is not. The former helps position your company as a thought leader and exposes your content to a much broader audience; the latter, of course, explicitly feeds that leads-to-buyers funnel, which ultimately pays the bills.
Provide content that satisfies the focus of each decision-maker and influencer in prospect companies. Chances are, your product’s purchase will need to be signed off on by the prospect company’s CEO, CFO, at least one VP, and one or more technical analysts and/or users. Clearly, you put your company a leg up by having available content tailored for each of those roles.

As Susan concludes: “Content is not designed to directly sell products or services. It is designed to educate prospects on how their peers are handling similar challenges, and subtly edge them along toward choosing the marketing company’s product or service.”

Add comment February 25th, 2010 Posted by: Bill Gadless

Nine mistakes to avoid in writing online B2B lead-generation copy

Ambal Balakrishnan has done us a great service by collecting the thoughts of several experts on the subject above, then posting the collection in ClickInsights. His experts: Michael Stelzner, Stephanie Tilton, Cindy King, Michele Linn, Jonathan Kranz. We’ve picked out a “top nine” here; for the rest – plus more depth – just click on over:

Failing to incent the prospect to read on. Within seconds, you need to grab (more…)

Add comment February 23rd, 2010 Posted by: Bill Gadless

Search engine rankings get way more focus than they deserve

We’ve blogged before about the dangers of B2Bs (usually their CEOs) focusing on their ranking on search engine results pages (SERP), to the exclusion of nearly everything else. Then there’s their willingness to exert virtually any effort in order to be “#1 by Monday” …anything, that is, except upgrade their site’s content, follow SEO best practices, and buy some traffic using pay per click (PPC) advertising while waiting for rankings to improve.

Maybe we’ve been too subtle …or “too light”, as the beer commercial says. So let’s just go ahead and take the gloves off for a change.

How insignificant or misleading are search engine rankings? Let me count the ways… (more…)

Add comment February 18th, 2010 Posted by: Matt Roche

B2B Web Strategy Blog - eMagine

With this checklist, you can build a compelling landing page

Try using seed nurturing to reel in those anonymous prospects

Proper use of analytics can pump up your website’s effectiveness

Rules for writing white papers that create “ready to buy” prospects

Does your site provide too much stuff, but too little information?

Nine mistakes to avoid in writing online B2B lead-generation copy

Search engine rankings get way more focus than they deserve

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