These are somewhat scary times at some B2Bs. Despite expert advice about becoming more aggressive in a downturn (some of it summarized in our posting “B2B Marketing in a Recession”), their top management is more inclined to be cutting marketing expense than approving increased spending. Leads are harder to come by and taking noticeably longer to close.
All these things make it a good time to do something fairly uncommon in the headlong rush of better times, which is to take a critical look at your marketing and fix some of those deficiencies that were ignored – with little or no penalty – back in the salad days. Fortunately, along comes a nifty research-based webinar from MarketingSherpa titled, “Top 10 B-to-B Marketing FastFixes: How to Generate & Nurture More Qualified Leads” (that’s the slide set, with audio available here). As usual, we’ll encourage you to check out the full presentation, and will discuss only selected points here.
Measurement. When the phones are ringing and it’s impossible to chase all the leads, it’s easy for results measurement to slide off the to-do list. But in times like these, it becomes critical… both to protect spending that you “know” is worthwhile, and to ensure that the highest-return vehicles are getting the proper priority.
Follow-up and nurturing. Suddenly every lead is precious. If you send an auto-response, be sure it’s engaging; if you’re not sure, try running a mini-survey. Be sure there are no leaks between lead capture and your nurturing program. When new leads are harder to come by, those already in your database should receive increased focus and TLC. You might also revisit with Sales the trigger points that indicate when to initiate phone contact; there may be a good case for starting to call prospects just a bit sooner than you would in better times.
Rework optimization. If you haven’t tweaked your website’s SEO for a year or so, it’s likely that good leads are drifting to competitors. Why? …because search engines revise their algorithms, and the search terms your prospects use change, too. You really need to go back through the whole recipe: check your site analytics to discover the terms prospects are using to find your site; use a keyword analysis tool to find similar phrases; re-optimize your site for those relevant phrases; and make sure they get used in your ongoing content development.
Try a quiz. More visitors than you might think – most especially engineers and IT types – enjoy showing off their knowledge, even just to an anonymous quizmaster. You’ll capture their contact info as they register to win the high-score premium. You can seed the quiz with some research questions that could inform part of a planned white paper. In addition to just a homepage button, try promoting the quiz on your blog, via the company-standard email auto-sig, and/or via Adwords.
Try using snail-mail again. What?! …a Web marketing company advocating other than online marketing vehicles? Thing is, email has shifted so much volume away from direct mail that you’re now almost certain to get noticed by using the latter; and it won’t be lost on your recipients that you chose to spend more to put this particular message in their hands.
For assistance with finding and fixing any holes in your marketing program, you may want to check in with your online marketing consultants.
August 21st, 2008
Posted by: Bill Gadless
“(OK, so you) walk into a coffee shop and notice one of your best customers sitting at a table with several people you don’t know. You walk over to say ‘hi’ and your customer invites you to join them, and introduces you to the others. They are talking about your industry, and you quickly realize that some of those you’ve just met are potential future customers. How you handle the next step is crucial: immediately launching into a sales pitch is likely to alienate the group. On the other hand, displaying your industry knowledge and providing insightful input to the conversation will make those at the table want to learn more from you.
Social media and social networks are simply an online version of that table at the coffee shop. They give you the opportunity to start, or join, conversations that can ultimately be beneficial to your business, if managed properly.”
(For that delightfully spot-on analogy, we’re indebted to Tom Pick in his “Best of 2007: News Articles on Social Media Marketing” posting on his WebMarketCentral blog.)
B2B marketers are finally starting to become more comfortable with social media sites, realizing that they’re no longer relegated only to teens and college students. In fact, some are finding that social networking serves as a great equalizer for small businesses, because anyone with an Internet connection can now launch a successful global marketing campaign. (Oh, btw: even though you may be venture-funded and don’t plan to stay a small business for long… you still are one at present, which makes it pretty tough to get heard.)
So many sites… so little time
With numerous sites to choose from, however, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. There’s just way more “out there” than any small business has the time or manpower to track. But a nifty built-in characteristic of the medium is that one can strongly focus on a few sites, and then let the viral nature of social media take over and eventually reach the others.
Which of course begs the question of which “few sites” are best to focus on …but fortunately we discovered Heather Johnson’s post for WebMarketCentral, “The 5 Best Social Media Sites for Small Businesses”. We can’t treat them all here; you really should click over to Heather’s post for that. But here’s just a bit on several of them:
StumbleUpon – currently the reigning champ for promoting many types of websites. Not only it is easier to gain attention via this site, but you can also give your site a boost via a StumbleUpon ad campaign …currently for a mere 5 cents a click. In his interesting post summarizing a year’s worth of data from both his corporate website and blog, Tom Pick says flatly, ““StumbleUpon is the most valuable single social media network overall for driving B2B web traffic.”
Twitter is a great way for business owners to network at their own convenience. People on your Twitter friends list will see each of your posts (aka “tweets”), which can be used to promote new ideas and features for your business. But don’t promote your site with every tweet, lest you be labeled a spammer. Point out other sites that interest you or some thought you’ve had that day… and within those tweets, you can sprinkle a link to your latest blog entry or a special feature offered by your company.
Wikipedia – It’s a boon to your small business to be mentioned on Wikipedia; its many entries are highly ranked by Google and read by millions each day. Just be prudent: start an account with the site, become active for a few weeks and educate yourself on how to contribute to Wikipedia before attempting to start your own page. This will increase your chances of remaining on the site.
These sites can help you create long-term business contacts and continuous traffic for little or no money, and can enlist others to help spread your gospel …all of which helps to level the playing field for smaller companies. Your Web marketing consultants can no doubt help you with the finer points of social-media leverage.
August 14th, 2008
Posted by: Bill Gadless
We sometimes get a call from a frantic prospect who says something like “I absolutely have to rank Number 1 on ‘convertible frammis’ by Monday.” Never mind that it’s Thursday afternoon, and that he means through organic search only …no PPC allowed.
We can only speculate as to what motivates a normally sane marketer to take on such a fool’s errand, though naturally a fit of sudden top-management interest/pressure springs to mind (think Dilbert). Of course, we always do our best to help such people… although they rarely end up becoming clients, because their circumstances generally keep them from even hearing our message that they’re probably 6 months or more away from seeing serious return on their search engine marketing (SEM) investment.
Patience… that rarest of virtues
We were reminded of this sad scenario recently when we came across Erik Dafforn’s piece for ClickZ, “SEM’s Elusive Long View.” As Erik puts it, “The characteristic most lacking in search engine optimization / SEM clients isn’t an understanding of analytics or page coding or application development. It’s patience.”
Why is patience so important in conducting SEM? Because…
- doing SEM properly (i.e., for the long haul) requires doing things that take time to do, and still more time to bear fruit once they’re done; and
- the things you might do in pursuit of short-term results can have very damaging repercussions that stay with your site for a long time.
Let’s look at each of these approaches: the short- and long-term. If you’re only going for the quick fix, you might be tempted to try some of these shortcuts:
- loading up your pages with keywords to the point that they’re barely intelligible, or at best simply boring, to the human visitors you’re trying to attract;
- going to a “link farm” to obtain a large number of inbound links …never mind their marginal relevance to your business;
- using a text generator that purports to be one step ahead of a search algorithm’s nonsense detector.
The problem with such tactics is twofold: one, you risk turning off the prospects who do respond to your (artificially) high ranking; and two, the engines sooner or later will deduce your methods and identify your site as the Web equivalent of a spammer. And once they do, it will take time to lose that stigma, even after you reform your practices.
Investing for the future
And the right way for the long haul? Well, we’ve written quite a bit about this in the past (see our White Paper, “Best Practice Methods for Driving Qualified Web Traffic”), but it really boils down to…
- discovering and using the keywords that prospects use in looking for products/services like yours;
- posting content that’s relevant, kept fresh, written for the reader (vs. the engines), and that demonstrates thought leadership;
- getting business-relevant inbound links – e.g., from directories and partners.
As Erik concludes, “Taking the ‘long view’ of SEM might seem like a luxury, but it’s not. It’s absolutely essential for anyone who wants a solid future. It’s the single best investment in time and resources that you can make.”
What to do while waiting for your SEO results to kick in? We suggest buying the traffic, via Pay Per Click advertising (PPC) …at least some of your competitors probably are. Your Web marketing consultants can help you sift through the options and realize the maximum return from your SEM investment.
August 7th, 2008
Posted by: Matt Roche
In a recent blogpost, we talked about how the new social media shouldn’t be thought of only as a means to raise your Google page rank. While that’s still true, there is a rapidly growing relationship between social media and search engine marketing (SEM) that’s worth exploring.
In his recent ClickZ piece, “When Does Social Media Matter in SEM?”, Erik Dafforn offers this clear-cut test: “Social media officially matters to SEM when search engines’ algorithmic treatment of social media sites intersects with user queries.” I.e., when social media pages start showing up in search-engine results pages, it’s time – maybe past time – to take notice. And it’s easy to verify that they are indeed hitting the SERPs more and more these days.
What this means, of course, is that (more…)
July 31st, 2008
Posted by: Bill Gadless
OMG!! We just came across this absolute killer article (actually, only a few bricks shy of being a white paper!) by Jon Miller, “The Definitive Guide to Business-to-Business Marketing in a Recession.” OK, so that may be the most overblown title since Douglas Adams’ “Life, the Universe and Everything”; but please, don’t let that stop you putting it way up on your must-read list.
In part, we liked this piece because it agrees with many of the points made in our own recent blogposts on the topic of the current “maybe/maybe-not” recession (or the worst possible non-recession, as Jon says he likes to call it); and it includes research backup for several of them. For example: (more…)
July 24th, 2008
Posted by: Bill Gadless
We’re continually amazed by the number of our good clients who are happy for us to help them with search engine optimization (SEO) …until it comes time for link building. They’re quite happy for us to worry about their keyword/keyphrase identification, page or H1 tags, alt-tags …all that gritty technoid stuff. But mention inbound links, and often as not we observe a glazed-over expression and hear, “Yeah, yeah, we’ll take care of that over the next month or so.”
Come to find out, on our 3rd or 4th monthly SEO checkup, that virtually nothing was done on the link-building front. Result? …their site is hovering on about the 9th or so page of SERP results, when everything else (more…)
July 17th, 2008
Posted by: Matt Roche
It’s an article of well-placed faith among B2B companies – where sales cycles are nearly always lengthy – that lead nurturing is vitally important.
And that’s in good times, when you may have gotten used to picking off new business like it was low-hanging fruit. But as Anne Holland says in her SherpaBlog post, How to Ride Out the Storm: “In bad times, the branches raise themselves up. Landing new customers is harder – more expensive – just at the time when your CEO holds that ‘How can we cut marketing costs?’ discussion with your department.”
Anne’s worthwhile piece goes on to discuss tactics for (more…)
July 10th, 2008
Posted by: Bill Gadless
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