B2B Web Strategy Blog

Dealing with the complex challenges of B2B search marketing

Anyone involved with B2B search marketing is well aware that it’s just not easy. After all, you’re dealing with prospects who are very intelligent, well placed in their firms, who are going to spend substantial time considering your solution (along with those of your competitors). Gimmicks just aren’t going to work in this scenario.

What’s worse, B2B purchase transactions tend to follow a myriad of paths to completion, and attempts to force them into academic stages like Awareness / Consideration / Negotiation / Purchase are likely to prove misleading or frustrating at best.

Posting in B2B Online Marketing, S. Ryan DeShazer takes note of these facts and, thankfully, offers a few helpful pointers…

Aim for micro-conversions, and the sale will eventually follow (if it’s going to), at its own pace. As Ryan says, “Introduce a call-to-action that focuses just on the ultimate transaction and you will lose 95% of your potential audience.” Instead, try offers or points of engagement that map to particular stages of the prospect’s decision cycle …for example, a white paper for those in early-stage research mode; an ROI calculator for those nearing a purchase decision.

Don’t overlook navigational search. These are search terms that are queried specifically to navigate directly to a particular brand’s website; they usually come to predominate over the life of a given prospect’s sales cycle, as a brand preference emerges. Clearly you want to treat prospects who’re leaning your way very differently from those that aren’t.

Analyze, draw conclusions, hypothesize, test. No, marketing is not formulaic, nor even close to an exact science; but that doesn’t make it wise to proceed on nothing but gut feel. The data is there for you, and it will speak volumes to those who make an attempt to understand what lies behind it.

These tips will help your search programs become more comprehensive and relevant to B2B audiences. Ultimately, you’ll be engaging and converting more search-referred prospects than ever before.

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

Business.com’s study of B2Bs’ social media usage – highlights

Most studies of social media use have focused primarily on the question of adoption, or the rate of conversion of B2B social media skeptics into users. In contrast, the researchers behind Business.com’s “2009 B2B Social Media Benchmarking Study” take as a given that social media usage has already gone mainstream, and believe that the more interesting questions now relate to patterns and modes of actual usage. In their words:

“Social media usage is a reality in today’s business environment, and the question of utilization is much more interesting, and important, to company executives and marketers interested in identifying the most effective and efficient opportunities offered by this new medium.”

So the results summarized here are from their study of participants already involved in using social media for business, either using social media as a business information resource, working for a company actively planning or engaged in one or more business social media initiatives, or both. With 564 respondents, the results are clearly bankable. We’ve pulled out some findings we thought interesting for inclusion here; those further interested should download the full study (behind a simple – and free – registration), which includes additional results as well as further breakdowns (by industry, job function, etc.) of those shown here.

Usage.
No surprise that corporate blogging scores with a high percentage of respondents; but more surprising were…

Visit company or product profile pages on social media sites – 62%
Conduct searches for business information on social media sites – 55%
Participate in online business communities or forums – 51%

Notable for their continued lack of strength (all at 36% or below): RSS feeds; using Twitter; discussion groups on third-party sites; social bookmarking.

(Counter-intuitively, the usage numbers were even a smidge higher for senior management than the averages shown …especially at firms with more than 100 employees; both RSS and Twitter use broke the 40% level with top management.)

Modes.
All of the following scored with 50% or more of the responding B2Bs:

maintaining accounts/profiles on social media sites (the surprising winner at 81%)
micro-blogging (e.g., Twitter)
company blog
monitor company-related or competitor mentions on social media sites
participate in discussions on third party sites

…and all of these, surprisingly, scored significantly higher with B2Bs than with B2Cs.

Metrics.
Those used by over half of the respondents: website traffic; brand awareness; engagement with prospects; engagement with customers.

Sites used (i.e., managing one or more profiles on).
Facebook – 77%; Twitter – 73%; LinkedIn/Companies – 56%; LinkedIn/Groups – 53%; YouTube – 43%. After that it falls off dramatically; the next most popular is used by only 14%.

Sites you’d recommend to a professional colleague.
LinkedIn/Companies – 53%; LinkedIn/Groups – 45%; Twitter – 43%; YouTube – 36%; Facebook – 24%. (Interesting that while Facebook is the most used, it’s also the least recommended; but the authors chose not to comment on or further explore this seeming disparity.)

Tools for monitoring online conversations.
Twitter Search, Google Search and Google Alerts are all used by right around 60% of the respondents; none of the rest break 40%.

If you’re still on the sidelines thinking about whether to use social media.. well, your competitors may already be charging ahead and figuring out what works best for them. Perhaps this study will provide the guidance needed to help you to get underway.

Add comment January 28th, 2010 Posted by: Bill Gadless

Getting your marketing on track for 2010

It’s that season again, when it seems just about everyone is opining about what will make 2010 different from the past and how to prepare for it.

One of the better of these that we’ve come across is a post for ClickZ by (no big surprise here) Heidi Cohen. Heidi starts off with a review of some changing online-marketing realities, including:

Online presence is required, regardless of where your business is transacted. Buyers gather info online first …and not only from your website.
Marketing is a multistep process, requiring you to provide easily accessible product information at each step of the purchase process.
Buyers trust their friends, colleagues and other buyers more than they do your advertising.

That said, she goes on to provide a number of tips for marketing success in 2010 and beyond; here are some of them, but you’ll want to click on over for the rest…

Listen. It’s imperative to know what’s being said about your company and brand. Monitoring social media has become critical for this purpose; but don’t forget to get feedback from your sales and customer service staff, too.
Provide useful content related to your product or service, on a regular basis and via a variety of vehicles (website, blog, social networks, email, mobile). Try thinking a bit like a publisher.
Use events – both live and digitally delivered – to connect and deepen relationships with your prospects.
Test everything; track & measure performance. There’s simply no point wasting budget dollars on promotional vehicles that show themselves to be less effective than alternatives.
Support online with offline. Advertising, events, direct mail, product packaging… all can be creatively tweaked to tie in with at least your website and perhaps selected online campaigns.

Stay alert to ever-changing trends, track and measure everything, and you should do just fine in 2010.

January 26th, 2010 Posted by: Bill Gadless

Duplicate content: bad, but not the worst content-related sin

Here’s a search engine optimization (SEO) pitfall that doesn’t get much press, so it’s sort of a “stealth” hazard: duplicate content.

As the term suggests, duplicate content occurs when two or more Web pages have the same content. This may sound implausible at first blush; but in fact it’s a big problem for B2Cs, who frequently sell the same product on multiple sites. For B2Bs, it can happen when…

multiple sites publish your e-distributed press release
partners use your product/service descriptions verbatim
your blog content is posted to multiple websites
multiple URLs on your domain point to the same content
you pay industry or news sites to host your content (syndication)

Some of this clearly represents things you set out to make happen, and for good reason. But there can be an associated cost, if you’re not a bit careful. It’s not that Google will actually punish your site, as commonly rumored (here is their statement on the matter); it’s that your website page might not show up in a given search results page, with Google noting its absence by a little message something like this:

In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries similar to the ones already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.

Of course, Google does this to avoid giving searchers 30 or so entries that are in fact the same page, with different urls. You may think this would be a rare event, but in fact Yahoo has stated that roughly 1/3 of the WWW’s pages are duplicates.

If the duplications are on your own website, then a second SEO hit may come into play: if Google can’t determine which is the primary page, your page-rank strength may be diluted as the value of inbound links may be spread across all of the duplicate pages. Now, you may think that this never happens either, but: I have a shall-remain-nameless B2B client whose site contained a couple dozen pages of content …each one targeting a specific industry, and all built using the same content. When called on it, they changed three sentences in one paragraph! Even disregarding the issue with search engines for a moment, what about the poor site visitors (aka prospects) who’ll be subjected to this?

In her excellent post for Marketo’s Modern B2B Marketing blog, Maria Pergolino provides several tips for avoiding duplicate-content problems…

Submit a site map; this will help Google understand which pages you think are most important on your site
Use canonical tags to avoid duplication concerns within your domain
Provide unique content descriptions when doing content syndication programs
Deploy press releases on your site before submitting them for distribution, and include additional unique information in your version
Build your product pages using unique information not provided to partners
Require partners to add unique information about how the partnership is relevant to your product or service on their pages

All this is goodness, but it still pales beside the biggest content problem of all, which is that too many B2B marketers still skimp, cut corners, or otherwise treat their content development as an unworthy pursuit. There once was a time when B2B marketers spent countless hours trying to get the copy in their off-line collateral “perfect” before disseminating it to prospects. But now, with that chore fading into the background and all the focus on their website, strangely they treat the content as if it is somehow secondary. Instead, they spend all their efforts on getting the blue line that spans the width of the page below the header banner “just so”.

Evidently we can’t say it enough, so we just gotta keep on saying it: quality, relevant content is the biggest single thing you can do for both prospect engagement and search engine ranking.

Add comment January 21st, 2010 Posted by: Matt Roche

How to avoid “ready-fire-aim” with social media

Well, the near-constant barrage of voices (including ours) urging your adoption of social media seems to be working: a recent Center for Media Research survey of media planners/buyers found that “having a presence on social networks” is one of the top priorities for media plans in 2010.

This has some folks concerned that such an unexpectedly whopping result could presage a tendency among marketers to do something – anything – to indicate that they’re aboard the social-media express. Among those concerned is Sean Carton, who warns in a recent post on ClickZ against proceeding without a real strategy. Even better, (more…)

Add comment January 19th, 2010 Posted by: Bill Gadless

That first step into online marketing today is a really big one

Remember back in those halcyon days of, say, the mid-00s and earlier, when starting your online program was as simple as…

build (or update) and optimize your website
get an opt-in customer/prospect list together for nurturing emails
cross-market your URL on traditional print, packaging, and other offline vehicles

…plus some more or less optional tasks, like:

develop a real content strategy
enable website analytics and set some benchmarks
assign responsibility for Web-related activities to relevant internal stakeholders
monitor competitive activity, including website changes and online marketing spend

Ah yes, things were so simple then (and we won’t dwell on those B2Bs who still haven’t worked very far down their “optional” list… (more…)

January 14th, 2010 Posted by: Bill Gadless

Measuring social media ROI: it’s not a slam dunk for B2Bs

There’s been a fair amount of e-ink spilled over how to measure social media results …some of it in fact on this very blog. Mostly, what you see is exhortations to measure attributes or variables that are readily measurable within the structure of social media: things like followers, mentions, responses, reach, influence. Perceptive readers, though, will readily see this as a classic example of assuming the conclusion: i.e., I “know” that getting lots of Twitter followers and mentions will have a positive effect on my business; hence, I can measure our social media effectiveness by simply measuring those things.

This leaves open the question of how did you “know” that those inputs had anything to do with your business results, because you didn’t actually measure it end to end; and if that question comes from your CEO or a Board member, it could be quite embarrassing. Fortunately, you can cite studies showing that companies active in social media generate (more…)

Add comment January 12th, 2010 Posted by: Bill Gadless

B2B Web Strategy Blog - eMagine

Dealing with the complex challenges of B2B search marketing

Business.com’s study of B2Bs’ social media usage – highlights

Getting your marketing on track for 2010

Duplicate content: bad, but not the worst content-related sin

How to avoid “ready-fire-aim” with social media

That first step into online marketing today is a really big one

Measuring social media ROI: it’s not a slam dunk for B2Bs

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