A joint survey by BtoB and the Association of National Advertisers last year revealed a gap we’ve gotten used to seeing: whereas only 10% of B2B marketers surveyed viewed social networking as effective, 36% of B2C marketers saw it as effective. The B2B respondents said they used social networks, blogs and virtual spaces such as Second Life primarily for brand-building, rather than generating new leads.
While B2B marketers grapple with how best to utilize social media – and we passed along some pointers on the topic in a recent blogpost – their companies are charging ahead with implementing other uses beyond marketing. So reports Rebekah Tsadik in her worthy BtoBonline piece, “Social networks starting to click”.
Much of this activity is aimed at setting up intra-company, unbranded or “white label” social networks, which have the potential to do for internal affinity groups what extranets have done for B2B e-commerce and partner programs. Such affinity groups might be…
- employees – all of them; just new hires; just the “under-30s”; or skills-based functional groups like engineers or salespeople
- task-defined groups – e.g., “the Omega Project team” or “the global Exxon account team”
- groups with a need to share new information and feedback quickly, such as a new-product release team and its beta-test site administrators
Tools ease task, enable targeting
“We actually see social networks getting smaller and more focused,” said Shaun Priest, Senior VP of Sales at Omnifuse, a white-label social network company. “Instead of saying we want to be all things to all people, how can we [reach] a targeted group?”
Clearly, this wouldn’t be happening if every company had to repeat Facebook’s IT-development effort. Fortunately, vendors such as Omnifuse and SelectMinds have jumped into the fray, making it about as simple to set up a social net as it is to start a blog these days.
Benefits
Nearly half of workers age 20-29 rated the availability of support/networking programs for employees with common interests as a very important factor in their decision to join or remain with an employer. For younger workers especially, social networks help maintain connections to family, friends, fellow alumni and business contacts.
Still more compelling: SelectMinds’ clients say that corporate social networking helped increase productivity on average 10%, new business an average of 12%, and retention an average 5% …clearly results worth departing from your comfort zone to obtain.
Your Web marketing consultants should be able to help you capitalize on social networks in your particular business context.
July 3rd, 2008
Posted by: Bill Gadless
It’s a fairly common narrative: our client XYZ Co. starts up a PPC program while waiting for their search engine optimization (SEO) to kick in …typically following a website redo. Once they see their results-page ranking move up to acceptable levels, we can expect to get the plaintive question: “Can’t we stop spending on PPC now?” (Sometimes the thought has been planted by a certain segment of SEO houses, who trumpet those savings as much of the payback that justifies their fees.)
As professional Web marketing consultants, we would advise “no”, in most cases. So does Kevin Lee, in his thoughtful ClickZ piece, “Is organic search enough?”; in fact, he says that “pulling PPC ads after achieving high organic position may, in fact, be a very bad idea.”
There are a number of reasons for this. For one thing, search engine results pages aren’t the monolith they used to be: personalization of search is increasingly diverging results; and different syndication partners may not only display results differently, but are increasingly fiddling with the underlying algorithms. So that great rank you may think you have, based on one instance, may not extrapolate to uniformly great visibility across all outlets and search instances.
Other factors at work…
But even assuming the old, more uniform search world, there are other factors that may act to maintain PPC’s worth, including:
Competitive landscape – If your organic listing is surrounded by enemies, then PPC is probably more important to you than if you enjoy relative solitude.
Messaging – If the page associated with your high organic rank conveys your message properly, all is well. If not, fiddling with any on-page elements can be disastrous; so you’ll be better off using paid placement titles, descriptions, and landing pages to effectively communicate your message and offer to site visitors.
Conversion – Because you have far more flexibility with PPC in ad creative and landing pages, you’ll need to look at possible differences in conversion effectiveness …not just clicks to your site.
Testing always tells the tale.
The above qualitative considerations aside, the definitive way to reach the right choice in your environment is, of course, via testing. This of course requires turning PPC off for a week or so (long enough to be statistically meaningful in your traffic context) and capturing every analytic, down to conversion rate and ROI …or at least lead quality.
In Kevin’s work with clients, such testing has always showed high ROI for PPC, even after factoring out cannibalization (PPC “stealing” clicks from organic). And the better the paid landing page, the higher the net gain in ROI. Our experience is quite similar.
If you’re unsure about testing to determine your optimal search marketing strategy, you may want to seek guidance from your search marketing consultants; they do this a lot.
June 27th, 2008
Posted by: Bill Gadless
We’ve relayed a number of forecasts showing a continued rise in online ad spending for this year, despite the economic uncertainties. One of the latest comes from researcher eMarketer, showing online ad spending reaching $27.5 billion, up 28.5% over 2007. No surprise, this spending will be driven largely by paid search engine advertising, which is expected to total $15.5B this year, up 31.9% over last year.
Within the huge online spend number, there’s a new kid on the block – video …and its kissing cousin, social networks (which feast on video and facilitate viral marketing). Spending on online video advertising is projected to reach $1.4 billion this year (up 74%), and advertising on social networks is projected to reach $1.6 billion this year (up 70%), according to eMarketer. We found these data points – and much of what follows here – in Kate Maddox’s worthwhile B2Bonline piece, “Video in play as ad vehicle”.
“There will be a lot more use of online video ads by B-to-B marketers,” said Lisa Phillips, senior analyst at eMarketer. “Video is becoming a way for people to find out about a product and how it works, particularly for B-to-B products (italics ours).” Many B2B marketers are using online video ads in innovative ways – including banner campaigns, outdoor ads and viral marketing – to drive viewers to their websites, where they can learn more about the company and its products. Some are incorporating games or contests, a natural fit with the social-network context.
Making the intangible real…
For example, China’s PC maker Lenovo launched an integrated ad campaign last July, driven heavily by online video ads. Their “Best engineered” campaign, developed by Ogilvy North America, included online videos of engineers testing Lenovo notebooks in extreme conditions. Its five videos were used in online ads as well as airport advertising, driving viewers to a microsite at www.insidelenovo.com.
Viral campaigns featuring online video are producing excellent results for marketers …certainly in terms of traffic. IBM’s campaign resulted in click rates four to five times higher than typical email campaigns and twice as high as average banner ad campaigns.
Back to the future
Pardon the oblique pun, but… we’ve seen this DVD before, haven’t we? Only a couple of years ago, blogs were seen as the domain of blowhards with a deep need to inflict their musings on others, and podcasts were suspected by some to be a devious plot hatched by Steve Jobs to make iPods even more indispensable. Yet today you have to look pretty hard to find a B2B that isn’t using both as a matter of course.
So video is already looking like a train that you don’t want to be the last B2B to catch. Your Web marketing consultants should be able to help you evaluate this vehicle and determine its fit to your business.
June 23rd, 2008
Posted by: Bill Gadless
The first thing journalism majors are taught in college is how to write an obituary. It’s true! Writing an obituary involves thinking about the highlights of the subject’s life from beginning to end, and writing about it in an extremely concise manner. This exercise disciplines the writer to focus on what’s most important, and to trim away the fat.
The same could be said for writing Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads in Google and Yahoo. When writing your ads, it’s vital to stay focused on the highlights of your product or service that are most appealing to your target Web audience …the meat and potatoes, if you will.
Too many times, we see in-house folks who manage their company’s PPC campaigns using branded product names and internal “lingo” in their writing, thinking that their ads have universal appeal and will make sense to everyone. Nothing could be further from the truth.
In fact, ads need to be constantly honed and perfected in order to achieve (more…)
June 17th, 2008
Posted by: Jonathan Eilberg
If your website is like that of most B2Bs, your “News” or “Press” section is somewhat of an afterthought. It’s like, “OK, finally we got all the important (product/service) content done; now what can we throw in under ‘News’ so we can get this puppy launched?” Too often, that ends up being simply an archive of moldy press releases and clippings.
But in his excellent RainToday article, David Meerman Scott argues that your “News” area can – and should – be so much more. As for the “should”… marketers need only remind themselves that journalists are a relatively trusted voice reaching large numbers of your prospects; so anything you can do to make it easier and more enticing for them to write about your firm is clearly worthwhile.
Build an online media room, and they will come …and stay.
How to do this? David discusses 10 best practices (more…)
June 11th, 2008
Posted by: Bill Gadless
We’ve spilled a lot of ink recently over the desirability of cranking up your online marketing aggressiveness during uncertain or shrinking economic times (see for example our blog posts, “How a Website Makeover Can Help “Recession-Proof” Your Company” and “Recession, Reshmession… Don’t Let the Headlines Scare Your Company into its Own Private Downturn”). Such aggressiveness helps offset the greater difficulty of finding and closing prospects, who can be expected to be more cautious in these times; and it will protect your market share …and maybe increase it, if at least some of your competitors are too timid to match your aggressiveness.
Of course, it’s not a time to simply throw money at the problem; it’s much better to first ensure that every dollar is working as hard as possible for your B2B. And with PPC, that means… (more…)
June 5th, 2008
Posted by: Bill Gadless
You can’t turn on the TV or read the newspaper (and never mind the blogosphere!) these days without someone berating you for being insufficiently green or having too big an environmental footprint. It’s as though Al Gore and Kermit had suddenly been crowned kings of all media.
The result of all the hype – so far – has been to make greenness yet another metric being increasingly applied to individuals and businesses …including your B2B. It’s no longer enough to be merely compliant with the Clean Air and Rivers & Streams Acts (which is a snap for most tech companies, anyway); now you’ve got to be on the bleeding edge of lowering CO2 emissions, reducing power consumption, recycling heat, and a host of other items that weren’t even on the radar screen 10 years ago. (It’s almost like winning the Nobel Prize really does focus people’s attention …who knew?) And you’ve got to do some chest-thumping about it too, or your silence could create an unjustified presumption of guilt in the court of buyer opinion.
Obviously there’s a lot your B2B can do company-wide to earn green points, but what can you as a lone marketer do? (more…)
May 29th, 2008
Posted by: Bill Gadless
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