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.
March 9th, 2010
Posted by: Bill Gadless
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.
March 4th, 2010
Posted by: Bill Gadless
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.
March 2nd, 2010
Posted by: Bill Gadless
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.”
February 25th, 2010
Posted by: Bill Gadless
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:
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…)
February 18th, 2010
Posted by: Matt Roche
In the beginning – circa 1994 – the Web was eagerly awaited as a place where visually interesting content would proliferate. After all, was not HTML specifically designed for the (relatively) simple development of pages containing both images and text? It’s no real accident that website development came to be most often called “website design”, and that at least as many of the initial crop of Webmasters came out of graphic design as out of IT.
It was a wild time, those late 90s: Webmasters were dueling each other to put up the flashiest, jazziest sites; and everyone and their grandma, it seemed, was lighting a fiber network to ensure the availability of the colossal bandwidth that would surely be needed to support all that Web traffic. Then came (more…)
February 16th, 2010
Posted by: Bill Gadless
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