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
Most experts on the subject agree: the first thing you should do in a social media program is to monitor what’s already “out there”, meaning what’s being said about your firm or brand. It only stands to reason that what you learn from listening will help make whatever else you intended to do more responsive and smarter-seeming. And it can reveal immediate and ongoing opportunities for engaging in meaningful conversations with customers and influencers.
In the past, monitoring was easier said than done. In particular, it was difficult to gauge the relative influence of a given comment’s source, or analyze how your brand was faring against competitors’ in the sea of online comments.
The good news, however, is that (more…)
February 11th, 2010
Posted by: Bill Gadless
We sing the praises of email, and many of our B2B clients use it pretty religiously, too …primarily for nurturing prospects in the pipeline. But what about email for lead generation? On the surface, it sounds great: its cost is so much lower than postal mail, and the results can be known much more quickly.
But hold on a minute, cautions David Ariss in a guest post for B2BMarketingSmarts. David’s firm (Ariss Marketing Group) recently ran a campaign for a large B2B publisher, sending the same survey and choice of offers via both email (n=30,000) and postal mail (n=100,000). Both utilized primarily the client’s in-house list, augmented by highly targeted outside lists. The results may astound you… (more…)
February 9th, 2010
Posted by: Bill Gadless
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… (more…)
February 2nd, 2010
Posted by: Bill Gadless
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 (more…)
January 28th, 2010
Posted by: Bill Gadless
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 (more…)
January 26th, 2010
Posted by: Bill Gadless
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 (more…)
January 21st, 2010
Posted by: Matt Roche
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