B2B Marketing Blog

Your website’s online exposure is a key component of business life, just like getting healthy and into shape is a vital component of our own personal lives. However, most people never  ‘get into shape’. Many people buy gimmicky workout machines or slim fast drugs only to be tricked out of time and money. Many get confused, frustrated, or give up.

The Online Marketing Athlete
Online marketing is very similar to personal health and fitness, so don’t be tricked by thrills and gimmicks. Think of building and maintaining online exposure like training to become a competitive athlete. It takes planning, time, diligence, and the right combination of exercises.

Get Healthy
Most websites are not fit or robust enough for the internet search environment; many have problems they don’t even know about. Most websites aren’t very healthy, even if they look ‘good’. Fortunately, that means with the right ‘diet and exercise’ of a good online marketing solution, you’ll be ahead of the pack just by improving the health of your website.

Get Fit
Sometimes, just a clean bill of health isn’t enough. If you are in a very competitive environment or are playing in the big leagues, you’ll need to have an online marketing solution to match. You will need a highly regimented solution that is high impact and intensive.

Use a Trainer
Just spending more time or money on your website does not mean you are reaching your goals. The advice and on-going coaching from a good online marketing specialist is an essential guide for success. Lastly and most importantly, you don’t have to do it on your own. A good agency can do most of the heavily lifting to keep your online marketing in tip-top shape. And just like a trainer, it doesn’t require much of their time, and therefore it won’t cost you much.

Especially Important in SEO
This advice can be generalized to most streams of online marketing, but this is particularly important when assessing search engine optimization (SEO) efforts. The process of SEO is a credible and important part of any online marketing effort, however, be aware that SEO is becoming a growing buzz term associated with quick success schemes and effortless automated programs and software which search engines detest. Don’t be fooled.

Conclusion
Employing a physical fitness mentality and approach for online marketing will keep efforts focused, committed, and working in the right direction. It may be hard at the beginning but it won’t be long until you’ll see results. And even easier to keep that way!

ActiveConversion hosted a Webinar on May 12th, 2010 on how to manage leads with ActiveConversion-SalesView. Paul Uppal, Senior Account Executive at ActiveConversion, interviewed his customer Ric Ratkowski,Vice President of Product Strategy at Host Analytics on how Host Analytics successfully implemented AC- SalesView within their sales team.

Some of the items covered in the Seminar were:

• ActiveConversion progression.
• Features and benefits of AC-SalesView.
• How AC-SalesView can help ensure no leads are forgotten or lost when your sales reps are not using Salesforce.com or other CRMs.
• Case Study on how Host Analytics successfully implemented AC- SalesView.

Are you really listening to your customers? Quite often we’re so busy with the day-to-day work around our businesses that we don’t stop to really take in what our customers are actually telling us. More often than not we’re listening with a bias towards our current issues. This is completely natural. However, to be Customer Centric; throw aside your personal thoughts, issues, desires and really listen to what your customer is saying. Be fully focused on their agenda. Questions to ask yourself; What is their life like? What are their challenges? What helps make them succeed? What are they really telling you about your product or service?

You’ll be amazed by the depth of understanding you’ll get. You will more clearly see the value your product or service is bringing to someone. You may even start to see patterns emerge in a particular subset of customers, perhaps even in a whole vertical market space. You may just find that competitive edge you’re looking for. Strangely enough, all you had to do was to listen, well, really listen.

Listening is a key skill for everyone in the organization. It is crucial to make listening a part of organizations communication protocol.  It should not be limited to just marketing & sales but should spread across other departments such as product and support. There are so many benefits, that listening skills should even be part of your hiring strategy! Because of the benefits of Listening, many smart organizations are actually training employees in listening skills. For all the advanced tools and plethora of ways to communicate these days, sometimes its the simple things that matters – just listen.

Social media is becoming a popular avenue for businesses by creating a voice for their business and attracting prospective leads by distributing details, free offers and news about their product & services. For a long time, social media was looked upon as a personal communication channel, where you could provide your opinion about personal things. Since that time Social Media has greatly evolved into a channel for businesses that want to leverage social networks to share their respective experiences and how others can benefit from their offering.

Many have seen Social Media as a distribution channel, a value add asset for potential leads, and a means to offer promotions that will in turn entice people to follow them and be their customer.

Join Yves Matson, as he shares emerging best practices that effectively integrate Social Media into online marketing.

Webinar Title: How to use Social Media in B2B Marketing

To access the webinar recording, click on the link below:
http://www.foundpages.com/social-media-webinar.html

Topics included:

* Utilizing newsletters, blogging, case study publishing, and webinars for social media marketing
* Using Social Media as a distribution channel for blog, newsletter, or website content
* Case Study: How ActiveConversion uses Social Media Marketing for B2B marketing and how they measure ROI using marketing automation.

You likely must have heard about social media by now.  Social media is not a personal communication tool any more, you can use it for your business as well. You may have noticed that large number of websites have the three most famous; Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn symbols on them so you can easily follow and broadcast websites that you like.  This has been quickly adopted by those in the ‘know’ because it makes it easy for your social networks to know about websites that you like.

In fact, you can now give the Facebook ‘thumbs up’ for websites, assuming the website has the Like button installed. On April 21, Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook announced that there will be over 1 billion likes across the web in the just first 24 hours of the “Like” button. Over a million websites have added this feature to their websites and blogs in just 48 hours, and the number grows steadily each day.

So why should you care? You now have the ability to harness the power of other people’s virtual networks to bring visitors that might be interested in what you do – without spending a dime or pushing them to react! It also has instant credibility because it was passed by a friend or business associate. And don’t think it’s just about your small network of 100 friends, but also about those 100 people’s networks.

Besides the obvious referral your website might get, there are SEO factors at work in the background, making your website/blog come up more frequently on search engines, that will get search engine and ‘feed’ traffic as well.  You can get heard over the noise by letting your social network endorse your content. Google likes to rank content that is popular with real human beings, and this is an easy way to that.

For those that were still skeptical about social media for business, this should convince you and perhaps make you a believer. For an example of how the like it button works, go to FoundPages or ActiveConversion, to see how it has been implemented on these websites. And remember to click ‘Like’ if you like what you see!

Most marketers face the challenge of generating qualified leads. According to the report published by Marketing Sherpa, 66% of B2B marketers face those challenges.

To some businesses, generating leads is still a primitive concept where they still use traditional marketing techniques and tools. Trade shows, mailing lists are some of the few ways to generate those leads. Obviously, these leads are nowhere near being qualified.

With the advent of Web 2.0 there has been a surge in the availability of web tools and techniques to generate leads. Having a presentable and message oriented website is good for any business, but what is more important for that business is the ability to find out the users coming to their website and what services or products they are interested in. Google Analytics has definitely paved its way to marketers who can measure online visitors, and track against certain pre-determined stats. And for sure, you can make changes to your website based on the stats and trends captured, but that’s not enough for the marketing ROI.

Importance of lead nurturing to marketers:

For marketers, it is more important to know who these visitors are, and if they will become customer some day? Now the question comes, after you see who is visiting your site, are they ready to be passed on to your sales reps? Definitely not, but at most organizations this is a still common practice in B2B Marketing. Strategic lead nurturing is a process where we can identify which prospect is ready to be a client.

Principles of lead nurturing:

We at Active Conversion have developed a three-step principle for lead nurturing,

1. Develop trust through credibility – be a valued advisor and gain trust
2. Target each of your market segments – use relevant content
3. Nurture your prospects according to the stage they are in the cycle – create a need for your product or services

Download our eHow to Guide to learn more about Lead nurturing and how B2B marketers can reap the benefits of marketing automation.