B2B Marketing Blog

Many companies are starting to question whether or not their traditional means of marketing are as effective as they once were. For example, at one time, taking out an advertisement in an industry journal was a great way to get your company noticed. However, if your competition was also doing this, were you really getting noticed, or just getting lost among the clutter?

Many of those same companies who have been questioning their current marketing strategies have moved towards an online marketing strategy simply because they are able to regain their competitive advantage. Remember, the most successful businesses are the ones who have embraced innovation.

It’s also understandable that many businesses do not know a lot about online marketing or even where to start when implementing a new strategy. The following are three steps that will help you on your way to marketing your business online in order to see your business flourish and prosper into the future.

1. Search Engine Optimization and Marketing:

Search engine optimization is a garden that must be tended to and cared for. The first step is planting the seeds, or in this case the keywords. For example, you can research targeted keywords that you feel people will be searching for to find your products and services and build them into your website so that Google can index them. Along with that and other “seeds” you should plant, you must maintain and water your SEO garden. It is very important to remember than you cannot simply set and forget your SEO. You must keep up on whether or not you are getting your desired results. SEO is an effort that, with the right amount of time and care, can produce a positive outcome.

The second element is search engine marketing, which are ads that are set up and only paid for if they are clicked. This is called pay per click advertising.

2. A website that looks and acts professionally:

Would you hire someone who didn’t look or act professionally? If you did, would you expect professional results? Probably not, right? The same goes for your website. Many businesses view their website as an online brochure and those same people do not get much return on their website investment. The key is to have a website that converts visitors into prospects for your business developers to follow up on. This in effect is a website that makes you money.

3. A Marketing Automation System:

Wouldn’t it be handy if you knew which companies were interested in your goods and services before they even told you? Well this is actually possible. By implementing a marketing automation system, you will not only know who is coming to your site, they will be lead scored, and inform you of their current engagement level. Further to this, for those who are not yet ready to buy, you can also set up email nurture campaigns to continuously remind them of your offers so that they will think of you when they are ready to buy.

Author: Jon Edgar is an Account Specialist at ActiveConversion

I have often heard, “Marketing automation doesn’t work for me”, or “It’s of no use to our company, but it certainly looks and sounds interesting!” For some companies, marketing automation is still just a fancy word, and a concept that is not well understood.

How can companies make optimal use of marketing automation? Here is my view:

Awesome SEO/Inbound Marketing:

To get those prospective leads to your landing page. It is hard to attract visitors to your website when search engines cannot find your business. It is even harder justifying inbound marketing costs then. Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Social Media Marketing (SEM) are ways that you can use to bring potential customers to your website or a landing page.

Conversion capability of your online forms:

You need a compelling offer to entice visitors: From your awesome SEO, visitors can now find you from search engines and other marketing channels they visit; now they would like to know more about you. On top of that, they need a compelling offer to click and take advantage of the information that you are sharing. An online form on a landing page, with offers such as free trial, free whitepaper downloads, free webinars, free consulting, free live demos will encourage visitors to fill out the form. Oh Yes! Do not forget to add the privacy statement beside the form. Your landing page visitors will be less hesitant to share their business information with you if you forget to assure them of confidentiality.

LEADS themselves:

The visitors who filled the form to avail the offer are now your LEADS. Some companies will still call them prospects and not leads because they have not shown any buying behaviour yet to call them qualified or warm leads. Their engagement is indicated by their action of filling out a form, or offering contact information. They are interested, they are involved, and they are LEADS.

A good marketing automating system to nurture those leads:

After you get leads from your forms, it is important to qualify them before you send the leads off to sales rep. Marketing Automation can be the engine that does just that. Targeted emails, on the targeted days, will nurture the leads while marketing automation tracks if the leads took additional steps in learning more about you. The more interest, warmer the lead is (interest typically shown from the kind of engagement leads has: eg: click on a link to your case study, collateral, webinars, whitepapers or at the very best reply to the email with an interest to talk). Nurturing the lead has done a good job in converting the cold lead to a warm or Hot one.

A great lead management engine to give only the qualified leads to sales:

Marketing automation is generally hooked up to a CRM. It is essential that only the HOT leads are sent to the sales rep. This will optimize their time and make it easy for them to close the deal. If the lead is not warm enough, it will be sent back to marketing or just ignored as dirty data.

Last but not least, you need a great sales team to close the sale:

Yes, a great sales team will make sure that no HOT leads are lost to competitors and the benefits of marketing automation come full circle; that is the reason why you bought marketing automation in first place!

Did I miss any points? Please comment with your suggestions!

When you have an online presence, there are a few things which you need to pay attention to in order to be a success. One of the major things to pay attention to is lead generation. After all, this is one of the premier reasons for having a landing page and an online presence to begin with. The more optimized you make your pages, the more leads you can enjoy. Below are five elements you simply must have on your landing page to make sure you will get the leads you are looking for:

1. Use a Good URL –
The URL is not only the way that your prospective clients will find you. It is also the way search engines find your website. To make sure your page is search engine friendly; it is a good idea to make sure that your URL uses keywords as much as possible. You should also make sure to opt for dashes rather than underscores.

2. Prove You Are Trustworthy –
One of the biggest problems most people have with giving up information is they feel they will be scammed in some way. Make sure to include everything from the Better Business Bureau (BBB) logo, to customer testimonials to Privacy Statements. These will reassure people you won’t use their information in a fraudulent manner.

3. Call to Action –
Always remember those who are on your landing page are looking for something. Give them a reason to click through to the free downloads, demos, reports or other freebies. Make sure you direct people to the content they are looking for through short copy with a distinct call to action.

4. Consistently Test Your Landing Page –
Make sure you are checking the effectiveness of your landing page on a regular basis. The more often you are checking in, the more likely you are to catch anything which is falling short of your goals so you can make necessary changes.

5. Thank Your Visitors –
Whenever you score a lead, make sure you thank those who gave up their information. Do not make them regret giving you their information. Make sure the thank you confirmation screen also includes another offer they can take advantage of. Above all else, make sure the thank you email is short, to the point and concisely written. You do, after all, want to make sure that you leave a good impression on would be clients.

These are just a few of the ways you can optimize your Landing page for lead generation. These can help you to get better results than the average telemarketing company, and for a fraction of the cost. You can also hire a professional company to help you with this kind of project.

Author: Matt Kraustrunk (Resource Nation)

Resource Nation provides free tools, tips, and purchasing advice for business owners and entrepreneurs in over 100 business categories ranging from telemarketing to credit card processing. Whether it’s connecting businesses with local and national pre-screened vendors, or offering easy service comparisons on a VoIP service, Resource Nation empowers business decision makers by providing the information they need to make smart choices.

Related articles

• How Landing Pages Can Make or Break Lead Generation Campaigns (customerthink.com)
• Tips to Create Effective Landing Pages (marketersdaily.com)

SEO, Content, Social Media

Search Engine Optimization (SEO), social media and content are collectively the three most important components of inbound marketing. For this webinar, we’re calling them “The Three Musketeers of Inbound Marketing”. Between them, they are capable of winning you the best qualified leads in this modern marketing battle of quality lead generation from various online medium.

View this live Webinar which took place on Tuesday, April 19, 2011 at 12:00PM MDT.

Inbound marketing “pulls” potential buyers towards your business and your products. In today’s shifting marketing paradigm, where your potential buyers research and dissect all the available options before they contact you, there is also a need for a strong inbound marketing capability. After all, you should be among the few that your potential buyers read and investigate about. Inbound marketing is executed with strategies such as: search engine optimization (SEO), relevant and compelling content, and social media.

In this webinar, Jim, our inbound marketing specialist will walk you through some tested and proven inbound marketing strategies that will enable you to know:

• How SEO can help you get found on the internet?
• How social media, marketing content and blogging can contribute towards a more informed inbound lead generation strategy?
• How marketing automation generates leads from various sources, and how it can help you make intelligent decisions?

Now that online marketing has become firmly entrenched in marketing, and it’s been predicted that in 5 years, up to 70% of your leads will be coming from your website, it is clear that websites are no longer just an ‘electronic brochure’ for marketing, but a vital part of the sales and marketing process.

Conversion is what everybody is starting to talk about. Whether it’s conversion ratios, conversion rates, conversion funnels or ActiveConversion, leading sales and marketing organizations understand that beyond having a professional looking website and large volumes of traffic, that they need websites that convert visitors into leads.

This is easier said than done, as your visitors don’t always want to be converted, at least not yet. Your website visitors want to make sure you fit the bill before they get called every week by your company for the next 7 weeks. In addition, today’s buyer wants to be well informed, before they contact you. This has increased the need to understand conversion so that you know what you are really getting from all this traffic.

Fortunately, conversion has been studied extensively, and it has resulted in tools and practices, that help increase conversion rates. One common, but neglected practice is the idea of a conversion path. With a conversion path, each step in a conversion is mapped out, so that the website elements lead to the conversion objective. For example, a home builders conversion path for a potential home buyer would typically be:

1. Community or area (needs to be where they want or is willing to live)
2. Amenities (does it have schools, recreation, or other amenities that the buyer needs, nearby?)
3. Floor plans (600 sq ft, 1 bedroom condos won’t fit a growing family)
4. Pricing (no sense looking at this until the above is checked out)
5. Form fill for an appointment at showhome (conversion objective).

Those companies thinking they can get to step 5 before addressing 1-4, will likely get poor conversion.

Knowing the usual order that a buyer will want to look at your product/services, and making it easier to find it in that order, will work much better than a website that just expects the visitor to spend time looking for it. Because your competition is always only 1-2 clicks away.

Nowadays, the majority of sales are generated from the web.  However only 1-2% of website visitors engage with the companies they are researching and even less become customers.  Companies turn to online advertising, search media, search engine optimization to increase leads. The expectation is that if you can get visitors to a website, and if the website has forms, visitors will fill out a contact form. However, amount of inquiries from forms typically fall short of expectations.

The truth is most website visitors avoid filling out forms.  Forms are so prevalent; nobody wants to fill out another form. Besides exposing their email address, people know if they fill out a form, they can expect to be hit with email.  Even if you put valuable information behind a form, most visitors’ feel that they’ll likely find what they need if they keep searching.

Losing Without a Chance to Participate

As mentioned, people don’t fill out forms unless they have to.  For most buyers, they’ll only fill out a form when they’ve done enough research to make their decision or next move.  If you don’t have the ability to identify a buyer during the early stages, you may not even have a chance to participate before losing.

If you can identify a potential buyer in their research stage and proactively engage with that buyer, your odds are significantly increased.  Especially if you are the only one among your competition who can engage them before they engaged you.

There are a number of anonymous visitor tracking solutions available that can help companies do more than just wait for inquires. Identifying anonymous visitors provides your sales team the ability to make well-timed calls, your marketing team the ability to nurture leads and business intelligence on your potential customers, and gives businesses a critical edge in this increasingly competitive business environment.

Mitch Joel, http://www.twistimage.com/ the author of “Six Degrees of Separation” says sometimes negative customer’s reviews provide better opportunities for a business. Though negative reviews are not taken that well by businesses, it might be a game changer for your business.

Customers provide their reviews for the product they bought from you, and also for the kind of service they received with the level of support they get – and all these help establish credibility and bring in potential customers and inquiries. Though the majority of product reviews on the web are encountered for B2C kind of engagements, B2Bs can also reap the value customer reviews and help bring their offerings to the same ball game.  One of the biggest barriers to businesses implementing customer reviews is the fear of negative comment(s). Contrary to the popular belief that it is better to only display positive reviews, negative reviews do hold some value. Here are some of the benefits for having not so perfect product reviews:

1.       Not so perfect reviews means that the published reviews are genuine and not necessarily fabricated. They establish authenticity!

2.       Decision makers often check for reviews to make their final decision, so having them helps confirm their decision

3.       Negative reviews can help you correct that particular negativity

4.       Companies can also find ways to better their business/product or service based on the reviews submitted.

Some interesting stats from PowerReviews that you might find useful:

This is for all the businesses out there. Human nature is to look and find negativity first, so don’t be afraid to be a human first and show some of your imperfection – it’s all well. Thus, negative reviews can help make you a better business. How can we all improve if everyone said that we were perfect? We cannot, and that’s the truth. The world is imperfect, as we commonly say it, and our mistakes makes us perfect.

Are you interested in achieving sales growth with existing resources? Businesses are increasingly turning into sales optimization and lead management which frees up time for sales representatives to focus on high yield activities like engaging qualified prospects and closing sales.  Download this ActiveConversion whitepaper which shows you how lead management can help you achieve best-in-class sales performance.

Industry surveys indicate that only 10 to 25 percent of all leads are sales-ready, meaning prospects are interested and ready to buy.  A similar percentage of leads are not qualified at all. This means 50 to 80 percent of all leads generated can result in wasted effort if handled inappropriately.

By implementing a lead management system, the quality of leads will increase while the quantity of leads will decrease. Marketing will see a higher percentage of leads being followed up and sales will see a gratifying increase in the quality of leads presented to them. Companies that have implemented these tools have experienced a 30% or higher lead to sales conversion rate.

A significant advantage introduced with marketing automation systems is the capability to alert the appropriate sales representative at the moment any lead becomes sales-ready. This further reduces the load on the sales force and increases their effectiveness.

Companies know the value of their assets, things like a building they own, or intellectual property they have developed.   But assets can also include things less tangible, like the business processes they have painfully put in place, and professional sales and marketing collateral they have developed.  You really understand the value of these less tangible assets when you change jobs and go to a company that has inadequate or non-existent processes, or that has no sales and marketing collateral you’d be willing to hand out.

In this list of less tangible assets is the company’s website, usually in the same category as the brochure that it closely resembles.  But what is increasingly expected of websites is that, instead of being a static brochure, that they convey insight; captivating reasons to stay engaged with a website, maybe even follow it on social media.  The standard way a B2B website accomplishes this is with what I will call “website assets”; whitepapers or case studies (and the promise of new ones in a timely fashion), sometimes a nice video, or most effectively, a blog that is updated on a regular basis.  The problem is that developing website assets at all, let alone a consistent cyclical production, requires some not-insignificant commitment and resources to see through.  Most companies, even if they agree that website assets are good ideas, will say that they have little time or money to get these accomplished.

The Easy Path to High-Value Website Assets
So I have an alternative, something easier, something anyone who is even somewhat passionate about what they do for a living can do without breaking a sweat; a webinar.  If you can talk for 30 minutes to a customer or prospect about how you can solve one of their more pressing business problems, then you can do a webinar.  Now many people respond that they are not comfortable doing public speaking, even if you’re presenting to your computer, to them I council “then don’t host it live with an audience, host without an audience and record it”.

Instead of inviting everyone to the live webinar you’re afraid of doing, invite everyone to the recorded webinar they ‘missed’.  Put in the invite that if while watching the webinar they have any questions (answering these live is one key value of live webinars, certainly during the webinar you will answer a few canned ones) they can email them in, and you promise to answer each and everyone one of them.  And the best part is this recorded webinar is now a website asset, you can put a button on your website that engages visitors, maybe even convinces them to give you their contact info:

(this is a webinar I hosted in early May), here’s a link to our full list of recorded webinars.

So here they are, the

10 Reasons Your Company Should Do Webinars, because everyone likes lists, heck maybe you just jumped right to the list, so here it is:

1. Webinars are the easiest to achieve high-value content your company can generate; it is the easiest way to capture the expertise and experience of your senior people in a way that can be accessed over and over again by prospects visiting your website.
2. People like to hear things from people, not faceless corporations.  Webinars give you the opportunity for visitors to your website to hear your expertise and experience on specific topics that matter to them, much more so than the generic statements on the website.
3. The invitation to a webinar, and the follow up invitation to download the recorded webinar, are a valid reason to email your entire “in-house” list of contacts at least twice
4. Announcing you are having a webinar increases your credibility on the subject the webinar will focus on.  If you stick to a subject that you know well because of both successful experience and passion, you will likely build credibility.
5. This high-value content is ideal for pushing out to your social media network; the companies winning at social media are the ones contributing content that speaks to their credibility.
6. High-value content like this is very useful to your sales team; when they encounter this business problem they can refer prospects to a webinar recording on the respective subject from your guru.
7. Webinars are easier to sell to the gurus that need to host them; getting them to speak for 30-45 minutes on a subject they are an expert on and passionate about is something they do all the time, and is much more “natural act” than asking for a whitepaper.
8. You can use recorded webinars as “conversion elements” to build your list; gate them behind a form on your website and require a name and email address to access them (have a very good privacy policy very visible, and do an opt in campaign afterwards).
9. You can very effectively increase your brand credibility by co-hosting a webinar with one of your more recognized suppliers or vendors.
10. Webinars can be very nimble; if you recognize a shift in your industry, or an event that is of significance, you can quickly reach out to your audience with your insight on the topic.