B2B Marketing Blog

It is common for online marketing efforts to dilute into a race of numbers.  With efforts focused on driving visitors, impressions, etc, business marketers can forget that the point is to convert visitors into potential leads.  Below are 3 common conversion mistakes:

Billboard with No Directions

Online advertising and social media have made it incredibly simple to broadcast content to the online world.  It’s easy to forget to build content that points to the website where online exposure can be converted. This is particularly common with social media efforts such as: Twitter, Facebook and Blogs.  Remember, that advertising and posts are billboards that need to direct people to where you want them to go.

Please Take the Scenic Route

Too many websites still require visitors to watch through a flash animation, or click through several pages before the point of conversion.

The attention span for the online audience is short; almost anything put in their way will deter them from engaging.  Visitors do need information, but there is no sense in forcing them through the scenic route.

The ‘Contact Us’ Obstacle Course

Have you ever visited a website where the contact us form looks like an insurance application?  A fantastic online marketing campaign and an effective website can be ruined by an overly ambitious inquire form.

Keep forms short and don’t make visitors fill out unnecessary information to contact you.

Related articles

• Online Marketing Best Practices: Generate Sales-Ready Leads (b2b-marketingblog.com)
• Analysis of Online Marketing Campaigns Effectiveness from A to Z (searchenginejournal.com)

Now that your company uses social media to interact with current and potential clients, do you know if you are saying the right things, and whether you are using the correct tone to get your message across to the other side?

If you already use Twitter or Facebook personally, you know they can be a soapbox for everyone’s personal opinions, and flights of fancy. When tweeting for your business however, it is a good idea to have a plan in place for what you want to say about your company. You want your tone to be consistent, message to be clear and your intent be transparent.

Tips on doing it right

1. Always have something interesting and useful to share. Some ideas would be product updates, whitepaper announcements and general advice.  In the world of B2B, chances are your followers would want to hear what you have to say for the subject you are an expert in.
2. Give extra care to the grammar and the language, as that will indicate the image that you’d like to give to your company.

How to do it with limited resources?
While it may be tempting to hire a family friend, or delegate social networking to an intern, you should use caution when lending the voice of your company to someone who is not the CEO or the owner. Hiring a social media expert is an option that some companies have employed, and with many business owners being too busy to regularly update things like blogs, Facebook or Twitter. This option can be expensive for small to medium sized operations, but there are alternatives available as well.

Now that social media has been established as significant marketing medium,  software developers have stepped in to help out those senior executives and business owners who don’t have the time to be tweeting. Apps like Hootsuite can schedule and automate the process, so you can spend an hour or two on Friday afternoon to bank a week’s worth of tweets and updates. Be prepared to do this regularly and once a week at least.

The added advantage
On Twitter, other users will be able to find your account through your mutual followers. This means that following your competitors can be very beneficial to your business. You may get more followers by following some celebrity, but the chances of them interested in your product or services is very bleak. If your focus is more local then consider following prominent local politicians and charitable organizations, and showing your support for them can be a good PR engine as well.

Finally, have a plan
Tragically, all of this advice has its downside, and is subject to change rapidly. The main caveat of social networking is the social aspect. People can be unpredictable, and your actions may have dire consequences even if you make every attempt to be neutral and politically correct. This is why it is important above everything else to have a plan in place before diving into the social media shark tank.

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!