B2B Marketing Blog

Online advertising like Google Adwords, MSN Adcenter and Facebook Ads all have similar ways of showing ads to targeted audiences and getting your website clicks. The problem with almost all types of advertising (online is not immune to this), is that it is hard to gauge if those clicks are becoming sales. Coupons used to be the main way companies could track print advertising return on investment while adding further incentives. If a customer comes in with a coupon in their hand, you know your campaign has worked.

Pay per click campaigns can act like a man in a gorilla costume with a sign reading “Sale!” We can assume that many people are seeing this ad, but there is little way to discern between visitors who did, and didn’t see the ad. Making things more complex, who is buying from you that saw the gorilla, who is buying from you who did not see the gorilla? This same problem can affect online campaigns if they are not setup correctly or if the administrator of the campaign is not experienced.

A few tools you can use to better track your online campaigns:

Landing pages – A landing page is a specialized page made to do one thing: to turn a “click” into a SALE. Design a landing page like a flyer or a catalogue page that the user can buy from immediately. Embed graphics and video to emphasize the value of your product, and make sure it is EXTEREMELY easy to purchase your product from that same page. Every click a user has to make will make it less likely they will finalize the transaction. The result? All sales from that page have come in from advertising campaigns and you can measure that in real numbers.

Coupon codes – “Free Shipping with the coupon BoxingDay2011” or something similar is not an uncommon offer to see on eCommerce sites. Just like in the old days of print advertising, these coupon codes can be tracked (as long as your eCommerce system supports it) and work as an additional incentive to make a purchase.

Software – A number of free and paid services/software will track your various campaigns. Integrating Google Analytics is a good first step, as it can integrate with Google Adwords and give you more intelligence on where visitors are coming from, and what they are doing once they get there.

Once you are able to tack your ROI, you can tailor your campaigns to make the most sales, while spending the least amount of money.

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.

ActiveConversion recently published an “eHow To” guide to Lead Nurturing that we at the SMB Marketing Blog would like to share with you (link, or click on the image at right).

From the landing page for the guide:

Lead nurturing is the process of communicating with prospects who are not yet ready to buy.

Only 10 to 25 percent of all leads are sales-ready. A similar percentage of leads are not qualified at all. This means 50 to 80 percent of all leads generated are potentially wasted if no appropriate action is taken.

With lead nurturing B2B marketers can realize significant benefits. Leads that are not sales-ready are not lost and significant online lead generation effort is not wasted. Automation of lead nurturing increases the ROI of all online marketing activities.

To download this whitepaper on why, when, and how to implement an automatic lead nurturing plan for your business, follow this link or click on the image to the right.

(eHow To Guides)

At the end of October Google released the latest PageRank (PR) updates. Has your Google PR gone up or down on your website? One of our brand new product websites, ActiveProspects, has gone from PR0 to PR5 in just two months and we are excited about it.

In an earlier post, I described how Google PageRank is based on a link analysis algorithm that is similar to a ballot system. When one page links to another page, it is effectively casting a vote for the other page. The more votes that are cast for a page, the more important that page is assumed to be. It is also calculated on the quality of those links. A handful of links from authoritative, trustworthy, relevant pages far outweigh hundreds of links from so-so sites.

Here are my tips on improving your Google PageRank:

1) Create professional and useful content on your website. When people find your content valuable, they will likely link and reference to your web content.

2) Provide client testimonials to your vendors. They will be happy to post your testimonial on their website and link to your website to show that its legitimate and credible (format the testimonial with a link).

3) Post insightful comments on blogs related to your industry (like this one!).  Avoid simply commenting with just “good post” etc. You’ll have to show that you understand the post; in your comment demonstrate a  shared experience or even challenge their idea with relevant sources.  Make sure in your profile your name links back to your website.

4) Your partners and clients are also good sources of relevant inbound links. Work hard at getting links from them.

5) Does your business have other websites. Make sure you create links to your website from your other web properties (but make sure these are not mirror sites).

There are many more ways to get credible inbound links, including outsourcing a link building campaign. Building up Googe PageRank through a link building campaign requires creativity and hard work. The upside is once you’ve earned a good Google PageRank for your website, the payoff is long term.

One of the most popular free search engine marketing tools is the one providing Website Comparisons. The tool allows you to see how your website ranks, and compares your site against others such as  your competitors.  Here are a few key benchmarks of search engine marketing you should know about from the tool.

Alexa Rank – gives you a general measure of the traffic your website is receiving.  The lower the score the better.  It’s very useful to compare the traffic trend to that of your competitors for example.  If you do any social media marketing, it will play a part in how much traffic you receive from your marketing effort. The SiteInfo of Alexa will also tell you a lot about a particular website, like Traffic Stats, Contact Info, Related Links, Keywords, Clickstream and Demographics.

Google PageRank – is a numeric value between 0-10 that represents how important a page is on the web. It is based on a link analysis algorithm that is similar to a ballot system. When one page links to another page, it is effectively casting a vote for the other page. The more votes that are cast for a page, the more important that page is assumed to be.

Indexed Pages – reports how many pages of your website can be found on Google.  More indexed pages usually indicates your website is search engine friendly and is ultimately beneficial to your ranking.   As an example, we’ve seen a large DVD rental website that initially had about 100 pages indexed by Google due to search engine barriers on the site.  With some effort and minor optimization of the website, it went from 100 to over 50,000 indexed pages in less than a month.

Inbound Links - reports how many websites directly link back to your site.  Having a good number of credible links to your website will also boost your Google Page-Rank and improve the importance of your website within Google.  It allows Google and other search engines to position your website higher in their search results.  Of course, the content needs to be related to the search terms.

The Website Comparison tool is just one tool and a start for your online marketing efforts.  You can also try the  Keyword Suggestion Tool to see what search terms people are using to find your website and Webpage Analyzer to get a technical breakdown of key components of a webpage relevant to the search engines.

For most small businesses, and a surprising number of medium sized businesses, marketing is a family secret kept in the attic.  Ask them about what they do marketing wise and eyes go downcast, a foot reaches out to kick a pebble, they look up a little ashamed and say; “we really don’t do any.”

Often I dig a little deeper and find out they are doing marketing, they’re paying $500 a month to the old search engine, the king that has recently died, the Yellow Pages (calling your company AAA-Plumbing was the old way to get Search Engine Optimized).

Here’s a piece of advice that I make no money on (so hopefully you can trust it more).  Take that $500 worth of spray and pray (you pay your $500 and you take what you gets, pray there’s ROI), and spend it with Google, the new king, for a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) adwords campaign.  With PPC you pay only if someone reads your ad and clicks on it to visit your site.  This is a first in the history of marketing and I’ll be so bold as to say that never in the history of capitalism has the bar been so low, so easy, and so cheap to do real and effective marketing.

And the best part? You can tell Google where you want the ads to run geographically, you can even tell Google when to run the ads, and you can tell Google where to direct visitors who have clicked on it (so you can have an extra special message or offer on hand to greet them).  Wait, there’s an even better part, research has shown that you’ll get about as many free click throughs from adwords as the ones you pay for; seems people like to cut and paste the web page address they find in ads into a new window.

Of course the ton of leads a properly set up adwords campaign produces can be a problem in itself for small companies with sales infrastructures developed for only a few new leads a week.   That being said, there are Marketing tools out there that can handle this wonderful problem and work with your existing process to manage the influx of new leads.