Can you believe this is at a trade show and not Halloween? That’s right, at this year’s DreamForce, salesforce.com’s annual user conference, ReachForce found a fun way to stand out from all the other booths. The theme was Let’s Make a Deal. You can see Monty Hall in the center with his wacky contestants around. The theme definitely worked and gained a lot of attention for ReachForce and their debut software product, Insight. One lesson learned though was that some people had a hard time having an intelligent conversation with Fred Flintstone. If you try to get noticed at your next event with costumes, choose wisely who will wear them.

Google AdWords can be a B2B Marketer’s dream, when leveraged and implemented properly. Not only can AdWords programs produce leads quickly, but those leads move through the funnel quickly and they cost less than traditional marketing programs. Or at least it feels like they cost less when you can spec a CPC of .50 to $1.00 per lead.

But that’s really just the tip of the iceberg, say the Search Engine Marketing experts at Apogee Search Marketing. They report business-to-business marketers can expect to spend anywhere from $85 to $100 per lead for Google Search Engine Marketing efforts. At NetQoS, we have a very successful Google AdWords program, but our cost per qualified lead runs at least $60.

When you’re spending that kind of money to generate leads, you really need a program designed to help you convert the junk leads to real opportunities. In the B2B Marketing world, in particular, it is likely that a large percentage of the people responding to your AdWords ads are researchers who are supporting a buying committee. Often, it is an assistant, a competitor or a Seymore, one of those guys whose job is to ask “can I see more?” but never to purchase.

ReachForce’s Funnelnomics B2B Marketing ebook advises Marketers to resist the urge to turn these leads over to Sales your Sales funnel, slowing down Sales productivity. That’s actually a best case scenario. The more likely scenario- is that Sales is simply tagging these leads “unqualified” before ever picking up the phone leading to gaping leaks in your funnel. These leads are really only seeds—an early indication that corporate buyers are in need of a solution like yours and are in research mode. That’s why it is vital to investigate these seeds thoroughly before handing them over to Sales. Before you do, you should have answers to questions such as what is the buyer need, is budget allocated, who else in the organization is charged with investigating solutions, who is the decision-maker, and what is the timeframe for purchase.

Read more about this topic in the ReachForce Funnelnomics Marketing ebook or in their white paper entitled, Making the Invisible Visible – Accelerate SEM Leads To Revenue.

Yep, you heard me, Mr. Happy Crack. The clever folks at Crack Team USA Inc. in St. Louis have managed to make a successful viral video campaign for their concrete repair business. According to the Wall Street Journal Independent Street blog:

“The video doesn’t preach, it’s not blatantly advertorial (at least in the beginning), it emphasizes brand over product and you might watch it even if you’re not in the market to get a crack repaired. Though chances are good that, next time you do, you’ll think of this company first.”

Check it out at:
http://blogs.wsj.com/independentstreet/2007/10/17/cracking-youtube-marketing-even-if-youre-boring/

Disclaimer: Shameless self-promotion follows. MarketingSherpa just published this summary of lessons learned from its Boston Summit last week. I had the privilege of joining a number of B-to-B Marketers who shared their successes in the area of demand generation, Viral marketing, and Web 2.0. Here’s the blurb about the NetQoS viral campaign:

Experiment with low-cost video. Video content is hot, but don’t assume the only effective videos are slick, broadcast-quality pieces with high production values. As long as the content is fun, engaging and relevant to your target audience, it can create a huge buzz.

Pam O’Neal, Senior Director, Marketing Communications, NetQoS, described a viral video campaign she developed based on a simple, animated depiction of network traffic developed by one of her in-house engineers. After creating a microsite for the video piece, posting it to YouTube, and seeding a few key industry sites with mentions of the demonstration, she created a viral video phenomenon that delivered a 6330% return on investment and cost per qualified lead of just $16.

“Always have your flip camera ready. [Video] doesn’t have to have high production values. When something great happens, be there to capture it,” said O’Neal.

Of course, this was just the tip of the iceberg. If you’re interested in the full presentation, stay tuned for –what else? a video of the presentation to be posted the day after the West Coast B2B Summit.

Contributed by Scott Daughtry, SEO Specialist, NetQoS

Most website owners eventually come to the conclusion that to have any success getting traffic to their site, they need to do one of three things: optimize the pages of their website (SEO), start a pay-per-click campaign (SEM), or do both. In an effort to save money, most people will tell you to go the free route first – that is, work to optimize your website and hope that your pages get indexed high in the search engines. I’m here to tell you a couple of reasons you may want to consider shelling out some money on a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign first.

For those of you with limited budgets, you may be asking yourself – why spend money on a PPC engine like Google Adwords before taking advantage of every possible opportunity to get free listings? My best answer to this question is that doing so will save you weeks or possibly months of frustration. How? When you begin optimizing your website, you have no idea what will drive potential customers to your site, let alone what will prompt them to buy. Sure, you hopefully will do some keyword research ahead of time, but you still won’t know which keywords will ultimately bring you the targeted, motivated traffic you are looking for. Aside from that, you have no idea if Google or other search engines will even list your pages anywhere near the top (check out the chart below to see why being above the fold on page 1 is essential in a competitive b2b environment). In the end you may end up spending a lot of time and effort waiting to gain that first page result only to be disappointed because you show up on page 10. Alternately you may show up on page 1, but end up getting the wrong type of traffic resulting in few or no leads/sales.

Eye tracking study: Areas of the page searchers focus on

Now let’s consider that you do the same keyword research, but set up a Google Adwords account first and wait to optimize your site. With Adwords you can be up and running ads in minutes instead of waiting days or weeks to get indexed by Google in the organic (free) listings. You can also guarantee visibility within the eye tracking sweet spot from the chart above. Now you can begin testing. You can test which keywords are getting the most conversions, which ad copy resonates best with your target market, and which landing page copy convinces people to fill out their information. Once you begin gathering this data, you can begin transitioning the things that work to your website; you can now be confident that your optimization efforts will not be a waste of time. It’s like having the ultimate focus group; people from all over are telling you which keywords they are interested in when looking for products or services you sell. You will now know exactly which web copy to add to your pages to get the most conversions – it is no longer a guessing game. Authors and publishing companies test book titles with Adwords before going to print. Entrepreneurs use adwords to test product ideas before manufacturing the product. Adwords is the ultimate market research tool; if you look at it this way, it is well worth the money spent. Of course this all depends on whether you use Adwords to its full potential and testing capabilities. My next article will discuss the first step to creating a successful Google Adwords campaign – Keyword Research.

The Internet Strategy Blog featured an excellent article on how to be a good citizen on Wikipedia today. In my experience, the keys to Wikipedia success are playing by the rules, delivering content that is of high value to your audience, and eliminating the marketing spin. Generally, we contribute articles about concepts, technologies, or approaches that include links to longer educational pieces on our web site. By following these guidelines, we attract thousands of visitors to our site.

Here are a few additional rules suggested by the Internet Strategy Blog:

• Don’t break community rules under any circumstances.
• Add information first, links second.
• Spamming can block your IP address from editing Wikipedia.
• Writing an article about yourself or a client is considered a conflict of interest.

Found this truly ironic interactive experience posted on Digg yesterday. It basically gives visitors a glimpse of what the famously clean Google user interface would look like if Google were to optimize it for its own search engine. Enjoy.

http://www.meangene.com/google/design_for_google.html

You know you have to have metrics to show value in marketing programs but are you tracking the right metrics? Can you track value added to top line revenue? Check out this article from Customer Think about aligning sales and marketing metrics.

This week, Google alerted Business Wire that press release headlines should not exceed 22 words. That’s eight words shorter than what we were told months ago. “An ideal headline should be between two and 22 words,” advises the search engine giant. Read more at BusinessWired.

As new media has pushed its way into B2B marketing, many marketing departments reacted by hiring a specialist to tackle these new forms of marketing and PR, especially blogs. But as these new media have come to replace many traditional media and really become now media, all marketers need to accept blogging and twitter and YouTube and become educated, so that not just one member of your marketing organization understands these communities. In this podcast, I interview Josh Dilworth to discuss the changing landscape of marketing and PR in new media.
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