Attention Conservation Notice: The following post provides a list of offers that B2B Marketers can use to improve campaign results.

OK, it’s a new year and you’ve got your freshly scrubbed ReachForce-built database full of highly-targeted prospects. Now what? If you found yourself busy reacting to end of year crises and didn’t greet the New Year with a properly planned, integrated lead generation campaign, you can still juice your Sales pipeline with a well written email and a strong call to action.

Unfortunately, for most B2B marketers, therein lies the challenge. What to offer? Where can I find a fresh and compelling white paper to serve up, because, well, every B2B marketer knows that a white paper is the number one offer in our arsenal. But if your product marketing group is as busy as mine, it’s not always easy to get your hands on new content to support your latest campaign.

Don’t be tempted to resort to a Sweepstakes offer like “enter to win an iPod.” Most will respond for the wrong reasons or avoid responding entirely because the offer is “too good to be true.” Aim for something that is relevant to the prospects’ daily job. Here are a few quick ideas:

1. Free Books: Identify a new business or technology book that is related to your prospects’ responsibilities and your product or service and give away 10 to the first respondents.
2. Webinar: Recruit a spokesperson and schedule an educational Web cast.
3. Newsletter: Offer a subscription to your newsletter with tips and case studies.
4. Video Tutorial: Grab your Flipcam, an expert, and a white board and shoot a mini-tutorial.
5. Podcast: Think video tutorial with a voice recorder instead.
6. Expert Guide: Ask an all-star group of experts to send you their best advice or anecdotes, package it up into a “guide” and publish.
7. Quick Assessment: Provide a list of questions that can be used to assess a problem.
8. Free Resources: Pull together a few free online tools, previously published white papers and articles, then offer access to the compendium.

Got any other creative ideas? Share them with us.

What do you do when you know that your company’s current logo and branding are no longer a fit? There are many costs and challenges associated with revamping or reinventing a corporate brand but do the benefits outweigh? At ReachForce, we decided the timing was right for an allover makeover for our brand. We launched a new website today! You can check it out at www.reachforce.com.

For us, the timing made sense as we also made a big announcement today of our Series B Financing. With this announcemnt, we are proving that ReachForce is a more established company. We felt like the old look and feel just did not fit our new growth.

Would love to hear your feedback on our new look!

Quick – how can understanding the science of vision and cognitive psychology help you boost B2B Marketing leads and revenue?

The Click Fu Masters at StomperNet just posted this intriguing video tutorial to help B2C and B2B Marketers boost their “Click Fu.” The team explains that understanding the function of the human eye and brain can help you improve marketing results and drive more revenue.

First, the eyes: StomperNet advises Marketers to understand the function of the eye and visitor blind spots to improve landing page design. Well, that’s a no-brainer. But, they go further explaining that primal man’s eyes were designed for two purposes: to eat and avoid being eaten. The FOVEA, designed for finding food to eat, is sensitive to fine details and color. The Periphery, designed to avoid being eaten, is tuned to motion and contrast. Understanding how to make appropriate use of color, organization, and design details while employing the right structure to the page can help Marketers boost conversions by more than 25 percent.

Now, the brain: StomperNet advises you to understand the link between vision and behavior so that you understand why a #10 result on Google will get you more clicks than a #6 or 7 position. Basically, their cognitive psychologist advises that: Easy wins out over Good or Better. Make user feel it will be easy to get what they want and they’ll stay longer and learn more. Understand your visitors’ goal and what they need to achieve the goal.

But that’s just the beginning. This is definitely a video that is worth watching.

If you are anything like me, keeping up with all of the different social networking tools out there can be a bit overwhelming. Now that you have joined Twitter how do you leverage it to boost your brand? It doesn’t really matter what your tweets are about if no one is reading them. I found a great article on building popularity on Twitter by Dan Zarrella.

Here are his top 10 tips:

1. Match Your Usernames and Avatars
2. Search Twitter for Twitter Users Mentioning Your Favorite Social Site
3. Search Google for Profiles on Your Favorite Social News Sites Mentioning Twitter
4. Link to your Twitter Account from All Your Social Profiles
5. Ask Readers of Your Blog to Follow You
6. “Twitter-jack” Active Social News & Twitter Users’ Friends
7. Ask Questions
8. Don’t Just Spam Twitter, Add Value
9. Post the Title with the URL
10. Consider Using a Social Media Specific URL Shortener

To get the specifics for each tip, click here.  I know I learn best by example, so here is a great TechCrunch article about Connie Reece and the frozen pea phenomenon.

Attention Conservation Notice: The following post provides an eight-point litmus test that B2B marketers and bloggers can use to evaluate their blog posts for Search Engine Optimization and relevance to business objectives.

I’ve stepped in to blog for Network Performance Daily recently since our full-time blogger was vacationing in New Zealand. For the 99.8% of The B2B Lead readers who live outside the network engineering universe, Network Performance Daily is the NetQoS corporate blog. It’s rated in the top .99% of all blogs and received great coverage including this piece in Computerworld. And, it’s also driven a great deal of interest in and revenue for our company. So, we must be doing something right.

One thing we haven’t done right (until recently) however, is to stay on track with our core audience and our company interests. Blogging is, after all, a conversation and conversations often stray off track. The allure of technological innovation was just too great at times and we were sucked into the dazzling world of iPhones and flying cars.

Clearly, it was time to get the blog content back on track to share network engineering tips, news and analysis with our core readers so that we could improve our sagging reader loyalty numbers. This was my goal when I stepped back in to blog for NetQoS, but what I discovered was there were far more benefits to staying on track with the content than just improving readership.

Of course, I knew there was a strong connection between the blog and SEO ranking. I also knew the blog was a great tool to attract readers and prospects to download content from our web site. But, until I actually dug in and crafted my own posts, I didn’t really understand the “magic” and how to create a repeatable process to boost SEO rankings which inevitably drive demand and brand awareness. So, with a few posts under my belt and a dramatic boost in SEO rankings for a couple of valuable keywords, I put together this quick litmus test for ALL future NPD posts.

I know that most blog and social media purists will violently disagree with these tips. They will argue that one should not be blogging with marketing and sales interests in mind. Last time I checked, however, I didn’t live in a Socialist country. And, my ego isn’t important enough to spend hours pontificating about topics without at least something to gain. We are all blogging with an objective in mind. I believe they key is in the “intent” of the post. If your goal is to be found, to educate and to attract a following of potential new customers without making false promises, then the following litmus test should help you to keep your posts on track with objectives:

1. Topic must be relevant to your target audience and—even better— to our company and product or service offerings.
2. Topic should be educational, controversial, timely or related to a news event. Bonus points for link-bait articles like posting a list of valuable resources, expert interviews, how-to’s, special reports, etc.
3. Post must begin with easy-to-understand and keyword-rich title (not just a cleverly worded headline). The goal is to communicate what the story and takeaways are about before the reader has to read the story.
4. Must contain links back to prior blog stories, an important corporate web page, press release or a white paper with more information. The exact keywords that are linked to those pages should correspond with the SEO terms for which those pages are optimized.
5. Post must be tagged with right keywords for SEO and content so that it can be categorized and found.
6. Posts should include our thought leadership messages where appropriate.
7. Post should include a list of tips that can be linked to from within the blog.
8. Post must challenge readers to take action in the last sentence—ie. continue the conversation, seek more information or spread the word.

So, that’s my quick list. I’m sure there are more. I’m sure some of these may become too cumbersome to apply. But it’s worth a shot. I mean, what is the value of a Google Page 1 listing to your company? With 80 to 90% of buyers starting their search on Google, I’d recommend giving it a shot.

I’d like to hear about your experiences with blogging and SEO. Importantly, what has been your success in achieving the coveted Google double listing?

As the new year begins you may want to take a look at your web strategy. For many companies this is the most important medium used to reach their customers. Jeremiah Owyang offers an extensive list of Web marketing tactics that might help you better hone your online strategy.

Search Engine Optimization is a big reason why a lot of companies start blogs in the first place. Make sure you are doing everything you can to optimize your blog. Start with having unique page titles. The following links will tell you how and why to have unique page titles for your blog posts:

http://www.socialpatterns.com/search-engine-optimization/writing-better-titles/
http://www.bloggingblog.net/the-importance-of-titles/
http://www.betterbusinessblogging.com/seo-in-blogs/basic-seo-in-blogs-important-title-tag/