Monday’s Marketing Profs “Get to the Point” newsletter featured Mike Volpe’s 5 tips for starting search engine optimization. Mike is the VP of Marketing at HubSpot and blogger for HubSpot’s Internet Marketing Blog. These are great SEO tips and we wanted to be sure to share them  with the readers of  The B2B Lead.

5 tips you should be sure to include in your SEO strategy:

1. Pick good page titles. The words that appear at the top of the browser window are what a search engine looks at first as it evaluates that Web page. Use keywords and unique titles.
2. Be smart about URLs. If you’re using a URL like yourcompany.blogspot.com, then you’re building SEO power for blogspot.com, not your own company.
3. Start a blog. Blogs help in two ways. They provide new content (search engines prefer new over old). Plus, the more interesting blogs tend to generate lots of inbound links.
4. Leverage your PR program. Use press releases and externally distributed articles to drum up more inbound links. To maximize effectiveness, link back to your Web site from keywords.
5. Use social media to build links. Find out where your customers hang out online, and start participating there. Remember to add value. Don’t lead with a sales pitch.

Written by Ryan Ohls, a Market Development Executive at ReachForce.

Before joining ReachForce I was a sales guy with no marketing department.  Knowing how important and effective marketing strategy can be, I set out to try and do my own lead generation. I can remember investing days and days of work on this one project.  As a sales guy, I had a particular interest in automated lead generation (that’s right, sales guys are typically lazy) and had been studying it for months.  I finally grasped the concept of doing it right, I thought.

So, having never been blessed with the spiritual gifts of patience or discernment, I decided my next step was to find and buy a list of 1,200 names to send my message to.  The plan was to do an email blast with an offer to download a new report.

The report looked great – guaranteed to attract plenty of hot prospects, turn them into customers, and make me look like the Dalai Lama.  The email was perfectly crafted, engaging, and sure to catch the eye.  I told my wife to get ready for the commissions to start pouring in.

So, with palms sweating and my reputation at my company completely mortgaged (side note – companies don’t like spending money on things they don’t understand), the time had come for launch.  Three…two…one…CLICK.

Within 15 minutes my mailbox was full!  The response was unbelievable…from “System Administrator, Address Unknown.”  The list of 1200 contacts turned out to be about 60% accurate, at best.

I believe whole-heartedly that a company’s biggest asset are customers and happy ones are even better. I’ll even take that a step further, though.  A sales and marketing person’s biggest asset is a database of FUTURE customers (prospects).

** WARNING – Here comes the ReachForce promotion.  Your prospect database should be 100% accurate, up-to-date, properly targeted, and relevant to your business.  Each name you have listed should be the right person inside the right company.  You’re thinking “in a perfect world…”

If you’re not a ReachForce customer and you’re reading this, here’s a few interesting data points to consider:

• Industry listed (rented) deliver less than a 3% response rate
• Sales people can spend up to 1/3 of their time hunting down the right buyers in a prospect company
• According to Gartner, 30 million people out of the 138 million employed in the US will switch jobs in the next 12 months.
• 2.5 million businesses will move, according to the U.S. Census Bureau

If you’re interested in cleaning up the data you already have, check out this post on Dirty Data.  If you’re interested in hearing how ReachForce can help, please contact me.

Sales people out there – please jump in here, tell your marketing counterparts to help you out and make sure they are marketing to the right people in the right companies so you can spend your time selling, not hunting.

Just returned from Brussels where I represented BreakingPoint at the Broadband World Forum (BBWF). Our  6 meter by 3 meter booth was quite a difference from my typical experience in a 30′ X 40′ Platinum booth at the show entrance.

As a startup and a new entrant in the market, we didn’t have the large Marketing budget to invest in a huge exhibit and it wouldn’t have made a good investment anyway. We also didn’t have the history to score a great booth location. Finally, to make things even more challenging, we didn’t have the $80,000 exhibit that our competitors had to stand out at the event. So, we had to rely on a superior product and a little ingenuity to get the most from our investment in the event. Here are a few tips for your next trade show:

1. Locate your exhibit right next to your hottest competitor. It’s a risky move, but if your product stands out and provides superior capabilities this strategy should help you attract a steady stream of qualified traffic. It also makes a bold statement about the confidence you have in your product.
2. Locate your exhibit next to your largest partner. This will also help you attract qualified traffic without the risk. Even better, your partner may actually recommend attendees visit your booth.
3. Make use of lots of plasma displays to tell your story without the need to invest in a costly booth or expensive graphics.
4. Promote and deliver presentations in your booth. Live presentations from subject matter experts attract significant crowds and helps position your company as a thought leader.
5. Produce a creative marketing campaign that stimulates word-of-mouth.
6. Use Twitter to spread the word about your exhibit.
7. Take your show on the road. At BBWF, I actually saw an exhibitor rolling a mobile demo stand around the show floor. Genius!

Just a few ideas to help your startup stand out at the next trade show. Wish we would have had the time and resources to leverage all of these ideas at BBWF. As it turned out, simply using idea #1, 5, and 6 were quite enough to drive very qualified traffic. Another interesting data point: our Twitter updates drove about as much traffic as our email blast. Neither of these techniques worked as well as parking right next door to our competitor, however. Big risk, big reward.

It’s the perfect storm – tough economic times … budget scrutiny … the Q4 numbers chase … budget planning for 2009. As Reachforce CEO Suaad Sait says, this Fall is a marketers ‘oh-crap’ moment when we start asking ourselves if there is enough fuel (or money to provide the fuel) in the lead generation engine to fulfill current year sales needs and fuel 2009 momentum.

Under old school marketing rules this storm would usually lead to 1 of 2 things … 1) slam on the breaks and try to hit NOP numbers by minimizing expense, or 2) a flurry of spray and pray direct marketing activities that seek elusive bluebirds against all odds. The big problem is that neither of these well worn paths does a very good job at motivating prospects who are in the middle of the funnel.

On this note, Josh Bernoff – Forrester’s Interactive Marketing expert – made a great point in his February 2, 2008 writing entitled “Strategies for Interactive Marketing in a Recession.” It’s more obvious to some than others, but most mid-funnel contacts are logically folks who are still in consideration mode or somehow on the fence about making a purchase. Mid-funnel contacts are not only abundant, they are literally bluebirds in waiting who just need to be earned.

Companies who opt to slam on the marketing brakes in an effort to save their way to success are essentially putting all of the pressure to motivate a purchase on their sales closers. This may work in certain instances, but it’s not very strategic, scalable or sustainable. Nor is motivating these people a matter of creating awareness with direct marketing. While consistent DM needs to be happening for sake of keeping the top of the funnel fed, it rarely has the sort of impact needed to push mid-funnel situations forward.

But social marketing applications like interactive webinars, e-communities, blogs and networking sites are an effective way to align B2B marketing’s work with the things that are most critical to driving mid-funnel situations to closure I.e. – establishing credibility, delivering proof points, deep-dive Q&A, earning “trusted partner” status and best of all – a structured, pragmatic way to capture, manage and execute against those issues/objections that most often create and add to mid-funnel traffic-jams.

In his easy to read, highly recommended article Bernoff points out three important social media attributes that help recession proof your marketing plan:

• Well-designed social applications are effective. Social programs leverage the voice of the customer to get messages carried further than ad impressions. If your message resonates with consumers, their word-of-mouth is a more effective medium than any of the traditional media.
•  They’re cheap. Advertising campaigns often run into millions of dollars. But Facebook pages and blogs are two examples of social programs that you can start for next to nothing. Even more sophisticated programs like a full-blown customer community typically don’t cost more than $50,000 to $300,000 to get going.
•  They motivate consumers in the middle of the funnel. Social applications like discussion forums are better than advertising at helping people in the consideration phase when they’re on the fence about purchasing. In a recession, improving consideration will be more cost-effective than blasting awareness messages at resistant consumers.

What’s your Google Rank? No, not your Google Page Rank, your personal Google Rank? That’s right, according to a story published by Business Week, Google has filed for a patent on technology for ranking the “influence” of people on social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace. Much like Google’s approach to ranking web sites, the algorithm would calculate your influence rating based on how many “friends” you have, how influential your friends are, how frequently you blog, etc. The article speculates that this breakthrough could finally make ads on social networks relevant and profitable.

Not sure about that. Sounds a bit too much like TwitterGrader to me and you all now know how much I like that product.

Written by Ryan Ohls, a Market Development Executive at ReachForce.

In this current economic crisis many businesses have a natural, knee-jerk tendency to “wait and see how everything plays out.”  It seems that business spending is put on hold, which only exacerbates the overall problem.

We as marketers and sales people feel it the most.  I’m sure we’ve all heard something like this in the past couple of weeks, “We’re going to ‘wait & see’ what this economy ‘does’ before we spend any kind of money on ‘that.’”

Yeah…and sometimes a deer in the headlights just “waits to see” what that car is going to do.

Here’s what I don’t understand – if what you sell can grow your customers’ bottom line, then why wouldn’t they buy it?  If they can’t afford what you offer “right now,” then how are they going to afford the additional cost – “right now” – of NOT having it?

I do believe that in an economic crisis it may be wise to lighten up spending on certain things if we can’t afford them (i.e. lavish parties, luxurious vacations, designer nose-hair clippers, doggy massages).  However, as sales guy at ReachForce, we have a unique opportunity to show our prospects how we can contribute to helping them through this mess.

If what you sell saves time, saves money, or adds to top line revenue or productivity in some way – AND YOU CAN DEMONSTRATE IT – then not only do you have an opportunity, you have a responsibility to tell as many prospects as possible about it.

If you’re still with me, you’re probably reading along, looking for your tip on how to get action from the ‘wait and see’ crowd out there today.  Well, here’s what I’m doing…

• I’m direct about how what I sell drives revenue
• I show real customer case studies that include customer results
• I provide best practice information around how to act on ReachForce solutions

In this chapter, David covers the basics of search engine marketing without getting into the technical details. He makes the great point that if you follow the New Rules, you will already be practicing search engine marketing.  It really is all about the content.  (Some of you may scoff that inbound links are most important, but I contend that great content is what draws inbound links.)

David covers a few tips on SEM but I want to highlight his tips on landing pages:

• Make the landing page copy short and the graphics simple.
• Create the page with your company’s look, feel, and tone.
• Write from the prospect’s point of view.
• A landing page is communications, not advertising.
• Provide a quote from a happy customer.
• Make the landing page a self-contained unit.
• Make the call to action clear and easy to respond to.
• Use multiple calls to action.
• Only ask for necessary information.
• Don’t forget to follow up!

Landing pages are critical to direct buyers to your content.  Well optimized landing pages can rank highly in organic search and produce high conversion rates.

That pretty much wraps it all up.  Now that we have completed The New Rules of Marketing and PR, the title of the final chapter sums it up nicely, “Make it Happen.”  David, himself, admits that he has not put into practice every idea presented in this book.  The point is to find what works best for you and your organization, put it into action and start reaping the benefits.  Best of luck!

A recent Wall Street Journal article based on a Forrester Research review of 90 enterprise blogs describes most B2B blogs as “dull, drab, and don’t stimulate discussion.” A few highlights from the WSJ article:

• 74% rarely get comments
• 70% stuck to business or technical topics
• 56% simply regurgitated press releases or other already-public news
• 53% of B2B marketers say that blogging has marginal significance or is irrelevant to their strategies

I’ve written before about the success we had at NetQoS with www.networkperformancedaily.com. But what I’ve never talked about were the challenges we faced in the early stages of the blog’s development. At first, we struggled to make a network management blog interesting without the ability to rely on a technical thought leader. So, we took the unusual approach of hiring a full time blogger – a former journalist who could not only report on news but who could entertain and dig deep into stories. Something like an investigative reporter with a twisted sense of humor.

We positioned the blog as “anything and everything that affects network performance from the mundane to the bizzare” and published sometimes humorous, sometimes scandalous, and often educational content. We mixed in relevant company content and interviews with technologists on staff. The blog was an immediate success. One of the early stories our blogger broke netted inbound links/mentions from the Washington Post, Wired Magazine, etc. At its peak, the blog reached 10,000 monthly readers. The key to success was developing original, humorous content, fun videos, and digging deep into breaking news stories.

I am now the VP of Marketing for BreakingPoint and we just re-launched our blog/community. While we don’t have a full-time blogger, we are working with some of the more visible experts in the company including our CTO, Dennis Cox, and others experts in our BreakingPoint Labs research team including HD Moore to provide useful and entertaining posts and videos that are relevant to our target audience. We are just getting started but already have more than 350 subscribers and I’m looking forward to another blog success. One of the keys to driving readership is the use of Twitter and other social media sites to highlight new content on the site and attract new readers.

Looking for great tips on how to make your blog a success? Try The Secret to Writing a Successful and Outstanding Blog by Liz Strauss, one of the most influential relational blogger on the Internet.

Would also love to hear from the rest of you on techniques for finding your blog “voice.”

This week’s focus on The B2B Lead seems to be social networking, not sure if we planned that or if it’s sheer coincidence.  Laura, Leigh Anne and I have been busy these past weeks building out our LinkedIn Profiles and making sure we are answering any of the LinkedIn Answers questions out there that apply to what we do on a daily basis.  So this chapter (19) is right on time for us.  Here’s a few new things we’re planning on doing or checking out in the coming weeks…

• Squidoo – Do you squidoo?  We don’t currently but we will be looking into it very soon.  If anyone is currently using Squidoo, we’d love to hear what you think?  Does it drive the right kinds of traffic?
• Max Pipeline – like Helga in the Volkswagen example – will be out there exploring the B2B Lead Generation world and will be sharing his findings right here on The B2B Lead.  Check him out on FaceBook and be sure to check back here for his updates.
• LinkedIn Groups – oh the possibilities here…

As you can see, we’re jumping in the social networking world with both feet.  If you’re just getting started or considering a social plan, here’s a few other tips David recommends to get the most out of your social networking sites:

• Target a specific audience – think niche market/long tail here
• Be a thought leader – provide valuable and useful information, remember this is not where you do company promotions
• Be authentic and transparent – just be yourself please
• Create lots of links – links “makes the web what it is”
• Encourage people to interact with you
• Participate – you can’t just put it out there and hope they’ll come, you have to engage with others in your space.
• Experiment – if what you’re doing isn’t working, try something new – there’s definitely enough choices out there.

What are you doing?  What have you learned?  Please share as this is a new world for most of us.  Making the leap can be scary but the benefits are there if you’re willing to work for them, right?

With economic times the way they are today, it is more important than ever that Marketing and Sales teams be aligned. Together you must decide and figure out what activities make the most impact to the top line of the business. Focus on all types of initiatives
1.    To retain, cross-sell and up sell current customers
2.    New customer acquisition programs
3.    Channel partner marketing opportunities

We recently rolled out an ebook, 10 Tips for Marketing and Sales Alignment, with our partner Marketo. These 10 tips are just a few ideas on how Marketing and Sales can play on the same team to generate qualified leads and drive revenue.

Here’s a few more tips to think about as you are building out your Q4 Marketing and Sales plans.

1.    Marketing and Sales teams should have shared goals

• Bookings and new customer wins are jointly owned by marketing and sales, and marketing bonuses are directly tied to the joint success.
• Revenue alignment and continued success programs for current customers ensure happier customers.  And we all know it’s more expensive to find a new customer than it is to keep your current ones happy.
• Shared goals means shared success -  when sales wins, marketing wins…and when marketing wins, sales wins … and overall the business WINS!

2.    Do Reality Based Planning

• Use TRUE funnel conversion metrics to set marketing lead generation targets.
• Understand and plan based on sales team behavior – how many leads can they work at time, how many calls does it take each sales team member to identify a hot or qualified lead, etc.

3.    Don’t forget those stuck in the funnel

• Deals get stuck in the middle stages of the funnel.  Let marketing help by trying to engage with the prospect through best practice content offers, event invites, or new media outlets.

4.    Don’t forget them when the deal is done

• Engage in current customer marketing programs.  Use a newsletter, blog or customer community to stay front of mind for cross-selling, up-selling and renewal opportunities.
• Case studies and references are powerful sales tools, but marketing needs help with the set up and creation of these.

5.    Communicate, Communicate, Communicate

• Share what’s working and what’s not – closed loop marketing is essential here
• Marketing should be involved in new sales rep training
• Celebrate WINS together

Organizations talk a lot about aligning their marketing and sales teams but many never put plans into action.  By implementing the five steps above and adhering to the plan, Marketing and Sales teams can align for shared success.

I welcome your thoughts and feedback (successes and other tips you want to share).