Twitter Analytics aka Analytwits - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #217
Friday, March 20th, 2009Do you think you have mastered the basics of Twitter and want to take it to the next level? I was amazed that there are 8 analytics tools out there just for Twitter. Here is a great blog post from Social Media Today on 8 Excellent Tools to Extract Insights from Twitter Streams. I am not sure that they all have great B2B applications, but interesting stuff to check out.
Is All Press Really Good Press? - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #216
Thursday, March 19th, 2009Do you keep track of what is being said about your company online? If you don’t, you should. I am certain that the folks at Mzinga were shocked by what Jeremiah Owyang, Forrester Analyst, said about them in his post on Monday. Thankfully they were monitoring and able to respond. He chose one of the most public forums at his disposal to publicly bash the company. He says, “Why this post? It’s my obligation to have my clients best interest in mind, and this is the fastest way for me to reach them, by using the tools where we’re already connected.” I find that a little hard to believe. My guess is that email is the fastest way to reach his clients, not a public blog post.
I have a real problem with anyone using a public forum to bash a company before actually speaking with someone at the company directly or at least reaching out to the company directly. Why do we feel in this online world that we can post something to Twitter, LinkedIn, or our own blog about another company without ever having taken the time to find out if our accusation is true or to resolve conflict we may personally have. Jeremiah obviously has connections to the folks at Mzinga. Why not pick up the phone and chat with them first to confirm or deny the rumors he has been hearing. When they gave him the answer that they would be making a public announcement in a week (in response to his tweets, not his direct reaching out), why couldn’t he wait? Or if he felt this was truly something his clients needed to know, why not inform them privately? (Sorry if I have gone on a bit of a tangent, but I fell very strongly about this subject.)
Jeremiah did respond with an apology on his blog. But like one commenter said, “After reading that “apology”, it wreaks of: ‘I have been asked by my employer to write something, but do not believe that I am in the wrong.’” I have to agree. Read the post and apology and decide for yourself.
Lessons learned:
- Track what others are saying about you online - Google alerts is not enough. Make sure you are tracking what is being said on Twitter (set up an RSS feed of your company’s name on Twitter Search) and LinkedIn.
- Respond quickly and pleasantly to everyone, analyst/blogger/customer/prospect
- If you don’t have something nice to say you shouldn’t say anything at all - I think we could all use reminding of this wonderful phrase our mothers used to say to us.
SEO for Press Releases - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #215
Wednesday, March 18th, 2009
We launched our new search optimized website yesterday. Thank you Leigh Anne for all your hard work! After many months of research and lots of copywriting, we are all set and ready for the inbound leads to start pouring in.
As part of the new website launch we are also doing a PR blast. Anyone that knows me well knows I’m not a PR person. I get that it has its place but PR has always been very difficult to measure. So instead of perfecting my PR skills, I’ve almost always outsourced this function.
But now, with social media and some pretty simple analytics we can see where we our visitors are coming from so we’ve built a PR program around the new launch. To get over my dislike of writing news releases I’ve convinced myself that we’re doing these to support our SEO efforts as well as our overall awareness goals.
Here’s a few tips we used when drafting these announcements:
- Writing for our audience – we want to be sure that our audience understands our news and sees the value in what we are announcing, this is key to supporting out SEO efforts. Important thing to remember here is the news comes first, SEO 2nd. You have to make sure you don’t confuse or dilute your news by trying to overuse keywords or keyword phrases.
- Decide on your keywords before your start writing – this will help you make sure you are writing with these in mind. Here, Leigh Anne keeps an updated list of our top keywords and keyword phrases on our white board, this way we’re looking at them every time we go to write something. Trying to plug in your keywords afterwards will cause problems like I mentioned above.
- Links, links, links - be sure to link keywords in your press release back to pages on your website. Best strategy includes already having optimized these pages with the same keywords.
- Optimize the important stuff – Be sure you are including your keywords in the most important places - your headline, your subhead, your boilerplate and your first paragraph.
- Press Release Grader - once again, a cool free tool from the folks at HubSpot. Just copy and paste your press release in and it will grade the release based on language, content and SEO. Don’t worry if you score a little low at first, it will give you tips for improvement.
- PRWeb – it’s what we use here – it’s worth it to upgrade (we use SEO visibility package). You will be able to:
- add links
- add images
- include in your own RSS feed
- add Technorati tags
- use SEO tools and statistics
We have seen some really great results since we started optimizing our releases. From one release alone, we got over 100 new leads in a day. It definitely makes the extra effort worth it.
Peer-to-Peer Sales Training - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #214
Tuesday, March 17th, 2009This tip comes from our very own Marketing and Sales Operations Manager, Lauren Kincke. Lauren is responsible for integrating and managing our marketing and sales systems. She spends most of her time working to make these systems and processes help us be more effective and efficient. She is an integral part in our closed loop marketing and sales system.
What do you arm your sales people with? A phone, a computer and a database of prospects (or worse, a phone book)? How do you prepare them for what is to come, the rejection, or better still, the prospect who wants to buy? How do we better equip our sales team and enable them to reach and exceed their goals? These are questions we recently decided to tackle at ReachForce…one of our answers came in the form of training.
Our typical training regime used to be comprised solely of a full-day quarterly kickoff. During that time we would run through a few “sales” skills specific sessions, some background on our industry, and a piece on what we do and how we do it (for newbies). Part team-building, part skills training, it was an exhausting day and by the end of it some of our more ADD inclined employees had mentally checked out. Recently we decided to make some changes. First, instead of only hosting training sessions on a once a quarter basis, each of our weekly sales meetings would be host to a mini-session led by a sales rep. Second, our quarterly sales training meeting would be shortened to a little over half a day.
Some of the topics that have been assigned out (and presented) by our sales team are:
- Best Practices: Preparing for a first call - items to research/points to know prior to the call
- Overcoming Objections
- Winning Closing Techniques
- Managing Your Time Effectively
- Creating ‘Date Certain’ Decisions
- Call to action emails
- Bringing a proposal to life
- Upping the average sales price
Each of our reps was assigned a date and a topic. There aren’t really parameters around what they prepare, some have used PowerPoint, some have just spoken and some have created handouts. I can’t say that we’ve measured our results, but I can say that our reps have been able to put these things into practice as quickly as they are being taught. One of the greatest things about this training is that it is led in a peer to peer setting. We felt it very important to remove senior management from these meetings, thus alleviating the fear of looking stupid or asking questions. Only our floor managers stay in the room with the sales reps, because our floor managers interact with our reps on a peer level, so they teach and learn alongside their fellow sales reps.
The topics listed above are just a few that we have come up with, our program certainly will continue to have fuel and the momentum of continuing education should have a great impact for us. What kind of topics would your reps benefit from?
New Programs for Inactive Leads - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #213
Thursday, March 12th, 2009It’s a new year and here at ReachForce we are in the process of analyzing all of our programs to determine which ones drive the most sales conversions. Very quickly we realized that people that respond to our programs seem to over and over again. But what about those that never respond? They are killing our response rates and conversions.
With every program we as Marketers run we are able to bucket people into “responders” and “non-responders”. We typically do different things with these two groups. Responders can either move into other programs that try and further qualify the lead for sales or they go directly to sales/inside sales for more follow up and further qualification.
Now – what do you do with the non-responders and inactive contacts in your database? By leaving them in the current mix, you’re only hurting your program ROI and possible sales conversions. Continuing to do the same thing over and over again with these non-responders is insanity, right?
So instead of writing these people off, change up the mix and try something new with them.
In our 2.0 world, there are so many new possibilities for reaching your prospects in a way they respond to. Here’s a few ideas to consider:
- Webcasts – some people are visual learners and want to feel like they are interacting with live people. Email them an on-demand webcast or invite them your next live webinar.
- Podcasts – some people like to listen vs. read [a whitepaper or eBook]
- Survey – we use explicit surveys here at ReachForce to gather lead qualifying information. Now, yes we do incentivize people to take the survey but the results we get back are fabulous. It helps our lead gen and sales team to prioritize their follow up and it helps us weed out no fits (also helping increase our next program ROI).
- Social networks – where else are your prospects hanging out? Get out there with them and try and make contact. Remember you can’t enter the social world with your used car salesman pitch, people will roll their eyes at you and never interact.
- Channels – are your prospects also customers of some of your partners, see if they can help with introductions or more insight into the prospect account.
- Offers and Incentives – be sure to change them up and test what works best.
And if all else fails, it might be time to clean up your data. Make sure you have the right buying contacts in the right companies or it doesn’t even matter what you are sending or offering.
With every program we put together here at ReachForce, our #1 goal is to drive more hand raisers. That means we have to create programs using multiple vehicles. Is vehicles the right word here? Maybe not, but you know what I mean.
So how are you reaching those stubborn prospects that give you no signal of interest? Hopefully you’re not just giving up on them …
Keyword Placement to Boost On-Page SEO - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #211
Tuesday, March 10th, 2009Now that you have researched your keywords and have a nice long list, it is time to optimize the pages of your website. You want to optimize each page for up to 5 keywords. I use HubSpot’s Keyword Grader to keep me on track to use keywords that have a good number of monthly searches and are not so competitive that I will never have a shot at ranking well. For some of your interior pages, a long tail keyword strategy will work well to reach a targeted audience (but that is a post for another day).
I recommend making a list of each page on your site and then choosing what keywords you are going to optimize for on each. Using a spreadsheet will help you keep track of all the changes you need to make. Here is a list of all of the columns I would create:
- Page Description (optional) - this is only for you to describe the page you are optimizing
- Existing URL - the current URL
- New URL - Here is your first opportunity to tell the search engine the most important keywords. company.com/productname is not as powerful as company.com/your-keyword-here. Dashes help the search engine know when to break the words up. Note: if your product name is something that is searched often then you may want to leave it in the URL but for most SMB’s this is not the case. Be sure to keep it short, this is definitely not the place to keyword stuff.
- Page Title - This is the text that appears in the (typically) blue bar of your browser window (and in the tab for that page). Here is another place to add keywords rather than just list your company anme and products. Keep in mind, the fewer the keywords the more strength each has and Google gives more weight to the first keywords than to the last. Also, remember that humans will be reading these too.This is also the bold text that appears on the search engine results page. Make it compelling to click on and unique for each page on your site.
- <h1> tag - These will show up on the page as your heading but in the html need to be properly tagged as <h1>. Again the fewer the words, the more weight each receives. Use target keywords to tell the search engines and humans what the page is about.
- Meta Keywords - these are not seen on the web page itself, only in the html. You can list 8-10 keywords separated by commas.You may consider including your target keywords plus common misspellings of those keywords. Meta keywords are not of much importance to Google but are more important for Yahoo and Ask. I find this is also a good place to keep track of the keywords I want to use as I update the content on the page.
- Meta Description - This is a 1-2 sentence description of the content present on the page.It is also hidden on the page and only seen in the html. However, this is the description under the page title used in search engine results. Be sure to include target keywords because the keywords searched on will be bolded in the description. There is a 150 character limit on what the search engines will show.
I cannot makes changes to my site on my own, so my web developer was extremely grateful that I had laid out all of my changes in a spreadsheet. It really helped him as we redesigned the entire site. You can also implement these strategies as small changes one by one especially if you have a content management system at your fingertips. Be sure to resubmit your sitemap to Google as you may changes so it knows to crawl your site.
Special thanks to Karen Rubin at HubSpot for helping me with my own website optimization. It goes live next week!
Social Media and Metrics - Not Words You Typically See in the Same Sentence - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #210
Wednesday, March 4th, 2009Our marketing team recently put together a quick survey to see what their peers are doing these days. In fact, if you haven’t taken the survey, please do. We’ll be sure to share the results with you.
What we’re seeing so far is a lot of people wondering how others are using social media as part their marketing mix and how they are measuring these different activities. Since the world of social media is still new to most of us, I thought I’d share with you how we are incorporating it here at ReachForce.
We are using traditional programs to fuel our direct marketing efforts - newsletters, email marketing, customer campaigns and thought leadership content programs, knowing that prospects engage in different ways. We are also reaching them through the new social media tools available to us today.
Here’s how we’re doing it today:
- We’re making sure our Twitter following knows when we have a new blog post
- We’re very active on The B2B Lead. We’re now at over 200 tips for B2B Marketing and Sales teams
- We’re also out there reading other B2B Marketing blogs and commenting on them
- We’re answering questions in LinkedIn and if we have a tip about the topic on our blog, we’re pointing them back
- We’ve recently updated our company email signatures to include our blog and twitter accounts
While I’m not sure how to measure specifics on any of this, what I am sure of is that by adding social media to our mix of lead generation tactics we’re seeing:
- A dramatic increase in inbound leads
- More traffic on our blog and hundreds of people a month jumping from our blog to reachforce.com for thought leadership content
- More pick up and recognition from industry thought leaders
Have you found other ways to track your social media efforts back to lead generation?
Twitter Search Optimization Strategy - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #209
Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009Are your tweets optimized for Twitter Search? Last week, I attended the Eloqua User Group event in Austin. Somehow the conversation ended up on Twitter. One of the Eloqua folks asked the group, “are you using Twitter?” I was shocked when only those of us from ReachForce and Eloqua raised their hands (but that rant is for another day). Steve Woods, CTO and co-founder of Eloqua, was there speaking to us about his new book, Digital Body Language. He said uses an almost SEO strategy for his tweets. I would call it more of a TSO (Twitter Search Optimization) approach.
If you are following a large group of people, it is almost impossible to read every tweet in your feed. More and more people have started using TweetDeck and RSS feeds from Twitter Search to stay up to date on what people are saying about their company or certain keywords. Following that logic, it makes sense to try to include keywords in your tweets so they will actually be read by the right people.
If you want to employ this strategy, you need to know two things: what other people are tweeting about and keywords relevant to your business (hopefully, you already have this one figured out). Play around on Twitter Search to see how often your keywords are used (this is also a good way to find new people to follow). You will find that certain keywords are used more frequently and in a more relevant way. Keep a running list so you can be sure to use those keywords in your tweets.
I would love to hear from anyone else about how to use Twitter more effectively. And if you’re not already, be sure to follow all of us on The B2B Lead:
Twitter for Lead Generation - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip # 208
Friday, February 27th, 2009We’ve been talking a lot about Twitter around here lately. It seems it’s become our newest shiny object. People are loving it, they’re dedicated to it so there’s got to be a way to leverage this very active audience, right? Right.
As we were out and about reading about the new world that is Twitter, I came across this blog post from Joint Venture Marketing Strategist, Christian Fea - 6 Effective Ways to Use Twitter as a Lead Generation Tool.
Here’s the list of his 6 tips and a few of my thoughts. Be sure to read his full post, it’s worth your time.
- Target your market to follow the right people.
We’re all about targeting here at ReachForce so I couldn’t agree more on this one being #1. If you are going to use Twitter as a lead gen tool, it only makes sense to find the right audience. - Offer actionable advice
Again, couldn’t agree more. Please save us the details of your Chinese food lunch or that you are on the bus ride home. Give us something useful, and please don’t waste my time. Just my 2 cents… - Use your 140 character wisely
And don’t forget about tinyurls. You can customize these too. - Your offer and call to action
Christian recommends that you push people back to your own blog whenever you can. This gives you an opportunity to interact with more than 140 characters. - Frequency of your tweets
We REALLY struggle with this one. It’s tough staying relevant and being as frequent as we should be. We’re trying to share the responsibility here, we have a team of 3 that are each responsible for tweeting once a day. This way our audience gets different personalities and not just one person is carrying the entire load. - Tracking your results
Google Analytics will tell you if people are jumping from Twitter to you. It’s free, why wouldn’t you use it?
All great and easy to implement tips, Thanks again Christian!
Are you using Twitter as a lead gen tool? We’re giving it a shot, in fact, follow us @reachforce. We’ll be sure to let you know when we land our first customer who found us on Twitter.
Blog Bling by Blidgets – B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #207
Thursday, February 26th, 2009Try saying that five times really fast! If you’re like us and are running a blog, you’re always trying to find new ways to get the word out to drive more traffic your way. One interesting method that we are partaking in is to create widgets for your blog. These widgets are little web-based trinkets that make your blog content available for people to access through popular “start pages”, such as Google IG, Pageflakes, and my personal favorite, Netvibes.
It’s really easy to create one and there are a number of services out there that will walk you through the process, but probably the easiest one I’ve found is the Widgetbox Blidget service. There is no coding required and all you have to do is provide it with the URL to your blog and then optionally configure some standard theme elements and off you go with your very own blidget within 5 minutes.
Widgetbox also hosts a gallery where you can publish your blidgets and it automatically draws in any meta keywords you have setup in your blog and will use them as the default keywords for people searching through the Widgetbox gallery to find your blidget with.
Check out our blidget to see what the finished product looks like. There are also over 60 other B2B-related widgets and blidgets already published out on the Widgetbox gallery, so no guinea pigs here!
With any luck, your blog could end up on The 25 Most Valuable Blogs list next year!
