“Six Mistakes B2B Marketers Continue To Make With Organic Search” - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #250
Friday, June 19th, 2009Trying to handle Search Engine Optimization in-house can be a challenge for many B2B marketers. I handle all of the web design/content/SEO here at ReachForce with zero formal training on the subject (granted I do have a wonderful developer but he basically just executes on my plans). I recently came across an article I had earmarked a while back that I wanted to share with anyone out there who is also trying there best to get this whole SEO thing right. In “Six Mistakes B2B Marketers Continue To Make With Organic Search,” Galen DeYoung outlines where many B2B marketers are falling down:
Inadequate site architecture
To be found for a specific keyword, there needs to be an optimized landing page on the website that revolves around that search term. Simply put, this means you need to review your business and ensure your site has at least one page that promotes each specific revenue stream. However, the complexities of B2B keyword strategy—which include the lack of shared lexicons in most B2B verticals—mean that you may have to create and incorporate several landing pages for each revenue stream. For instance, an accounting firm promoting litigation support services may have a page on expert witness services, but it may do well to also consider having a page on forensic accounting.
Simply put, most B2B websites need more content, both to respond to likely organic search and to be seen as being by the search engines as an authoritative site on a given topic.
If you are having difficulties creating this content, try looking for it other place. Take a look at your whitepapers, past articles, press releases, and blog posts. You might find content that just needs a little tweaking to work for the website.
Lousy meta descriptions
When B2B marketers actually specify the meta descriptions for site pages, they often write from an internal standpoint, using corporate and internal lingo that doesn’t speak to the searcher. (Unfortunately this is often true for the actual content as well. ) Typically, B2C marketers are much better at writing meta descriptions that promote click-through. When you write meta descriptions for B2B, think about what will entice the searcher (your prospect) to click on your search result versus all the others on the page. While you can write as much as you want, Google will only display about 165 characters. Make sure you use those characters wisely to create a keyword-rich, compelling message. You’ve only got a few seconds before searchers decide on which results they will click.
Not analyzing organic landing pages
Many B2B marketers don’t bother to evaluate, let alone manage, organic landing pages. Test your organic landing pages for all significant, ranking keywords. You may rank highly in the search results for a given search phrase. You may even have a meta description that drives click-through. But is the page searchers land on the page you want them to land on? If not, optimize a different landing page or make changes to the content at the current landing page.
Not monitoring analytics
The analytics associated with PPC landing pages are often scrutinized in great detail. Bounce rates are analyzed. Alternate landing page versions are tested. Ad copy is tweaked. Yet organic landing pages rarely see the same rigor, despite the fact that B2B purchasers tend to first look at and click on organic results almost twice as often as they do paid search results. So, dive into your analytics and do the same for your organic visitors. Isolate your organic traffic. Look at the organic landing pages. Analyze the bounce rates. Adjust landing page content. Tweak meta descriptions. You’ll be glad you did.
Failing to optimize printed marketing assets before converting them to the web
B2B marketers are frequently guilty of mindlessly posting lots of print marketing communications to their websites, often in lieu of html content. Hundreds of hours and great sums of money have been spent creating these pieces, yet most people won’t spend even an hour to optimize these pieces before posting them to the web. These often include PDFs of brochures, case studies, technical or white papers, and product and spec sheets. While these represent valuable, influential information, if you don’t optimize them, they won’t show up in the search results; the only people that will find them are those who actually visit your site. Why not make sure searchers can find them, too.
Duplicate title tags and meta descriptions
B2B sites are often rife with duplicate title tags and duplicate meta descriptions. In addition to decreasing the chances that more of your site’s pages will rank well, this practice will likely lead to less of your site’s pages being indexed by the search engine. Moreover, it’s a clear sign that you haven’t optimized your site for searchers. Title tags and meta descriptions help determine whether a searcher is actually going to click on your search result. Today, there’s really no excuse for this. You can easily check for duplicate title tags and meta descriptions using Diagnostics>Content Analysis in Google Webmaster Tools.
Be sure to check out the full article for all of Galen’s tips.
Looking for more Online Marketing Tips? Download 30 Online Marketing Tips from The B2B Lead
10 Things to Consider When Creating a Social Media Policy - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #249
Tuesday, June 16th, 2009One of my favorite social media news sites, Mashable, had a great post a couple of weeks ago worthy of sharing with our readers. Sharlyn Lauby, the post author and president of Internal Talent Management (ITM) put together a list of 10 things to consider when creating a social media policy.
Leigh Anne and I try to stay pretty active out in the new social world and we often get asked if we have a social media policy here at ReachForce. We don’t have one, but as we continue to grow our team we might consider it in the future.
Sharlyn says, “Whether you’re writing your social media policy from the get-go, or letting it develop organically in reaction to situations as they arise, here are 10 things you should definitely consider. These 10 tips will help you steer clear of pitfalls and allow you to focus on what’s important: engaging the customer.”
- Introduce the purpose of social media for your organization- focus on the things that employees CAN DO rather than what they can’t do. it’s all about leveraging the positive to get people to engage and bring value to your social media efforts.
- Be responsible for what you write - Your team needs to take responsibility for what they write, and exercise good judgment and common sense. You’d think this is obvious, but better safe than sorry, right?
- Be authentic - Include your name and, when appropriate, your company name and your title. People want to interact with other people in the social world, not business (aka sales people). Here at ReachForce, when we’re participating in the social world, instead of including our ReachForce URL, we include a link back here, to the The B2B Lead. We figure it’s more comfortable and gives our audience and followers a better snapshot of who we are personally.
- Consider your audience -When you’re out and about remember that your readers could include current customers, potential customers, as well as current/past/future employees, your boss, your board members, and of course your mom. Consider that before you publish and make sure you aren’t alienating any of those groups.
- Exercise good judgment - Refrain from comments that can be interpreted as slurs, demeaning, inflammatory, etc. You’d think this was obvious too but remember if it ends up on the internet someone will find it.
- Understand the concept of community - The essence of community is the idea that it exists so that you can support others and they, in turn, can support you. You need to learn how to balance personal and professional information, and the important role that transparency plays in building a community.
- Respect copyrights and fair use - This should be a no-brainer, but just in case: always give people proper credit for their work, and make sure you have the right to use something with attribution before you publish. i.e. These tips come from Sharlyn Lauby via Mashable.
- Remember to protect confidential & proprietary info - Transparency doesn’t give employees free rein to share just anything. Common sense here please, it could cost you your job.
- Bring value - share relevant activities or news with your community, fellow bloggers and other social media followers. Do your customers really care what you had for lunch? I doubt it.
- Productivity matters - But, your social media usage won’t get you very far if you don’t execute on the core competencies of your business. Remember that in order for your social media endeavors to be successful, you need to find the right balance between social media and other work.
Looking for a sample policy? IBM has published their social media guidelines publicly for anyone to read. It’s a great policy, though rather long.
Retweeting to Build Your Following and Your Brand - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #245
Tuesday, June 9th, 2009Notice: If you are a professional Twitter user, you probably already know this tip so please take a minute to share your favorite Twitter tip with The B2B Lead followers.
Now for those just getting started on Twitter, here’s a simple tip on retweeting.
When you are just getting started on Twitter, building your following and having quality tweets are two of the biggest challenges. A great way to solve both is retweeting. See a great tweet? See something interesting worthy of sharing? Think that your followers would be interested in it, retweet it!
Proper Twitter etiquette dictates that you begin your tweet with RT followed by the original tweeters handle. Example: RT @ReachForce: Building a Sales Enablement Playbook Part 1 - http://tinyurl.com/qotz4f.
When you retweet someone else, they are likely to start following you and there is a good chance they will retweet you in the future. When you are retweeted, your message is now seen by a new audience also creating a situation where you could gain more followers and build your personal brand.
Looking for a specific topic to tweet about? Try searching for it on Twitter first. If it is a hot topic, you might see a few people with similar tweets. Be selective about who you retweet when building your lead generation Twitter brand. Think thought leaders in your industry, prospective customers, customers and partners. This will help with general awareness as well as help demostrate your participation and thoughts on the topic.
Building Your Brand on Twitter - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #241
Thursday, May 28th, 2009There is a lot of buzz abut Twitter out there. If you are just getting started it can be a bit overwhelming. I came across another great post on Mashable, HOW TO: Build Your Personal Brand on Twitter by Dan Schwabel. This post goes through six steps you should take to build your brand (personal or company) on Twitter.
- Claim your Twitter handle - stop what you are doing and claim it now. Even if you aren’t ready to take the next 5 steps you will want your handle there waiting for you.
- Decide how you want to brand yourself - Dan offers some good tips including creating a custom background
- Become known as an expert or resource - make sure you are optimizing your tweets with keywords as most people don’t read every tweet but instead look for keywords.
- Establish a Twitter marketing plan - this is all about making sure your Twitter handle is everywhere and anywhere like in your email signature, on your blog, on your business cards, etc.
- Utilize third-party applications - there are lots out there but many serve the same function and many will not be useful to you. Dan outlines the best ones for building your brand.
- Form a Twitter “Mastermind Group” - this is not right for everyone and I think is more for personal branding than company brands.
If you are just getting started, the point is to do just that, get started. Everyone should do number 1, you don’t want to have to try to buy it later. Then, go at your own pace to complete the rest of the steps.
Creating a Personal Background on Twitter - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #239
Tuesday, May 26th, 2009Being a somewhat typical marketer, I pay attention to the look and feel of everything we do. I believe that a cohesive look for our brand is essential because we run so many integrated marketing programs. I came across a great post on Mashable, HOW TO: Create Custom Twitter Backgrounds by Ben Par. The post goes into why you would want a custom background and examples of some great ones but to me the best part is a list of tools to help you create your own:
- MyTweetSpace: MyTweetSpace is one of the simplest ways to create a Twitter background with minimal effort. It allows users to create badges, add graphics, play with text, and more to create elegant backgrounds and left-hand text columns. You can even log in with Twitter and MyTweetSpace will automatically update your background.
- TwitterBacks: This website provides a set of templates perfect for creating your ideal Twitter background. The templates come in PSD (Photoshop) form. In fact, my Twitter account utilizes a TwitterBack template as the basis for my design. Can you guess which one?
- TweetStyle: TweetStyle offers free background templates, custom Twitter backgrounds, and a few useful blog posts on the subject of the backdrop.
- Free Twitter Designer: This handle little app provides an easy-to-use image editor to help you create a professional-looking theme.
- TwitBacks: This is another tool for creating backgrounds. This one specializes in left-hand column-based backgrounds.
- TwitterGallery: TwitterGallery is a directory of themes based on color and category. You can even click the “install” button under any theme, log into Twitter, and poof!…your background is ready.
- Peekr: If you stumble across a great Twitter background and want to take a quick look at it in its pure form, the Peekr bookmarklet is the way to go. Click on the bookmarklet once to show only the background, and press it again to bring everything back to normal.
One tip I would add is to be sure to change your design colors to match your new background. When you are in your Twitter account, click on settings and then change design colors. You can change your background, text, links, sidebar and sidebar border to match your new background.
We have already done this for the ReachForce twitter page but I can’t wait to get started on my own personal background.
Lose Control of Your Marketing - ReachForce Book Club
Monday, May 18th, 2009Lose Control of Your Marketing is the latest eBook from David Meerman Scott. It is mostly composed of excerpts from his new book World Wide Rave. Readers of The B2B Lead already know I am a huge fan of Mr. Scott, especially his book, The New Rules of Marketing and PR. However, the ideas presented in this eBook were a little hard for me to accept whole-heartedly. As the name suggests, he encourages marketers to take down any barriers to their content and lose control to allow their ideas/content to spread. As a bit of a control freak and one who lives by the mantra that everything marketing does must be measured, I had a bit of an internal struggle while reading this eBook.
According to David, You need to think in terms of spreading ideas, not generating leads. A World Wide Rave gets the word out to thousands or even millions of potential customers. But only if you make your information easy to find and consume.
One of the most difficult ideas for me to accept is the idea that sales leads are the wrong goal. Isn’t my number one goal as a marketer to provide qualified leads to Sales? David’s most compelling argument is that he has seen content downloads multiply by as much as a factor of 50 when a registration form was taken off. I don’t know that I could ever take down every form on my website, but it is worth a shot on an eBook or two, just as a test.
The last part of the eBook focuses on how organizations should create a social media policy for its employees. At ReachForce we are very open to allowing all employees to participate in social media, but if you are trying to create your own social media guidelines, David gives some great tips.
Helpful hint: if you are strapped for time you can probably skip pages 16-21. And if you really don’t have time to read this eBook at all, let me leave you with David’s main point: The biggest requirement is that you change your behavior, so let me remind you of the most important strategies for successful marketing in a world of social media:
- Stop obsessing over the old measurements of sales leads and marketing ROI.
- Make your valuable online content free and registration-less.
- Give away lots of good information (videos, photos, data, graphs, audio, blogs, e-books, and the like) to enthusiastic or curious people interested in your products and services.
- Encourage an organizational culture of sharing.
Jump Start 2009 Marketing Programs, Now - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #233
Wednesday, May 6th, 2009Ready, Set, Go! It’s a short year, 8 months to go and 12 months of results to deliver.
Planning since last Fall has been a challenge, chances are you’ve been holding off (or have ratcheted down) on your spending hoping the bad news would stop and you would be able to get to work as normal. Well it looks like that time has come. The economy seems to be coming back and now you’ve got to make up for lost time. Here’s a few ideas to jumpstart your lead generation initiatives:
- Check out those web logs or unknown visitor reports, this is a great opportunity for you to start reaching out to companies who have already been checking you out. Once you’ve identified the companies, make sure you have the right targeted leads to market to. This is key to your program success.
- Think and be positive/upbeat — get new content (that’s not talking about the recession). Make sure it’s everywhere – your social networks, your website, as a possible link in your email signatures, offered on your blog, your email programs and don’t forget to share it with your customers, this could be used in the introduction you need help with.
- Dust off your old whitepapers, add some images and turn them into a new eBook. Use this refreshed content for your nurture marketing and email programs.
- Put together a news release schedule, remember to include your keywords. Press drives website visitors. Make sure you have your Google Alerts set up so you know when someone picks up your news and don’t forget to check those weblogs and unknown visitor reports so you can market back to those checking you out.
- Don’t forget your customers, they are your greatest asset. Talk to them. Ask them what they need from you. Ask them how you can better deliver your product or service and don’t forget to ask them for a referral or two. There’s no time better than the present to kick off a customer referral program.
The point is to get the most out of what you already have, be everywhere your prospects and customers are, and stay positive.
A Role-based Website - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #231
Thursday, April 30th, 2009Here at ReachForce, we talk a lot about role-based leads, but I have never heard of a role-based website. I came across a great post by Heather Foeh on Eloqua’s Marketing Insights blog, Segmentation on Your Website. In the post, Heather shares a well segmented website, rallydev.com. They give a great user-guided experience letting you choose your role which then delivers you relevant content to fit your needs.
On our new website we also use segmentation. Instead of segmenting by role, we segment by function. We sell mainly to marketers, so we ask our visitors if they are looking to do direct marketing, event marketing or online marketing. We then deliver up a total solution as well as whitepapers and eBooks to help with continued education.
This same logic can and should be applied to other marketing vehicles like email. We segment our database by role and revenue range and send relevant content that matches the needs of each group.
6 options for searching Twitter - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #230
Tuesday, April 28th, 2009After a couple of days out of the office I’m finally catching up on my Google Reader. Mashable, one of my favorite sites, always comes through with great social media tips. Twitter is definitely getting its fair share of airtime these days so for the Twitter obsessed, here’s a couple of options for searching Twitter to find what you need or want.
6 options for searching Twitter –
- TwitterSearch – this one seems to be the most common as it is hosted by Twitter. Results show the sender’s avatar, a link to the original tweet, and a link to Twitter.com to reply…
- Twazzup - this is Twitter Search on steroids. For any given query string, you can see results down the left column that are updated in real-time.
- Tweetzi - Perhaps the best element it has that neither of the above applications do, is the ability for real-time playing and pausing. See the blue “Play” button? If you click it, you can watch your trending topic gather steam; and you can hit Pause whenever you want.
- Tweefind - If you want a basic search utility, Tweefind is it.
- Twitterseach/Zeitbase – looking for something really simple, this is it!
- Flaptor – the key difference here is an RSS link, one click and you can get an RSS link of your results.
Of course you can find screen shots and more details of each of these on Mashable. Thank you Mashable for the keeping us up-to-date and in the know on our ever changing world of social media!
Are you using any of these to help with your lead generation efforts? If so, please share.
Targeting Someone Other Than the Cs and VPs - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #229
Monday, April 27th, 2009By now you know that there is more than one person involved in a B2B buying decision. The DMU (decision making unit) typically consists of the end user, key influencers, management, a financial buyer and others that have their hands in the decision to buy or not to buy.
It’s pretty easy to find the management decision makers with just a little research, but what about the others? Here’s a few tips to help you identify and build out lead generation programs for those other than the Cs and VPs.
- Where have you been winning? This is always a good place to start. Hopefully your sales team helped you out a little here and included notes about everyone they talked to in the buying process. If so, are you able to define their roles? If not, don’t despair, you’re not alone and this is not the end of the road for you.
- Profile your best customers – talk to your best customer implementation team, talk to the sales person that sold the deal and if possible interview a few customers to better understand who all was involved in the decision to buy.
- Once you have your roles defined, do you have these people in your leads database? Remember you are matching roles, not just titles. If so, tag them with a role identity. If you’re missing roles, call ReachForce, we can help you fill in the gaps. (Sorry for the shameless promotion…sometimes it just happens…)
- You’re finally ready to start marketing to these people. You are now able to build out very targeted programs focusing on key influencer and end user issues. Here’s an example –
- Nurture – not all buyers are ready to buy at the same time so be sure you are nurturing all of your prospects as well as those involved in a sales cycle. Here’s a few ideas for offers for your nurturing programs -
- Email analyst reports supporting the pain and possible solutions
- Email customer case studies
- Invite to webcasts
- Be sure to share any new content you roll out (whitepapers, eBooks, etc.)
For best results, I recommend you engage with your sales team before launching your newly segmented programs and ensure they are onboard to provide guidance and feedback throughout the process. To execute a healthy, ROI generating program it’s important to map out each step of the building process taking into consideration budget, timing and appropriate follow up. Here’s a template if you need help.
