By 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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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…)
4. 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 –
   
5. 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.

It seems like everyday I hear about a new social networking tool and read another article about how to increase my Twitter following or maximize my Facebook presence.  You can’t be everywhere but how in the world do you go about choosing the right networks to participate in? I have found there are 3 questions to ask myself when choosing where to spend my efforts online:

• What are these networks already talking about? - Most every social network has some sort of search tool. Plug in your keywords to see if your industry is already being talked about.  Sign up immediately and join the conversation if they are.  Don’t forget to include your Company name in the search.  Someone else may have already started the conversation about you.
• Where are your competitors? – If your competitors have a presence there, you should too. To find out where they are, go to their website or blog and look for links like “follow us on Twitter” or “join our LinkedIn Group”. You should also head to some of the post popular social networking sites and see if your competitors have created profiles/accounts/pages.  Be sure to check for activity in groups and discussion boards like in Facebook groups and in LinkedIn Answers.
• Where are your customers? – I think the best place to start is with your customers. Their activities should most closely mimic those of your prospects.  You can find out where they are by a quick survey to your customers.  Do you have a customer advisory board?  Use them to help you get started.  And there is always the hard way (not really all that hard but rather time consuming) which is to go out to different networks and search to see if your customers are already there.

Keep in mind that social networking is not right for every industry.  You definitely want to do your homework up front so you can be stategic in your social networking lead gneration.  If you feel like you are a little ahead of your time for your industry, I would start with something like LinkedIn.  It is the most professional of the networks out there and is kind of the gateway drug to other social networks.

Do 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.

For those of you conversing out in the Twittersphere on your company’s behalf, here’s a little tip to leverage your web site visitors to get the word out about you on Twitter.  Create a simple link on your home page that links to the following url:

http://twitter.com/home?status=[whatever+status+you+want]

Be sure to replace the [whatever+status+you+want] with, well, exactly that.  For example:

http://twitter.com/home?status=Checking+out+ReachForce

To be safe, you’ll want to use the “+” character in place of any spaces in your status text.  When someone clicks on your new Tweet This link, it will take them to their Twitter login page and then automatically populate the “What are you doing?” box with the text that you put after the “status=” part of the link.  Below is an example of what happens when clicking on the link above:

Now 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!

Our 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?

Are 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:

• @ahawthorne
• @LAWallace
• @ReachForce

Try 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!

I don’t share my vacation pictures with everyone I know in real life so why do it in the social world? Jason would not have shared this picture with everyone in our office but it was out of his hands.  If you believe in complete transparency online, then this is not the post for you.  For the rest of you out there, this post will help show you how to manage your Facebook profile so you share only what you want to share with each of your friends.

Step 1: Login into Facebook and click on Settings -> Privacy Settings (it is in the top right).

Step 2: Click on Profile.  From here you can control who can see what on your profile.  The default setting allows your friends and those in your network to see almost everything.  For most of us, one of our networks includes the city we live in.  This means anyone in your city can see your full profile include pictures, videos and more.  If you want to specify exactly who can and cannot see your photos for example, in the drop down menu next to Photos Tagged of You click Customize… From this pop up you can select the option Some Friends and then list each friend you want to be able to see your pictures.

Step 3: Go back to the Privacy Settings page and click on Search.  This page allows you to control who can find you via the search feature in Facebook.  It is also automatically configured to create a public profile that can be found by search engines.

Step 4: Go back to the Privacy Settings page and click on News Feed and Wall.  Here you can choose what stories are published to your news feed to be seen by your friends.  There is a second tab on this page called Social Ads.  Click there and you can choose whether or not you want to appear in social ads.  Social ads are those that pair your profile picture with an application you use or page that you are a fan of.  By default, these will only be seen by your friends.

Step 4: Go back to the Privacy Settings page and click on Applications.  The page that you will see shows how applications interact with your information.  If you click on the second tab, Settings, you can control what informaton can be seen by your friends through applications they use.

Step 5: Go back to the Privacy Settings page.  The final option available is to Block People.  I only friend people I know, so I have never had to use this feature, but it is nice to know it is there if I ever do need it.  Feels a little like a virtual restraining order.

I love that Facebook allows us to easily share pictures and what is going on in our lives.  Without Facebook, everyone wouldn’t be able to see me hanging out with David Meerman Scott.  However, I like being able to maintain some privacy online.  This guy could have avoided being called a fairy.  Would your boss be so cool?

I am sure most of you have heard of HubSpot’s Website Grader.  If you have not, it is one of the best free tools out there to help you figure out where to start your website redesign.  The basic principle behind website grader is to rate your website on a number of attributes, mostly relating to SEO, and give you ways to improve your rating. It is very easy to get started.  First, go to website.grader.com then simply enter your website, any competitor websites (this is optional) and your email.  Click generate report and you will have a full report of your website in minutes.  (Be patient; trust me it’s worth it.)

The report shows you how your website is doing in six major areas:

1. On-Page SEO
2. Off-Page SEO
3. Blogosphere
4. Social Mediasphere
5. Converting Qualified Visitors to Leads
6. Competitive Intelligence

Each category is broken down further and the report gives you a rating in each as well as advice on how to improve.  Some items are quick fixes like shortening your meta descriptions or adding your company to the Yahoo Directory.  Some things may take longer and require involvement from others in your company, like starting a blog, if you have not already.

This report may also show you that a full overhaul of your website is not necessary.  You may just need to tweak a few things.  And if you do decide a full overhaul is the way to go, make sure you know what your website is already doing well so you don’t loose it.  You never want to loose good inbound links or high keyword rankings.

Keep in mind that this is a free tool and cannot take the place of a good SEO consultant.  However, it is a great starting point to help you decide where to begin first if you are planning an overhaul of your existing site.  The great thing is you can keep coming back to see if your score is improving.