For our 200th Tip here on The B2B Lead we decided to do a survey to see what you want to talk about these days.  Our goal was to see what our readers are challenged with in these trying times and get an idea of what’s working right now in the B2B marketing world.  Thanks to everyone who has participated in the survey.  If you haven’t taken the survey, you should, we’re sending the results to everyone who takes it and you want to know what your peers are doing, right?

The last question on the survey asks what you [the survey taker] what you would like to ask our audience.  With over 100 responses, we’re already noticing some really interesting trends.  The 2 most asked about subjects from the last question aren’t big surprises though – social media and marketing program metrics.

Since we’re stacking up a good number of questions people are searching for answers to, I thought we’d go ahead and start talking about these.  Below are a few of the questions from our survey, please jump in and share your thoughts.

Social Media –

• Are social networking sites really that helpful for B2B?

• What are the metrics and things corporate marketing can do with social media?

• If your company doesn’t support the use of social media (to promote the business) how have you overcome those objections?

• Do you get returns on podcasting? What is the breakdown for your marketing plan among the social media tools for Blogging, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Podcasting, Flickr, StumbleUpon, Digg & Plaxo?

Marketing Metrics –

• How are they calculating revenue attribution back to campaigns?

• What trends are you seeing in email response rates? I’m seeing a big problem with increasingly aggressive spam filters and policies trapping marketing emails.

• What metrics do you track to measure overall success of your program?

• How are your google ppc campaigns going?

And the question I’m most interested in…
What has been working for you in the first few weeks of this year?

P.S.  Here’s the tiny URL, http://tinyurl.com/B2BMarketingSurvey, please forward to any other B2B Marketers out there.  After all, the more responses we get, the better the results.

I’m not a marketing or sales guy per se so please help me understand something here.

As the classic saying goes, “I know at least half of my data is bad…I just don’t know which half”.
Marketing Sherpa tells us that contact data degrades at a rate of 2.1% per month (and it’s probably gone up  substantially given the current rate of job loss), it’s easy to see how this is essentially a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Having said all that, does it matter you could be sitting on piles of dirty data?

Contact data cleanup seems to experience a run-up of demand at the end of the year when marketers have just enough budget to burn on something small to mid-sized but not enough to do anything substantial with.  Or at least this is what we saw. In fact, we cleaned up some of our own CRM data in December as well.

But come the turn of the new year and new budget, the psychology of “new” is the all the rage.  Sales reps are innately in perpetual want for new leads, but as we say around here, it seems most marketing and sales teams would rather keep building new add-on rooms to their houses than spend the money to fix the basement that is flooded with sewage.

So what is the psychology behind using what you have vs. buying something new?  Is it simply fueled by an unquenchable thirst for “new, new, new” (and the perception thereof)?  Or do you have a more systematic approach to if and when you elect to use what you have vs. buy new stuff?

Is it the same mentality of buying something that is on sale even if you don’t really need it?

I just don’t get it.

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.

Is it better to have a lot of social bookmark icons on your blog, or ones that are relevant to your space? I have heard (and seen) different opinions on this. What do you think?

I personally think you only need to have ones on your blog that are relevant to your audience.  So how do you going about finding these?

I don’t know if there is an easy way, or if it depends on what you are looking for, but I used sites like Social Poster to look up social bookmarks.  Then, I went through them individually and searched “marketing” to see if there was anything. That’s how I made the decision of what is on this blog as of now.

Any ideas or know where to find other applications like this to help B2B Marketers?

We’re currently conducting a survey of B2B Marketers inquiring about how the economic downturn has impacted their budgets and activities.  As part of this survey, we’re also probing for what types of social media activities are being tested by these Marketers.  Some of the results are not surprising (blogging), but there are a few surprises (which you’ll have to wait until we publish the final report to find out about).  Some B2B companies are experiencing or interpreting success with their company blogs and even Twitter participation.  The latter is of particular interest, especially since finding a way to monetize corporate participation on Twitter appears to be a leading candidate for Twitter’s “how do we make money off this” strategy.

As most of what I see on Twitter (and even blogs) seems to be people mass-emailing the types of random, quippy things that we used to put up on our Yahoo Messenger status, the true relevance of content circulating about Twitter falls into a fairly classic signal-to-noise ratio problem as depicted below.  However, as the Post Office makes it increasingly less attractive to do direct mail marketing and technology makes it more difficult to do email marketing, it will be interesting to see how those who Twitter on their employer’s behalf will fare in their experimentation with this.  Done craftily, I could see CRM systems build on top of Twitter, similar to what this company is doing.  Those who don’t grok it so well will unleash upon us a brand new epoch of spam….several times a day, 140 characters at a time.

Jason Morio, VP of Products at ReachForce

I’m the resident technologist and product “strategery” guy.  After serving an almost decade-long sentence on the chain gang of enterprise software, I have emerged reborn, abask in the glow of SaaS and web x.0.  My current musings include gazing into the crystal ball of “U.S. Economy – The Restart” and how B2B marketing is going to react and adapt to it.   You can expect postings from me covering (well, pondering, mainly) B2B marketing applications of social media and that fountain of eternal vitality that seems to write its own material these days: venture capital.  All postings served with a sprig of controversy, a twinge of east coast humor and an occasional dash of psychedelia.

Now with the 9th and final installment discussing Customer Experience Indexing (CEI™) as a way to measure, plan and act on customer feedback.  (#1) (#2) (#3) (#4) (#5) (#6) (#7) (#8)

CEI is a metrics-based way to drive revenue growth from customers you have, those you’ve lost and one’s you’ve yet to win. In drops 1-8 we’ve given CEI use cases for:

• An expanded Net Promoter-type way to calculate and measure satisfaction + prompted + unprompted customer advocacy
• Applying metrics for better account-by-account management planning
• Building lenses for better strategies and tactics for up-selling, cross-selling and renewals.
• Using metrics for Reference Account Management and sorting a top 10 list of best customer references, and why.

Last week’s rant aside, I heard some heartwarming feedback during my phone rounds last week on Reference Account Management. Sorting a top-10 list using the aforementioned steps is great way to have a constantly regenerated, rules based index of advocates who are not only loyal for reasons intangible, but are also qualified “satisfactioneers” from a statistical lens measuring service fundamentals such as quality function, value, basic expectations, length and frequency of engagement. And as you are able, you can even create sub lists for different verticals, channels, etc. for more precise matching of current prospects with current customers who can and want to help you win deals.

Taking this one step further, what if you took all of the companies on your top-20 RAM list and created a rules based profile that paints the picture of what a perfect opportunity looks like for your sales team? No guessing! If you find and start prospecting companies who match up with your most loyal and satisfied customers you’re not only communicating where your message is most likely to resonate, you’re also creating mindshare and giving your company a strategic messaging and positioning edge segment by segment (directly relating to where you have the most traction). Look at this as a snapshot of your winning market segments and the activities that contributed to these wins, thus arming Marketing and Sales teams with the road map to further success.

Is this a shameless plug for ReachForce’s Insight SaaS? Yes it is. But it’s still a golden opportunity to ask and answer the following:

1. Are you marketing to the right companies and what rules do you use to make this determination?
2. Are there trends in your sales funnel that you are not capitalizing on?
3. What kinds of leads move through the sales funnel the fastest and generate the most revenue?
4. Can you look into their sales funnel and identify current trends. By analyzing opportunities in the sales funnel in real time, marketers are able to adjust programs on-the-fly to help keep deals moving to close.

These are all questions marketers ask themselves as they are developing lead generation programs. And by combining CEI metrics with applications such as ReachForce Insight, marketing and sales teams can finally agree on winning target markets and focus lead generation efforts at other companies that match the same profile.

A website redesign/overhaul can be a daunting task but, for some, a necessary one.  One of the first steps, from an SEO perspective, is to define your target list of keywords to use when optimizing your site for search.  I have heard recommendations of having anywhere from 300 to 500 keyword on your list.  Keep in mind you will optimize each page of your site for only 2-5 keywords.

Here is a list of the top keyword research tools you may want to use:

Keyword Discovery – According to their web site, Keyword Discovery has a database that tracks over 36 billion searches from 200 search engines worldwide over the last 12 months, including seasonal trends over this time period.  This tool is useful in building keyword lists, overall campaign planning and competitive research.

Price: Standard – $69.95 monthly/$599.40 annually; Enterprise – $495 monthly/$4455 annually.  They offer a free trial with limited functionality.

Wordtracker – Wordtracker helps website owners and search engine marketers identify keywords and phrases that are relevant to their or their client’s business and most likely to be used as queries by search engine visitors.  Marketers can also determine how many competing sites are using those keywords and can identify the phrases that have the greatest traffic potential.  Wordtracker periodically compiles a database of over 330 million search terms which is updated on a weekly basis. All search terms are collected from the major metacrawlers – Dogpile and Metacrawler.

Price: $59 monthly/ $329 annually.  They offer a 7-day free trial.

Wordze – With a database of about 552 million keywords and 68 million unique search terms, Wordze is a great tool for building keyword lists.  But it is also valuable as a tool to assist in creating SEO strategies, as it provides analysis on competing sites on specific search terms.

Price: $38.98 monthly, $7.95 1-day trial

Google AdWords Keyword Tool – If you are running (or plan on running) a Google Adwords campaign, then this tool is critical to your sucess. One can only guess the size of the database (all of Google?) and how frequently it is updated, but it is excellent at showing you what a site looks like according to the Google spiders.  While a free tool, it does not lack in features.

Price: Free

KeywordSpy – KeywordSpy offers analytics to study competitors’ tactics as well as monitor their online search campaigns.  According to their website, their database includes over one billion keywords.  Best used for competitive research.

Price: monthly subscription from $89.95 – $139.95.  They offer a free trial with limited functionality.

SEMRush – SEMRush uses 25 million of the most popular and expensive keywords to collect Google search results. SEMRush can show you keywords for any domain ranked high enough to be in top 20 search results results or that purchases AdWords.  It helps you to keep track of your competitors, uncover your competitors’ organic and AdWords’ keywords, find their landing pages, discover your own long-tail keywords, and check Google rankings of any site.

Price: monthly subscriptions from $19.95 – $499.95.  Free version available with limited functionality and only 10 queries per day.

SEO Book’s Keyword Tool – This keyword tool is powered by Wordtracker’s API. You can explore more keywords by subscribing to their powerful keyword research tools.  Offers rough suggested daily search volumes by market for Google, Yahoo!, and MSN.  Provides links to price estimate tools from Google AdWords.  Links to various vertical databases like Topix.net, Google Blogsearch, and Del.icio.us to let you know if people are talking about your topic and what types of resources they are referencing.  Is driven off the Wordtracker keyword suggestion tool. If you sign up for a Wordtracker account they offer many additional keyword research features and tools that are lacking in our basic keyword tool.

Price: Free

SpyFu – The SpyFu database can point to which sites and advertisers rank highly for any given keyword phrase.  They can also indicate advertising trends, including Top 500 Advertisers, Top 500 Organically Ranked Domains, Top 500 Most Clicked Terms, Top 1000 Most Expensive Keywords.  Best for competitive research.

Price: $38.50 monthly.  Free registration for basic features.

Google Insights for Search – Insights can help you determine which messages resonate best, determine seasonality, create brand associations, and determine a new market.  Google Insights for Search analyzes a portion of worldwide Google web searches from all Google domains to compute how many searches have been done for the terms you’ve entered, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. It then shows you a graph with the results, indicating interest over time, plotted on a scale from 0 to 100; the totals are indicated next to bars by the search terms.  Keep in mind it was created for advertisers.

Price: Free, need to have a Google account

HubSpot Inbound Marketing System’s Keyword Grader – This is what I use.  You import your list of keywords (or type them in one by one) and it shows you how many monthly searches that term gets, how difficult it is to rank for that term, your website’s current rank and the cost per click.  Once you have had your tracking scripts on your website it will also show you how many visits you are getting from each keyword.  There is also a competitors view to see how you compare on each term vs. each competitor.  HubSpot actually does A LOT more than this so I didn’t originally include them in the list but since it is what I use I thought I should add them on.

Price: $250 monthly subscription (mostly for business owners) or $500 monthly subscription for closed loop marketing analytics and salesforce.com integration

Stay tuned over the next few weeks for more website redesign tips.

It’s a big day for us here on The B2B Lead.  Today we’re bringing you our 200th B2B Marketing and Sales Tip…well, kind of.  Instead of a tip per se we’d like you to participate in a survey about how your life as a B2B Marketer has changed in this new economy.

This will help us bring you relevant tips and tricks as well as provide you some insight on what your peers are doing.  Also, if you participate, we’ll send you a copy of the survey results.  You want to make sure you are keeping up, right?  Take this 8 question survey and pass it on to your fellow marketers.  There’s value in it for all of us.

Here’s a tiny url to make it easier to pass along: http://tinyurl.com/B2BMarketingSurvey

Thanks for playing along.

By now, we are all tired of hearing how the world is coming to an end.  The financial markets are down, companies are struggling and people are losing their jobs every time we turn around – times are hard and we’re all suffering.  But quite frankly, we’re tired of talking about it.  So instead, this month we’re focused on all around best practices that we should all be applying in any economy.

Optimizing your marketing mix for success – are you doing it?  If so, how’s it working for you?

As marketers, we have a lot of options for reaching our audience.  We use some for overall awareness and others for one-to-one contact with our customers, prospects, media contacts, etc.  And in most cases, we are building programs using a variety of tactics to get our desired outcomes.  Here at ReachForce, we categorize tactics into two buckets – air wars and ground attacks.

Air wars are things like PR, social media, and SEO.  All necessary but can be difficult to measure real ROI.  Ground attacks are direct one-to-one initiatives, things like email programs, webinars, and targeted live events.  You have to have both to get the results you really want.

We’re going to be exploring the following questions over the next few weeks on The B2B Lead, be sure to check back in.

• So how do you decide what combination of activities is driving the most value for your business and your audience?
• Are you just spinning the wheel of luck and hoping it lands on new customers?
• How are you measuring your programs for success?
• When do you decide a tactic isn’t working and you need to cut it out of the mix?
• How often are you adding new tools and tactics that help you drive ROI from your efforts?
• Is there a specific combination of activities that work with specific audiences?