Authenticity still matters in B2B social media marketing
May 22nd, 2013
When it comes to business use of social media there are two types of players: organisations and individuals. Organisations and individuals should both approach social media as authentically as possible. While I’m aware the word “authenticity” has been thrown around a great deal by social media experts, almost to the point where it has lost all meaning, the truth is authenticity matters. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted By: Martin Broadhurst
Data mining B2B website analytics for increased leads and sales
May 20th, 2013
Data. That’s what everybody is talking about. Not just any old bit of data either. No, the data that people are talking about is big and complex data. Do a Google news search for articles mentioning big data from the last 24 hours and you will get over 10 pages of results, but the big opportunity for many B2B firms remains in small data such as website analytics. This blog focuses on those opportunities and how B2B firms can mine that data for quick wins and increased lead conversions.
Landing page metrics
In front of every great piece of B2B marketing content sits a data capture form waiting to be filled in. It is the landing page that turns an ordinary brochure website into a lead generating marketing asset. With that in mind, you need to consider the following metrics when reviewing your landing page performance.
- Call-to-action click-through rate: A landing page is only effective when people actually land on it. As such, you need to make sure the pathways to the landing page, i.e. your calls-to-action, are actually driving people to the landing page in the first place.
- Visitors-to-lead conversion: A landing page that gets 1,000 hits a month but only converts in to 1 new lead a month would politely be referred to as under-performing. Monitoring your visitor-to-lead conversion rather than simply the landing page traffic is vital if you are to be able to optimise your landing pages for lead generation.
Search engine optimisation metrics
One of the key goals of your ongoing digital marketing efforts should be to increase traffic to your website from organic search and to improve your search rankings for targeted keywords to get closer to that no. 1 spot. Along the way there are various different factors that you’ll want to measure in order to be able to measure your progression.
- Organic search traffic: The most simple and fundamental of all the SEO metrics you should be measuring is, quite simply, the increase in organic search traffic over time. Did you get more people arriving on your website through organic search this month compared to last month? If so, well done. You’re doing something right.
- Unique search terms: Aligned to the above metrics is the unique search terms through which you are being found. Are these terms increasing? Are you being found for more long-tail keywords than you previously were? Your ongoing blogging efforts should help build more long-tail keyword traffic over time.
- Inbound links: Despite the importance of inbound links slowly diminishing as search engines continue to refine their algorithms, they do still play an important role in determining search engine rankings. They also help you find out if you’re doing something right insofar as if people are sharing and linking to your website, your content is probably well received.
Business blogging metrics
More often than not it is only when data is analysed that marketing directors and chief executives begin to take the company blog seriously. A well maintained corporate blog is often unrivaled as a means to growing brand reach, increasing website traffic and generating new leads. To ensure your blog is delivering on these promises, monitor the following stats.
- Individual post views: Regularly checking the page performance of your blog posts is essential to finding patterns to help steer your content and help drive new leads. Why so? Because that blog post you published three months ago that still gets 50 hits per day could become a valuable source of new leads if you put the right call-to-action and content offer on there.
- Blog traffic sources: If your content is resonating with your desired audience it will likely be shared into online communities that you didn’t even know existed. Monitor the sources of traffic and try to identify potential websites that you could be engaging with better to grow your presence.
- Visitor-to-lead conversion rates: Blogging with the purpose of generating new leads requires that you monitor the sources of your new leads. After all, you want to know the people coming to your blog are the people you want to sell to. See which blogs are converting the the most visitors-to-leads, or, at the very least, which are providing the most click-throughs on your calls-to-action. Use this information and produce similar content in future.
Posted By: Martin Broadhurst
Sales & marketing: Avoiding the break-up
May 17th, 2013
The divide between sales and marketing teams can pose a major obstacle to lead generation. As is often the case in unhappy marriages, a breakdown in communication is often to blame with the two parties unable to reconcile the differences in their priorities and metrics. In many cases they’re talking different languages, add to that a lack of clarity and you have the perfect recipe for the inevitable mistrust and finger-pointing that ensues…and a relationship beyond repair. So, what can be done to get things back on track and lay the foundations for a loving, long lasting union? Well, a step change in marketing methodology can help:
To have and to hold
Buyer behaviour has changed and so it’s time to adapt, sales and marketing teams have the opportunity to change and integrate their approach. What Forrester describe as the new interaction model of ‘need-match-engage’ demands that sales and marketing teams work more closely together to respond effectively when buyers initiate interactions, engaging them with the brand when they are researching suppliers with a view to converting this initial interest into a warm lead. This is where inbound marketing can help.
From this day forward
Inbound marketing offers many opportunities for sales and marketing teams to work closely together from the off, day in day out. For example, who better for the marketing team to speak to when developing buyer personas than the sales team. In speaking to prospects on a daily basis, sales teams can provide invaluable intelligence to build profiles, understand ‘pain points’ and identify marketing preferences. Further, this can be invaluable in informing keyword research and developing engaging content.
For better, for worse
When it comes to leads, quality should always win out over quantity. Five great leads or 100 rubbish ones? It’s your choice but through techniques such as lead nurturing, the inbound marketing methodology focuses on moving prospects carefully through the sales funnel and delivering results in less time than a sales team can achieve through chasing tepid, low converting leads.
For richer, for poorer
Inbound marketing facilitates greater transparency between sales and marketing teams. For example, in producing sales ready leads, a more formal handoff can be established. This could extend to an SLA which defines expectations and sets out the responsibilities for everyone involved (Let’s call it the ‘Pre nup’) e.g. marketing get a target volume of warm leads to be generated each month whilst this also sets out a plan for sales on how to follow up those leads. And the benefit? According to HubSpot’s 2013 State of Inbound Marketing, the average cost per lead for companies with such a process in place generate leads at around 50% of the cost of those that don’t.
In sickness and in health
Is your database in good health? Aspects of inbound such as marketing automation help to deliver quality leads more efficiently and will also force an honest assessment of existing data. Again, it’s another opportunity for sales and marketing to work together to lay down the criteria for where the business should be focussing its attention. This might sound painful but happier times are around the corner in the form of a better bottom line.
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Posted By: Neil Perrott
Google I/O: What you need to know
May 16th, 2013
What a difference a year makes. In 2012, the Google I/O focused heavily on hardware: from the skydiving sequence introducing Google Glass to the launch of the Nexus Q and Nexus 7 devices, it was clear Google was looking to sell products. This year’s keynote set a very different tone and I had a lot of fun geeking out following the news while sat in the pub last night.
Posted By: Martin Broadhurst
What is inbound marketing? Get found, engage, convert, analyse.
May 14th, 2013
“The process of helping potential customers find your company – often before they are even looking to make a purchase – and then turning that early awareness into brand preference and, ultimately, into leads and revenue.” – Jon Miller, VP Marketing at Marketo
Inbound marketing is a marketing methodology that uses content to position your company as an authority on a topic as early as possible during the buyer decision-making process. By providing invaluable content that answers your ideal clients most pertinent questions you can increase your visibility in search, build trust in your brand and, most importantly, start generating online leads.
Understand your buyers
In order to be able to create content that speaks to your desired audience you must first understand what your customers’ pain points are. What problems can your company solve for them? The best way of answering this question is to create a buyer persona. Buyer personas are fictional representations of your ideal customers and by going through the process of creating a buyer persona you will be better positioned to answer their most pressing problems by through informative and engaging content. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted By: Martin Broadhurst
Must have features for your B2B website
May 1st, 2013
There are some essential features that your website will need to incorporate in order to take advantage of all the different tactics involved in B2B digital marketing. Most visitors to your website will not be ready to make a purchase at the time they visit; instead, they will be seeking out solutions to their problems or comparing your services against the competition. Your job is to ensure those visitors engage with your organisation and enter your marketing funnel to ensure a deeper dialogue with them can take place.
In order to do that, your website must have the following features:
Calls-to-action
These are the visual aids that will help guide your visitors to the areas you want them to visit. They help to signpost your visitors towards your offers and closer to a point where they will exchange some useful data with you. Make them bold, snappy and compelling so that your visitors simply have to take up your wonderful, generous offer.
Landing pages
These are your conversion hotspots and should be designed with the single goal of converting website visitors in to leads. Your landing pages you will need to have some data capture, a headline that sells your offers, body copy that reinforces your message and an image that shows what people will be getting. It’s important that your process is seamless, so consider investing in some marketing automation software to ensure your follow-up process, CRM and website analytics are joined up to provide high quality insights into your website visitor and lead behaviour.
Analytics
While this might sound exceedingly obvious, having a good analytics package on your website is vital. That is only half of the story though as a good analytics package is only useful if it is regularly used. Create some benchmarks for your website, look at your organic search traffic and find ways to optimise your content to increase your visibility for long tail keywords. I’ll a write a more detailed blog post on this in the near future.
Blog
When something is important you will find time to do it. It’s very rare that you will find a business who doesn’t rank chasing debts as an important task for their organisation so when blogs are so effective at increasing reach and visibility, why is it that marketing departments still struggle to find time to blog regularly? With pageviews, bounce rates and ranking opportunities being so important for marketing managers these days, it really is essential to have an active blog.
Social Media
Being able to keep a conversation open with your website visitors, leads and prospects via social media is important, right? Well, if it is so important, you have to make sure your social media profiles can easily be found. Add links to your social media profiles and use your social media profiles to share your blogs and links to your landing pages. Maybe I’m teaching Grandma to suck eggs by saying that but I see too many B2B firms tweeting nothing but pleasantries and product pages.
By Martin Broadhurst
Posted By: Martin Broadhurst
Seven steps to ensure your B2B website goes completely unnoticed
April 26th, 2013
In contrast to our usual helpful and informative selves, we thought we’d put a slightly different spin on things for this post. Read on and you will learn how to fall into the key traps of B2B website development thereby ensuring that you fail to attract the attention of customers and prospects alike.
1. When developing a website that is destined to perform poorly, it’s important to get everything wrong from the outset so let’s start with the brief. Key to this part of the process is avoiding the use of phrases such as lead generation, conversion and return-on-investment. This is important as the best briefs for websites that deliver little or no impact, unsurprisingly, avoid clear objectives and meaningful metrics from the off.
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Posted By: Neil Perrott
Inbound marketing for reducing costs
April 22nd, 2013
Inbound marketing can be a way of reducing costs within your business. Read on to find out how…
Reduced cost-per-lead
In the State of Inbound Marketing 2012, it was found that the average cost-per-lead for inbound marketing stood at $135 compared to $346 for outbound leads.
The report also found that blogging, social media and SEO produced a below average cost-per-lead among more respondents than for direct mail, telemarketing, PPC or trade shows.
Save time with marketing automation – Acquisio case study
Before Acquisio implemented marketing automation methodology, leads were typically gathered at trade shows and then passed to sales with no lead nurturing, relationship marketing or lead qualification carried out first. This resulted in a lot of wasted time as sales teams spoke to leads who weren’t ready to buy or had to sift through the data in order to pre-qualify the leads.
This changed once marketing automation was implemented. By using marketing automation, Acquisio was able to cut lead qualification costs by 50% and reduce the time between lead generation and initial contact by more than 90%. This second detail is particularly important as sales studies show that 35-50% of sales go to the supplier that responds first.
Identify under-performing paid media spend – NSK case study
NSK, an IT consultancy based in Boston, MA, implemented HubSpot all-in-one marketing software and saved $18,000 by using the analytics tools to find out how much traffic was being directed from a sponsorship they had on another website. The data revealed that only a handful of people ever navigated to NSK’s site and Cathie Briggette, director of marketing at NSK, saw that a change was necessary.
Cathie says, “[HubSpot has] saved me a lot of guessing and marketing dollars, because now I can show anyone what we are spending that money on, and how well it works.”
Posted By: Martin Broadhurst
How to create valuable marketing offers for inbound marketing
April 19th, 2013
If you have been reading any marketing literature from the last few years you are likely to have heard the phrase “content marketers have to think like publishers.” This is simple enough if you’re a publisher but for the rest of us it can be difficult to get a grasp of what this actually means. By following these steps you can plan your content marketing with the focus on increasing your online visibility and generating more leads.
Step 1: Consider the stage for the content
Within your marketing funnel there are four stages which your potential customers will be at during some point or other. The stages are: awareness, where your potential customers become introduced to your brand; research, where your audience is looking for potential solutions to their problems; comparison, where your services are compared to the competition; and purchase, where the buyer decides who to buy from.
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Posted By: Martin Broadhurst
