Client Spotlight | Thought Leadership | Don't Take Our Word For It


Best practice information from Marketing, Advertising & Public Relations experts across the country.

This issue:
Why Most B2B Websites Fail To Convert Sales Leads
What Google Wants
Organic vs. Pay-Per-Click
B-to-b online Marketing Spending on an Upswing

Why Most B2B Websites Fail To Convert Sales Leads
By Brian Carroll
Most people who come to your web site aren't coming there to buy anything. Rather, they come to your site for information. With that fact in mind, perhaps you should ask yourself: "Do I have my web site's good content under lock and key?"

Research Shows...
Research from MarketingSherpa (8/10/2005) shows that if you require visitors to register on your website before they are allowed to download content, such as articles, white papers, studies, or other "free" resources, you could be losing 75 to 85 percent of your potential leads!

Prior to the Internet, sales often consisted of a series of face-to-face meetings, during which the service provider and the prospect shared information. The prospect told the provider about a business problem that needed to be solved. The provider was frequently able to give the prospect valuable information about a possible solution. In this kind of exchange, the provider became a trusted advisor. As such, he or she usually got the sale.

In the Internet age, businesses who have valuable information often have fewer opportunities to share it with prospects, because prospects do much of their purchasing research online, instead of meeting face to face with providers.

A recent press release announced a study completed by the Nielsen Norman Group, which also supports this finding. According to their study, the practice of making users register before providing them with deeper information will send sales prospects running. When you have a chance to offer "something for nothing" and perhaps become a trusted advisor, why would you want to "charge" a prospect for your knowledge in the form of a registration?

Rethinking Your Strategy
You'll do better by thinking of lead generation as a process of micro-conversions that slowly build a prospect profile over time. Perhaps you request an email address after your first contact, then later ask for first and last name, and eventually request a phone number, and so on. Again, the statistics show that trying to get too much information too soon simply scares people away.

Almost every company has at least some decent content for leads who are in the later stages of their buying process, including brochures, case studies, success stories, sell sheets, etc. Why not offer some of this content to the solution shopper who is hungry for it? Does it not seem likely that the shopper might include you on their short list of potential providers if your information is informative?

Make your content easy to find and easy to access; you may make friends who will become clients. Your thought-leading content can be a valuable lead generation tool. When prospects contact you, be sure to ask them how and where they learned about you. You might be surprised at how many tell you they appreciated the free information on your web site.

The Early Bird Gets The Client
The key is to reach people as early in their buying process as possible. When they come to you on the web, it's a great opportunity to offer them some valuable content for free - no strings attached. When you reach them early and offer them something of value, you can be more influential. This is certainly better than waiting until they are late in the buying process and narrowing their short list.

What most companies fail to do is offer free, thought-leading content that addresses the needs of people who are in the early stages of making a purchase decision. KnowledgeStorm made this same point in their recent report on evaluating and scoring web leads. Despite recent data, advice, and studies to the contrary, many websites with
good, relevant content lock it up behind registration pages or other barriers. This is the equivalent of shooting oneself in the foot.

What Google Wants
by Steve Phillips, Purple Trout SEO
It's the 64 million dollar question: "What Does Google Want?"

No one really knows. Afterall, Google considers more than 100 different elements in its search engine ranking algorithm.

However, you'll go far if you focus your SEO energy on these five areas:

1. Keywords
Research and use the best possible keywords in your website. Use researching tools such as Wordtracker and, yes, study your competition. What keywords are they focusing on?

2. Write Good Copy
You don't need to completely redesign your website (unless it's in Flash or Frames), but develop some good content for your site's pages. Use those good keywords that you've researched in Step No. 1 above.

3. Write Fresh Content
Don't just let your website sit there and get stale. Write fresh content about your products, services, staff. Publish your press releases and company information. Write industry articles. Search engine spiders love fresh content. Feed them!

4. Create Backlinks
Although this takes time, it's worth it. Developing a link building program goes hand-in-hand with getting your site ranked higher in Google and other search engines. Backlinks are one-way links from other websites and Directories pointing to your website.

5. Create a SiteMap
Not only is this good for visitors to your website, but search engine spiders like it as well. It helps them find all of the pages in your website.
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Organic vs. Pay-Per-Click
Steve Phillips, Purple Trout SEO
Some interesting stats when considering organic search engine optimization vs. a Pay-Per-Click campaign:

Top 10 Email Marketing Must-Dos
By Jim Herbold, Sales VP of EmailLabs

1. Get relevant—dive into personalization and segmentation
The greatest capabilities of email marketing technology -- segmentation and personalization -- are likely the most underutilized by most companies. Your emails are competing for attention with an increasing number of messages in your subscribers' inboxes. The emails that resonate most, through personalized subject lines, offers, articles, products showcased and follow-up emails based on recipient activity, will be the clear winners. It is crucial that you begin this process, even if it is simply personalizing the content of the subject line or sending modified emails to several
different segments of your list. Once the process is started, you can then work toward the promised land of dynamic content and lifecycle-based messaging.

2. Resolve or minimize deliverability and rendering issues
Always send pre-campaign test messages to uncover delivery problems before sending the actual message to recipients, and then monitor results after each message to spot potential ISP blocking, filtering and blacklisting. Test your email messages in different email clients (Outlook, Lotus Notes, AOL, and web clients like Hotmail/MSN, Gmail and Yahoo) and platforms (PC and Macintosh) and correct problems. Establish authenticity as an email sender by publishing SPF code in your DNS record.

3. Redesign email messages for the inbox and for users who view them in the
preview pane and block images
Redesign your emails to render properly and be easily read and acted on in a world of preview panes and blocked images. In 2006 Yahoo Mail and Hotmail will add preview panes to their web-based clients, adding to the significant usage of preview panes by Outlook and Lotus Notes users. Also, redo your message templates to deliver maximum information in the top two to four inches and increase creative use of HTML fonts and colors, while relying less on the use of images that ISPs or recipients' email clients might block.

4. Optimize the beginning of the email relationship
Focus special attention on the beginning of the email relationship, because the most significant decline in email performance comes two months after recipients opt in. Engage your new subscribers immediately with an organized program that includes a welcome message sent out upon confirmation, followed by the current newsletter or promotion, and emails offering a set of best-of newsletter articles or an email-exclusive offer just for newcomers. Lastly, make sure you manage subscribers' expectations from the start by adequately explaining the email program's value proposition, frequency, type of content and privacy policies.

5. Get on the permission train
Review your permission practices across your company's websites and at all customer-contact points within the company. Convert any opt-out address collection (loading a subscription form with a checked box or sales offers emailed to prospects without permission) to opt-in. While not required by the CAN-SPAM Act, permission-based email has become the standard practice in the industry. Companies that send unsolicited email risk damaging their brand and losing customers.

6. Focus on metrics that matter
Quit worrying about process-oriented metrics such as open and clickthrough rates. Email marketers need to focus more on their end goals by tracking conversion rates, revenue per email, whether specific desired actions were taken, et cetera. Newsletter publishers need to drill down and track which type of articles and format style motivate subscribers to click through to read more, and then adjust content and formats accordingly. Use open and click rates as indicators of trends and possible delivery and rendering issues rather than as stand-alone measures of program success.

7. Take better care of your long-term subscribers
EmailLabs estimates that 30 to 50 percent of a company's email list may be inactive, meaning that subscribers have not opened or clicked on a link over a reasonable series of messages or time period. Marketers need to wake up these dormant subscribers by trying different subject lines, frequency of mailings and new formats, sending them special offers or best-of newsletters, surveying them, and getting them to update their demographic, preference and interest profiles. Analyze these "inactives" to uncover
potential trends such as how they opted in (sweepstakes offer, free whitepaper, et cetera) and their demographic profiles.

8. Maximize search with email
Search is now a dominant means to acquire customers and leads, but if you don't integrate your email programs with your search efforts then you are throwing search engine marketing dollars in the trash. Include an email offer as a secondary objective on the landing page. Invite visitors to opt in to a newsletter, download a whitepaper or try a product/service demo if they don't want to buy or take other desired actions. Then, use email to move your subscribers along the sales lifecycle.

9. Test, test, test and improve
Things move and change quickly in email marketing. What works for a competitor or worked for you six months ago might not work today. Companies need to test variables continuously, including format, design, copy style and calls to action, subject line approach and offers, personalization, content types or product categories and more. Start with simple A/B split tests, and repeat the test at least a few times to verify results.

10. Create an email marketing plan and align resources
Do you have an actual email marketing plan with specific goals, success metrics and action steps outlined? Because email marketing is still so new to many organizations, budget and resources for the channel are often not in line with the opportunity and potential ROI. Develop a plan that clearly demonstrates to management the value and ROI of a strategic and well-run email marketing program. Make sure your plan includes enough budget and resources to enable significant improvement in ROI through increased personalization and segmentation, better deliverability, continuous testing, analysis and improvement and use of advanced technology. To sum this all up, yes, it's a long list, and it probably looks pretty intimidating if you haven't developed your email program beyond batch-and-blast. But remember that a profitable email-marketing program can't be developed overnight. You can't fix an underperforming program overnight, either.
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B-to-b online Marketing Spending on an Upswing
Sep 20, 2006 – New York – B-to-B marketers’ online budgets for the second half of the year are growing at a healthy clip, according to anecdotal evidence from a handful of marketer panelists at BtoB’s NetMarketing Breakfast Wednesday.

Panelists from IBM Corp., KnowledgeStorm and Raymond Corp. said their marketing budgets for the second half have increased and that the additional money is being invested in online marketing, including search and podcasts.

Sher Taton, senior manager-global interactive at IBM, said she received a 30% increase in her budget after appealing to upper management for additional dollars. “We should have a sizable increase next year as well,” Taton said.

Kevin Trenga, manager-marketing communications at Raymond Corp. a manufacturer of electric forklifts and forklift trucks, said his increased budget will be put towards an integrated content management system and an upgrade of the company’s 5-year-old Web site, including search engine optimization.

KnowledgeStorm Exec VP Jeff Ramminger said his company is focusing on search marketing investments.

Paul Dunay, director-global financial services marketing at BearingPoint, said his company’s interactive budget is holding steady. He said the company is continuing to focus on leveraging blogs, podcasting, videocasting and viral marketing techniques for lead generation.

The comments are in stark contrast to an announcement from online giant Yahoo! on Tuesday that online spending has slowed, a trend the search engine said would affect both branded and search advertising.
—Carol Krol
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