SMB Marketing Blog

I spoke with a prospect recently who was disappointed with the results they were receiving from the Google advertising they had set up and paying as much as $5 per click with little or no response.  Search advertisers make it very easy for business owners to set up a pay per click account but the costs of setting it incorrectly are not as apparent as they should be.

In today’s blog we look at the top 5 mistakes made when setting up pay per click advertising:

1. Not doing the right keyword research – Search advertisers provide research tools to find keywords to run your advertisements on, but often they suggest the highest searched keywords which have the highest competition.  Selecting these keywords also requires you to bid significantly higher for them in order to have your advertisement show up.  In most cases it is better to select keywords which have a reasonably high search volume, but lower competition, which will help to keep your bids down in the long run.
2. Not defining a daily budget – You can define a daily budget for your advertising where your advertisements stop showing after the budget is reached.  Not doing this may result in your monthly budget being reached within a week or two and your advertisements not showing for the remainder of the month.
3. Not targeting the right audience – You need to define the cities, states or countries that you want your advertising to be shown in. It doesn’t make sense for a local service provider to show advertising across the nation.  It is also important to set the time of day you want your advertisements to show (ex. Not in the middle of the night).
4. Not improving your website or landing page – If you do not get any business off your website currently, then driving more traffic using pay per click advertising does not always mean that will improve.  Your company website needs to be credible and look professional before someone will contact you from it.  Improve your landing page and add the right offers or calls to action to entice your visitor to make contact.
5. Not maintaining the advertisements regularly – There are a lot of moving parts in pay per click advertising that often get overlooked; It’s not easy enough to simply set something up and let it run.  You need to pay attention to things like: bids, keywords, ad copy, click through rate, bounce rate, quality score, etc.  It is worth the effort to run experiments and try different variations on ad copy and landing pages to see what produces the best result.

Search advertising is a very powerful medium to use when it is done right.  It can produce a good amount of business and easily pay for itself.  If you do not have the expertise or time to manage it, we recommend consulting with an expert who can help you to manage and achieve better results.

It is important to note that paid search advertisements are only clicked on by ~30% of search engine users; the large majority of search results are delivered through organic listings, so ensure you have a search engine optimization strategy as well.

There’s mounting evidence that the popularity of Twitter has hackers and phishers shifting focus to Twitter accounts.

According to researchers at Kaspersky Lab, cybercriminals are trying to sell hacked Twitter user names and passwords on-line for hundreds of dollars.

While this is an outgrowth of existing security problems…

[data-stealing malware is] popular because criminals are starting to realize that they can do better than simply swiping credit card numbers. Bestuzhev has seen Gmail accounts for sale on Russian hacker forums, (asking price 2,500 rubles, or $82) RapidShare accounts going for $5 per month, as well as Skype, instant messaging and Facebook credentials being offered.

…Twitter is being singled out because of the premium hackers and phishers can charge for them:

…one Twitter account, with just over 320 followers, was offered at $1,000 in an underground hacker forum. The user’s name was a simple three letter combination that Bestuzhev thought might make it more valuable to criminals.

The answer is to use the same vigilance with Twitter as you currently use with email. Evaluate the link you are about to click on (URL expander plugins for Internet Explorer and Firefox that will show you the extended URLs without you having to click on them), use a strong and unique password, always check that you are at twitter.com before logging in, and select third party apps with care.  Learn more here.

Many companies send regular email newsletters to their customers but not many of them measure the effectiveness of their newsletters and adjust them. I recently helped a non-profit organization improve its email newsletter campaign. They had been doing several newsletters each month in the past but they didn’t know if they were being read or even opened. Peter Drucker once said that you can’t manage what you don’t measure, and this can apply to newsletters too!

When I looked at the newsletters. I found that it had too many articles. These articles covered many different topics and the staff  had to spend quite a bit of time collecting these articles each month. They created long newsletters and there wasn’t any focal point in them. I then looked at  the email opens and click thrus from previous newsletters and found that the numbers were very low.

As a result, I advised them to greatly reduce the number of the articles in each newsletter and focus on a theme for each month. For interested readers, we provided headlines and excerpts linking to longer articles on their blog and website.

I also noticed that they used the same email subject line for every month. The only difference in the subject line was the month. Many recipients will automatically set it aside in the hope that they would come back to it when they have time, but this may not happen unless the subject line has relevancy. I advised them to make the subject line more relevant and describe the theme of the newsletter with some curiosity and urgency for the recipients.

The results: It freed up time for the staff and the email open and click through rates increased significantly. Now the recipients see the value to them and some are even anxiously waiting for the next e-newsletter!

So the point is: You have to regularly monitor, measure and adjust your email newsletters to make it work. Don’t give up on it – it can be one of your most powerful marketing tools.

ActiveConversion recently published an “eHow To” guide to Lead Nurturing that we at the SMB Marketing Blog would like to share with you (link, or click on the image at right).

From the landing page for the guide:

Lead nurturing is the process of communicating with prospects who are not yet ready to buy.

Only 10 to 25 percent of all leads are sales-ready. A similar percentage of leads are not qualified at all. This means 50 to 80 percent of all leads generated are potentially wasted if no appropriate action is taken.

With lead nurturing B2B marketers can realize significant benefits. Leads that are not sales-ready are not lost and significant online lead generation effort is not wasted. Automation of lead nurturing increases the ROI of all online marketing activities.

To download this whitepaper on why, when, and how to implement an automatic lead nurturing plan for your business, follow this link or click on the image to the right.

(eHow To Guides)

Last week at the Salesforce Dreamforce conference, ActiveConversion was invited to be part of a panel on email marketing. The panel covered some basics on email marketing along with specific applications on campaigning within Salesforce, lead nurturing and the impact that social media has on email marketing.

An interesting observation I took away was that many B2B Marketers are not using email marketing on a regular basis.  I feel like this is something which we take for granted, because we have been using email marketing for so long.  I thought it would be valuable to cover the 5 tips for email marketing which were covered in the presentation:

1. Targeted Lists – Ensure you spend the time when building your lists to segment them.  This allows you to send out more targeted messages and offers, which will help give you a higher response rate and better return on your efforts.  Fields to segment on include: Country, City, Zip, Phone, Company size, Job title/level, past purchases, Age, Gender, etc
2. Targeted, Relevant & Fresh Content – Build messages which are relevant to those groups which you’ll be targeting in your offer. Use fresh content and offers to encourage the desired outcome of your email (ex. New whitepaper, limited time discount, new product announcement, etc)
3. Tracking and Reporting – To improve the quality of your email marketing be sure to use the built-in tools for tracking or reporting of your marketing campaigns.  Some of the metrics you may choose to measure success on include: Unique open rates, Unique click-through rates, Delivery success rate, Conversions and Unsubscribes, and Post click-through activity scoring.
4. Go Viral – Email is a great means to get your marketing messages out because they are easily forwarded and shared with others.  Make it easy for your emails to be forwarded or shared by your recipients
5. Permission is everything – Allow prospects to opt-in to receive your marketing messages and respect their privacy and requests if they choose to unsubscribe. When you are requesting information from your prospects, ensure you make it clear that their information will not be sold or rented to any third parties and it is being collected to be able to provide information on your company’s products and services

You can view the recording of this presentation and panel discussion here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eAkoptsBG0

A great post back on Sept 10 from Funnelholic called Increase in Connect Rate = Increase in Conversion Rate made one point vividly clear: it is critical to resist the urge to dump all arguments for buying into an email campaign (or in a trade show booth meeting, or in a cold call) just because we have that prospects attention for once, and because we’re afraid of never getting it again.  Predictably, there is too much content, too big a message to swallow, and the prospect’s eyeballs roll back in their head and they delete the email, or leave the booth, or say “not interested” and hang up.

Marketers ALWAYS try to achieve too much with their campaigns and in most cases they are trying to sell the product when what they really need to do is sell the next step.

He goes on to make great points regarding Marketing Automation software, pre-connect scripts or emails, and opening scripts: use MA to help time the connect, then sell the connect, then with permission sell the next step.  Like any worthwhile, complicated, time consuming endeavour, break a sale down into bite sized pieces, and then achieve them sequentially.  Offering a glass water to a thirsty prospect will be more successful than offering a fire hose.

We’re currently working with a local commercial real estate firm and the economic downturn has had a significant impact on the amount of business the brokerage has seen over the past year.  In previous years, the industry was booming and the brokers were experiencing some of their most profitable years.  In today’s market, deals are taking longer to find and commissions are harder to earn.  Along with the usual marketing and lead generation efforts employed, as with many B2B businesses there was a need to reach out to a relatively untouched set of leads.

The source of leads, which is often overlooked in many SMB businesses, is the contact database that the commercial real estate firm had built up over the past 10 years.   Market data tells us that many leads you generate today may not be ready to buy within the next 90 days, but will be ready over the next 12 to 24 months.  And that’s certainly the case today given the economic turmoil we’re experiencing.  So how can you easily reach out to these 15,000+ contacts easily and cost effectively and ensure that as we work through these tough times we take advantage of the opportunities?  The answer is: Marketing Automation through Nurturing.

Fortunately, the contact database maintained by the real estate firm was very well organized, with details about each contact’s business and their requirements for office space.  This made it easy to segment the list and define 8 groups of potential buyers which needed to be “nurtured”.  The groups would be nurtured with important information about the commercial real estate economy and specific opportunities in their area that would be of interest to them.  The 8 sub-groups would also be dynamic and need to be updated on a monthly basis as contacts are added or removed.

Each month, the team would reach out to their different property seeking groups with the automated messaging and would understand who is interested and who they needed to follow up with based on activities captured by the marketing automation tool (ex. click to website, open email, download of brochure, etc).  In addition to being an easy way to market the properties available, this allows the real estate firm to remain ‘top of mind’ for those that might not be looking to make a change.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of this post as we discuss the successes of this campaign and benefits experienced by the commercial real estate broker.

For most small businesses, and a surprising number of medium sized businesses, marketing is a family secret kept in the attic.  Ask them about what they do marketing wise and eyes go downcast, a foot reaches out to kick a pebble, they look up a little ashamed and say; “we really don’t do any.”

Often I dig a little deeper and find out they are doing marketing, they’re paying $500 a month to the old search engine, the king that has recently died, the Yellow Pages (calling your company AAA-Plumbing was the old way to get Search Engine Optimized).

Here’s a piece of advice that I make no money on (so hopefully you can trust it more).  Take that $500 worth of spray and pray (you pay your $500 and you take what you gets, pray there’s ROI), and spend it with Google, the new king, for a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) adwords campaign.  With PPC you pay only if someone reads your ad and clicks on it to visit your site.  This is a first in the history of marketing and I’ll be so bold as to say that never in the history of capitalism has the bar been so low, so easy, and so cheap to do real and effective marketing.

And the best part? You can tell Google where you want the ads to run geographically, you can even tell Google when to run the ads, and you can tell Google where to direct visitors who have clicked on it (so you can have an extra special message or offer on hand to greet them).  Wait, there’s an even better part, research has shown that you’ll get about as many free click throughs from adwords as the ones you pay for; seems people like to cut and paste the web page address they find in ads into a new window.

Of course the ton of leads a properly set up adwords campaign produces can be a problem in itself for small companies with sales infrastructures developed for only a few new leads a week.   That being said, there are Marketing tools out there that can handle this wonderful problem and work with your existing process to manage the influx of new leads.

Previously I wrote about how SMB can take advantage of Google Local Business listings. The Google Maps team has just launched a new dashboard in its free Local Business Center that will provide you with information on how users interact with your local listing on Google Maps and Google Search.

It will show you stats such as how many times your business comes up as a search result, how often people click through, which queries led customers to the business listing, as well as which zip codes customers are coming from when they request directions to your location. All you have to do is claim your listing in the Local Business Center and go through a quick verification process to get access to this information.

For the local business owner who relies on Google in helping customers find the business, you can now measure the impact of search, especially the top search queries that result in your business showing up in the listings.  I’ll bet that once you see these search queries, you’ll wonder how your listing can show up more often in the search.  This will lead you into assessing whether you should move forward and buy the keywords in the Google AdWords campaign.  You’ll also think about optimizing your website to get more inbound traffic from natural search results.

If you are interested in knowing more, you can go to the Office Google Blog to learn more details about the new Local Business Center Dashboard.

In companies of every size,  sales are down and quotas are not being met. “The Meeting” has occurred, the one where sales and marketing heads have asked for ideas on how to increase sales. “Well, we could do more with our website”, is what emerges because everyone in the room knows just how much they themselves use Google to find the products and services they buy. This is where I come in, as they’ve contacted my company. I let them know that the bad news is this is step 1 of 6, but that the good news is the six steps are relatively cheap and easy to implement. Most importantly, for the same cash asked for by traditional advertising, these steps deliver HUGE return on investment and over many years.

1. Update and refurbish the website. Read Seth Godin’s book “The Big Red Fez” and read the previous blog posting.
2. Get search engine optimization (SEO); it’s cheap and easy. You need to get found by Google – 90% of B2B transaction start with a search engine. Focus in on a geographic area, win that and then expand from there.
3. Start online marketing; it’s cheap and easy. Google adwords, link building campaigns, banner ads and Facebook are great places to start.
4. Start email campaigning; it’s cheap and easy. Use Email Service Providors (ESPs) like VerticalResponse, Constant Contact, MailChimp. ESPs will help keep your messages out of spam filters, and keep you from getting labeled as a spammer. Start with the list your company already has, supplement it with data from Jigsaw.
5. Auto-nurture leads generated by your website; it’s a cheap and an easy competitive advantage. Get Marketing Automation software like ActiveConversion so that when your website does generate a lead you can auto deliver more touches to each and everyone one of them.
6. Track desirable activities on your website; it is a cheap and easy competitive advantage. Again, use Marketing Automation software to know which companies or contacts are visiting your site, how they got to your site, which pages they are visiting, if they come back for a second visit, and if they are achieving goal pages or goal clicks.

Do these things because:

The entry price is low – these eMarketing solutions cost a relatively little and very quickly let SMBs punch well above their weight.
Low change risk – these activities don’t replace the relationship selling that SMBs know – it just lets them eliminate the cold calling that uses their time inefficiently.
Low surprise risk – budgets for these activities are fixed, and the ROI feedback is exceptional.
Low time risk – these solutions don’t require a new hire, don’t require information technology infrastructure, don’t require new expertise, and implement in days.
Many others using it – must be the right (safe) choice.
Competitive advantage – the six steps will either give you a competitive advantage over your competitor, or you’ll need them to level the playing field with your competitor