We all know that happy customers are advocates for your product or service. But how do you get fanatical customers? These are customers that really move the marketing and sales yardsticks. They promote you, they review every feature, and can’t imagine their work life without your product being part of it. One of the ways is to engage your customers in a way that makes them part of the team. The best way to do that is to make sure they have a voice, and that their voice is heard. This can best be accomplished by building an online community.

There are many, (many!) online community tools in the marketplace. They range from message forums to social media networks to chat oriented products.  In order to enhance service and make users heard, business to business companies can make use of these tools which are basically feedback channels where customers can provide any and all thoughts they have about your product. This helps companies listen, really listen, to what their customers want. An online community not only allows the customer to see how their feedback has been handled, but it also allows them to see the interest on those ideas from other professionals using the service. They may even stumble upon ideas that would enhance their own use of the product.  This creates engagement, and engagement generates fanatical customers.

How are you building your fanatical customers?

Companies know the value of their assets, things like a building they own, or intellectual property they have developed.   But assets can also include things less tangible, like the business processes they have painfully put in place, and professional sales and marketing collateral they have developed.  You really understand the value of these less tangible assets when you change jobs and go to a company that has inadequate or non-existent processes, or that has no sales and marketing collateral you’d be willing to hand out.

In this list of less tangible assets is the company’s website, usually in the same category as the brochure that it closely resembles.  But what is increasingly expected of websites is that, instead of being a static brochure, that they convey insight; captivating reasons to stay engaged with a website, maybe even follow it on social media.  The standard way a B2B website accomplishes this is with what I will call “website assets”; whitepapers or case studies (and the promise of new ones in a timely fashion), sometimes a nice video, or most effectively, a blog that is updated on a regular basis.  The problem is that developing website assets at all, let alone a consistent cyclical production, requires some not-insignificant commitment and resources to see through.  Most companies, even if they agree that website assets are good ideas, will say that they have little time or money to get these accomplished.

The Easy Path to High-Value Website Assets
So I have an alternative, something easier, something anyone who is even somewhat passionate about what they do for a living can do without breaking a sweat; a webinar.  If you can talk for 30 minutes to a customer or prospect about how you can solve one of their more pressing business problems, then you can do a webinar.  Now many people respond that they are not comfortable doing public speaking, even if you’re presenting to your computer, to them I council “then don’t host it live with an audience, host without an audience and record it”.

Instead of inviting everyone to the live webinar you’re afraid of doing, invite everyone to the recorded webinar they ‘missed’.  Put in the invite that if while watching the webinar they have any questions (answering these live is one key value of live webinars, certainly during the webinar you will answer a few canned ones) they can email them in, and you promise to answer each and everyone one of them.  And the best part is this recorded webinar is now a website asset, you can put a button on your website that engages visitors, maybe even convinces them to give you their contact info:

(this is a webinar I hosted in early May), here’s a link to our full list of recorded webinars.

So here they are, the

10 Reasons Your Company Should Do Webinars, because everyone likes lists, heck maybe you just jumped right to the list, so here it is:

1. Webinars are the easiest to achieve high-value content your company can generate; it is the easiest way to capture the expertise and experience of your senior people in a way that can be accessed over and over again by prospects visiting your website.
2. People like to hear things from people, not faceless corporations.  Webinars give you the opportunity for visitors to your website to hear your expertise and experience on specific topics that matter to them, much more so than the generic statements on the website.
3. The invitation to a webinar, and the follow up invitation to download the recorded webinar, are a valid reason to email your entire “in-house” list of contacts at least twice
4. Announcing you are having a webinar increases your credibility on the subject the webinar will focus on.  If you stick to a subject that you know well because of both successful experience and passion, you will likely build credibility.
5. This high-value content is ideal for pushing out to your social media network; the companies winning at social media are the ones contributing content that speaks to their credibility.
6. High-value content like this is very useful to your sales team; when they encounter this business problem they can refer prospects to a webinar recording on the respective subject from your guru.
7. Webinars are easier to sell to the gurus that need to host them; getting them to speak for 30-45 minutes on a subject they are an expert on and passionate about is something they do all the time, and is much more “natural act” than asking for a whitepaper.
8. You can use recorded webinars as “conversion elements” to build your list; gate them behind a form on your website and require a name and email address to access them (have a very good privacy policy very visible, and do an opt in campaign afterwards).
9. You can very effectively increase your brand credibility by co-hosting a webinar with one of your more recognized suppliers or vendors.
10. Webinars can be very nimble; if you recognize a shift in your industry, or an event that is of significance, you can quickly reach out to your audience with your insight on the topic.

Wondering if you’re wasting sales time or marketing budget? Or likely, both?!

In this free companion webinar to the eHow To Guide A Marketing Automation Guide to Lead Scoring, join Paul Uppal, Senior Account Executive at ActiveConversion, as he speaks with  his customer, Tim Lawler – Lead and Demand Generation Consultant at LMG Consulting, on how Tim successfully implemented closed-looped lead scoring systems with Active Conversion for his clients.

“The key is getting the user to click through the email to a landing page with the Active Conversion code.  That starts the lead scoring process (a download is not necessary).  After the first landing page visit, the user web activity is tracked  and scored going forward.”

Tim Lawler

Click to access the recorded webinar

Learn best practices on how to implement a lead scoring process, automatically manage leads, and focus your time on the best prospects to increase ROI by 30% or more.

Not all leads are created equally. A lead scoring system acknowledges this by assigning values to leads based on objective criteria. The lead score determines the appropriate action for that lead.

See real world tools and examples to help you shorten your sales cycle and make intelligent sales and marketing decisions.

The title of this article from BizReport is “92% SMB owners recommend business-focused online networking“, which is a great stat.  But in my opinion the bigger result from the survey conducted centers on ROI:

59% have won customers or done business as a direct result of online networking sites.

Furthermore, as business networking (the survey definitely shows a divide between “social” networking such as Facebook and “business” networking such as LinkedIn) shows significant ROI, the love is returned:

78% are open to purchasing from contacts made on such sites

While these results are from a survey conducted in the UK, I’m going to say that empirically they are valid for the business environment on this side of the pond.  For those of you who are skeptical of the power of social networking, some powerful numbers are starting to make a pretty strong case, all the more so when you can start measuring the result.  It’s one thing to engage in social networking on a gut call, it’s another to get measurable returns that justify the investment.

Wellesley, Mass. - January 25, 2010. THINKstrategies, Inc., the leading strategic consulting company focused on the business implications of the on-demand services market, announced today that ActiveConversion has been named the latest winner of the Best of SaaS Showplace (BoSS) Awards program, which is aimed at promoting the measurable business benefits being delivered by today’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions.

The BoSS Awards program was announced in January 2009 by THINKstrategies as an initiative aimed at bringing greater attention to SaaS and cloud computing companies that are producing tangible business benefits for specific user organizations. These benefits include increased sales, lower costs, higher customer satisfaction, faster operations and greater profitability.

ActiveConversion recently released another in their popular series of “eHow To” guides.  This one deals with using Marketing Automation to leverage B2B Blogging.  From the summary:

Lead nurturing is the process of communicating with prospects who are not yet ready to buy. B2B Blogging enables marketers to contact such prospects on an ongoing basis.

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 B2B Blogging 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, click on the image!

The folks at Forrester Research have updated their Interactive Marketing Forecast out to 2014. 

The table of contents has some predictable headlines:

• Interactive Will Cannibalize Traditional Media
• Interactive Marketing Spend Will Near $55 Billion By 2014
• Search Marketing Still Leads Interactive Spend
• Display Advertising Rebounds
• Email Marketing Continues Healthy Growth
• Social Media Fixes Itself In The Interactive Mix
• Mobile Marketing Matters – Post Recession
• WHAT IT MEANS – Interactive Trends Will Redefine Your Business

It’s a very good read, and a few points jumped out for me.

When faced with budget cuts or the need for immediate sales, these marketers find that interactive tools are less expensive, more measurable, and better for direct response than traditional media.

Empowered consumers today expect a customized, interactive brand experience that goes way beyond a 30-second television spot or two-dimensional print ad. Forty-two percent of online adults and 55% of online youth want to engage with their favorite brands through social applications.

And last, even laggard industries feel that they have enough experience and data to prove interactive marketing’s worth. Online display spending by telecom companies in Q1 2009 grew 50% over Q1 2008.

What was also interesting was the the potential for more growth; interactive marketing ad spend is still under represented and laggard compared to how much of sample media time is spend online.

You can sign up for a copy of the full report here, courtesy of  DemandGen Report. Check it out. Your marketing future may depend on it!

Real-Life Lessons in Using Google AdWords
from the NYTimes Small Business Guide, October 14, 2009

This is a very good background article by the NYTs on Google AdWords, further evidence that Google AdWords are going mainstream.  Maybe I’m too deep into the forest, but I’m still always surprised by how many small and medium sized business managers who don’t know, or know enough about Google AdWords to realize what they are losing out on.

“It used to be that business owners often struggled to afford advertising for their products or services. Google AdWords has changed that by offering an inexpensive way to spread the word. But if you don’t do some careful planning, you can easily find yourself spending thousands of dollars with little to show for it.”

Kudos to them for also identifying that unless done properly, Google AdWords can also be a waste of money.  The truth is, in the same way when someone clicks through on a “natural” search (the unpaid portion of Google) Google is interested in sending searchers to the best quality content, Google has the same goal for click throughs on ads.  This is why having good search engine marketing skills is key to successful AdWords Marketing.  If Google likes your website for certain keywords, it will like your ads and the website it directs searches to because it is relevant. Seems commonsensical, but the popular perception is that you just have to bid the highest and your ads will show up highest.

Double Kudos to the NYTimes for mentioning the wisdom of outsourcing the setting-up and maintenance of AdWords campaigns.  Outsourcing this is low cost, and it far outweighs the opportunity cost of not doing it well.

‘Social Media Revolution’ – some say the biggest thing to impact our world since the industrial revolution, others say just a passing Fad.    You judge …….

I was once asked by a B2B customer that didn’t get many leads from their website even though they got a lot of relevant traffic. A quick investigation led us to the answer — they didn’t have a single form on the website! While they displayed the phone number and email addresses on the contact page, visitors didn’t want to pick up the phone or look for email addresses to contact them. As soon as we setup a proper inquiry form on their website, their online conversion increased more than ten fold.

However, not all online forms are created equal. Here are some tips from our experience that will help you get better success with your online forms to get better conversion to leads.

Make your web forms easy to access
Make the link to your forms very obvious. For instance, put a “Get a Quote” button on key pages to take visitors to the page where they can submit a form for a quote of your service or product.

Only ask for necessary info
How motivated are you completing a form when it feels like filing a tax return?  The less information people have to provide, the more comfortable they will be with completing the form. For example, if you’re promoting an e-newsletter subscription, you probably need only email address and the name on the form.

Limit the mandatory fields
Mandatory fields help to get fully complete registration forms, but too many mandatory fields can frustrate the user. Ask yourself what information is truly essential.

Validate the key fields and provide help
Generally you should ensure the email addresses are in a valid format. If a user has an error, let them know which one it is. It’s frustrating to guess what the error is.

Help users with the answers
Try to pre-fill or pre-select the data for the users. Some browser toolbars like the Google toolbar can also help pre-fill the form fields when using standard fields. You should also use drop-down boxes with pre-defined answers to help users choose.

Display your privacy policy
Many people are concerned about who will have access to their information and how it will be used. Make sure you have a privacy statement available on the online form to reassure the prospect that you will not abuse their information.

Make use of the Thank You page
Consider doing more than just a “Thank you for inquiring” message. Make it feel personal by displaying their first names. Provide links to key information to get them back to your website. Maybe even provide a special offer for users who submit the form.

Online forms are key to lead generation for B2B. The less barriers there are between the user and the form, the more  likely they will complete the forms.