SMB Marketing Blog

While a well designed and well promoted website can create leads for a company, it goes without saying that most companies will not rely on it entirely.  They will also supplement inbound marketing with outbound targeted calling; they will take a look at who their customer base is and why, develop a list of other companies that are similar, and start calling.

Success at this point will usually sound like “…interesting, send me an email with your info in it and I’ll get back to you”.  The big question is did they say it to be nice,  to get you off the phone?  Or are they genuinely interested? If they are not interested, you may have just set yourself up for a waste of time following up with them.  What you really want is insight into who on the “send me an email” list really is interested, who is actually engaged with your message.

One path to this insight is through a combination of a content-rich website, and marketing automation like ActiveConversion.  When they ask for the “more information email”, the email itself contains links that lead to the information/content.  With the ActiveConversion Outlook plugin installed, if they click on any of those links, you’ll see if they clicked through and what they looked at.

If they said they were interested, but didn’t click through on any of the informational links, well, not as qualified.  However if they clicked through and looked at multiple pages, and even more significantly, if they returned later for a second look at your website, notch them up as having passed qualifying test #1.

Keep in mind this same approach is useful when re-engaging with customers and old prospects.  Even deep into a relationship sell, being able to gauge how interested and engaged a prospect is with the new message you’re delivering is invaluable.

The days when all you needed for online marketing was a nice website have long passed.  In order to be effectively represented online, you’ll need effective campaigns on several critical platforms.  The platforms vary depending on the type of business you are in, but for those of you still finding your footing; here is a short checklist of platforms you should consider.

Stable Content

• Website: Since its 2010, you should have professional website.  If you don’t have one, get on it.
• Bonus Points Wikipedia Entry: Businesses haven’t fully embraced Wikipedia but it is the authority for information reference.  Having a Wikipedia entry will become increasingly important for online credibility and exposure.

Regularly Updated Content

• Blog: A critical platform for establishing credibility with the online community and search engines.  If your organization doesn’t have a blog, you are missing out on establishing yourself as an online authority in your industry.
• Bonus Points Periodical Press Releases: Press Releases still have their place online, particularly when pushed out with a service like PRWeb.com.  It can do more than just a blog posting or website update as it pushes to many channels, allowing for more exposure and credibility.

Social Networking

• Twitter/Facebook Fan Page: Twitter and Facebook are the kings of social networking and an increasingly important platform to promote dialog between companies and the online community.
• Bonus Points LinkedIn/Foursquare: LinkedIn and Foursquare aren’t for everyone, but depending on the kind of business you do, these maybe valuable platforms to reach potential customers.

Video Media

• YouTube: YouTube continues to be a predominately an entertainment focused community, but its reach is undeniable.  If you have how-to videos, or a business presentation, they are good candidates for YouTube.
• Bonus Points Webinar: Webinars are a great way to interact with customers and the community.  Webinars add great value for any customer base.

Search Engine Marketing

• Google AdWords: This isn’t a must but for those of you who are just starting out, or struggling in competitive markets, pay-per-click campaigns with Google can get you that exposure when you need it.
• Bonus Points Pay-per-click on Facebook/LinkedIn/Yahoo/Bing: Although Google is the most recognized player; pretty much every major platform (Facebook, LinkedIn, Yahoo, Bing, etc) has a similar version of the pay-per-click program.  They may present a less competitive and more targeted environment to push marketing efforts.

Depending on your business and goals, the platforms mentioned may not be critical.  Also keep in mind that just because you are represented on these platforms doesn’t necessarily mean you are being represented well on each platform.  However, how to assess your effectiveness on the various online platforms is the topic for another post.

Do you have other platforms that are critical to your business’s online marketing strategy that you feel should be on this list?  Please share it with us in the comments.

Experience-based marketing is not a new concept, as it has been around for a while and many B2C companies have had a lot of success implementing it. The challenge is for B2B companies to use such techniques to advertise and market. Experience marketing gives the target audience a first hand experience by giving the audience the ability to touch, feel, see and know your offering or product.

Max Lenderman, the author of “Experience the Message“,  says engaging potential customers is more important than shoving advertisements into peoples’ faces. With an attention span of 8 seconds which is equal to that of a goldfish, it is really hard to reach the target audience minds with one or two or even 10 instances of our marketing campaigns. I like two examples that Max Lenderman gave at the Art of Marketing event.

Example 1: In India having a cell phone has become the fifth necessity after food, housing, clothes and electricity. Most of the people in rural places are not educated and their main preoccupation is with farming. Reaching such an audience to promote products is a difficult task. Billboards, TV, newspaper ads or online ads are all off limits. How do companies reach such audiences? The way marketing agencies do that is by implementing experience based marketing. They use pop ups in stores where they engage the audience via a street play, drama or musicals.

Example 2: Charmin, the maker of bathroom tissue, opened up a few free to use washrooms in one of the busy New York areas. People in New York’s Time Square area had resorted to washroom use in Starbucks or nearby restaurants. Now people are happy to see these public washrooms conveniently situated  that also provide an experience nothing like they have ever experienced before. In addition to providing a washroom facility, Charmin has richly decorated that place with fancy chairs, and a stage to dance and sing while waiting. Many people have left with pictures and most importantly praise and promise to use only Charmin from there on. View the video.

Takeaways for B2B marketers:
1.      It is more important to engage with the audience while marketing or showing off your product.

2.      Instead of spending thousands of dollars in billboards, banner ads and other expensive ads, make use of experience based marketing by giving away  free to use products and giving prospects a first hand experience.

3.      B2B marketers can learn from these examples by letting their potential customers experience the product before making a decision like the 30 day free trial by ActiveConversion.

4.      Make it easier for them to use/try the product. It is easier to make people switch if you change the environment to making ease of use your priority.

To all you B2B marketers, can you bring the flavor of experience into your marketing?

We at ActiveConversion make use of various social media channels – with our presence in Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn groups, Slideshare, YouTube, Digg, StumbleUpon, Flickr and many more. Keeping track of all these social media channels and updating them on a regular basis is difficult and time demanding, but if we use them smartly they work very well to our advantage. With the advent of Internet and as the web 2.0 matures, the online community is an ever growing powerhouse, and it is quintessential to engage with our audience.

Broadcasting

Traditionally websites were developed as a brochure, with static content, one way communication. But as Web 2.0 matured, websites became more than just a brochure. It was necessary for companies to adapt to this ever changing World Wide Web where two- way communications was more than a necessity for any B2B type company. This communication can be in any form; blogs, forums, and online community etc. Similarly, social media channels started as a means of personal use. Twitter & Facebook mainly started as people to connect with their family and friends to let them know where they were or what they were doing or simply share activities and photos. Now B2B companies can also use Facebook and Twitter, but it is important to know the difference between using these channels to broadcast your message versus using them to engage with your targeted audience.

I recently attended “The Art of Marketing” event and found a very close connection in all the speeches that had a common theme of “Engaging”. It is important to understand that our users or customers, and our audiences are the most powerful and the biggest advocate for our products. For B2B companies, the new way of creating customer relationship is by engaging and knowing who their audience is and what are they talking about. Here are some of the speakers who talked about engaging with the audience:

Mitch Joel, the author of “Six degrees of separation” said the Internet is almost going to be as important and pervasive as the electricity”. In the social media world where B2B marketers are trying to connect with as many people as they can and create a solid followers base, it is important to understand that it is the basis of who is following you more important than how many followers you have.

Engaging

Gary Vaynerchuck, author of “Crush It!” cleverly stated that “Internet is just a baby and it still has to grow up and unleash its power”. Whether you are in B2C or B2B, Twitter, Facebook’s and similar social media accounts are a must have. If you don’t have either of these, it is not too late to jump on the bandwagon. Facebook credits are soon going to be precious currency and if we don’t use Facebook, and there is a big chance that companies might miss out on large opportunities in the future.  Social Media should be used intelligently in a way that we not only broadcast our messages and offers but to engage and be involved with our audience. Having a conversation with our audience, providing opinion, resolving issues on the go and engaging with our audience is a key.

Sally Hogshead, the author of “Fascinate” said, “Create messages for our network’s network”. Don’t ignore the larger network which is linked to our immediate network. Social media lets you connect to this web of networks that you simply can’t ignore.

So go ahead and start engaging in conversations!

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.

Most marketers face the challenge of generating qualified leads. According to the report published by Marketing Sherpa, 66% of B2B marketers face those challenges.

To some businesses, generating leads is still a primitive concept where they still use traditional marketing techniques and tools. Trade shows, mailing lists are some of the few ways to generate those leads. Obviously, these leads are nowhere near being qualified.

With the advent of Web 2.0 there has been a surge in the availability of web tools and techniques to generate leads. Having a presentable and message oriented website is good for any business, but what is more important for that business is the ability to find out the users coming to their website and what services or products they are interested in. Google Analytics has definitely paved its way to marketers who can measure online visitors, and track against certain pre-determined stats. And for sure, you can make changes to your website based on the stats and trends captured, but that’s not enough for the marketing ROI.

Importance of lead nurturing to marketers:

For marketers, it is more important to know who these visitors are, and if they will become customer some day? Now the question comes, after you see who is visiting your site, are they ready to be passed on to your sales reps? Definitely not, but at most organizations this is a still common practice in B2B Marketing. Strategic lead nurturing is a process where we can identify which prospect is ready to be a client.

Principles of lead nurturing:

We at Active Conversion have developed a three-step principle for lead nurturing,

1. Develop trust through credibility – be a valued advisor and gain trust
2. Target each of your market segments – use relevant content
3. Nurture your prospects according to the stage they are in the cycle – create a need for your product or services

Download our eHow to Guide to learn more about Lead nurturing and how B2B marketers can reap the benefits of marketing automation.

I got an email from Marketing Profs for a seminar entitled “Demolish the Roadblocks on Your Website: Clearing a Path for Customer Action, Sales and Loyalty“.  I’m not here to sell this seminar, I just found the lead-in couple of paragraphs selling the seminar a great post all on its own.

Too many people create websites that look beautiful. But what we really need are websites that WORK beautifully. It’s not enough to put some content up. It’s not enough to launch and leave an application or a new website design. If you want a website that makes money you must continuously improve the completion times of your customers’ top tasks. The most important thing you need to manage on your website is your customers’ time.

This is Coolaid that we drink all day every day; it is more important to be found, answer questions, generate a lead, than it is to look the prettiest.  Of course the website can’t be a junker either, or that becomes a barrier (lack of credibility) all in itself.   Just don’t spend all your money on the design, save 75% of your budget for promoting the website and answering your customers questions with webinars (and downloads of recorded ones), case studies, and white papers.

Marketers are shifting to digital for a variety of reasons, chief among them are the results.  While social media gets all the hype, it’s two tried and true workhorses, email and search marketing, that come out on top of effectiveness.  From a post over at Marketing Profs:

Most marketing executives cite email or search marketing as their company’s top-performing advertising channel in 2009—39.4% and 23.6%, respectively—and over nine in ten (93.6%) say they plan to increase their budget allocation to digital marketing in the next five years, according to the Fourth Annual Marketing and Media Survey from Datran Media.

Just 9.4% of marketers cited offline channels as their most effective response channel last year. Another 4.7% cited social media, while mobile marketing, still in its early stages, was cited by 0.8% of marketers.

Crucially I’d argue that all these pieces need to work together.  Search so they find you, content to convert them, email to nurture them.

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.

In the third of their very popular “eHow To” guides, this guide explores how to effectively use Social Media for marketing.  While a lot of ink has been spilled on this topic, this guide approaches it from a layman’s perspective, and focuses on the business case and a pragmatic way to implement in a way that will succeed.

“The spectacular growth of social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter have taken B2B marketing by storm. B2B marketers recognized that they have access to hundreds of millions of people who have registered for and are using social networking sites.

More importantly, within those substantial groups B2B marketers can target their messages and advertising directly to the audience that will be the most receptive to their product or service, using the underlying technology inherent in social networking sites …

Social media differs from traditional media in that social media is where many individuals share information with each other rather than one source broadcasting to the masses. In Web 2.0 marketing language, it is many-to-many instead of one-to-many.”

Specifically it speaks to integrating Social Media efforts into wider eMarketing such as SEO/SEM and email marketing, all the while managing the flow of new referrals with proven marketing automation tools such as ActiveConversion.

Link to download page