eBook Vol1 Online Marketing

101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead VOLUME ONE Online Marketing Driving Leads to your website through paid search advertising, search engine optimization, blogging and more PRESENTED BY 101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead PRESENTED BY 30 Online Marketing Tips for Driving Lead Generation Today, online marketing is vital to any integrated marketing program. With so many new avenues for reaching prospective buyers, we as B2B Marketers have to think outside of the box to stand out in the crowd. From significant improvements in marketing program metrics to greater efficiencies in your sales funnel, employing new online marketing tactics can create immediate benefits, if done right. In this collection of 30 online marketing tips from The B2B Lead, you will find information on the basics of SEO, optimizing your video for the web, boosting your blog using twitter, how to measure your online successes and much more. Here’s a few of the included tips in this eBook: • • • • • • Using Press Releases to Drive Web Traffic and Leads Boost Your Google Juice with Link Bait Invest in the Right Tools to Track the Metrics That Matter Dive in and Jumpstart SEO With a Quick Start Plan Practice Metrics-Based Copywriting Twitter to Attract Readers to Your Blog If you like what your see here, be sure to check out http://www.theb2blead.com for more B2B Marketing and Sales tips. Content contributed by: Scott Daughtry, SEO Specialist Kyle Flaherty of www.engageinpr.com Amy Hawthorne, Director of Marketing at ReachForce Pam O’Neal Mickelson, VP of Marketing at BreakingPoint Leigh Anne Wallace, Marketing Coordinator at ReachForce VOLUME ONE • Online Marketing 2 101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead PRESENTED BY Table of Contents Search Engine Optimization and Paid Search Advertising 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. Dive in and Jumpstart SEO With a Quick Start Plan Boost Your Google Juice with Link Bait 2008 is the Year of Digital Omnipresence Optimize Your Video for SEO Results Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Checklist: Step 1 - Start with SEM (ala Google Adwords)? Practice Metrics-Based Copywriting Sprout Widgets, Mashups and Other Great Content That Drives SEO Blogging 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. Blog Basics Page Titles are Important Keep Your Blog on Track to Support SEO and Other Business Objectives Measuring the Effectiveness of Your Corporate Blog Want Bloggers to Write About You? Make Sure Your Website is Blogger-Friendly Twitter to Attract Readers to Your Blog Blogging to the Beat Everything I Know About B2B Blogging I Learned from Perez Re-think Blog ROI Social Media 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. When it Comes to Social Media: Play By the Rules A Case Study in Viral Video Marketing - The B2B Lead Vidcast Put These 20 Ideas into Action for B2B Viral Marketing Success Building a Following on Twitter Learn From the 6 Cs of Social Influence Marketing Other 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. Using Press Releases to Drive Web Traffic and Leads TagClouding Your Leads Web Analytics for B2B Marketers Make Some Imaginary Friends AKA a Persona When Investing in New Media Programs Track the Metrics That Matter Invest in the Right Tools to Track the Metrics That Matter Creating Forms for Content - How Much is too Much? 10 Signs You Picked the Wrong Web Design Agency Keyword Optimization for Press Releases VOLUME ONE • Online Marketing 3 101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead PRESENTED BY Dive in and Jumpstart SEO With a Quick Start Plan Attention Conservation Notice: The following post provides quick tips for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and six-step plan for getting started. You might call me a fast-follower when it comes to Search Engine Optimization. I resisted for some time because the prospect of researching and sorting through hundreds of keywords and applying techniques to outwit Google’s ever-changing algorithms seemed so daunting. I can barely spell algorithm, after all. Then a slew of industry surveys showed that anywhere from 80 to 90 percent or more of B2B tech buyers start their research and buying process on Google. Well, that was a wake-up call. So, last year I made SEO a higher priority. I shifted the funds from online advertising into SEM and a ReachForce role-based database build. (That way, I could cover both my Inbound and Outbound bases.) I also maintained my investments in PR and some key sponsorships to cover the brand awareness and drive Inbound traffic. Then, I pulled resources and funds that had been spent trying to keep up with endless campaign design and development, and re-focused them on social media and SEO. It’s truly amazing how quickly you can get results like Page 1 Google rankings when you focus resources on boosting a particular page ranking. Here are a few tips to help you do the same: • • • • • • • • • • • Invest in the right tools: There are literally dozens of free and low-cost SEO tools that you can use to get a lay of the land and assess your best SEO prospects. Of course, Google provides several like Google Suggest and Google Trends. Another one of my favorites is WordTracker. And, a new tool I am using right now is HubSpot. HubSpot’s VP of Marketing, Mike Volpe makes a great case for SEO in the HubSpot Inbound Marketing blog. More about that another time. Don’t just go for the highly competitive popular terms. Consider niche or long tail keywords terms. There are dozens of keywords with significant search traffic that have little competition. Optimize for all of them and the numbers add up. Integrate your PR and SEO efforts to ensure inbound links from press releases support your strategy. Make sure your “anchor text” on in-bound links is optimized to provide the greatest SEO value. Optimize with a conversion strategy in mind. Leverage your “educational” assets for landing pages and social media sites like hubpages.com, scribd.com, flickr.com and others. Here’s a quick plan for getting started: Information Gathering Session: Just like data cleansing, it can be difficult to know where to start when it comes to SEO. Pull together a team to discuss and prioritize objectives and scope your initial project. Research: Review your marketing objectives, competition, and your web site and blog to get a lay of the land and identify low-hanging fruit. Produce a plan and guidelines for optimizing your top five web or blog pages. This should include recommendations for URLs, internal link building, meta tags, page content updates, blog cross-linking and a conversion strategy for each of those pages. Then begin to build your inbound links to those pages by leveraging other sites, partners, blogs, social media sites, portals, and other high-value (not spam) paid link directories like Yahoo. Review and Revamp: After the pages have had sufficient time for Google Indexing review the project and results, and adjust the components of the program if necessary. I realize this post presents a fairly simplistic view of SEO. It is, in reality, a very complex and overwhelming discipline. But this is a quick plan for hopping on the moving train. You will, of course, learn more through trial and error and there are numerous online tutorials that will help you hone your skills. VOLUME ONE • Online Marketing 4 101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead PRESENTED BY Boost Your Google Juice with Link Bait Attention Conservation Notice: The following post provides a list of different types of link bait and key considerations for making sure the link bait is effective. Encouraging inbound links to your website is a sure-fire way to improve your SEO performance, in other words, to boost your Google juice. One of the best ways to build those highvalue inbound links is to produce “link bait” by delivering valuable content that encourages others to link to you. Nick Wilson, a contributing writer for Search Engine Land, recently wrote about the various forms of link bait that web marketers use to drive inbound links to their web site content. Here’s a summary of the three types of link bait according to Wilson: • • • Textual Linkbait: … any kind of page content that takes no more technical skill than being able to type. This kind of link bait is very accessible as the only real cost is time. With good imagination and research, you can quickly devise a series of posts designed to attract links. Site Based Tools & Software: … functional scripts that run on a website. These vary widely in nature depending on the site. A good example in the search marketing world is the NetQoS network latency calculator. Widgetbait: The holy grail of link baiting in 2007 will be the widget. In late 2005 and early 2006, I came up with a linkbaiting concept to put my previous company, Performancing, on the social media map. That idea was the Performancing Blog Editor Firefox extension that has achieved nearly half a million downloads on Mozilla alone. I would also add to this: visual or graphics link bait. Bloggers and journalists love visuals and diagrams that help communicate a point. A popular example of this is the Social Media fatigue visual Andrew Shuttleworth created using Mind Manager flow charting software. Here are a few tips on making sure your link bait is effective: 1. 2. 3. Make it relevant and useful to your target audience to drive the right types of links and web traffic. Make sure it supports your brand. Don’t require registration to use it, but do embed offers for more (this requires a conversion strategy). While link baiting can be controversial, it seems to me that it has resulted in so many new free tools available to users. How can that be a bad thing? VOLUME ONE • Online Marketing 5 101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead PRESENTED BY 2008 is the Year of Digital Omnipresence Attention Conservation Notice: The following post contains ideas for helping B2B marketers secure multiple page one listings on Google and Yahoo. More tidbits from SMX West have been posted to Web Pro News by Jason Lee Miller. Apparently, digital omnipresence was the hot topic at the event. According to Miller, “the discussion surrounding search is no longer just about securing your place in a same-for-everybody top-ten list of search results. The discussion is about being everywhere; it’s about establishing a case for digital omnipresence.” Now, I wasn’t there (unfortunately), so I don’t know the full story on digital omnipresence, but it sounds very similar to the concepts promoted by the folks at StomperNet. As a B2B Marketer and a follower of StomperNet strategies, I have experienced the results first hand and am hooked. Today, it’s not enough to have one listing on page one of Google. I’m driven to secure multiple page one listings. And that is made far easier by posting valuable, actionable content in a multitude of formats – web pages, blog posts, video, podcast, etc. When you look at the research on B2B tech buyer behavior, it’s easy to see why. Research from numerous sources, including Marketing Sherpa, indicate between 85 to 98% of B2B technical buyers in North America use the Google search engine. Yahoo dominates in other areas of the world. And, reports published by StomperNet, Enquiro and others show that a double listing at the top of Google not only boosts brand affinity but generates more than 2X the leads of a single listing. Difficult to argue with those odds. And, it’s not enough to secure organic listings. Enquiro Research suggests that B2B technical buyers start their research in the organic or Search Engine Optimization (SEO) listings of search engines and their purchase process in the Search Engine Marketing (SEM) or pay-per-click (PPC) ads. What’s more, Marketing Sherpa reports that organic listings draw 75% of the click through traffic, while SEM draw 25%. Clearly, when targeting the tech buyer, it is vital to be in both places. To succeed online, B2B marketers are going to have to learn how to present their brand and their corporate and thought leadership messages everywhere, in many different formats. We will have to drive demand, build brand awareness, establish thought leadership and a community of interest using social media, traditional media and Search Marketing techniques. One way to do this is to optimize a variety of different types of content for broadly searched/highly competitive terms. However, securing a top listing for competitive terms requires a significant time and resource investment so it is not an option for many B2B marketers. Even with the longterm commitment required for success here, I’m not advocating that B2B marketers avoid these keywords. Just the opposite. Go ahead and optimize for those terms, but use SEM programs such as Google AdWords and contextual PPC advertising to fill in gaps and “be there” when both researchers and buyers are searching. Then, leverage new media program elements including your blog and social media/Web 2.0 sites to secure high value inbound links. A steady investment in these programs will help move these listings closer to the top of the search engines. A far faster approach to top listings, is targeting “long tail” terms—keywords that have moderate search volumes and are relatively easy to dominate quickly. Targeting these terms should enable you to secure a double or triple listing at the top of page one of Google or Yahoo. At least until Google changes its algorithm again! Once again, it is important to use social media program elements such as a blog, social media, social bookmarking, PR, and high value link-building to secure the best results. VOLUME ONE • Online Marketing 6 101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead PRESENTED BY Optimize Your Video for SEO Results While prepping for my upcoming presentation on Viral Marketing for the Marketing Sherpa B2B Summit, I ran across this excellent posting on http://seo-space.blogspot. com/2007/09/14-best-practices-and-tips-for-video.html. Here are three of the 14 best practices listed in the article: 1. Make sure that your video clips are relevant and informative - For starters, ensure that your video provides useful and informative information. Videos that demonstrate step by step procedures are great, videos that express an opinion about a specific topic can be useful too. Videos that have nothing to do with your brand or service offering or are general or vague in nature will just confuse your audience. SEO Video Optimization Fundamental Tip #1: Give your video a Catchy Title - Video can be used to bring visitors to your site. One way to get users to view your video is to give it a catchy title that contains a related key phrase that is relevant to your product, service or brand. Use Video as a Portal to other Content on Your Site - Upload a couple of videos to portals like YouTube and provide links back to related content and other videos on your site. 2. 3. According to B2B Magazine, currently only 1% of the videos on YouTube are posted by businesses. But I can tell you from experience that viral video is a great tool for B2B Marketers for both brand awareness and demand generation. Marketing WTF? - This Marketing Geekout Moment Brought to You By StomperNet Quick – how can understanding the science of vision and cognitive psychology help you boost B2B Marketing leads and revenue? The Click Fu Masters at StomperNet just posted this intriguing video tutorial to help B2C and B2B Marketers boost their “Click Fu.” The team explains that understanding the function of the human eye and brain can help you improve marketing results and drive more revenue. First, the eyes: StomperNet advises Marketers to understand the function of the eye and visitor blind spots to improve landing page design. Well, that’s a nobrainer. But, they go further explaining that primal man’s eyes were designed for two purposes: to eat and avoid being eaten. The FOVEA, designed for finding food to eat, is sensitive to fine details and color. The Periphery, designed to avoid being eaten, is tuned to motion and contrast. Understanding how to make appropriate use of color, organization, and design details while employing the right structure to the page can help Marketers boost conversions by more than 25 percent. Now, the brain: StomperNet advises you to understand the link between vision and behavior so that you understand why a #10 result on Google will get you more clicks than a #6 or 7 position. Basically, their cognitive psychologist advises that: Easy wins out over Good or Better. Make user feel it will be easy to get what they want and they’ll stay longer and learn more. Understand your visitors’ goal and what they need to achieve the goal. But that’s just the beginning. This is definitely a video that is worth watching. VOLUME ONE • Online Marketing 7 101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead PRESENTED BY Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Checklist: Step 1 - Start with SEM (ala Google Adwords)? Most website owners eventually come to the conclusion that to have any success getting traffic to their site, they need to do one of three things: optimize the pages of their website (SEO), start a pay-per-click campaign (SEM), or do both. In an effort to save money, most people will tell you to go the free route first – that is, work to optimize your website and hope that your pages get indexed high in the search engines. I’m here to tell you a couple of reasons you may want to consider shelling out some money on a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign first. For those of you with limited budgets, you may be asking yourself – why spend money on a PPC engine like Google Adwords before taking advantage of every possible opportunity to get free listings? My best answer to this question is that doing so will save you weeks or possibly months of frustration. How? When you begin optimizing your website, you have no idea what will drive potential customers to your site, let alone what will prompt them to buy. Sure, you hopefully will do some keyword research ahead of time, but you still won’t know which keywords will ultimately bring you the targeted, motivated traffic you are looking for. Aside from that, you have no idea if Google or other search engines will even list your pages anywhere near the top (check out the chart below to see why being above the fold on page 1 is essential in a competitive b2b environment). In the end you may end up spending a lot of time and effort waiting to gain that first page result only to be disappointed because you show up on page 10. Alternately you may show up on page 1, but end up getting the wrong type of traffic resulting in few or no leads/sales. Eye tracking study: Areas of the page searchers focus on Now let’s consider that you do the same keyword research, but set up a Google Adwords account first and wait to optimize your site. With Adwords you can be up and running ads in minutes instead of waiting days or weeks to get indexed by Google in the organic (free) listings. You can also guarantee visibility within the eye tracking sweet spot from the chart above. Now you can begin testing. You can test which keywords are getting the most conversions, which ad copy resonates best with your target market, and which landing page copy convinces people to fill out their information. Once you begin gathering this data, you can begin transitioning the things that work to your website; you can now be confident that your optimization efforts will not be a waste of time. It’s like having the ultimate focus group; people from all over are telling you which keywords they are interested in when looking for products or services you sell. You will now know exactly which web copy to add to your pages to get the most conversions - it is no longer a guessing game. Authors and publishing companies test book titles with Adwords before going to print. Entrepreneurs use adwords to test product ideas before manufacturing the product. Adwords is the ultimate market research tool; if you look at it this way, it is well worth the money spent. Of course this all depends on whether you use Adwords to its full potential and testing capabilities. My next article will discuss the first step to creating a successful Google Adwords campaign – Keyword Research. VOLUME ONE • Online Marketing 8 101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead PRESENTED BY Practice Metrics-Based Copywriting The B2B Lead features a number of helpful articles on copywriting, so I thought I’d share one of my favorite tips for ensuring B2B marketing copy is relevant. As marketers we constantly try to write compelling copy that motivates people to take some sort of action. The trick is to write in the voice of our target audience; speaking to them using language they respond to. Sometimes we use focus groups or A/B testing to help with this; getting out in the field and talking to prospects/customers also helps. In the end though, the words we choose often amount to best guesses. Keyword research tools like Wordtracker, Google Trends, and the Google Keyword Tool provide a wealth of insight into the voice of our audience. Using search data and trends can give excellent clues to the words people use to describe things. Talking to your audience, using the same words they search for themselves, puts you at a major advantage. For example, the other day I was crafting an email to promote a new webcast. Problem was, some people were calling it a webcast and others were calling it a webinar – which was it? What would more people respond to; a webcast offer or a webinar offer? I decided to use Google Trends to compare the search volume of both words. I figured the term that is searched more often will also be the term used more commonly in conversation. This term should also spark a higher interest if used in my email. So I quickly pulled up Google Trends and here is what I found. This obviously made my decision easy. Split testing my email offers confirmed that using “webcast” got the better response. Now, this is just search-driven copywriting in its simplest form. If you want to take this further, you can use the Google Keyword Tool or Wordtracker almost like you would a Thesaurus. For example, maybe you are promoting a “golf strategies” guide. If you plopped this keyword into the Google Keyword Tool, it would offer you numerous suggestions for related terms people are searching for. In this example (shown below) maybe you would be better off promoting it as a “golf tips” guide since that term is searched more frequently. Hopefully by now, you are starting to get the idea. This stuff really works – I have personally seen higher conversion rates on landing pages and emails by using this strategy. If you are interested in reading more about similar ideas, Aaron Wall has a very interesting article on keyword research that is definitely worth a read. http://learn.wordtracker.com/articles/keyword-inspiration-aaron-wall-of-seobookcom-shares-his-secrets/ http://www.wordtracker.com http://www.google.com/trends https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal VOLUME ONE • Online Marketing 9 101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead PRESENTED BY Sprout Widgets, Mashups and Other Great Content That Drives SEO One of the best ways to increase your SEO rankings is to attract inbound links to your blog or website. Traditional link building efforts involve asking for links, link swapping, or link buying. This process is extremely time consuming and can get expensive if you are buying high quality links. Really, in this instance, is there any such thing as a quality link? After all, Google has made no secret that it is actively seeking ways to weed out this practice. In contrast, you can save yourself a lot of time and money by leveraging social media to convince others to link to your content. The challenge is coming up with link-worthy material and then spreading the word via Twitter and other social media tools. Fortunately for those of us with little time and fewer resources, the process of building this content just got a lot easier. You no longer need to embark upon a lengthy research project or write a 10 page white paper. These days, successful link bait is taking the form of widgets or mashups or other forms of rich media content. The prerequisite is that the content should be helpful, clever, funny, or remarkable enough that others want to write about it or include it in their roundup of free tools. The process of building a widget or mashup used to require Web development skills or enough budget to farm out the work. I’ve been reading about a number of free tools that allow just about anyone to create their own widgets but have not found the confidence to try them. Prodded by a “tweet” from one of the more influential Twitterati (did I really just write that?), I decided to check out, Sprout, an extremely cool and easy to use site to help you build widgets or other informational tools that can be embedded in your blog or web site. http://sproutbuilder.com/whataresprouts. Sprout looks easy enough to use and I’m ready to check it out. Now, I just have to come up with the “killer app” for our blog readers. To get ideas, the first step will be to reach out to the community reading the BreakingPoint blog at http://www.breakingpointsystems.com/community/ and then do a bit of brainstorming. VOLUME ONE • Online Marketing 10 101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead PRESENTED BY Blog Basics If you feel like you are completely lost when it comes to blogs, here is a great post on the basics of blogging from VR Marketing blog. Here are some key takeaways and a few of my own thoughts: • • • • • • • • • Be sure to link back to your corporate site, this is especially important if your blog has its own url. (One major reason to start a blog is because it can increase your search engine ranking) Tag each post with categories. This will help your readers find what they are looking for and help boost your search engine ranking as well. Blogs are a great medium for customer feedback. Write a post that gets your customers talking (and commenting) or put a poll on the blog to survey readers on a specific topic. Always moderate your comments. There is a lot of SPAM out there and you want the comments section to be a true dialog that is not interrupted by SPAM. It is ok if someone disagrees with you, do not block that comment because it can get people talking. Comments are boring if everyone agrees and there are no new ideas. Avoid “shameless self promotion.” Blogs with interesting, relevant, and up-to-date content will gain a loyal following. Don’t try to trick your readers and sneak in a sales pitch. Be transparent or risk losing readers. Be sure to include keywords in titles and within relevant content for search engines. Your blog can be a great supporter for your PR efforts. Post an excerpt from a press release on the blog or reuse blog content for PR ideas. Don’t just put your blog out there and expect readers to come. Be sure to leverage your database of customers to let them know about it. Make sure your posts are up-to-date. They recommend twice a month but I would say at least twice a week. In a world of instant gratification, we are used to getting what we want when we want it. If your most recent post is two weeks old, I probably won’t be checking in again anytime soon. VOLUME ONE • Online Marketing 11 101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead PRESENTED BY Page Titles are Important Search Engine Optimization is a big reason why a lot of companies start blogs in the first place. Make sure you are doing everything you can to optimize your blog. Start with having unique page titles. Here are a few tips from Michael Nguyen’s Social Patterns blog: Why is the page title important? • • • • • • Page titles influence search engine rankings. The page title is often used as the heading for your site listing in search engines.. Page titles are the default label for browser bookmarks. Page titles are stored in browser history lists. RSS generators and content management systems use page titles to create headlines. Most people link to web pages using the page title for anchor text. Tips for Writing Better Page Titles • • • • • • • • • • Keep your titles short. Write descriptive titles. Do not use the same title for all your web pages. Focus your keywords at the front. Write in plain language. Avoid unclear titles with more than one meaning. Use a call to action. Avoid unneeded words. Avoid keyword stuffing. Use separators instead of words like “and” or “also”. The following links will have more info on how and why to have unique page titles for your blog posts: http://www.bloggingblog.net/the-importance-of-titles/ http://www.betterbusinessblogging.com/seo-in-blogs/basic-seo-in-blogs-important-title-tag/ VOLUME ONE • Online Marketing 12 101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead PRESENTED BY Keep Your Blog on Track to Support SEO and Other Business Objectives Attention Conservation Notice: The following post provides an eight-point litmus test that B2B marketers and bloggers can use to evaluate their blog posts for Search Engine Optimization and relevance to business objectives. As a blogger it is sometimes difficult to stay on track with your core audience and company interests. Blogging is, after all, a conversation and conversations often stray off track. But when I stepped in to write for my company’s blog, I discovered was there were far more benefits to staying on track with the content than just improving readership. Of course, I know there was a strong connection between the blog and SEO ranking. I also know a blog was a great tool to attract readers and prospects to download content from your web site. But, until I actually dug in and crafted my own posts, I didn’t really understand the “magic” and how to create a repeatable process to boost SEO rankings which inevitably drive demand and brand awareness. So, with a few posts under my belt and a dramatic boost in SEO rankings for a couple of valuable keywords, I put together this quick litmus test for ALL future posts. I know that most blog and social media purists will violently disagree with these tips. They will argue that one should not be blogging with marketing and sales interests in mind. Last time I checked, however, I didn’t live in a Socialist country. And, my ego isn’t important enough to spend hours pontificating about topics without at least something to gain. We are all blogging with an objective in mind. I believe they key is in the “intent” of the post. If your goal is to be found, to educate and to attract a following of potential new customers without making false promises, then the following litmus test should help you to keep your posts on track with objectives: 1. Topic must be relevant to your target audience and—even better— to our company and product or service offerings. 2. Topic should be educational, controversial, timely or related to a news event. Bonus points for link-bait articles like posting a list of valuable resources, expert interviews, howto’s, special reports, etc. 3. Post must begin with easy-to-understand and keyword-rich title (not just a cleverly worded headline). The goal is to communicate what the story and takeaways are about before the reader has to read the story. 4. Must contain links back to prior blog stories, an important corporate web page, press release or a white paper with more information. The exact keywords that are linked to those pages should correspond with the SEO terms for which those pages are optimized. 5. Post must be tagged with right keywords for SEO and content so that it can be categorized and found. 6. Posts should include our thought leadership messages where appropriate. 7. Post should include a list of tips that can be linked to from within the blog. 8. Post must challenge readers to take action in the last sentence—ie. continue the conversation, seek more information or spread the word. So, that’s my quick list. I’m sure there are more. I’m sure some of these may become too cumbersome to apply. But it’s worth a shot. I mean, what is the value of a Google Page 1 listing to your company? With 80 to 90% of buyers starting their search on Google, I’d recommend giving it a shot. I’d like to hear about your experiences with blogging and SEO. Importantly, what has been your success in achieving the coveted Google double listing? VOLUME ONE • Online Marketing 13 101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead PRESENTED BY Measuring the Effectiveness of Your Corporate Blog Companies create blogs for different reasons. Some use it as a tool to communicate with their customers. Others try to leverage their blog for lead generation. Some use it to supplement their PR strategy. Whatever the reason, all companies should have set metrics to follow in order to track the effectiveness of their blog. I just read a great MarketingProf’s article by Mack Collier (this one does require a premium membership, but I highly recommend it). To give you a recap of what Mack suggests, there are three major metrics to track: 1. 2. 3. Traffic Feed Subscribers Links Traffic can be easily tracked using a tool like Google Analytics. You can use traffic measurements to help you determine what subjects are being read the most, what days of the week you get the most traffic and if outside activities like a press release or commenting on another blog gave you a boost. Feed subscribers are different than traffic and will not count as part of your traffic. You may actually see your traffic decrease as your readers find your content to be valuable and subscribe to your RSS. Feedburner is a tracking tool for feeds and offers a few other benefits as well. (Just as an FYI is owned by Google now.) You can track your links through Technorati or Google Blog Search. This will help you determine which topics resonate the best with your readers and will help you to create relationships with other bloggers. VOLUME ONE • Online Marketing 14 101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead PRESENTED BY Want Bloggers to Write About You? Make Sure Your Website is Blogger-Friendly Attention Conservation Notice: The following post shares a few counter-intuitive tips for getting bloggers to write about you. Cory Doctorow – the genius behind Boing Boing, and the inspiration behind ReachForce’s attention conservation notices–has shared more of his brilliance in 17 TIPS FOR GETTING BLOGGERS TO WRITE ABOUT YOU. If you can get past the InformationWeek’s annoying, in-your-face advertising and survey requests, you will find several great nuggets in this post. Many of which will really throw most marketers for a loop. Here are a few of the more interesting suggestions: • • • • • Have a permanent link. Don’t just change the front page of your site every time a new speaker for your speaker-series in announced. A blogger who links to the front page of your site today in a post about the upcoming address by Philo T Farnsworth, wants that link to stay good for in the future, PDFs stink. It’s not a Web page (see “Have a link”). It’s hard to copy and paste out of. It doesn’t show up in browsers half the time. The Web is made of HTML. Put your URL on your images. If you’ve got cool photos or other images up on your site, stick your URL in unobtrusive type at the bottom of it. Forget the “copyright protection” Javascript. Some sites have bizarre Javascript that pops up snotty little copyright messages when you try to right-click on an image to save it. OK, we get the point: you don’t want people to copy your images. We’ll just move on. Enjoy your obscurity. Enough with the legal boilerplate. If every page on your site ends with “(c) 2008 Paranoid Co Inc, all rights reserved. No part of this site may be reproduced without permission,” then bloggers may just take you at your word and write about someone else’s site. The world of Marketing has changed drastically in the last few years and it’s time for B2B Marketers to question the status quo (and their legal counsel) and make some changes to thrive in this new world. VOLUME ONE • Online Marketing 15 101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead PRESENTED BY Twitter to Attract Readers to Your Blog Blog Master…Not just shared the best way (If You Build It, They Will Come) to attract readers to your blog in a recent post to The B2B Lead. Here’s another: Microblogging. Most people I know are absolutely perplexed by the value of microblogging sites like Twitter, Pownce, Seesmic or Jaiku. I’ll spare you the details of the conversation it spawned with my husband the engineer. Personally, I use Twitter and I love it. Don’t always have time to use it, but when I do, it’s amazing. It can also be very powerful. In fact, we presented a podcast on the subject by a real Twitter expert – William Hurley or whurley (listen here). Whurley was able to build a huge following for his Opensville Blog. So much so that his blog rose to a Technorati ranking of 196 in a few short months. Want to benchmark that stat? The B2B Lead is currently ranked 2,910,025. (come on guys, give us a little link love here.) When you immerse yourself in the community and start sending “tweets”, as they are called, it’s easy to see how powerful these tools would be for building a following and driving readers to your blog. That is—if you have something interesting to say. After all, as the fine folks over at FiveRuns say “don’t wake up the dog to tell it it’s sleeping.” My advice: don’t register for Twitter with the idea that you’ll really share exactly what you’re doing at any giving moment. After all, most of us really don’t care what you had for lunch (bad for the diet), how long the line is at the bank, or who you were having lunch with today (that’s just name dropping). What we do care about is: the neat idea you just had, your cool new project, a happy hour forming in your city, your latest brush with greatness, the exciting new product you just bought, a hot new company on your radar screen, or a new sale on shoes! OK, maybe that’s just me. Anyway, you get the picture. Think Word of Mouth. Or, Word of Mouth 2.0. Twitter has become my way to become an “insider.” As an avid blogger and social media enthusiast, I follow Robert Scoble, the author of Naked Conversations—the definitive text on the culture of blogging. His tweets turn me on to the most amazing products and ideas. Toys like the WiFi detector t-shirt (http://www.thinkgeek.com/tshirts/generic/991e/) . Cool multi-media tools like www.vuvox.com. He wrote an excellent article on microblogging for Fastcompany Magazine. In the piece, he speculates that the step from e-mail to microblogging may be as significant as from fax to e-mail in the 90’s. Hans De Keulenaer also provided some excellent tips for microblogging on his Web Business Marketing Blog. He suggests: 1. Daily tips and tricks: energy saving, use of a software package, … But consider, how quickly will you run out of steam? 2. Quick reporting from a roadshow, tradeshow, … Microblogging can be easily done from mobile devices. It allows you to communicate broader about your event for the folks not there, while you are busy with the event. 3. Information during a crisis, when aid workers have essential information, but no time. 4. Animate events, such as a conference or trade fair, showing announcements of participants on a giant screen. For a customer event, you can use it to share developments in the itinerary, speakers as they sign on, encourage feedback, etc. This will help you build a community of interest and encourage registrations for the event. As adoption grows, you could consider expanding use to organize events at major trade shows, etc. The options are only limited by the imagination. Like these ideas? Follow me on Twitter (http://twitter.com/poneal). Want to microblog with your voice – post a recording at Utterz (http://www.utterz.com). Not convinced? Read more about Microblogging: Microblogging:What Is It Good For? VOLUME ONE • Online Marketing 16 101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead PRESENTED BY Blogging to the Beat I was cruising through my Google Reader (one of the best things I could have ever set up as a blogger) and stumbled upon a great post about blog writing on Diana Huff’s B2B MarCom Writer Blog. She suggests that bloggers have a beat just like journalists. If you are just starting your own corporate blog, this is a great tip to help you figure our what to write about. If you can define your “beat” then you will find yourself soaking up everything you see about those topics and inspiration will come more easily. Also, if you are one of several contributors to your blog, each writer having a unique beat will help each author to be differentiated from the others. I’ve always loved the saying “a jack of all trades is a master of none.” If you can really narrow your focus, you have a better chance of positioning yourself as an expert in that area which will increase the quality of your content and hopefully your readership. VOLUME ONE • Online Marketing 17 101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead PRESENTED BY Everything I Know About B2B Blogging I Learned from Perez Love him or hate him, but Perez Hilton knows blogging. He’s parlayed his celebrity juice blog into one of the most highly visited blogs on the Internet and transformed himself into a minor celebrity. I confess I too follow his blog to read his snarky updates on people whose lives seem infinitely more interesting than my own. And, I’ve picked up a number of techniques along the way that I use in my role as a B2B Marketer. Here are a few highlights: Let me info-tain you. Today’s audiences want a hefty dose of entertainment with their information. Let’s face it, with all of the noise on the Internet and the myriad of sources spewing content our way; it’s difficult to capture attention without being outrageous, humorous, or at least somewhat entertaining. It’s more challenging to pull this off in the business world. Can you imagine pulling some of the stunts Perez is known for? Still, it pays to have some fun with your blog and take a few risks. Don’t take yourself too seriously. If you are going to “make some noise” and get visibility in the blogosphere, you better expect to attract criticism and jokes at your expense. So, it’s important that you don’t take yourself too seriously, have some fun, roll with the punches…. If you do it right, you might even get Farked! Trust me, this isn’t a bad thing. Check out some of the comments made in response to my latest viral marketing campaign - http://forums.fark.com/cgi/fark/comments.pl?IDLink=2729832. Push some buttons. Notice how Perez engages his readers by reaching out to them to comment on his images or stories or pushing their buttons? Even better – he actually asks them to contribute to his content by coming up with celebrity Uni-Names—a personal favorite. And, let’s face it, he’s the master of stirring up a flurry of controversy which can be the tipping point for instant blog visibility. In the blogosphere, being opinionated pays big! So, if one of your posts sets off a firestorm of flames, don’t get mad, get famous. Got any favorite Perez moments to share? Maybe a B2B Uni-Name you’ve coined like Funnelnomics? Send ‘em our way! VOLUME ONE • Online Marketing 18 101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead PRESENTED BY Re-think Blog ROI Yes, you read that right, I did actually use the words “Blog” and “ROI” in the same headline. But this isn’t a post about how to calculate the ROI of your blog. If that’s what you are looking for, reading further will be a frustrating exercise. Whenever I speak about social media and blogging, the questions always follow the same path from cynical challenges to reluctant how-to questions. Sort of like the 5 stages of grief (disclaimer: I am not a clinical psychologist and really have no idea if these stages are even accurate): Shock - “Is a blog right for my audience?” Denial - “How can I justify the value of a blog, I can’t measure the ROI, can I? Bargaining - “How can I justify investing in such a time-consuming exercise? Isn’t my time better spent elsewhere?” Anger - “Where do I even start? Social media is out of control.” Acceptance - “How often do I have to post?” Just like death and taxes, blogging is inevitable. It helps you establish a closer relationship with your customers. It gives your company a face and a personality letting you share your evolving philosophies and lessons learned with your readership. And, it helps with search engine optimization so that buyers can find you. For all of these reasons and so many more, you will eventually be forced into embracing blogging. I mean, when was the last time a journalist or blogger wrote a wildly exciting post linking to your web page? Not happening? You’re not alone. People don’t get excited by web copy. But they do get inspired and passionate about blog posts—if they deliver value. I recently read an extremely interesting post by Phil Baumann’s entitled Blog ROI: It’s About Value, Stupid!, in which Phil makes an excellent case for why hospitals should have a blog. His reason: “value.” According to Phil: “Until someone establishes a standard measure of Blog ROI, I think it’s helpful to focus our lens on a fundamental question: What information is needed to decide whether a blog is worth its cost. There’s probably a complicated answer to that question, one which depends on the economics of your particular organization. In its place, I’d like to offer up three simple intuition pumps: 1. 2. 3. Value drives ROI Price is a function of Value Value-Multiplied is replacing Value-Added” Now, here’s the real genius behind Phil’s post. He claims that: “Value-Multiplied is Replacing Value-Added” - And that’s where intelligent applications of social media come into play. Can you think of a better way to multiply the shared values of your going concern? Word-of-Mouth (WOM) was always king. But know the kingdom of WOM has come. Know thy king. He’s a little different this time around. He’s wearing new clothing: a crown of truth, a cape of respect and a staff of democracy. In fact: he’s you! If you lay down the tracks for your customers’ value-train then ROI will come chugging along. Ready to get started delivering value? Check out Guy Kawasaki’s Alltop Blogging for tips and resources. VOLUME ONE • Online Marketing 19 101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead PRESENTED BY When it Comes to Social Media: Play By the Rules Attention Conservation Notice: The following post provides an overview of the Social Media landscape and important tips for making it work for both brand awareness and lead generation. The marketing analysts at Sirius Decisions just came out with a decent high level view of the Social Media Landscape in today’s SiriusPerspective newsletter. Some of the categories and descriptions seemed a little “old school”, so I’m adding my own edits to their categories here: • Blogs/Blogging including the creation of a blog and participation in other writers’ blogs. • Social networks such as MySpace and Facebook where people can network with other parties who are interested in a particular topic. • Forums such as Yahoo or Google Groups that are moderated and focused on a particular topic or function. • Podcasting or Vidcasting which simply means syndicating your digital or video messages via sites such as Odeo or YouTube. • Media sharing on sites that let users upload and rate content such as contributed articles, videos and images. • RSS/Web feeds that distribute blog articles or other content summaries which readers view via an RSS reader. Users then click through to read content. • Wikis. Collaborative documents that are created using a Web browser. Contributors can add, delete or edit content, and notify other authors of their changes. • Social bookmarks: Sites such as del.icio.us (owned by Yahoo!) and Digg that enable users to store, rate and recommend bookmarks. Many bookmark sites provide Web feeds to notify subscribers of updates. The newsletter states that, according to their research, roughly 50 percent of B2B organizations are utilizing some type of social media. They also warn that social media may not be a good tactic for demand generation unless marketers play by the rules. Let me first say that while I am typically not one to “follow the rules,” I do agree with that statement. It is vital that marketers have a solid conversion strategy for social media that is not “in your face” or overly aggressive. The important point in the social media arena is to network, build awareness, establish your expertise, provide high value content that buyers can easily find and make it easy for them to contact you when they need your product or service. The results of the NetQoS viral video campaign show that it works. VOLUME ONE • Online Marketing 20 101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead PRESENTED BY A Case Study in Viral Video Marketing - The B2B Lead Vidcast Attention Conservation Notice: The following post contains a long post on controversy in the field of viral marketing and a long (30 min) video case study on viral video marketing presented by Pam O’Neal Mickelson. It presents advice on what to do and what not to do when it comes to producing and distributing a viral marketing campaign. Viral video marketing has become a hotbed of controversy these days! Who would have believed that videos like Netcosm, Mr. Happy Crack, Benny Lava, and Tay Zonday could be tainted by heated debates over the validity of viral marketing and the techniques used by some to promote their campaigns? Still the debate rages: Many B2B Marketers think viral marketing is like “lightening in a bottle.” They advise there is no simple formula and you cannot possibly orchestrate such a campaign because both content and timing are so critical to viral success. Others, will argue that they can concoct a viral campaign for anyone and will go to just about any lengths to do so. While most will agree that content and timing are both crucial, I do believe that almost every B2B Marketer has a successful viral or Word of Mouth campaign in them. And, I also believe that they don’t have to resort to trickery or deceit to attract tens of thousands of viewers for their YouTube video. In fact, I believe the more authentic you are, the stronger the Word of Mouth effect. Unfortunately, not all B2B Marketers are using a transparent or authentic approach. A recent widely criticized Tech Crunch post written by Dan Ackerman Greenberg advising marketers to pay for blog coverage and trick viewers into viewing videos has triggered a firestorm of controversy that threatens to ruin the discipline for the rest of us. Much like spammers ruined email marketing. Greenberg kicks off his post with this inauspicious intro: “Over the past year, I have run clandestine marketing campaigns meant to ensure that promotional videos become truly viral, as these examples have become in the extreme.” He might as well have run an ad inviting people to bash him. Or was that his intent? This is almost as bad as the sales letter I received from a company offering to post “laudatory comments” on our video postings or blog articles in an effort to build a following. I felt like I needed to take a shower after reading that letter and this post! (As you’ll read later I was not the only one.) Greenberg also advised “So how do we get the first 50,000 views we need to get our videos onto the Most Viewed list? • Blogs: We reach out to individuals who run relevant blogs and actually pay them to post our embedded videos. Sounds a little bit like cheating/PayPerPost, but it’s effective and it’s not against any rules. • Forums: We start new threads and embed our videos. Sometimes, this means kickstarting the conversations by setting up multiple accounts on each forum and posting back and forth between a few different users. Yes, it’s tedious and time-consuming, but if we get enough people working on it, it can have a tremendous effect. • MySpace: Plenty of users allow you to embed YouTube videos right in the comments section of their MySpace pages. We take advantage of this. • Facebook: Share, share, share. We’ve taken Dave McClure’s advice and built a sizeable presence on Facebook, so sharing a video with our entire friends list can have a real impact. Other ideas include creating an event that announces the video launch and inviting friends, writing a note and tagging friends, or posting the video on Facebook Video with a link back to the original YouTube video. • Email lists: Send the video to an email list. Depending on the size of the list (and the recipients’ willingness to receive links to YouTube videos), this can be a very effective strategy. • Friends: Make sure everyone we know watches the video and try to get them to email it out to their friends, or at least share it on Facebook. VOLUME ONE • Online Marketing 21 101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead PRESENTED BY As you can imagine, Greenberg’s post was slammed big time for advocating “techniques including writing fake sensational titles and creating controversy by having arguments in the comments of a video using multiple YouTube accounts.” I can’t help but notice, however, that while Greenberg may be unpopular with the readers of Tech Crunch, he is apparently very popular among advertisers. A look at both the quantity and the prominence of his clients shows that there is huge demand and high stakes around viral marketing. Viral video, much like televised infotainment, remains one of the best ways to broadcast your brand and message to a very large audience. Combine it with a blog or other social media component, and it can be an ingenious way to build a large following. And, unlike televised infotainment, it doesn’t come with a multi-million dollar price tag. Importantly, viral campaigns come with the added bonus of Word of Mouth cache. Viewers are guaranteed to tune in when the content has been recommended by a friend or colleague, or when the buzz has reached a level that demands their attention. It’s easy to see why companies such as Greenberg’s firm are in high demand. And, while what he does may feel unethical and deceptive, is it really so different from the infotainment that we call reality TV? I mean, wasn’t The Apprentice just one long commercial for Burger King and Yahoo? Isn’t Project Runway a great promotional vehicle for Banana Republic and Bitten by Sarah Jessica Parker? Aren’t these all examples of Marketing disguised as entertainment? Aren’t we, as viewers, tricked into tuning in to these hour-long commercials by slickly produced teasers of apprentices battling to the finish or snarky fashion designers back stabbing each other to get ahead? In an increasingly marketing-averse world, tricking your audience into tuning in may seem the only way to get your message out. But this is extremely short sighted. If you’re not looking at viral marketing with a long term perspective, you are over looking one of the most valuable aspects of this approach – the ability to quickly and inexpensively build a community of interest. The Word of Mouth aspect of viral marketing gives Marketers a powerful way to attract a following of media, blogerati, influencers, and–most importantly–buyers. Click here to watch the video case study. As this video case study of ReachForce customer, NetQoS, network monitoring campaign illustrates, just about anyone can be successful with viral marketing if they take an authentic, transparent, relevant and entertaining approach. Look at the fantastic job Dr. Pepper did with the Cherry Chocolate Rain viral video or this clever Symantec video. It may not always guarantee a million views, but it will earn you respect and a loyal following over the long term. In the next B2B Lead post I’ll enumerate the 20 ideas that made the NetQoS campaign a success leading to a Marketing Sherpa Viral Marketing Hall of Fame inclusion. I’ll also present some of the visuals that might have been difficult to see on this video. VOLUME ONE • Online Marketing 22 101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead PRESENTED BY Put These 20 Ideas into Action for B2B Viral Marketing Success Attention Conservation Notice: The following post contains 20 ideas for packaging, promoting and tracking the results of your viral video campaign. It also contains visuals from The B2B Lead Vidcast on viral video marketing. As I’ve written previously on The B2B Lead, many Marketers advise there is no simple formula for making your campaign go viral. Others argue that they can help anyone go viral and will use less than authentic and transparent techniques to do so. As you can see from this vidcast case study for a B2B viral video campaign NetQoS ran, it is possible to be successful without resorting to trickery. It just takes relevant content, clever packaging, a solid conversion strategy, and transparent outreach via Social Media. However, even with a good idea and superb execution, there are no guarantees. Viral marketing is like walking a tight rope. There is a fine line between success and failure. There are no assurances. No opportunities for testing messages. And it could backfire or simply fizzle. But the great thing about walking a tight rope is that no one can pass you. Want to improve your odds in the world of B2B viral marketing? Here is a roundup of the 20 ideas that made the NetQoS network monitoring campaign a success, and some of the charts and graphs that you might not have been able to see on the video. Viral Video Idea #1: Set clear objectives for your campaign. For NetQoS, we wanted to use viral marketing to increase brand awareness, break into the blogosphere in a big way and increase web traffic and leads. We set specific objectives and measured our success. Viral Video Idea #2: Be relevant. Make sure your message and content are relevant both to your company and to your target audience. Because without relevant content, you may hit a home run but effectively strike out. Kind of like that dancing baby concept from the 90’s. Can you name the company behind that one? Viral Video Idea #3: Know your audience. And, I’m not talking about their pain points and job roles. I’m talking more about psychographics and behavioral characteristics. Understand what interests them, where they live and work, how they get their information. For NetQoS, we knew that our audience would be a great viral target—they were comfortable online, 80% read blogs or are active in blogging, 84% start their search on a search engine. Most are smart and cynical audience—marketing averse. Viral Video Idea #4: Be opportunistic. – Have your FlipVideo on you at all times to capture a great idea or moment. I heard a story about one of the leading open source database providers recently. Apparently, a Marketer for that company had a great idea for a video. He Twittered his circle of contacts to round up a video camera and by the time he was ready to shoot, his competitor had already heard about the idea and beat him to the punch. For us, we were lucky enough to have the right video material right under our nose. A senior researcher had developed a 3D video-game like data visualization of our product data. It converted live Network Performance data from our products into 3D images. It was unique and very, very relevant. Viral Video Idea #5: Have fun. As I wrote in this blog post from The B2B Lead, you should make fun of yourself before someone else does. We were extremely kitschy because we knew the quality of the graphics was not up to the realistic standards of today’s CGI. It had a very 80’s Tron like feel so we made the most of that. We didn’t just post the clip. We named it, packaged it and added humor at every turn. Viral Video Idea #6: Develop a seeding and conversion strategy prior to posting your video. In 30 days with less than $7,000, our in-house team along with our team at Porter Novelli developed the strategy and materials for a complete viral video experience including seeding the campaign, welcoming viewers and offering additional content as well as a program for building a following after the campaign. Viral Video Idea #7: In the world of viral video, production value isn’t important. In fact I would discourage it. Ours looked like some techies had cooked it up in their spare time. In fact, that’s how it started. But we did put a great deal of thought into the packaging, promotion and conversion strategy for the campaign. It is important to always provide a thumbnail image of what the viewer is getting. VOLUME ONE • Online Marketing 23 101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead PRESENTED BY Viral Video Idea #8: Protect your brand. You can make fun of yourself but don’t do anything that will embarrass you or the company. Don’t take chances with controversial content or release anything of such poor quality that you create a negative brand image. Don’t use dubious tactics to get noticed or bait and switch techniques. We explained very clearly what Netcosm was (a data visualization) and was NOT (a product for sale). We also made it clear that the work was done through NetQoS Performance Labs and not beta tested. Viral Video Idea #9: YouTube reports that the average viewing time for videos is 15 to 30 seconds. You have a very short runway to take off. Get to the point fast, entertain and leave them wanting more. We added captions based on the old “This is brain, this is your brain on drugs” campaign. We selected clips that showed the most action and had some fun with the content. Then we offered a longer video if people were interested in seeing more. Viral Video Idea #10: Somewhere between 40,000 to 65,000 new videos are posted to YouTube every day. Help people find it by optimizing for search engines: Tag it, name it appropriately, describe it, add links and compelling copy and optimize using the right keywords. If it takes off in a big way, you want as many links to your content as possible using your top keywords. Viral Video Idea #11: Use your corporate blog to trigger the viral distribution and keep the story alive. You’ve got to get the word out and a press release is simply not appropriate for viral marketing. What’s more, blogging with the full story behind the campaign helps to give your program and your company a face and a personality. Make sure that personality is one that will garner respect by being completely open and honest on your blog. Viral Video Idea #12: Build a community of interest. This is the core message behind my prior B2B Lead post on the subject of viral video marketing. Don’t use trickery or bait and switch to get people to your video because you will be forgoing one of the most valuable benefits of the viral approach – the ability to quickly and inexpensively build a community of interest. The Word of Mouth aspect of viral marketing gives Marketers a powerful way to attract a following. Do this by explaining each step of the program using your blog. Tell your audience what you were thinking when you produced it. Report on the results. Give followers a way to track the momentum and keep it alive. Viral Video Idea #13: Seed the story with the blogerati, your customers and friends, your social network. Post it to Digg and Reddit or whatever social media site is appropriate for the topic. Twitter your followers. Leverage Social media like Facebook, MySpace, and other groups to spread the word. Of course timing is everything. Here’s a high level snapshot of our timeline. Viral Video Idea #14: Track and monitor the results and keep your followers and the blogging community posted on the momentum building behind your viral video. This helps build excitement and credibility around how your video is resonating with the audience. It might just convince an influential blogger that he/she should write a story about you. We not only tracked YouTube views and Most Viewed Honors, but we also monitored: • • • • Google Analytics for web traffic Google Alerts for media and blog coverage Salesforce.com for leads and evaluation requests as well as revenue opportunities Eloqua for clickstream analysis to determine if people were using the right path from the blog story to the video to the microsite and finally to product pages and offers VOLUME ONE • Online Marketing 24 101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead PRESENTED BY Viral Video Idea #15: Automate and expedite lead processing. When viral goes big, it really goes big. And, studies show that B2B Marketers and Sales reps need to follow-up on Web-generated leads within 30 minutes of a registration or the chances for conversion are poor. If you don’t have a great program for automatically scoring and qualifying leads so that you can route quality leads to your salesforce instantly, you could be asking for big trouble using viral. First of all your Inside Sales team is likely to be swamped with a larger percentage of irrelevant leads. Secondly, you will miss out on a number of great sales opportunities by taking weeks to respond. We were actually given the Marketer’s Choice award by Eloqua for our Lead Scoring and Automation program that enabled us to process the leads generated by our viral campaign within 24 hours. Eloqua’s Marketing Automation was critical to this process. Viral Video Idea #16: Demonstrate that you met your objectives. YouTube will allow you to track some of your results, but it won’t show the whole story. Here are a few results that NetQoS tracked: • YouTube Views: 66,000 and growing. (This did not include those who viewed it on Google video, Tech Crunch or other blogs.) • Blog Coverage: 70+ blogs wrote about the video. • NetQoS Blog Readership: Traffic more than tripled. • NetQoS Corporate Web traffic: YoY 43% higher • Organic SEO: As the chart below shows: weighted market exposure for NetQoS top keywords increased by 41% for all keywords plus 600% on the primary keyword. Viral Video Idea #17: Show your campaign delivered value to the business. You most certainly will have to do a lot of convincing to get sponsorship for your viral campaign, so don’t miss your chance to prove to all of the skeptics that the idea was worth the investment. Show that the spike in traffic and coverage hit the right audience and generated brand awareness or demand. For us, the results show it was: As the charts below show, there was a spike in web traffic for all product pages and a large 4X increase in Web-based leads. We also showed a 26% increase in product demo requests. Our cost per qualified lead was $16. Other techniques range from $60 per qualified lead for Google AdWords to $250 or more from a seminar or online advertising campaign. VOLUME ONE • Online Marketing 25 101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead PRESENTED BY Viral Video Idea #18: So, show me the money. Viral video, like any other Marketing campaign, should always demonstrate a positive return. While it is still too early for us to show revenue, we do have more than a half a million in pipeline from this campaign that cost $7,000. Viral Video Idea #19: Don’t forget to subtly brand the video and microsite with your company name. Don’t be overly obvious or slick. The point is to entertain and encourage people to spread the word while subtly associating your company with the content. Viral Video Idea #20: It’s not over when it’s over. Extend the life of your campaign. You’ve done the hard work to build a community of interest, so keep them interested and the lines of communication open. Evolve your story, and continue to post updates. For NetQoS, we turned the Netcosm experience into a live event and continued to post about it on our blog. When we first embarked upon this viral video campaign, there was no playbook. The NetQoS Marketing Team, Dr. Mike Johns, and the Porter Novelli Austin team all worked together to figure it out. Now we are sharing our playbook with you. Let us know if you’ve had success using it or your own techniques. VOLUME ONE • Online Marketing 26 101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead PRESENTED BY Building a Following on Twitter If you are anything like me, keeping up with all of the different social networking tools out there can be a bit overwhelming. Now that you have joined Twitter how do you leverage it to boost your brand? It doesn’t really matter what your tweets are about if no one is reading them. I found a great article on building your popularity on Twitter by Dan Zarrella. Here are his top 10 tips: 1. Match Your Usernames and Avatars 2. Search Twitter for Twitter Users Mentioning Your Favorite Social Site 3. Search Google for Profiles on Your Favorite Social News Sites Mentioning Twitter 4. Link to your Twitter Account from All Your Social Profiles 5. Ask Readers of Your Blog to Follow You 6. “Twitter-jack” Active Social News & Twitter Users’ Friends 7. Ask Questions 8. Don’t Just Spam Twitter, Add Value 9. Post the Title with the URL 10. Consider Using a Social Media Specific URL Shortener To get the specifics for each tip, click here. I know I learn best by example, so here is a great TechCrunch article about Connie Reece and the frozen pea phenomenon. VOLUME ONE • Online Marketing 27 101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead PRESENTED BY Learn From the 6 Cs of Social Influence Marketing When I was in college (far too many years ago) we learned about the 4 P’s of Marketing. Of course, in just the last few years, we’ve seen a major shift in thinking about the 3rd P – promotion. We no longer accept the notion that 2% returns on direct mail or 0% responses from print advertising are smart Marketing. Instead, we are laser targeting our messages to audiences and using social marketing to build a following of like minded customers. With increasing interest in the power of communities, we now have the 6 C’s of Social Influence Marketing thanks to Dave Friedman, president of the central region for Avenue A | Razorfish. In today’s post, I’ve shared some of Friedman’s very timely advice on making social marketing and communities work. You see, I’ve had some very interesting discussions of late on how to design and “position” a community. It boils down to “can you really design and position a community or will the community itself determine what it becomes?” We’ve decided to let the BreakingPoint community define itself. Stay tuned for the big launch announcement and see how this works for us. In the mean time, here is what Friedman has to say courtesy of Chief Marketer Report. 1. Content: Access to valuable tools and content is a key factor in a consumer’s decision to interact with a brand. Regardless of their goals, brands need to think about customizing bite-sized, portable content or experiences for their most prominent target segments—content that their “friends” would be proud to display, share, or support. Sound familiar? This was the focus of The B2B Lead – snack size educational nuggets. 2. Customization: Users crave the ability to customize, post and share content. On social networks like MySpace or Facebook, users define themselves through their personalized profile pages and the elements that they choose to display. Marketers need to empower consumers to express themselves. 3. Community: The adage “build it and they will come” is not applicable here. To build community within social media campaigns, brands need to achieve several things: Give users a reason to interact with your brand frequently by providing unique content, value or engagement. Let your content travel by distributing it across widgets and other mechanisms beyond your Web site. Get the rest of the 6 Cs Or, check out Joseph Jaffe’s version at http://www.jaffejuice.com. VOLUME ONE • Online Marketing 28 101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead PRESENTED BY Using Press Releases to Drive Web Traffic and Leads If you’re like me, you pour a lot of time and effort into wordsmithing press releases. It’s important to get the message just right. Then you go back and forth with executives and/or partners to make sure all parties are happy with the messages. It can take days or weeks and become frustrating. Sadly, if you’re not taking advantage of new ways to publish your own content online, chances are nobody’s reading the results of all of that hard work. Or, so says David Meerman Scott. In his recent post entitled Top 10 PR tips, Scott’s #1 piece of advice is “The old ways to get noticed were to buy expensive advertising and beg the media to write about you and your products. The best way to get noticed today is to publish great content online.” Here’s some ideas I came up with to stretch beyond traditional media. Did I miss anything? 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. Distribute the release via a wire service like MarketWire, Business Wire, PRWeb or PRNewswire. Include video or audio interviews with the wire service post to get pickup on a wide variety of sites like Odeo. Post a supporting video on YouTube. Develop a chart or image that supports the release and post to Flickr. Blog about it on your own blog and your partner’s blog. Reach out to other bloggers to conduct a Q&A about the news. Promote via StumbleUpon. Create a Google AdWords or Yahoo campaign using the headline of the release – promote using traditional PPC ads and contextual advertising. Send out the link to your LinkedIn or Facebook friends to help you spread the word. 10. Post your blog post to sites like Reddit, Digg, etc. 11. Include it in your RSS feeds – both press release and blog RSS feeds. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 18. Send out a tweet to your Twitter following. Hold a webinar to discuss the reasons behind the news. Turn the release into an educational article and post it to http://www.scribd.com or http://www.ezinearticles.com. Embed the headline and a link in your email signature. Include it in your own newsletter or magazine. Send the release to relevant user groups or professional organizations. http://www.free-news-release.com/ http://www.freepressreleases.co.uk/ http://www.i-newswire.com/ http://www.prleap.com/ (I’ve never tried these but heard they are good for SEO. Anyone had success with them?) 20. Oh yeah, pitch it to the press. 17. Post it to your customer support site. 19. Use a free press release posting service such as: VOLUME ONE • Online Marketing 29 101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead PRESENTED BY TagClouding Your Leads Messaging is critical to how you communicate your benefits and your product to your audience. Your messaging follows you throughout your communication and no place is it more applicable than your main website. This is the spot where your prospects must make a fairly immediate decision whether to stick around and gather some more info (and hopefully make a purchase). When you find the proper messaging you will ultimately be able to provide customers, partners, media, analysts and even internal owners your core value proposition: • • • • Who are you? What do you stand for today? Tomorrow? How do you explain your main benefits? Your first step to consistent and powerful messaging is to have your internal and external constituents answer the above questions. If done properly you’ll have a tremendous amount of data. In a recent scenario at my last gig, we were able to gather information from more than 1,500 survey responses from users, partners, executives and investors. Often you simply comb through all the data and make various hypothesis based on a thorough scrub of the data. It is great to have so much data, but with too much data comes the fear that we won’t be able to get to the core of what people actually thought of the company and its solution. Also, we would need hundreds of hours to sort through it all properly. One thing we have noticed as we sifted through data were the patterns in the answers that were receiving. The ability to quickly view these patterns is critical to discovering how your audience views your company and your product, thus starting to form the messaging that will most resonate with prospects. The most simple and effective way for you to visualize the patterns of your data is to create a tag cloud. A tag cloud will help represent the words that appear the most; the larger the font the more that word appeared in the results. Very quickly you will see if your prospects will respond more to particular words and phrases. Fortunately there is the ability to automate tagclouds using tools such as TagCrowd, which allow you to input data and create a tag cloud; this could be a URL, a file or just paste in the text to be visualized. It then gives you options for how many tags to show, ignore common words (‘and’, ‘the’, etc), grouping of similar words (innovate, innovation, innovating) and whether you want to show the amount of times each word appears. You can then grab the HTML or take a screen grab and you have a great visual way to demonstrate data. Reviewing these tag clouds is highly effective and can lead you to terrific conversations about your company and your final messaging…which of course is the goal. But the power of the tag cloud goes beyond simply helping to create the proper messaging. Use it to visualize what each of the pages of your site actually say about you, critical for SEO/SEM, but also to determine if you are actually saying what you mean to say. It can be surprising to find out that not only are the words you are using on your homepage not resonating directly with your prospects, but often we are using hypocritical verbiage. The same can be done for any marketing campaign you are gearing up to drive leads. Just remember you may not be saying what you think you’re saying. VOLUME ONE • Online Marketing 30 101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead PRESENTED BY Web Analytics for B2B Marketers In today’s world of new media, search engine marketing is perceived as a necessary tactic in the B2B world. The challenge with online advertising is that we, as B2B marketers, take a B2C approach. We build PPC ads under the guise of “if we’re out there they will come”. The problem is that B2B buyers are different from B2C buyers. When you are shopping for new running shoes, you search in Google for “red nike running shoes”. Various sponsored and organic results appear, you click through and pull out your credit card. B2B sales cycles are measured in months not minutes, so why are we trying to use the same tactics? B2B marketers instead need to do whatever they can to drive leads to their website, be that SEO, PPC, links from blogs, etc. but because their business is less transactional they must capture those visitors so that they can control the marketing messages and proactively target interested buyers throughout the buying cycle. You may be thinking, “Well I capture web visitors through landing pages and forms.” The thing is that only 3% of web visitors fill out a form and according to MarketingSherpa, only 50% of those fill it out completely and accurately. The #1 name filled in on forms is Mickey Mouse (although cute, I don’t think he is the buyer you are looking for). Also, did you capture contact info for the right buying roles? How many college interns did you have filling out information? You know there are unannounced visitors on your website, the challenge is to identify those visitors so that you can turn passive visitors into actionable leads. There are several web analytics tools out there that can help you on your way to identifying these unknown visitors. You should look for a tool that: • Identifies the companies visiting your website • Analyzes those visiting companies to determine trends in the industries and sizes of visiting companies • Allows you to set up business rules to score visitors based on pages visited and time on site • Offers data services to find the right buying roles within those companies Also, be sure to ask for a free trial so you can test the power of the tool and see results before you have to buy. VOLUME ONE • Online Marketing 31 101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead PRESENTED BY Make Some Imaginary Friends AKA a Persona Didn’t get approval to fly to London for last week’s Search Engine Strategies? Never fear, Susan Esparza kindly live blogged from the event and shared a number of wonderful lessons including this super post from Ian Lurie’s presentation on Search Marketing & Persona Models. When explaining the concept of personae, a topic we blogged about on this B2B Lead post a few weeks back. Ian provided a very “sticky” definition: “A persona is your brand’s imaginary friend.” He also shared these wonderful words of wisdom for building a campaign to woo your persona: • Pick the persona you want to start with • Refresh yourself with their needs, motivations, wants, fears, limitations, etc. • Become empathetic to that persona - really put yourself into their head. • Too hard? Get a team together to act the parts…but be careful in your casting choices. (Don’t cast a competitive person as a competitive persona. It’s cross contamination.) VOLUME ONE • Online Marketing 32 101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead PRESENTED BY When Investing in New Media Programs Track the Metrics That Matter I have a confession to share with you. And, to most readers of The B2B Lead, this will come as no surprise. I am a metric-aholic! My professional life is ruled by metrics. Metrics help me plan my day. They buy my credibility and expedite decision-making. They inspire my competitive spirit and drive me to produce more. They help me justify the purchase of $30,000 worth of t-shirts without a song and dance. Best of all, they empower me to utter the dreaded “No” when asked to use resources unwisely. So, when it comes to B2B marketing techniques, I rarely invest in programs that do not result in a demonstrated return. Leigh Anne recently posted that she struggled with social media and its effect on lead generation and asked the question “Is social media like traditional PR? You have to do it but there is no way to measure results?” Well, Leigh Anne, I’m happy to tell you that you can track and measure the results of social media. My post on viral video marketing provides a real world case study of those metrics in action. But the post did not include all of the metrics I track. Nor did it include the tools I use to track these results, some of which may break the average startup budget. In this week’s post, I’ll share a few metrics for determining if your Web Site, blog and social media marketing techniques are working for you. Here are a just a few of the metrics I track weekly: Website Traffic: Ensure unique visitor trending is “up and to the right.” Top Referrers: Monitor the sites that are contributing the most traffic to my Website. Hopefully, your blog is in the top 5. Unsolicited Inbound Leads: Provided you use Salesforce.com, track the source of all inbound leads using Salesforce.com web-to-lead tracking codes. This will give you insight into your campaign results. Track all leads without a campaign separately and monitor the trend. You can attribute growth in these leads to a combination of PR and social media. Blog Rankings: Monitor your Technorati ranking and authority rating. This will enable you to monitor your position in the blogosphere. Conversions from Blog to Website: Is your blog converting readers to your Website? This is critical. If you are providing valuable, relevant, and actionable content on your blog, you should see a high rate of conversion to your website. If you are tracking web-based lead growth, you should be able to make some correlation between an increase in blog conversions and inbound leads. RSS Subscriptions: Monitor your Feedburner stats to see how many people are signing up to receive your RSS feeds. Once again, make sure that number is growing and experiment with promoting your feed to fuel growth. Inbound Links to Website and Blog and Link Value: Social media is a wonderful tool for search engine optimization (SEO). And, when it comes to SEO, there is nothing better than a large number of high value optimized inbound links. So make sure you are tracking an increase in inbound links that use the proper anchor text. Google Page One Listings and Weighted SEO Exposure: Sadly, page one search engine listings don’t just happen with a call to Google. Monitor and measure performance of target keywords and your exposure for both search engine marketing (SEM) and SEO. That’s probably enough to get started. In my next post on The B2B Lead, I’ll share insight on a few of the tools I use to track these metrics and assess the value of search engine marketing and new media programs. VOLUME ONE • Online Marketing 33 101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead PRESENTED BY Invest in the Right Tools to Track the Metrics That Matter In my last post, I shared a few of the metrics I track each week to assess the performance of my social media programs. In this week’s post, I focus on the tools I use to track results. Because I’m a metrics-aholic, I have racked up a rather expensive habit over the years. But, I have found the insight these products provide is well worth the investment. Here are a just a few of the products I use to track social media and traditional marketing program results: Website Traffic: Google Analytics helps me track web analytics basics. And, it costs nothing! Top Referrers: Once again, Google Analytics has my vote for the best info at the best price. Unsolicited Inbound Leads: I use a combination of salesforce.com and Eloqua to track inbound leads. Eloqua, while one of the most expensive tools in my tool chest, actually gives me details on a one-off basis so can monitor the click stream of a user from our blog to our web to a lead form. And, it helps me automate lead processing which can come in handy when you have a viral marketing success. I have been able to identify enough leads that came from our blog and converted to closed deals to more than justify it’s expense (including the salary of my full-time blogger). Blog Rankings: Technorati posts blog rankings and authority ratings. Once again, the price is right: Free. Conversions from Blog to Website: Google Analytics shows me the conversion rate from our blog to our website. RSS Subscriptions: If you use Feedburner for RSS you can easily get this data for free. Inbound Links to Website and Blog and Link Value: I use a wonderful SAAS service from Hub Spot to provide this data and more. And, it’s not really that expensive. Google Page One Listings and Weighted SEO Exposure: This is a tricky area because web traffic data can often lie. But I’ve found another somewhat expensive offering that gives me a good idea of our company’s weighted search engine exposure –both paid and organic– on the keywords that matter. The service is called CIRadar. Compete.com can also give you an idea of your web site traffic trends compared to the competition provided you have enough volume to show up on their radar. I’m also intrigued by the possibilities of other tools that help measure share of voice and analyze the value of coverage. Products like Meltwater and Factiva. Have any experience with these products? Are they worth the price? Would love to hear from readers about their value for the small and medium size business B2B marketer. VOLUME ONE • Online Marketing 34 101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead PRESENTED BY Creating Forms for Content - How Much is too Much? Marketing Sherpa says the average abandonment rate on forms is 95%. Is this because we as Marketers are asking too much of our visitors? Sherpa also tells us that only 40% of the forms that are filled out are accurate and complete. So what’s that…40% of 5% of your visitors are possible leads? Are forms really helping identify buyers? I also wonder if forms are prohibiting people from getting to that demo, webcast or white paper we might be offering. Everyone knows by now that if they fill out a form at some point in the near future a sales person is going to be reaching out to them. If a prospect is still in the education phase of the buying cycle, are we helping or hurting ourselves with forms? If you are going to use forms, here’s a few ideas to help boost your ‘submit’ rate. • • • • • Pre-populate forms with as much information as you have. People are more likely to continue on if they don’t have to do much. Ask questions that enable you to better qualify a lead and allow for more targeted marketing messaging. Ask questions in stages. Forms with more than 7 fields have very low submit rates. Ask questions that are related to the best practice piece you are offering. Offer multiple choice questions, not free text boxes. Chances are you won’t get the kinds of answers you are hoping for. Here’s a few more tips from Kevin Gold - Evaluating Lead Forms for Greater Conversion, Less User Frustration (use this link here http://www.searchmarketingstandard.com/articles/2008/03/evaluating-lead-forms-for-greater-conversion-less-user-frustration.html ) I’m not sure on what the exact right answer is here but we are running programs with content behind forms and some without. I don’t have enough data yet to say one way or the other but I’ll definitely keep you posted. What’s working for you? Chime in and let us know. VOLUME ONE • Online Marketing 35 101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead PRESENTED BY 10 Signs You Picked the Wrong Web Design Agency I’ve just emerged from a very difficult web site redesign project with a local agency that hasn’t yet moved into the Web 2.0 world. After living through the ordeal, I thought I would share some of the lessons I learned during the process to help others avoid the same nightmare. (I’m also hoping the process is somewhat cathartic for me too.) Fortunately, most of these signs are easily identifiable during the review stages. If I’ve missed any, please share your ideas. 1. When you ask about multi-browser testing, you’re told “Well I have a Mac and so and so has a PC, so I’m sure we have it covered.” Sadly, there is no one browser standard and today’s websites must look great in the top browsers-Firefox, IE, and Safari, at the very least. That requires a systematic plan for multi-browser testing and attention to detail. 2. There is no upfront information discovery session to determine your goals and objectives for the site. No one asks about the personae of your target audience or your sales process. It is absolutely vital to start your website design with careful consideration of your target audience and how you engage with them. It’s also wise to map your conversion strategy prior to design. 3. When you mention in the first meeting that the site design needs to support your SEO efforts, the instant response is “Oh we don’t do SEO.” Designing a website without considering your future SEO efforts is extremely dangerous. Hard coded H1 tags, too many graphics, failing to redirect valuable inbound links, and a difficult to update site will hamper your efforts. 4. Your agency’s idea of a project plan is a list of dates for a design template, copy drafts and a go-live date. Marketers really need to approach a website design or redesign like a software development process with a solid project plan that takes into consideration the need to iterate and fully test. 5. After several attempts to come up with a design, you have to supply “inspiration” sites to get them on track. Well, this one really should go without saying but sadly it still happens. If you find yourself stuck with an agency that can’t figure out how to design to your satisfaction despite being given brand guidelines, target personae, a site architecture, etc. you can pull the project out of the ditch by giving them some other sites that you like to help them get on track. If the right work has been done upfront to understand your business, however, you shouldn’t have to do this. 6. You realize that when the home page design is reviewed on a normal size monitor, the flash movie takes up the entire monitor screen pushing your core content below the fold. Just like multi-browser testing, monitor size is critical. It is vital that you look at the site on different monitors to ensure visitors can get to the content they need. 7. Once the home page is designed no further design goes into the layout and graphics elements of the subpages. This is like walking into a gorgeous store with a beautiful façade and stepping into a bare warehouse. Put the same care and attention that went into the home page into the subpages to make sure you provide content and next steps for your visitors. 8. There are no status checks or project meetings. In fact, it is extremely difficult to get a return phone call from your project manager. Designing a website is a team effort requiring lots of different team members to contribute. And, that requires coordination and conversation. Make sure your agency schedules frequent project update meetings and discussions to make sure you are on track. 9. You are ready to go live with the new site, your project manager is nowhere to be found leaving you to work with a developer. This is a biggie. Always make sure you have a plan for go-live, a backup plan in case something goes wrong. And, go live in the middle of the night or over the weekend, just in case there are problems no one will see them. 10. You must conform to the agency’s process of logging in all processes, errors, changes and questions to an Extranet with no training on it. You find that you still must post those changes multiple times before resolution. OK, you got me on that one, it was just a rant. Today’s B2B Marketers need to have a well thought out site architecture, succinct and compelling messages for their target audiences, engaging designs, and an error-free site that supports search engine optimization. And marketers should select their agencies carefully, building in strict contractual demands for things like multi-browser testing, and SEOfriendly structure, clean and well-designed page layout, and tight security lockdowns. Pick your web designer like you would pick a software development shop. Wow, I feel so much better now. VOLUME ONE • Online Marketing 36 101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead PRESENTED BY Keyword Optimization for Press Releases Keyword optimization on your website has become standard operating procedure for most marketers. But are you optimizing your press releases with keywords? Here are a few reasons why you should: • If you are posting your press releases to your website (and you should be), it is probably the freshest content. Google gives precedence to new content (that is why blogs rank so highly in search engine results). • Press releases and news articles rank very highly on Google. The more keyword rich your press releases are, the better they will rank in Google. • Press releases are not just for the press. Make it easy for prospects/bloggers/analysts/media to find you wherever they are searching. Don’t know where to start to find the right keywords? Check out these tips from MarketingProfs: Four Steps to Writing Search-Engine-Optimized Press Releases (I highly recommend the entire article) by Kim Cornwall Malseed: • Find out what keywords successful competitors are using • Read articles written by target journalists • Survey your PR and Marketing department personnel • Survey your Web site development team • Survey product development personnel and executive management, Many press release distribution services (PRNewswire, MarketWire, etc.) have SEO features. Use them a few times (the companies usually permit you to do a free trial) and track results to get an idea of which keywords are most popular. Also, be sure to avoid gobbledygook, those over-used industry words like “flexible,” “scalable” and “market-leading” so aptly named gobbledygook by David Meerman Scott. After you have written your press release and think you have optimized all necessary keywords, put it to the test. HubSpot recently announced Press Release Grader, a free online tool to rate your press release. “Press Release Grader rates a press release based on a checklist of criteria – from content and structure, to search optimization and link analysis. The free tool is designed to optimize a press release so it can be found more easily by media, bloggers, customers and prospects. Press Release Grader provides an analysis and recommendations that will help you improve the way your press release is structured.” As it is for most marketing tactics, in the end it is all about testing and re-testing to find what works best for your audience. I am sure I am missing a lot here. Anyone have any more tips? VOLUME ONE • Online Marketing 37 101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead PRESENTED BY About ReachForce ReachForce delivers software (SaaS) and data services that enable B2B companies to laser target their lead generation programs. ReachForce solutions allow marketing and sales teams to target market ‘sweet spots’ using CRM and website visitor data then reach the right buyers in these companies using role-based contact discovery services. ReachForce was created to ensure Marketers, keep their seat at the table. As a team of long time Marketers we decided we were tired of it being ok to be wrong 97% of the time. With marketing response rate industry averages being less than 3%, there is something fundamentally wrong with the way we as B2B Marketers have been driving lead generation initiatives. Response rates don’t equal leads and leads don’t always mean qualified buyers. At ReachForce, we don’t care about or measure response rates, we drive and measure revenue delivered to the business from lead generation initiatives. By addressing the foundation of any marketing program, the data - or “The WHO” as we call it, ReachForce was founded with one goal in mind: to provide businesses with revolutionary, high quality, costeffective data to fuel their marketing and sales lead generation initiatives. About The B2B Lead We’ve designed The B2B Lead blog to deliver real world, practical B2B Sales and Marketing Tips to help you capture more qualified buyers and convert them into profitable customer relationships. Each week, we will deliver snack-size how-to’s and thought-provoking commentary from B2B Marketers for B2B Marketers. ReachForce customers–who include Directors of Marketing Communications, Sales Professionals, Marketing Programs Managers–and other guest writers will share techniques that help you take a more deliberate and predictable approach to increasing the velocity and efficiency of the Marketing and Sales funnel. If you want to share ideas while learning from your peers, subscribe to our B2B Marketing RSS feed now. We hope you will make it your go-to resource for techniques to succeed in the new world of metrics-driven Marketing. This is the first of a five volume collection of B2B Marketing and Sales Tips from The B2B Lead. Below are the upcoming volumes. To download all 101 B2B Marketing and Sales Tips, check back in the coming weeks. Volume One: Online Marketing Volume Two: Event Marketing Volume Three: Direct Marketing Volume Four: Marketing and Sales Alignment Volume Five: More Marketing and Sales Tips VOLUME ONE • Online Marketing 38