Optimizing

B2B Digital Marketing

Copyright 2012 CustomerThink Corp.

Optimizing B2B Digital Marketing: 10 BIG Ideas

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© Copyright 2012 CustomerThink Corp.

Foreword

By Bob Thompson, CustomerThink Founder/CEO

The Web 2.0 movement has dramatically changed the game for Business-to-Business (B2B) marketing and sales. With a few clicks of a mouse, prospective buyers can educate themselves, research alternatives and even find peers to exchange “war stories” about experiences with solution providers.

Some experts estimate that by the time a prospect engages with a potential vendor, more than 50% of the buying process has already been completed—with no direct influence from would-be sellers!

This shift to empowered buyers makes B2B digital marketing a critical capability, because unless your brand ends up on a prospect’s short list, it’s unlikely to ever be considered. Sales excellence won’t matter if your reps don’t get an “at bat” to close the deal.

That’s why I compiled this collection of 10 articles from CustomerThink’s most popular authors on Digital Marketing. While it’s just a small fraction of the 700+ posts contributed by these experts in the past year, these ideas will help you get started on the road to Digital Marketing success.

Be sure to learn more about each of our Top 10 Authors (as of January 31, 2012) featured in this guide.

Top 10 Authors in Digital Marketing

1. Nick Stamoulis, Brick Marketing

2. Maria Pergolino, Marketo

3. Matt Heinz, Heinz Marketing Inc.

4. Jesse Noyes, Eloqua

5. David Raab, Raab Associates Inc.

6. Tony Zambito, Buyerology

7. Ardath Albee, Marketing Interactions, Inc.

8. Achinta Mitra, Tiecas, Inc.

9. Scott Brinker, ion interactive

10. Christopher Ryan, Fusion Marketing Partners

To explore Digital Marketing further, visit our DigitalMarketingOne community.

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Table of Contents

How to Shorten the B2B Sales Cycle ..................................................................................................................................... 3

2012 Content Marketing Trends for Manufacturers .............................................................................................................. 5

10 B2B Sales and Marketing Metrics Worth Tracking ............................................................................................................ 7

How New Buyer Behaviors Will Affect B2B Marketing and Sales ........................................................................................... 9

Overcoming the 5 Barriers to B2B Social Media Marketing Success ..................................................................................... 11

Stories are the Key to Buyer Engagement ........................................................................................................................... 13

Three Common B2B SEO Mistakes ...................................................................................................................................... 15

11 Questions to Help You Optimize Your Landing Pages ...................................................................................................... 16

Beyond Marketing Automation: Building a Complete Marketing Infrastructure ................................................................... 18

Organizational Models to Improve Marketing and IT Collaboration ..................................................................................... 21

Copyright Notice

This e-book is the copyright property of CustomerThink Corp., available free to CustomerThink newsletter subscribers. Individual articles are the copyright property of the authors.

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© Copyright 2012 CustomerThink Corp.

How to Shorten the B2B Sales Cycle By Christopher Ryan

If there is one thing that aggravates the modern B2B company, it is the constantly lengthening sales cycle. Everyone, from CEO to sales VP to sales rep, suffers from this problem and wants to know what to do about it. The future of your company (and its stock price) may depend on getting revenue in the door faster.

What exactly do I mean by the term “sales cycle?” The classic definition is “the total time elapsed from the buyer’s first contact with your organization until the sale closes. Of course, the sales cycle time is expressed as an average. For example, if one deal closes in two months and the other in 10 months, the average sales cycle is six months.

So why are B2B sales cycles getting longer? Here are some primary reasons:

Budgets are tighter. In case you haven’t noticed, the go-go days of American business are pretty much over.

Fear of making a bad decision. Corporate expenses are getting scrutinized more carefully so buyers are more cautious.

Buyers have an increasing number of options. More choices can confuse the buyer and confusion leads to procrastination.

Lousy marketing and selling. If the message isn’t crystal clear and the selling process is out of alignment with the way customers want to buy, the sale will take longer.

If these are the problems, what are the solutions? Here is the Six Point Fusion Marketing Partners formula for reducing your sales cycle.

1. Make sure that you have a brand promise that is clear and differentiated. Overcome the temptation to make your message very broad because prospects that know exactly what you do, and how it benefits them, buy more quickly.

2. Identify your target audience carefully. Once you have a compelling message, make sure it is aimed at the people or companies likely to need what you are selling. This sounds intuitive but you would be surprised at how many B2B companies can’t articulate their target audience.

3. Optimize your website. This strategy is a biggie. Remember that there are two sales cycles. The first is the actual sales cycle, which is the total time it takes the prospect to go through his or her investigation, discovery and purchase process. The second sales cycle is the time the prospect spends in a sales engagement with your organization. I also call this the “effective sales cycle.” If your website contains a wealth of valuable information, the prospect can self-educate and self-qualify. Thus, the effective sales cycle is shortened. This is a win/win scenario for your company and the prospect.

4. Create compelling offers. Many B2B websites are little more than online brochures. They may do a good job of explaining what it is that you do, but provide little incentive for the prospect to take action. This is the purpose of the offer

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– to first drive prospect engagement and then drive prospect action (buying your product or service). A good offer is the fuel that can not only shorten your sales cycle but also turbo charge your entire revenue generating machine.

5. Establish a lead qualification process. If you have a decent amount of inbound inquiries and an average selling price in the thousands, it probably behooves you to institute a lead qualification process. This way, your sales reps receive only the leads that are deemed qualified. The elimination of the time spent on pursuing early stage unqualified inquiries can be an important factor in shrinking the sales cycle.

6. Implement an efficient marketing and sales workflow and measurement system. The old saying that you can’t improve something you don’t measure certainly applies to B2B marketing and sales. Leads that fall through the cracks either take longer to close or are lost to competitors. Set up a good end-to-end process, monitor your conversion ratios, and reduce your sales cycle.

These six steps are not easy to implement but the rewards are well worth the effort. Each of the steps will have a positive impact by itself, but in combination, the impact will be profound. Shorter sales cycles mean more revenue and more profits. Smart B2B marketers follow proven formulas to shrink the sales cycle and expand sales revenue.

CHRISTOPHER RYAN

Christopher Ryan is CEO of Fusion Marketing Partners. Chris has 25 years of marketing, technology, and senior management experience, and is a widely known expert in B2B marketing, sales strategy, systems, and processes. As both a services provider and in-house marketing executive, Chris has played a transformative role in driving marketing and sales programs that achieve the desired results and create alignment and synergy between the sales and marketing operations. Download his new eBook on creating Brand Awareness.

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2012 Content Marketing Trends for Manufacturers By Achinta Mitra

I just finished reading an excellent research report from the good folks at Content Marketing Institute (CMI). This report is chock full of statistics and graphs about B2B content marketing. In this post, I want to focus on some of their findings that I feel apply to content marketing for manufacturers and industrial companies.

Even though the content marketing adoption rate for these companies is at an impressive 83%, I am surprised that it is even that high; the Manufacturing / Processing industry (as defined in the report) is dead last among the six industries studied.

What is encouraging though is the fact that 68% of companies with 10 – 99 employees maintain a blog as compared to only 55% for larger companies that employ this content marketing tactic. Many of the manufacturers and industrial companies fall in the smaller size category.

That’s not the only good news for blogs. Even though other marketing tactics like in-person events and webinars are still seen as the most effective tactics, this year blogs registered a 45% increase in “perceived effectiveness” as compared to the study done in 2010.

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These results match what I’m finding on the ground. I am working right now on creating a new blog site for a manufacturing client that is scheduled to launch in mid Q1 2012. I’m also in serious discussions with two other industrial clients who want to set up an integrated blog. And they want it done as soon as possible in 2012.

This year, B2B marketers are measuring the effectiveness of content marketing slightly differently from the past year. More marketers are now applying SEO criteria like ranking and the number of inbound links to evaluate the effectiveness of their content marketing strategies.

An industrial blog can provide a huge boost to your SEO efforts because it is easier to optimize posts for long tail keywords than it is to optimize static Web pages. Link building is easier too and adding links to product pages deep within your site will seem more natural when they are part of the text within your posts. Blog posts written by internal experts establish thought leadership and help to differentiate you from your competition. This is far more effective than making unsubstantiated claims on your Website.

Getting internal experts to write blog posts can be a challenge. You may require the help of a professional copywriter to interview engineers and other subject matter experts to get the core ideas. Then have that person edit the content into compelling blog posts. (See my post “How to Coax Content Out of Engineers”.)

When it comes to social media, Twitter trumps all other channels for content distribution. 74% of B2B content marketers reported using Twitter followed closely by LinkedIn (71%), Facebook (70%) and YouTube (56%). I have seen a lot of manufacturing related tweets coming across my timeline, especially from material handling, construction, adhesives and electronics enclosures industries.

The use of videos in content marketing is on the rise and this is reflected in the increase in the use of YouTube as a distribution channel. It scored a 47% increase in usage, the highest growth rate among all other social media channels.

CMI’s report also found that 60% of respondents intent to increase their spending on content marketing in 2012. Over half (62% of respondents) use outsourcing for at least a portion of their content marketing activities, a significant increase over last year’s use of outsourcing (52%).

Video production is one area where I have found more manufacturers opting for DiY videos to avoid the high cost of outsourced production. These videos may lack the slick, studio quality but the informal approach seems to work well with the target audience. The DiY approach allows these companies to produce more videos, launch and repurpose them quicker than outsourced options.

Those are some of the findings from the report that I think manufacturers and industrial companies should pay close attention to in 2012. Download CMI’s report: “The 2012 B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends report.”

What emerging trends in content marketing for the industrial sector do you see in 2012?

ACHINTA MITRA

Achinta Mitra calls himself a “marketing engineer” because he combines his engineering education with 20+ years of practical industrial marketing experience. He has helped many engineering companies and manufacturers improve their lead generation, conversions, and marketing communications to increase sales. He is the founder of Tiecas, Inc. – an industrial and business-to-business (B2B) marketing company in Houston, Texas. Achinta writes regularly about industrial, engineering and manufacturing marketing on his blog.

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© Copyright 2012 CustomerThink Corp.

10 B2B Sales and Marketing Metrics Worth Tracking By Matt Heinz

The fine folks at Focus.com let me do a Webinar on this topic several months ago, but I wanted to summarize what I consider to be 10 fundamental B2B sales & marketing metrics here as well.

You can get an on-demand recording of the full Webinar here, but below (with some qualifying thoughts & questions) are the 10 metrics.

Quick Disclaimer: Just because you can track it, doesn’t mean you should. Just because you can track it, doesn’t mean it’s important. Choosing the right metrics that will give you clarity and drive action in your business is most important.

So without further adieu...

1. Marketing Cost per Sale You absolutely must track leads through to close and beyond. This helps you understand not only spend efficiency but cost per lead source and, eventually, lifetime value of leads you may be generating from higher-priced channels. Even better if you can track those leads through to renewals, referrals and other post-sale activity.

2. Customer Lifetime Value What are you willing to spend to acquire a new customer? It’s more than just the first purchase or first month’s revenue. Which customers are most profitable to you? What do they look like, where do they come from, and how can you get more of them? How will this insight drive sales incentives and behavior as well? And is your customer experience team involved in defining target customers and setting expectations before the sale?

3. Nurture Database Performance First off, how are you defining a lead that’s in a “nurture” category - someone who’s somehow qualified but not yet ready to buy? What number and percentage of deals come out of your growing nurture database? Do you know what catalyzed their movement out of nurture and into an active buying cycle? Bonus points if you can use this insight to predict future revenue from your nurture database over time. What’s a new “nurturable” lead worth to you based on this model?

4. Sales Cycle Length How long is each sales stage once a lead is qualified and in the market to buy? What catalyzing events (internally or externally) accelerate deal velocity? Where are your opportunities getting stuck and is there anything you can do to proactively move them through more quickly? Many lead generation models don’t take into account sales cycle length and duration, and therefore overestimate new sales in too short of a period of time. This metric is critical to accurate forecasting.

5. Addressable Market Size Does your entire organization define your target market the same way? How do your sales goals translate to market penetration expectations? Based on your funnel input and conversion assumptions, are those market penetration expectations realistic? Depending on the maturity of your market, you may also want to make sure your addressable market is small enough. Are you unique enough for your immediately most addressable customers, or are you reaching too broadly?

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6. Lead-to-Opportunity-to-Sale Conversion Rates You can quickly over-complicate this one, but at minimum make sure you understand two numbers: How many leads does it take to create an opportunity, and how many opportunities end up closing? Bonus points, of course, if you can further break this information down by lead source, vertical industry, sales rep and any other angles that help you optimize for acquisition cost and sales volume.

7. Deal Size Are some deals not worth pursuing? Do you know where your sweet spot is, and are you proactively targeting it? Are you adjusting your sales & marketing strategies based on revenue, margin and lifetime value yield potential?

8. Qualified Leads First, ensure that sales & marketing agree on a common definition of a qualified lead. And it’s OK to have different stages of qualified leads. But make sure there are explicit next steps for managing these leads moving forward, and explicit roles for both sales & marketing to do that. Now look back at your lead sources, nurture paths and other activities to determine where you’re most successfully generating qualified leads from, and double down there.

9. Referrals Too often companies constrain potential referral volume by making the act of generating a referral too difficult. A cumbersome form or registration process may be easier for you to track, but may lower your capture rate. What programs and incentives do you have in place to drive the right referrals? And are you segmenting referrals from customers vs. prospect, influencers, etc.? If you’re doing it right, the biggest source of referrals for your business may be a group that’s never given you money, and never been an active customer. How are you engaging, capturing and measuring referrals with that audience?

10. Customers Quantify your best customers, and ensure that your sales & marketing efforts are focused on finding and closing more of them. Is your core or most-valuable customer segment growing or shrinking? Can you quantify your share of wallet? What additional opportunities do you have to increase loyalty, lifetime value, referral potential and more?

MATT HEINZ

Matt Heinz is a national speaker and author, and his most recent book is Successful Selling. He is President of Heinz Marketing Inc, a Seattle area Marketing Agency focusing on Sales Acceleration. Matt’s career has focused on delivering measurable results for his employers and clients in the way of greater sales, revenue growth, product success and customer loyalty.

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How New Buyer Behaviors Will Affect B2B Marketing and Sales By Tony Zambito

Changes in buyer behaviors continue to march on as new social technologies take root into the mainstream of B2B businesses. Uncertainty on how best to understand buyers today as well as engage buyers is on top of the list for many B2B organizations as they look ahead to 2012 and beyond. During the past two years, we’ve seen new tactical attempts come and go while some are sticking. With clear determination of changes in buyer behavior remaining elusive, B2B organizations are struggling to find the right mix of buyer strategies and tactics that result in a winning formula. Looking ahead, more and more B2B organizations will seek to find a formula that works specifically for them.

5 Ways B2B Marketers Are Affected

New buyer behaviors means B2B organizations have to rethink many of their existing ways of engaging B2b buyers today. This is certainly problematic when rethinking often entails looking at such building blocks as strategy, tactics, systems, and infrastructure. Let’s take a look at new buyer behaviors and how they are affecting B2B Marketers (note – when using the term B2B Marketers, I am referencing both marketing and sales):

1. Buyers Expanding Their Decision-Making Networks The advent of social technologies is allowing B2B buyers today to expand not only their social network but their collaborating network. While we have been conditioned over decades to focus on a single target buyer, or as I have written about often, a target buyer persona, we are beginning to see that this will no longer be adequate for B2B Marketers. The expansion of these buyer ecosystems and networks is changing who is included in new buyer decision models. Buyers are less and less representing themselves or behaving as individual buyers but more and more as a buyer network. B2B Marketers will need to get grounded in figuring out what buyer ecosystems and buyer networks exist for their respective industries.

2. Buyers Are Seeking Intelligence, Not Content I’ve covered this recently in several articles. In qualitative efforts I’ve been involved with recently that included conducting buyer interviews, I can tell you that the overwhelming amount of content that buyers are dealing with is an issue. Buyers are essentially being forced to be more selective and to “junk” perceived non-relevant content. I use the word perceive here because it is very much like Malcom Gladwell‘s theory of Blink. They are making the perception of non-relevance in a blink of an eye. B2B Marketers then must focus on standing out and offering intelligence that buyers seek and not mere push messaging content.

3. Buyers Want Humanized Buyer Experiences Let’s face it, many B2B buying experiences still feel, look, and are acted out in very transactional ways. Buyers today are basically saying: why should I settle for less! I still stand solidly behind Paul Greenburg’s mantra that “buyers want to be a subject of an experience, and not an object of a sale.” B2B Marketers will need to focus on how to make humanized buyer experiences happen. The margin of difference between products and services is narrow so the playing field of experience is gaining in prominence.

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4. Risks Continues To Play Big Role In Buyer Decisions Risk aversion and risk avoidance continue to affect B2B buying decisions. The uncertainty created by a tumultuous global economy and uncertainty about the future means B2B buyers give extra attention to driving down costs and putting more pressure on reducing price whenever they can. The affects of buyer perceived risks is enormous. It is resulting in more problem solving research, longer sales cycles, and the expansion of buyer networks in decision-making as mentioned above. B2B Marketers then must not only determine what these perceived risks are, but address them early on in buying cycles and buyer decision models.

5. Buyers Adopting New Self-Enabling Technologies If we think back ten to fifteen years ago, it was very common to think that mid-level managers to senior executives probably would privately break down and cry if the administrative assistant called in sick. Fast forward today, new technologies have caused a major mind shift. B2B buyers from mid-level managers to senior executives are efficient at using newer technologies to be self-enabling. Meaning they want more self-enabling technologies and services from B2B Marketers. With 60% to 70% of purchase decisions being made before there is direct sales involvement, this is the new frontier in B2B Marketing and Sales. B2B Marketers then will need a mind shift themselves. In the past three years, we’ve seen a considerable increase in marketing technology investing with some producing measurable success while some are questionable at best. The shift needs to be towards investing in buyer enabling technologies. Meaning B2B Marketers will have to think more about how they can create self-enabling buying experiences that buyers customize on their own. Experiences that don’t necessarily follow what we think are normal buying processes or stages.

Investing in the Two Sides of Buyer Insight 2.0

Enriching insights on existing customers and prospective buyers is rising to the top of the agenda for C-Suites in B2B organizations. The above mentioned buyer behaviors and their impact on B2B Marketers mean that making assumptions about existing customers and potential buyers is risky business. While investments in BIG data surged in the past two years, investing in BIG insights will gain more attention as B2B Marketers continue to struggle making sense out of data and analytics.

In 2012, B2B Marketers will begin to incorporate the two sides of buyer research and analysis into Buyer Insight 2.0 – data and context. There is a symbiotic relationship between the two and B2B Marketers will discover in 2012 that to understand buyer decision-making behaviors - data or analytics cannot exist without context and that context cannot exist without data or analytics.

Without question, there is a lot to think about in 2012. One thing B2B Marketers can think about consistently is that new buyer behaviors will affect them and it will not be the other way around. Those days are long gone indeed.

TONY ZAMBITO

Tony Zambito is Founder and Principal of the buyer research and strategy firm Buyerology℠. He is the originator of the buyer persona research methodology as well as Business Buyergraphics™ that are widely used to make informed decisions from buyer insights. Tony also served in the role of Vice President in Sales and Marketing capacities for TRW, Knight-Ridder, and Compaq (HP). He holds a B.S. in Business and an M.B.A. in Marketing Management. Read Tony’s blog Buyerology Now for insightful commentary on changing buyer behavior.

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Overcoming the 5 Barriers to B2B Social Media Marketing Success By Maria Pergolino

Today, many marketers look to jump on the B2B social media bandwagon while expecting a simple integration with current B2B marketing efforts. Although many think this, it’s simply not the case, as most run into barriers along the way.

Barriers to successful implementation include simple, and sometimes complex, problems to resolve for many marketers. To break through these barriers, marketers will have to evolve and oftentimes change the organizations way of thinking. Once they do this, they will reap the rewards that come from successful B2B social media marketing practices.

To help you navigate social media waters, we give you the five barriers to B2B social media marketing success and how to resolve them:

1. It’s difficult to go viral – Many marketers dive into the B2B social media tank looking to reach as many prospects as possible with the first or even second piece of content and sometimes set unattainable goals in a quest to ‘go viral’. Although getting in front as many eyes as possible seems like a viable goal, it’s not always easily achieved and not always the most productive when considering an ultimate goal of building relationships and generating leads.

Jumping into social media should be more strategic and planned out than the creation of one or two campaign elements in the hopes to attract thousands of visitors.

Leveraging social channels involves creating unique and informative content for your audience over a long period of time.

Will one of your creative campaigns go viral? Maybe. But as marketers we have to ask ourselves the question of volume versus quality. A video, let’s say, that attracts thousands of views may seem like a solid win. But how many of those visitors were from the target audience as opposed to irrelevant visitors just interested in seeing a novel creation?

2. Engagement failure – Although many marketers strive to maintain engagement with prospects, over time, it may falter. To correct this, consider making it easier to share content that’s fresh and relevant.

Begin to use channels including blogs, content curation, micro-blogging and other activities that make it easy for people to respond and easy to share.

Creating and distributing quality information is only half the battle. Equally as important is the fact that someone needs to be there when your visitors respond, comment or share your content.

You can’t expect to build relationships if you are not responding to your audience. Be sure to allocate resources for follow-up.

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3. Difficulty to measure results – One of the hottest marketing topics of the past year was how to measure the ROI of social media efforts.

To become effective in social media, marketers need to adopt different methods to measure and analyze data to show a return like blog stats and third party Twitter dashboards. Create milestones such as number of Facebook “Likes,” Twitter followers and shares of content.

Then, connect the social metrics to already established metrics such as website visitors. Doing so can help upper management see the influence building social relationship has on metrics already known to be an influencing factor to lead generation.

To take measurement to the next level, consider using a powerful backend for management of marketing data. This includes leveraging marketing automation or CRM solutions to transfer data into useful statistics.

4. Creating a winning reader experience – Building the right experience for readers takes time and effort. From creating valuable content to tracking results, marketers utilize many different tools.

The best way to achieve this goal is through a serious commitment to researching and writing. Oftentimes writing is the easy part if you do your research well. Become a master at using Google and similar tools to find information to inspire your writing and help you put together winning content.

Develop a content plan that outlines concepts that will be covered throughout each month and then stick to your plan. Don’t over commit to your writing goals as everyone is already busy. But do make a plan you can live with such as devoting 20 minutes a day to research and writing.

If you can produce just 4 relevant pieces of content each month, you will be pleasantly surprised at the results. You will also see the benefits growing over time as each new post is a new, unique page on your website that will get indexed in Google and eventually show up in the search results.

5. Scaling follow-ups – Many marketers have difficulty scaling their follow-up procedures which may result in lost leads and wasted resources.

To resolve this, marketers should consider adding lead scoring and lead nurturing processes to their B2B social media and lead generation practices for maximum results. This will not only make it easier to follow up with large numbers of leads but it will also improve the quality of the user experience leading to higher quality leads and more sales.

Achieving B2B social media success doesn’t require large amounts of funding or resources, it simply requires careful planning and addressing the right solution for each issue. By encouraging relevant action, making it easy to deliver fresh content, using powerful backend tools, utilizing turnkey solutions and implementing lead scoring and lead nurturing processes, marketers will find themselves on the path to social media success and real ROI.

MARIA PERGOLINO

Maria specializes in Inbound Marketing for Marketo, leading efforts in adoption of social media channels for brand awareness and demand generation. She has worked in marketing for over ten years, and specifically in online marketing including social media, search marketing, and lead generation and nurturing for the past six.

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Stories are the Key to Buyer Engagement By Ardath Albee

One of the biggest challenges for B2B companies is what they do to keep prospects interested and engaged across a long-term, complex buying process. And, with buyers pushing sales conversations to the later stages, the bigger question becomes how to keep them moving to help them get there faster.

I submit to you that storytelling is the answer. Stories are an expression of movement. Stories, by their very nature, progress from beginning to middle to end.

Things happen in stories. The main character has a goal, overcomes conflict and gets to the happily ever after. In business terms, the client has a problem to overcome so they can achieve a strategic objective. Not so different.

Build Your Marketing Story

Stories link ideas. This is a key factor for your content strategy. The norm in the past has been one-off, one-way messaging that gets generated when an idea strikes or a particular event is happening within your company. Companies spend a lot of time “telling” prospective buyers what they should be thinking.

The difference with stories is that they position your communications to evolve. They build from one idea or premise to another. They pull buyers forward in the process by giving them contextual reference points and discussing one topic at a time to transition them through the pipeline without anxiety or information overload. Another benefit to stories is that they establish your company’s credibility, showcase impact and allow buyers to envision their future, once the pain has been eliminated.

To create a story strategy for momentum, map the complete knowledge transfer requirement and tackle a piece of it. Then give buyers a prod, or preview, into the next piece they can either request, or that you’ll be sending as a follow-up. Learning is a process. You can’t just dump all the information on them at once and expect them to say – “Yes! This is exactly what I need. Where do I sign?” Especially not for a B2B complex sale.

Remember the ebb and flow of decision making. Buyers may move two steps forward and one step back, then forward again, as questions and obstacles occur. Look for places where they can get off track and plan ahead to address them before they happen.

How a “Story” Might Exist for a Buyer

An IT systems manager needs to roll out patches and updates across his network more quickly but doesn’t have the technology and visibility to know which computing device needs what without a manual check.

He learns a variety of software tools are available to solve that problem. He also learns that these tools can update his inventory catalog. He’s found your company via a search that returned a blog post at the top of the

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results page. Upon further investigation, your products look viable for his situation and he found a customer story that directly relates to his situation. Suddenly he’s heading toward happily ever after.

Then, the step back – Your prospect slams the brakes on as he starts to question how easy this change is really going to be and whether your repoorting tools are really as customizable as you say. What if his expectations aren’t met?

This doesn’t have to be a set back because you prepared for this and are ready with a paper [a story] that discusses all the steps of the implementation and the division of responsibility. You share testimonial proof [a story] that the solution can be implemented in less than three weeks. The buyer sees he can well manage his side of the requirements and gains confirmation that the reporting will do what he needs.

All the “I’s” are dotted and “T’s” are crossed. He’s back to visualizing happy days and how he’ll shine when the project comes off without a hitch.

Wait. The CIO is concerned that the new tool will won’t adapt to their corporate compliance policies and that the total cost of ownership is too high.

Not to worry, you assure your buyer, and whisk him a link to an article or video[a story] that highlights the time savings achieved with your software and the customization capability that will map to their compliance policies. And the buyer becomes a customer.

You may not be selling IT software, but it’s likely that this ebb and flow—from positive to hesitant—exists within your buyers’ process. Salespeople and customers can help you narrow down the critical points where these step backs are likely to happen. By mapping the buying journey and preparing stories to handle each step, you’re not only prepared, but elevating trust with each relevant, timely response to your buyers’ needs.

ARDATH ALBEE

Ardath Albee is a B2B Marketing Strategist and the CEO of her firm, Marketing Interactions, Inc. She applies over 25 years of business management and marketing experience to help companies with complex sales use eMarketing strategies to generate more and better sales opportunities. Her book, eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale was recently released by McGraw-Hill.

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Three Common B2B SEO Mistakes By Nick Stamoulis

It’s very easy to make small mistakes with your company’s B2B SEO campaign that can have lingering effects on its long term success. Many B2B companies don’t even realize they are making these simple mistakes and can’t understand why their SEO campaign is under-delivering on their expectations. If your B2B SEO campaign seems to be suffering, double check that you aren’t accidentally making these 3 SEO mistakes before deciding to chuck your campaign.

1. Relying too heavily on industry jargon for your main keywords.

This is a common SEO problem in many B2B industries, especially for tech or software companies. You might rely too heavily on industry specific keywords (like “contact reasoning engine”) that don’t mean anything to your target audience. Instead of “contact reasoning engine,” they are searching for “call center analytics.” You have to remember to take user intent into account when conducting B2B SEO keyword research. You might be using industry approved jargon that your top competitors are also targeting, but unless you are taking the time to educate potential clients with your content marketing you can’t assume they know what those keywords mean or are using those them to search.

Obviously you don’t want to forgo all industry keywords, as those are important to building your credibility as an industry expert. However it’s important to incorporate related keywords that the average user might use to find your products/services.

2. Keeping your content on lockdown.

I’ve noticed that a lot of B2B websites keep a large portion of their content behind a login, trying to keep some content accessible only by their customers. While I understand wanting to provide unique and exclusive content for your current customers (as an added incentive), you don’t want to lock all of your content away. Anything that requires a login to be accessed can’t be read and indexed by the search engines; making is useless for your B2B SEO. If you are going to lock a large percentage of your content away, it’s important to balance the content scales by producing similar amounts of content that is crawl-able. A B2B business blog is a great way to consistently produce fresh content that is easily indexed by the search engines and you’re your brand connect with potential customers (they need content too!)

3. Failing to take your sales cycle into account.

You can’t rush your B2B sales cycle any more than you can rush your SEO. Most B2B sales cycles are much longer than the average B2C sales cycle. After all, it only takes 5-10 minutes to decide where you are going for lunch today while it takes 5-10 months to decide to purchase a $50,000 business software solution. Many B2B companies forget to take their sales cycle into account when measuring the success of their SEO campaign. You can’t begin to measure the effectiveness of your SEO until AFTER your normal sales cycle has completed.

NICK STAMOULIS

Nick Stamoulis, a SEO and search engine marketing industry veteran, is the President of SEO company, Brick Marketing. Nick Stamoulis also writes daily in his SEO blog, the Search Engine Optimization Journal and publishes one of the largest SEO newsletters with over 130,000 opt-in subscribers.

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11 Questions to Help You Optimize Your Landing Pages By Jesse Noyes on September 25, 2011

Landing page optimization is not the sexiest topic. But for those in demand generation and lead management, the landing page is one of the most important tools in an online marketing campaign.

There are all kinds of landing pages. But the best way to optimize your landing page is to think like your audience. To do that, you’ll need to ask yourself some hard questions. Here we provide 11 questions you need to ask about your landing pages. Answer these now and you’ll drive greater conversions later.

1. What does this all mean? One of the most common problems with optimizing landing pages is the language used. Ask yourself, What are we trying to say? Your message should be short, sweet and to the point. Kill all unnecessary adverbs and adjectives.

2. Why are there so many questions? How many questions do you ask on your landing page? How many do you absolutely need? The more questions the ask, the less likely the prospect is to complete the action. With progressive profiling you can eliminate questions, collecting incremental information on prospects as they progress through the funnel.

3. Do these keywords match with the search results? Whether a prospect is coming to your landing page from an email or from Google, you want to make sure the keywords match what made them click in first place. In other words, if your Google display ad says “Download This Free Report on the State of Digital Marketing,” your landing page should match that message.

4. Does this image make sense here? Adding images is an important part of landing page optimization. But the wrong image can distract rather than compel. You should question the relevance of your images to ensure it reflects the tone, taste and topic of your audience.

5. Is this the right topic for this segment? Segmentation makes it possible to steer the best message to the right audience. But that requires diligence when it comes to optimizing your landing pages. An invitation to webinar for IT managers doesn’t make much sense for a group of marketers. Make sure the topic of your landing page fits the group you’re reaching out to.

6. What is the work/reward ratio? Ideally, with progressive profiling and segmentation, you’re making the work a prospect has to put into completing your landing page. But there are some data you have to collect. When you do, make sure the reward the prospect receives is greater than the effort put in. The last thing you want is a prospect who feels cheated.

7. Where’s our privacy policy? When someone gives you their information, they need to know how you’re going to use it. Every company should have a clearly worded privacy policy that explains how they use the data. (For instance, whether it’s shared with third parties or not.) Make sure this privacy policy is included on your landing page.

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8. Can prospects easily share my landing page? Goal number one through three of your landing page is driving conversions. Let nothing distract you from this mission. But there’s no reason why you can’t help prospects help promote your content. Make it easy for them by adding social sharing for platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn along with email buttons. Best to make this the last step, added to the page prospects see after completing the form.

9. Is the “send email messaging” permission box unchecked? Many landing pages include a checkbox that asks for permission to send email marketing to the prospect. Some organizations set this to an automatic check by default, putting the onus on the prospect to uncheck it. It’s better to set the default to uncheck. Make your offering compelling and let the prospect opt in.

10. Where does my eye go? Here’s a tip: When you’re done laying out your landing page call in a colleague. Ask him or her where their eyes go. Does it follow the desired path from message to a clear call to action? Or is it all over the page? Make sure the prospect is easily led to the call to action to get the result you want.

11. Are we testing this landing page? There are some general principles you can follow for landing page optimization. But nothing beats good old-fashioned testing. Try different concepts, layouts and messaging to see how prospects convert to leads. Tracking the results will enable you to establish your own set of internal guidelines over time.

JESSE NOYES

Jesse came to Eloqua from the newsroom trenches. As Corporate Reporter, it’s his job to find the hot topics and compelling stories throughout the marketing world. He started his career at the Boston Herald and the Boston Business Journal before moving west of his native New England. When he’s not sifting through data or conducting interviews, you can find him cycling around sunny Austin, TX.

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Beyond Marketing Automation: Building a Complete Marketing Infrastructure By David Raab

B2B marketing automation vendors generally position their systems as a replacement for separate applications including email, forms creation, Web analytics, content management, and reporting. This may leave the impression that marketing automation is the only system a marketing department needs. Marketing automation vendors have little incentive to correct the error, since mentioning integration would only slow the sales cycle. (For more about integration requirements, take a look at our recent workbook on the topic.)

Raab Associates does have its own model of a complete marketing architecture. But before presenting it, let's look at some other opinions. I found three surveys that address the issue.

The most intriguing was published last September by Adobe and Econsultancy. The focus is online marketing (remember that Adobe owns Omniture, Day Software, Demdex and now Efficient Frontier) but the survey is especially interesting because it asked about adoption, value received, and effort required. The original report presented these separately but I’ve combined them in a bubble chart:

This is worth some exploration. You’ll see that marketing automation is at the bottom – meaning it’s the least resource intensive of the technologies listed. But it’s also farther left than most, meaning it’s also among the least effective at delivering profits. (I’m going to assume that “significant impact on the bottom line” meant significant positive impact.) I’m really feeling a bit disrespected here: marketing automation is easy AND

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ineffective? Maybe the survey-takers are getting poor results because they’re not putting in the necessary resources. Or maybe they're mostly Web marketers who aren't really all that familiar with it.

Either way, the respondents still gave marketing automation a better effort / value ratio than attribution, buzz monitoring and social media management. Maybe they understand those better and see how much work is involved. But campaign management, which I think is email campaigns but might be Web ad campaigns, also rates as harder than marketing automation. Doesn't marketing automation include email and a whole lot more? I have a hard time understanding how email alone could be harder.

This survey also addresses the ever-popular question of adoption. This group reported that 38% were using marketing automation. That’s considerably higher than most estimates but it’s among the lowest rates on the chart. In that sense, at least, it supports the general belief that marketing automation is still in its early stages. I’ve provided the actual numbers here.

If you looked carefully at the previous survey, you probably noticed that a few important applications were missing, such as Webinars. Oops. A survey last February by Act-On Software had a more realistic range of applications.

The Act-On survey isn't perfect for today's purpose: it was sent to small and mid-size business, listed several marketing automation components separately (email, lead nurturing, and lead scoring), lumped all of social media into a single category, and ignored Web analytics entirely. Still, it gives a pretty reasonable idea of the relative utilization of different methods, most of which would involve different marketing systems.

I found a one more survey that listed marketing systems, from the CMO Council in July 2011.

This is by far the broadest list. It includes CRM, call center, master data management, talent (staff) management, ecommerce, and product life cycle systems. That the question describes them all as “marketing automation solutions” gives some idea of how broadly the term is sometimes defined – which I still suspect is a major reason

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that many surveys show that “marketing automation” has such a high penetration rate. Unfortunately, this survey didn't ask directly about usage.

If we look across all three surveys and add Raab Associates' own research, a reasonably complete set of components for a marketing architecture would include:

marketing database management (data extraction, customer data integration, master data management, database updates)

Web advertising (paid search, banner ads)

Web site management (Web content creation and management, search engine optimization, ecommerce if relevant.

Web analytics and optimization (could be part of Web site management but still largely done by separate systems.)

social marketing (blogs, social media monitoring, social media posting, community management, advocate management)

Webinars (it seems odd to make these their own category but they’re still separate systems and don’t easily fit with Web site management or social marketing)

marketing automation (direct mail, email, mobile, landing pages, web behavior, nurture campaigns, lead scoring, reporting; includes batch, trigger, and event-driven campaigns and real-time interactions)

media buying (for conventional media: TV, radio, newspaper, magazine, outdoor, etc.)

marketing resource management (project management, workflow, content and digital asset management, budgets and forecasts, purchasing, staff management)

analytics (reporting, dashboards, attribution, marketing measurement, predictive modeling, mix optimization – this extends beyond the channel-specific applications like Web analytics)

CRM (not usually run by marketing but so intimately connected with marketing systems that I'd consider it part of the architecture. I'm using CRM as a catch-all term for sales automation, order processing, customer service, loyalty, call centers, and partner management.)

There are many ways to draw this architecture and perhaps I'll return to it another day. My point for now is simply that marketing automation is just one piece of the larger marketing puzzle -- and marketers need to recognize that they'll need to pull data from multiple systems to do a thorough job of managing customer relationships.

DAVID RAAB

David Raab is a consultant specializing in marketing technology and analysis. Clients have included major firms in financial services, retail, communications, and other industries. His B2B Marketing Automation Vendor Selection Tool provides detailed information and guidance to buyers of marketing systems. Mr. Raab has written hundreds of articles for DM Review, DM News and other industry publications. Many of these are available without charge at www.archive.raabassociatesinc.com.

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Organizational Models to Improve Marketing and IT Collaboration By Scott Brinker

The good news is that, at last, everyone agrees:

1. Marketing technology is now a major dimension of marketing.

2. The marketing department and the IT department must collaborate.

The challenge, however, is that beyond those two principles, there is a stunning diversity of opinions for how marketing technology should be managed and exactly what the new collaboration between marketing and IT should look like. I’ve heard from many different companies that are addressing this in very different ways.

At this stage, I actually think that’s fine. Different organizational structures should reflect different strategies and cultures — and often the individual leaders at the helm. What works great for one company might be a train wreck in another. What’s important, however, is that there is clear governance driving the choices in each particular company.

Are you consciously making your marketing-IT organizational decisions? Or do they just happen by “accident?” Of course, it helps to know what your choices are. With that in mind, I thought I’d try to assemble a list of the different marketing technology organizational models that I’ve encountered:

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Here are brief descriptions of these models:

Model Description

Traditional Marketing makes requests to IT, IT implements and manages overall technology strategy; funded via chargebacks to marketing and primary IT budget. Overall cycle speed usually slowed with overhead, differing priorities. Marketing unlikely to develop much technical savvy in this structure.

Committee

IT and marketing leaders, often including the CIO and CMO, participate in a committee to make joint decisions about marketing technology investments and governance. Usually IT handles implementation. Committees are rarely “agile,” but may provide good guidance. Committee members may become fluent in marketing-technology synergy.

Co-located

An IT team is dedicated to marketing technology and is physically co-located with the marketing team. Day-to-day execution is done collaboratively with marketing staff, but IT group still reports primarily to IT management (maybe dotted line to CMO). Helps exchange marketing and tech savvy across both departments.

Liaison

Similar to Committee structure, but an individual person provides coordination between IT and marketing, reporting jointly to CMO and CIO. Can be more agile. Role may be “Chief Marketing Technologist.” IT still handles most implementation, although outside vendors may be arranged by the liaison.

Embedded

A dedicated marketing technology team based in the marketing department — but unlike Co-located, reports to (and funded by) the CMO, not the CIO. Led by a Chief Marketing Technologist. Should still adhere to IT governance, may have dotted line accountability to CIO. May wear “marketing operations” label. Marketing becomes very tech savvy.

Direct Report The IT department directly reports to the CMO. I’ve heard of a case of this with a major retailer. May work if marketing charter is broad enough to address the total customer experience. Seems tricky for non-marketing IT responsibilities.

Independent An independent marketing technology team is assembled that lives outside of the traditional marketing and IT departments, although its chief reports to both the CIO and the CMO. Independence may enable agility, but possibly at the expense of alignment with the core departments from which it came.

Outsourced (Mktg)

The majority of marketing technology strategy and implementation is outsourced to one or more third-party vendors, but primarily under the direction of the CMO. Sidesteps as much IT implementation as possible with software-as-a-service (SaaS) and standardized APIs and data formats. Alignment concerns if third-parties are too strong relative to marketing’s own technical savvy.

Joint Venture

IT and marketing both contribute staff and resources to a joint “marketing technology” team, but the participants remain rooted in their origin department (unlike Independent). Can be quite agile and can cross-pollinate tech and marketing savvy across both departments. Requires good CIO-CMO synergy to work well.

Outsourced (IT)

Again, the majority of marketing technology strategy and implementation is outsourced to a third-party — but in this model, that’s done primarily under the leadership of the CIO. May be a different set of vendors than when outsourced from the marketing department. Runs the risk of diverging from core marketing vision.

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Practice Center

IT creates a marketing technology “practice center” within its department to specialize in the growing tech needs of the marketing department. Possibly a dotted line report to the CMO. Can be quite agile. With the right dedicated hires and good communication with marketing can be a very marketing-savvy IT team.

Outsourced Triangle

Significant portions of marketing technology strategy and implementation are outsourced, but the outsourcing is jointly led by the CIO and the CMO. Requires good synergy between CIO and CMO to work. Growing number of agencies adept at this structure. Runs risk of not having marketing technology as an in-house core competency.

Hostile The IT department and the marketing department are at best not speaking, at worst engaged in intracompany warfare. This is not a model anyone would want to adopt, but unfortunately it does accurately describe the state of some organizations. This is a terminal disease if it isn’t cured.

Merged Some visionaries have suggested that IT and marketing should fully merge, more integrated than a Joint Venture or a Direct Report relationship. Loses independent IT governance. Mini-mergers with other departments, an IT diaspora? Viability depends on post-merger internal structure.

Which organizational structure is right for your company? It depends.

Generally, I think that most companies should develop marketing technology competency internally — even if they choose to outsource certain pieces — and that marketing needs to become more technically savvy in order to properly lead the vision of customer experience and brand development in a digital world.

Many of the above models can accomplish those goals, although I think Embedded, Joint Venture, and Co-located (or Merged, if you believe that’s feasible) address those objectives better than the other configurations.

What do you think? What model is being used at your company? Are there other organizational structures that I should add to this list?

SCOTT BRINKER

Scott Brinker is the president & CTO of ion interactive, a leading provider of post-click marketing software and services. He writes the Conversion Science column on Search Engine Land and frequently speaks at industry events such as SMX, Pubcon and Search Insider Summit. He chairs the marketing track at the Semantic Technology Conference. He also writes a blog on marketing technology, Chief Marketing Technologist.