Analyzing B2B Marketing Trends

January 27th, 2012

b2b 2012 benchmark findings

There’s been so much interesting analysis and insight in the marketing world that we’ll keep it rolling with some more white paper findings! Today, we’ll take a look at SEO through the B2B lense in MarketingSherpa’s 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report.

Take a look at this graph, as it shows the average allocation of marketing budgets for B2B companies. From these results, we can assume that a higher allocation means a higher perceived result. As you can see, a majority of the B2B respondents invested resources into promoting their business through trade shows. The investment in tradeshows grew from 2010 from 7th most popular to 4th. As an example in the SEO industry, you can see this in marketing summits such as Online Marketing Summit, Search Engine Strategies, BlogWorld and more. At these events, you’ll find many business with booths or keynotes. Of course, the underlying purpose is to promote their own business, while helping those in need of it. Time will tell how successful this tactic is.

On a scarier but realistic note – from 2010 to 2011, B2B marketers felt like the effectiveness of online marketing drastically fell. The top contenders that were losing out on effectiveness include web design/optimization, SEO and email marketing.  A more detailed look at these findings can be found on page 3 of the free marketing report. Some reasons for this decrease in confidence include: economic hardships, fluctuating marketing goals, and the online environment (Panda updates, more competition, etc.)

Some more interesting findings are that 62% of B2B marketers feel like they don’t have enough resources for staffing, budgeting, or managing time. Some other obstacles include lead generation as a high priority and a big challenge. The next biggest priority and challenge is how to convert qualified leads into paying customers. If you’re in the B2B marketing industry, this might not be such new news to you. But seeing these responses put together in a quantified report should make you think about your tactics and strategies for 2012 a bit differently.

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Optimization for a Lower Bounce Rate

January 26th, 2012

bounce rate How high is your website’s bounce rate? Obviously, a lower bounce rate is desirable. But depending on your industry, the “norm” can greatly vary.

If you take a look inside your Google Analytics account, it’s important to remember to look not only at the OVERALL bounce rate, but the bounce rate of individual landing pages. This applies whether you’re reorganizing your website or setting up new pay per click landing pages. Let’s say that your overall average is around 40%, but if you take a look at your home page, you find that the bounce rate is 80%! This means that 80% of customers aren’t finding what they need and leaving very quickly.

As a starting point, here are a few things you can look at:

- Page load time: Let’s face it, who likes sitting around waiting for a page to load? If your site is slow, you can make it more effective by optimizing photos, your layout and cutting down on unnecessary content.
- Design – Do you have a search engine friendly web design? Sometimes, a more complex design might sound appealing to make your site stand out while squeezing in all the information you want customers to find. But this won’t help your website unless it’s something that your customers are responding to, and not what you’re personally partial to! Take a step back and do some testing between some more simpler designs to find out for sure.
- Relevancy – Here’s one more reason not to use broad keyword terms all over your website. Although you may want to rank for a variety of different keywords, your customers will want to find exactly what they’re looking for. If a certain keyword brings them to your site and they find that it’s irrelevant, your site is not useful. The last thing you want to do is to mislead potential customers. The best solution is to optimize per page/section and use specific keywords that describe exactly what they can expect to find on that page.

In the end, remember that a bounce rate is only one of many factors you can use to gauge your progress. But it is an important one as optimizing for a lower bounce rate can also improve your content focus, site design and even SEO.

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3 Missing Elements of Social Media Success

January 24th, 2012

social media influence

comScore and Buddy Media Research recently released a report on the effectiveness of social promotions during this past 2011 retail holiday season. If you haven’t seen the 17 slide presentation yet, it’s time to take a look before planning your next social media campaign.

While the report analyzes bigger brands like Amazon, Best Buy, and Walmart, there are some important takeaways that you can apply to your small business. Take a look at this slide above. This is an important slide because it addresses many conceptions that business owners have about utilizing Facebook to promote their business. The immediate thought is to 1) Get Facebook Fans 2) Become successful. As we all know, success doesn’t come that easily. According to this slide, you can look at the missing process in three steps:

1) Cut-through – As your fan base grows, you’ll need to broadcast brand messages that are interesting so that they capture your customers’ attention. The importance of this step is that most Facebook users spend 27% of their time on their Newsfeed. Spread out your focus to include updates for your newsfeed, media updates (using photos and videos) as well as status updates.

2) Engagement – Your Facebook Page can’t truly gain exposure if it’s not being talked about. Comments and Likes are both very desirable forms of engagement. Don’t forget that these actions now also play a greater role in your search engine rankings! Interestingly enough, Mashable recently came out with in infographic that showed that “positive” updates are more likely to get Likes, while “negative” updates are more likely to get comments. See for yourself, here.

3) Amplification – Facebook Shares, reposts and even private messages are also intermediary ways to help reach your end goal of success. The best part about sharing on social media websites (especially on friends’ profiles) is that there is an extra component of trust and credibility when customers vouch for your product/service. These shares will come naturally and no coupon, newsletter or commercial can replace the value of word-of-mouth advertising.

Make sure to check out the report for yourself and see what other elements you can use or learn from for your next social media campaign!

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Are You Obsessed with Keyword Rankings?

January 17th, 2012

obsessed with seo rankingsobsessed – past participle, past tense of ob·sess (Verb)
Verb: Preoccupy or fill the mind of (someone) continually, intrusively, and to a troubling extent: “he was obsessed with thoughts of suicide”.
–

If this word best describes your relationship with your keywords, there’s a big problem. Whether you’re dealing with your own search rankings or clients’, it’s important to remember that an effective SEO campaign means more than just where you rank.

Instead of asking the most obvious questions like “How can I rank #1 and how long will it take?”, you should be taking a deeper look and asking “How can useful SEO content help me achieve higher rankings for keywords that my customers are actually looking for?” Search engine ranking algorithms, competitors, your past work being indexed – these are all things that make search rankings fluctuate on a daily basis. This is why you can be #1 for a term one day and #3 for the same term the next.

Although we would all like to capture that much coveted spot, the organic optimization game doesn’t quite work that way. And there are new factors emerging every day, some that we have little control over. Take Google’s new Social Search, for example. Now social media connections have a greater impact on how search results are personalized depending on your friends’ searches, interests and location. With all these varying factors, this means that search rankings can and will vary for each different person.

Ranking well is still an important part of SEO, but being overwhelmed with the details is something that can truly drive you insane. For now, it’s more about practicing patience and building up your site with credible and useful information so that you can keep visitors onsite. Working on these social aspects with a complementary plan will also build your business’ trustworthiness so that potential customers will keep your brand in mind for a time when they do need your product/service. As you can see, nowadays search engine optimization has emerged as something much more than just ranking #1 for some keyword terms. There is MUCH more too it!

Take a look at some of our free whitepapers to see if you can get any new ideas for your search campaigns.

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Keyword Research Ideas and Tools

January 13th, 2012

Sometimes, research for keyword advertisting can be totally redundant and uninteresting. If you’re feeling like you’re stuck in a rut, here are few ideas that will hopefully revitalize you and hopefully give you that spark that you need:

Related terms and synonyms – Need a better idea of what keywords to use? In your next Google search, use the tilde ~ in front of a term that you’re interested in. For example, “~creative social media campaigns” will give results such as:
- create social media strategy
- best social media campaigns
- design a social media campaign
- creative engagement in online and social media campaigns

After writing awhile on the same topic, you can find that you start to use the same phrases and words. This search option is a good way to find alternative anchor text to link, come up with page titles and use phrases to use in meta descriptions.

Visualize your keywords – Keyword Eye is a keyword visualization tool that can help with your pay per click landing pages as well as give you ideas for your copywriting. This tool has a free option which is easy to use. Below, you can see an example I tried:

keyword eye

For PPC campaigns, the keywords are color coded for search competition and the size represent search volume. There is also a chart and list version to help you with further keyword analysis.

Self-Analysis and Social Media - Think about your most popular products and services as your customers would perceive them. After making a list of keywords you want, you can add a social touch by researching sites like Topsy and Social Mention. You can also find new synonyms here and add them to your list.

Let us know if you have any go-to methods when it comes to keyword research!

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What is SoLoMo and is Your Website Ready?

January 10th, 2012

so-lo-mo

If there are 3 areas of online marketing you should concentrate on this year, these are it. If you don’t think your site is quite ready, you may be more prepared than you think!

Social – Focus on a few social networks that you can consistently update. You don’t want to be the website with dozens of social media publishing buttons. Instead, focus on quality over quantity. You’ll want to make sure that everything you post on your website is shareable and somehow linked back to your social media profiles. Remember, this isn’t just to be user-friendly, but search engines are paying more attention to these metrics as they play a factor in your search engine rankings.

Local – Paying more attention to local marketing means proper keyword research so that you use terms that are relevant to geographical areas. Additionally, you’ll want to encourage customer reviews and testimonials that will be linked and crawled from Google Places, Yelp, Yellow Pages and more. Remember, the goal isn’t to FAKE reviews… because it is totally noticeable as well as unacceptable. Instead, you might want to create a short, standard questionnaire to send to satisfied customers/clients. These blurbs will help boost your brand reputation without taking forever to complete.

Mobile – If it isn’t totally obvious by now, you need a mobile website! You can read more about some recent mobile trends here. With the growing trend of browsing the internet via phone and tablet, experts believe that mobile browsing will soon surpass desktop usage! If you’ve been wondering why mobile optimization is so popular, it’s because of the potential that you can claim. Google indexes the desktop and mobile version of your website separately, so that your results can differ depending on what device your customers are using. Take advantage of mobile SEO today before your competitors do!

Funny name aside, SoLoMo is going to be an important part of marketing goals for 2012. Make sure that your business is prepared before another year slips before your very eyes!

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Social Media Spending Trends for 2012

January 7th, 2012

A recent report by Borrell Associates shows that small business spending for social media marketing is growing. But you don’t need a fancy study to tell you that. The interesting part of this article is that more small businesses feel that social media is a more important marketing channel than paid ads. Some experts have put these two findings together to predict that small businesses are going to be willing to spend more on social media marketing than paid search in 2012.

Why Spend More?
As some comments in the article suggest, the findings do not break down what “spend” really means. Does this consist of training, set up, consulting and other fees? And what do you plan to do with these assets after your accounts are created? As social networks become more popular, it’s also important for small business owners to have a good idea of the ROI on their investment for social media. Putting money into a marketing strategy without proper research or followup doesn’t guarantee success. In fact, investing the same amount into a paid search campaign may be even more productive for your business. There is no “right” answer and you can even choose a mix of both.

Choose an Effective Strategy
A growing demand and interest in social media can be overwhelming as you try and decide what is best for your small business. The answer isn’t easy, which is why an experienced marketing firm can help you evaluate all your options with a budget and resources that will fit your need. There is no set guideline for an effective social media plan, which is why experience and industry insight can give you a better idea of what to expect in your specific case. Contact us for a free consultation on how a social media campaign can help your business today.

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Looking at Google’s Evil Ways

January 5th, 2012

While “Don’t Be Evil” is Google’s official motto, there are many recent arguments that can be made showing how the internet giant is slowing descending into the realm of being not-so-good.

Earlier this week, Google got caught utilizing SEO spam to promote its Chrome browser. They hired a video marketing company and bought sponsored blog posts on questionable sites, which bloggers caught onto very quickly. Not to mention that the articles and content that was pushed out wasn’t well-written or relevant to the sites they were being featured on!

This is the exact type of behavior that Google punishes, so what happens when they’re the ones violating this “golden rule”. As punishment, Google has penalized itself for its “mistake” so that Chrome doesn’t show up for browser-related terms (for the time being). Yeah, that will show them… but for how long? You have to admit that it is hypocritical for Google to get caught doing the same thing that they penalized J.C. Penney for doing early in 2011. And in some ways, this argument can be extended to the small scale – how Google is constantly adding more Panda updates to penalize content they deem as spammy or evil. These updates have greatly affected traffic for legitimate small business sites, so why do they just keep coming?

If the issue of spam weren’t so blatantly offensive to SEOs, it’s more frustrating to see that Google isn’t very transparent with their search algorithm and other ranking methods. As far as we can see, they change this as often as they please and leave reputable website marketing firms to guess what is going to happen next.

The more you look into it, the more you’ll discover of the dark side of Google and why so many people question their motives. Do you think Google made a honest mistake with this ad campaign are or they just sorry because they got caught in such a public manner? Maybe it’s time to retire that motto and think of a more fitting one…

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Happy New Year – 2012!

December 31st, 2011

Here’s to new experiences, new goals, new opportunities and new beginnings!

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3 Things to Think About Before Launching a New Site

December 30th, 2011

emarketed portfolioAs exciting a new website launch sounds, it requires a lot of time, research and communication on your part! You don’t have to limit yourself to just 3 questions, or these 3 specifically, but it will help to have a list that you can look to when thinking about your new site.

Do I need to integrate seo web design? – Search optimization isn’t something that just comes later, after the design and building process. Make sure that you understand the SEO capability of your site as it’s being built so that all the necessary elements can be added during or immediately after the design aspect is completed. Think of SEO as an ongoing campaign and not something that just done at the beginning of the website building process, such as the design.

Do you know your customers and what they want? – Do you know your target demographic? Once you’re able to answer this question, you’ll get a better idea of what content will best suit their needs. Remember, there are many trends such as QR codes and even certain social media sites. Will your customers even use these functions? Just because it exists doesn’t mean that you should use it. Case in point: QR codes have been spotted on the BACK of moving buses. Talk about a quick response!

What do I want my customers to do? Remember that your website has to have a point. Do you want to push calls, newsletter signups or contact form submissions? Make it clear so that customers know how to complete the action, but don’t be so pushy that they feel overwhelmed and leave. A good example is Neil Patel’s Quick Sprout blog. If anyone is familiar with it, it used to just be a marketing blog about different topics. Now, a re-vamp as focused the calls-to-action and has made users more familiar with Neil’s services and his other companies.

What type of website do I need? This depends entirely on your industry and business model. If you’re selling goods, an ecommerce store is the way to go. For services, information is key. Feel free to browse competitor sites or even look at our portfolio to see what kind of website will best suit your business.

Whatever questions you decide to use for pre-launch, remember to take that list back out and evaluate it post-launch. There are always things you can use to improve the customer experience and these seemingly simple questions can be the basis of marking your progress!

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