Here's an article I recently wrote as a guest post on the Hubspot Internet Marketing Blog.
Many businesses I come across truly intend to do the right thing as far as optimizing their websites for lead generation. However, even though they do their best to drive more traffic and execute Internet marketing campaigns that will capture and convert more leads, many of them end up in one of two buckets:
Bucket 1: "We have no idea where to start given the crushing amount of available tools, opinions and advice."
Bucket 2: "We have all the bells and whistles (we think, anyway) but we can't seem to tie them all together so they work for us."
Both scenarios are very different, but there's one common, critical component that is almost always missing from both buckets: the up-front planning and thinking needed to create an ideal marketing engine.
When funding or budget approvals are coupled with time and resource pressures, the businesses in Bucket 1 jump right in and start frenetically implementing whatever tools they can get their hands on. These tools are often a blend of CRM apps, email campaign tools, website CMS packages, analytics packages, lead intelligence apps, etc.
Meanwhile, businesses in Bucket 2 are busy buying up all the latest fancy tools as they come along because they can afford to at the time. The tools become immediately disparate because folks using them can't get what they need out of them and frustration ensues between marketing, sales and management.
If you happen to fall into one of these buckets, here's a 4-step planning approach that will put you back on the path to closed-loop marketing bliss and yield the long-term payback your business needs.
Step 1: "WHO'S IN?" - Pick a Team and Assign Roles
- Get a representative from each functional area to participate (sales, marketing, web support, IT, executive sponsor). Involving whoever you can in the decision-making process tends to make them care a lot more about the outcome.
- Define what success means: establish clear goals, metrics and responsibilities around web stats, campaigns, lead generation & nurturing, sales cycles and pipelines, what to track and report on, etc.
Step 2: "AS IS" - Assess What's Happening Right Now
Internal issues typically include:
- Lack of Automation. This mostly stems from disparate systems (such as your website, campaigns, conversion forms, CRM system, lead nurturing practices and analytics) not working in harmony.
- Mis-Aligned business processes. Is sales and marketing working in unison?
- Un-Standardized processes: Are you agreed on lead workflows, opportunity pipelines, lead follow up procedures?
- Dis-Integrated systems: do you have island solutions that don't talk to each other?
- Data, not Information: can you gather data intelligence (not just data) so you know what programs to do more or less of?
- Un-Informed business decisions: are you able to measure, track and report on the data that's important to all parties in your organization?
Step 3: "TO BE" - Determine What's Possible
- Build out your requirements for each stakeholder or business area in the organization (sales, marketing, management, etc.).
- Map out all of your current processes so you can start to uncover where some of the breakdowns occur.
- Investigate and decide on which tools you want to implement based on need-to-haves vs. have-to-haves, making sure that whatever you do pick is scalable to the needs of your organization.
Step 4: "GO"- Put the Plan in Motion
- Map out an implementation and roll-out timeline keeping things to short and focused projects with clear milestones so things don't drag on and get off course.
- Training: whatever you do, make sure that whoever is responsible for using a particular tool (CRM, Internet marketing, etc.) gets the appropriate training to maximize its usefulness. Otherwise, things can quickly get stale and people unmotivated.
- Test, test, test. It's a lot easier to fix things at the front end versus when things get seemingly too broken to bother fixing.
- Finally, stick to your plan! With the right amount of planning, the right tools in place, and the right data intelligence to pull from, you will be positioned to quickly make informed decisions and confidently know when your marketing efforts need to be fine-tuned, repeated or ended. Truly some closed-loop marketing euphoria.
When I speak with small business owners and marketers, one
of the persistent obstacles to creating a blog presence often are expressed as
two key points:
1) We
don't have time to write regularly.
2) We
don't have the ability to write regularly.
That seems like a non-starter, right? If you find this
is your situation, please think again, as you are missing a key opportunity -
since, as mentioned in an earlier business
blogging article, YOU are the expert in your field.
Vehicles, Blog sites and Web sites
Think about what you do every day. And bare with the
drama but... you likely get into a multi-thousand-point vehicle powered with
explosive gasses, you head down the road with other similar vehicles, risking
life and limb to get to and from work, the store, home, and road trips.
Driving a car is a pretty risky thing with special attention and skills
required to avoid disaster. But we all do this regularly, and one reason
why is because we HAVE TO. Another reason is we get real advantages from being
able to transport ourselves here and there. In short, it is worth it and
necessary. The same thing can be said about creating a blog-based
presence for your business. In fact, to stretch a metaphor even
further - let's think of your standard minivan as somewhat akin to your main
web site. So if your www.company.com
is a minivan, what of your blog? Ahh, truly it is a turbo-powered sports
car!
You need your regular web site to represent your business,
your products, who stands behind the business, investors, contact information
and the like. You don't always change content on it super-quickly, you
just need it, above all, to be accurate, current, reliable, somewhat attractive
and optimized
for getting found online. Okay, so we might question whether a minivan
is attractive, but you get the idea! You need your primary web site to
take you places and live up to the expectations and needs of a broad
audience. But is that enough? In order to be
competitive, and get found online, a blog site can provide you with the more
nimble capability to present your products and related knowledge, maneuvering
in ways that your minivan web site can't.
-
Drive traffic and
generate leads: blog sites are built with search optimization in
mind. You can use your knowledge (and hyperlinks!) to create a
high-octane traffic-driving machine. That's one major way your blog is
supposed to function! Increasing conversions
is key to building your business, and your blog can play a crucial role of
increasing interested and qualified traffic.
-
Engaging and Building Connections: blog
sites are created to be interactive. Each article is an opportunity to share
information, get feedback and engage in dialog with those customers, prospects and
industry experts who care about what you care about.
-
Test Drive Ideas: A blog site can also be
an opportunity to share ideas about new or possible initiatives. This can
be invaluable interaction about future directions.
Here's an experiment to
try: take the name of your own industry, for example, "draperies."
Google it: "Draperies
and blogs." Results: what your
competition is doing. So it could be that while you've been functioning
using the ol' minivan, your competition has been zipping-by using their own
speedier on-line vehicles. Yikes!
Again the good news is that the
technology part can be quite easy. Low technology barriers
to entry for the blog sphere are a fact.
And we know your blog site can be well positioned to contribute to your
business growth. Given this, it seems that the old excuses will fix
themselves!
If you are like me, you are regularly receiving unsolicited email from various quarters, telling you about the latest and greatest SEO solutions on the planet. Just buy the book, or guide, or download the promotional whitepaper and this expert will offer you the latest "Secrets" to search engine success.
Google it. At last count I saw
millions of results! Well, it's not a very well-kept secret anyway.
One reason for the mysterious "secret" is simple: Google and other search engines do not publish their algorithms, and they are known to change without notification. Another reason, of course, that everyone is clamoring for the top spot, is because that's where the eyeballs track. Plus, if you monitor your placement closely, you'll find that it will change at least somewhat, even from one day to the next.
That said, practicing good SEO is not mysterious. A secret you only share with a BFF? Hardly. Good SEO is a combination of good standards-based web design and using your keywords intelligently, plus (and here's the tough one) getting good quality inbound links, as has been mentioned in "Business Blogging: the Value of Adding a Blog to Your B2B Mix."
Of course, aside from your own blog, your ability to add in-bound links can be limited, but here are some principles you should stick to that will make a difference right off the bat:
Make sure your web site or blog uses CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) rather than "inline styles." In short, inline styles (boo, hiss!) clutter your content pages with information that should be tucked away in a style.css file. Google only cares about your content, not what fonts and colors you are using.
Use key words in your page titles, headings and links to other content in your site. We know that Google "weighs these" as part of the keyword density of your site. Of course this assumes that you have a handle on your keywords, and this certainly takes some thought and analysis. Likewise, you want to avoid so-called keyword stuffing, as Googlebot has been around the block a time or two and can sniff it out and penalize you. It's really a common sense thing, don't try and trick the Google!
Whenever possible, use keywords in your URLs. Sounds easy, right? It may not be if you are using an outdated CMS or blog system that builds links that are full of squiggles and look like www.blahblah.com?p=1234&abdc. If your web site is built and linked manually, then it is easy, just www.blahblah.com/my-important-keywords. The standard preference is to use a "-" hyphen between words rather than an underscore or a space.
You almost never want to only put keyword text as an image. It not only makes it a pain to update them in the future, but it is completely opaque to search engines. Seems like common sense? Maybe, but there are cases when particular graphics fall into the "I absolutely must have them or I will just die" category. In these cases, you should label it with an "alt" tag. The general idea is that alt tags function to describe the image and they can contain your keywords. Keep in mind, though, that alt tags aren't "weighed" in the same way as paragraph headings and other parts of your site.
Again, you don't need an SEO secrets BFF to help you with basic principles. Just use some common sense website optimization considerations, and some analysis and footwork to get a good understanding of your marketing keywords. There are some great self-help tools available at www.seochat.com.
Image credits: PEANUTS© United Feature Syndicate, Inc. and the Charles Schulz Museum
Four or five years ago if you said to your web guru, "let's make a
site map!" You'd probably end up with a quaint-looking single web page that had a list of links and categories indexing your site. You can still find these from time to time. As it turns out, Apple still has one, go figure. As you may recall, this was yet another alternative to a search engine, to help visitors find your content. Not your grandfather's web code, the "site map" of the 21st century, however, is something a bit different but with the same goal of helping visitors find your content, albeit in a bit more "high tech" fashion.
It's XML not HTML
So we are talking
XML sitemaps. These sitemaps are
somewhat similar to the old-fashioned kind, they are a list of links and web pages, but in a special structured format, one that Yahoo! and Google know how to scoop right up. It takes search engines time to spider through your regular site menu, and you've just given them an easy shortcut, and they like you for that. Also, these files include time stamps and change frequency, this meta data also tells search bots how frequently they should revisit your site to check for updates. Pardon me while I sample a bit for you:
You are probably thinking, "yikes, does my techie guru have to keep that stuff updated?" The answer is yes, but the good news is really that no one need keep up your entire sitemap manually. There are many tools out there to generate these for you. Really -- don't ever even think about coding it manually!
Creating Sitemaps
If you are using blog software like Typepad or Wordpress, it's typically a
built-in feature or an easy
plug-in. Many hosted services like
Hubspot provide this automatically, but if not, there is software that will generate the XML tags for you. After which, just upload the "sitemap.xml" to the root of your site. That's right, search engines are looking for "sitemap.xml" in the root of your web site. So when you are done, you should see: www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml which will yield a file that looks somewhat like the paste-in above. Google has
a fabulous listing of sitemap resources, something I've returned to again and again. If you do have access to a web guru, he or she may want to look at programmatically automating using any of those items list in the "Server side programs" grouping. However, most running a small static site, without the benefit of automatic generation of sitemap.xml, may find any of the "Downloadable Tools" or "Online Generators" useful. In the past, I've had pretty good luck with
GsiteCrawler, but don't take my word for it, try others and see what works for you. Also don't forget: if you are managing a static site, you'll want to submit your sitemap to Google via "
Web Master Tools," a service that is a MUST for marketing and web professionals alike.
Sitemaps and SEO
It can take many days for a search engine to locate all the pages in a large site. Especially if your site employs Flash or fancy javascript drop-down menus. By creating a sitemap you can do quite a lot to address this challenge. But, having the sitemap in hand is also a chance to analyze your site in terms of Search Engine Optimization and your
marketing keywords. So, once your site map has been generated, take a good look at it. Do you see any of your keywords as part of the URL's? Your marketing keywords should be part of your web link schema, and if not you are missing an opportunity. Think of it this way, if you've never seen that web page before, does the URL at least give a
hint of what the web page is about? So the quick lesson here is that site maps should be presenting the search engine with your most important marketing keywords, as they will also contribute to your ranking and to the goal of
helping visitors find your content.
You've seen them. You can see them on this site, those odd little
widget-icons that grace the footers and headers of blog articles. These aren't graphical garnishes, but yet another avenue to get your content out of your own little blogosphere and into the social media networks. What do they do? In a nutshell, they create the potential
for major traffic.
Go ViralIt's not rocket science. In case you haven't noticed, the web has been evolving lately. It is no longer just a one-way information channel. Social interaction, i.e., social networks on the internet have exploded in popularity in just the last few years. So, if you haven't already, it's really worthwhile to spend some time on some of the big players, especially in the social bookmarking arena: Digg, Reddit, Delicious, Stumbleupon, and others. This is where stories are submitted and ranked by the crowd. Get familiar with them and even participate. You'll notice that there is a real buzz, especially in the comments sections. Okay, so what do the icons have to do with the sites? Simple: the icons simply provide your visitor with a quick and easy way, a shortcut to submit your specific content to the crowd, so the potential is indeed huge. Likewise, Facebook users and Twitter users who are already logged into their accounts will post or Tweet your article out there.
As mentioned previously, inbound links are one of the most effective ways of improving your Google rankings. This is the good SEO stuff you really want! For example, if thousands are clicking links on Twitter or Digg about YOUR "5 Ways to Improve Window Cleaning Widgets" article and linking to YOUR blog, guess who benefits on Google when someone searches for "Improve Window Cleaning?"
Content is Still King, But..
Substance matters, it's true and unavoidable. Providing worthwhile, unique information that is interesting and relevant to your readers is probably the most important reason why someone would use those social icons. However, if you spend some time on bookmarking sites you will notice some elements that are common to many of the "most Dugg" stories.
Image courtesy of KnowTheBook
Of course it is now a prerequisite to have a professional web
presence for your business. More than likely, you spend time and treasure on this critical resource. But what about a blog? Blogging may just seem like a fad for techies (
www.Gizmodo.com) or people that seem to have plenty of time on their hands, or people who have plenty to say, like researchers (
www.researchbuzz.org). By now, having a companion blog site has become part of a comprehensive marketing program for many. Blogging, and other forms of social media, has become a de facto means of engagement for B2B companies. It's simply essential. Just as you would view in-person networking events as necessary to engaging with customers and partners, your blog site should be this as well. And while it may seem that a blog will cost you additional time (and that treasure), there are resources available to streamline blog publishing. More than this, your blog site can be well-positioned to feed visitors to your existing company web presence.
You are the expert
Want to create a buzz about your latest offerings or upcoming initiative? No one is better positioned to do this than you. Of course you have the latest vetted marketing copy on your official "www" site. You might be surprised to find that you've got plenty more to say. One of my colleagues who regularly writes on his own blog, finds it much easier to write in the more conversational style that is typical of blogging. It's less formal, less restrictive, approachable and believe it or not, it can be fun. Unlike traditional web copy, with blogging you have the option of getting reader feedback via comments. This feedback can give you the additional sense of satisfaction that someone is actually paying attention. More about that in a sec!
SEO Opportunity
Hyperlinking is the basic building block of the web. That's how it was conceived as a "web" of linked documents. Google ranks sites using various metrics, not the least among them are these inbound links. So why make this point? Because blogging is a great way to build a network of contextual links pointing back to your primary web. So that's key: don't forget to hyperlink as you write. If you are writing about your latest product -but not being pitchy-, be sure and hyperlink back to the relevant section of your main site. The idea is to take advantage of SEO goodness as Google will weigh those keywords in relation to that landing page. Also don't be shy about linking to other relevant B2B or industry resources. If you happen to link to another blog, for example, often the owner of that blog will get a "trackback" acknowledgement. This is an electronic "kudos" and you may just find that others are linking to your content, further upping your SEO worthiness.
Social Networking and RSS
As mentioned, unlike traditional web copy, blog sites tend to be more interactive. If you have enabled commenting, whether moderated or not, you now have the possibility of getting direct feedback from readers and creating a real "buzz" around your postings. Speaking of Buzz, if your blog software has the ability to add a social bookmarking widget to the footer of your articles, you have a great way of building inbound links from sites like Digg and Reddit. RSS has become a universal way of "syndicating" your content, offering the ability to have your content literally distributed anywhere online. Check out feedburner (recently acquired by Google), which offers some additional ways to get your blog content "out there," and has some great analytics tools to boot!
Low Barriers to Entry and ROI
Where you might pay thousands of dollars to get your traditional web site designed, configured and hosted, the barriers to entry for a blog site are relatively few. Free and/or inexpensive hosted options are plentiful (wordpress.com, blogger.com, typepad.com). Likewise, you may want to see the many success stories from Hubspot. For example, check out how this B2B supplier, Palomar Technologies leveraged their blog site to build authority for itself, increasing traffic some twenty-fold, nearly tripling their monthly lead program.
Photo Courtesy of Proniit.
If you have been paying attention to SEO principles, and your 
site's keywords, and your Google ranking - give yourself a pat on the back! A lot of the battle of marketing on the web is simply getting found. If you are at this point, you may well be asking, "okay, so what's next?" In order to realize a return on investment for your efforts, you need to actually convert those web clicks to sales leads. It's not magic, it's a combination of building the right landing page, and then measuring, testing again, and measuring.
The Obvious Offer is Key
Don't kid yourself, there is precious little time to catch the attention of a prospect. In a matter of a very few seconds, your visitor must determine whether they are going to take action or whether they will contribute to your bounce rate. Is your offer clearly visible? The entire approach of building your page must take this into account. As a result, the featured offer should be the most obvious item on the page, above the fold. Don't overuse graphics, or you can run into the over-stimulated "Las Vegas effect." Simply remember that you have a fleeting chance to get the focus of a short attention span, so use these images judiciously.
Highlight Value Points
We've already answered the question: "What do I get?" Next we need to make the short and sweet "value points." It is much shorter than even the proverbial elevator pitch, much shorter. Bullet points that clearly relate some clear message that your targeted audience will understand and value. Keeping things concise and understandable is, in fact, quite challenging. But if we were asking someone to download some new "Widget for Cleaning Windows," we might point out:
See clearly through your windows like never before
Allows window cleaning without usual streaks
Easy application
Keeps windows clearer longer, less work
This is really about enough! This is truly one of those times when less is more.
Effective Elements of Call to Action
Don't Distract: If you are linking from a landing page to a form, be sure and link both text and images, and of course they all need to point to the same offer. And while you may have a standard menu or navigation for your site, bear in mind that your offer page serves a very specialized purpose. Consider removing that standard navigation, sidebars and such, as you want to avoid extraneous links as much a possible. We want to feed the funnel, and if we present the visitor with a network of pathways, we are defeating our own business purposes.
Minimal Field Requirements: We've all seen it happen: An offer form designed by consensus with dozens of fields and drop-down lists from which to choose. This is definitely what we don't want. Figure out what you minimally need. The user experience is just as important as the business need and if that user feels hassled by multiple questions, your own results will suffer. The rule is simple: ask for the minimum information you need to fulfill the business objective. Pay special attention to see whether your required fields make sense. Hopefully you can get away with something like: name, email, and perhaps phone number --whatever you need to be able to contact them. Consider linking to a clear privacy policy, particularly if you must ask for phone number details.
Measure and Test
Well, hopefully you've been using some kind of web analytics tool to measure traffic. Google Analytics is a free and powerful tool, so there's really no excuse. Plus, having web analytics in place is critical in getting to the next step: measuring and testing what works with Google Optimizer. Think of Google Optimizer as kind of a subset of Google Analytics, more specialized, but dependent upon it. The combination of these two products gives you the ability to see abandonment rates, what versions of a landing page work best, and even what other pages on your site are of interested to those key constituents who convert. Consider the A/B test: Say you have your standard version of your "Widget for Cleaning Windows" description (A), and another that includes a couple of customer testimonial quotes (B). Do the quotes truly add value to your offer? Run the A/B test, and Google optimizer will randomly present one or the other version of the form to your prospects. In addition, Google Optimizer will present you with a running tally of which version is the most successful at converting visitors.
Building landing pages is a combination of trying different approaches, testing the results and simply doing more of what is the most effective in feeding the funnel. The approaches that work require some common sense approaches and some real discipline around focused messaging and value propositions. With the kind of tools now available for measuring and reporting, you can substantially improve your marketing efforts.
photo credit John Smith's, UK
A quick background on Inbound MarketingThe truth is, that while more traditional marketing tactics and outbound-type campaigns still do have a place in the B2B
marketing mix, it's to a much lesser degree. Email marketing done right, for example, is still an effective way to nurture existing leads and contacts that have already opted in to receive your content. But, as far as getting new prospects, there's been a massive shift toward inbound marketing (getting found by potential customers).
David Meerman Scott describes inbound marketng best and recommends that marketers "publish their way in" (via blogs, social media, etc.) in contrast to outbound marketing where marketers used to have to "buy their way in" (via paid advertisements, direct mail, list rentals, etc.).
So, the first place to start is to
turn your website into a lead magnet. To help get you started, we put together a
website optimization eBook that'll walk you through the basics of search engine optimization (SEO). The main goal is to show you how, with a little bit of effort, you can start to adjust or revamp your website to drive more traffic to it and begin making your Internet efforts more profitable -- without investing a fortune.
For those who are looking to enhance the marketing of your company website or feeling the pressure to increase website and online marketing performance, this eBook was put together to help get you started.
Learn how to:
- Quickly turn your website into an optimized, lead generating tool that gets your company found by qualified prospects.
- Implement effective natural (organic) search engine optimization (SEO) tactics in a few easy steps. If your site isn't receiving enough traffic, it might not be properly optimized.
- Apply keywords to your website and some best practices.
- Use linking to your advantage. Explains link popularity, PageRank and the importance of getting more links to your site.
Once you've had a chance to go through the eBook, let me know what you think by commenting on this article. There will be several more eBooks in this
Internet Marketing Essentials series so we want to provide only information you'll find useful.
Many B2B companies know that they should be incorporating an ongoing social media campaign into their arsenal of tactics to generate leads and sales. But, as a business owner or marketing professional, half the battle is trying to get your head around the social media wave, the crushing amount of information about it, where to even begin, and how to make it all fit into your marketing plans.
The great news is that being successful at Internet marketing does not need to be as complicated as others may sometimes make it out to be. It will, however, require some start-up time and dedication to get a solid working plan in place. Here's the thing. The key to effective and profitable Internet and online marketing requires an integrated approach, utilizing the right tools and applying them with consistent effort.
This 4-part series brings you up-to-speed with some practical things you can do to confidently get your results-driven website and Internet marketing campaign off the ground.
Part 1 - Fix the Foundation: Is your current website optimized for getting found? The first eBook of the series will help you quickly turn your website into an optimized, lead generating tool that gets your company found by qualified prospects.
Part 2 - Capture and Convert: Now that your website is optimized, is it set up to convert qualified prospects into leads? This eBook will outline ways to build great offer landing pages and calls to action that are optimized for converting traffic to leads and customers.
Part 3 - Spread the Word: Now that you've got a killer website and tools for converting, it's time to start promoting through social media channels and blogging -- delivering only meaningful content along the way. This eBook will give you the basics for why you need social media, how to get social media traffic and specific examples on how to set up your campaigns using some of the biggies -facebook, twitter, etc.
Part 4 - Analyze, Measure, Test and Pivot: Use analytics and tracking tools to measure the effectiveness of your efforts so you can confidently do more of what works, and less of what doesn't. This eBook will arm you with some of the best practices and and tools (some new, some older yet really effective) for measuring performance, tracking and reporting on your efforts.
For those of you who are looking to enhance the marketing of your company website or feeling the pressure to increase website and online marketing lead generation performance, this series will help get you on the right track.
What else do you think future Internet marketing Pros need to know?