b2b
Five questions for B2B paid-search marketers
Sep 1st
Passionate or just want to keep their job?
In contrast to consumers who might have their pulse racing by the latest gadgetry and ultimately part with their money in the chase of being the cool kid for a week, most business buyers are pragmatists that are mostly concerned about keeping their job.
Work with experienced B2B marketers that understand your service and audience and how to tailor copy, call to action and keywords that reach the right audience with the right message.
Brand or demand?
Whereas search campaigns for consumer ecommerce sites often have very clear objective of sales and revenue, many B2B search campaigns too often initially come in all shades of grey. A basic question to answer is; are we talking brand or demand? Depending on the answer, first then can you establish suitable objectives and KPI’s.
What’s the sales process?
Complex business sales take time, and often the deal is made offline over the phone or in person perhaps many months away from the initial touch-point through search. This obviously creates difficulties when it comes to tracking and understanding the value of individual clicks. Key to success is to have a clear process and solid technology in place, which can optimally track end to end of the campaign.
Are you searching in the right places?
Traditional keyword research tools are great for when you already understand the audience and product at hand. With the vast complexity of many niche business solutions, and different people involved in the buying process, B2B search marketers need to take a step back before starting to play around with their spreadsheets.
Sit down with product managers, read white papers, and get feedback from people on the sales floor and call centres to get a solid understanding of the product and the business issues it solves.
Whose keyword is it?
For larger B2B companies running several PPC campaigns across different products and divisions, there will at some point be raised a question about keyword overlap. Who should bid on the term XYZ and why?
Look to establish a clear matrix of strategic primary keyword ownership early on in the process. This should not be considered resolved for all time, but instead you should constantly analyse how this can tactically be altered with current objectives, performance and budgets to maximise the overall search opportunity for the organisation.
Can an API replace business development?
Aug 31st
Shaival Shah, who is VP of Business Development at Hunch, thinks so. In a post on his blog, he writes:
When I joined Hunch, Chris Dixon asked me what my goal would be and more importantly, how I would know if I achieved success. My response was to cannabilize my own function by popularizing the Hunch API into the wild. It was a simple lesson that I learned from Alan Spoon, former President of the Washington Post Company and Managing Partner at Polaris Venture Partners, who once told me that companies don’t move aggressively enough to cannabilize their business, but rather spend too much time trying to defend it.
Shah offers up some really good advice about growing an API’s presence in the market. For instance, he suggests that, at least in the beginning, a self-service API will still realistically require some one-one-one deals. He also recommends a “Bowling Pin Strategy” in which outreach is targeted at a “neighborhood of companies within an ecosystem.” The goal there: by targeting a vertical, it’s easier to build a brand. Finally, Shah reminds companies of the importance of knowing the metrics your API is designed to boost.
But some of Shah’s advice is, in my opinion, a bit off the mark. Most notably, Shah that “validation, PR and analytics” trump revenue. “Revenue will follow if you solve for those three missing variables,” he writes. That’s not, however, necessarily true. Here’s why:
- Validation means different things to different people. But ‘validating‘ the market for an API is different from ‘validating‘ a business model. There are plenty of popular APIs offered up by companies that have failed to validate that they have what it takes to make it as real businesses. Twitter, anyone? Unfortunately, far too many new businesses fail to recognize the importance of testing out business models and determining if there’s real market support for them as early as possible in the company’s lifecycle.
- PR is no doubt important for companies, but it hardly guarantees revenue. Plenty of startups have received boatloads of press attention but still failed to generate substantial revenue. And for good reason: popularity without a viable business model is just, well, popularity. Driving a million people to your website certainly won’t be profitable if there’s no business model in place to take advantage of the popularity.
- Many companies collect lots and lots of analytics data, but they either don’t know what to do with it, or they focus in on the wrong data points. Analytics can help companies better understand how their users are using their products, which can help them build better business models, but again, the business model is the key. Analytics for analytic’s sake isn’t helpful.
At the end of the day, I think most startups should draw a distinction between true business development and their APIs. The goal of business development is, by definition, to help develop business. If a startup, however, really isn’t yet a business (eg. an entity that has revenue or a model for potentially generating revenue), an API designed to deliver “validation, PR and analytics” isn’t likely to constitute a business development asset, at least in the near term. In other words, a company without a business model isn’t likely to magically to morph into a going concern simply thanks to a cool API. Thus, promoting the API is more accurately described as a marketing or product development activity at this stage of the game.
Of course, a company might focus on building up a wildly-popular API that itself could one day drive revenue through some unknown business model, but that’s sort of like opening a jumping off a diving board blindfolded and hoping that there’s water in the pool.
Return on Effort Study
Aug 24th
More budget is hard to come by…more time is impossible. One aspect of digital marketing is that marketers have more to do, smaller teams and less time, within a landscape of multiplying channels, emerging technologies and scattered audiences. The Return on Effort Study was fielded to help organizations put hard figures around the time component of common tactical activities.
The primary goal of this study was to quantify the effort that marketers expend on fundamental and emerging marketing tactics. By comparing the time invested in these tactics with their ROI and brand impact, we hope to help marketers in two ways. First, by guiding managers in evaluating tactics for future consideration and second, in helping teams compare their own effort to return ratios with those of the industry.
Another important element of the study was to explore how skill sets are aligned for emerging and inbound tactics. Since social tactics rely so heavily on the capabilities of team members in-house and occasionally at partner organizations, it’s valuable to set benchmarks for comparison and the planning of future training and hiring.
Contents
Table of Contents
- Summary
- Introduction from HubSpot
- About Hubspot
- About Econsultancy
- Research aims
- Methodology
- Survey Demographics
- Who is this report for?
- Tactics compared; ROE, ROI & brand
- Business to Consumer Tactics
- Business to Business Tactics
- Return on Effort, ROI and Brand – Table Data
- Emerging needs in marketing skills
- Business to Consumer Skills Evaluation
- Business to Business Skills Evaluation
Table of Figures
Figure 1: Which of the following statements best describes your organization?
Figure 2: Primary target segments (over 25% of 2009 revenue)
Figure 3: Primary product type.
Figure 4: 2009 revenue
Figure 5: Organizations’ monthly lead goals.
Figure 6: Comparison of tactics in B2C by time & brand
Figure 7: Comparison of tactics in B2C by time & ROI
Figure 8: Comparison of tactics in B2B by time & brand
Figure 9: Comparison of tactics in B2B by time & ROI
Figure 10: Traditional skills evaluation – B2C
Figure 11: Inbound skills evaluation – B2C
Figure 12: Traditional skills evaluation – B2B
Figure 13: Inbound skills evaluation – B2B
Who is this report for?
This is primarily a report by client-side marketers for client-side marketers, specifically at small and medium-sized organizations that engage in digital marketing and are currently or planning on using socially-driven, content focused “inbound” tactics. However, many findings and takeaways apply across company size and target markets.
The report is also intended to inform non-digital marketing specialists such as senior managers who need to understand the similarities and differences between established and emerging digital channels.
In addition, the report will help agencies understand their clients’ challenges and thought processes and assist them as they design future marketing services and refine their current ones.
Building your B2B social media case
Aug 11th
CEO’s and CFO’s are undeniably busy people, and with limited time on hand there’s a need for quick, bullet-point arguments and proposals. Unfortunately social media is not ideally suited to short sharp PowerPoint synopsis.
Its focus on community and long term engagement mean that genuinely valuable metrics and solid ROI tend to appear slowly, emerging along with your network.
If a CEO is looking at allocating budget for social media, they will instinctively run the simplest, most revealing tests initially. Unfortunately, these can paint a very poor picture of social media.
In order to get your executive branch’s full support, you’ll need to build a compelling business case.
Here are a few points that will help you convince your higher-ups that they should be joining the social media conversation…
Don’t let your CEO do their own research
What do these three have in common?
- Fidel Castro.
- The Princess Diaries.
- Justin Bieber (of course).
Haircuts aside, they are topping the trending topics this afternoon.
Unless your B2B has a particular interest in the fate of the People’s Revolutionary Army or the films of Julie Andrews, it’s understandable that your CEO won’t see the immediate benefits available here.
As mentioned, executives are often pushed for time, so their own research will often be limited to broad statistics.
Social media is primarily filled with entertainment content, so make sure you are showing them where the genuinely relevant conversations are taking place. Make a comprehensive list of industry blogs and forums, and list competitors who are already active there.
Ignore Facebook
OK, that’s a little extreme, but again mainstream coverage gives a very blinkered view of the sphere of social media.
Most people will assume it involves Facebook, Twitter and little else. B2B touchpoints do exist on these networks, but again the bulk of the conversation will be found on blogs and industry forums.
You need to construct a solid list of recent conversation and sentiment in order to convince.
You can construct a quick, clear picture by using bespoke software like BrandWatch or InfluenceFinder, but if you don’t have the budget available run your site URL through Yahoo (type linkdomain:yournamehere.com/into the Yahoo search page) to grab a quick list of backlinks and mentions.
Think like a customer
For B2Bs network building is important, but their networks can function in a slightly different way than those of B2Cs.
A core group of important, personal relationships with major clients will often require most of your attention, so in order to define the most important touchpoints, behave like a client. A vast majority of B2B buyers will begin their research with a simple look at Google, and so should you.
Forum comments, blogs and Tweets will rank highly here, so make sure you communicate this to senior management. It’s incredibly important that they understand who is talking about them and exactly how it’s likely to affect business.
If negative comments are ranking highly in Google, then it’s important to address them quickly. Likewise, if competitors are doing well here, then they will be gaining a large slice of your potential business.
Make the case for visibility
While most marketers are now convinced of the benefits of social media, the broad reach and low costs it can offer, it’s easy to see why these don’t immediately leap out to others.
Take time to list relevant figures and provide examples. Without adequate support your social media strategy could be doomed from the start, so plan ahead and make sure you have a solid footing when you set out.
Increase search marketing ROI with retargeting
Jun 18th
Getting started with retargeting
The first thing you should do if you are considering setting up a retargeting campaign is to make sure the cookie pool is starting to build up. Since Google won’t activate any retargeting lists before it has at least 500 unique cookies this might take some time if you’re working in a niche industry. Also keep in mind the typical sales cycle and future use of the cookie pool when setting the cookie length.
The simplest way of starting a retargeting campaign is to reach out to everyone that has visited a specific landing page or whole site. While this will likely improve conversion rates (considering that typically around 95% of visitors won’t convert on the first visit), it is still wasting budget on existing customers and restricting the possibilities of tailored messaging.
Audience lists in Adwords works similarly to keywords and can be used as negative matches and part of Boolean expressions which gives them enormous power to hone in on the desired audience.
Fine tuning the audience
A next logical step to improve the basic retargeting campaign is thus to exclude any visitors who have already converted by using an audience list of converting visitors as a negative match. This also gives the flexibility to target them with a possibly more enticing offer to win them over. This can then be further refined by combination lists to target people within a certain timeframe after a visit, or where they dropped off in the buying cycle etc.
In recent tests for B2B clients, we’ve recorded a vastly improved cost-per-lead due to the improvement of conversion rate that are up to triple that of search and is already contributing to an additional 20% leads.
Obviously retargeting cannot work on its own, i.e. in order to create a retargeting campaign there must be visitors to retarget in the first place. Worth noting is that the Adwords remarketing tag will work for any type of traffic, so in contrast to the regular Google conversion tag, it will drop cookies for visitors from other sources such as direct traffic, email or display etc.
Don’t be creepy
When discussing the topic of retargeting, it’s virtually impossible to not feel obliged to also highlight the privacy issue. As noted earlier Google requires at least 500 unique cookies per list before it can be activated for retargeting purposes. The main reason for this is to avoid the risk of overly clever online marketers to triangulate data to target individual people.
Google also requires the inclusion of retargeting information in the sites privacy policy and a link for users to opt-out from the functionality across the Google Content Network.
A further control that we as markets have to avoid the creep factor, is the frequency cap. While Google typically advices to start off with an uncapped retargeting campaign, it’s advisable to revisit this as the campaign progresses over time.
In addition to improving campaign ROI, retargeting can of course also be used very effectively for branding purposes, but that’s another post.
Is there a role for social media in B2B commerce?
Jun 2nd
According to a recent study conducted by digital marketing agency White Horse, social media is being adopted by B2B businesses, but not surprisingly, adoption lags B2C.
For instance:
- 60% of B2B companies surveyed don’t have a staff member who is dedicated to social media marketing. Less than half (46%) of the B2C companies surveyed lacked a full time social media staff member.
- Only 10% of B2B companies surveyed have retained an outside agency or consultant to assist with social media marketing. 28% of B2C companies, on the other hand, have.
- Of the B2B companies surveyed, the largest group (45%) said they have a “basic social presence but no significant marketing.” The largest group of B2C companies surveyed claimed to be involved with non-paid social media marketing on a daily basis.
Not surprisingly, White Horse, which has a practice dedicated to B2B social media marketing, concludes that “social media plays a significant and ever-growing role in the marketing arsenal” of B2B marketers. But one statistic from its survey is perhaps far most revealing: 46% of the respondents reported that the perception that social media was irrelevant was an internal obstacle in getting social media initiatives approved. Only 12% of B2C respondents cited this as a problem — the largest gap between B2B and B2C respondents amongst all obstacles listed.
One could look at the data and conclude that B2B businesses are simply slower in ‘getting it‘ when it comes to social media but I actually think the data raises an interesting question: are B2B marketers actually more strategic than their B2C counterparts?
Obviously, it makes sense that B2C companies are trying to embrace social media at a much greater clip than B2B companies. B2C companies have very different relationships with their customers and prospective customers, and social media is a natural fit for reaching them.
But that doesn’t mean that B2C companies aren’t social. To the contrary; the world of B2B is already quite ‘social.’ In some respects, B2B commerce is arguably far more social than B2C commerce. Existing relationships often drive sales, and companies and their salespeople are always working to build new relationships through various channels which are extremely social, such as trade shows. The importance of relationships in B2B commerce is logical: most B2B companies sell to a much smaller audience, so investing in relationship-building is usually a must for success. After all, chances are you’re not going to sell a $100,000/year software license without going through a ‘courtship‘ process that involves extensive one-on-one interaction and engagement.
From this perspective, if B2B companies aren’t adopting online social media in the same fashion as B2C companies, it isn’t so much an indication that they don’t get it, but rather that they understand that the most popular (and hyped) social media platforms don’t always offer the best opportunities to build meaningful relationships. Because of this understanding, when they do use social media, they might be more likely to be cautious and skeptical. That, in turn, may support a far more strategic use of the medium. Indeed, White Horse found evidence that B2C companies were embracing areas of social media that “support traditional B2B marketing activities“, such as third party forums and podcasts. On the surface, that seems like it’s probably more thoughtful than simply adopting the social media soup de jour.
Interestingly, in a day in age when a lot of what’s taking place in the social-media-sphere increasingly looks less social and more uninspired, it seems that B2B companies might be able to teach their B2C cousins a lesson. That lesson: just because you have a 200 piece toolset doesn’t mean that you have to use every tool in it to get the job done.
Optimising PPC for long-tail keywords
May 20th
It’s no secret that click-through rate is the dominant factor for quality score in Google Adwords. At the SMX Advance London sessions earlier this week, I argued that, due to this in particular a lot of long-tail campaigns are not doing any favours for their quality score, and ultimately campaign success.
The problem has all to do with split testing and statistical significance. Since the dominant factor is CTR, it’s key to continuously split-test and evaluate new creative in order to stay ahead of the competition.
Someone utilising a long-tail approach by creating a 1:1 campaign structure (one Adgroup containing one keyword and a tailored creative) and at the same time is relying on Google to optimise by CTR of split-tested ad copies, will have to possibly wait a very long time.
Assuming that we want to achieve 95% confidence that the new adcopy will outperform the original, the following table highlights the number of days we have to wait to achieve this if our creative is only getting 100 impressions a day.
Most search marketers would find it difficult to wait 40 days to merely know if the new adcopy is performing better or worse. In case it’s worse (with the same percentage point dip), the consequences could be wider reaching than just the loss in clicks, but also lowered quality score, higher CPC and ultimately negatively impact campaign ROI.
Note that more dramatic changes in performance will lessen the time needed for this test.
In order to properly CTR optimise these campaigns, one solution is to use a system that bring together data from different keywords and adgroups on a semantic level and use the aggregate numbers to find the winning combination of a creative.
Alternatively, if there is a reliance on Google, the impression levels need to be considered when structuring the campaign, to make sure that the ad groups receive enough volume for efficient split testing.
The size of the circle denotes the number of keywords in each Adgroup (real or semantically created through reporting), and the number inside the total daily creative impression volumes:
Q&A: I Love Local Commercials – a branding and identity viral firestorm
Apr 26th
Q: What was the genesis of “I Love Local Commericials,” and what are your strategic goals?
Brian Bradley: We had an idea that using comedy would be an effective way of reaching our customers. We started with Rhett and Link, not with “I Love Local Commercials.” During the meltdown on Wall Street, they created a song. One of the guys here got involved and in the process we ended up deciding, “Hey this is something that really touches on our industry, so why don’t we reach out to these guys?” We ended up sponsoring that video, and it caught on. People were sharing it, and a lot of people that were customers or partners of ours thought it was great. That video is called The Economic Meltdown Song.
We really enjoyed working with these guys, so that’s where we started with the idea. We didn’t think anybody would be all that interested in hearing about our company.
We asked, “Well, how do you actually bring in more business if you’re not promoting your stuff? But let’s test this.” We started testing with a series of three. It was pretty edgy. I don’t know if you seen Red House, but you know, when we first jumped in we just jumped in and followed Rhett and Link.
We really took a back seat. If it’s successful, people will get to know Microbilt. We thought that might happen, but we weren’t convinced. When “Red House” hit, I said, “Wow, people really like this.” A lot of people responded and though this was great. Those are Microbilt customers. We think this can be something that can have some real longevity because we’ve served these different types of customers. They all have a great story.
The process continues to build Microbilt’s friends. Not in a direct way, but the real value to us is that a lot of these different businesses are in the industries we can serve. When we’re calling on a contact, if they’ve never heard of Microbilt they certainly can google Microbilt and “I Love Local Commercials” and they’re going to find out who we are and understand there’s real depth and real substance to Microbilt, although they may have never heard of us.
Q: You’ve had millions of views on these videos. Were you expecting that kind of volume? Have you been tracking leads and conversions?
Brian: We certainly have seen leads and conversions. There have been direct leads where people say “Wow, you guys are a real company. Call us.” We call them. In the same way they call us. A lot of the businesses [in the videos] end up getting a lot of calls, too.
Q: They’re all real businesses?
Brian: Yes, they’re all real businesses. Some are Microbilt customers and some are not. The very first one was TDM Auto Sales. That was released over a year ago and people are still talking about it, still watching it. Every time we release a new one, we have new people that find them and then go back and watch them. That viral aspect is not only immediate, it really continues. One of our sales people was at a corporate training on social media and they used our commercial.
Q: As an example?
Brian: Of what people are doing right.
Q: I’ve seen Tweets on the campaign from people like Errol Morris and Roger Ebert. You’re even penetrating filmmaking circles.
Brian: Yep, and we just won a viral video award from Ad Age.
Q: Are you tracking conversations around the campaign on blogs, on social media, on Twitter and Facebook?
Brian: Yes, yes we track it, and we participate sometimes. It’s all over the map. Some people don’t like one [spot], but they love another. It’s been a very rich experience to be a participant. It’s also made us understand how important it is to remain…I don’t want to say neutral, but as soon as you start to push the sales side of your business in these conversations is when you start to lose that audience.
Q: Yes.
Brian: So this has been a celebration of our customers, of our types of customers: Main Street business across the country. Microbilt is there if you want to find out who we are and what we do. Even the context of “I Love Local Commercials” they ask, “What is this company, Microbilt?” That is translating into real leads. And it is translating into a brand. When we call on customers even if they haven’t heard of it, they can easily go on and see everything that has been written about it. Besides that, it’s fun.
Q: It is fun.
Brian: It’s been a fun process. Rhett and Link have been great. The guys at Insight have been great. We’re always looking at keeping it fresh. We’ve got a couple more coming up in the spring that are very interesting. They always come up with something fun.
Q: Explain the online nominations to enter a local business as a candidate for a commercial.
Brian: It’s an opportunity to nominate yourself or someone as your favorite business. Rhett and Link are really the driving force who say, “Hey this is a business that sounds funny.” Thousands of people have nominated their businesses. We review that list when we’re looking to do the next one, trying to select businesses that sound funny.
We give the nominator the opportunity to give us a couple of comments on why they picked the nominee. Then we get on the phone and talk to them about the process. Once we find a good prospect, Rhett and Link go out there. They spend one day with the business and come up with the idea. The next day they shoot, and we release it a couple of weeks later. It’s that simple. We’re trying to give everybody an opportunity, any type of business. A lot of small businesses aren’t Microbilt type customers.
Q: But they’re funny anyway.
Brian: Yeah, and we felt the best way to celebrate Main Street business is to really leave it wide open.
Q: Right, like the zoo. Let’s talk about the evolution of this campaign. Will you continue it with the videos indefinitely? Is there a plan for another plateau or dimension?
Brian: Good question. I can’t tell you. We’ve got some great ideas. Certainly Rhett and Link are getting a lot of interest from Hollywood. One of the videos was just on “Ellen,” so our videos are still getting a lot of play out there.
Q: You might be a victim of your own success and you won’t be able to afford them anymore.
Brian: Certainly if that happened we’d be very happy with their success. But we’ve developed a very good relationship with these guys. I’m sure there are bigger companies than Microbilt that have called and said “Hey we want to do this with our company.”
Q: Is there anything I haven’t asked you about the campaign or the results?
Brian: No, just that we’re thrilled with how well it’s been received. You hope that when you do something like this, it’ll catch on. When we first watched Cullman Liquidation, I got it on a Sunday and I called another guy in New York and I’m going, “This isn’t funny. You think this is funny?” They’re like, “Oh, my God.”
We talked to Rhett and Link the next morning. They took a couple of our comments, but they stuck to their guns and said, “No, we think this is one that’s going to really hit it.” And that one just exploded. People loved it.
You know what? It’s great. I don’t know why I didn’t see it initially. We took a big leap of faith.
Even a lot of our employees are like, “Why are we spending money doing this? Shouldn’t we be doing more direct mail, or email marketing or whatever?” But I think everybody come around. We hit a chord. It does make sense to participate in this type — I don’t want to call it marketing — this kind of entertainment. It’s an opportunity to touch people. People know who you are, they have a sense of who you are as a company.
Managing Digital Balance 2010
Apr 12th
Join Econsultancy for a special evening of cocktails and dinner. Enjoy networking with your fellow colleagues in the digital marketing community. During the evening, we will unveil our new study “Achieving Digital Balance” a must -have report for marketers and media strategists who grapple with media investment allocations across various digital markets.
Meet the Econsultancy team and let us know how we can help you and our industry.