TKG SEO Blog

Guest Blogger: Corey Hammond

Advanced B2B Marketing

Moderator:

• Jeffrey Rohrs, Vice President, Marketing, ExactTarget

Speakers:

• Barbara C. Coll, CEO, WebMama.com Inc.
• Patricia Hursh, President & Founder, SmartSearch Marketing
• Adam S. Goldberg, Chief Innovation Officer, Clearsaleing

Patricia up first. She starts by giving 10 tips for B2B sites. Some highlights were offering multiple action options and simplifying forms. There is a Forrester graph that she shows that illustrates that people do more searches very early on in the buying cycle. It is easier to reach people at that time and then either keep them on the site to convert or to get them to come back. In my opinion, I think it is best for sites to offer everything to buyer going through the buying cycle. Sites should educate and inform to the point where people either buy or request to be contacted. Another graph she shows displays that people will still convert on branded terms later in the buying cycle when they are looking to purchase because they found that resource earlier in their research. She says that PPC ads can qualify searchers by being specific in their ad copy. The example is if a B2B business only can work with 15-300 users for an IT solution. I don’t completely agree with pre-qualifying through PPC ads. You could always sell your leads to another company that can handle bigger accounts if you get them to convert on the site or by contacting after visiting the site. If you pre-qualify them in the ad, you may get good qualified clicks for your business but no other opportunities. She emphasises that everyone should test landing pages. There is a test that her company did that took a landing page and made 2 of them. The only difference between the pages was on had a conversion form on the bottom right. The test showed that the landing page with the form converted worse than the one without. The conversions depend on the market you are targeting.

Barb is up next and to talk about the enterprise world. Traditional enterprise salesforces think their best leads come from their network or previous connections. A good way to get these sales people to trust online leads is to give the site visitors a free trial or a demo. These 2 qualifiers show that the user is interested in the product or service that the company offers. Barb suggests that if you are looking for keywords, talk to the sales people and find out how they explain your products or services to new perspective clients.

Next up…Adam. He is relating the marketing industry to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and that there is a flow that businesses need to take. He says that people need analyze the right metrics. Sometimes companies apply the same average numbers to their cost per lead metric and they could potentially not make the money they could have if they analyzed each traffic source. Adam gives a lot of details on analysing your sales based on where they came from, how did they convert, etc.