Why your kite won’t fly.
by Ms. Marion Clarke
Tweet to @MarionClarke10
B2B tech marketers today are tasked to work with Sales to deliver marketing campaigns that build lead pipeline and help close business — at the same time told not to sell, but to make them buy! Increasingly, B2B tech marketers will use social media to foster consistent, easily accessed dialogue with potential buyers with the intention to leverage their full brand of assets, crucial to profit. Tough job, often complex — demanding and taxing; but apart from producing incredible ROI, ranking above the fold on major Internet searches for Google, Yahoo, MSN, AltaVista, AOL, Alltheweb, Fast, Netscape, Gigablast, Snap or Wisenut is not always quite so easy either.
Many B2B tech marketers prefer to produce content by scratch, but still fail to use social media strategically. Creating high quality search engine optimized content that provides messaging and thought leadership in a compelling, story based manner is an advantage, as is social media. According to
e-Marketer, in January 2012, Satmetrix surveyed 1,000 B2B and B2C companies worldwide and found that among B2B companies, only 27% track follow up brand mentions, while another 22% do tracking only, and nearly 50% basically ignore social media as a brand marketing tool. How then do you expect to pull your audiences to your brand without peer reviews and user generated feedback?
A 2012 Content Preference survey by DemandGen found that nearly a quarter of the respondents in the survey said they typically begin searches for business solutions using social media to track prospects and to inform their buyers. Social media can certainly be frustrating with the amount of data available and the time it takes to research a prospect before calling. Blogging — more difficult. Gaining traction on the Web — even harder. Tweeter conversations, re-tweets and generating likes through Facebook, still – no Deal – Problem is: Your work expanded into innumerable complexities in your attempt to make inroads with your target audiences because you distributed to the wrong social media networks. Your connection with the community is of basically no help to you now. The challenging conversations and opportunities are gone. The lure of potential buyers and access to new markets did not produce quality leads or sales. And you lack quantifiable metrics and content you can share that is good enough to generate deep engagement.
Joe Chernov, an award winning content marketer in B2B marketing and VP of content marketing at Eloqua, a leader in providing Internet Marketing solutions, says in Eloqua’s Joe Chernov Discusses Content Marketing’s Potential: “The people that are doing it right are those who start from their audience’s interests and working backwards to the content itself.” Complicating matters is that “electronics engineers are naturally skeptical of marketing messages,” Ross Ayotte, managing director and publisher of CMP Media’s EE Times magazine, said in Connecting with Engineers: Marketers must have an understanding of engineers’ behavior to reach industry pros. Such differences compared to IT technology buyers pose challenges to marketers until they begin to understand “electronic engineers’ deeper psychographics and behaviors,” Kerry McClenahan, principal of McClenahan Bruer Communications, a marketing agency in the electronics industry, said according to a McClenahan Bruer study. “It’s important to speak to electronics engineers in their own language; they use jargon and labels that nobody else does.” Plus, electronic engineers are big readers of trade and technology magazines more than anything.
In 4 Tips to Take the Frustration out of B2B Social Media Marketing, Kevin Jorgensen, an engineer by trade and Partner at Innovative Marketing Resources, says to regularly publish blog posts, particularly “evergreen blog content” that can be shared over and over is “fundamental.” Through his own research, he discovered stating that “visit-to-lead rates” can be 300% to 400% greater than “organic traffic visit-to-lead rates” on your website, so chances are greater at capturing new quality leads if you’re sharing your own content rather than promoting somebody else’s. In addition to blog content, he says, consider posting links to “landing pages” for your premium content so that you’re able test higher frequencies cautiously before inundating your audience with what may appear to be ads. Share relevant content that you did not create with a ratio of 2 out of 3, he suggests, so when you finally post your own material, people pay attention and your audience is engaged.
Social media is a low-cost way of generating awareness and leads and is still drastically underutilized, with recent research by Satmetrix showing 67% of businesses having no social listening system in place.Content Marketing Institute (CMI) reported in The Importance of Inbound Marketing for B2B (March 2, 2012) that over 60% of B2B marketers are expecting to spend more on content marketing in the next 12 months. Recent studies cited by eMarketer show that two thirds of the U.S. internet population will belong to a social network by 2013 and that the majority of brands are now actively using social media to manage their digital presence.
SEO continues to make the biggest impact on lead generation — with the “perceived impact increasing 20% year-over-year,” for B2B and B2C alike, said Paul Taylor, CEO of Webmarketing123., “The reality of today’s business environment is that the early sales cycle lives online and your success boils down to one key factor — if you’re not ranking on page 1 of search results, you are invisible to most prospects.”
According to the CMI and MarketingProfs in 2013 B2B Content Marketing Benchmark, Budget and Trends research report, this year, on average, B2B content marketers are using 12 tactics — a significant increase over the average number of tactics used in each of the past two years (8 tactics). Unlike last year, where articles where number 1 on the
charts, social media, excluding blogs, is reported to be the most popular content marketing tactic, with an adoption rate of 87%. The biggest B2B content marketing challenge for most marketers (29%) according to the report is now “producing enough content, beating out “producing the kind of content that engages,” and (18%) of B2B content marketers who are more uncertain whether they are using various content marketing tactics effectively.
Laura Ramos, Vice President of Industry Marketing Services, North America at Xerox Corporation and former Forrester research analyst currently runs industry marketing for US division of Xerox Document. Ramos guest-lectured recently at a Business Marketing Association (BMA) luncheon in St. Louis and shared expert advice for B2B marketers, posting a few tips from the lecture in her blog: To Choose Where You Play in the Market: Know Your Buyers Well, pointing out also to the irony that although marketers want their message heard by as many people as possible “less becomes more” in many B2B marketing opportunities.” Better marketers and their sales counterparts Ramos explains, “understand the detailed specific issues buyers face in their respective markets. They understand what motivates buyers and why one buyer’s needs are distinct from another.” This understanding, Ramos says, makes it easier to engage prospects in meaningful conversation as to how products and services can profit the buyer and that showing that you as a marketer are part of a community focused on solving problems and not just looking to push your brands and sell “stuff” is very important to creating belief in purchasers that it’s worth the time to converse with you. Ramos said, “Personas are a primary tool to help you move from technology supplier to industry insider. Relentless study about who buyers are and what causes them to buy keeps these personas current and useful as tools.”
Charle John Cafiero, President and CEO, CJC Strategies, a Manhattan-based marketing and branding communications agency with a global reach that specializes in the very latest cutting edge, SEO, social media and networking tools, recommends in How to Create Compelling SEO-Optimized Content that Will Rank You Well in Search Engines that you make your best content search engine friendly, using language in context and relevant to searchers’ keywords and phrases and develop a key word plan set with the big four: Facebook, Twitter Google+ and LinkedIn, now the most commonly used social network among B2B content marketers for the first time, CMI reports.
The report states 83% of B2B content marketers used LinkedIn to distribute content, while 80 percent use Twitter and Facebook. More than 90 percent of B2B marketers generate content as part of their strategy. It’s important to test different social media channels. The ones you think will be most effective, may not be. Technorati, Live Journal, Open Diary, TypePad, WordPress, Vox, Ning, Bebo, Orkut, Skyrock and Elgg are blog websites. Twitter, Plurk, Tumbir, Cif2.net, Identi.ca and Jaiku are used for micro-blogging, and Pinterest, an online pinboard.
ITtoolbox is a recently-launched site of IT professionals that allows users to share and compare information with peers who have similar interests including evaluating IT vendors. The site allows its reported 1.5 million visitors each month to post blogs and registrants to join topic-based groups and check up on recent postings from their connections.
KnowledgeStorm is the Internet’s top ranked search resource for technology solutions, according to a recent study, “Demand Creation: A Prospect’s View.”Instead of delivering information and links to relevant pages on the web, KnowledgeStorm delivers links to white papers, case studies, webcasts, articles, reports and analyst reviews; and it gives technology vendors the most opportunities to reach business conducting research on the Internet and convert them into Web leads.
IT.com uses “dynamic peer ranking” to order its search results, with the goal of mirroring “how a large community of buyers judges each vendor’s position in the market” and offers a more narrowed search within specific categories. IThound like KnowledgeStorm, delivers white papers, product information, webcasts, and reports. Incisive Media is one of the world’s leading business-to-business information providers, serving the financial and professional services markets globally. HubSpot is an inbound marketing software that offers businesses an all-in-on marketing solution: blogging, social media, analytics, email and automation.
For selling technical or otherwise complex oracle products like Enterprise Manager or AJAX products, white papers can be one of your single most successful content marketing tools.Ajax, which stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, is a design approach and a set of techniques for delivering a high interactive desktop-like user experience for Web applications in popular HTML browsers. OpenAjax Alliance is an organization of over 100 leading vendors and companies using Ajax based Web technologies. The alliance informs us that its prime objective is to accelerate customer access with AJAX by promoting a customer’s ability to mix and match solutions from AJAX technology by helping clients drive the future of the AJAX ecosystem.
Ajax’s website includes white papers and blocks diagrams on AJAX technologies and associated best practices with focus on cross-vendor interoperability. According to Interactive Technology, Software and Media Association (ITSMA) and RainToday’s joint survey on lead generation, the best performing organizations are succeeding with the use white papers as B2B lead-generation tools, such as: case studies and insight into new generation, emerging markets and business trends, and how to advice, effective in drawing potential clients in the more research oriented beginning stages of the buying process. White papers, also referred to as issues paper, are highly effective and frame certain issues that are of intent to a specific industry used to convey the right mix of marketing and technical information to knowledgeable customers when making final decisions. They should build credibility, trust and appeal to the interest of decision makers as they try to answer the question: How will your product help solve my business needs?
As AJAX and mashups continue to gain extensive acceptance under the Web 2.0 umbrella, according to AJAX, it is “critical” for organizations to understand these threats and to avoid them by adhering to some best practices. AJAX applications could be attacked and provides a set of best practices techniques to address each of the vulnerable areas, available at www.opa.ajax.org. The white paper represents the collaborative efforts of AJAX security experts from the multiple companies, a joint effort prepared by OpenAjax Alliance Security Committee and the Marketing Working Group. ThatWhitePaperGuy.com is owned by award-winning technology writer Gordon Graham. Not white paper savvy? Graham helps B2B Tech firms write white papers and case studies and should be able to assist you. Google, Hitachi, HP, IBM, Oracle and Sprint are a few of his clients.
Still, according to a MarCom Ink, Sept. 2008 report, 70% of B2B tech marketers miss moneymaking opportunities to directly influence sales decision makers by not incorporating Really Simple Syndication (RSS) into their company’s online marketing strategy. The survey included visits to 300 US B2B tech company websites and found that 7 out of 10 are not using RSS, a standardized web-feed format used to publish recurrently updated information on-line, such as news and product announcements. Though 30% of companies are providing RSS, only 10% have multiple targeted feeds enabling visitors to choose from a number of topics to subscribe to, the report states.
MarCom Ink said these findings are important based on the fact that while only 16% of the general public uses RSS feeds, 71% of technology buyers find them beneficial. The sooner you provide your new prospect with more and more content, the more likely they will convert and begin moving through your sales funnel. “RSS offers B2B technology, marketing and PR professionals a golden opportunity to establish ongoing relationships with their target audience and become a trusted source of valuable information on topic buyers care most about,” Kim Cornwell Malseed, Principal, MarCom Ink. said.
Bottome line: Share, nurture your leads … and measure your results. Make sure your site is search engine friendly, coded properly using HTML Meta tags, and 100% optimized. Still very important, you should definitely be using your best keywords in these tags properly and regularly, making sure every image has tag descriptions with your chosen keywords. Your URL structure should be clear and concise — that your URL’s don’t use random character strings or present any broken links on your site.
Developing useful content and publication is probably the single best thing you can do to show up on Google.
Feedback welcome.
