B2B Lead Generation Strategies

Webinars for B2B Lead Generation: 6 Keys to Engagement & Thought Leadership

James Carter — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 18:48:17 +0000

Webinars are powerful tools in lead generation. But to generate leads, you have to keep your webinar attendees interested from beginning to end, and even after the webinar ends. One of the things that makes webinars under-produce is if they’re simply boring! Attendees are talked at and told things, and will often drift away to find something else to do before the webinar is over. There are some tips that can help you prevent that.

1. Make the Webinar an Experience
With YouTube videos, online television, and hundreds of thousands of websites that might interest your webinar attendees, you need to make your online meeting something to keep them from jumping to those other things. Plan your webinar to be interesting for even the person in the group with the least interest in what’s being said. How do you make it engaging and interesting? Present the information you have in a lively way. And keep your participants reminded that they’re part of the webinar, not just spectators.

2. Know Your Audience

Having them fill-out surveys or questions in advance to be touched on during the webinar will help engage them. Always ask an open-ended question if you can:

“what is one thing would you like to learn?”

“what is your biggest challenge relating to _______”

3. Engage Your Attendees

Interaction will keep webinar attendees interested. Stop and think–would you rather sit through 30 minutes of slides, or have a couple of sessions in that 30 minutes where you can ask questions or present ideas?

An interactive webinar will naturally be more successful at lead generation than a static one where attendees just listen–or get tired of listening and leave.

Q&A sessions, surveys, and other interactive activities can mean the difference between an unproductive webinar and one that produces leads.

4. Plan Content According to Group Size
It can help you to plan the interactive portions of the webinar–and there should be many–by having a good estimate of how many will be attending. Large groups are by their nature the hardest groups to maintain this interaction level with. Very small groups like 5 to 20 can be treated “family style.” Family style meals have diners sitting around a table, sharing food from the same bowls and passing them around. These small webinars can benefit from that feeling of intimacy; they’re a small group all passing around and sharing ideas and information. Our firm’s webinars are typically in the 10-30 range, and if they are under 15, we will open the line at the end for questions, this is a great way to start a sales conversation.

For larger the groups, the more polished and engaging a speaker should be, and the more important things like surveys and text-based Q&A can help keep the audience involved.

5. Kick Off With Warm & Fuzzy & Ditch the Credientials

I am getting really bored of analyst type calls where it is all credentials, if you want your audience to engage, and you’re not a speaker by nature, make sure you plan a few jokes and trade credentials for honest humility.

If the group size allows and you want this level of interactivity, let attendees introduce themselves before the webinar starts. If there won’t be this level of interaction from attendees, then before the webinar starts is a good time for speaker introductions and entertaining or lively stories and intro information from the speaker or moderator.
6. Have A lead Generation Goal!

While the webinar is your core presentation, it pays to have a clear idea of exactly what you want your ideal attendee to do next. Make sure there’s a way for attendees to get further answers to their questions and keep the sense of connection and conversation going; and after the webinar, a crucial time for lead generation, ensure there is a clear call to action to move them from audience to actual sales leads (ie a free 30 minute consultation etc.).

“If you liked what you saw here today, there are a few ways you can engage with us..

A Deal: You Can Purchase a Complete Guide on Our Site, We Will Email You A Discount Code…
A Lead: Let’s have a chat – book free 30 minute consultation with a senior
Subscriber: join us on twitter

IMC Vancouver This Week! Hope to See You There

admin — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 00:30:37 +0000

In case you’re still on the fence, here’s my top-five reasons to come to IMC Vancouver:

1. Make good use of your time

If you come to IMC, you will get absolutely the best, the latest and greatest of thought leadership, best practices for everything from web analytics to social media marketing. So you can start the quarter right and not spend all your time in webinars.. (not that there’s anything wrong with that).

2. Meet Trusted Authorities of Internet Marketing:

Avinash Kaushik was involved with Google when Google Analytics was just someone’s little pet project.. He literally wrote the book on Google Analytics.

Avinash Kaushik - Author of Web Analytics an Hour A Day

Did I mention LinkedIn, Facebook & Yahoo! will be represented? All in, about 70 other speakers in 2 days.

3. Workshops!

The first day, (this Wednesday) is entirely workshops! So roll up your sleeves for some hands-on internet marketing.

4. Free Consulting / You Don’t Really Have a Plan for How to Boost Leads This Fall

If you agreed with above.. let’s talk this week! (At IMC) of course.

5. Everyone Loves A Discount!

This link will take you directly to my VIP rate reserved for IIMA Partners and Corporate Members. Please enter in the registration that James Carter referred you.

Register Now!

See you at IMC!

Overwhelmed With Google Analytics? 10 Reports to Get You Started

James Carter — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 14:00:04 +0000

If you feel a little overwhelmed by the sheer amount of data in your Google Analytics, don’t worry you’re not alone. It is important when you first take on the task of using your analytics that you approach it like you would any other area of your business; so after your initial gathering session, isolate your baseline (your current key metrics) and then write down specific goals to improve those key metrics each month.

Depending on what is realistic for you, you may want to set specific themes for each quarter, and not try to fix everything at once; “This quarter I will decrease homepage bounce rate by 30%” etc. Contrary to most people who take on Search Engine Optimization (getting more traffic) first, I like to do a round of conversion optimization first; this is marketing speak for making sure key pages are doing their best to either capture leads, generate inquiries, or in e-commerce, complete a transaction.

1. Traffic

Everyone gets excited when they get 10 million hits on their site, and so they should, but what really matters to us marketing folks and business owners alike, is the people who hit our site that will buy.

I once had a customer that was so well optimized in her image names and alt tags, that 99% of their 100,000 visits came from people simply looking for images of the San Francisco Bay area on the Google images search. She was a little disappointed to find out that really only 1% of her traffic number really mattered.

To really understand this, take a look at traffic by keyword and by referral sources.

Traffic Sources Report

Traffic Sources > Overview

Key Traffic Reports:

unique visits per month
return visits per month
referral sources: direct | search engines | other site links

You can observe that there were 1,453 search engine visits and 437 via direct traffic. Many people misinterpret where this is coming from. It is important to look at the actual pages, as many people think this is existing customers or referral business, but email campaign traffic will be included in this statistic.
Top keywords have been summarized in this report as well. We have blurred these to protect the website owner.

2. Keywords

Take a close look at your keywords. If you are getting a lot of traffic from one particular keyword, make sure your site offers a very relevant call to action to turn that visitor into at very least an email or RSS subscriber.

Also, as discussed above, focus your SEO goals on getting more relevant traffic, not just traffic!

Keyword Report
Traffic Sources > Keywords

3. Geography

Another critical aspect to knowing if you are capturing your correct market is to look at your geography.

There are easy things to do to optimize if your site is not coming up enough in your target markets; google local listings, adding customer references and cities, adding links to partners in your market, and of course, your inbound links, local business associations etc.

The Map Overlay Report
Visitors > Map Overlay

This report shows a map overlay with the darkest colors being the highest traffic areas.

At the bottom of map overlay is a list of countries, total visitor numbers & percentages.

4. Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is the percentage of single page visits on your site versus the total unique visits on your site.

Most people start by reducing homepage bounce rate, and increasing overall time on site. You may also want to know what your top 5 other exit pages are, and work to improve content and “calls to action” on those pages.
Look closely at your top pages and top pages with high bounce-rates. This means they are arriving directly to that page and bouncing.
Examine keyword relevance: what were they looking for?
Examine calls to action: did the page have clear, engaging, enticing calls to action in content?

Finding Bounce Rate: Top Content Report
Content > Top Content

This is the best report to do a deep dive on exit rates. It shows your top content pages, their bounce rates and exit rates.

What’s a good bounce rate? There’s no firm answer, but my target is usually to keep 80% of my target market, so it does depend on your visitor quality. As you spend more time on Analytics, you may want to look at reports that show bounce-rate for specific keywords.

5. Top Exit Pages
Check out any pages that result in exits. perhaps they are not providing info customers are looking for. Doing some deeper digging on initial keywords etc. may tell you why they are existing.
Top Exit Pages Report
Content > Top Exit Pages

Shows top pages by exit volume. You may also want to sort it to identify top pages by exit rate %. To do this, simply click on the column heading labeled “% Exit”.

6. Time on Site

Average time on site can be a great benchmark for your site’s content quality and site usability (a fancy word for ease of use). This is definitely worth comparing month over month.

Remember: as much as we want our analytics to be an exact science, monthly changes can be directly affected by a single blog article or if you have an email campaign that is pushing visitors to a landing page which has been included in your analytics. Remember: be very sure that you have properly filtered out internal staff IP addresses otherwise you may get unusual spikes in visitor times.

Need to filter your IP Address? Watch this video

Where to find time on site: This metric will appear in the traffic report summaries and on the main dashboard.

7. Goals

Google Analytics makes it easy to build goals. People sometimes call these conversion funnels. Experiment with these as soon as possible; it’s easier than it sounds. This allows you to map out the optimum way you think the “personas” (your various target markets) move through your site.

This will give you a clear picture of how many people make it from your homepage to product page to inquiry form etc.. some other examples:

home page > products page > demo request
home page > services page > contact us page > call me form
home page > free evaluation > form completion page

Goals Overview Report
Goals > Overview

8. Most popular pages internal navigation

if you have one page that is dominant, consider why, consider the following:
“   is this the logical next place I would go if I was in “buying mode”
“   what is the logical next place to go if I’m in “evaluation mode”
“   consider providing direct “call to action” buttons on your homepage content (as well as in the menu) example on the 1Path site: “Free Demo” “Join A Webinar”
Top Content Report
Content > Top Content

9. Site Search

Google offers an easy to implement, free site search tool that provides very useful analytics about what people are looking for.

There are 2 useful pieces of info here:

what do people search for most commonly (this means they’re not finding it)
what do people search for and not find

For the first question, consider making significant improvements to your site architecture to make that information more prominent

For the searches that result in abandonment, just add content.

10. Blog & Newsletter Spikes

Keep an eye on spikes in traffic to individual blog posts; there may be big opportunities to capitalize on any articles that really rise to the top. Use the ’sticky’ feature in your blog to make sure any top articles get a little more play before being archived.

Also, ensure that with any significant traffic, you may want to drive a ‘conversion’ from the bottom of the article, like “Download a Complete Report Now” etc..

More Free Tools, Tips & Tricks for B2B Lead Generation

Email Benchmark Statistics Are Handy!

James Carter — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 06:12:39 +0000

I always get the question.. “what is a good read rate? click-through rate etc.”

For read rates, my typical answer was more than 20% and more than 30% is great. As it turns out that rough estimate was pretty accurate.

In terms of click-through rates, we always seem to play in the 8-12% range.. which by industry standards according to this publication are on the upper end. I suspect that is because Mail Chimp services a lot of entry-level Small Business marketers who may not be as aggressive about click-through rates and testing.

I was convinced that the answers were tied up in some extremely pricey benchmark report from a research firm, but www.mailchimp.com has provided them free. These categories are broken out to cover several business to business and business to consumer industry types.

Mailchimp Small Business Email Benchmark Report – Full article here

5 Ways to Get More Leads With Less This Year

James Carter — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 17:10:36 +0000

So money isn’t growing on trees anymore, but you can plant some seeds!

Leaner times call for bigger marketing accountability and ROI. These 5 strategies are guaranteed to deliver leads for less.

1. Keep Your Customers First!

Before you run out in a panic looking for new business. If your company is like many, you took a bit of a beating the last couple quarters.. so the obvious focus becomes ‘new business yesterday!’ This sounds good, but remember, it costs 500% more to get a new customer than to get more revenue from an existing customer.

A recent article by Harvard Business Review recommended at the very least a very earnest call with all customers may help keep you off their cost-cutting list, and or even uncover opportunities to do more business with them.

2. Nurture Your Database!

Many companies with a little creative thinking and some effective segmentation, can drive as much as 20% increase in top-line revenue just by doing more with their existing database. Are you leaving big money on the table?

3. Social Media Marketing Basics

The payoffs of social media marketing for lead generation and branding are too numerous to be neglected. Almost every B2B firm should consider at very least a well-optimized and engaging blog strategy, and utilize some social media strategy around this.

The good news about social media, if you think it’s a ‘time-suck’ there may be some unlikely contributors in your firm; it doesn’t have to be a marketing-only task, take a poll you might be surprised where you find some hidden talent in your firm.

4. Pay Attention to Google AdWords

If you’re using AdWords already, take a deep-dive on your account, and make sure you’re not wasting money:

test variations of ad text
remove low-performing keywords
modify bid prices on secondary keywords to get you in the #3 or 4 position without paying any more than you have to

Not doing AdWords?? Get started. Many B2B companies site AdWords as one of their top ROI generating strategies, and if times are tough, it will bring leads in the door quickly!

5. Work Closer With Your Sales Team!

Where does your B2B Lead generation accountability end? Do sales reps clearly understand where the leads are coming from? Do they understand the needs of that specific market? Have they ‘bought in’ to the campaign?

Keyword Reasearch 101 from Aaron Wall

admin — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 20:32:57 +0000

A quick video I found on the SEO Book Youtube Channel.

Aaron’s site, seobook.com is a great resource.

In Summary:

1. Start by Looking at Analytics

Look at your site analytics and Google Analytics. It’s easier to rank for keywords that you are already getting some traction on than entirely new keywords.

2. Scout Your Major Competitors for Long Tail Terms

Scout out long-tail terms that matter. Look at how your competitor’s menus are structured. What are the key product or service sub-categories?

If this is a very competitive market, product menus can give a lot of ideas about long-tail keywords.

3. Get Serious About Long Tail Terms

It’s been proven that long tail terms are easier to rank for and rankings can be achieved much more quickly by younger sites.

4. Use Keyword Tools

There are lots of them, here are the three free keyword tools we like the most

Thanks Aaron!

2009 B2B Lead Capture & Site Usability Checklist

James Carter — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 19:57:53 +0000

Comprehensive Checklist for Getting That Long-Overdue Website Overhaul Done!

Download Now: B2B Site Usability Checklist

We’re now officially in the dog days of summer. So before September creeps up on you, and you start turning up your spend again, make sure your site is ready to convert that traffic!

We’ve Put Together a Little Checklist That Will Get You On Your Way Quickly:

Homepage best practices
Navigation best practices
Landing page & squeeze page best practices
Overall usability issues & enhancements
& more.

Download The Full Website Usability Checklist Now:

Homepage best practices
Landing pages & squeeze pages
The Complete List

DOWNLOAD USABILITY CHECKLIST NOW

Does Your Website Resemble an IKEA Store Map?

James Carter — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 06:05:22 +0000

Thank you for shopping at IKEA!

Have you ever tried to “just run” in to Ikea? This map is what I was confronted with! Fortunately for IKEA, the only way for a visitor to exit is to walk all the way to the end! However, web browsers, can hit the back button in a split second, out or simply return to the browser’s search bar, and you’ve lost them forever.

If you suspect this might be a reality for your visitors, you are just delaying the inevitable – you need to take a deep dive on your usability

For B2B Sites, The More Ideal Customer Experience Should Be:

Welcome, You’re In the Right Place
Here is what you are looking for
Please take it.. no charge, really
Please come back

If You Can’t Prove That Your Ideal Customer Will Arrive at Your Site & Experience This.. Google Analytics is Probably Proving to You That They Aren’t Staying Long!

Before chasing down more traffic, it’s important to look at closely at how your site performs as a lead capture ‘pipeline.’ Unfortunately, most websites have pretty serious “plumbing problems.” Before you go out and spend money on putting more traffic to your site, make sure you ‘fix your leaks.’ It will pay for itself immediately!

B2B Site Usability Starters – Set Goals

It is important to try to keep a B2B site down to 3-5 ideal “goals.” One of the Best Ways is to think of 2 things:

1. What You Want From Your Site

Leads
Direct sales
Subscribers

2. Demographics

Most importantly, define your ideal customer X the 3 buying phases & what they are looking for (example):

“Senior Sales Manager of Mid-Market Firm” that is..

Buying Today – Contact Info & Evidence You Can Solve My Problem
Early Research – Some Good Ideas & A Reason Why I Might Want to Come Back
Solving a problem, unaware of solution

Existing Customer that is..

Learning more
Looking for help
??

Create Goals & Use Cases

Now that you’ve created a matrix of scenarios, actually start listing them superficially in order of priority. Use your existing customer’s real names to paint a clear picture:

Julia, has 10 years experience in marketing and is a Marketing Manager for Chapters Books. She typed “marketing recruiter into google” and found us. Her goal is to shortlist 2 qualified vendors by the end of the week to help her find a top-notch senior webmaster.

Now map write out the ideal path through your site Julia will take:

Where does she go from homepage?

Practice Areas > Marketing Professionals

Does the next page keep her moving in a clear direction?

Download case study
Free 20 minute consultation
Place a job order

.. these might all be obvious next steps for a recruiting squeeze page

Does the final landing page convert?

Relevant messaging
Clear value to complete inquiry
Clear call to action
No confusing links or buttons

If you want, these cases can be the underpinning not only for your own testing, but you may want to conduct small usability tests by assigning these tasks to test-subjects.

Turning Your B2B Site Into a Lead Capture Machine:

From homepage to lead capture in 3 clicks? (give or take)
There are no irrelevant calls to action from squeeze pages & landing pages
Value of completing an action is clearly stated “Get My Report Now” etc..
General landing page best practices have been employed
Deliver on your promise – give something and expect almost nothing in return (an email address will do)
Nurture leads & continue to add value
Clear call to actions for sales ready leads should be apparent in subsequent campaigns

July is Get to Work On Your Site Month! Stay Tuned for 3 More Usability Tools This Month..

Examples & Best Practices for Homepage Design
Top 10 Mistakes (or Opportunties) with Site Usability
the 2009 B2B Website Usability Self-Assessment Checklist Coming this Friday!

Overall Usability Checklist	Pass / Fail
Site search is prominent & intuitive. Results are easy to understand
Site Looks Consistent in All Browsers Internet Explorer 6-8 / Firefox 2-3 / Safari 3-4
Logo Is in Top-Left of Site (hyperlinked to homepage)
Sub-Title or Slogan Explains Exactly What You Do
Hyperlinks are underlined or prominently in bolded and blue
Trust & Confidence On All Pages Displays certifications, brands of high profile clients, Verisign
Security, Trust & Confidence on Lead Capture or E-Commerce Cart Pages Paypal verified, BBB Online, Verisign Secured VISA verified etc..
Footer Links Terms of service, privacy policy, anti-spam, contact us etc.
Customize 404 Pages Over 20% of exits can be lost by a mis-typed url, a bad inbound link from an email or a legacy publication etc.. Examples: www.pathmarketing.com/404-page-best-practices

404 Pages – The Easiest Way to Increase Your Site Retention by 20%

James Carter — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 20:23:34 +0000

On average, over 20% of site visits can be lost by a 404 page!

A 404 page is that useless page that turns up when you..

click on a page link that has been moved
click on a link in an old email where the page is no longer there
or any other number of possible reasons!

Most of the default 404 pages are unintelligible for the non-geek. First of all, the page has the word “Error” preceded by a meaningless number. For most people over the age of 40 this, immediately gets them a little nervous, reminding them of blue screens of death and DOS commands gone wrong..

Aside from the internet explorer / IIS error, you will likely see this generated by default from an Apache web server:

When non-sophisticated browsers hit it, they often report thinking:

this site is broken completely
my computer is no longer connected to the net
this site might be a bad site, might give me a virus
it must be an old site
etc.. etc..

Even sophisticated browsers will tell you they do not bother hitting the back button and re-starting their search:

these guys don’t know how to maintain a site
obviously they don’t have what I want
I’ll just go to Google and start my search over

5 Things Your Custom 404 Page Should Have:

1. A clear, friendly un-alarming description

“Sorry, the page your looking for was moved.”

Also, because a 404 error can harm your brand, you may want to inject some creativity into it. Some fun & creative examples can be found at smashmagazine.com’s 404 revisited article.

2. A Clear Call to Action

“Please search here or use the sitemap to find what you’re looking for”

3. A Prominent Search Bar with a clear purpose:

4. Prominent Sitemap

Zappos.com is the world’s largest online retailer of shoes. When someone hits their 404 page, the first call to action is a summarized product catagory list that gets the buyer right back into searching products:

* What we can learn from Zappos is that displaying your entire sitemap probably isnt as effective as displaying the top 3-5 places that people go on your site / or the top 3-5 places you want them to go!

5. Prominent Homepage Link

The word “HOME PAGE” will suffice

2 Things to Drop: the words “404″ and “Error” both are fairly irrelevant to your average visitor.

My Top 5 404 Pages:

Additional 404 Resources:

Some Creative 404 Pages

Why Twitter Matters for B2B Marketers

James Carter — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 14:45:38 +0000

Let’s face it, Twitter is a huge time-suck!

Twitter doesn’t matter for a lot of B2B marketers and business people
and probably shouldn’t. If your target market is CEO’s of industrial waste management companies, buyers for Wal-Mart and Costco, or a handful of other “less-likely-to-give-a-darn” folks, you’re chirping up the wrong channel get back to your tradeshow booth and blackberry! Don’t get fooled though, there have been some huge wins in this space, but it does depend on your audience. If your audience is gen x or younger, or the marketing crowd, you will find them in the thousands on Twitter.

So if you’ve decided that your audience is of the “Tweeting” variety, and you’re ready to “get your tweet on,” here are a few things you should know:

1. Ditch the Inane Banter

I’ve recently taken a liking to following the daily ramblings of Darth Vader and it is amusing to hear about the first thing he did after he got out of bed this morning, but I’m not about to call him up and ask him for any business advice.

There are more than a few Twitter aficionados that will tell you Twitter requires much more personality to generate a true following, but I have work to do and so do you! When I have something really juicy and relevant to my B2B lead generation audience, it will go up there, and if not I’ll go silent for a day.. no inane ramblings about what I had for breakfast, how bad my drive to work was.

2. Add Genuine Value

Still spamming? Twitter is no different than email, don’t burn your list! Help people solve real problems and gather invaluable nuggets for their business. Big kudos for people like John Hossack at VKI Studios his tweets are generally the best of what he’s come accross in his daily research.

3. Don’t Ask for Anything In Return

I can’t believe how many corporate accounts I’ve followed over the past couple of months who still don’t get it!! DellSmallBiz is a prime example: great, value-add tweets but too many direct product plugs, the net result is much less buy-in. Help me deal with the bigger problems in my business, and I’ll buy from you because I like you!

4. Be Consistent In Message & Focus

Your Twitter persona and your brand are one in the same.. if you want to be the go-to -person for carbon footprint auditing services make sure you focus your content around carbon footprint auditing.

5. Add More Value

Repeat number 2 regularly!

6. It’s Social! Be Involved, Start & Be Part of Conversations

One thing we’re learning as we go, is how to create more of a conversation with Twitter. Conversations draw people in from the periphery and are the same as attending a party.

7. If You Build it They Will Come!

Be patient, they will come.

8. Read-Up On Some Twitter Do’s and Don’ts:

Ogilvy PR’s Do’s & Don’ts for Twitter

Twitter Best Practices Article

Stay Tuned for more on Twitter..

Next Twitter Article: Top 10 Tools for Twitter