What You Say Is As Important as What You Pay

When the goal of search marketing is to generate leads, it is not good enough to take prospects to a generic home page when they click an ad. With less than a 2% conversion rate, it's like throwing away 98% of your search budget. Instead, search marketers must focus on conversion optimization through targeted landing pages as much as traffic generation. In fact, companies that have optimized landing pages targeted to specific search terms can increase conversions by 400% or more.

Landing page optimization is important for many reasons.

• First, prospects are using search to research your market and company, so targeted landing pages can provide relevant, useful content matched to their buying cycle. This can help your company become a trusted source of information.
• Second, in exchange for a well designed offer, you can capture contact information and get permission to enter into a nurturing dialog with that prospect.
• Third, as keyword prices become more and more competitive, the companies do a better job converting traffic into leads will be able to invest more in getting the clicks.
• Fourth, Google ranks search ads not just on the bid price, but also on the relevancy of the landing page to the search term – so a targeted landing page will increase traffic without increasing cost.

The challenge B2B marketers face is that landing page optimization requires building and maintaining dozens – or hundreds – of landing pages. Trying to add A/B split or other testing methodologies only compounds the problem.

As a result, many marketing and IT departments quickly get overwhelmed and settle for a few, static landing pages. One CMO I spoke with wanted to put up just seven landing pages – but he had to wait so long (almost a year) for his IT department to get to the request that the company was acquired before they could finish. More generally, Forrester Research found that only about a quarter of B2B search ads take buyers to keyword specific landing pages.

Fortunately, there are some great solutions out there to help B2B marketers build and test landing pages without IT support. (Disclosure: The company I work for, Marketo, provides landing page optimization as part of our suite of B2B marketing solutions.) Stay tuned for a future post on what features you should look for in a landing page optimization solution.

In the meantime, please share any best practices you have used to create landing pages that work, and what kind of results you are seeing. I'll post a summary of all the tips I receive in a future post.

End of Interruption Marketing: B2B Marketing Response

In my last post, I wrote about the end of interruption marketing. Here are some strategies B2B marketers can use to practice “attention marketing” (the opposite of interruption marketing).

Market when customers give their attention.

There are points in every buying cycle whenhe customer is actively seeking information. From typing something into Google to begin research to putting together a short list to building an ROI justification, buyers want trusted information to help them. This is why search engine marketing is so critical. Because the buyer is searching for information, the company that provides it is in the best position to be considered a trusted partner. The implication is that B2B marketers need search terms and landing pages designed to provide useful information to each stage of the customer buying cycles.

Build trusting relationships.

If a marketer calls me in the middle of my day, I feel interrupted. If a good friend calls me, I pay attention to what he has to say. The difference is trust, built over time.

B2B marketers can build trust with their prospects in the same way that trusted relationships are built “in the real world”.

1. Expert advice. B2B purchases are, by their nature, complex. Buyers often need help to see possibilities and issues they wouldn’t think about on their own. If you can help frame the discussion, you will be seen as a trusted advisor and thought leader. This will help buyers believe that your company understands their problems and knows how to solve them.
2. Not self-serving. You need to have the buyer’s best interests in mind. Marketing messages that are self-serving will be painfully apparent and could damage rather than build trust.
3. Long-term view. Trust is built over time, and needs to be nurtured across a series of interactions. This requires a long-term view of your marketing investments.

Nurture a community where people can discuss your solutions.

Customers trust other customers more than they trust marketers. This is as true in B2B are it is in consumer marketing. MarketingSherpa’s recent Business Technology Buyer’s Survey found that word of mouth is by far the most common factor influencing purchasing decisions (48.3% mentioning they were impacted by the tactic, as opposed to webinars which came in at 18.4% and cold calls which came in at 2.8%).

So what can B2B marketers do to take advantage of social media-based marketing techniques? The answer is to engage in and nurture the online communities, conferences, discussion groups, and blogs that your customers, prospects, partners, and influencers are already using.

Doing this successfully requires changing the traditional marketing mindset. B2B marketers are used to thinking they have control over the message, but with community-based marketing this is no longer the case. Put another way, marketing is no longer about putting on a show in which the audience (your community) watches passively; it is more like throwing a party and encouraging the attendees to interact. In this world, marketing’s job is not to control the message but to ensure that their “party” is the most interesting and useful one around.

What do you think?

How is the role of the B2B marketer changing in a world where traditional marketing messages are ignored and buyers talk to each other to get their information. What strategies and tactics have you found that work?

The End of Interruption Marketing

Seth Godin coined the term Interruption Marketing to describe tactics that work only if they interrupt you to get your attention. Classic B2B examples include the cold call that interrupts you working on a proposal, the print ad in your morning newspaper, or the flashy booth at a tradeshow. In each example, the marketer – who knows the buyer doesn’t want to pay attention to the advertisement – thinks his job is to create a call script, ad copy, or booth gimmick that will make people pay attention.

Of course, all the other marketers are also fighting to get the buyer’s attention, and so the battle escalates. The result is a “tragedy of the commons” – when everyone tries to get the customer’s attention, the customer tunes it all out and nobody wins. Just look at what happened with credit card direct mail: from 1990-2002, direct mail volumes went up 5X while response rates dropped to below 0.5%.

Seth and others have done an excellent job describing why this approach doesn’t work anymore in consumer-marketing: TiVo lets people screen out TV ads; spam filters block unwanted e-mails; the national do-not-call list prevents unwanted telemarketing. (It is even less effective with younger consumers who are used to multi-tasking and “snacking” on content in YouTube-length snippets.)

The same people who buy TiVos and spam filters don’t suddenly embrace interruptions when they get to the office. They’re just as good at blocking unwanted B2B advertising. Jill Konrath writes that it is virtually impossible today to cold call a C-level executive without going straight to voicemail. Direct mail goes to a box in the mailroom which gets checked rarely or never. Even webinars – which the customer has actively decided to attend – are watched while simultaneously checking email or reading websites.

Stay tuned for my next post: “The End of Interruption Marketing: How B2B Marketers Should Respond.”

Does Modern Marketing Apply to B2B Marketing?

In an earlier post, I described the key principles of Modern B2B Marketing, namely that Modern Marketers:

• Know that customers control their attention and that marketers should engage when and how the customer wants
• Create leverage by enabling and nurturing a community of customers, prospects, partners, and other influencers
• Are left-brained (math and science over creativity and art)
• Are accountable – and more influential as a result

Many others have discussed how marketing is being reinvented in a world where buyers can ignore a marketer’s messages and instead choose to talk to each other, where traditional methods of “spray and pray” marketing are being replaced by highly targetable, highly measurable, and highly accountable techniques. For example:

• Emergence Marketing by Francois Gossieaux and Gabe D'Annunzio
• The Viral Garden by Mack Collier
• ANA Marketing Musings by Bob Liodice at the Association of National Advertisers
• Marketing Voices Podcast from Jennifer Jones at Podtech.net
• Communities Dominate Brands by Tomi T Ahonen and Alan Moore
• And the aptly named Modern Marketing Blog by James Cherkoff

Notably, these authors tend to use B2C examples like Lost’s “Inside the Experience” online campaign, the Washington Post, P&G’s Tremor viral-marketing division, and of course “Snakes on a Plane”, and they tend to talk about the transformation of marketing channels that are primarily consumer-oriented – especially the decline TV advertising and the rise of social media sites like MySpace.

B2B Marketers Can Gain From Modern Marketing as Well

I believe that B2B buyers are as in control of their attention and buying process as B2C consumers are – if not more so. I believe B2B marketers can (and should) take advantage of online techniques and that they need to be just as left-brained and accountable as their B2C counterparts. In other words, B2B marketers have as much to gain from Modern Marketing as B2C marketers do.

So, the focus of this blog is to discuss new ways of thinking about B2B marketing, from best practices in lead acquisition and nurturing to accountability to community-based marketing.

What do you think? Do the principles of Modern Marketing apply to B2B? How do they need to change to handle the unique challenges of B2B marketing?

Modern B2B Marketing Defined

The focus of this blog is to discuss new ways of thinking about B2B marketing, from best practices in lead acquisition and nurturing to marketing accountability to community-based marketing.

It is clear that traditional marketing approaches are no longer acceptable. Some reasons why:

1. Customers DON’T want to be interrupted. They DON’T want to be marketed to. And they’ll let you know by finding ways to screen out, throw out, and tune out your unwanted marketing messages.
   
   
2. There are no more mass channels. Buyers (especially the young and tech-savvy) are harder than ever to reach using traditional channels and media outlets. At the same time, new technologies (especially broadband and mobile) combined with social computing have created a “Cambrian explosion” in experimentation with media and marketing channels. This fragmentation diminishes the effectiveness of traditional marketing channels while simultaneously creating opportunities to reach customers in new ways.
   
   
3. Marketing can’t get away with not being accountable. New channels (like PPC search engine marketing) have raised expectations for marketing accountability. It is no longer acceptable to say “half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half.”

Marketers must adapt to these changes. CMOs that don’t will not last long. Those who do will survive by practicing Modern B2B Marketing. Some principles of Modern B2B Marketing:

1. Attention marketing. Buyers are in control of what information they want and their attention is a valuable, scare commodity. Marketing needs to engage with customers when and how they want to engage. This is why search engine marketing is so powerful – the customer is attentively seeking information.
   
   
2. Community marketing. In a world where we can no longer push our message TO the marketplace, marketing need to finds ways to communicate WITH the marketplace. The best way to do this to enable and nurture open source style communities of customers, prospects, partners, and other influencers. In other words, join the conversations that customers are already having, online and offline.
   
   
3. Left brain marketing. Because many of the new marketing channels are measurable and targetable, marketing is rapidly shifting towards science and away from art. Forrester Research aptly calls the rise of analytics over creativity in marketing “Left Brain Marketing”. New marketing skills will include segmentation and targeting, testing and optimization, and quantitative planning and measurement. (This is not to say creativity has no place in marketing, just that the balance will incorporate more math and science than in the past. And that creativity will take a different form, i.e. thinking of creative new things to test.)
   
   
4. Accountable marketing. Certain parts of the marketing budget are already very accountable – most notably pay-per-click advertising. As testing becomes predominant and budget shifts towards measurable channels, CMOs will be able to measure the bottom-line impact of every marketing activity. Aided by tools to aid with marketing planning, measurement and execution, they will also be able to quantify the impact of changes to their budget and to predict pipeline and revenue as well as sales can. Over time, this will raise marketing’s power and influence across the organization.

Of course, there are many other forces driving the transformation of marketing today, including the changing role of the marketing organization and new marketing automation technologies. What factors do you think are most affecting B2B marketing?