B2B Marketing Blog

7 steps to analyze your backlinks profile

By |2023-04-05T11:42:20+00:00February 13th, 2017|

topicIcon SEM

John Doe

Architect & Engineer

We love that guy

analyze your backlinks profile header

Introduction – analyze your backlinks profile

A healthy backlinks profile is an essential part of your brand’s SEO strategy.

All too often, many companies find themselves frustrated when they are obtaining backlinks according to plan, but failing to get traction in search results.

Though the guidelines for websites in all shapes and sizes remain, the perfect backlinks profile is different for every single site. What makes for a perfect backlink profile for a small blog won’t work for a B2B website. A popular DIY blog can’t seek the same links a SaaS company might seek. Companies are neglecting the big picture of their backlinking strategies, and their backlink profiles suffer for it. This post will walk you through the basics step to analyze your backlinks profile.

Once upon a time (about 20 years ago), SEO was all about keyword quantity and density. Those then called webmasters, used a whole lot of shady methods such as placing white text on a white background and stuffing that “invisible” text with keywords. Users couldn’t see it, but the search engines could. That was called cloaking. Other similar levels of blackhat SEO existed and flourished with backlinks, such as a site going from zero backlinks to 100,000 virtually overnight.

Since then, Google and other search engines have become much more sophisticated in detecting various spam links and tactics. All sorts of exotic animals (Penguin, Panda, Possum and Hummingbird if to only name a few) shook and changed the very foundations and face of the SEO industry in those two decades.

These days, if a company wants to rank well on Google, the currency is quality.

Quality content, quality (and topically) related backlinks, quality website code. The bottom line is that Google want to send their user base to a spam free environment.

Links are basically being used by search engines as “votes” and endorsements for websites, that help arrange its rankings and authority. The more authoritative and trusted domains there are in your backlink profile, the stronger your website will become and higher it will rank.

In short, backline quality means that you’re linked from good neighborhood websites that are trusted by Google and their users.

If your website is brand new, this may not be a big deal. Probably because you don’t yet have any links pointing to it. Nevertheless, this doesn’t mean you should not consider quality over quantity right from the very start.

If your website’s been around for a few months or longer, there is a good chance that you have some links pointing to it. Some may be good, some may be mentions of your brand (on social media for example) and some may even be harmful for your site.

Because of this, it is essential to audit your backlinks profile and analyze it regularly.

Essentially, a kick ass profile should include:

  • Natural diversity of links from smaller and larger, authoritative sites
  • Relevant niche/industry links
  • Relevant local links
  • Social mentions/Reviews

So, how do you carry out a professional analysis process for your backlinks profile?

1. Choose your Backlinks Analysis Tool

Before you master the art of creating the perfect backlinks profile,  start by choosing a backlinks analysis tool.  There are a lot of tools out there offering backlinks tracking, as well as other cool features. Some of the favourites among SEOs and Digital Marketers are:  Ahrefs, Majestic SEO and SEO Powersuite (to name a few…).

Personally, I recommend testing two or three tools over a period of time and choosing the most accurate one that best suites your needs (and budget).

You can check out this article by Neil Patel that gathers 9 Backlink Analysis Tools to choose from.

2. Look for the Root Domains within the backlinks

“The root domain is the overarching structure which contains the subdomains and every URL of a site. If you want the data for an entire site, sticking with the root domain will likely be the easiest way to access this data. An example of a root domain would be example.com ” – Check this definition by Majestic for further explanation of domain levels.

You should look out for root domains because they are typically with higher authority and trustworthiness than subdomains or folders. You want as many root domains telling Google that you’re awesome at what you do. However!  Not all root domain backlinks are a win, they should be topically related to your expertise or field. For example, a link from a major news site is great, since they are usually considered high authority and getting loads of traffic. But those sites may not always be contextual and relevant and therefore might not contribute as much as you’d like to imagine. Try and put your efforts on getting referred by relevant sites for your niche.

Most of the analysis tools mentioned above offer the option to view referring root domains to your site.  You can also check for root domains on your Google Search Console dashboard:

check root domain

3. Understand MozRank, Trust Flow and Citation Flow

To fully evaluate the profitability of a site linking to you, there are number of metrics to consider.

If you have a friend who has a tendency to tell you a lie every once in awhile, then every time that person gives you information, you will tend to take it less seriously, correct? Google appreciates relationships between websites in the same manner

If Website A links to Website B, it’s like Website A is vouching for Website B and telling Google “Hey, this guy knows something about this subject, you should definitely check what he has to say”. Google’s is not so gullible, though – quite the opposite. Google trusts websites that people visit, interact with and share on social media the most. If Website A is a trusted site, then Website B will receive a boost in status.

With the extinction of Google PageRank, secondary metrics matters a lot. Metrics like MozRank, Trust flow, and Citation flow are becoming more and more important ranking factors.

MozRank – represents a trademark metric for a page’s authority score by MOZ. It reflects the importance of a given webpage. It’s earned by the number and quality of other pages that link to them. The higher the quality of the backlink, the higher the MozRank.

Citation Flow – represents a trademark Majestic SEO metric for how influential the backlinks to your page are based on how many sites link to and from it. Majestic use it in conjunction with the:

Trust Flow – which is the metric representing the overall page’s authority score. It’s designed to decide how trustworthy the webpage is, based on the quality of backlinks pointing to the link (the Citation Flow).

4. Understand the difference between Dofollow or Nofollow links

Essentially, there are two types of links that point to your site. To understand do/nofollow links, one must understand the term SEO Juice. Which is the power or equity passed to a site via links from external or internal sources. This power is interpreted as a vote of recommendation towards your site and is one of the most important factors in determining your site’s SERP ranking.

SEO juice

SEO Juice anyone?

The difference between Dofollow and Nofollow backlinks lies in the fact that Dofollow links let the “SEO juice” flow, while Nofollow links are blocked from letting SEO juice flow.

Do follow links obtained from authority domains boost your site’s authority and improve your site’s ability to rank higher. However, when a link is marked as Nofollow, Google’s rankings discount it and it does not add power to your ‘link juice.’ But just because a link doesn’t directly impact your rankings on Google for specific search queries doesn’t mean that it lacks value. In fact, Nofollow links may have a ton of relevance and authority (in the case of posting helpful comments on an industry Linkedin group, for example).

5. Aim for Dofollow and Nofollow links diversity

The worst thing you can do for you link profile is to have all of the same kind of Dofollow links from only a few domains, even if they are from high authority publications. This may signal to Google that your ‘link juice’ has been nothing more than doping and that you are more interested in bolstering your rankings for sales purposes instead of trying to provide the most relevant and authoritative information for a specific search query. This will end up having the opposite effect that you intended, and will penalize your website in rankings.

6. Backlink Velocity

In essence, link velocity is how fast you are gaining links to your website.

Some blackhat spam methods involve sending hundreds or thousands of links to a website in a day or over the course of a week.  This method is not only likely to get your website penalized, but you could be de-indexed for using it. While sending thousands of links to your site in a short period of time is absolutely not recommended, link building can be faster or slower depending on your traffic and the rate that you have historically gained links.

For example, if you are averaging 30 site visitors per week, yet received 25 backlinks in a given week, Google might flag your site. Google does this because the backlink pace does not seem natural.

However, if you are getting 250 visitors per week, Google might not be concerned about you getting 25 links in the same week, especially if your content is good and visitors are typically on your site long enough to read the content and share it. Backlink velocity is shrouded in mystery – no one really knows exactly how Google weighs it, but be sure that it is better to grow backlinks slowly than get penalized.

Remember, don’t try to oversmart Google. Some methods may seem profitable in the short term, but suddenly you’ll start noticing drops in ranking. And believe me, it’s a pain in the ass to recover from manual penalties.

7. Competitors link analysis

Lastly, don’t forget to compare yourself to your competitors and see how you stack up against them.

Almost every SEO analysis tool offers a way to “spy” on your competitors.

Monitoring your competitors on an ongoing basis will give you a different angle on the current status of your market. These insights may also make an excellent baseline for planning an intelligent backlinks building strategy. Discovering the keywords your competitors are targeting and how they rank for them will give you an advantage, since you can actually learn from other’s “mistakes”.

Conclusion

Building a backlinks profile is only one part of a successful SEO strategy.  But without a doubt, it is still the most important aspect of search engine optimization.

Although much has changed from the first days of SEO, the internet is still all about recommendations from the right neighbors. Auditing your backlinks profile and analyzing it regularly is a vital process for a business online growth.

A site is not judged only by the quantity of its recommendations, but the trustworthiness, quality and topical relatedness of these referrals. A referral is always almost good, as long as it comes in a natural way. Even if the link doesn’t seem profitable, someone still vouched for your site.

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How to remove unwanted results from Google

By |2023-04-24T10:55:06+00:00February 6th, 2017|

topicIcon SEM

John Doe

Architect & Engineer

We love that guy

remove unwanted results from google header

Introduction – remove unwanted results from Google

Discovering your business has a bad search result associated with it, is a business owner’s worst nightmare. All of the hard work you’ve put into ensuring your customers are satisfied with your product or service, may be thrown out the window as a result of one review which found it’s way to the top of your branded Search Engine Results Page (aka SERP).

If you notice a bad review, slanderous remarks, or other negative content showing up at the top of your branded search results, instinctively you would want it removed. Right?

Luckily, there are a handful of techniques and strategies, used primarily by companies in the ORM (Online Reputation Management) industry, to remove unwanted results from Google and make defamatory content vanish.

They are two ways to approach this issue:

  1. Entirely removing the unwanted result or
  2. Suppressing the unwanted result

This post will walk you through both.

1. Removal

There’s a difference between removing content you have control over, vs. content that’s out of your control. Let’s start with the former:

Removing Content from Web Pages You Own/ Control

The need for this might arise when you’ve realized that you have pages that are no longer relevant for various reasons: old products or staff members, tour options you no longer offer, or pages that are simply causing duplicate content on your site.

The majority of website owners choose to simply delete the unwanted content. They probably do so because they don’t know any better. The problem with entirely deleting pages from your website is that since you’ve already established the pages on the net, they’re likely to be linked from other pages on your own site as well as external links from other sites (such as social media mentions, bookmarks, shares, or even plain old linkage).

When you delete the content, Google (and other crawl bots) immediately identify that page as a missing page, which may harm your SEO efforts and overall rankings.

There are three way to overcome this issue:

  1. remove pages with the Google Remove URLs Tool via your Search Console account
  2. exclude pages from being crawled using your Robots.txt file (if you’re using WordPress, Yoast SEO is a wonderful tool for this)
  3. indicate that the page should not to be indexed using the “noindex meta tag” (this method is not as secure as the two methods above and may be a little tricky if you don’t know your way around coding).

Make sure to clean up after you and never leave a missing page by applying one of the three solutions above.

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Removing Content from Web Pages You Don’t Control

More often than not, a negative search result will appear on a page you don’t own. Somebody may post a negative personal experience they had with your product, a bad review on social media, and so on. You know the drill. (Since this post is about removing negative results from Google, I won’t go into the hidden opportunity behind bad reviews, but rather recommend reading this article by Joel Goldstein on Lifehack on ways to turn negative reviews into positive results).

Since you don’t own those sites, you’ll need help removing the negative content. It’s not easy, but in many cases, it can be done. There are two ways to do this:

1. Contact the website owner

Simply Reach out and ask them directly (but politely). For example, you can ask a blogger to remove their negative post. If you can explain why they should remove it, or how you can improve their experience with your product or brand, they may reconsider their stance on your company and even turn the bad review into a positive one.

Remember: Bad reviews don’t mean bad business, they create buzz (did anyone say Miley Cyrus?) and when handled right may even help future prospects in their purchase decisions by showing them you care about your customers.

2. Contact Google

Google offers several ways for website owners to remove wrong, personal, harmful or outdated content from their search results.

For example, publishing sensitive financial or personal information is against Google policies. Anything that can be used to commit fraud is not allowed. Offensive images or videos are also a violation. If you notice negative content that violates any of these policies, contact Google and ask for it to be removed. Bear in mind, the page will still exist, it would be just blocked from appearing in Google search results.

If the content you want removed is simply outdated OR the page no longer exists, simply use the Remove outdated content tool. Google is very strict about how to use and not use this tool, so use it only if the result snippet or the cached (stored) result in SERPs is different from the current page.

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2. Suppression

Suppress Negative Content with Reverse SEO

Reverse SEO, also referred to as search engine suppression, is a method used in the ORM industry to minimize the reputation damage of negative content.

Very much like SEO, which uses strategies to make your business more visible in SERPs, Reverse SEO uses a variety of techniques to suppress negative results on Google Search and other search engines, causing the positive pages to move above the negative ones so that nobody searching the name of your business will see the unwanted results.

This is the backbone of how ORM experts mitigate the impact of negative content about your brand. Much like fighting fire with fire. Instead of trying to remove content, you create more in an effort to bury the negative content in the search results.

In most cases, Reverse SEO is not only effective at removing negative content from the first few pages of search results, but it also works to strengthen your online branding and promote your business in a positive light.

Most searchers will only visit the first few links on SERPs. As you create SEO-focused content, your page rises to the top of the search ranks, while other pages move down. If you can get the negative content pushed to the third or fourth page, it’s likely that consumers won’t even see it.

Suppressing the Bad Links

There are plenty of ways to bury bad links, all of which are very manageable and very effective:

  • Start a company blog and post excellent content regularly.
  • Optimize content you already have on the web, like pages on your company site.
  • Create quality content and link it to and from a variety of authoritative websites that are topically relevant to web pages you’re promoting
  • Set up social media profiles and make sure you’re active on all of them (leverage bad reviews to show proper customer care).
  • Publish and promote other types of media like videos, images, and podcasts.
  • Leave useful or positive comments on other influential websites within your industry.
  • Become a thought leader by publishing expert advice in professional forums.

Suppressing negative content is much like traditional SEO, because the new content you create should be optimized to outrank the negative results. The more types of content you create, and the better the quality is, the more likely it will be to rank above the negative content and thus make it less visible.

Conclusion

When dealing with negative content about your business, don’t panic. Channel that negative energy into creating a strategy to make that content disappear by getting it removed or pushing it into the depths of search results.

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How to find the right B2B marketing agency

By |2023-04-24T10:56:45+00:00February 2nd, 2017|

topicIcon B2B Marketing

John Doe

Architect & Engineer

We love that guy

b2b marketing agency.png

Introduction

Turning complete strangers to customers is a challenge. It requires a deep understanding of the B2B sales cycle and its complexity. When searching for a B2B marketing agency, make sure to partner with professionals who understand your company needs. This post will help you learn what to look out for.

Is the agency goal oriented?

A proper B2B marketing plan requires evaluation and goal setting. A professional agency will not agree to work with you before setting specific measurable and realistic goals Goals aren’t random – you should have a clear idea on what digital marketing success means to your company. And no, “more leads” isn’t a proper goal. Leads are a means to an end – if they don’t become customers they’re useless to you. You should be able to back up your numbers based on your current efforts and on calculated projections.

Elements to consider:

  • What are the overall business goals of your company?
  • How long does it currently take you to acquire a new customer?
  • How much does it cost you to acquire a new customer?
  • What do you do with incoming leads?
  • How much do you pay per lead?
  • What are the steps in your sales cycle?
  • Customer life time value (LTV)
  • Current conversion rates from visitors to leads
  • Current conversion rates from leads to customers
  • What ROI have you seen on your current marketing efforts? What are you currently investing in?

Make sure the agency you work with is goal oriented.

Evaluate and discuss the goals with the agency and verify that they are confident the goals set are reachable.

Ready to Step up your marketing?

Is the agency customer centric?

B2B customers, typically become such as a result of a relationship between you and them. They will not do business with a company they don’t trust.

Two main things to consider in this respect:

  1. You’re not selling to everyone.Your target audience is specific and as such has specific needs and challenges. A professional agency will help you figure out exactly who your audience is by mapping out your buyer personas. Those are semi-fictional representations of your ideal buyer. Having an in-depth understanding of who your ideal customers are will help you tailor your messaging and focus on relevant people, not wasting time on irrelevant prospects.
  1. Your prospects aren’t ready to buy on the spot.There are three stages to a typical buyer’s journey:

    -Awareness
    -Consideration
    -Decision

Buyer's Journey

Trying to sell to a prospect who is only at a stage where they have realized they have a problem and have expressed symptoms, would be like asking someone to marry you on a first date – too soon!

Marketing strategies that are marketer-centric, focusing on cold calling and interruptive ads, stand a very low chance of succeeding. Make sure that your agency tailors your marketing strategy around your buyer persona’s buyer’s journey. That way, instead of interrupting, you will be building fruitful relationships.

Is the agency transparent and educative?

You should be clear on what you’re spending your budget on. Make sure to receive monthly reports that are goals oriented.  Make sure the strategy is evaluated and adjusted to the ever-changing digital landscape. A professional agency will always bring you up to speed on relevant marketing innovations and strategies that are worth looking into and testing.

Make sure your agency values transparency and is eager to make sure you understand every step of the process. Many times we see clients who have worked with an agency and are confused, not sure what questions to ask or how to measure success. That should be the foundation of any collaboration between you and an agency. What are the KPIs for success and how do you measure progression?

If you are under the impression that your agency is working around the clock for you – that’s great. But if you stutter when you need to explain to a colleague what they’re doing or if you’re not sure how to tell if it’s worth your investment, make sure to cure that ASAP. You’re not hiring an agency to work for the sake of work – you have goals in mind and you need to be able to measure them.

Who are their clients?

B2B is a specialty. Make sure the agency you hire understands the complexity and is experienced in generating clients for other B2B companies. Ask to speak with their current clients and make sure to run this list by them. Their clients should be hands on and educated, as the agency should keep them up to speed.

Drill down and ask about the process these clients went through with the agency:

  • What does the client’s business do?
  • What challenges did they try to overcome with the agency?
  • What was the scope of the agency’s involvement?
  • Do they have any evidence that would demonstrate productivity, quality of work and the impact of the engagement?
  • How did the agency perform from a project management standpoint?
  • What did they find most impressive about the agency?
  • Are there any areas the agency could improve?

What does their own marketing look like?

Remember a marketing agency is a B2B company. As such, they should be reflecting their B2B know-how in their own marketing. Are you under the impression that they understand you as their buyer persona? Do they understand your buyer’s journey? Are they customer centric? Are they building trust and creating a relationship with you? If so, those are all good signs. If not, consider it an alert.

What are their qualifications?

Among others, certifications to look out for are:

Summing things up

When looking for a B2B marketing agency, make sure the agency is:

  • Goal oriented
  • Customer-centric (understand your buyer personas and buyer’s journey)
  • Transparent and educative
  • Experienced
  • Not a barefoot cobbler
  • Qualified

If you found this useful, and you’re curious to learn more and find out how to step up your b2b marketing , we invite you to download our B2B marketing practices that every CMO must know eBook.

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The Best B2B Lead Generation Tactics That Actually Work

By |2023-04-24T10:57:35+00:00January 23rd, 2017|

topicIcon B2B Marketing

John Doe

Architect & Engineer

We love that guy

b2b lead generation header

Introduction to B2B Lead Generation

Almost every C-Level executive in a B2B company found themselves, at one stage or another, wondering if the money they’re spending on digital marketing is worth the investment. Otherwise put, is their investment generating quality leads that actually turn into customers eventually and they are seeing positive ROI on their investment.

B2B lead generation is a great challenge for most companies and marketers. The main reason is that B2B buyers go through a typical buyer’s journey that is much more sophisticated than a B2C buyer’s journey. This post will walk you through B2B lead generation tactics that are scalable.

The volume challenge

Most B2B Marketers rush to set up campaigns on Google AdWords, using keywords that are directed to their exact solutions or services. Such precise keywords will usually prove to be very expensive (prices per click are usually double digited and up) due to extremely low search volumes (thousands of monthly searches at the most globaly) and high competition (classic case red ocean vs. blue ocean).

Search volumes are a given reality that the advertiser has no direct control over – once maximized, scaling becomes an issue.

When hitting the search volume glass ceiling, marketers turn to display advertising and launch direct response campaigns on platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook etc. The intent is to apply sales messaging that will catch the attention of relevant prospect’s and help turn them into leads.

Such campaigns rarely prove effective since the chance that the person clicking on the ads actually needs the advertiser’s solution, at the exactly time that they see the ads are very slim.

The result: money is being spent , low quality/un-nurtured leads are generated and handed over to sales. Sales waste their time on irrelevant leads that do not become customers. This situation causes the classic sales and marketing face-off, blames are being thrown around and the business goals never end up being met.

By that stage, most B2B Marketers start pulling hair off their scalps trying to figure out how to scale lead generation campaigns beyond the basic search terms solution, CEO’s are considering to abandon marketing and there is a total chaos in the company.

The solution: Zooming out

There is a way to broaden display campaigns to include people who are actively looking for a solution, or are on the verge of doing that (bear with me).

The secret lies in an in-depth buyer persona research aimed at unveiling your ideal customers’ unique interest, habits, daily challenges and needs. Figure out their typical buyer’s journey. What are the symptoms current prospects express to the problems that your business can help them solve?

Buyer_journey

Let’s take as an example a company selling CRM solutions. An average CMO would set up narrow campaigns targeting “CRM solutions”. A pro CMO would figure out what symptoms their buyer persona would express, and could lead them to consider a CRM solution. Those could be sales managers looking for “company sales pipeline management tips” or “how to segment leads and opportunities using Microsoft Excel” etc. By zooming out and understanding what prospects go through before deciding on a certain solution, new ways of generating quality leads become relevant. Think of the hidden potential you can fulfill by broadening your messages to entail all stages of the buyer’s journey (instead of focusing on the decision stage alone).

Application in search engines

Tap into your customer’s mind. Understand their buyer’s journey and create blog content for those stages of their journey that occur before they would search for your brand or exact solution.

Add CTAs to these blog posts, leading the readers to a premium content offer (such as an eBook) that’s contextual to the post they are currently reading.

lead generation conversion path

 

source: HubSpot

Organic traffic from search engines tends to have high conversion rates. Allocate SEO attention to getting ranked under longer tail, awareness and consideration stage keywords. This will prove easier than getting ranked on narrow terms since the competition on these terms will be much lower.

Don’t count on taking the blogging approach using PPC – driving traffic to a blog post will prove expensive. The conversion rate to leads will usually be low. With an average blog post CTR on CTA of 5% , and an average 50% conversion rate of a content offer landing page, you would need to generate 40 clicks in order to convert a visitor to a lead. That could sum up to 80-100USD per lead (depends on the keywords) – not super appealing.

Using PPC, the best option is to drive traffic directly to a content offer landing page via keywords that are related to the specific content offer. You should expect to see a conversion rate of 15-20% (depending on how well you know your way around the PPC field).

At an average of 2-4USD per click you can generate leads at 10-25USD per lead. Remember – those leads are not ready to buy. Make sure to nurture them properly and push them down the buyers journey before trying to sell them.

Application via display advertising:

After you mapped out who your buyer persona is try to target those exact people on LinkedIn and Facebook (LI will usually be more precise, but more expensive). Try to promote the same top of the funnel content offers you are trying to promote via your blog posts or PPC activities. Make sure to use vivid creatives and sharp copy to entice users to click. The CTR on Facebook and LinkedIn (especially on B2B) is a major factor for click costs and derived from that – the CPL.

Additional option for display advertising is utilizing native advertising such as Outbrain or Taboola. Driving low cost traffic(0.25$-1$ per click)  to your most converting blog posts could be very effective, especially when trying to scale further.

Using display advertising is a great way to push the user down the buyer’s journey. For companies with thousands of contacts at different stages, display could assist in pushing them further by using remarketing and promoting middle and bottom of the funnel content offers. If you can segment your contacts and understand exactly what phase each contact is at, this method will be very cost efficient for you.

Conclusion

B2B lead generation requires a different more subtle and customer centric approach. If you truly understand your buyer personas and understand their challenges and needs, you can provide them the value they are seeking for, build trust and authority in their eyes, and eventually be asked by them what you are selling, instead of trying to force them to buy from you at a stage when they aren’t ready or interested.

If you found this useful, and you’re curious to learn more and find out how to step up your b2b lead geneation, we invite you to download our 30 greatest lead generation tips, tricks and ideas. Get your FREE copy now >>

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B2B sales – cracking the code to success

By |2023-04-24T10:58:27+00:00January 17th, 2017|

topicIcon B2B Marketing Sales

John Doe

Architect & Engineer

We love that guy

B2B sales - cracking the code to success header

Introduction to b2b sales

Selling services or products to another business can be frustrating. You need to deal with endless rejections, cold shoulders and being flat out ignored. Your target customers are busy doing their job and they don’t want to be interrupted. This post will help you recalculate your route to closing B2B sales.

1. Get your priorities straight

Who are you placing in the center of your sales process? Yourself or the customer? You might think you’re customer focused, yet chances are there’s a reason you’re getting blown off by prospects. To paraphrase JFK “ask not what your prospect can buy from you, ask how you can help your prospect“.

At the end of every business is a human being. That person actually has a life. They’re busy, don’t know your business, don’t trust you, and don’t want to be interrupted. Respect that. Figure out who they are, what their needs are and how you can help them and tackle your entire strategy from that angle. This goes way beyond clichés such as “listen 80% and of the time and speak 20% of the time”. This is about a shift in attitude, it’s about building relationships, educating, answering to needs and only cutting down to business when the timing is right – for your prospect’s business (not yours).

b2b sales meme

2. Understand the buyer’s journey

The buyer’s journey is the active research process a potential buyer goes through leading up to a purchase. This is especially crucial to understand from a B2B perspective. B2B sales cycles are long by nature and requires a high level of trust. Decisions are far from spontaneous. In fact, 47% of B2B buyers consume 3-5 pieces of content prior to engaging with a salesperson. This means that some of your prospects are consuming your content before you even know who they are. By understanding the typical journey a buyer goes through before you speak to them, you can carefully figure out the right time to sell. This will help you avoid time wasted on pitching to prospects who are not ready to buy from you, as well as to avoid ruining what could otherwise evolve to a long-term relationship.

There are three stages to the average buyer’s journey:

1. Awareness

2. Consideration

3. Decision

Buyer's Journey

 

 

Look how the buyer’s journey correlates with a typical conversion funnel:

Buyer_Journey_SalesFunnel

 

Only 5-15% of leads are sales ready. Most lead require nurturing, relationship and trust building. It’s important to understand that and to only sell at the bottom of the funnel. In order to do so it’s important to qualify leads and pinpoint where they are in the funnel.

3. Qualify MQLs and SQLs

Make sure to set clear criterias of what qualifies a lead to be a marketing qualified lead (MQL) and further on, what qualifies them to be a sales qualified lead (SQL).

An MQL is a lead who’s relevant to your company as a potential customer, but who isn’t far enough down the buyer’s journey to be ready to buy. This is a lead that will potentially respond to being nurtured. For example, if your company is a SaaS company providing solutions for small businesses in the US, a marketing qualified lead would be a person who is a small business owner, a US resident, and who’s company is the relevant industry to your business. They will have expressed interest in your company but such that doesn’t reflect direct intention to buy.

You can qualify a lead as an MQL by doing a bit of intelligence work. Look them up on LinkedIn, visit their website, google them and use any relevant means at your disposal to eliminate and not waste time on irrelevant leads (if the lead was generated from paid media, the campaign would have ideally been targeted per demographics, location and other relevant qualification screening options). Then make sure to evaluate what you know about their specific buyer’s journey and behavior:

  • Did they express interest in your company?
  • Did they download an ebook or whitepaper? Was the content they downloaded awareness, consideration or decision stage type of content?
  • Did they view your pricing page?

When using marketing automation tools, you’ll be able to use forms, lead scoring and workflows in order to qualify a lead as an MQL. That being said, don’t let the lack of marketing automation stand between you and lead qualification.

An SQL is an MQL who is further down the buyer’s journey. These are leads that you can pick up the phone and call with an intent to sell to, as they are ready to speak with you. This would be a result of lead nurturing or a direct expression of intent to buy from you.

4. Align marketing and sales goals

When marketing and sales disagree on the differences between MQLs and SQLs, everyone loses. Both marketing and sales should focus on quality and not quantity. A typical complaint from sales is that the leads they’re getting are useless. A typical complaint from marketing is that the sales team can’t sell ice to eskimos.

This can be solved.

Setting clear criterias for MQLs and SQLs, and as a result a clear process of when a lead is handed over to sales, is a win-win situation. It’s tempting to pick up the phone and call an MQL, however they’re probably not ready to buy. They need to make some sales ready actions, or else you will be “jumping in” too soon.

Conclusion

The secret to B2B sales is to be customer centric. Understand who your target audience is, figure out their buyer’s journey, qualify your leads and only sell to them when they are ready.

If you found this useful, and you’re curious to learn more and find out how to step up your b2b sales, we invite you to download our 30 greatest lead generation tips, tricks and ideas.

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B2B Marketing Strategies, if you’re going to read one post, read this one

By |2023-04-05T11:44:20+00:00January 9th, 2017|

topicIcon B2B Marketing

John Doe

Architect & Engineer

We love that guy

b2b marketing strategies

Introduction

B2B and B2C marketing are worlds apart. As opposed to B2C, B2B sales cycles are typically long and complex, requiring multiple decision makers, aimed at narrow audiences of specific industries, have a high life time value (LTV) per customer, and are long lasting engagements.

Many bold and brave CMOs who tried to make the shift from traditional marketing to online, were disappointed by the results of their efforts, quickly crawling back under the traditional marketing rock. The assumption was that due to the B2B complex nature, online marketing methods are great for B2C but are irrelevant for B2B.  While some online methods are indeed irrelevant for B2B, some are actually the holy grail of B2B marketing. This post will layout traditional and online B2B marketing plan and help you decide which to pursue and which to forget.

 

First things first – know your audience

You probably already know your target market, but how much do you know about the people you’re trying to sell to? On the other end of the businesses you are trying to sell to, are actual human beings. What do the people within the businesses you are targeting have in common? Map out your buyer personas (fictional representations of your ideal customers) and make sure you are tailoring every bit of your marketing strategy to fit their needs and challenges.

Attend industry conferences and other networking events

Relationships are the name of the game in B2B sales. Attending networking events has been a winning B2B lead generating strategy since..well, forever. Some pro tips:

  • Make sure you have a clear brand story and that your messaging reflects your narrative.
  • Do your homework – prior to the event check the RSVP list and prepare conversation topics for people who you identify as relevant connections (don’t forget your business card).
  • Add the people who you meet on LinkedIn and send them a follow up email

Make sure to stay up-to-date on networking events in your target industry and strive to attend at least one event per quarter.

Television, newspapers and radio ads

Advertising on each of these traditional platforms is nothing more than “nice to have”. Relaying on them for anything other than branding purposes won’t get you very far. Brand awareness and authority is super important for B2B, but it’s 2017 – there are much better ways to build trust and generate relationships online. Generally speaking, be wary of any marketing strategy that’s not entirely measurable. If you have an old-fashioned board/ CEO, and you decide to choose your battles and find yourself forced to allocate some of your budget to these ATL mass market methods, try to make the most of them. Things to consider:

  • Make sure you aren’t advertising to “everyone”. Focus on your buyer personas, and tailor your messaging to them
  • set measurable goals to each campaign
  • try to measure the performance of each unique campaign using discount codes/coupons, campaign specific phone numbers and other metrics that will help you attribute performance
  • Try to only have one ATL campaign live at a time. That way you will be able to get an idea of the impact the campaign had, even on occasions where the performance isn’t measurable down to the cent.

If “politically” possible, unless your budget is limitless (don’t you wish) I recommend ditching these platforms and allocating your budget to best-practice measurable platforms.

Ready to Step up your marketing?

Cold outreach

The “good old” method of cold calling, cold emailing and PPC advertising with hardsales messages – please stop it. Cold outreach is marketer centric and interruptive, your low conversion rates aren’t a coincidence. You are trying to sell to people who are not ready to buy from you. Buyers go through a typical journey before making a purchasing decision, it’s called the buyer’s journey and I strongly recommend learning it and living by it.

In a nutshell, there are three stages to a buyer’s journey:

  1. Awareness
  2. Consideration
  3. Decision

When you’re trying to sell to people who don’t know who you are, don’t trust you, and don’t know why they should even consider buying from you, you’re wasting time and money. Cold outreach is as good as spam. Though it works to some extent, it’s short sighted and at the end of the day, you’re doing the opposite of relationship building. Instead of interrupting, focus on adding value and being there when and where your prospects need you. That way you’ll be creating long term valuable relationships and even turning your customers to ambassadors.

Inbound Marketing

Inbound Marketing is a holistic strategy. There are four stages to the Inbound methodology:

 

inbound marketing.png

 

1. Attract – turn strangers to visitors on your blog/website

2. Convert – turn visitors to leads

3. Close – turn the leads to customes

4. Delight – turn the customers to promoters

Inbound Marketing is best applied when combining content marketing and marketing automation. Let’s look into both:

1. Content marketing

Content marketing is a strategic approach focusing on communicating with your prospects without selling to them. It’s done by distributing valuable content, building trust, creating lasting relationships and turning them into customers when they’re ready.

Generating results using content marketing takes time but it’s worth the investment. Content marketing is about publishing the right content at the right place and the right time.

content_place_time

 

It’s customer focused and as such, it’s marketing that people actually like. It doesn’t interrupt them, it helps them. The way to go about it is to:

lead generation conversion path

 

35% of B2B marketers have a documented content strategy – that number is bound to grow as more and more businesses realize the long-term potential of adding value instead of interrupting.

2. Marketing automation

Marketing automation goes hand in hand with content marketing. Marketing automation softwares enable you to help your leads find their own path down the buyer’s journey leading to a purchase. The way to do it is to interact with your prospects and send them relevant content using:

  • workflows
  • email drips
  • lead scoring
  • smart content

The most popular marketing automation softwares out there are Hubspot, Marketo, Eloqua, Pardot, Act-on and Silverpop.

Note that implementing an Inbound Marketing strategy without marketing automation is a valid option. Start off by doing things manualy and perfect your strategy as you go.

Conclusion

B2B is about creating long lasting relationships with both prospective and current clients. By putting your customer in the center and ditching a marketer centric approach, you can dramatically improve your performance and help your company grow.  It’s worth spending time researching and understanding how to implement an entire Inbound Marketing strategy. It’s a long term investment and for most B2B business, a worthwhile one.

Ready to Step up your marketing?

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B2B branding – how to build authority and create brand awareness

By |2023-04-24T10:59:18+00:00January 8th, 2017|

topicIcon B2B Marketing

John Doe

Architect & Engineer

We love that guy

b2b branding - how to build authority header

Introduction to b2b branding

The biggest challenge when selling B2B online, is an authority issue. People want to trust a brand and see it as a professional one before deciding to buy from it. This post will walk you through how to build trust and create long lasting relationships with your prospects, in a way that will make selling to them natural.

Stop selling. Start adding value.

Who are your target customers? Create fictional representation of your ideal customers A.K.A buyer personas. Figure out what their main needs and challenges are and then consider how you help them. Instead of trying to sell to them, consider how you can add value to them and educate them. A PPC campaign that sends prospects to a hard sales landing page, inviting a prospect to fill out a form and connect with a sales person, is an almost sure way to fail. Why would they want to speak to a sales rep? they have no idea who you are. It’s too soon. Zoom out and-

Understand the buyer’s journey

The buyer’s journey is the active research process a potential buyer goes through leading up to a purchase. There are three stages to a typical buyer’s journey:

  1. Awareness
  2. Consideration
  3. Decision

Buyer's Journey

 

On the awareness stage, the prospect is experiencing and expressing symptoms of a problem and is researching in order to understand and give a name to their problem.

On the consideration stage, the prospect has clearly defined and given a name to their problem and is researching available ways to solve it.

On the decision stage the prospect has decided on a strategy to solve their problem and is now ready to make a purchase decision.

Simply put, if you’re trying to sell to a person who doesn’t yet understand their problem, or has not yet decided on a way to solve it, your chances of them choosing your solution are scarce. Alternatively, if you’re the one who helps them identify their problem and consider various solutions, they are way more likely to choose your solution, and to choose to buy it from you. The way to do that is to –

Create remarkable content

As part of their buyer’s journey, 47% of B2B buyers consume 3-5 pieces of content prior to engaging with a salesperson. Your prospects are researching about you before your sales people even know who they are. Make sure that your content is in-line with their journey. Create content that will help them learn from you. By adding value and educating, you’re building trust and positioning your brand as an expert in your field.

Content that focuses solely on sales is detached, self-centered, and does not put your prospect and their needs and stage of readiness in the center. It’s interruptive and will only result in frustration on your end. Start writing content that focuses on your prospect and considers their journey from their shoes. This will cause a shift in the way your business is perceived. It’s a sure way to establish trust.

Make sure that your content is optimized so that when prospects are searching for it, it will show up in search engine result pages. Follow the tips on this post to learn more.

How To Create An Effective Inbound Marketing Strategy Call to Action

 

Engage with your prospects

Research and find out where your buyer personas go for information.

  • Engage and share your content in places such as:
    • Industry specific Linkedin and Facebook groups
    • Q&A sit es such as Quora
    • Reddit, Tumbler, Medium etc.
  • Write guest posts on industry blogs.
  • Conduct webinars
  • Podcast

Sell to them when they are ready (not when you are).

Only once you’ve:

  • mapped out who your buyer personas are
  • tailored content for all stages of their buyer’s journey
  • made sure your content is visible and that your prospects are engaging with your content

Then and only then, is it time to offer your services. In other words, there’s no point in trying to collaborate with a stranger that you have not established a relationship with, and who does not yet trust you.

Conclusion

B2B sales and B2B branding and authority are inseparable. Investing in research, understanding your audience and then creating online content assets is a great way to position your business, build trust, establish relationships and help your target audience find you, trust you, and choose you. Prepare yourself for a long process, B2B purchase decision involve multiple decision makers and take time. Don’t convince yourself that digital marketing is irrelevant for B2B. That’s an excuse for business who aren’t willing to put in the effort and ripe the results. Don’t be lead, become a leader in your industry, add value, and position your business. And by the way, the leads that you generate offline via word of mouth, biz dev, conferences and networking events are also going to be researching about you, all the more reason for your online presence to be up to standard.

35% of B2B marketers have a documented content strategy, time to step up yours.

Good luck!

P.S. If you found this useful, and you’re curious to learn more and find out how to create a long lasting B2B marketing strategy, we invite you to download our How-To guide for creating an Inbound Marketing strategy

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B2B SEO – is it worth your time?

By |2023-04-24T11:00:28+00:00January 5th, 2017|

topicIcon B2B Marketing SEM

John Doe

Architect & Engineer

We love that guy

B2B SEO header

Introduction

Sooner or later, every CEO/CMO of a B2B Company ask themselves “should I even bother with this SEO crap? Is it really worth the time, efforts and budget allocation?”

I’ve heard many forms of this, dozens of times, from brilliant and successful people on many occasions. It’s always brought a big smile to my face. Not because I decried them, god forbid. But it proved to me how SEO has and still is perceived incorrectly by many business owners. Let me explain why B2B SEO is worth your time.

Before understanding why it’s important to invest in SEO, let’s quickly recap what exactly SEO is…

Search Engine Optimization is the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine’s (Google for example) organic search results. “It is a methodology of strategies, techniques and tactics used to increase the amount of visitors to a website by obtaining a high-ranking placement in the search results page of a search engine” – Webopedia
Since its early days, SEO has always had naysayers insisting that this marketing discipline is a passing fad, or that it’s dead. Well, not only has it survived this long, it’s actually thriving. With over 3.5 billion searches per day made on Google alone, it’s no wonder that the $65 billion worth industry is steadily growing, with no end in sight.

SEO meets B2B

B2B transactions are characteristically different from B2C transactions since decisions require collaboration and coordination between various entities in order to reach the final stage of the transaction. It’s no surprise at all that all B2B dealings turn out to be ongoing processes that involve a certain lapse of time between researching the product and placing the order.
Since the research done in B2B marketing is far more intensive than traditional product purchase research, it goes without saying that search engines play a dominant role in B2B purchases whereby they are extensively used during the (early and mid) research phase of the transaction.
Most B2B internet searches start with a generic term, which means your prospects are looking for a product or solution, not for your brand. It is important to understand what prospects and customers are searching for, and your company website must contain a steady stream of rich content that provide answers for your prospects problems.
To make sure your ideal customers find your site on top of the SERP (Search Engine Results Page), you should first create buyer personas, which will help you identify the people you’re trying to reach and their commonly asked questions. Then tailor that content to their stage of the buyer’s journey.
In the past two years, the way people research and buy online went through some dramatic changes.
Business buyers rely on the internet during their research and selection process. But did you know that more and more of these decision-makers are using mobile devices? In fact, B2B mobile usage is intensifying throughout the entire buying cycle.
Nearly three-quarters of online buyers are now using mobile to search and shop. For B2B marketers, this means your prospects and your buyers are using mobile devices more frequently than ever, at the office, on meetings and outside of work hours, to make critical business decisions.
With Mobile devices being deeply personal devices, quite logically, Google’s investigative efforts in 2016 (And 2017) seem almost fully devoted to personalized, semantic and predictive search. With Google’s announcement of a mobile-first indexing in November 2016, providing a favorable mobile experience is absolutely required to continually engage prospects and drive leads and sales. Moreover –  voice search, machine and deep learning began to be used by default in every facet of Google Search. Thus, we should expect them to be used even more in 2017.

Ready to Step up your marketing?

 

SEO and Content marketing

“Content Marketing” was undoubtedly the key buzzword of 2016. With 29% of brands’ total marketing budget spent on content marketing alone, and 39% of which anticipate that budget will increase in 2017.
Assuming your business is part of those 80% of B2B companies that have a content marketing strategy, you already know the importance of content for lead generation, brand authority and dozens of other aspects for your company’s success.
Even-though most of the time they are treated separately, content marketing and SEO goes together like PB&J. “Yes, SEO and content marketing are distinguished from one another in several critical areas. And while they have points of differentiation, you still can’t separate the two entirely” – says Neil Patel on Kissmetrics
The only way to ensure your content marketing success is by applying SEO techniques in its implementation. SEO demands content, keywords, linkbacks and great onsite optimization – content marketing answers all of these requirements.
Thus, your SEO campaign will fail unless you integrate content marketing. Your content marketing campaign will fail unless you integrate SEO.

SEO and your business

Every business aims to grow revenue, lower marketing cost, and of course become more profitable.
SEO can help mapping the organization’s top-level goals by identifying searches your target audience perform and then ranking for them. Thus driving more quality traffic with organic search and by that reducing the company’s dependency on advertising and other more costly platforms.
Search Engine Optimization was and still is, a must-have marketing discipline for businesses of any type and size. As a manager or CEO, your challenge is about how best to intelligently integrate SEO into your marketing mix to reap rich rewards.
SEO plays an important role in this research and buying cycle. It’s like a prospect magnet, attracting potential buyers to your website through critical and relevant keywords and phrases ranked high in search engines where searchers are already looking for information about them.
It’s about being where your customers are, and directing them towards solutions you offer them.

Conclusion

Without SEO, the chances of prospects finding your website are as scarce as finding a needle in a haystack. Without fully understanding the intent behind your visitor’s search and their unique and individual needs, the chances of losing the prospect forever is high. Getting them both right means more visitors, and more sales

Hopefully, these compelling reasons have convinced you about the value and benefits of an integrated SEO strategy in growing your business. Good luck!

And If you find this useful, you’re invited to download our B2B Marketing Best Practices that Every CMO Must Know Ebook. Get your FREE copy now ==>

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How to translate business goals into marketing actions

By |2023-04-05T11:45:40+00:00December 29th, 2016|

topicIcon Digital Marketing

John Doe

Architect & Engineer

We love that guy

business goals to action header

Introduction

Too often I speak with CMOs who are unsure how their marketing efforts align with their company’s businesses goals. I relate this to a general vagueness that is left over from days when marketing wasn’t measurable and the key buzzword was branding. Moreover, not all companies have smart goals, resulting in a general confusion when it comes down to creating an actionable marketing strategy that marketing can control, manage and evaluate.

In this post, I’ll break down how to clarify and translate business goals to marketing actions, hopefully helping you to focus on what truly matters to your company, therefore making the most of your marketing efforts. Let’s get started.

Break down your business goals

Start off by making sure you have a clear understanding of the vision and business goals of your company. Make sure there are no discrepancies between how you envision the company goals, versus how the rest of management does.

The best way to do that is the good old SMART goals method i.e setting clear goals that are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Timebound. As this is not a general business strategy post, I will not go into much detail on this point, yet I will mention that smart goals are a great method yet should be used carefully. You do not want to enter a state of mind that locks you down to only attempting achievable things. Combine smart goals with stretch goals and always remember the latter. A company that does not shoot for the stars, doesn’t stand a chance of getting there (If the subject of combining practical goals with stretch goals interests you, I strongly recommend reading Charles Duhigg’s bestseller “Smarter faster better“, specifically the chapter about GE and how legendary CEO Jack Welch paired the two back in the 80s).

Let’s take an example of a SaaS company’s smart goal to “grow the number of core customers who buy a yearly subscription by 10% within the next year”. If the company has 10,000 core customers with a yearly subscription, this would mean they would need to add 1,000 new yearly subscribers within a time frame of 12 months (in order to simplify the example I’m not taking into consideration natural churn rates).

Now let’s dive in and figure out how to turn business goals such as the above to marketing actions.

helping you navigate your startup to marketing stardom

Identify where in the funnel you have a problem (top, middle, bottom)

Consider this standard conversion path:

conversion path

 

Source: VWO

At the top of the funnel the goal is to attract strangers and turn them into visitors on your website.

Things to consider:

– Are you generating enough traffic?

– Are you happy with the number of monthly visitors on your website?

The middle of the funnel focuses on converting visitors to leads. Check your current conversion rates from visitors to leads.

The bottom of the funnel focuses on converting leads to customers. If you have a high volume of leads but your conversion rates are low, focus on fixing that part of the funnel.

In the SaaS company example, let’s take into consideration an standard visitor to lead conversion rate of 2%, and a standard industry average lead to customer conversion rate of 5%.

In order to grow the number of core customers who buy a yearly subscription by 10% within a year, they would need 1,000,000 visitors a 2% conversion from visitor to lead = 20,000 leads a 5% conversion from lead to customer = 1,000 customers.

Based on the company’s current number of visitors, and current conversion rates, they can identify where in the funnel action is most required in order to achieve the business goal.

Of course, there could be a problem on all stages. That is legitimate and requires action on all fronts.

Once you identify where your problem is, you can proceed to taking actions that will cure it.

Top of the funnel marketing actions:

In order to attract strangers to visit your website, map out who your buyer personas are. Buyer personas are fictional representation of your ideal customers. Research and be crystal clear on who you are aiming to turn into customers.

Next, figure out how you plans to attract them to your website. Possible methods:

  • PPC – target your buyer personas with relevant messaging
  • Blogging – educate and add value with content that is relevantand helpful to your buyer personas
  • SEO – optimize your website to show up in SERPs when your buyer personas search for relevant terms
  • Social media – engage in social media and leverage it to attract your buyer personas

Note that at the top of the funnel it’s usually too early to be trying to sell. It’s important to first build trust. Figure out what your buyer persona’s challenges and pain points are and see how you can help them learn more in context with their stage of the buyer’s journey.

In the SaaS example, one of their buyer personas could be a CTO at a startup company. One of the CTO’s main challenges would be dealing with time to market issues and scalability. The company can try to tap into that and leverage this challenge so that when the CTO is interested in dealing with the problem, she will find end up on the company websites via any of the methods above, and learn how to deal with her issue.

This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t target your buyer personas and turn them from strangers to visitors at a stage where they have a strong intent to buy. The SaaS company should make sure they are easy to find when prospects are searching for the direct solution that they are offering. The idea is to not come on to strongly, not to be interruptive and to make sure you are combining the right message at the right time. The right time should be measured from your prospect’s perspective, not yours.

Middle of the funnel marketing actions:

If you identify your problem in converting visitors to leads, i.e. you have enough visitors on your website, yet they don’t progress down the funnel, evaluate the following:

  • Is your traffic random or relevant? This ties back to the top of the funnel. Who are your efforts targeting?
  • Are you taking action to convert the visitors or are you relaying on chance or strong intent that your prospects may not have at this stage of the funnel?

Possible methods to cure this problem:

  • Revisit your top of the funnel and make sure you are attracting the right visitors
  • Use content offers, landing pages, forms, calls to actions and gated content to convert the visitors

In the SaaS company example, it would be a good idea to invite visitors to download an eBook or other content offer in exchange for filling out a form and providing their email thus turning them into a lead.

Bottom of the funnel marketing actions:

If you have plenty of leads, yet your conversion rates are low, the bottom of the funnel needs attending. There could be numerous reasons for this to happen:

  • Your targeting isn’t focused enough and therefore you are capturing irrelevant leads
  • Your sales team is pitching to them when they are not yet ready to buy
  • Your sales team is pitching to them at the right timing with respect to their readiness to buy, however, they are not yet ready to buy from you – they don’t trust you yet

If when speaking with your leads your sales team’s feedback is that the leads are irrelevant, revisit the top and middle of the funnel (stop it, sales aren’t your enemy, collaborate with them and make love not war).

Otherwise, if sales are struggling with readiness issues, the secret lies in lead nurturing. The bottom of the funnel is the stage to nurture your leads, gain their trust, and only approach them once you identify that they are ready to buy, and from you.

Possible methods:

  • Email workflows – stay in touch with your leads and keep adding value and educating them. Send them relevant content and build their trust. Do this using triggered automated actions based on a lead’s behavior. Most email marketing platforms provide this function (mailchimp, aweber etc)
  • Lead scoring – rank your leads in accordance with their current engagement with your company and relevancy to your company. Possible criteria: job position, company size, number of forms the lead filled out, number of emails they opened, number of CTAs they clicked on, the nature of the content they read on your website (a strong indication of their level of readiness) and so on.

In the SaaS example, a good way to push a prospect down the buyer’s journey would be to send the CTO and automatic email with an eBook right after she fills out a form requesting the content. Then, proceeding to sending a series of emails inviting her to read educative blog posts. Then further on, depending on her engagement and lead score, to send her an email inviting her to a free evaluation call with one of the company experts. Using lead scoring and evaluating her engagement, sales would be able to pitch to her in correlation with her relevancy to the company, state of readiness and intent. This could save lots of time that the company may currently be wasting as a result of sales reaching out to irrelevant leads.

Conclusion

In order to turn business goals to marketing action, make sure:

  • the goals are clear (smart goals)
  • you understand who you are targeting
  • identify what stage of the funnel is currently standing between you and reaching the goals
  • take relevant action

Pro tip: retaining a customer is cheaper than acquiring a new one. Make sure to nurture customers using by continuing to add value and engaging with them. Strive to make your customers your greatest promoters.

 

 

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What your B2B Website Should Include

By |2023-04-24T11:01:43+00:00December 27th, 2016|

topicIcon B2B Marketing

John Doe

Architect & Engineer

We love that guy

B2B Website Should Include header

Introduction to B2B Website

Your B2B website isn’t working. You invested time and money in an overpriced, shiny new website that you were 100% sure will get your phone ringing in no time.

Ask yourself – If you handed your site to a total stranger, would they be able to tell what your business does within 5 seconds?

If they couldn’t, then you’ve got a messaging problem.

What you should want from your website: More sales, More conversions, Higher quality leads, build trust. What your customer wants: Solution to their needs, Fast load and easy navigation. This post will walk you through the look and feel, content and SEO aspect you should consider and include in your B2B website.

Look and feel

Reflect value and keep your buyer personas in mind

B2B, much like B2C, is all about solving your visitor’s pain points. Be crystal clear about how your company is going to solve a buyer’s problem in every step of the marketing funnel.

When thinking about your homepage, make sure it touches your buyer persona‘s pain points right away. Even better, help your visitors to better define their problem and evaluate possible solutions.

Your site has to be able to efficiently introduce your buyers to the solution for their business needs and why your company is the best at providing it.

Keep your design minimal, yet bold, with your buyer’s feelings in mind

B2B marketing is actually H2H (human-to-human) marketing, and people are messy. Impulse, mood, rationalization and reason all affect your visitors buying decisions. Even under corporate hat. So make sure to create an uncluttered, easily navigable experience for your end-user. Pick a deliberate use of color, content and layout that best reflects your business’ added value over your competitors.

Remember –  B2B doesn’t mean boring. Make your site more engaging with big, bold visuals that bring your brand to life, but don’t overwhelm your visitors.

Think hard on how every section on your site keeps your different buyer personas engaged. If you can’t, maybe it shouldn’t be on your site.

Don’t be boring and over corporate

The best B2B websites show, they don’t tell. This is not an excuse to get lazy and use generic stock photos or videos. Luckily, there is a growing movement of designers and photographers that provide either a free or subscription service that looks much more genuine than the boring ones you’ll find on every regular sites. Some of the best stock footage websites are Pexels, Unsplash, ProVideoFactory.

Make sure your visitors are never overwhelmed or confused

Your homepage should be long enough to be clear, but short enough to keep their attention. Clarify:

  • who you are, what you do,
  • where you’re located (if you’re local)
  • your value proposition
  • what visitors should do next.

Make sure to evaluate the look and feel of every piece of content or page on your site, be it a service, about page or blog post.

Add value all throughout your website 

A face lift alone doesn’t cut it to get more leads. Content (whether it’s text, image or CTA) should be spot-on throughout the site, with nothing but high value offers. Your buyers time is short and priceless, so don’t waste any of it.

Ninety percent of B2B marketers use content to grow awareness, drive consideration, and generate sales. The trick is to include attention grabbing CTAs and to leverege your content to generate leads by asking for a visitors email address in exchange for accessing your great content. When doing so, make sure to consider the buyer’s journey.

Ready to Step up your marketing?

 

SEO aspects to consider

Just because B2B site goals are substantially more complex than those on the typical B2C site,  is no excuse for them to have bad usability. On the contrary – the more complex the scenario, the higher the need for supportive user interfaces.

Remember – B2B=H2H. Make your site is customer centric and optimize your page for user experience

Write for humans, not search engines.

It’s important to realize that Google is no longer trying to match the keywords you type into its search engine to the keywords of a web page. Instead, it’s trying to understand the intent behind the keywords you type so it can match that intent to relevant, high-quality content.

This means that you do not have to place your keywords word-for-word in the content anymore. Instead, write the content for the user. If you use related terms or synonyms, search engines like Google will still understand what your page’s overall goal is.

Optimize your images

Search engines cannot see images on websites, so it is important to give the image an alt text and relevant file name to ensure Google knows what the image is about.

Make sure to make image files you (or your web master) uploaded to your site as light as possible. There are a lot of easy tools and photo editing software you can do this with (Irfanview, jpegmini and more)

Testimonials:

“2017 may well be the year of testimonials and reviews in local SEO. As our industry continues to grow, we have studied surveys indicating that some 92% of consumers now read online reviews and that 68% of these cite positive reviews as a significant trust factor.” – MiriamEllis on Moz Blog

As opposed to some saying that “testimonials pages are useless”, well-crafted testimonials pages are, in fact, vitally useful in a variety of ways.

Client testimonials, reviews and case studies can impact your local rankings, win you in-SERP stars and boost your website overall trustworthiness and reputation in the eyes of Google. They validate your claims, and they help prospective buyers imagine use cases for their own businesses – and imagine themselves as clients.

Your site isn’t just a piece of code that shows your company logo, contact info and services, it needs to be part of your sales strategy

Blog!

“B2B marketers that use blogs receive 67% more leads than those that do not.” – Olivia Allen on Hubspot Blog sums it up great.

Business blogging is the lowest cost way to improve your site’s visibility by both users and search engines, and is one of 5 most trusted sources for accurate online information.

If that statistic alone isn’t enough to convince you that blogging can benefit your business, here’s another one –  companies who blog receive 97% more links to their website, which of course benefits your SERP ranking efforts.

By nature, blogs have a more personal touch to them, so naturally they’re a trusted source of information for you potential buyer.

Provide your visitors with insights and industry news, build authority and become a thought-leader in the progress.

Remember, B2B is about earning trust by solving your buyer’s pain points.

Conclusion

Especially when it comes to B2B, keep in mind that your buyers are busy. Don’t waste their time.

Take time to understand your core audience, identify their pain points and be crystal clear about how your company is going to solve the buyer’s problem in every step of the marketing funnel.

Keep it clear, light and customer centric. Your website isn’t about your company, it’s about how your buyer benefits from choosing to work with you.

If you find this useful, you’re invited to download our B2B Marketing Best Practices that Every CMO Must Know Ebook. Get your FREE copy now ==>

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