9 Search Marketing Tips for Effective B2B Lead Generation

   

 

 

“Average B2B Buyer’s Attention Span Is 8 Seconds” – REALLY? 9 Search Marketing Tips for Effective B2B Lead Generation 

 

In a heated discussion at one of my client’s offices recently, the company’s senior executives were hung up on a study that said “the average B2B buyer’s attention span is only 8 seconds”. Their digital marketing agency was in the room and so were the key team members who managed their lead automation system and CRM. They all gave me a shocked look when I asked, “Eight seconds is quite a long time, isn’t it?” I was ready for this. Silence. Looks exchanged around the room. And then, one gentleman said, “It’s barely enough time to talk through one presentation slide.” Made no sense to me.

 

“Well”, he explained, “if our blog post has a 30 second demo video of our new product, the prospect will probably just see only 1 slide in 8 seconds”. I asked him how long it would take the prospect to lead the headline of the blog post. “One or maybe 2 seconds”, he replied. “Then that is how much time you really have—2 seconds”, I said. As the point drove home, I saw people sink back into their chairs one by one, with a look of resignation. The general sentiment in the room seemed to be—“we can’t make it; we just don’t know how.”

So I decided to focus next on search marketing as Part Three in the Back-to-School B2B Primer series. 

HERE ARE 9 SEARCH MARKETING TIPS FOR EFFECTIVE B2B LEAD GENERATION:

1. UNDERSTAND THE NEW RULES OF RESEARCH. Statistics from the Consumer Executive Board show that buyers are typically 2/3 of their way into the buying cycle before they even engage with a company they would potentially buy from. What’s changed here? What must we do differently now to feed the research hunger of the B2B buyer? We need to stop using pushy, promotional content that we wrongly presume is “informative” and “educational”. The buyer is looking for vendor comparison data, competitor pricing charts, product/service features Vs. benefit matrixes, and other holistic market intelligence. It’s not about YOU. It’s about THEM.
2.  UNDERSTAND THE NEW RULES OF SEARCH. In a recent webinar by the Content Marketing Institute, the presenters mentioned an interesting fact—that there is more power being harnessed in a single Google search today than what NASA used to put a man on the moon in 1969. What does this tell you? That your buyers have this supernormal power available at their fingertips. They can use it to find you and they can also use it to shut you out if you don’t provide relevant, meaningful and useful content; the first time and ongoing.
3. UNDERSTAND THE ANIMALS IN THE GOOGLE ZOO. Panda? Penguin? What do all these Google updates mean and how do they impact your company’s online presence? How is each new version different from the previous one? What will you need to do differently to not be hit by Google’s algorithm changes? Here is a good summary of recent changes to Google’s Panda and Penguin Updates in 2013.
4. RECOGNIZE THAT KEYWORD RESEARCH MUST BE DONE ONLINE AND OFFLINE. Even the best, most sophisticated keyword research tool cannot identify all the right keywords that you need to optimize your digital marketing content. Talk to your field sales staff and front-line customer service teams. What keywords and phrases regularly come up in conversations with prospects and customers? No matter what your SEO experts tell you about search volume, traffic volume, broad-match searches and all that tech-speak you’ll hear; if your buyers are asking and talking about certain terms, you can’t ignore them in your keyword optimization list.
5. IDENTIFY BUYER PERSONAS AND BUYER BEHAVIOURS. Match these to the SEO trends you are seeing on your various online properties—your company website, your blog, social media profile pages, etc. Marketing automation software and lead generation systems today are evolving. If you are stuck with an automation tool that does not perform the critical function of integrating prospect activity with the referral source of information, you are missing out on some very pertinent and valuable data points.
6. REALIZE THAT PHONE CALLS CAN STILL TRUMP FAQ PAGES. This may not apply in very early stages of the buying cycle. But deeper into the cycle, when a potential buyer is already on your site, for example, and has spent some time on your site already or even made a few visits over a period, a phone call can be a timely conversion tool. Buyers have a question and they want an answer now without having to spend another extra minute looking at your FAQ page. Your organization is B2B but your buyers still care about P2P (person-to-person)—don’t treat them like they are just a number in your prospect list. Do remember, however, that you have to give the buyer the ability to call you easily, not the other way around. Plus, with call tracking, you can further evaluate your lead score and take the immediate next steps required for further lead nurturing.
7. REMEMBER THAT ONLINE FORMS ARE LIVING, EVOLVING TOOLS. Gone are the days when you created an online form and stuck it in multiple places—your website, your blog, your email blasts, your landing page. As I mentioned in my recent piece about “7 Tactics that are Working for B2B Lead Generation Today”, try to customize and update at least one form field in new online campaigns. Ask a prospect for information you don’t already have on file. This is proactive progressive profiling. Online forms are powerful and their power is not just for protecting your content! The more content you share without hiding behind lengthy and complicated forms, the more high quality engagement you will start to gain.
8. DETERMINE HOW YOUR COMPANY WILL TRAVERSE THE SOCIAL JOURNEY. It is a journey. You have to go down that road of social relationships and work hard to stay on track. There are many internal and factors at play here and you need to make sure it all comes together before you can become a social business rather than just a socially active company. I enjoyed this SlideShare presentation that talks about how to make the transition from social media to social business. Examine whether you have absolute executive buy-in, are your employees involved and engaged in your social journey, how does the rest of the company view the role of marketing, what social platforms are your buyers spending time on, what social tools and technologies will you use to engage them, how will you gather and interpret data points from social media activity…take a close look at all of these.
9. DIFFERENTIATE BETWEEN SEARCH MARKETING GOALS AND CAMPAIGN KPIs. You must have overall objectives and goals for your search marketing strategy, but you also need to break them down further into specific KPIs for each campaign or component of your search marketing. If you are using Paid Search or Pay-Per-Click (PPC), then cost-per-click and cost-per-lead are the right KPIs to measure. When a whitepaper campaign is geared towards thought leadership and brand awareness, on the other hand, then a suitable KPI would be to measure the volume and quality of viral sharing across multiple channels including email and social networks.

What are some search marketing techniques that your B2B organization has found useful and effective in recent times? Feel free to add to the list above and do leave me a comment below.

 

About the author: Louis Foong View all posts by Louis Foong

Louis Foong is the founder and CEO of The ALEA Group Inc, one of North America’s most innovative B2B demand generation specialists. As a thought leader with more than three decades of experience in the field, Louis guides his team and ALEA’s clients through the dynamic, evolving lead generation landscape. His astute sense of marketing and sales along with a clear vision and ability to see the “big picture” has proved beneficial to numerous organizations, both small and large. With the right advice and a slew of result-driven services, he enables clients to gain maximum return on investment for their lead generation efforts. His clients include companies in the technology, telecommunications, software, healthcare and professional services industries. Prior to starting the ALEA Group, Louis Foong has held various senior executive positions within corporate America. Today he is known and well-respected as a thought leader and pioneer in this industry. Foong is a published blogger and among the top authors on CustomerThink, a global online community of business leaders.

Rediscover Your Company's Humanity

by Sam Ford

We've heard the rallying cry for the past few years for companies to "be customer-centric" and to transform into "a social business." But what does that really mean?

As I've said before, It's hard for most organizations to come to any real consensus because each part of the company only sees one small sliver of the customer, a sliver that comes with different meanings and measurement: a segmentation profile in marketing, website traffic for the digital team, "call volume" to the customer service team, a "conversion" to the sales team, or an "impression" to the advertising team. The real risk here is that no one sees the customer as an actual human being.

But the challenge the corporation really needs to answer — listening to and understanding the customer more deeply — can start with the concept of empathy: encouraging employees to put aside their particular duties with the company and put themselves in their customer's shoes.

This process need not require deeply specialized skills: it can be as simple as it sounds. The problem is, professional training has distanced us from fundamental principles of human communication. We now tend to focus on empirical data from survey results and analytics or customer insights from feedback forms and focus groups constrained by what the company knows to ask.

And, just as challenging, the differences in each of our professional trainings as we look across disciplines within any organization means that people think and talk differently about their relationship with that customer. Even more confusing, we are often using the same words for somewhat different purposes from department to department.
 
As a result, empathy with the customer, which is among the simplest of principles, can be among the most challenging to master, especially for employees managing communication with a community to which they've never actually belonged themselves.

At our agency, Peppercomm, this core philosophy of listening and empathy has transformed the way we work. We strive to see ourselves as beholden not just to the clients paying us for our consulting but equally so to the audiences they seek to reach, who give their time and who ultimately determine the success of our clients' businesses.

We've largely accomplished this through putting a deeper focus on helping our clients see the world from the eyes of their various audiences. We make it a priority to think about the communications experience of various stakeholders at every step along the way.

Thinking this way is a challenge. We still find ourselves accepting assumptions passed along by clients about their audiences without thinking them through from the audience's perspective. Occasionally, we'll catch one another talking about the customer as a number, or a profile, or a concept instead of an actual human being. And we sometimes still realize that we have created a communications strategy or drafted content more intent on capturing what everyone within the company would like to communicate without much thought as to what audiences actually want or need to know.

Customer empathy is a goal we'll never claim to "master," because it requires constantly challenging ourselves to work as a team from the common place of the perspective of the customer, the employee, the journalist, or any other constituency. But we pride ourselves on holding it up as our rallying cry and our filter on a daily basis.

As all of our companies continue acclimating to the realities of today's communications environment, it's imperative that those of us who see listening and empathy as a critical determinant of organizational health make it a company priority. We must all ensure our daily work reflects these principles. And we have to spread that message, both vertically and horizontally, within our organizations (and, for those of us in professional services, inside those companies we work with).

It will likely be frustrating and occasionally disheartening, especially since it seems so deceptively simple. But it is vital work, not just for the sake of our companies but for those audiences we serve. Only when all employees, from the C-suite to the interns, work to truly understand the world from their customer's points of view can we truly call ourselves "customer-centric" and a "social business."

Sam Ford

Sam Ford is Director of Digital Strategy at Peppercomm and co-author, with Henry Jenkins and Joshua Green, of Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. 

The Five Laws of REAL Social ROI

B2B Marketer Alert: Look In Before Looking Out

Another Social Media Week has come and gone, 5th year in a row. Where are we today? Have we really moved on from Social 101 and Social for Dummies? From a B2C perspective, I think we certainly have and that is inevitable given the popularity of social media channels and the ease of communication. We know that social advertizing has also come a long way with new tools and platforms available to marketers so they can drive conversion and monetize their social activities.

But I am not talking about advertising and certainly not about B2C. Our world, the B2B world is a completely different planet as we know. And on this planet, we still need a logical ecosystem. On my part, I have really made a very diligent effort to find B2B social media best practices. I look for the leaders who have driven innovation and change and been able to translate that into tangible results.

Social media is a great catalyst for effective demand generation but have we found the secret sauce for converting a prospect into a qualified lead or sale for a company? It all depends on how you deploy social within your organization. The need of the hour is to achieve total alignment of all go-to-market tactics. What is happening in most organizations, sadly, is that whether it is the hired consultants or in-house social media boss, these experts tend to look at social media as a single-focus tactic. But it is not a proven tactic yet! B2B marketers—my call to you is to start thinking integration and alignment.

I have seen recent advocacy of various measurement metrics, social ROI measurement formulae—this one here, I actually read with keen interest. On the surface, it does seem very logical and simple. I just can’t see a B2B company actually being able to use these formulae very effectively.

The organizations that have seen some B2B social media ROI worth mentioning are focusing first on becoming social organizations within their own four walls. Here is a good case study from CIO magazine about how TD Bank formed an enterprise social network that fuels innovation internally and helps serves customers better on the outside. The bank has seen ROI in the form of:

• Time saving
• Increased productivity
• More effective communication

The 5 Laws that can Deliver B2B Social ROI

There are some useful lessons we can learn from the success of organizations like TD Bank in the case study I mentioned above, and more from Cisco—take a look at this SlideShare presentation: How Cisco Operationalizes Social Media for Repeated Success. Yes, I realize it is a bit dated but it still reiterates the point I am making about “looking in before looking out” and hence, I think it is worth reading. Here is another example of how this company shows “love”. With the combined effect of internal and external social media training, Cisco is seeing greater success in this space—as Elizabeth Houston says in this interview. She also stresses the point I’ve been making: Tons of people are interested in consumer products, but the audience in B2B is more of a finite audience – it requires a specific approach and targeted strategy.

So to quickly summarize what in my opinion should be the tenets / laws / rules, call them what you will of B2B social media:

1. Test your social business initiatives—always—just as we always did with traditional lead generation methods. It’s not worth flying blind when your customers are signing your paycheck!
2. Benchmark internal processes so that even before you start to test your initiatives, you know the direction you are headed in and the goals you hope to accomplish.
3. Collaborate with your employees and learn and share together. Pushing social strategy down people’s throats won’t work, just as no other marketing tactics work either when there is not sufficient buy-in and commitment.
4. Look at ways to utilize your company and executive leadership to see how social processes internally can be enhanced and become value-driven.
5. Don’t worry about fancy metrics and formulae. Relationships cannot be measured by those yardsticks. Your social listening posts and proactive initiatives will yield better results and more meaningful measurement.

On one last note, I want to remind my B2B friends (because I am seeing a lot of this going on and I feel it is my duty to say something)—I don’t believe that employees or executives have the time to Tweet to your customers all day. And your B2B customers don’t have time to read them either. Let’s leave all this noise-making to the Hollywood stars and the Oscar stage. We have a business to run—we need to think Value, Relationship, Originality, Omniscience, Measurement—VROOM…let’s go! (Could not resist that…it came about as I wrote.

About the author: Louis Foong  

Louis Foong is the founder and CEO of The ALEA Group Inc, one of North America’s most innovative B2B demand generation specialists. As a thought leader with more than three decades of experience in the field, Louis guides his team and ALEA’s clients through the dynamic, evolving lead generation landscape. His astute sense of marketing and sales along with a clear vision and ability to see the “big picture” has proved beneficial to numerous organizations, both small and large. With the right advice and a slew of result-driven services, he enables clients to gain maximum return on investment for their lead generation efforts. His clients include companies in the technology, telecommunications, software, healthcare and professional services industries. Prior to starting the ALEA Group, Louis Foong has held various senior executive positions within corporate America. Today he is known and well-respected as a thought leader and pioneer in this industry. Foong is a published blogger and among the top authors on CustomerThink, a global online community of business leaders.

The Five Laws of REAL Social ROI

B2B Marketer Alert: Look In Before Looking Out

Another Social Media Week has come and gone, 5th year in a row. Where are we today? Have we really moved on from Social 101 and Social for Dummies? From a B2C perspective, I think we certainly have and that is inevitable given the popularity of social media channels and the ease of communication. We know that social advertizing has also come a long way with new tools and platforms available to marketers so they can drive conversion and monetize their social activities.

But I am not talking about advertising and certainly not about B2C. Our world, the B2B world is a completely different planet as we know. And on this planet, we still need a logical ecosystem. On my part, I have really made a very diligent effort to find B2B social media best practices. I look for the leaders who have driven innovation and change and been able to translate that into tangible results.

Social media is a great catalyst for effective demand generation but have we found the secret sauce for converting a prospect into a qualified lead or sale for a company? It all depends on how you deploy social within your organization. The need of the hour is to achieve total alignment of all go-to-market tactics. What is happening in most organizations, sadly, is that whether it is the hired consultants or in-house social media boss, these experts tend to look at social media as a single-focus tactic. But it is not a proven tactic yet! B2B marketers—my call to you is to start thinking integration and alignment.

I have seen recent advocacy of various measurement metrics, social ROI measurement formulae—this one here, I actually read with keen interest. On the surface, it does seem very logical and simple. I just can’t see a B2B company actually being able to use these formulae very effectively.

The organizations that have seen some B2B social media ROI worth mentioning are focusing first on becoming social organizations within their own four walls. Here is a good case study from CIO magazine about how TD Bank formed an enterprise social network that fuels innovation internally and helps serves customers better on the outside. The bank has seen ROI in the form of:

• Time saving
• Increased productivity
• More effective communication

The 5 Laws that can Deliver B2B Social ROI

There are some useful lessons we can learn from the success of organizations like TD Bank in the case study I mentioned above, and more from Cisco—take a look at this SlideShare presentation: How Cisco Operationalizes Social Media for Repeated Success. Yes, I realize it is a bit dated but it still reiterates the point I am making about “looking in before looking out” and hence, I think it is worth reading. Here is another example of how this company shows “love”. With the combined effect of internal and external social media training, Cisco is seeing greater success in this space—as Elizabeth Houston says in this interview. She also stresses the point I’ve been making: Tons of people are interested in consumer products, but the audience in B2B is more of a finite audience – it requires a specific approach and targeted strategy.

So to quickly summarize what in my opinion should be the tenets / laws / rules, call them what you will of B2B social media:

1. Test your social business initiatives—always—just as we always did with traditional lead generation methods. It’s not worth flying blind when your customers are signing your paycheck!
2. Benchmark internal processes so that even before you start to test your initiatives, you know the direction you are headed in and the goals you hope to accomplish.
3. Collaborate with your employees and learn and share together. Pushing social strategy down people’s throats won’t work, just as no other marketing tactics work either when there is not sufficient buy-in and commitment.
4. Look at ways to utilize your company and executive leadership to see how social processes internally can be enhanced and become value-driven.
5. Don’t worry about fancy metrics and formulas. Relationships cannot be measured by those yardsticks. Your social listening posts and proactive initiatives will yield better results and more meaningful measurement.

On one last note, I want to remind my B2B friends (because I am seeing a lot of this going on and I feel it is my duty to say something)—I don’t believe that employees or executives have the time to Tweet to your customers all day. And your B2B customers don’t have time to read them either. Let’s leave all this noise-making to the Hollywood stars and the Oscar stage. We have a business to run—we need to think Value, Relationship, Originality, Omniscience, Measurement—VROOM…let’s go! (Could not resist that…it came about as I wrote.)

About the author: Louis Foong 

Louis Foong is the founder and CEO of The ALEA Group Inc, one of North America’s most innovative B2B demand generation specialists. As a thought leader with more than three decades of experience in the field, Louis guides his team and ALEA’s clients through the dynamic, evolving lead generation landscape. His astute sense of marketing and sales along with a clear vision and ability to see the “big picture” has proved beneficial to numerous organizations, both small and large. With the right advice and a slew of result-driven services, he enables clients to gain maximum return on investment for their lead generation efforts. His clients include companies in the technology, telecommunications, software, healthcare and professional services industries. Prior to starting the ALEA Group, Louis Foong has held various senior executive positions within corporate America. Today he is known and well-respected as a thought leader and pioneer in this industry. Foong is a published blogger and among the top authors on CustomerThink, a global online community of business leaders.