5 tips for B-to-B search marketing

More and more organisations are investing in paid search marketing, or pay-per-click advertising, as it is more commonly referred to.

In Australia, because of the dominance of Google, paid search marketing is normally Google AdWords advertising.

The following tips may help you get better value for your investment.

1. Pre-qualify

In mainstream advertising, when you want to reach Chief Executives and you choose to advertise in the Financial Review, you are pre-qualifying.

Well, you have to do exactly the same online. And you mainly do it with key phrases and keywords. You can hardly spend too much time getting your keywords right and regularly reviewing them.

The keywords should make it clear exactly what people will find when they click through to your site. If they click on ‘house and contents’ you’d better make sure that’s where you take them – and that when they get there, you explain your ‘house and contents’ policy. You may reduce the volume of clickthroughs, but that’s what qualifying involves.

2. Focus on what the user needs

If you truly understand the buying steps that your prospects typically go through, you are more likely to know exactly what it is that they need.

What is most likely to influence purchase? If it's a complex sale with multiple buyers and influencers, then you need to provide the type of detail that buyers require.

Landing pages, in particular, should highlight exactly what buyers need.

3. Hot leads go cold quickly, so nurture them

In most B-to-B sales, getting leads to your site is just the beginning.

You need to have an agreed system in place for ‘working’ your leads, and that begins with an opt-in from the prospects for regular email.

How are you going to keep in touch? Is there something of value that you can offer on an ongoing basis?

If the lead has to be passed to your technical people or to sales, then there needs to be an efficient way of doing this that you stick to every time.

4. Track all conversion points

What’s the conversion point that is usually most telling? Maybe it’s the completion of an online form by a prospect.

It’s important to know what this critical point is, but it’s also important to monitor the impact of your paid search campaign on all your sales metrics.

Only then can you be sure of the impact your investment is having.

5. Detail tells the story

Search Engine Marketing is very much a detail business. If you are going to do it effectively over time, you need to have the time to continually check it.

Maybe it’s identifying different ads that work, maybe it’s advertising on different days or at different times. Whatever the case, there are savings to be made if you can identify exactly what is going on.

For example, if you uncover that a certain ad is producing most of your response and that other ads are doing nothing, then you can improve your results significantly by dropping the ones that don’t work and putting all your budget into the one that does.

Consumer attitudes and a good cause

It seems that despite the GFC, consumers are still spending with companies and brands that have a clear social purpose.

A 2009 global study reported last month in The Wise Marketer (www.thewisemarketer.com) has some interesting stats about consumer attitudes.

Surveying 6000 people in 10 countries, the study particularly looked at whether consumers will swap brands where a brand supports a good cause. Countries surveyed include USA, UK, France, Italy, Japan, China, India and Brazil.

Some of the most interesting results were:

> 67% of consumers say they would switch brands if another brand of similar quality supported a good cause.
> 83% of consumers are willing to change their consumption habits if it can help make the world a better place to live in.
> 70% said they would prefer to live in an 'eco-friendly house' rather than a 'big house'.
> 69% of consumers would rather use a brand that supports the livelihood of local producers than a designer brand.
> 71% think brands and companies spend too much on advertising and marketing and should put more into good causes.
> 64% would recommend a brand that supports a good cause, up from 52% in 2008.
> 64% expect all brands to support a good cause.
63% are looking toward brands and companies to make it easier for them to make a difference in the world.

With the survey covering so many countries, the challenge for us is to assess how relevant these figures are for Australia in general, and for our own specific target audiences in particular.

Putting a value on email subscribers

Arthur Hughes is an American marketing guru who has been around for a long time. He’s been to Australia, and some readers of The Scoop may have been lucky enough to hear him.

Hughes wrote the book on database marketing many years ago, but since the rise of the internet and the new media, he has reinvented himself.

Today, Arthur Hughes is senior strategist for the email marketing services provider e-Dialog, which is based in the small town of Burlington, near Boston, in the state of Massachusetts.

At a recent presentation, Hughes put forward some thoughtful ideas on acquiring email subscribers, including the following.

1. The first step is to find out what your email subscribers are worth. Without knowing their value, you don’t know whether the effort to acquire more is worthwhile.

2. For putting a value on subscribers, there are four important metrics that you need to be specific about:

•The value of online and offline orders generated from email;
•The costs of your email program;
•Gross profit generated from email subscribers; and
•Individual subscriber lifetime value.

These numbers are fundamental before you proceed.

3. Once you’ve decided that getting new email subscribers benefits the business, then Arthur Hughes suggests you consider the following:

> Promote email registration prominently throughout your site, including the checkout page.
> Explain why consumers should subscribe. Is it for free shipping on their next order, for the chance to receive ‘thought-leader’ white papers, express checkout, or what?
> Send triggered, personalised welcome messages as soon as consumers sign up for your email program.
> Reward your employees for email addresses collected.
> Reward your subscribers. Offer subscribers incentives such as special prices for them only, discount coupons, premiums, white papers and continuing benefits such as free shipping.
> If appropriate, upgrade your point-of-sale system to capture email addresses.
> Use surveys to solicit email addresses. The surveys can be about any subject — e.g. politics, economics, products, etc. — and are a good way to get email addresses in return for survey results.

Changing your mood

We’re talking about changing your mood in writing, here, not your mood first thing in the morning or when you’re disturbed after watching an exciting movie at home!

Writers need to be aware of mood changes.

You need to alert the reader as soon as possible to any change in mood from the previous sentence. Words to use for changing the mood include: but, yet, however, nevertheless, still, instead, meanwhile.

Shareholders were obviously delighted to get the overall picture from the Chair, but when the CEO began to speak . . .

In this example, the mood obviously changed when the CEO began to speak, and the word that signals that mood change most clearly to the reader is ‘but’.

It’s much easier for readers to process a sentence if you start with ‘but’ when you are shifting direction. It is much harder if they must wait until the end of the sentence to realise that you have shifted.

Many of us were taught that no sentence should start with ‘but’. If that’s what you learned, then it’s time to unlearn it.

There is no stronger word at the start of a sentence when you want to change the mood.