5 Ways to Improve B2B SEO Conversion Rates & Benchmarking Data. In late October MarketingSherpa published a chart from their 2012 Website Optimization Benchmark Report, highlighting average conversion rates broken down by industry. B2B search marketers certainly obsess about conversion metrics and this chart does well to provide broad expectation for success, from an industry perspective. That said, the associated article does a good job identifying important considerations in addition to just benchmark information. How do you define conversion? How do you use benchmark data? For this article, I want to look deeper into the improvement of conversion rates for the B2B website.
Here are five recommendations for B2B search engine marketers who seek to improve conversion rates and leverage benchmark data. 1. The first striking thing about the MarketingSherpa chart was the type of conversions B2B marketers were tracking. Some of the types of conversions we recommend to clients include: A somewhat generalized client example: 2. By definition: 3. 4. 5. What's the Most Powerful Use of Big Data for Lead Generation Marketing in 2013? Thad Kahlow | January 2, 2013 | 0 Comments inShare99 As digital marketing techniques and technologies have evolved, front-end metrics from web analytics tools often fall short in delivering enough high-value insight to drive business decisions.
What are the most powerful ways B2B lead generation marketers will be using big data in 2013? Some may say attribution - understanding which channels, content, and messaging is working best.Others may claim personalization and engagement scoring - delivering the right message to the right person at the right time.A few may argue sales efficiency and effectiveness - giving the sales department more relevant information at the right time, helping to close more business faster.But ultimately, I believe the most compelling case can be made for closing the loop - from marketing lead to sale and ultimately maximizing true ROI. To be fair, I introduced these use cases in my last post, "What's the Big Deal With Big Data. " What key insights did this deliver?
The Steps You Need to Define the Stages of Your Sales & Marketing Funnel. By now, most marketers understand the importance of mending the traditional rift between sales and marketing. The mistrust and miscommunication that’s so often found between the two teams can act like an anchor on your company’s growth rate. In fact, organizations with good alignment between sales and marketing teams achieved 20% annual revenue growth in 2010, according to a study by the Aberdeen Group. By contrast, companies with poor alignment saw revenues decline by 4%. Often, one of the biggest blockers for sales and marketing alignment is the very different views each team has of the funnel.
For example, they might disagree about the number of stages a lead passes through before becoming a customer. But that's just our funnel ... what does yours look like? Step 1: Understand Lead Quality Focus on the definition of a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL). Aspects of Lead Qualification Is the lead a good fit? Is the lead interested? Step 2: Develop Your Definition of an MQL Identify Patterns. Sales - Who Is Your Ideal Customer? Three Simple Ways to Find Your Target Market. Determining your target market and acquiring accurate data on your sales prospects may be the most important first steps in developing and managing your long-term sales and marketing strategy, but they are also steps worth repeating to ensure your success.
Salespeople must continually evaluate and determine whether those initial assessments were, well, on target. Unfortunately, the old adage that "a product sells itself" is nothing more than a sales and marketing myth. Products sell in large part because of the due diligence that is completed before the first sales call is made. That means taking the necessary time to create your "ideal customer" profile and then securing a high-end database of prospects and companies that match that profile. My company, AG Salesworks, took such a course of action two years ago as part of its long-term sales strategy. Step 1: Whom do I love doing business with today? Your current client roster is the best place to look for determining whom to sell to. Lead Generation: Trends in 2012 marketing budgets. According to the MarketingSherpa 2012 Lead Generation Benchmark Report (free excerpt at that link), 71% of survey respondents indicated that generating high-quality leads was a top challenge.
So, in today’s blog post, let’s look at lead generation budget trends (hint: money is moving to online tactics) and provide some resources to help you make wise use of that budget. To help you get the most effective use of your budget, here are several case studies and how-to articles for some of the tactics mentioned in the above chart. Website optimization Lead Generation Optimization: Finding the right amount of friction Learn how to optimize for high-quality leads or a high volume of leads, depending on your organization’s needs.
Website Optimization: 7 ways to reduce the perceived cost of lead generation offers You will only capture a lead if the perceived value of providing that information outweighs the perceived cost. Social media B2B Social Media: Video of Jay Baer destroying social media myths. Five 'no regrets' moves for superior customer engagement - McKinsey Quarterly - Marketing & Sales - Strategy. No organization can avoid coming to grips with the rapidly evolving behavior of consumers and business customers. They check prices at a keystroke and are increasingly selective about which brands share their lives. They form impressions from every encounter and post withering online reviews. As we noted in a McKinsey Quarterly article last year, these changes present significant organizational challenges, as well as opportunities.
The biggest is that all of us have become marketers: the critical moments of interaction, or touch points, between companies and customers are increasingly spread across different parts of the organization, so customer engagement is now everyone’s responsibility. In many companies, the marketing function is best placed to orchestrate customer engagement for the entire organization.
To do so, the function must be pervasive—able to influence touch points it doesn’t directly control. 1. 2. The second consideration is how regularly the council should meet. 3. 4. 8 Steps to Designing a Reactivation Campaign. Jack Aaronson | July 6, 2012 | 2 Comments inShare6 With reactivation marketing, you need to understand how long people have been gone, why they left, what's different in your offerings now, and what incentive they might need to come back. While there are many ways to run a reactivation campaign, the following steps will set you on a pretty good path should you decide to launch one. Who is your target? Finally, realize the difference between a reactivation campaign and a regular campaign. If you can't answer, "What is different in our offerings that would make them come back," then skip the reactivation campaign and focus on answering that question! Thoughts, comments? Until next time... Jack.
30 Thought-Provoking Lead Nurturing Stats You Can't Ignore. We've got some news for you, inbound marketers, and it might come as quite a shock: your job doesn't necessarily stop at lead generation (GASP!). Just because a website visitor has downloaded your awesome ebook or registered for your informative webinar doesn't exactly mean he or she is ready to chat with one of your sales reps and jump right into a purchasing decision. (Sorry, but someone had to break it to you.) This means that, in order to be a truly effective inbound marketer, you'll need to continue talking to, sharing content with, and engaging those leads who may be stuck in the middle of your funnel -- caught between their first conversion and a sales call.
The good news is, this is where lead nurturing can play a vital role, enabling marketers to continue to educate, inform, and build a solid relationship with those lost leads to push them closer toward the bottom of the funnel and transform them into a much more qualified sale that's way easier to close. 5 Integrations That Will Amplify the Power of Your Lead Nurturing. To increase the effectiveness and power of your lead nurturing campaigns, there's no question about it: you need to integrate them with other aspects of your marketing.
In fact, it’s actually impossible to run effective lead nurturing campaigns in isolation. They are so closely tied to landing pages, analytics, social media, etc., that you really need to view all these elements as part of an interdependent ecosystem. So how can you ensure your lead nurturing is fully integrated with the rest of your marketing efforts? In this blog post, we'll explore some ways in which lead nurturing relies on and impacts other marketing elements, and exactly how you can take advantage of these optimization opportunities. 1. Integration With Landing Pages Lead nurturing is all about pushing existing prospects through the sales funnel. Next Steps Look at the analytics you have for your landing pages and identify three to five offers that seem to have the best potential for converting leads into customers.
Developing personas for marketing strategy. Personas are an extremely valuable tool for marketers in any field. If you're not familiar with the term, personas are representations of your target audience based on research and interviews. From PR to digital to advertising, any marketing team or agency can benefit from developing client- and/or brand-specific personas. As an example, let's say one of your target audience types is a 18-21 year old male who likes emo music, skateboarding and high-end electronics.
You would come up with a name for this person along the lines of "Nate" and you would find an image of him to use in your planning. When you start making decisions about marketing strategies, you would check back to "Nate" and ask if it would reach him. What would reach him more effectively? What message does he need to hear. Why personas are important: Personas put a face on the customer. How people screw them up: Personas take time and research to get right. How you can avoid screwing them up: Get data. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 7 Clever Email Campaigns That Get Customers Buying Again. If you have a great product, customers will probably want to buy from you again.
But that doesn't mean they'll always remember to. People are busy; no matter how much they love you, sometimes it's just hard to keep in touch, you know? Which is why email remarketing campaigns are great ideas for those who have purchased (or almost purchased) from you in the past! What's an email remarketing campaign, you ask? Pretty much what it sounds like ... you send an email marketing campaign to a lead or customer in your database that encourages them to purchase from you again. And ecommerce businesses that don't leverage remarketing campaigns are missing a huge revenue opportunity -- according to Practical eCommerce, only 5% of new customers that make a purchase with a company return to the site, and only 3% make a second purchase.
But they can get better when you leverage email remarketing campaigns. 1) Abandoned Shopping Cart 2) Wishlist Sale 3) Last Chance to Purchase 4) Repetitive Behavior. Marketing Research in Action: 65% of B2B marketers are not nurturing. So I’ve got this old friend from college. At first, we had fun. Now I only hear from when he needs something. Then after I help him out … he disappears again. Sound uncomfortably like your B2B marketing and sales efforts? Listen in as I speak with Brian Carroll, Executive Director, Revenue Optimization, MECLABS, about lead nurturing and post-sales nurturing, based on research from MarketingSherpa’s 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report and MarketingSherpa’s 2012 Email Marketing Benchmark Report.
“The goal with nurturing is not just always be closing or always be selling,” Brian said. 0:44 Majority of B2B marketers have not established lead nurturing Click to enlarge 2:47 Brian’s definition of lead nurturing3:02 Nurturing emails lead the way for customer lifecycle campaigns 4:23 Three dimensions of lifecycle emails – effectiveness, difficulty and use Related Resources: Lead Nurturing: Build trust, win more deals by helping prospects – not selling them B2B Marketing. General Management - Marketing Automation: Five Must-Do's for Achieving Maximum Efficiency. As marketers continue to face loftier goals while still down a player or two, many of them have turned to marketing automation (MA) as a way to accomplish more with less. MA software, which streamlines and automates marketing activities, has been a focus of many marketers for some time. Using a single system, marketers are able to manage prospect and customer databases, track individual activity, and personalize their messaging.
In most cases, a series of impressions precede a prospect's taking action. Thus, marketers are building more and more complex programs with a variety of activities to generate and convert new leads. So, how can you continue to capitalize on your marketing automation investment and kick your efficiency into high gear?
1. You've probably heard of a welcome campaign, and you likely have auto-responder emails in place to "greet" or thank someone who submits a form on your website. 2. Webinars have become a staple in marketers' strategies. 3. 4. 5. 5 Actionable Insights to Extract From Your Landing Page Analytics. Your landing pages are critical to your effectiveness as an inbound marketer. After all, what better way to collect inbound leads than landing pages? So if you're not putting the effort into creating landing pages -- and the offers to house on those landing pages -- your inbound marketing efforts might not be faring as well as they could be.
And where there are landing pages, there is data. Or at least, there should be. And you know how we feel about data ... Analyzing how your landing pages are performing can provide you with some great insights about the strengths and weaknesses of your lead generation efforts. In short, studying your landing page analytics can make it easier to understand how well your pages are working and help you prioritize which pages and offers to test, improve, and optimize.
Interested in how your landing page analytics can help you make better marketing decisions? The Metrics You Need for Success 1) The Overall Effectiveness of Your Landing Pages. Social Media Landing Pages - 5 Tips for Moving Social Media Leads Into the Sales Funnel. Top B2B Firms Gaining 230% More Leads via Social Media Than Peers. Best-in-Class B2B companies generate on average 17% of their leads from social media channels, roughly 230% more marketing-generated leads than other companies (5%), according to a new report by Aberdeen Group, which examines the social marketing strategies of top-performing B2B companies. In the new report, titled "B2B Social Meeting Marketing: Are We There Yet," Aberdeen uses four key performance criteria to distinguish the Best-in-Class (top 20% of aggregate performers) from the Industry Average (middle 50%) and Laggard (bottom 30%) organizations. The top 20% of companies (i.e., Best-in-Class) have achieved the following performance metrics: Overall, 84% of all surveyed B2B companies are using social marketing in some form.
However, Best-in-Class companies are more likely to use social media primarily for lead-generation purposes, and more likely to integrate social marketing with other core channels and processes, the study found. Below, additional findings from Aberdeen Group. The Time-Crunched Marketer's Guide to Creating Lead-Gen Offers. How to Tailor Lead Nurturing Content to Suit Individual Personas. Conversion Assists: How to Leverage Your Site's Most Influential Pages. How to Start a Lead Management Program in 9 Easy Steps. How to Excel With the Most Underused Marketing Automation Features. How social business will transform B2B Sales & Marketing. Combining SEO and CRO for Higher Conversion Rates. Sales - Three Ways to Improve Your Lead-Scoring Process. How to Master the Design of Compelling Calls-to-Action. 6 Tips for Using Propensity Models to Improve Response and Revenue.
Five Tips for Implementing a Successful QR Code Campaign. How to Use Lead Intel to Accelerate Sales. 7 Lead Generation Trends For 2012 -- What You Need to Do Right Now [SPONSORED] What a Top-Notch Lead Management Program Looks Like. 10 Creative Ways to Use QR Codes for Marketing. What Makes People Buy? 20 Reasons Why. Selling to Big Companies - Accessing C-Level Decision Makers.