Driving Sales and Marketing Alignment
by Jonathan Block, Sirius Decisions
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While methodologies and approaches abound for understanding where customers or prospects are in the social channel and how they use it, we’ve found no better guide than our buying cycle. I’ll use this post to cover our buying cycle concept and the roles within it, while a future post will discuss how these notions should play a key role in your social strategy and execution.

If an organization doesn’t understand — even at a basic level — the way prospects buy what it sells, it will never be able to use social media outlets and marketing to facilitate these decisions. This is due to the fact that as prospects move toward a purchase, the tone, message, offer and even communicator for a specific marketing effort should be altered.

Buyers don’t go through a straight-line process of getting information through the Web or social outlets, weighing one solution against another and finally making a decision. Instead, a typical B2B buying process comprises a series of smaller decisions involving a variety of audiences that move into and out of the buying process.

SiriusDecisions has created a model that describes six macro stages that B2B organizations typically go through (see diagram, below). These six stages can be rolled up into three higher-level phases: education, active buying and closing.

As you are identifying the distinct activity phases within a buying cycle, you should also be uncovering who the key “actors” are in each phase and the specific roles they play. Typical actors include champions, CXOs, influencers (can be external or internal to the company), users and ratifiers (usually purchasing, procurement or negotiations). It is common for groups to enter and leave regularly, and to play multiple — and very different — roles depending on the type of product or service being sold. While a CTO might play a significant role during the Exploring Possible Solutions stage in one case, he or she will wait for the Justifying the Decision stage in another. Users may be brought in early or late, while other executive groups play no role whatsoever.

An understanding of actors and roles by stage is a tremendous advantage to your sales and marketing teams; not only will they know whom to target (and who to ignore) and what channels (social or otherwise) to use, but messaging, programs and specific content can be developed and delivered at the right time. You also will avoid common mistakes such as targeting the CXO level with Loosening of the Status Quo and Committing to Change messages and demand creation efforts when these executives do not play any role at the beginning of the buying process.

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10 Top Tips for Managing Your AdWords Account
by Ian Rhodes, AMA Access – B2B Marketing
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In business, it’s easy to have the mentality of “if it’s not broke, don’t fix it”. This is far from the truth when it comes to managing your Paid Search account within AdWords.

Whichever level of management you’re at, whether the Managing Director or the Marketing Executive, the accountability for your AdWords campaign lands at somebody’s feet. If that’s you, then follow these top tips to maximize the effectiveness of your Google account.

1. Know your AdWords Interface.
The next time you log in, take a look at the “Professional Qualifications” page whereby you can register to take the Google Professional Individual Qualification. More importantly, within this section there are a series of test exams. Take 1015 minutes to see how well you know AdWords by attempting these questions without any reference back to AdWords (no cheating!). Taking the qualification will not only advance your knowledge of AdWords it will also enhance your stature within your business for pursuing additional budget and resources.

2. Drill Down to the Individual Keywords.
It’s all well and good seeing pleasing conversions and controlled ad spend when viewing your top line figures. There are, however, massive opportunities available to you when optimizing individual keywords. Google has recently launched “Bid Simulator” within its latest interface which allows you to view the potential impact on clicks and impressions if you raise or lower your bid on individual keywords or phrases. This is the perfect tool for any business managing its AdWords manually without assistance from a bid management tool.

3. Keep Your Campaigns Tidy
Make sure you maintain necessary levels of categorization for your ad groups and keywords. Running an optimized campaign with your keywords neatly categorized either through Call to Action terms such as “Buy Widgets” and all variants such as “Cheap Widgets” etc, not only assists maintaining a high Quality Score it also helps you understand which phrases represent the best value for your business. April 2010 2 B2B Marketing

4. Customize Your Placements
With AdWords you can choose the specific sites where you wish your ads to be shown within Google’s Content Network. Rather than relying on simple Automated Ad Placements, delve deeper to see if WidgetForums.com are running AdSense to give you a great opportunity to hit your target market.

5. Sync with Analytics
Taking advantage of Google’s Free Analytics package not only gives you a greater understanding of your site traffic levels, it lets you delve in to see the specific success/failure of each of your ad campaigns, groups and individual keywords. Certain groups may be triggering great levels of leads rather than purchases or vice versa and may affect your willingness to spend more or less on those particular keywords. Analytics provides a tremendous amount of information at your fingertips for deciding upon the necessary bids throughout your campaigns.

6. Conversion Tracking is a Must
Without any form of conversion tracking for your site, whether for leads, registrations or purchases, you’re potentially flying blind and focusing all of your efforts on the wrong areas. Conversion tracking is easy to integrate; if you’re not sure how to, find somebody who can.

7. Don’t Be Afraid to Tinker
Your ads stand between your website and a potential customer. Be smart and run a variety of ads to see which ones convert and which ones obtain the higher CTR. This will lead to the overall success of your ad campaign(s). Once you have data from 200+ click throughs, revisit your ads and pause those that simply aren’t attracting your customers’ interest. Yes, you’re not paying anything due to the fact nobody clicks, but the knock on effect is a lowering of your Ad Group Quality Score as well as missing out on potential customers who aren’t seeing the ads that really do work.

8. Segment your Market
Don’t just focus on those that are looking to buy. Evoke interest by running specific campaigns for specific offers your business is running. This can be a great way to shift excess stock for retailers. You’ll see greater Click Through Rates on those ads that aren’t necessarily focused on the mainstream, but on the niche.

9. Look For Trends
Use Google’s Reporting mechanism to look at daily, weekly and monthly trend patterns for your particular ads. Are you seeing certain ads are performing well during the day, but poorly at night? If this is the case weight those ads using Google’s Ad Scheduling (found in Ad Campaign Settings). You may find people have a different mentality to their shopping whether it’s from the office desk at lunchtime, or surfing the net in the evenings. Run the Hourly Reports and see what information you can extract.

10. Make Good Use of AdWords Offerings
Following the latest launch of the AdWords interface there’s now even more assistance available to allow you to optimize your ads. Run ‘Campaign Optimizer’ to see if Google have found any empty holes in your account where you could capitalize with additional keywords. Don’t forget, it’s in Google’s best interest to make sure your account is optimized and you’re spending more.

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30 Ways to Use a Paragraph of Copy
by Marjorie Clayman, Musings on Marketing and Other Morsels
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Time is of the essence these days. Everyone is busy. Time is an endangered species, it seems. We all want the most mileage out of cars, out of our jobs, out of our networks, and out of everything else we do, too.

I maintain that one of the biggest time savers is, paradoxically, a lot of planning on the front end. To illustrate this point, imagine this hypothetical situation (or maybe it’ll hit close to home). You’re the CEO of a manufacturing company, and you’ve just introduced a new and exciting benefit-oriented product. You write up a description of the product, how it works, and how it will benefit your prospects and customers. Still, the roll-out process seems undeniably daunting. How can you get the most bang for your creative buck?

With a lot of planning on the front end, that little paragraph can form the entire backbone of a campaign. With some additions here, some revisions there, and some rewording when needed, an entire product launch can be built around that first little cloud of a product thought. Here are 30 ways to use a single paragraph of copy to promote a new product across a multitude of channels. Just imagine where 2 paragraphs could take you!

1. Blurb of copy introducing the product on the company homepage
2. Press Release
3. Copy for a sell sheet
4. Copy for a YouTube “about” description
5. Break it up into a handful of Tweets
6. Facebook Status Update
7. Facebook Note
8. E-Blast
9. Ad copy
10. Copy for a landing page to track ad performance
11. Blog
12. Description for a Flickr ” post
13. Answer to a LinkedIn question in the Q&A section
14. Answer to a question that pops up in a LinkedIn group
15. Copy for Booth Graphics
16. Copy for a direct mail piece
17. Webinar Abstract
18. Answer to a customer email
19. Pull a line of copy for a promo/promotional item
20. Blurb for “on hold” customer to listen to
21. Submission for a value-added write-up (could be on product, lit, other)
22. Introduction to a case study
23. Centerpiece of an article
24. Slide for a presentation at a company open house
25. Presentation to a board of directors
26. Narration for a video on the product
27. Core narration for a podcast
28. Submission for innovative manufacturer award
29. Baseline for interview
30. Description for an industry buyers guide or directory

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Thank you, Come Again!: Best Practices for Thank You Pages
by Christopher Haddad, HubSport Blog
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For many businesses who have worked hard to optimize their website, create compelling content and set up landing pages to convert visitors, generating leads is the ultimate reward. While generating leads is a great accomplishment marketers need to think about the steps that follow the lead conversion and their impact on customer acquisition.

Before you crack into the champagne for getting the notification that a new lead has come through the site, take a moment and reflect on what you are telling that lead before they’ve even left your site, or before they probably even received the offer that you promised them. Here are a few best practices you can use to start nurturing your leads from the start and help to make sure every lead is excited to hear from your sales team.

Thank the Lead for Their Interest

Thank You pages exist so that we can begin nurturing the leads that converted. Put yourself in the lead’s shoes – they just gave you their email address, and the least you can do is say “Thanks for your interest”. Every Landing Page should have a dedicated Thank You page, which makes your life super easy to further tailor your Thank You page to continue reinforcing the value of the offer and why the lead can’t live without it.

Set Great Expectations

On your landing page, you made it clear what needed to be done in order to receive the offer. On your Thank You pages, one of the big things that you should be doing is telling the lead what will happen next. Are you sending them an email with a link to a PDF for them to download? Will they be getting a call to schedule an assessment within 24 or 48 hours? The absolute last thing you want the lead to think is “Oh great, they have my email address – now what?”, so just answer that question before its even asked.

Suggest They Follow You

You’ve already added links to your blog and social media accounts to your home page, site footer, and even your email signatures, right? Add an additional call-to-action to your Thank You pages explicitly asking the visitor to subscribe to your blog or follow you in social media. They’ve already completed one action you asked them to do, so why not ask for something else that will help them stay in touch with you, while increasing your marketing reach.

Bonus – Suggest They Share the Offer

One of the easiest ways to turbocharge your landing page is to ask the lead to share the offer with friends right on your Thank You page. Give them an easy to share link that leads others back to the Landing Page for the offer, the will help your offer spread even further.

We’d love to hear what some of your Thank You page best practices are, feel free to share!

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Bethesda Emedia Marketing – Ask us about your website or template redesign.