We’re increasingly seeing this request from clients, which is to be expected when they’re spending hard cash on soft marketing. This eMarketer table shows the change in the expectations of CMOs from 2010 to 2011 (original source was Austin’s original Bazaarvoice and their CMO Club Survey).

The most interesting change is the DOUBLING of the expectation that increased conversions are a reasonable measure of SMM effectiveness. In B2B marketing, there’s a tripling of the use of increased channel sales as a measure. It’ll be interesting to see how their marketing departments connect cause and effect on those sales!

To put all this in the proper context, consider this pull quote from the published results of the CMO Club Survey: “However, standard ROI metrics proved difficult to measure for many social efforts; only 40% of CMOs surveyed in 2011 successfully tracked ROI on their social initiatives.” Not saying it can’t be done, but it ain’t easy.

The B2B Technology Marketing Blog posted results of a B2B Marketing poll conducted via their LinkedIn group.  Things like: Integration of social media into lead gen programs; Focus on content marketing, lead quality, sales enablement, pull/inbound marketing tactics, etc.   No gigantic surprises, but predictions are always fun and B2B Marketing Trends seem worth a read to me.

I’m in charge of coming up with B2B social media marketing strategies for our clients, then helping get the content that makes them work through the process of development and implementation. That means I do a lot of research and exploration to find out what lies in that lovely matrix of customer interest and market opportunity. What I do is all about possibility. It’s about sorting out the puzzle pieces and making something cohesive from them (which I love doing).

My research takes me outside of the things that are my immediate domain because I need to have an understanding of what the client does already and how it’s working, what they’re not doing, and where the opportunities are. There tends to be a pile of “other stuff” that isn’t what we’re contracted to do. If there’s something that really needs attention, we’ll point it out and can help you get it taken care of or refer you to someone who can.

Sometimes, I wish that it was my job to help deal with this pile of “other stuff” that could be done as part of the web marketing strategy. It can be hard to curtail scope creep when you’re really excited about finding a huge, untapped opportunity for a client. You might be wondering how people missed these big opportunities in their own business. They’re often not the most obvious or trendy ways to solve the problem. Or maybe they solve the problem in an unexpected way. What they almost always are is the second right answer.

A Facebook page or Twitter stream might not yield big results for your company. You might not have the time or strategy to market it, maintain interest, and fill it with useful content. That doesn’t mean you’re exempt from needing to have some social media in place. Would answering common troubleshooting questions regarding your product or software on tech forums make users less frustrated and inspire brand loyalty? Is checking your reviews on Google, Yahoo!, and Yelp part of your routine? What about responding to customers that had a less than ideal experience?

If you’re intimidated or unable to build and maintain some of the bigger efforts that would boost your company’s web marketing strategy, I challenge you to sit down and think of a dozen things you could do that are second right ideas. Just because they weren’t the first right idea doesn’t make them any less right!

October is usually the month that companies are working on budget for the next year, so I wanted to be prompt in reminding you that the continual improvement offered by site optimization is a great investment.

We talk to a lot of companies who a) didn’t know they were missing 90+ percent of their potential new prospects by having an unoptimized site, b) had no idea they would need to rework their website to reach these people, and c) didn’t budget for it. Well, what other marketing investment is going to increase your leads and web sales by 50-100%? That makes the ROI on the investment easy to figure out.

If you don’t know what it’s going to cost to fix your site, talk to a good SEO agency now, discuss your options, and make sure you include enough money to do the substantial work with content that will improve your rankings. Even if you only have $1000 a month to put toward working on the site, that’s still enough to effect positive change. We have clients who spend $250 a month, and clients who spend $5-10,000 a month on SEO. What you need for a search marketing budget really depends on what needs to be done…which is why we start with an audit or, for bigger companies, an audit with a thorough competitive analysis. That gives you a strategy and road map of how to get there…well worth the effort and the limited investment ($2500-4500). Our rule of thumb for B2B sites is to plan on spending $25-30K in the first year, and adjust based on your results.

Lots of marketing folks have produced articles about the tendency for businesses to cut their marketing budgets when things take a downward turn.  Marketing is often considered an expense (although WE consider it an investment) and is one of the first areas to be cut when budgets are slimmed down.  Okay, hacked away to decimal dust.   What is one thing you CAN do if your budget has been reduced to near nothingness?  Referral Marketing.  It can be cheap — free even! — and benefits are realized very quickly.  This article, “The Power of Referrals,” from e-Myth Worldwide gives lots of good rationale for referral marketing, including steps you can take to increase referrals to your company.  Be sure and read the comments left by their readers, as well.  Oh, and if you know of any B2B companies that could benefit from increased traffic to their websites, you know where to send them!

I just listened to a recording of John Jantsch with Duct Tape Marketing, interviewing Seth Godin, bestselling author, entrepreneur and agent of change. They covered a LOT of interesting topics related to small businesses and our current economic environment, including why Godin doesn’t Twitter! Godin is a believer in being the best in the world at a few things, rather than being average at a bunch of things. I was multitasking while listening (being average at a bunch of things), and I still got a great deal out of the interview. Seth’s final request of the audience was to “just start” — so, I am hereby just starting by blogging about it! Tell me what YOU are going to start.

I’ll be chairing a panel on Metrics and Measurement at Interactive Austin 2009, and tasked the panel (Ian Strain-Seymour of Apogee Search, Pam O’Neal of BreakingPoint, Michael Wilson of Small World Labs, and Andy Meadows of BudURL fame and Live Oak 360) with coming up with questions we think people will be interested in. We’ve got a couple of search marketing gurus, a couple of guys with companies wrapped around social media marketing, and Pam’s a B2B social media maven, with some great success stories and real-world experience to share.

Please take a few minutes and complete this questionnaire on the topics, focus and specific questions YOU would like to have answered. We will be a much more focused, relevant panel if we can get your input. Hope to see you at IA09!

Click Here to take survey

This is a very interesting time, as we’ve got multiple projects requiring keyword research, and very different requirements:

• Revisiting a national marketer’s site after almost 2 years of client inactivity
• Finessing a technology client’s site after doing our PPC experiments
• Optimizing a couple of new healthcare technology sites
• Starting up a PPC campaign for a client marketing to IT managers

Working on new sites is always like solving a puzzle, because you have to dig into their business quickly, take the keyword research you have, and apply our marketing experience to make recommendations about how the site should be structured. You have to think about the one person making the initial search (when they have a vague idea of how to solve their problem), and then multiple visits from multiple people as the solution is researched, the company is closely inspected, and the search activity becomes a genuine lead. You have to write for awareness, consideration and evaluation, writing good marketing copy, but interweave the best search terms in such a way that the prospect doesn’t notice.

Technology companies are especially challenging, because you use the vocabulary of an engineer, who may be searching on heat dissipation, cooling, fans, heat sinks, or thermal management. (Doesn’t that sound just like an engineer? Optimistic that the problem can be completely controlled, if the right technology can be found.) Over the space of a few months, a leading edge technology will engender more and better searches as the topic gets presented at conferences and in the trades, so we have to stay open to the change, refine our research, and revise our strategy. Quickly adapting to the trend gets you a lot more search, because you’ve already established some authority for the topic.

The PPC campaign for IT managers is also very interesting professionally. The client had been with a PPC agency on the West Coast, but it was obvious that they didn’t do their homework…generic keywords, vague terms, scattershot campaigns, and an absurd offer. After doing technology marketing for 20+ years, I understand that our clients’ prospects are usually very intelligent, marketing-averse people. Fortunately, I’m curious about technology, like to dig into the details, and can generally help the client communicate more clearly–and certainly more persuasively, but without the condescending cuteness of “agency creative.” Taking that experience into the field of paid search, with a classified ad to communicate and one shot to get the prospect to register, requires some real focus (and the willingness to test several approaches). I’m excited about it because I get to work with some very analytical marketers, and because we’re doing an experiment which can be replicated for other clients.

Tech marketing via PPC ads isn’t easy, especially when you know only 20% of the prospects are willing to click on an ad, but if we can generate good results with this tough audience, we know the effort was worthwhile…and we do want all of our clients to succeed. Because search marketing is measurable, it’s all about the metrics and measurement of results…and in taking the time to understand the prospect and doing the keyword research to find the terms that are most likely to convert.

I often think about how to get messages to the B2B market on behalf of our clients.  Typical ‘networking’ and ‘lead-generation’ groups I’ve been involved with rarely had B2B participants.  I don’t know if you’d ever see a C-Level executive delivering their “elevator pitch” at your typical BNI meeting. I think B2B decision makers are so entrenched in their day-to-day jobs that they have no time or patience for networking, much less social media outlets.

Then, I stumbled upon “New research: B2B buyers have a very high social participation” on the Groundswell blog site. Groundswell is a book written by two Forrester Research analysts.  Their research shows that 91% of technology decision makers are watching videos and participating in (if only just reading) blogs and other social media outlets.  So, we’ll keep recommending social media strategies to our B2B clients.  I, for one, will feel just a little bit more comfortable doing so with some research statistics under my belt that validate the necessity.

What do you other B2B marketers think?  Are you encouraging your B2B clients to have a blog? post videos? Tweet away the hours?

While most readers of this blog do not work for local businesses, many of you know local ‘bricks and mortar’ business owners needing some guidance about advertising locally.  I am also assuming that most of you have a bulky yellow pages taking up room on a shelf in your home.  Mine has never been opened since it arrived at my front door, and it has stayed out of the recycle bin only because a day may come when my internet connection goes down.  So it was not surprising for me to read a recent article in SearchEngineLand.com that two thirds of people looking for information about local businesses are abandoning their print yellow pages for the internet.  A July 2008 study by TMP Directional Marketing shows that of the 90% of people looking for local business information, about a third use print yellow pages, a third use internet yellow pages and local search websites, and a third use search engines.  However, those using search engines are often directed to internet yellow pages and local search sites, making these directories very important for local businesses!  For example, of the top twenty organic results on Google for ‘austin tx party store,’ only two of these link to the websites of stores in Austin selling party supplies.  All the others comprise eleven different national yellow page directories, local search directories, and party specific directories.

So local businesses need to pay attention to directories – but which ones should they choose? It is important to do keyword research to know what terms people are using to find the products and services you offer.  If you then use these keywords to run searches through Google and Yahoo!, it will become clear which directories have visibility, and you should spend some time adding as much free information that is allowed on those directories. SearchEngineLand.com gives additional guidance here, showing the usefulness of Google Trends in determining the web search volume of particular sites. Google trends will also show regional distinctions between directories – Citysearch is by far the leader in Austin, but comes a distant third to Yellowpages.com and Superpages.com in Dallas. Google Analytics will also help businesses see how internet traffic is coming to their site.  A minimum amount of advertising can be done on a number of high ranking directories, and then the performance of those directories can be tracked over several months.  Directories in their ‘resurrected’ form can definitely help small businesses!