In the world of B2B marketing, the fourth quarter is like a wind-up toy slowly coming to a halt. The third quarter is when marketers are busy, priming the sales pipeline. If the deal’s not done by Thanksgiving, it’s probably not happening…unless your client suddenly needs to empty out their 2011 budget. There’s plenty of discussion about 2012 budgets in Q4, but it’s a rare company that can commit to start spending in January.

So, it was a pleasant surprise this past week to be super busy working on proposals and projects. I think some consistently positive economic news has generated a little confidence in the executive ranks, emboldening marketing folks to get going. Clients are now talking about branding and complete site redesigns, not just tweaks. That’s what we like to hear!

We always kick off the new year by looking at year-over-year stats for our clients, using Google Analytics to provide visual reinforcement for the gains of the past year. We’re really enjoying some of the bells and whistles in the new GA interface…one of the best is persistent dates and comparisons, which made these YOY comparisons a snap. (Googlers, please get busy on restoring email and PDF exports…our clients rely on getting these!)

Some of the new energy in the search marketing world is coming from Google+ and the emphasis on social search in their current direction. This should not have a significant impact on B2B marketers at present, but it’s a trend to watch. By all means, set up a Google+ page for your business, and learn about Circles, which is the clever organizational tool they’re using to help you filter your communications. Social marketing, whether it’s PR or your blog or now Google+, is creating links for your site in the biosphere of relationships and interconnectedness…your site needs to be an active part of the community
of your industry.

The continuing tweaks Google is making to the Panda release of their indexing shows more emphasis on freshness, on a positive user experience (especially page load times and engagement), and on quality. Sites with lots of ads at the top of the page are seeing their rankings go down. After all, a site visitor wants to see your content, not a bunch of AdWords ads. It’s always good when Google reinforces the message of quality…we’ve always been about quality content and thoughtful site architecture, so our clients’ rankings remain remarkably consistent, through change after change in the mighty Google algorithm.

The start of the year is a good time to revisit your web strategy. Have you opened up your site to mobile users? Are you migrating from Flash to HTML5, to the benefit of all those visitors using iPads or iPhones? How are you doing with your rankings? Are you missing opportunities because you’ve been complacent about reaching all the people searching? A fresh analysis of the Total Available Search Marketâ„¢ right now can open up new possibilities for growth…and drive a brilliant 2012.

John Rasco

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.

Here’s an interesting little table (you go, eMarketer!) on how Internet users share information…how they publish or share. I saw a tweet yesterday that 71% of all tweets are ignored (meaning a 71% drop in Twitter’s imaginary market value, I guess), but it’s fascinating to look at demographic penetration and see what’s really happening. Too bad some other social media weren’t called out, like LinkedIn. Even with all the news and buzz, we can’t get enough data on actual user behavior to inform our clients’ business decisions.

Thought you marketers might be interested in a little research on how people are using all the tools of the social media trade: email, Twitter, etc. Despite all the buzz, only 4% of internet users are not only doing email, but also are Facebook fans and Twitter followers.

Thanks to the folks at eMarketer for another perceptive perspective.

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!

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

Ran an interesting little experiment last week, testing the marketing effectiveness of promoting a new free SEO Web Design Tips PDF. Patrick’s blog post was too good not to use as link bait, but as you probably know, you can’t track the downloads of a PDF with on-page analytics tracking code.

However, link shrinking software CAN give you these metrics. Using a $4 account at BudURL, I created two shortened URLs, /SEOWebDesign and /SEOWebDesignTips. Then, I used LinkedIn’s News feature in all the groups I belong to, and sent out an announcement with a link to the new freebie. At the same time, I tweeted the news, using the shorter of the two URLs…at 140 characters, it’s not exactly a press release. I have about 100 followers, and I expected it would get retweeted, hopefully by some of the more popular Twitizens. However, in retrospect, I realized I should have specifically asked that people retweet.

The results? In a week, 271 page visits via LinkedIn, 2 via Twitter. Our site traffic was up 17% for the week, so all-in-all, a decent promotion. I’ll try retweeting the tweet this week with a specific retweet request, and see what we get.

I don’t think I’m any more well-known on the marketing groups on LinkedIn than among my Twitter peeps, but it’s certainly true that the audience self-selected in LinkedIn groups is better targeted. When you think about social media, don’t forget that you still need affinity, interest and motivation to see results…and, that if you measure your results, you can learn a lot about where you should be spending your time.

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?

Some people make resolutions around this time of the year. If you like them, great. I have no use for them. I prefer challenges and goals, things with restrictions and deadlines, things that demand work every day. The problem with resolutions is that they’re so nebulous, so open-ended. For me to be successful, I need a community, too. Back in college, a bunch of friends and I did the Danskin Women’s Triathlon. I never would have signed up on my own. Never ever. The community of friends was only way I wound up standing in front of a lake, watching the sun come over the horizon with a few hundred women.

The secret wasn’t support, though that was great. It was having to be accountable on a daily basis for working toward a goal. We hired a coach. We learned to run and to swim together. We were stunned at our successes and marveled at the unexpected roadblocks. Almost every single big, personal accomplishment in my life has a similar structure. NaBloPoMo was easy compared to NaNoWriMo (next year, so help me God, I will get to 50,000 words).

I’m a writer, and I mostly live in the land of words. That’s not all I do. Right now, I take pictures every day. Every single day. If there weren’t flickr and the various groups and challenges and projects and photo friends, I think it would be really hard to do. It’s the same with anything. When people ask me about adding various social media aspects of marketing to what they’re already doing in marketing, the main point I try to make is that it doesn’t create itself. Yes, it’s free and available to everyone, it’s not hard to do, but you actually have to DO it.

We all have computers, pen and paper—how many of us write books or poems or stories? The idea of sitting down to write a book is incredibly daunting. Writing for an hour or so a day for a month? Not so bad. You can do all 50,000 words of NaNoWriMo in 60-90 minutes of writing a day. You can do social media in far less time. A huge part of successful social media is being involved with the community. You don’t have to blog every day. Blog on Monday mornings. On the other mornings, you come in to work, grab your cup of coffee, and spend 20 minutes reading what other people write. Make pertinent comments. Internalize what they say. Not only does it foster relationships and bring you readers, it makes you informed and creates something for you to write about when it’s time for you to sit down and say something.

My challenge to you isn’t to make resolutions or identify places that could use some work, but to actually find something small to add to your daily routine that will make a big difference in aggregate. You don’t have to be a writer or a social media expert or incredibly clever in snippets of 140 characters or fewer. You just have to do the work.

Here are some numbers from page 42 of Groundswell, by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff:

From a sample of 10,000 online US consumers, the percent who say they do the following things monthly:

Use Twitter – 5%

Write articles, stories, poems, etc, and post them online – 7%

Use RSS – 8%

Listen to podcasts – 11%

Publish / update their own Web pages – 11%

Publish / maintain / or update a blog – 11%

Post ratings / reviews of products or services – 11%

Listen to or download audio/music from other users – 14%

Contribute to online forums or discussion groups – 18%

Add comments to someone’s page on a social networking site – 18%

Update / maintain a profile on a social networking site – 20%

Read blogs – 25%

Read reviews / ratings – 25%

Visit social networking sites – 25%

Read online forums or discussion groups – 28%

Watch video from other users – 29%

Those of us in b2b marketing must keep in mind that business-to-business happens person-to-person. And more and more, folks are getting together online to swap stories in one way or another…are your prospects there?