The ABCs of B2B Search Success in 2017
by MGB2B
Follow These Basic Tenets of B2B Search Engine Marketing To See Success in 2017.
2016 was a year of big changes in the field of online search. With the switch to a mobile-first ranking system, the addition of expanded text ads in paid search and an overhaul of the desktop search results page that reduced paid ad space, our friends at Google are always doing their best to keep us in B2B search marketing on our toes. And 2017 is sure to be another exciting year full of changes, opportunities, and challenges. That makes right now the perfect time to reflect on some of the basic tenets of B2B SEO and SEM strategy. Or as I like to call them — the ABCs of B2B Search Success in 2017.
A – Audience Awareness
Whether you’re freshening up ad copy, running a new link-building campaign or strengthening your keyword lists, the most important thing is to focus on addressing the needs of your audience. It’s easy to get caught up in your own sales goals and deadlines, but if you don’t think of the customer first, you won’t each either one successfully. Research their demographics and interests. Understand who they are and where they are before you plan your SEM. Imagine who you’re writing that ad copy for and what things they care about. Remember what drives them to search in the first place, what problems they have, and the answers that you can provide when adding keywords. Mastering this skill will give you an edge over your competition in 2017.
B – Business Opportunities
We all work in different business sectors, with different goals, priorities, and concerns. Whether you run one large SEM account or multiple accounts for different sub-brands, it’s important to keep your strengths and weaknesses in mind. And keep a sharp eye out for SEM opportunities that play to those strengths. This will help you pinpoint the most effective pathway to meeting your goals. Perhaps it means capitalizing on gaps in the search market for your field. Or pushing a specific promotion for a new product launch or bestseller. Or maybe just understanding the seasonality of your product offerings, and adjusting budgets and goals to reflect this. Whatever opportunities and challenges your particular business faces, staying on top of them will help you ride out any changes to the search landscape.
C – Conversion Tracking
For most marketers, conversion tracking is the main pathway to search success. You need to be able to see which pages, keywords, and ads bring home the bacon in order to optimize and exceed your goals. This means taking advantage of every conversion opportunity available. In this modern world of search, your customers are using an ever more diverse set of routes to reach you; you need to follow each one. You’ve likely relied upon standard landing page conversion tracking for years. But now it’s more important than ever to branch out and expand your reach. Call conversion tracking allows you the chance to capture customers that may have been untrackable in the past. As mobile search continues to become the forefront of search, the ability to click on a phone number and speak to a rep is becoming a more viable option than form fills for your busiest customers. Now’s the time to capitalize on this conversion avenue and give your campaigns a welcome boost in the new year.
It’s tough to predict which new innovations and technologies will shape the search engine landscape of 2017. But by sticking to the ABCs of B2B Search Success you can weather any search storm.
Continue ReadingB2B Monday Myth: My Brand Doesn’t Have a Story to Tell
by MGB2B
The Myth: My Brand Doesn’t Have a Story To Tell.
The Truth: There’s More Than One Way to Tell (or Spin) a Story.
As the Internet becomes more crowded with B2B content, it is increasingly difficult for brands to stand out. One way to do so is by telling more compelling stories than your competitors. While you may already be aware of this, perhaps you don’t consider your brand’s story intriguing enough to get the job done. Well, here’s some good news. Even if your company’s story isn’t worthy of a Hollywood film adaptation, there may be an angle or two you haven’t looked at yet.
Do your clients have compelling stories that you have contributed to and are allowed to discuss publicly? For instance, a company that manufactures plastic parts may seem uninteresting. But if that company manufacturers a part that helps a scientist make a medical breakthrough, that’s a storytelling opportunity. Even if you don’t have that kind of story, you may be able to, as an industry expert, provide insights on relevant stories in the news. Many manufacturers already use these approaches for storytelling.
Here are a few examples of creative B2B brand storytelling:
GE – GE has an entire separate website devoted to content. It not only showcases their own case studies, but also highlights other stories. There are articles that don’t even contain “GE” anywhere in the copy. Instead, they represent the innovation with which GE has made itself synonymous.
Cisco – Cisco is a master at content marketing and another example of a B2B brand that has its own website just for content. They also have a gigantic content team to keep it running. Cisco has established itself as the authority in digital networking, which means they can easily discuss topics like smart cities. And their words carry significant weight with their prospects.
Betatronix – Even if you aren’t a highly visible B2B brand like GE or Cisco, you can still try this approach. Betatronix, a company that manufacturers potentiometers and other components, may seem uninteresting at first. But not when you find out who they work with – NASA. Just one of many clients with major news stories that Betatronix can either contribute to directly or provide expert commentary on.
If you think your brand doesn’t have a story to tell, take a step back and look at the big picture. By analyzing your impact on your more well-known client’s projects or looking at what’s going on in the industries surround your brand – you’ll be able to find plenty of stories to tell. You don’t need a 100-person content team to make it happen. You can simply use your blog to distribute your stories as often as you can. Doing so will establish a more personal connection with your consumers and prospects. It’s a strategy that will feed your lead-generation engine well into the future.
Continue ReadingWhy Are My Social Media Bounce Rates So High?
by MGB2B
Google Analytics is one of the most powerful tools in your social media arsenal. The data you gather from it can tell you what types of content your audience prefers and how they’re most likely to find it. You may discover that the content that drives the most visits to your website from search might not do the same from social. You also might realize that while visitors are landing on your white papers page (for example) from your social platforms, they are immediately leaving, or “bouncing.” So what is causing your high bounce rates from social media and how can you lower them?
First, what is a bounce rate, as it pertains to web traffic? A bounce rate, as defined by Google, is “the percentage of sessions in which the person left your site from the entrance page without interacting with the page.” While Google uses the term “sessions,” I am going to continue referring to these as visits. Both sessions and visits refer to the number of users who landed on your page, not specifying unique or repeat traffic.
Your website has an overall bounce rate, which, if things are going well, is probably somewhere between 40% to 55%. Naturally, people are going to land on your page looking for something else or will need to leave it for one reason or another. But as a rule of thumb, at least half of the visitors to your site should take some sort of action, whether that’s clicking to another page, filling out a form, or downloading a piece of content. When your overall website bounce rate creeps up higher than 60% or 70%, you should start looking for issues.
When it comes to high bounce rates from social media, however, 70% or higher is all too common for B2B companies. But why? Consider one of the top pages you send social media users to and ask yourself a few questions:
Is the content that my social media posts are promoting visible? There are few things more frustrating in the digital world than clicking on a link expecting to find ABC, only to find XYZ. It’s a BuzzFeedy strategy than can work to boost website clicks and lower bounce rates, but only if the content that’s being promoted is actually somewhere on the page. For example, you are tweeting about your latest manufacturing white paper, and while it’s at the top of the page you’re sending users to, so are several other white papers that might pique users’ interest. What won’t work to lower your high bounce rates from social media is tweeting about a great new piece of content, only to send users to a totally unrelated page. That will surely prompt a user to leave your site before interacting with it (and possibly not come back).
Is there an obvious call to action on this page? If you are sending users to your most recent blog entry from a social media post, it’s pretty obvious that reading is the action they’re expected to take. But if you are dropping visitors onto a page where your ultimate goal is to collect their contact information, then you need to have a very clear call to action to make that happen. Don’t rely on the social media post the user clicked on, even if it clearly read “fill out the form to download,” to drive the user to action. A user clicking away from the page for a moment, taking a phone call, or not fully reading the tweet could all result in confusion if the page they land on does not feature a clear call to action.
Can users easily navigate to other parts of my site from this page? Perhaps the blog post that you promoted on LinkedIn that drove the user to your site in the first place isn’t quite what they were looking for. They might scroll up looking for a navigation bar so they can explore other parts of your website. But if your blog page doesn’t feature such navigation, they might just throw curiosity to the wind and close the page. A user that could have become a lead is now onto other things.
In all three of these scenarios, a user was driven from a social media post to your website, only to leave it before taking any action. These issues are likely reasons why your bounce rates are sky high. By presenting your content clearly, giving users an obvious call to action, and offering them a way to explore the rest of your site where appropriate, you can drastically lower your high bounce rates from social media.
Your social media channels’ proprietary analytics can also reveal valuable insights into how users interact with your content. Take a look at your top tweets, LinkedIn posts, and other updates by engagement to determine which times of day, phrasing, and platform best drive users to your site. For example, a tweet about your latest white paper shared after working hours may have received plenty of likes, but not many clicks. Try sharing the white paper again, but this time in the morning on LinkedIn, and see how it performs.
Like much of what you do online for your B2B company, lowering your high bounce rates from social media takes a certain amount of trial and error. Testing and tweaking your strategy will help you hit the right users at the right time. And making improvements to your website will benefit your bounce rate from social as well as your site’s overall user experience.
Want to learn more about lowering your bounce rates from social media? Drop us a line.
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