B2B Monday Myth: When Sales Are Down, a Quick Fix Is the Answer
by MGB2B
The Myth: A Quick-Fix Marketing Campaign Is Necessary When Sales Numbers Are Down.
The Truth: A Slow-Burn B2B Marketing Strategy Will Foster ROI in the Long-Term.
Imagine: it’s Q2, and you look at the numbers. And the numbers aren’t looking good. If you end the year like this, it is bad news. Panicked, you call your marketing department, and give them this message: Do whatever you can, right now, to get my sales numbers up.
And Marketing executes a last-ditch, quick approach to try to get your company back on track. It may even yield good results. In the short term.
But the truth is, if you implemented long-term marketing strategy in Q1, you should expect a slow burn instead of an immediate increase in ROI. Especially with marketing plans that rely heavily on content marketing. If you put your time into a quick execution to boost immediate numbers, you’re wasting it. Instead, you should spend that time working toward larger, long-term successes.
There are several elements that take time to develop – many that require testing – in order to be done well. So you have to ask: what are the steps for implementing a successful long-term B2B marketing strategy?
Step 1: Know Your Goals and Objectives
The purpose of your campaign is to increase ROI over the long haul, not just in the immediate future. Converting leads right now will increase your sales in the short term, but long-term thinking will set the wheels in motion for greater successes year after year. Outside of sales, what are you looking for? Know exactly what you want to achieve from your campaign. You cannot expect to implement this strategy in a day and have leads knocking the door down. Brainstorm how you can sustain this campaign in the over one year, two years, three. And remember, a lot of your strategy will hinge on building relationships over time. Continuous engagement with your brand puts you on a steadier path to conversion.
If you are a bigger company, it might benefit you to take a step back and look at the bigger picture for your marketing strategy. Reworking your brand may be the key to sustaining leads for longer.
Step 2: Do Your Research
Your strategy will be useless if you haven’t taken the time to do proper research on your target audience and how your message will be best conveyed. Utilize market research initiatives to find out more abut who you plan to target, what they want, where they are in terms of the sales funnel, what messages resonate with them, and their preferred media and marketing channels. By doing the research, you will be putting the right message in front of the right people at the right time.
Step 3: Implement, Evaluate, and Fine-Tune
Your slow-burn campaign will be a long-term commitment, meaning the creation of a pipeline with organized divisions of labor and clear deadlines is vital to staying on track. When implementing a long-term strategy, you want to make sure it is as effective as possible. That’s why it’s important not to underestimate the value of keyword evaluation, website analytics, and A/B testing. Note that sales are far from the only KPI (key performance indicator). It’s important to align your KPIs with the goals you set in Step 1. If you’re measuring the wrong thing, it may become an obstacle rather than a boon. You may also need to accept that not all measures of success can be supported by hard data.
Taking the time to create a strategy, research your target audience, and detailed evaluation may seem like a lot of work. But it’s worth it in the long run. While you may not see an immediate increase in sales, these steps will ultimately foster long-term success that all company stakeholders will benefit from in the end.
Continue ReadingLimited by Budget – 5 Ways to Stretch Your B2B Paid Search Budget
by MGB2B
B2B digital marketing is not always an easy job, especially for those of us poor souls who have smaller monthly budgets to work with. When your Google AdWords campaigns are constantly limited by budget, trying to turn web site visitors into leads can seem like a near impossible task. Luckily for you it’s not, and I’ve got 5 pointers to help you stretch those B2B digital marketing dollars in your Google paid search efforts.
1. Campaign Structure – Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is
Google AdWords allows you to structure your account nearly any way you want. This is great, but can sometimes feel overwhelming. I won’t go into the nitty gritty of ad group and keyword groupings (although I could for hours after a drink or three), so let’s keep it simple and talk about campaign structures.
As the starting point for your AdWords account, your campaigns are where you’ll be setting your daily budgets. So, you structure them in a way where you can put your budget to the most lead generation success. I like to separate general, broad terms, say, from branded or company specific terms in different campaigns. This is so I can set my budgets accordingly depending upon how effective I think each campaign will be at generating leads.
Getting visitors to your website through broader general terms is harder work, and often requires more cash. Setting aside money specifically for that task will allow you to generate some difficult leads without breaking your overall account’s bank.
2. Search Term Reports – Sailing the Seas of Big Data
Odds are that even the best kept paid search accounts are spending some of their valuable budget on searches that are entirely irrelevant, not to mention very unlikely to convert into leads. Combing through your account’s search term reports can be a long and eyeball burning process, but absolutely worth it. You may find that you’re regularly showing up for search terms closely related to your business’s offering which the searcher simply won’t find on your site, and so will never turn into a lead.
Nix out these clicks by adding these terms as negative keywords – a vital practice to ensure you’re using every dollar appropriately, or as appropriately as possible.
3. Dimension Reports – The Whens and Wheres of It All
Another place you may accidentally be wasting some of that budget can be found in your AdWords dimensions reports. Run reports for Geographic/User locations to determine where you’re spending the most and seeing the most conversions. You may find that you can tighten up your campaigns’ location settings and nicely increase your profitability.
The same is true for Day-of-week/Hour-of-day dimension reports. If your business is only open 9 to 5 on weekdays, or only services other companies on that schedule, then you’ll likely find that nighttime and weekend clicks rarely lead to conversions.
If you’re limited by budget, cutting out traffic from these times and places allows you to use your funds where and when you need it the most.
4. Search Impression Share – Sharing Isn’t Always Caring
Sometimes us B2B search marketing folks can forget that each Google search is an auction, which means we’re often sharing space in the search results with our competitors. The problem with campaigns that are regularly limited by budget is that we’re often not being included in every auction we’re eligible for, because we simply don’t have the available funds to afford to pay the cost for them all.
A good way to get a picture of how often your ads are showing in your eligible auctions is to run reports with the included Search Impression columns: “Search Impr. Share,” “Search Lost IS (rank)” and “Search Lost IS (budget)” specifically. In Ad group and Keyword reports, only “Search Impr. Share” and “Search Lost IS (rank)” are available, but you can easily calculate “Search Lost IS (budget)” by subtracting “Search Lost IS (rank)” from “Search Impr. Share.”
These columns let you know how often your ads show up in eligible auctions, and the reasons their not when they don’t. They can point to a campaign that could use more of you allocated budget than another, or can highlight a keyword which could perform better if it only had more available money behind it.
It may be a more advanced method of analysis than you’re used to, but it can really open the doors to using your budget effectively.
5. Decreasing Your Bids for More Clicks – Has the World Turned Upside Down!?
Now I know this is going to sound crazy, and is the opposite of what Google will tell you about how to increase clicks and conversions, but if your campaigns are regularly limited by budget, DECREASING your CPC bids can actually lead to more clicks and conversions. Before you grab your pitchforks, hear me out!
Increasing your CPC bids will increase your ad’s position in the search results, but obviously it will also increase the CPC, the cost you pay for each click. If your campaign has a daily budget of, say, $100 and your CPC bids are set at $2.00 then you can roughly only obtain 50 clicks a day. This will vary by your ad rank, but let’s just keep it simple for the sake of argument. If you decrease your CPC bids to $1.50, then you can obtain an extra 17 clicks a day, without hopefully losing too much position on the search results page.
Those extra clicks will go a long way over time, and could be the key to increasing your leads and lowering your cost per conversion. All things being equal, the more visitors you can bring to your site, the more leads you’re likely to generate. If you can still bring them in at a slightly lower position, then you’re really using your limited budget to its utmost potential, something we can all get behind.
Every B2B search engine marketing specialist wishes they could have more budget to work their advertising magic with, but by following these 5 suggestions you can turn those limited by budget campaigns into lead generation gold!
Continue ReadingB2B Monday Myth: All I Need Is a Press Release
by MGB2B
The Myth: All I Need Is A Press Release
The Truth: The PR Landscape Has Evolved, and B2B Brands Must Evolve with It
The nature of public relations has changed. The truth is, traditional PR cannot exist on its own anymore. Your company cannot skirt by with just a press release, hoping that newspapers, television, and radio will pick up your story. Technology and the rise of digital marketing have forced both B2C and B2B brands to broaden their PR strategy. The way information is shared is different, and your business must adapt if you plan to remain relevant and get your stories out to the right people at the right time.
The Integration of Different Departments
In the past, PR would have its own separate silo. When social media first blossomed, it was largely separate from PR. Now, public relations must integrate with social media and other digital marketing efforts for more engaged customers and better results.
SEO is also an important part of public relations today. Your press releases can go much further with the right links and keywords. These tools also give you the ability to better target your prospects and track results. This way, you can find out which stories resonate most with the audiences you’re trying to reach and back your decisions with concrete data.
Increased Speed of Communication
Information today moves faster than ever. Gone are the days when drafting and distributing a press release was a multi-day process. Companies today benefit from preparing stories ahead of time and developing a cohesive strategy for distributing them through multiple channels and media.
Public relations, at its core, is still very much about building and nurturing relationships. Going the extra mile to write in a form that is easily convertible for your contact, who will (hopefully) be publishing your work, will go a long way and get your stories out faster. Let them know where they can find more information, such as on your website or social media channels to speed up the process and keep your company top of mind.
A Bigger Network of Storytellers
Today, people aren’t solely relying on national publications and TV news channels as the only important and credible source of information. With the rise of social media, there could be any number of people talking about your company. Identifying influencers in your industry, whether they’re respected bloggers, YouTube personalities, or trusted trade publications, can help you shape your stories and who you want reading them. Engage and cultivate relationships with these influencers and you could see your stories reaching their networks of dedicated followers.
Improve Relationships With Trade Publications
Print is not dead. Which is why it’s important to cultivate good relationships with trade publications for editorial preference and customized digital opportunities. Leveraging a media buy and keeping up your advertising with a specific trade publication is a great way to get better PR for your company.
As the public relations landscape continues to change, it will become more critical to stay on top of digital trends and maintain valuable connections. While B2B companies should not overlook traditional media and trade publications, you should look for ways to stay connected online and make your PR content even more shareable. Telling your brand’s story is an important part of connecting with your audience and reaching new ones.
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