I’d like to share this fantastic presentation by French consulting firm faberNovel, a study on how Apple has maneuvered itself successfully in the market against Microsoft and Google.
More and more B2B marketers are turning to lead scoring as a way of optimizing lead management. Many of us will remember when we used to process raw Excel lists, handing over hundreds of names with job titles and companies to our sales department, only to find that leads weren’t being followed up on. It wasn’t possible to know which leads were the most interested in your company, and wasn’t easy to see which matched your target buyer.
Recent advances in marketing automation and sales CRM software have made it easier to streamline the whole process. Marketing and sales professionals can apply lead scoring algorithms to leads, effectively sorting and prioritizing them for nurturing programs and sales follow-up.
In a recent episode of the weekly #B2Bchat on Twitter, we dug into questions surrounding lead scoring. Here is a summary of the questions and comments, compiled:
Q. What is lead scoring?
There are a lot of online resources on the topic lead scoring. We’ve posted a couple of articles on lead scoring including The 5 Basics of Lead Scoring on B2Bbloggers.com.
Here are a couple of definitions of lead scoring in 140 characters or less: Lead scoring is assigning a probability/weight to a lead based on its online behavior while interacting with your digital assets (via @joezuc) and Lead scoring is giving a rating system to prospects so more time spent with qualified leads (via @NuSparkMktg)
Q. What do you need in order to get started with lead scoring?
A marketing automation system. Vendors that were mentioned by name in the session included Marketo, Vtrenz, Eloqua, Genius, Marketbright and Silverpop. @jepc referred us to a comprehensive list of marketing automation systems that he has compiled.
You need a list of the possible paths/interactions a customer can have with your digital assets. This can be quite complex, depending on the type of product/service.
A target audience definition is needed, and an understanding of your buyer personas.
You need to understand your customer buying behavior. Talk to sales in order to learn buying behaviors, and look at previous activities associated with closed deals.
An agreement on the definition of a lead is essential. Sales and marketing need to come up with the definition together. Any discussion of lead scoring helps sales and marketing connect better with goals.
Executive buy-in from sales & marketing leadership is needed.
Q. What advice would you give to marketers that want to take lead scoring to the next level?
Normalize job titles to get better scoring, or restrict job titles to a pick list.
If possible, include consideration of offline activities as well.
The following high-value interactions should be weighted accordingly: E.g. “How We Help” page = higher score
The combo of product page w. case study or contact us page = bonus points
More visits from more people in one company within a shorter time frame = bonus points
Use negative scoring for certain job titles, e.g. consultant, student and assistant.
Review lead scores of closed sales to assess the validity of your scoring assumptions
How do B2B marketers tackle the question of marketing campaign value? Do we make strategic decisions based on real, actionable data? With the firehose of data that is available to marketers now-a-days, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find the information that truly matters. And this is especially true for B2B with their typically complex, drawn out sales cycles.
In our latest episode of #B2Bchat, we dug into questions surrounding metrics. Here is a summary of the questions and comments, compiled:
Q. Which components of your digital marketing campaigns are delivering the best results? E.g. Search, Email, Display Advertising, Social Media?
Search (PPC and SEO). These are most effective when in used in conjunction with great landing pages.
Email
Mediums are secondary, success depends on the contextual relevance of the message.
Q. Why do campaign budgets get cut? Poor performance or lack of tracking?
Both: poor performance due to lack of clear objectives. and lack of tracking because no analysis properly done during campaign
Most of the time the problem is poorly defined goals and metrics
Budget cuts can also come due to lack of well defined baselines.
Lack of commitment to the campaign. Unreasonable expectations of sales impact.
On social media budgets: Shyness with social media due to it being unproven, thus high risk. Execs are holding back.
Measuring metrics a science, but knowing how to explain them can sometimes be an art. e.g. convincing your boss to keep budget.
Q. What is your biggest pet peeve when it comes to marketing reports?
First Dashboard reports need to be customized (management level) and meet biz needs…focus on actionable metrics!
A lot of people over-do it with reports. Too much data and too complex = danger of focusing on wrong metrics.
Q. How do you assess the value of a digital marketing campaign? Where do you start?
Have specific goals and objectives
Start with the dollar value of new sales and work backwards
Measure the number of sales-ready leads and wins
A good marketing dashboard is fundamental
Q. What metrics (Key Performance Indicators) do you track? Which matter most?
“Actionable” metrics, data which will allow us to make better decisions and take action
PDF downloads, newsletter subscriptions, sales leads, e-commerce transactions
What is the Return on Investment (ROI) of an ad campaign? How do you go about measuring it? Which attribution models work best for your sales process?
These are some of the things I was working on this afternoon which led me to ponder the following relationship. As you start to think of the ROI question, it sounds very straight forward.
Return on Investment = (Gain – Investment) / Investment
Then you begin to realize that there are a lot of different ways to define each of these. And what about the interplay between the various ad campaign investments? Where does it end?
It’s not until you work it through further that it becomes clearer once again.
Redesigning a website can be a lengthy, complicated process. Done properly, it can give a dramatic boost you your online presence. Over the years I’ve had the pleasure, and pain, of being a part of several redesign projects.
Here is a checklist for website redesign, a series of steps that developers will go through in a successful redesign project.
Document the reasons you’re redesigning the website.
Having these listed will act as a compass through the lengthy project. When things get stressful, you’ll want this reminder.
Test the old site, e.g. with an online intercept survey.
How easily can users find key parts of the site? Other testing methods include focus groups and eye tracking. For the survey, get enough data to make it statistically relevant. The qualitative, descriptive feedback from one-on-one sessions with customers is also very valuable.
Conduct a baseline analysis of the old site.
A baseline analysis is a document which sets the bar by which the future site will be measured. It should detail how the old site has performed over the past year, including key performance indicators like visitors, bounce rate, conversion rates, pages/visit, etc.
Set targets for the new site.
These should be actual numbers and be based on the baseline mentioned above.
Hire a design company.
Choose a company which has experience in your industry and has demonstrated success in the past. Do they ask you the right questions? Do they understand your customer? Do they deliver on budget and on schedule?
Map out the new site’s architecture.
Work on a whiteboard or a blank piece of paper. Use one box per web page, starting with the home page on top. Draw lines between the pages to show logical connections. An alternative process, called Card Sorting, starts with cue cards. Create one cue card per web page, lay them out on a large table and start grouping and arranging them.
When mapping out the architecture, remember to keep the site compact, i.e. don’t create too many levels. This is bad for usability and bad for search engine optimization.
Do keyword research.
Consider words being used by your customers, at conferences, etc. Take a look at your old site’s analytics to determine which keywords have been bringing traffic from the search engines, especially traffic that converts into real business. Also consider third party tools like Google’s Search-based keyword tool, Seo Book’s Keyword Suggestion Tool. And don’t forget Google Trends.
How long should your keyword list be? That depends on your business model. But in most circumstances, a list of 20-30 is a great start.
Audit all of your existing online collateral.
This includes all old and existing web pages, online brochures, podcasts, etc. Make a list in Excel and leave a couple of columns for notes and an instructions, e.g. ‘keep’, ‘keep but edit’, or ‘throw away’. B2B sites should also make room for columns to describe the type of buyer that web page appeals to, e.g. technical buyer, economic buyer, and when in the buying process that web page would best be viewed, i.e. Phase I: Awareness of Problem, Phase II: Researching a Solution, etc.
Write content for the new site.
Each page should have a clear purpose, give an opportunity to continue, and be optimized for 1-2 keywords identified in number 7 above.
Create wireframes, mock-ups, etc.
Carried out for the most part by your design company, this is where your combined knowledge of the target market turns into a creative and user friendly design which works. Have the design company give you at least a couple of unique designs for the home page to choose from.
Test the mock-ups for usability. Let some customers loose on these mock-ups. The pages only need minor functionality for now, e.g. be able to click on a couple of key areas. Make note of how easily and quickly key parts can be found.
Fix, adjust and iterate
Based on the results of your tests, iterate until you have a design which you can live with for the next 2 – 3 years.
Build out and populate pages.
A lot of this may be handled by the web design company. Take all of the freshly written content and place it in the built pages. When choosing file and folder names for pages, consider using the keywords you identified in the keyword research stage above.
Organic optimization (SEO)
You’ve already written the content and used the right keywords. Now is the time to take it further by ensuring that each page’s title, description and header tags do the same. Include links between pages. Interlinking is great for usability and great for search engine spiderability.
Don’t forget to create a sitemap. There are two types of sitemaps, one which is on your site and visible to the user, and one which is visible only to the search engines (an XML Sitemap).
And, don’t forget inbound links coming to some of the old site’s pages. Put a redirect in place for each of those so the new visitors, and link power, know where to go.
Testing. Try to break it before the site is launched.
Get a large group of people you trust to poke around, find broken links, etc. Use various browsers, operating systems, look at it on a smart phone.
Add tracking code to each web page.
This will ensure you can measure what’s happening with the new site. For tracking software like Google Analytics, it will be a fairly easy process, i.e. same tracking code on each page which can be applied in the footer.
Launch day. Flick the switch, uncork the champagne.
Don’t forget to take a screen shot of the old site.
Post-launch monitoring
Make a schedule and force yourself to note the key stats at regular intervals after the site is launched. For the first few days, do it every day. After that, weekly. If you have budget, do a second intercept survey (see #2 above).
Take the time to create a Content Development / Maintenance plan. Use a calendar and map out when you’ll be adding new content. How often will the ‘latest events’ section be updated? Who will update it? When will you review the product descriptions? Or case studies?
In case you hadn’t heard, or seen, Bill Gates launched his own website last week called The Gates Notes. Bill Gates’ new website allows you to “stay up to date on where Bill is at, what Bill is learning and what is on his mind.” The Twittersphere welcomed Bill Gates last week as well. In case you’re not following him, Bill Gates’ Twitter username is, unsurprisingly, @billgates.
So back to Danny Sullivan’s critique of The Gates Notes. Danny starts off by showing the Search Results Page for the query ‘bill gates blog’. The results show his blog listed in the top 10 in Google, but being outranked by some fake Bill Gates blogs. Interestingly, in Bing, his new blog didn’t show up at all in the top 10.
The blog post proceeds with a well-laid-out walk through SEO 101. And the example he uses happens to be the founder of Microsoft, the world’s second richest man who has just started blogging and tweeting. It points out the importance of:
- relevant title tags
- description tags
- unique title tags for each web page
- the power of inbound links, even from Twitter
I’ve just taken a look at The Gates Notes site and it looks like some changes have already been made to the Bill Gates site. Back on his blog post, Danny Sullivan is taking some heat, but also a lot of well deserved praise in the comments section. And it looks like Bill reached out to him on Twitter as well:
It’s that time of year again when offices around the world brace for the worst, the most creative, and most daring ideas to surface in what is known as April Fools.
Search engine company Google hasn’t shied away from the fun over the past few years, and has even used the April 1 date to launch new products, for example, Gmail in 2004. As it turned out, the story of a free email provider providing a whole Gigabyte of storage was unheard of in the day, and spread like an April Fools joke.
Here I’d like to share my five favorite Google April Fools Jokes:
1. Project Virgle
The Adventure of Many Lifetimes, inviting participants to enter and qualify for an epic journey to Mars. This actually was a collaboration between Sir Richard Branson (Virgin) and Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, hence the name Virgle. I came across this by accident several months after April Fools, and seeing Richard Brandson talk about out-of-this-world plans for Virgin seemed quite plausible. They had me going for a while.
2. AdSense for Conversations AdSense for Conversations promises to be a new type of monetization solution that “puts the ‘context’ in contextual advertising”. An interface attaches to the head of a speaker and lists ads related to what is being spoken about. As a recommendation for untargeted ads, it recommends rambling.
3. Gmail Custom Time
Be on Time, Every Time.
This innovative Gmail feature allows users to back-date the send time and date on an email, ultimately eliminating the concept of being late. It utilizes an e-flux capacitor to luckily work around the issues of causality. Unfortunately the use of this tool is limited to 10 per user per year.
4. Google Romance
Dating is a search problem. Solve it with Google Romance.
If you choose the Contextual Dating option, be prepared to deal with thematically appropriate multimedia advertising throughout the entirety of your free date. www.google.com/romance
5. Rick Roll’d
Rick Astley’s video of his 80′s hit single Never Gonna Give You UP was the unintentional destination for many YouTube visitors on April Fools 2008. When clicking on any Featured Video on the YouTube homepage, users were taken to the music video in a practice which has since become widely known as being Rick Rolled or Rick Roll’d.
I’d like to give special mention to Google Gravity from the Chrome Experiments Group. Although this wasn’t an April Fools joke, it is a whole lot of fun. You can try the page for yourself, and it is best viewed in – you guessed it – Google Chrome. It actually is an impressive display of Chrome’s ability to process Javascript at speeds way above other browsers.
For your further amusement, here is a complete listing of Google hoaxes over the years on Wikipedia.
Greetings! I'm Andrew Spoeth, and here you'll find a mix-match of gems on B2B marketing, social media, PR and technology. You'll also find me speaking at industry events and co-moderating the weekly #B2Bchat on Twitter.
Greetings! I'm Andrew Spoeth, and here you'll find a mix-match of gems on B2B marketing, social media, PR and technology. You'll also find me speaking at industry events and co-moderating the weekly #B2Bchat on Twitter.
