Archive of B2B Posts

Leads that turn into sales are certainly the most important conversions when evaluating the effectiveness of a search engine marketing campaign; or any marketing campaign for that matter. However, if you’re only focusing on closed deals as the yardstick for measuring these efforts, you might be missing other opportunities for defining value.

Here is a short-list of additional conversion opportunities marketers should consider when measuring value of a search engine marketing (online marketing) campaigns.  ... Read the full post

The other day a B2B company called inquiring about our SEO services. While our services where not a good fit in this specific circumstance, a distinct challenge surfaced that’s worth writing about.

The company was interested in gaining visibility for broad keywords (unrelated example: “packaging manufacturer”) but only served a specific regional market (such as “packaging manufacturer in Boston”)

B2B organizations focused in a local or regional market will find difficulty creating an SEO campaign for broad-based keyword strategies. A few possible reasons:  ... Read the full post

The recent Learn 24 B2B Content Marketing Summit was a fantastic success. Derek Edmond (about, twitter), from KoMarketing Associates, was one of the presenters at the educational seminar.

Below are the slides he shared with the audience:

Topics Covered at B2B Content Strategy & Marketing Summit:

• Deliver value to prospects and customers throughout the buying cycle
• Maximize the impact of your content assets
• Squeeze the most life from existing content
• Leverage your content to take advantage of blended search results
 ... Read the full post

The fact that you can apply geographic constraints to more accurately target searchers in a specific region makes PPC an obvious partner for a local search strategy. Here the term ‘local’ is defined purely as the area in which an advertiser operates business.  For a scrap metal recycling firm in Springfield, Massachusetts local may be defined as Hampden county, a the entire state of Massachusetts, or a certain area radius where the operation, transportation, and labor costs are low enough for the transaction to be profitable.  ... Read the full post

Once B2B Marketers realize the critical need for content to support online initiatives, it is easy to get so entrenched in creation that the marketing of that content is overlooked.

There is an adage in the Internet marketing space that “content is king” or “build it and they will come“. The unfortunate truth is that content still needs to be marketed to achieve visibility. Gary Vaynerchuk hit the nail on the head when he was quoted saying,

“Content is king but marketing is queen and the queen runs the household.”

How does the B2B marketer develop content and also create marketing strategies for bringing visibility of that content to their target audiences online? The answer lies in search engine marketing and social media strategies.  ... Read the full post

As should be the case this time of year, many online marketing sites are publishing their list of the best posts for 2009. Here is a round up of these “Best of 2009″ posts, organized by Internet Marketing theme.

There is a lot of great information, concepts and writing to read through. If I’ve missed your list, please feel free to send me a message directly or through the comments below. Happy New Year and wishing everyone the best in 2010 and beyond!

Internet Marketing  ... Read the full post

Guest Author

Lilia Shirman Managing Director, The Shirman Group Author: 42 Rules for Growing Enterprise Revenue Twitter: @B2BGuru; Blog: Revenue Orchard

I had the pleasure of moderating a recent SVAMA discussion about the use of social media for generating B2B leads. The panel included three veterans of social media: Brian Halligan (CEO of the award-winning marketing software startup, HubSpot, and new author of Inbound Marketing), Mike Linton (most recently the Chief Marketing Officer at eBay and formerly the CMO at Best Buy), and Zack Urlocker (Vice President of Lifecycle Marketing at Sun Microsystems).  ... Read the full post

What do I always tell clients, family, friends, cocktail party-goers (whose eyes glaze over as they get the answer), etc. when they ask about how social media can really benefit a non-consumer-products company (i.e. B2B social media)?

Build relationships.  Strengthen relationships.  Be genuine.  Add value.

I always add something like “social media can help with driving traffic to your site and building links for SEO, but that isn’t the main goal.” (clients seem to enjoy this; friends, family, cocktail-party-goers – not so much).

And I believe it when I say it – and I believe it now.  ... Read the full post

On Sep 30, 2009 Google announced a new AdWords reporting feature that measures conversions for display ads in the Content Network (display ads are image-based or rich media ads only – not text ads).

When I first saw this I was excited because it provides an extra level of measurement that was missing.

Many ad networks have had this metric available to advertisers for some time.  ... Read the full post

Guest Author

CJ Boguszewski Chief Marketing Officer, Hiconversion Twitter: @CJBogus

SEO vs. Conversion Rate Debate Shouldn’t Exist — Three Reasons CRO Complements SEO & SEM

Rand Fishkin, whose SEOmoz.org blog frequently has industry-leading commentary on a wide variety of optimization topics, entitled a post in January 2006 “SEO versus Conversion Rate Debate Shouldn’t Exist.”

In October 2009, the debate is still ongoing.

While the Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) discipline continues to mature alongside the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) categories, most eBusiness organizations frame their understanding of CRO in SEO/SEM terms.  ... Read the full post