Why Manufacturing Companies Need More Touchpoints in Their Marketing
by Emily Swet
So, the bad news: the new reality for manufacturers is that to be successful, B2B marketing campaigns are going to take a bit more effort. According to Forbes, nurture cycles are getting significantly longer – so B2B manufacturing companies need more touchpoints in their sales funnel before hitting a conversion. Unfortunately, this means you might have to make your marketing mix work a bit harder to be more effective.
The good news: simply put, what challenges you changes you – and usually for the better. There’s real opportunity to arm your manufacturing company with a campaign that both acknowledges and works with these trends.
How? Start Here.
- Look Back: Analyze the data from your past campaigns to get a correct view of what worked, what didn’t, how long the cycle was, and how many touches were needed to convert.
- Look Forward: Use your historical conversion data to get a better understanding of the challenges that lie ahead and how you can circumvent them.
- Then Look Side to Side: Who is creating your content? Is it their forte, or is an employee doing double duty wearing another hat that doesn’t quite fit? Make it worth your time, effort, and spend by getting a pro on your side.
- Make a Plan: Map out an intuitive content calendar that addresses these longer cycles and how you’ll nurture your prospects within them. If your audience engages with a video, what will be the next thing they see? If you capture their email, what is the most compelling piece to arrive next in their inbox? You can make your content do double duty this way.
- Develop and Deliver: Create content that is valuable – helpful or interesting to your audience – and capitalize on social media, visual content, and thought leadership pieces.
These longer nurture cycles seem daunting, and there’s a lot of noise in the content space right now. But that’s exactly why manufacturing companies need more touch points – and valuable ones at that – along the way. Need a hand getting started? Drop us a line.
Continue ReadingB2B Monday Myth: The More Leads the Better
by MGB2B
The Myth: More Leads Means More Conversions, and Thus More Profits
The Truth: Quality and Not Quantity Is What Leads to Conversions
Sure, it might seem like common sense. But how many times have you heard someone say “we’re just not getting enough leads coming in”? If you’ve heard this complaint once or twice – or perhaps you’ve complained about it yourself – you’ll want to read on about how to get quality leads over quantity. Often, it’s better to narrow your approach instead of casting a wider net and catching whatever happens to float in. By filtering out bad leads, you can increase your conversion rate, which is more important than having more leads.
To keep with the fishing metaphor, let’s say you’re only looking for red snapper. If you throw out your lines where snapper don’t usually swim, you’re going to catch a lot of fish that you don’t want and no snapper. Best to drop your line in the spots where snapper like to swim. You may only catch one or two, but you’ll get what you want. It’s as simple as that.
How to Get Quality B2B Leads:
- Tightly Define What a Quality Lead Means. Start with some buyer personas, to make sure all of your marketing efforts are targeted at the right people. But go beyond that. While there are many people who might fall under your buyer persona categories, you also need to examine their behavior. Perhaps a lead is someone who has spent time on your website and downloaded a particular piece of content like a white paper. Or maybe it’s someone who’s filled out a form on your website. You and your team need to agree on the criteria to determine what is considered a quality lead and not just a tire-kicker.
- Implement a Proper Paid Search Campaign. Paid Search is perhaps one of the most misused tools in the B2B marketing arsenal. When done properly, it can get the right leads through the right doors, and thus turn into an effective lead generation machine.
- Consider Retargeting Ads. Retargeting is when you serve up ads to people who visited your website, but the ads appear on other websites. Undoubtedly you’ve experienced this from other brands. A jacket you looked at on one site shows up on a news site your visiting. Or a hotel website you visited for your upcoming vacation serves you an ad on a blog you like to read. It’s not by accident that this is happening. It’s a highly effective tactic that works just as well for B2B brands as B2C.
- Partner with a Trade Publication Who Will Share Lists. Supplementing your own list of prospects with one from a trade pub is a smart approach to lead generation. Even if they won’t give you the list, they might allow you to send out an e-blast to either a portion or all of their subscribers if you already spend money on advertising opportunities with them. It’s a great way to keep your list growing with high quality leads.
- Score Those Leads. If you use CRM (customer relationship management) software, you most likely have the ability to score all leads that come in online (via website, social media, emails, online ads, etc.). They are scored based on a number of things including behavior, engagement, and demographics. And you can weight them however you like. So if Engineer is the most important job title you’re looking for, you can give that a higher score than other job titles. If you don’t want administrative staff to get into your sales funnel, you can give them a lower score.
- Look at Your Data Frequently. You can’t just set it and forget it. The data that comes from your campaigns will tell you what’s working and what’s not. And whether you use a CRM system or Google Analytics, or any other program to measure data, what you see happening each month can tell you quite a bit. You’ll discover which campaigns, search terms, and platforms are most effective.
- Refine Your Process Based on What the Data Is Telling You. Take what you learned from the previous step and rework each step to fine-tune your approach. Cut out what’s not working and test new things to make your marketing dollars work harder.
Again, the overarching goal is to increase your conversion rate. When it comes right down to it, what would you rather have: more fish in your net, or on your table?
Continue ReadingB2B Monday Myth: SEM and SEO Are the Same Thing
by MGB2B
The Myth: SEM and SEO Are the Same Thing
The Truth: These Two Different Methods of Increasing Search Engine Visibility Work Hand-in-Hand
So you’ve created a great website. And you’ve filled it with pages of relevant information about your company, clean graphics, and insightful industry blog posts. You’re proud of your work; the website looks smart, and it’s relevant to your customers. Naturally, you’re going to want some eyes on this content. So what do you do next? How can your company break through all the internet clutter?
You’ve likely heard both the terms, “search engine marketing” and “search engine optimization.” The two phrases are definitely related, since they both have the same goal in mind: increasing your visibility and bringing more users to your site. But there is a common misconception that these two terms are interchangeable, which is not true at all. They typically refer to two entirely different tactics. By identifying the differences between them, you’ll be able to properly employ these two methods to your website.
What Is Search Engine Marketing?
SEM was once used primarily as an overarching term for increasing website visibility. But when people use the phrase today, they are most often referring to the practice of Paid Search. Paid Search is when you use paid advertisements that appear on search engine result pages. Google AdWords is the most popular paid search platform. It allows you to pay only when a user clicks on an ad to visit your website.
How Exactly Does Paid Search Work?
When a user is searching on a platform like Google, there are certain keywords that they are going to enter if they are looking for a specific product or service. This gives you the opportunity to place your ads alongside the organic results that pop up when your prospects type in relevant keywords. Those attractive links that come up at the very top of your search results? Those are being paid for by the people who really want you to see them.
These ads are also known by the term pay-per-click ads. They are usually small, text-based ads that drive users to specific landing pages.
What Is the Benefit of Paid Search?
Search Engine Marketing is valuable because it is a great lead generator. It gives you the opportunity to put ads right in front of users who are further into the sales funnel. These people are often ready to make a purchase. Paid Search is also highly measurable. If more prospects are coming to your site via certain keywords and not through others, you can stop paying for the keywords that don’t work and put more money into the ones that do, building efficiency over time.
What Is Search Engine Optimization?
While the important word when talking about search engine marketing is paid, the best word to describe Search Engine Optimization is organic. Simply put, it’s the free and natural way to maximize the number of visitors that come to your site. It involves writing, formatting, and fine-tuning the content of your site in a way that makes it the most user-friendly and compatible with Google searches.
What Does SEO Encompass?
Search Engine Optimization requires adjusting different elements of your site, both on the technical and creative side to improve its presence in search results. This could be anything from the language used to the way your site is structured, including how strong your keywords are and how they’re ordered. The secret? Optimize so that both users and search engines can understand easily. SEO also takes into account the way other sites link to you on the internet and how relevant a search engine deems you to be based on these connections.
SEO can be broken down into two categories: on-page activities and off-page. On-page includes elements like:
- The incorporation of keywords
- Clean and optimized blog posts and page copy
- Page load speed
- The integration of social sharing
- Titles, headings and meta descriptions
Off-page SEO includes elements like:
- Having other relevant sites link to yours
- Indications that your content is being shared on social sites
While SEO is free, you’ll likely want to hire someone or pay an outside agency with SEO expertise to help you implement these changes properly.
Which Should I Use – SEM or SEO?
Taking into account the differences between SEM and SEO, you should consider how they might help drive traffic to your website. Note that while Paid Search is the more immediate, gratifying way to boost your visibility, optimizing your website organically can be beneficial in different ways. Both require monitoring and fine-tuning to see what’s working best with your prospects.
As for the debate on which tactic is “better,” the answer is: none. Your best bet is to use a combination of the two. Talk to an expert on both topics to help you out, as you launch a Paid Search campaign and incorporate new SEO techniques into your site. Whichever you lean on more, SEM or SEO, understanding the difference between the two is already a step in the right direction. Both will ultimately help you toward your overarching goal of boosting traffic, and eventually converting prospects into new customers.
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