B2B 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.
Continue ReadingB2B Monday Myth: I Don’t Need to Test My Emails
by MGB2B
The Myth: I Don’t Need To Test My Emails
The Truth: A/B Testing Can Help You Turn Your Email Program Into a Lead-Converting Machine
You are likely among the 93% of B2B marketers who distribute content via email. But are you doing it right? If you’re not using A/B testing, there is likely room for improvement. A/B testing is one of the best ways to gain insights about your audiences, fine-tune your efforts over time, and increase open, click-through, and conversion rates.
It’s important to remember that when testing B2B emails, you can only test one thing at a time. If you do it all at once, you won’t know what caused your email to succeed. Or tank. And then you’ve lost a truly helpful tool.
Here are 5 different elements you should test to fine-tune your email program:
- Subject Line. This is the big one. This is what gets people to open your emails. Does a question perform better than a statement? Does your core target audience appreciate humor? Or do they prefer you to get right to the point? Subject line tests can help answer those questions and increase your open rates.
- Day of the Week/Time of Day. When you test this, do it when you’re not testing subject lines. Or any other elements. Send the exact same subject line, message, and layout to one half of your audience on Wednesday at 6am and the other half on Thursday at 6am (for example) to test day of the week. Then with an entirely different email, test Wednesday at 6am and Wednesday at noon, to determine time of day. This is something you’ll want to log and perfect over time. It’s not something you can determine with only one email blast.
- Message. You’ve already tested subject lines, but what about the message once people open your emails? Which headlines perform the best? Which calls to action are people clicking on? Each individual copy element can be tested. But again, only one element at a time. Testing too many copy elements at once won’t tell you what you need to know.
- Layout/Design. What happens when you change the order of your articles? The color of your calls to action? Each variant can change the outcome. Test each one until you find what works. Before you even begin testing, make sure that you are using responsive design. If your audience(s) can’t read your emails easily on their mobile phones, this will negatively affect your results, and your reporting on other testing elements will be skewed.
- Type of Content. If you have a newsletter-style email promoting many different types of content, what performs the best? Do you have a higher CTR when you drive the audience to an infographic? A white paper? A blog post? Determine which kind of content your audience craves most — you might find it varies by segment.
Testing B2B emails takes time and patience. But in the long run it will help you give your audience what they want and take your leads further down the sales funnel. Email is one of the most important tools in the B2B toolkit. Get it right, and you’ll be miles ahead of your competitors.
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