B2B Monday Myth: Working With Influencers Is Irrelevant for B2B
by MGB2B
The Myth: Only B2C Brands Can Benefit From Working With Influencers.
The Truth: Influencers May Play a Different Role, But Can Be Equally Valuable for B2B Brands.
When someone says “influencer,” perhaps you the imagine a Kardashian promoting weight-loss tea on Instagram. This type of strategy surely can’t work for your B2B brand, can it? As it turns out, there are a number of strategies to help your business identify proper influencers (even if they aren’t Kardashians) and have them play a beneficial role in advocating for your company. Here’s a quick guide:
What Are Influencers for B2B Brands? And Why Work With Them?
Let’s start out with a definition we can all agree on. An influencer is, simply put, a person who has the power to influence many people via social or traditional media. This comprises everything from bloggers, vloggers, and Instagrammers, to industry analysts, thought leaders, and writers for trade publications.
The relationship between influencer and brand is symbiotic. It’s easy to see why you’d want to work with one: you have a product or service you want to market; influencers have a built-in audience. But influencers have their own brand they need to uphold – themselves. A large part of this image relies upon fresh, relevant content that keeps their followers interested and informed. From simple product mentions to expert interviews, with the right strategy, your brand could be a source of reliable, non-advertorial content that influencers value. Or they may produce it themselves based on what they learn from you. It varies from influencer to influencer.
Keep Your Niche In Mind.
Consider working with micro-influencers, who may not be the most popular, but hold the most knowledge, expertise, and influence within an industry or particular vertical. These are individuals who have probably gained their influence organically over time. They value their audiences enough that they want to provide them with good information. And because of that, they are seen as trustworthy. Your company can work with thought leaders, industry analysts, bloggers, or writers for trade publications. It’s important to note that these micro-influencers are authentic advocates. And while their audience may not be huge, you can bet it’s very interested in the niche. So you’re getting quality over quantity.
What Your Influencer Wants.
Not everyone is motivated by the same incentive. Some will operate for as little as $50 and a gift card. Others get paid in the millions. And everything in between. This person has valuable industry insights. No matter what you offer to pay them, they will not promote a product or service they don’t believe in. After all, they have a reputation and industry cred that they’ve built up over the years. The key is to let them know how you’ll contribute to that credibility and reputation in a positive way. What’s even more important is that you do your due diligence before partnering with someone.
Think Long Term.
Remember that working with an influencer is about building a relationship, which takes time. This is not a one-time transaction. B2B brands usually work with much more complex products, so your influencer needs to have a full understanding of your industry and your products before they begin advocating for you. Before you enter into a partnership, get to know the influencer as well as you can. Invest some time – it will be worth it. And above all, makes sure you communicate openly and authentically, every step of the way.
There are a multitude of ways you can work with an influencer, whether you have them share or collaborate on content, speak at your event, or blog about your product. When you work with micro-influencers within your niche and approach them with a long-term relationship in mind, you set your company up for success.
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: Once the Lead Is Generated, My Job Is Done
by MGB2B
Myth: Once a Lead Is Generated, My Job Is Done.
The Truth: Lead Nurturing Is Necessary to Drive Prospects Towards a Purchase Decision.
Your B2B sales funnel has multiple steps: Awareness, Interest, Decision, and Action. As marketers, we spend a lot of time trying to generate leads and get prospects into the top of the sales funnel by promoting awareness. Once we have the lead, it’s time to pass the contact onto Sales, where they can try to work their magic on convincing the prospect to make a purchase, right? Not quite.
Before the prospect is ready to make a decision, they spend some time in the Interest portion of the funnel. This is the opportunity to nurture the relationship, and move the buyer along in the decision-making process. Here are a few tips to get you started:
Develop the Right Media Mix
The different steps of the sales funnel require different strategies in terms of media mix. So if you are targeting those who have shown some interest, attempt to settle their skepticism with targeted, informational media. This could include paid social media posts on topics in the industry, webinars with trade publications, sponsored e-blasts, or paid search. Take this step to foster interest. As a result, prospects will be engaged and ready to make a move toward decision-making.
Know How the Lead Was Generated
The way you nurture a lead will depend a lot on how you garnered the prospect’s awareness in the first place. They took some palpable step to give you their information, whether it was filling out a form on your website or giving you their business card at a trade show. How you go about nurturing one lead will differ from the others. The channels you use and the content you share will depend on many factors. For instance, if a prospect watched one of your webinars, send an email thanking them and asking for feedback. Then invite them to the next one. Automated B2B lead nurturing can help you get the right messages out to prospects based on their behavior. And it can raise conversion rates significantly.
Segment Your Prospects Into Personas
Creating a fictional character who represents a buyer in one of your audience segments will more easily allow you to share relevant content that the prospect actually cares about. Your target segments have different needs, preferences, motivators, challenges, media preferences, and belong to different verticals. Don’t ignore the power of personalization. Start here by checking out our guide to persona creation.
Be Authentic
Nothing will turn a prospect off more than trying to pitch to them every time you’re in contact. Your purpose for lead nurturing is to maintain relationships with your prospects, and convince them of you authority in the industry. This can be done without sending out weekly promotional product emails. Distributing relevant content will position you as a trustworthy company with integrity. And talking to your prospects like they are actual human beings can only benefit you. While promotions should be tastefully added, content should be your primary focus.
Marketing and sales teams should work together to master the lead process. Resist the urge to pass your contact along for a sales pitch without first increasing their interest. And remember — it often takes 7-10 touchpoints to have a qualified, interested lead for the sales team to close. If you beef up your lead nurturing program, you’ll enable your business to do a lot more closing. And the marketing team, the sales team, and the CEO will all be very, very happy.
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