Inbound Marketing Case: The new B2B Purchase Journey

The online landscape for marketers is changing at a rapid pace. People don’t buy the way they used to. There is a new purchase journey with three key elements:

1. Search-initiated - Most people begin their research of a new product via search engines, 78% of Internet users conduct product research online (Source Pew Internet & American Life Project, May 2010)
    
2. Social-powered – The growth of social networks has meant we can now tap into our own external networks for recommendations. Twitter’s active user base alone generates 90 million tweets per day, with 24% of adults have posted comments or reviews online about the things they buy. We now have a lot of user-generated content to review before making a purchase decision.
    
3. Buyer controlled - People can now choose where and when to engage with your brand, plus what content they would like to consume. You have to produce marketing strategies they choose to engage with.

For B2B companies this means their sales people are being engaged a lot later on in the purchase cycle and presents marketing with an great opportunity to become an integral part of the overall sales process.

"Get Found"

Considering the above, we decided to run a pilot project in the UK around the concept of “Get Found” (coined by Brian Halligan of Hubspot). Our aim was to get found by the people who are actively looking for help with the kinds of issues we address. We would do this by harvesting our own expertise in content that helps our prospects do their jobs better.

Since the core mediums involved in this project were search, social and content, we needed to consider how these different tactics are starting to converge and try to hit our sweet spot.

To do this we needed to answer three key questions:

• What do our prospects care about?
• How can we harvest our expertise to help?
• How can we get this content to market now?

Our Answer – “Content Rich Microsite”

When discussing microsites, a lot of people probably conjure up images of those used in new product launches (they have a very short life span) or those used to build elaborate link schemes. Our solution was to build content-rich microsite filled with the kind of content our target market would value. One critical aspect of the project was the location of the site. If you look at the salesforce.com structure, you will notice we already have a lot of great blogs sitting on http://blogs.salesforce.com/company/. Since I am interested in EMEA and in particular the UK for this project, I wanted the site to sit within our UK folder, so it would benefit from all the inbound links and social shares generated. To build our micro-site strategy, we had to address six key points:

1. Personas:
Who would this site be for?

For me persona development is the foundation of any good inbound marketing strategy. I am a massive fan of persona development, from the usability and design of your site, to content development; they ensure you strategy stays on target. In fact one of the best link building posts I read last year involved a type of persona development. We ran an intensive persona workshop (with the help of iqcontent.com) that included people from marketing, sales and customer feedback. We came up with 5-6 profiles of users we were trying to reach.

We mapped these against different stages of the purchase cycle and segmented by company size. All of this would help us when it came to content strategy and promotion.

2. Theme:
What would be the overarching theme that would hold all of our content together?

We used our own Radian 6 our social media monitoring tool, analytics and feedback from personas to come up with “The Social-Powered Business”.

3. Topics:
How do we take that theme and break it down into specific topics we can generate content around?

For us, this was pretty easy; we looked at the areas of business where social media had the greatest impact (sales, customer service, collaboration and marketing). It’s also important that your topics and themes are aligned to your products (we are trying to generate leads after all).

4. Process:
Exactly where would this content come from and how would it be validated?

Getting people excited about the project is key. You need to have people who will help with content development, feedback and amends. We used our own collaboration tool Chatter to build an internal social network around the project that consisted of 56 people. All content development was driven through that group.

5. Resources:

Of course we needed to source budget and a team.

6. Metrics:
How would we measure success?

This is a really important part of establishing any successful strategy. Brand awareness is never a good enough metric, traffic; leads and pipeline are what count. We built a dashboard in omniture with all key business metrics to measure our project.

The Launch – #socialsuccess

In 12 weeks we managed to develop:

• Strategy
• Personas
• Website
• 32 pieces of content

and our #socialsuccess site was launched on January 3rd, 2012.

The following five items were important in terms of making the launch of the site a success.

1. Content Types

For launch we chose four different categories from which we could generate content:

1. Created: Original content that was created from scratch. These are obviously the most resource intensive. They included things like an eBook, infographics, articles and slideshares.
2. Curated: These are round-up style posts. Choosing a topic like social selling and pointing to the best resources from the web on this topic.
3. Collaborative: We choose some of the best thought leaders around our topics and reached out to see if they would contribute some content.
4. Legacy: One of the easiest ways companies can quickly scale their content for inbound marketing is to repurpose content they already have into different assets. For example, our Dreamforce event that runs in San Francisco has a huge amount of expert presentations that are recorded over three days and put onto Youtube. We simply took the best videos and turned them into articles.

2. Product Messaging

Remember this sort of content is not product centric. Best practice for this kind of content is to follow the 80/20 rule – 80% non product and 20% product, for launch we stuck to 90/10. Product references were used where they made sense, but only on a limited basis.

3. Promoting the site

If you build it, they probably won’t come unless you have an awesome promotion plan. Some of the things we did to promote the site were:

1. Facebook/Twitter: Of course, all our best content was shared via our own Facebook, Twitter and Google+ pages
2. We took over the home page of our corporate site (www.salesforce.com/uk) to promote this new microsite
3. Expert advocates: We collaborated with 15 experts for launch, who were kind enough to share our content with their networks.
4. Email/Newsletter: We promoted the site launch to our UK email database and also created a newsletter called #socialsuccess Insider to keep connected with users who signed up via our eBook download.
5. Guest Blogging: We did some guest blogging on relevant sites to promote #socialsuccess
6. PR: We did some PR around some of the pieces we produced
7. Employees: We galvanized our internal employees to share with their external networks

4. Outbound Marketing

We supported all our inbound marketing with great outbound tactics:

1. Twitter: We ran sponsored tweets for our premium content (eBooks). We saw some really great CTR numbers for these. I highly recommend them.

 

1. LinkedIn Banner Ads: We ran some advertising on LinkedIn targeted at our core personas developed above (linkedIn has some great targeting options like target by job title). Again, we saw a far higher CTR from these ads (those offering content) over those just advertising a product.

 

1. Google Display Network: We are currently rolling out the same type of ads (those offering our premium content) on GDN.

5. Experts

Reaching out to thought leaders in your market is a great way to produce some highly valuable content. We were lucky enough to have some great experts involved in the initial content, who shared their expert advice with our audience and were kind enough to share our content with their own.

E-Commerce : On-Page Optimization

Elements of the page you should work on

I made the following mockup to try and visualise clearly all the elements of an eCommerce product page that are important for on-page optimization.

Let's get into more detail on each of these elements and see what we can do to take advantage and optimise for them, starting with the new additions since Rand's post in 2009. I've related the numbers in the mockups to the sections below; some sections do not have numbers because they are not visible on the page, for example META description.

 Customer Reviews

If you run an eCommerce website and are not collecting customer reviews, you are seriously missing out. Not only is this great feedback that you need to have to improve your business, but it is also an amazing source of unique content. Better yet, it is very scalable across large websites, which means you can get lots of content onto lots of pages.

Quick tips for collecting and using customer reviews:

• Build or buy a system to automatically email customers a few weeks after purchasing and ask for a review
• When getting off the ground and trying to get volume, offer incentives such as a discount on their next purchase in exchange for a review
• Don't worry about publishing negative reviews, customers aren't silly and can tell when reviews are a bit too positive

Also, if you are worried about things like this having a negative effect on conversion rates:

See if you can customise your review system to not show this message on products that do not have reviews. Set a threshold so that when a couple of reviews are received, reviews are shown on the product page.

Added benefit: microdata

You also need to make sure you are marking up these reviews with relevant microdata. This will give Google more context about your content, as well as giving you the chance to improve click-through-rates from search results like what we see in this example:

The use of review microformats is increasing all the time so there is an argument that you are not standing out anymore if all the other results have the same type of markup. You could even argue that to stand out you should take them away :)  

 Product Videos

I'll admit that this is a tough one to execute, but it is one that I feel is very worthwhile for eCommerce sites. There are many websites already adding videos to their product pages, but they are not always doing it in the most optimal way. A great example of the right way to do this is Zappos who now have over 50,000 product videos.

There are a few benefits to having videos on a product page. One of which is helping make your product pages more link worthy and rich in content. Good quality videos demonstrating use cases of products could also help conversion rates (particularly for high-end, technical products) but I can't provide evidence for that unfortunately.

Another added benefit as you'll see from the screenshot above is how your search results for product pages can stand out from competitors. I've seen loads of eCommerce stores who have videos on the page but are not embedding or marking them up in the correct way.

By far the best system I know to embed and optimise your videos properly is Wistia, which SEOmoz use for Whiteboard Fridays. These guys have a great system and are always improving how things work and adding new features. We've used them on a test site or two at Distilled and got video snippets showing very quickly.

I could talk more about using videos to aid SEO but Phil did a great post that covers pretty much everythingyou need to know here. He also did a presentation on video SEO and you can see the slides over onSlideshare.

Rel="next", Rel="prev" and view all

One of the problems that always crops up on large eCommerce sites is how to efficiently deal with pagination. You can have product categories that contain thousands of products that span many pages. You want to make sure that all of these products are indexed and regularly crawled, but at the same time you don't care too much about the paginated pages ranking or having too much link equity.

Since Rand's post of 2009, we've been given an additional way of handling pagination. Namely the rel="next", rel="prev" and "view all" attributes. This markup can help Google better understand pagination and pass link equity to key pages. Google gave some good instructions on how to implement these attributes here andhere which you can take a look at.

There are a few other ways to handle pagination, which Adam Audette explains very well in this post onSearch Engine Land.

Microdata markup and Schema.org

Another new tool that is available to us now is the use of microdata and the support of the Schema.org vocabulary by the major search engines. That announcement back in June 2011 was quite exciting but didn't really live up to expectations and Google seemed pretty slow in showing this support in their search results. However this seems to have changed and we are seeing more and more examples of Google using this data now.

Bringing this back to eCommerce, there are a few types of markup you can use on a product page which you can see documentation on here. This page also contains details of review markup that I talked about above. Not all of the properties on this page will be applicable to you, but here are some tips on how to use this:

• Only choose the properties that are relevant to the product attributes you have
• Take development time to integrate these properties into templated elements of your page, so that when you add new products, they are automatically marked up
• Add notes to your analytics package when you put these changes live so you can monitor any improvements

 Q&A Content

Another big opportunity for eCommerce websites is the integration of question and answer content focused on products. As mentioned above, eCommerce websites have always had the problem of getting unique content onto product pages on scale. Question and answer content can help solve this problem and gives you great scope to get user generated content onto lots of your product pages.

There are a few benefits to integrating this type of system:

• Scalable, user-generated content published onto product pages
• Improving ranking for long-tail terms and question driven keywords if the content is crawlable
• Possible improvement in conversion rate if customer concerns are addressed in the answers
• Possibility of encouraging brand evangelists and even bringing in some gamification principles to help motivate users

Here is a live example from Jessops:

I personally feel like there is an opportunity for Quora here if they wanted to explore this space. Many retailers will be looking for this type of system and Quora may be able to offer something that helps them reach the critical mass of content they'd need.

 Social sharing buttons

I'm a little skeptical about whether social sharing buttons on product pages are a good idea. The goal of a product page is to get someone to buy, not to get them to tweet or like the page. Sure these social signals can help, but personally I'd rather not distract people from buying my product. For me, social sharing should be encouraged at different points in the buying process:

• After the point of purchase on a thank you / confirmation type page
• Email follow up and correspondence - follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook etc
• After a review has been published - give the reviewer the option to share their review

There is an alternative use of social buttons, which I haven't seen or been able to test on a client site yet. But I wanted to share it anyway. It builds upon the code that Tom Anthony talked about here which allows you to detect if a user is logged into Twitter, Facebook or Google+ whilst they are viewing your website.

If you can use the code that Tom created to detect if a user is logged into Facebook for example, you could show that user a custom message. This could be anything you want but it could be something as simple as encouraging them to like your page in exchange for a discount. This not only gets you the like but also increases the chances of the user converting after giving them a discount.

Tom quickly tested this theory on a test site which you can see a screenshot from here:

You can put whatever message you want in here, this is to demonstrate what could be done if you think a little out of the box and not just put social share buttons on a page because that is what everyone else does.

Page Speed

Again, this is something that has become more of a focus since Rand's blog post. Speed has always been important but SEOs sat up and took a lot more notice when Google confirmed it was a factor in the algorithm, albeit a small one.

For me, an eCommerce site should care about site speed because of its effect on conversion rate rather than rankings. A user is not going to hang around waiting for your product pages to load and there have been some good studies that show the positive effect a fast loading page has on conversion rates.

Bottom line is that you should care about site speed for your users rather than SEO. Here is a good guide for improving site speed written by aaaa

Email Marketing: 5 Elementos clave para diseñar plantillas

Si está considerando implementar una campaña de Email Marketing o eMarketing y tiene dudas sobre cómo desarrollar su plantilla html, o no está obteniendo los resultados deseados con su plantilla actual, tome estos 5 elementos básicos para tener una plantilla exitosa.

Diseño de la Plantilla: No es tan simple como parece

Existe mucha desinformación acerca de el correcto diseño de una plantilla para Email MKT.

Si utiliza un programa de envío de boletines, ofertas o novedades y este tiene plantillas, va por buen camino. Sin embargo por cuestiones de identidad corporativa o branding esta no pueden estar dando el resultado que usted en especifico requiere.

Toda plantilla de Email debe cumplir con por lo menos los siguientes 5 elementos para garantizar el éxito de sus campañas de eMarketer o Email MKT.

1. Diseñar para un vista previa horizontal (horizontal preview pane)

La realidad es que la mayoría de usuarios de clientes de Email tales como Outlook, Mac Mail, Gmail, Hotmail o Yahoo Mail, pre-visualizan sus correos entrantes en una ventana que en promedio mide 638x86 pixeles. Este promedio es el resultado de un estudio llevado a cabo por MicroMass Communications.

A pesar de parecer increíble, la mayoría de las personas no ven más allá de los 100 pixeles iniciales de cada Email. Esto significa que su plantilla no debe exceder estos 638 pixeles de ancho. De hecho el estándar recomendado es de 600 pixeles.

Por otro lado su texto introductorio más relevante debe estar dentro de estos primeros 100 pixeles, o mejor aún, dentro de los primeros 80 pixeles.

2. Maximizar su plantilla con 2 columnas

Es poco probable que el lector en los 54 segundos promedio que invierte en un Email, lo lea por completo. Por este motivo si su Email tiene más información debe maximizar el espacio en dos columnas. Una de ellas para el texto principal y otra para separar otro tema de interés que se verá en segundo plano. La proporción mas usual es 400 pixeles para el contenido principal y 200 para contenidos de menor tamaño con enlaces de navegación.

Ahora bien, de que lado colocar la columna de ligas o enlaces es cuestión de debate. En lo personal, prefiero utilizar la columna pequeña del lado derecho por los siguiente motivos. Nuestra lectura es de izquierda a derecha por lo que este arreglo coloca el contenido principal en orden de lectura en una posición preponderante, esto se repite en el diseño de un sitio web, por ello siempre hay que tener en cuenta como se desarrollara el diseño de la plantilla. Otro motivo es que si por aluna razón la ventana de pre-visualización es menor a los 600 pixeles, el contenido principal seguirá estando a la vista del lector.

Yo recomiendo probar con ambos arreglos o diseños de plantillas y probarlos en diferentes clientes de Email como MailChimp, NewsMaker o el que utilices normalmente y determinar cual le resulta mejor.

3. Definir imágenes y ligas (enlaces)

Es importante tener en cuenta que los clientes de email son menos estandarizados que los navegadores, por lo que es importante cuidar el código html de su plantilla.

En principio, el tamaño de cada imagen debe estar definido. Es decir, dentro del código html debe esta perfectamente definido el alto y el ancho que tiene cada imagen. También es importante siempre utilizar tanto el Atl Tag como el Title Tag.

Ejemplo: 

<img src="

" alt="Playa de arena" width="500" height="910" border="0" tppabs="playa-de-arena.jpg" > modo correcto de colocar una imagen con sus correspondientes Tags.

Las ligas deben ser absoluta y no relativas. Los navegadores soportan código html con ligas relativas, los clientes del Email solo reconocen ligas absolutas. Si no están correctas la ligas estarán rotas y esto es algo que nunca debe suceder en un Email.

Ejemplo: 

<a href="http://www.midominio.com/fotos/verano.html"></a> esto es una liga absoluta, es un enlace con la ruta completa apuntando hacia a donde se encuentra el arcivo "verano.html".

esto es una liga relativa, en el caso de tener el HTML en el que mismo directorio en el que estamos trabajando.

4. Limitar el uso de imágenes

Es importante limitar el uso de imágenes al mínimo. Siempre trate de darle relevancia a su contenido mediante código html. Si es cierto que las imágenes son muy vistosas, sin embargo traen muchos contratiempos al ser procesados por los clientes de Email, cuantas menos imágenes mejor.

5. Mantener el contenido corto y simple

No importa que tan bueno sea su contenido, el usuario NO va a leer su Email! Los usuarios lo ESCANEAN al contenido, y esto lo harán en menos de un minuto. Por este motivo no escriba su contenido en largos párrafos de texto que no sean fácilmente legibles.

Presente su contenido con grandes encabezados relevantes y un párrafo corto con una liga al contenido completo en su sitio web, para que el lector interesado en este tema en particular pueda leer el contenido completo.

El uso de listas (bullets) también pueden ser de gran ayuda. La idea es no atosigar al lector con textos extensos.

Ejemplo:

• Ejemplo 1
• Ejemplo 2
• Ejemplo 3

Código:

<ul style="list-style-image: url(URL DE TU IMAGEN O BULLET); color: rgb(148, 0, 211); font-weight: bold; font-size: 12pt;">

<li>Ejemplo 1</li>

<li>Ejemplo 2</li>

<li>Ejemplo 3</li>

</ul>

Es cierto que su contenido tiene valor. Sin embargo un Email no es una página web y mucho menos un Blog. El comportamiento de un lector frente a la bandeja de entrada es muy diferente al que tiene cuando esta navegando en un sitio o interactuando en un Blog o Red Social.

Mantenga su contenido, corto, ameno, directo y haga de él un generador de clics, aperturas y no un generador de gran información.

Agencia365 Marketing Online en Argentina

#email #marketing #plantillas 

5 Things Your Youtube Channel Should Have

#1: Add Your Custom URLs in the Newly Placed Description Area

This option is now at the top on the right of your video. Talk about brand power. Previously, only partners could take advantage of this prime channel real estate.

However, you don’t have to be a partner to place your URL links in plain sight to the right of the video. Before, your links were drowning below the fold (scroll down) to the left. Now your channel description area is to the right of the video above the fold. That means a higher potential click-through rate to your outside sites.

Plus you can add your social media links in the description area, such as Facebook, Twitter and now Google+.

Brand juice for non-partner channels.

#2: Add Overlays to ALL of Your Videos

This is a huge opportunity! Most people don’t know about this feature. YouTube promotions are a vastly under-used resource for traffic generation (98 of AdAge‘s Top 100 advertisers can’t be wrong).

Previous YouTube guidelines required you to promote your videos in order to take advantage of YouTube’s self-branded overlays.

However, YouTube has changed that requirement. You don’t need to have a running and approved promotion for a specific video to take advantage of overlays.

Now you can simply create the promoted video, pause the campaign and still have the power of the branded overlay.

Create a custom ad for your overlay.

#3: Prevent Other Ads from Showing on Your Video

In order to keep all other ads from showing up on your featured video player, check the box that says, “Prevent ads from showing in my videos on this page.”

This is of course useful and necessary once you add your own branded and clickable overlay to your featured video.

Also, if you opt to have your newest video as the featured video, then you’ll only have to make this selection once and it will apply to all of your featured videos. Simply click on the Edit button found directly over the featured video.

Click the Edit button above your featured video.

From there, you can edit the information. Check the "Prevent ads from showing in my videos on this page."

While you’re here, I would also suggest making sure the auto-play option is also checked to have your featured video start playing right away when visitors come to your channel. (This is the only way your overlay will actually show right away.)

#4: Check “Always Take Subscribed Users to the Feed Tab”

It allows your existing subscribers to see your latest videos and the comments you make on other channels and videos (as well as any updates that you mention). The “Feed” tab not only brings your subscribers that much closer to seeing your channel comments, but they’re more likely to dive in and start commenting themselves to keep up with the conversations.

This can be found in the Edit Channel feature.

Click the Edit Channel button to begin editing your channel.

From there, go in and click the “Info and Settings” tab, which will show you where you can check the “Always take subscribed users to the feed tab.”

Once in Info and Settings, check the "Always take subscribed users to the feed tab."

The Goal Here Is Engagement

YouTube is a social network site (many of us forget that). That being said, treating your YouTube Channel as your traffic filter to your external links can only work well if there’s solid engagement on the channel page itself.

From the Feed tab, you can choose to click through to comments only or channel activity.

For instance, if you’re trying to build engagement within YouTube, commenting on other YouTube channels is a great way to get them to come back to yours.

Ask questions. Engage in thoughtful conversation.

Nostalgia Sets in for the Old Layout

As far as the new layout goes, channel commenting is one of the only features that seem a bit lacking from the user experience and engagement point of view. You can still comment; and actually, I like where the comment is structured on the channel (the top to the right of the video).

After leaving a channel post, you can view your post as well as others' posts.

But it is more of a “submit your comment” box and not a place where you can read the comments that are coming through the channel. (In this regard, I prefer the old layout.)

In fact, the only way to see the comments is from either the feed section or after you’ve submitted a comment.

With the new design layout, new users coming to your channel can certainly watch a series of videos with a more fluid user experience than before. However, from the channel page, the only way to read existing interaction on the channel is by going to the Feed tab and clicking through to “comments only.” (Seems counterintuitive to the flow that YouTube has fine-tuned.)

#5: Prioritize Your Favorite Channels on your Home Page Using the Pinned Subscribers Feature

The recent home page changes mean big things for YouTube. Social is what’s on their mind—and the home page, having more personalization, reflects that.

The channels you’re subscribed to are in list form under your profile on the left.
The middle column shows all the activity of those whom you’ve subscribed to.
And the Pinned feature allows you to take your top 10 YouTube users and have their information fed to you first.

Home page secrets.

So How is this Powerful?

The benefit is that you can scan the activity of those YouTube channels within your same niche to discern if their patterns on YouTube are successful or not. I don’t have to look too far to know what someone I subscribe to is doing. It’s right there in front of me. Not only that person’s upload patterns, but also the frequency of his/her communication—video commenting and channel subscribing—ultimately, how he/she is using YouTube socially to establish relationships.