Monday, July 15, 2013

Five Things Good For Your Web Site

 Detailed Product Information: Your customers and prospects want to see up-to-date and comprehensive product information that is well organized, filled with product details and technical specifications to allow for product comparisons. The vast majority of your audience comes to your Web site to discover if and how your products can meet their needs.
 
Offers and Landing Pages: Your Web site visitors crave information that will help them do their jobs more effectively. Your job is to offer white papers, technical articles, application notes and other educational content. Sprinkle offers on relevant pages throughout your Web site and send prospects to specific landing pages that describe the offer in more detail to capture prospect information to generate leads.
 
Consistent Page Design: Keep your visitors on track and avoid confusion by adhering to consistent page design. Navigation menus should appear in the same place on every page, usually across the top or down the side, or both if your site has multiple levels of hierarchy.  A user-friendly design may use a wider column for the main content and a narrower column for secondary content. Make sure your headings, font size and typeface are consistent too.
 
Contact Features: Because one of the primary goals of your Web site is to capture lead information, you must make it easy for prospects to contact you. A good idea is to have a phone number and email address on every page, plus a link in the navigation menu to a Contact Us page.  Landing pages should include forms as well as phone numbers and email addresses to give users multiple options for contacting you.
 
Basic Search Engine Optimation: Almost every site can benefit from basic SEO techniques to help drive more qualified traffic from search engines for specific keyword searches.  Make use of page titles, description meta tags, keywords in page copy, site maps and simple HTML pages to make your Web pages more search engine friendly.
 
Next time, five bad things to avoid for your Web site.

Tuesday, July 2, 2013

B2B Content Marketing


 B2B marketers often turn to content marketing for lead generation and prospect nurturing throughout the lengthy sales process. Recent research points to a growing number of B2B marketers ramping up content marketing for more brand-based goals, namely boosting thought leadership and brand awareness. Sales and customer acquisition were each cited by 29% of respondents.  Customer retention and loyalty were also important content marketing goals for about a quarter (26%) of marketers.
 
Though engagement as a campaign end goal was only cited by 20% of respondents, as a tactic, it was vital for content marketing success. More than half of B2B marketers used content marketing to foster greater audience engagement -- necessary for drawing leads and generating greater brand awareness. Other top reasons B2B marketers turned to content markeing to achieve their objectives included its ability to establish brand trust (47%) and offer marketers a way to create faster, more frequent touchpoints with customers and prospects (33%).
 
The creation of content assets needed to satisfy those multiple touchpoints appears to rest heavily on the shoulders of marketers. 94% of technology marketers created their own content from scratch, with 39% adding third-party content. About a third reported reusing content where applicable, and 30% encouraged user-generated content.
 
When generating content from scratch, engagement was again a common tactic. 81% of B2B marketers cited engaging and compelling storytelling as the most important elements of effective content marketing. Even within the technology sector, a highly technical, complex industry, engagement and originality trumped professional writing when generating content marketing. While prospects may rely on technical, professional content to make decsions, they are initially drawn to brands that offer a more engaging, dynamic content experience. 

MY OBJECTIVE:

To share common sense lessons learned with 40-plus years experience in marketing, sales and as a B2B publisher.

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