Stopping short

Today, most B2B marketers use analytics for reporting and measurement to gauge campaign performance. This is a good thing. However, they often get so caught up in day to day measurement and evaluation, that they lose sight of the power of analytics to influence other business decisions. For instance, many marketers regularly log into their analytics to check the usual suspects — monthly unique visitors, lead volume or e-commerce value, average time on site, or month over month and year over year trends – but then they stop there.

Understanding the value

But analytics offers marketers so much more beyond campaign performance data. In fact, its true power lies in leveraging it as a tool for influencing other business decisions that will help drive efficiencies and ultimately more revenue. For example, tapping into your analytics can help you identify a new market opportunity, or drive a decision to invest in a new line of business, or lead you to divert resources from one territory to another. Savvy marketers know the ability to use this data to influence other business decisions which can set them apart from the competition and could very well translate into a competitive advantage.

Case in point

Imagine how you would feel if your boss walked into your office and told you that your company was going to rebrand, and that a year from now she wants to see 30 percent growth in revenue? While that’s not exactly how it happened, over the past year, I worked with a B2B office furniture business that went through a similar challenge. As we began planning for the rebrand, everything was put on the table, and the company was willing to change or fix any portion of their business that needed fixing if we could substantiate it with data.

So we started to think about the various issues we could address and how we could leverage analytics. By digging into the data, we were able to not only influence the site redesign and impact offline sales channels, but we were also able to further segment our online campaigns by market, and more effectively integrate media channels. Ultimately, by leveraging analytics to influence other business decisions and marketing channels, we were able to grow the business by more than 30 percent year over year.

Try this at home

Below are 4 ways to use analytics to influence other business decisions:

1. Evaluate business units. Take advantage of your analytics tool to help you segment out your data and allow business units to better understand their online performance. For example, let’s say you have a social media team who is interested in knowing what kind of revenue and traffic their online efforts are producing. By segmenting out the data, you can provide them with exactly what they need. Fortunately, many analytics tools allow you to segment out your data so you can look at the traffic and revenue coming from the sources you identify as relevant. Moreover, they also allow you to create logins that drive users directly to this information so they don’t have to sift through other data each time they login.
2. Inform search and online and offline media. Marketers constantly use analytics to evaluate how they are doing online, and they also use it to segment out specific online media channels to understand direct traffic from each source. However, most don’t use analytics to influence media buying decisions. But marketers should take advantage of some of the tools within analytics to help define strategies for their next media blast. For example, it can help you understand how loyal your visitors are by evaluating the number of times each visitor comes back to your site. It can also help you evaluate your site search to understand what your users are actually looking for. Understanding this information will allow you to better connect with your potential customers through your media campaigns.
3. Influence a site redesign. Did you know that by tapping into your analytics you can see the various operating systems your customers have, the browsers they are using, and their screen resolutions? This information could be invaluable for a site redesign. For instance, it can help you determine whether your lead form or call to action is within your customers’ browsing window more often than not, or whether you should you move it a bit higher up the page. It can also help you determine what pages are driving the highest bounce rates, and learn how you can enhance them to keep customers on your site longer or drive them down the path to becoming a lead. Your customers are telling you what they want, but you need to use that data to help them through your process.
4. Support decisions to invest in emerging technologies. Media and technology is constantly changing. Do you remember back to when you wondered what Facebook and Twitter was all about, or why you should care about targeting users on their mobile devices? While it can be challenging to keep up with the changes, your analytics can help you understand whether you need to pay attention to new mediums and technologies, and how you can better target your audience. For instance, it can tell you whether or not users are accessing your site on their mobile devices, and which devices they are using most often. Knowing this information could drive you to invest in a down-sized version of your site for mobile users so they can get at the information they need quickly, instead of bouncing and heading to a competitor’s site.

To remain competitive in today’s economy, marketers need to fully capitalize on the tools they have at their disposal. Smart B2B marketers will tap into their analytics as a multi-purpose tool – like a Swiss Army Knife — and leverage it to influence other business decisions, not just assess campaign performance.

Understanding the value

Contrary to what some direct response marketers might think, investing in your brand online is not just about spending money on the brand. Instead, it’s about building an entity that will resonate with your customers and keep them coming back again and again—even when there’s no deal or promotion to entice them. Not only will building your brand online go a long way to boost awareness and build your reputation, but the more people are invested in your brand, the greater the chances are that they will actively seek it out and remain loyal. Given that, direct response marketers need to recognize that online branding should be a priority as it can help you achieve your goals by driving incremental revenue for your business. In short, if you want to grow your business online, you first need to grow your brand.

Recently, I witnessed a new direct response player stumble in the online marketplace. The company spent a year building up its business, developing its product mix, adding staff, growing relationships with key partners in the industry and investing in a website to attract its target audience. But when the company launched its site, nothing happened. It netted zero leads. In fact, the only traffic to its site was coming from internal IP addresses. Three weeks later things weren’t much better—the site had generated fewer than 10 leads.

So what went wrong? While this company had taken the time to build its business before launching its site, it didn’t invest in building its brand online. Instead, the company figured that because it was a direct response entity, driving leads was the priority, and brand building efforts could come later. Unfortunately, they were wrong. Without a brand, there was no concrete way of driving leads. Sure, anyone can find a way to get out in front of an audience, but without a reputation, strong online presence or an effective media strategy behind it, consistently driving business leads will be challenging.

The company was able to turn the situation around, but it took a carefully crafted online brand building campaign, including a creative strategy, media plan and an online reputation building effort. But the value speaks for itself. Not only did the campaign help grow brand equity with strong awareness for the company, it also produced real business leads. Today the site generates more than 200 qualified leads per month.

Here are five key strategies to consider before launching your online branding efforts.

Research your audience. To build your brand online, you must first have a clear understanding of your audience, especially before you begin creating content strategies and communication plans. Fortunately, there are plenty of tools out there that can help you identify your target audience, including products from comScore, Nielsen, Google and Compete. Tools such as these allow you to learn more about your audience, including gender, age, marital status, household income, and locale.

Give your brand a voice. Based on your research, determine what your audience wants to hear and what message you want to put forward. This will form the foundation for your brand’s voice. But in doing so, keep the following in mind:

• Have an open mind and consider all ideas (imagine Geico‘s reaction when its creative team first suggested using a lizard as their brand voice).
• When creating content, speak with your audience—not at them—as people respond better to a conversation that relates to them and engages them.
• Be consistent in your messaging as people look for consistency in a brand.

Balance your online media mix. Work to build your brand through multiple channels. Use display and content networks to build your brand through repetition, and get your ads out in front of your target audience using behavioral targeting, site specific targeting and re-messaging. From an organic search perspective, make sure that your brand name and messaging is consistent in your title tags and in your meta descriptions. In addition, be sure that your messaging is consistent with your brand voice throughout your various channels, including paid search. By creating consistent messaging throughout the buying cycle, you allow consumers to continually recognize and recall your brand. This will make you the clear choice when customers are ready to make a purchase.

Plan your social media integration. What do you want your brand to say or do online? What types of interactions do you want your consumers to have with your business? Is Facebook right for you? Twitter? You may not have all of the answers at this point, but a little research should help you understand where your audience is and how to interact with them. Start by listening and seeing who is talking about your brand. If no one is, then start the conversation. But remember, it’s a conversation leading to interaction, not a means to force a message on consumers. Your brand will be on the path to grow in popularity online in no time if you remember to treat social media as a conversation.

Build up your reputation online. Building your reputation online is similar to a networking breakfast, but it’s not as easy and it takes more time. First, it’s important to have a clearly defined strategy for reaching your audience. Next, you need to identify the tactics you’ll use in the process. For instance, be sure to leverage any existing offline partnerships you have in order to grow your reputation online. Doing so will not only help build links pointing back to your website, but it can also enhance your organic search presence. Overall, the more prevalent your brand becomes in the mind of your reputable peers, the stronger your reputation will grow online.

The situation

B2B marketers work hard to target the right keywords, create compelling ad copy, and drive potential customers to click on their ads, all with the hopes of capturing them as a lead. But unfortunately, conversion rates often fall short of what they could be. Desperate to make up ground, many B2B marketers ramp up their paid search spend to drive more traffic, and in doing so, end up maintaining their dismal conversion rate.

The solution

So as a B2B marketer, how can you convert more visitors into leads? How can you keep those customers engaged and ensure that they don’t end up on a competitors’ site? Quite simply, by focusing on better converting the traffic you’re already getting. And the best way to do that is by improving the pieces that you can control: the experience a potential customer has when they reach your site. In other words, you can boost your conversion rate by focusing on the landing page.

Understanding the value

As a B2B marketer, let’s say that you receive 5,000 visits to a landing page each month, with a conversion rate of two percent. Of that amount, you ultimately close 20 percent of the leads that come into the database. That works out to be 20 new clients per month. But what if you could double that two percent conversion rate just by making a few simple changes to the landing page? Doing that would translate into an incremental 20 new clients each month. In fact, it would allow you to double the revenue from your paid search campaigns without spending an additional dollar on advertising.

Seeing it in action

But can merely tweaking a landing page actually boost conversation rates? Absolutely.  In fact, we did exactly that for a software company that I was working with last year. Their business was going well, their click through rate and quality score was continually improving month over month, and they were getting ample traffic to their website.  However, their conversion rates were stagnant. But by making a few changes to the landing page — including placement, and focusing on benefits rather than features — we were able to improve conversion rates by 250% in just six months.

Making it work

Landing pages are the key to keeping potential customers engaged and closing them in under a minute. Below are five key landing page tips that will help boost your conversion rate and drive more revenue from business to business transactions:

1. Simplify your content. Landing page content should be in bullet form, not paragraphs.  In addition, it should focus on the benefits of your products/services, not the features. A visitor to your site is already interested, so why sell them on what your offering does? Instead, sell them on how they can benefit from it. Keep it short, simple, and to the point. Remember, this is your opportunity to add value to their experience and keep their eyes on your site instead of the competition’s.
2. Shorten your lead form. Think about what you truly need from your customers in order to consider them a lead. At this point in the process, do you really need to know their industry or the size of their organization? Or would you be better off simplifying their commitment and only asking for an email address, name, name of company, and a telephone number? The shorter your lead form, the more likely a potential customer is to fill it out.
3. Use your analytics to drive decisions. Your site analytics package offers a lot of useful data that you can leverage to improve the performance of your landing pages. For instance, do you know the screen resolution that 75% of your top prospects are using? Tapping into this data for current site profiles could tell you exactly that. Moreover, it could help you determine whether visitors can actually see the benefits of your offering or the lead form, and the specific browser types they are using.
4. Keep the conversion path in mind when using images. The use of images on landing pages can be powerful as they attract the eye and can help keep a user on the page. However, they are not risk free. For example, some images might distract the eye from the conversion path, or sit front and center while pushing a lead form below the fold or off to the side. When considering the using of images, think about driving the user down the path to conversion. You want to be sure that your imagery enhances the experience, and does not detract from the optimal path.
5. Leverage landing pages for extended user engagement. Beyond driving visitors down a conversion path, think about how you can leverage landing pages to engage the consumer beyond today. For instance, do you have a Facebook fan page, a blog, press releases, a newsletter, or an RSS feed? If so, think about how you can offer such content to visitors so that they continue to engage with your brand beyond the initial lead form. Adding simple links, or teasers for content such as white papers, behind the lead form will allow you to keep your customers engaged throughout the sales process and beyond.

If you are looking to boost your conversion rates, don’t make the mistake of chasing after more of what you already have. Instead, work to better convert the traffic you’re already getting. Improving your landing pages will help you do exactly that.

Today, search is ubiquitous. Given that, it can’t help but impact brand. Think about it: your customers and prospects go online every day, but what if you’re not there for them when they need you? What happens if they can’t find you?

It’s simple really. If they can’t find you, they’ll surely find your competitors. And when they do, what do you think their perception will be? Chances are, they’ll consider your competitors to be superior. In fact, research by our firm shows that 39% of search engine users believe that the companies whose websites are returned among the top search results are the leaders in their field. And that is exactly why you need to have a well thought out strategy to leverage search to help build your brand.

A three-part search strategy for building your brand

Use paid search to reinforce offline branding. Paid search offers the ability to control your visibility, messaging, and customer interaction—all key elements in brand building. But how do you go about achieving all of these objectives?

Start by building out a comprehensive keyword set made up of targeted keywords, which are relevant to your business and which your customers would search on to find information about your company. Then you need to target your creative or ad copy to speak to your brand’s messaging, and keep it consistent with your offline messaging. For example, do you have something that is uniquely different from your competitors? Do you have a discount or an offer? Make sure to use that in your creative and landing pages. In addition, be sure to create highly targeted landing pages that speak to your brand’s integrity, the benefit of choosing your company over your competitors and make it relevant to the keyword search, while keeping the “look and feel” consistent with your offline branding elements. Lastly, tap into the content network to reach the broadest network of customers by being in front of them during their every day interaction with the web. In the process, create tightly themed ad groups, targeted ad copy, and a consistent brand message, but don’t stop at text ads either: utilize other forms of creative such as image ads, videos, or flash to attract the user’s eye.

Leverage organic search perceptions. Organic search gives you the opportunity to drive relevant traffic to your site; however it can’t match the visibility control of paid search. So how do you go about growing your brand through organic search?

Considering that 39% of users believe that the websites appearing in the top search results are the leaders in their field, it’s imperative for you to show up in the top search results. In order to do this, you’ll need to create unique and valuable content that will drive up your rankings and solidify your brand presence in the results. You’ll also need to continue with your offline brand messaging, focus on the benefits of your brand versus your competition, and make it enticing enough to get others to link to you. Of course, you’ll also need to work on gaining valuable links from relevant websites as external linking is a major part of the success of an organic search campaign. By creating relevant content on your site, other sites will want to link to you as a valuable resource of information. But it doesn’t stop there; you need to pursue these links. Think of it as the PR of organic search. Ultimately selling the value of your site to those who would be interested in your content will help strengthen your brand.

Join the conversation in social media. Participating in social media allows you to take creativity, unique content, and linking to the next level. So how do you get involved in social media? Where do you get involved? And how does it impact search?

Start with a clearly defined strategy for getting your brand out there. It should be high-level and fit with the objectives of your brand. Then figure out which pieces of social media work for your brand and how best to interact. Should you be on Facebook? Should you be on Twitter? Not every social medium will be right for your brand, so how do you figure out where to start and when to engage? First keep in mind that this is not just marketing to consumers; instead, it’s actually interacting with the community. Given that, you need to get involved, and genuinely becoming a part of the community will go a long way to promoting the integrity of your brand. In addition, be mindful that social media affects search. It can be an extremely effective means for dominating the page, as results for Twitter, Wikipedia, blogs, and other social mediums are showing-up in the search results more and more every day.

At the end of the day, it’s your brand. Your investment. And not only is it worth protecting, it’s worth improving.  Smart marketers will leverage search to improve the efficacy of their offline branding efforts, and in doing so, ultimately build the overall strength of their brand.

Christopher Wallace is a Client Services Manager at iProspect. He oversees the activities of Search Marketing Specialists and Search Marketing Analysts responsible for natural search campaigns, paid inclusion, shopping feeds, and pay-per click campaigns.  The Brand Aid column appears Wednesdays at Search Engine Land.