As powerful as search marketing is for B2B lead generation, it has ironically served to increase the ages-old friction between sales and marketing. This is because when buyers use search to research solutions and find vendors, they are extremely early in the buying process—often long before they are ready to engage with sales. Passing these […]
Do you want to know how to reduce your cost per conversion by up to $10.67 and improve your quality score at the same time? Let me tell you a story about how I used two easy landing page optimization tricks to do just this.
No one enjoys blind dates. Whether introduced by friends, the Internet, or your neighborhood matchmaker, it’s nerve-wracking to meet for the first time. Conversely, everyone loves weddings. The flowers, the tradition, the drunken dancing at the reception–you can find something you like. Everything that comes in between is the interesting part. You’re learning about each […]
Let’s listen in on a call between a sales rep and a new lead generated by a paid search campaign: Hello Sarah, my name is Brian, and I’m your sales rep from Widgets Inc. I noticed you recently clicked one of our ads and registered to download our paper “10 Ways to Better Profits through […]
Your landing page is a key part of any successful paid search campaign, and by now, the value of testing and optimizing your landing pages has become accepted wisdom. However, many testing methodologies—especially multivariate testing—are complex and are only appropriate for sites that get hundreds of conversions a day. Small- and mid-sized companies simply do […]
Mobile search is the hot topic this week, especially given SMX Local & Mobile and the fact that Google AdWords is showing text ads for free on mobile phones for the next 46 days. I spend my days helping B2B marketing professionals drive revenue and improve marketing accountability, so naturally I got to thinking about […]
All I really need to know about search engine marketing I learned in kindergarten. Or something like that. The goal of search engine marketing is to get your pages to show up when target customers make relevant searches. As search engines get better at finding relevant content and preventing SEO-spam, search engine marketing success comes […]
In Part 1 of "How To Optimize B2B Pay Per Click In 4 Hours A Week", I wrote that in most B2B companies, the person or team that manages PPC campaigns and landing pages is under constant pressure to "do more with less". This means that search marketing is at best a part time job, […]
In a typical B2B company, the job of managing pay per click campaigns is given to someone in the demand generation or business development team. For this person, managing PPC is at best a part time job, squeezed in around managing webinars, email campaigns, field events, whitepaper creation, and perhaps much more. This challenge is […]
Business-to-business (B2B) marketing is too often the ugly stepchild in the marketing family, especially when compared to the golden child that is business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing. B2C marketing gets all the glory, so much so that when people talk about marketing without a modifier, it’s usually assumed they mean consumer marketing, never business marketing. This is […]
If your goal is to make Google richer with no gain for your yourself, then stop reading. You don’t need to worry about landing pages or conversions. But if your goal is to grow your own business using search, then you must pay as much—or more—attention to converting traffic into leads as you do to […]
So you got a click on your PPC ad. Now what do you do? The job of the B2B search marketer is only beginning when a prospect clicks. As MarketingSherpa points out, the decision to click is microscopically unimportant compared to all the things you are asking from a prospect after they’ve clicked: Stick around […]
Nearly three-fourths of companies that outsource their pay-per-click search marketing to agencies are dissatisfied with their results, and only 21 percent are completely satisfied, according to a Jupiter Research published late last year. What causes this dissatisfaction, especially for B2B marketers? There are five factors at work: