Category Archives: Landing Pages & Forms

B2B Pay Per Click Advertising

Interview with Terry Whalen from CPC Search

terry whalen cpc search To generate demand for your products, it’s not enough to nurture the existing leads in your database. You also need a steady stream of fresh leads coming in. There are many ways to find these new leads: inbound marketing, search advertising, tradeshows, lead programs, etc. They all have their pros and cons, and most companies use a combination of strategies.

I have written a lot about Inbound Marketing (social media and search engine optimization): it’s free, but takes a fair amount of time to set up. Search advertising (pay-per-click) is another popular option: it costs money, but it immediately starts driving people to your site. I recently got in touch with Terry Whalen of CPCSearch, a B2B PPC agency, and he offered to answer some questions: this turned out to be a great B2B Search Marketing primer. If you have additional questions for Terry, please leave a comment below.

Jep: Some of my friends claim that B2B paid search is less interesting than B2C because the average B2B search budgets pale in comparison with B2C. What is your take?

Terry: B2B paid search tends to be more challenging to get right versus B2C – so if you like challenges, B2B paid search can be quite fun. It’s true that measuring true ROI usually takes a longer time and more effort than measuring ROI for B2C campaigns – so, when the ROI data does start to come in, it’s all the more exciting.

Jep: What are some of the key differences in running a B2B paid search campaign vs. a B2C campaign?

Terry: As I mentioned, it typically takes much longer to determine things like lead quality and ROI.  To me, this means that we want to be very careful to be clear on the true value proposition delivered by the client’s products and services when we are crafting ad text. I’m a little less inclined to “think outside the box” when it comes to B2B ad testing. Compare that to a B2C account where you are measuring credit card transactions. Because we’ll get super quick transaction and revenue data on any testing we do, we may feel more inclined to test “crazy” ad ideas that – if they do not work – can be quickly killed.  Same goes for keywords. For B2B keyword and ad testing, we tread with a bit more caution.

Jep: How would you describe the unique benefits of Paid Search in the entire spectrum of options that B2B marketing managers have to promote their products (such as banner ads, list rentals, telemarketing, etc.)?

Terry: Well, the reason paid search has become so big is that ads are matched to user searches.  When paid search works well, solutions (ads) are matched to needs (searches). If you can figure out which keywords are aligned with the user intent you are targeting, then you can have ads appear that are relevant to the user, and relevant to what your company provides.  Above all, paid search is very measurable and controllable. So, advertisers have a lot of wind at their back in terms of testing and iterating to get their campaigns working well for them.

Jep: Is there a typical target group that is easier to reach with PPC? E.g. promoting software to developers vs. selling a value-based proposition to C-level executives?

Terry: I’d say it’s easier to target certain groups for the very simple reason of size. For example, there are many more software and web developers in the world than there are CIO’s of F1000 companies. So, if you are selling into CIO’s of F1000 companies, you will certainly have a tougher time – the population you are targeting is a small population, and the number of daily searches done by this group will be a much smaller number than searches done by software and web developers.

Jep: How do you track opportunities or revenue associated with specific AdWords Campaigns? Do your clients use Salesforce for Google AdWords, Marketing Automation systems or other tools?

Terry: For the most part, clients use Salesforce-for-AdWords, which is a very elegant way to link leads with valuable AdWords data like keyword, search term, campaign, etc. For clients that are using marketing automation platforms like Marketo or Eloqua, there is a bit more integration to do, but the links can still be made to work. At the end of the day, we feel that the most important piece of data is the search query – so, if you can just get a hidden field to capture this data and connect it with a lead, you are ahead of the game. In AdWords, you would just append a parameter to each active ad you are running, e.g. keyword={keyword}.

Jep: Could you see some kind of integration with Marketing Automation systems that would make running a profitable PPC campaign easier?

Terry: Yes, in a very general sense, anything that can increase the value of a lead after it has been acquired – which marketing automation can certainly do – should have the effect of increasing ROI from your paid search activities, thus making it easier to rationalize larger budgets and higher cost-per-lead targets, which can lead to additional keyword and ad testing, higher keyword bids, and more leads.

Jep: Do some of your clients use lead scoring together with PPC advertising? If yes, can you use the lead score to refine the campaigns?

Terry: Yes, some do – and yes, we certainly can and do use that to inform our target cost/lead for various clients. Lead scoring can be a great way to speed up the time required before we know if we’re on the right track with certain keyword groups and ad messaging, without having to wait for the lead to have been closed (won, lost, etc.).

Jep: What are you tips for creating effective landing pages and/or microsites?

Terry: I think it’s important to be clear and transparent about what it is that your company brings to the table, include the lead form on the page, have the cursor already be in the first field (if possible), and include at least a logo that will take users to the home page if there is no other navigation available on the page. If you are getting sparse conversion data, consider using less fields in your lead form. If the sales folks are complaining about poor-quality leads, remember that one way to increase lead quality is to raise the number of mandatory fields in your form. There is no set amount of fields that are best.  We have never found microsites to be a good investment of our time.

Jep: What kind of conversion offers (whitepapers, webinars, trials, etc.) do you find most effective?

Terry: Trials, then webinars, then white papers.

Jep: Terry, thank you very much for this introduction to B2B pay-per-click advertising.

NOTE: if you have questions or remarks, please leave a comment below.

Review of FormAssembly Form Builder

On this blog I primarily write about integrated Lead Management systems, rather than small tools. However, in a previous post I wrote about a project in which I’m replacing a full-blown Marketing Automation system with tools that add on to Salesforce.com. One of the key tools is a form builder: and that is exactly what FormAssembly provides.

I was impressed with FormAssembly: they have a cool-looking form builder that has lots of advanced features in a user-friendly package. You can simply add form fields to the form, position or group them, and get a live preview. You can edit the properties of the form fields, and set the advanced features (such as label placement or calculated fields).

Once you are done with your form you can copy-and-paste the form’s HTML code to your own website or you can run it from the FormAssembly server.

formassembly form builder

Advanced Features

You can send a ‘thank-you email’ immediately after form submission, and also get a notification yourself. You can create conditional questions, such as showing a ‘state’ field only when ‘United States’ is selected as a country. Also, you can pre-fill form fields by putting parameters in the form URL (e.g. http://website.com/form.html?field1=value1&field2=value2) However, it does not automatically recognize repeat visitors, like most marketing automation systems.

Submission of the Form

On the submission side of things it is very flexible too, but it takes more knowledge to set it up properly. You can submit straight into Salesforce.com, but it supports only limited deduplication: based on email address it can overwrite all other fields. So if an email address matches an existing Salesforce.com record, the information in the form will overwrite all information in Salesforce: I find that a little scary. Therefore I’ve used their HTTP Post functionality to submit the form to Ringlead, which does more elaborate deduplication.

Salesforce.com integration complexity

The setup of this part is more complex than in most marketing automation systems. You have to:

  • Manually map fields to the right Salesforce.com fields, based on naming conventions
  • Re-create select boxes (e.g. a list of industries)
  • Add several hidden fields, for example to link the form submission to a Campaign

Once you’ve figured this out once, you can easily copy the settings for additional forms.

AdWords Landing Pages

I’m using AdWords to drive visitors to one of my landing pages. I’ve tagged the advertisement so the link contains the search keywords and Ad Group. I’d like to save this information in Salesforce.com too, so I can see which keywords and Ad Groups generate the most business. Some marketing automation systems capture this information automatically, but with FormAssembly I had to write some PHP code to read the information in the URL and put it into a hidden field. It would be great if FormAssembly could make this feature standard: I bet a lot of people are using FormAssembly for AdWords landing pages.

Conclusion

Overall I feel that FormAssembly provides excellent value a low monthly fee ($34). And if they would improve Salesforce.com deduplication I would happily three times as much, and even more if they support AdWords tagging.

Abandon Your Marketing Automation System!?

I’m working on an interesting project right now: moving away from a marketing automation system. The plan is to go back to using only Salesforce.com with some cheap add-on tools for email, form submission and data quality. Smart or foolish? I’d love to have your input on the potential pitfalls (and benefits) of this approach.

Background

The company in question has used a comprehensive marketing automation system for about 2 years. In the early days it was used to sift through hundreds of new B2B leads per day to identify the valuable leads. This changed over time: now the focus has shifted to pro-active outreach to a handful of executives, instead of targeting thousands of software developers. In addition to cost savings, the thinking is that a full-blown marketing automation system just makes less sense with the new strategy.

How to Replace a Marketing Automation System?

My first reaction was: no way, you should not want to do without any type of marketing automation system (for simplicity sake, I use this term as synonymous to demand generation and lead management). However, when I started looking into Salesforce.com and the wide variety of add-ons, I was less convinced. The Salesforce.com database has some big issues (e.g. the split between Leads and Contacts), but many 3rd party tools are addressing these weaknesses.

What is easy to replace?

Email marketing that integrates with Salesforce.com is provided by many vendors, like VerticalResponse, Boomerang, ExactTarget, Genius, Lyris and more. There are also some relatively affordable registration form vendors, like FormAssembly and OnDialog. Basic lead scoring features are built into Salesforce.com, and data quality tools are available from vendors like Ringlead, CRM Fusion and Datatrim. Notifications of companies visiting your website are available from Leadlander, Netfactor, LEADSExplorer and DemandBase. You can create reports and dashboards in Salesforce.com to provide analytics. So there are lots of useful add-ons available at a nominal price.

What Is Going to Be Missed…

Some Email Service Providers can send email on behalf of the record owner or can handle drip-campaigns, but those are exceptions and you sometimes pay quite a bit more for these advanced features. Unsubscribe handling is typically done via a generic page, rather than via branded page.

If you use a basic form vendor, you have to manually map the fields, and put the form on a landing page yourself. You may want to pre-fill the form, or send a thank-you email or the start of an email drip campaign: this is not always possible. Also, some form vendors are not able to append to existing records (resulting in duplicates) or to link new registrations to a Salesforce.com campaign.

Lead scoring based on attributes (e.g. job title) is built into Salesforce.com, but that does not include activity-based scoring, such scoring based on website visitors, clicks on links in emails or form submissions.

Even though you can get reports on anonymous visitors via stand-alone tools, it’s much more work to set up notifications of website visits by known users, and even more challenging to sync that information with Salesforce.com.

Then there are specific usage scenarios that are automated in a marketing automation system, such sending a reminder to non-registrants for an event: with the new approach this needs to be done manually, which takes a lot more time.

Most marketing automation systems replicate the Salesforce.com database with their own database: in the new situation everything is stored in Salesforce.com (or at least: that’s the goal). That is great for manageability, but – if you have the habit of qualifying leads before sending them to the CRM system – you now have a database full with unqualified leads.

What Is Your Take?

This project is still in the planning phase, so I’m still compiling a list of all the pros and cons. One thing is sure: in the new situation the monthly cost will be about $200, down from well over a thousand dollars. That is a significant savings.

But how much more time will it cost to manage the new situation? Are there specific features that create revenue, but simply cannot be implemented with the new approach. What is your take on this?

MarketingSherpa’s Email Summit 2009

marketingsherpa logo Today MarketingSherpa’s Email Summit started in Miami. It is focused on advanced email strategies, which is an important part of the demand generation process. Most of the case studies seem to be B2C rather than B2B. The focus is on list- and trigger-based emails and on landing pages, rather than on the full Lead Management Automation functionality. Nevertheless, there are lots of interesting advanced email topics that are just as relevant for B2B demand generation specialists.

Unfortunately I can’t be there, but there is live coverage via Twitter.

Some highlights from the agenda:

Email Strategies

  • Using email in conjunction with social media campaigns
  • Combining List- and Trigger-Based Campaigns
  • Using direct mail with dynamic printing to recover email addresses

Email Analytics

  • Integrating web & email analytics for better conversion
  • Using Artificial Intelligence to predict prospect behavior

Email design

  • Leveraging user-generated content
  • Mobile email marketing
  • Cross-channel: using SMS and instant messaging

Landing page design & Personalization

  • Post-click personalization based on the “wisdom of the masses”
  • Optimization by focusing on specific actions

Testing

  • Using multi-variate testing to optimize conversion and sales
  • Using Email Control Groups for cost justification

Lead Management Automation Systems Compared

Stagnant email service providers becoming irrelevant? (see conclusion)

In a previous post there was a lively discussion about the terms Demand Generation and Lead Management Automation (LMA) systems. The consensus was that Lead Management System is part of the demand generation process, and focuses on managing leads you already have in your database (and capturing/importing new leads). Some example features:

  • building landing pages and registration forms
  • tracking the source of leads
  • collecting as much information as possible (web & data analytics)
  • nurturing via email and other channels
  • calculating a lead score until the prospect is sales-ready

But how does that compare to email marketing, web analytics and landing page optimization tools? In talking to several marketing managers, they often asked: “How do LMA systems compare to {fill in any other marketing software}”. In the next paragraphs I compare LMA systems with other popular marketing systems, and I hope to go more in-depth in future posts.

Email Marketing

Lead Management Systems can send out batch emails to a list, similar to Email Services Providers (ESPs) like VerticalResponse, ExactTarget and Constant Contact. Interesting enough, I’ve heard of several companies that still use ESPs in addition to their Lead Management System, not sure why. Let me know if you have ideas.

Lead Management Systems also provide lots of advanced email features, such as drip-marketing, event-based emails, heavily segmented and personalized emails (e.g. sent from the account of the responsible sales person), and event reminder emails. However, ESPs are also moving forward, and for example ExactTarget now also offers drip-marketing support.

Data Management

Some demandgen vendors provide data management features for deduplication and normalization. My personal opinion is that these features are usually somewhat limited, and that they’re not mature enough to replace specialized data cleaning solutions (Ringlead, DemandTools). But that may change soon, as LMA vendors keep expanding their offerings.

Web Analytics

All Lead Management Systems offer some kind of web analytics, mostly focused on marketing metrics. Only LMA systems aimed at smaller companies tend to offer generic web analytics (page views, referrers, etc.). In all other cases, you would still need a general-purpose Web Analytics systems, such Google Analytics, Coremetrics, Omniture or WebTrends.

There are also some specialized Web Analytics vendors that identify the company name of anonymous leads (Leadlander) or website activity for known leads (Genius.com). However, more and more LMA systems include this functionality. It ranges from fairly basic (Market2lead) to more comprehensive (Marketo, Genius Enterprise, ActiveConversion, LeadGenesys, Pardot).

Web Content Management

Lead Management Systems also do not replace Web Content Management systems, although it may be more common to have WCM features in Demand Generation in the future (earlier post). The only web pages they currently manage are landing pages or microsites. Those are usually hosted on a subdomain such as http://marketing.company.com. There are some exceptions: both Marketbright and Marqui include a full WCM system.

Landing page optimization & Website Personalization

An area where many Lead Management Systems can still improve is landing page optimization. In my opinion they should offer more features to optimize landing page conversion, which critical for Search Marketing efforts. There are dedicated vendors with a superior feature set, such as ion interactive, magnify360 and Sitebrand.

I’ve heard some vendors thinking about personalizing offers based on behavior of anonymous visitors to make it more likely that they register for an offer. Currently I’m not aware of any LMA vendors that offer this functionality: let me know if you know more about this…

Search Marketing

Search Engine Optimization and Pay-per-Click management are usually not included in Lead Management Systems. At most, LMA systems provide reporting on the lead source (which keywords, and organic search or PPC). It looks like SEO and PPC management will stay separate from Lead Management for the short to medium term. Personally I expect this will be integrated in the long term, as lead acquisition and lead management naturally complement each other, and cover the entire demand generation cycle.

Conclusion

Lead Management Automation vendors are rapidly expanding their functionality, but will not replace all specialized tools any time soon. I think we’ll see a consolidation of the industry of the next couple of years. Specialized vendors need to keep innovating, otherwise they will falter. Some categories are there to stay, such as Web Content Management and Web Analytics, but each will also expand their marketing automation features.

I’m not sure about Email Service Providers: In my opinion they either need to move towards lead management or become irrelevant. ExactTarget, Lyris and Silverpop are on the move, but VerticalResponse is at risk: even for small companies there are more effective lead management solutions (such as InfusionSoft).

What do you think: is there a future for pure-play ESPs?

Web Content Management for Lead Generation

This week’s news about the acquisition of Content Management vendor Interwoven by Autonomy made me think about the importance of website management for lead generation. Nowadays, most lead generation campaigns revolve around the website: SEO, AdWords, Email campaigns and even direct mail usually point to a website to capture responses. So the website clearly has an important role in lead generation.

Thinking about lead generation, what functionality would you expect in a CMS? I would look for the following:

  • Updates possible by non-technical users (WYSIWYG)
  • Search Engine Optimized & SEO Reporting
  • Landing pages
  • Registration forms integrated with Salesforce.com
  • A/B or multi-variate testing
  • Web Analytics integration, and automatic inclusion of other tracking code
  • Real-time visitor reporting (similar to Demandbase Stream)
  • Press Release distribution to PRWeb and others
  • Behavioral targeting
  • Fast downloads for downloads for trial software, videos and Flash demos (CDN)

There are some vendors that focus on these areas. First of all Hot Banana, who’s been focused on creating a ‘Marketing CMS’ for quite a while already, further emphasized after their acquisition by Lyris. However, few of their clients are in industries that rely on lead generation (such as tech companies).

I-Dialogue has also been around for many years, and their solution works from within Salesforce.com. They seem to be more focused on closed communities, but please correct me if I’m wrong.

There is one demand generation vendor that integrates a full Web Content Management system: Marqui. However, they had financial difficulties and have been acquired in the fall of 2008 by a group of investors: now they’re hiring again, so let’s hope that their new management can execute their vision.

In addition to their core SEO functionality, Hubspot offers a basic CMS for their entry-level customers. However, those are typically small companies, who are most likely migrating from either template-based Site Building tools or simple plain HTML websites: no advanced features to be found here.

Demand Generation software vendor Pardot is part of the Hannon-Hill group, a CMS vendor. Adam Blitzer, co-founder of Pardot, told me that Hannon-Hill just launched eCrowds, a hosted CMS for SMBs, and they are actively cross-selling the Pardot marketing automation system (see ‘add-on’ section on their pricing page). Also, there is some product integration: Pardot’s tracking tags and forms can easily be inserted into an eCrowds-based site. That’s interesting, and I’m curious to see how many customers will start using both.

There are also companies focused on landing pages alone, rather than a full CMS. For example, ion interactive and OnDialog (formerly Plurapage). When I lasted talked to OnDialog they were moving towards a full marketing suite, because landing pages along didn’t give enough revenue. Ion interactive has followed a strong thought-leadership campaign, including a recently published book on post-click marketing,and they seem to do pretty well, although they also introduced lower entry-level pricing.

Altogether, my gut feeling is that CMS software can definitely be optimized to support lead generation, but few customers are willing to pay a premium for it today. Most likely, website management will be added as an add-on to Demand Generation systems, or vice-versa. When the worst of the credit crunch is over (say 2010) we may even see some acquisitions: will Marketo or Eloqua acquire a CMS vendor, or will CMS vendors acquire marketing automation companies? What is your take?

Zoomio Review – European Marketing Automation Vendor

Today I had a meeting with a representative of Zoomio, a European marketing automation vendor that started in Denmark in 2002. I was curious to learn about their solution, because I’ve heard of Eloqua, Market2Lead, Marketo, and a whole bunch of other demand generation vendors, but never of Zoomio.

Zoomio Marketing Automation

It turns out that Zoomio is mainly doing business in Northern Europe, but they do have 600 customers and 75 employees, so they’re larger than most US-based demand generation vendors. Most US-based vendors have at least half of their customers in the technology sector, but not Zoomio: they have customers across all industries: from travel agencies to car dealerships to software companies.

Their strength is in the definition of the interaction process: they have a flow chart that defines the touch points, which includes call centers and text messaging. Another neat feature is the split in an easy UI for marketers and an advanced UI for marketing specialists. However, they do not support typical B2B features such as lead scoring and Salesforce integration.

We really need those features, so it isn’t a great solution for us. But when they decide to offer lead scoring and a Salesforce integration I will definitely look at them again: especially since their pricing is quite attractive. By that time I hope they also offer US-based support, because currently it’s only offered in mainland Europe.

I’m curious to learn more about Zoomio from actual users: if you use Zoomio, please leave a comment below with some feedback on how you like Zoomio.