Lead Management & Marketing Automation

About two weeks ago I posted a survey that asked the LeadSloth readers what they wanted to read about. As it goes with surveys, it took some effort to get people to fill it out. But this week it reached critical mass, so I was able to draw some interesting conclusions.

The Most Requested Topics

The top 6 topics mentioned in the survey were:

• Metrics & ROI
• Marketing Automation Best Practices
• Lead Nurturing / Drip campaigns
• Landing Pages & Forms
• Social Media

It is interesting to see that ROI and Best Practices score so high. I was surprised to see Landing pages & forms: important, but not very exciting. And the last topic “Social Media” confirmed my gut feeling that Social Media is hotter than Inbound Marketing and Search Marketing (which were hardly mentioned by the respondents).

There were also some runner-up topics:

• Data Quality & Data Management (boring but essential)
• Multi-channel Campaigns (not for everyone)
• Content Marketing (the latest trend)

The Favorite Types of Posts

The first question was about the topics, and this one is about the way it is delivered. These were the preferred types of articles:

• Thought leader interviews
• Practical how-to articles
• Opinion pieces
• Advanced topics

I was surprised to see that the large majority of respondents mentioned Thought Leader Interviews: I clearly need to do more of those. Then both practical but advanced posts and opinion pieces were highly valued: clearly people enjoyed some of the recent posts that had a lot of discussion, like the “7 reasons why marketing automation projects fail” post.

Other Interesting Comments

In the text boxes people gave lots of useful suggestions, like these:

• Choose your own “purple cow”
• Avoid vendor bias
• Talk about the best mix of lead gen approaches (also based on the economy)
• Explain how to make a business case for Marketing Automation

And luckily one person responded to my request for jokes. Here we go: “A plane was flying to Houston.  A blonde girl stood up, walked up to First Class and sat down.  They asked her to move back to coach and she refused.  They asked for help and she still refused.  Finally, they asked the pilot to speak to her. He whispered something into her ear, she stood up and walked back to Coach.  Asked about the remarkable thing he said, he told them “I simply told her First Class was not going to Houston.” ”

Conclusion

Based on these results, I will try to keep posting once or twice a week, but with more focus on Thought Leader interviews and on vendor-neutral articles. I will focus on Marketing Automation and Social media, with an emphasis on mid-size to large marketing teams. ROI and best practices will be the main topics, but always with a practical voice. And maybe I will throw in the occasional joke ;- )

Let me know any additional feedback!

I’ve been writing this blog for a while now, but I’ve never explicitly asked for your input. The topics have been diverse, and I’d like to focus a little more on what you would like to read about. So please tell me about your preferences!

Can you please fill out this questionnaire? If you have any questions, please let me know (jep on leadsloth dot com).

Earlier this year Jame-Ane Ervin wrote a great post about the results of promoting her webinar via Social Media. She got a 400% increase in leads! Now that’s effective use of social media.

A couple of weeks ago I met one of the founders of the site Social Media B2B: Jeff Cohen (@dgtlpapercuts). We started talking and he asked me to write a post about using Social Media for B2B Lead Generation, as LeadSloth has done a fair bit of work in that area.

I decided to limit myself to Blogging, LinkedIn and Twitter. I could only use 1,000 words, and in my opinion Blogging, LinkedIn and Twitter are the powerhouses of social media for B2B lead generation. Just some excerpts from the post:

• “Always include a clear call to action at the bottom of older blog posts (…) this call to action does magic for lead generation”
• “Twitter is getting more popular every day. That’s both a blessing and a curse. It’s great that the audience is growing, but the average Twitter user has a hard time actually reading all those tweets.”
• “The benefit of LinkedIn is that it is a business-focused social network, so it’s usually a source of very qualified leads.”

You can read the post here: Increase B2B Lead Generation with Social Media

Let me know what you think!

In the last years I’ve done a lot of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) projects. What keeps surprising me is that most people think it’s some kind of black art. Basic SEO is actually quite straightforward: hence my 3 steps to SEO Success. Agreed: I had to simplify some things, so please don’t bash me on that. My goal is to expose the basic principles of SEO, not to provide a comprehensive cookbook.

Side note: I mainly write about Marketing Automation, but I’ve come to believe that Inbound Marketing (which includes SEO) should go hand-in-hand with Marketing Automation. Inbound Marketing adds more leads to your database, and Marketing Automation manages those leads.

How Search Engines Work

All search engines have approximately the same approach: they rank based on relevant content and page popularity. Relevant content means that the keywords from the search query appear frequently on the page, and in the right places (Title, URL, Headings). Popularity means that many other sites link to this page, ideally using the same keywords in the link text. So let’s look at the 3 steps.

3 Steps to Improve your Search Engine Ranking:

(1) Choose your keywords wisely
(2) Create exactly 1 page for each keyword or keyword group
(3) Get links to these pages

(1) Choose the Right Keywords

First, pick approximately 10-20 keywords that you want to optimize for:

• Choose keywords with enough search volume, but not too much. Too little volume means only few people will see your site, too much volume means that it’s going to be hard to get on page 1. You can find keyword search volume with the Google Keyword Tool. This tool also provides keyword suggestions
• Choose keywords that are relevant. For example, for a company selling Portal software the term “web portal software” is more relevant than “news portal” (= people looking for a news website)
• To start, choose keywords that are relatively specific. “Web Portal Software” rather than “Business Software” and “Web application usability” rather than “usability”. This ensures that you have a reasonable chance of getting on page 1 of the search results, and that you attract the right audience. Later on you can optimize for more generic terms.

(2) Optimize Your Website

Once you’ve created your keyword list, you can start optimizing your site:

• Just to be sure, check if the search spiders can find your site. Type the following into the Gooogle search box: “cache:http://www.yoursite.com” without any spaces (click here for an example). You can use SEO Browser to see how Google sees your site: check that all content and links are visible in this text-only view. Do this for each page.
• If pages are not indexed yet, make sure that other pages are linking to this page, and avoid JavaScript-generated links (search spiders don’t read JavaScript)
• For each keyword term, create exactly 1 optimized page (or choose an existing page)
• For each of those pages, put the keywords in the TITLE, URL, H1/H2 and in the content itself (example: a page optimized for “SaaS Analytics“); in the URL, use dashes (“-”) to separate words; if your website doesn’t use <h1> and <h2> tags (do a ‘view source’ to find out), ask you web developer to add them.
• Use unique content on each page: if you use the same or similar content, you run the risk that the Search Engines think they are duplicates (and only show one of them)
• Add an ‘elevator pitch’ in the META description tag, so Google will display this as a summary on the results page. Example: search for ‘Good Data’ and Google shows a summary written by Good Data’s marketing team: “Good Data brings easy, flexible, affordable analytics within reach of every company”.

(3) Get links

The search engines think your page is more relevant if other trusted sites link to it (“trusted” as opposed to “spammy” sites). The key is to write interesting content, and to network with bloggers and site owners so they want to link to your pages. You can still ask them, but an excellent ranking is only attained when other people link to your site without you having to ask for it. That means: create great content that is educational rather than necessarily promoting your products. So in short:

• Write appealing content, so other people want to link to it. Consider creating “link bait”: popular topic formats are “top 10 rules for…” or a list of blogs or Twitter accounts that cover your space. Always keep in mind: write about the interests of your target audience, rather than pushing your wares.
• Links (internal and external) should have descriptive link text. Use “business intelligence software” instead of “click here“. Google uses the link text to figure out what your page is about.
• Ask other people to link, and already give them the HTML code for the link, so you can optimize the link text
• Add your pages to directories that accept link submissions (e.g dmoz.org or industry-specific lists)
• If you have a blog, put it on the company domain (http://blog.company.com) and ask other bloggers to add your blog to their blogroll (and do the same for them).
• On your home page, include links to the keyword-optimized pages, so Google easily finds these pages (example: the links on bottom of Rightnow.com). The link text should be the same as the selected keywords.

Keep Optimizing

As you go through these steps you will find out what works for you. You should monitor the ranking for your selected keywords weekly or biweekly: just type it into the search engine and see if your site pops up. Then check your web analytics tool to see which keywords bring most traffic. If you monitor conversions (e.g. a whitepaper registration) you’ll see that some keywords convert better than others. Focus on link building for the keywords that work best for you, and keep adding new keywords. Also, as your ranking improves, you may take on more challenging keywords: the ones that are really popular.

I hope this article was useful for you: let me know if you have question, or if you want to suggest changes to the approach I described. And keep up the optimization effort: it will take at least a couple of months before you start seeing results.

PS. You may have noticed that I’ve optimized this post for “SEO Optimization”