Author: Dave J.

Over the years I’ve heard the advise that I should have a dedicated ‘landing page’ designed to maximize ‘conversions’. I’ve always said phooey. Turn ’em loose and let them find what they want once I get them to our site.

Now the Marketing Maven at GlobalSpec is backing me up. In their latest newsletter, there is an article titled Landing Page or Landing Path? Improving Post-Click Marketing that identifies why landing pages may not be a good idea.

“But landing pages can be fraught with problems that turn visitors off and lower your conversion rates. Some of the common problems include:”

• Loading up on content
• Trying to close too soon
• Being all things to all people
• Looking cheap

In other words, for the ‘complex sale’, you can’t try to force the visitor to fit their complex needs into a simple one-page landing page. Better to make a ‘landing path’ with navigational cues based on different needs of the visitor.

The Maven goes on to give some clarification when to use a ‘page’ versus a ‘path’. Ultimately, it depends on your products and prospects. Use what makes sense, not what you hear others saying should be done.

I’ll save you the long story about why, but I had granted someone access to my Adwords Account. Then I deleted their access account. Easy enough, right?

Nope. I was mystified when I found some changes made that I didn’t do. Some digging around and I found out they were continuing to gain access via API. (API allows the use of other master accounts or external applications.)

Turns out when I created their account, the API access was actually a different ‘account’ listed under a different section of the Adwords site.

My experience to your future benefit, I hope.

(Those of you familiar with Adwords campaigns may have a guess as to what I was up to. Hopefully I can share the details later.)

A little off topic–I hate the seeing the bad guys get away. These guys come from a medium I’ve nearly abandoned: television.

Bad guy #1: Kevin Trudeau
Flipping thru Direct Magazine, my attention was caught by an ad that didn’t fit. Turns out MacroMark is selling a mailing list of Kevin Trudeau’s clients.

Who is Kevin Trudeau? I googled him and found out that he is a shady character gettting past FTC rules based on his first amendment rights to print and sell books that say whatever he wants. The books are sold via Informercials and are really just an entre to sell subscriptions to his website. He’s a guy with a checkered past staying one step ahead, and by selling his client list, milking it for all its worth.

I can only hope that no one buys these lists and make this guy any richer. But if Direct wants to keep the message that direct marketing is above scammy infomercial and phone solicitors, they should distance themselves from this guy.

Bad guy #2: Bill O’Reilly
Marketonomy blogger Chris Kenton rants on Bill O’Reilly’s recent snub of JetBlue giving some tickets to website DailyKos. I don’t really care about O’Reilly or DailyKos, and I don’t think Chris really cares either.

O’Reilly basically says that because JetBlue gave some free flights to support DailyKos’s member convention, that JetBlue is endorsing hate-mongering speech that some commenters at DailyKos have made.

Knowing the simple fact that DailyKos is a community site with lots of members and free form discussions makes the whole 7 minute YouTube clip Chris linked to laughable. Well, I guess I’m not laughing, because Bill skips this fact and chooses to attack JetBlue and DailyKos, specifically calling DailyKos a hatemonger (note the singular term he uses). The pansy ‘expert’ from BusinessWeek is there just as a foil and does nothing except give Bill someone to hurl unsubstantiated questions at repeatedly.

Rant wrap-up:
Anyway, two crappy examples of what makes this one-way communication model of television is broken. And two people taking advantage of it, with major companies behind them. I’m just revolted. I hate when truth and fairness are abused while I sit her politely selling my B2B products.

Sorry, but these were bugging me. Now I can go home!

The Small Business Commando Blog by Dick Larkin targets small, local businesses like electricians and plumbers that depend heavily on Yellow Pages.

So why is he talking about online video?

Imagine you need a fence for your home and business. You know whoever you pick out of the yellow pages (or on the web) is likely going to be who you buy from because it is a complicated purchase. The vendors websites are of such varying quality that you aren’t sure who to trust. The slick sites are too slick, and the poor sites might just be hiding a top-notch pro.

How can you reliably judge credibility before making that fateful call? Video!

Take a look at Scott Fence’s promo video (via Google Video)

Video isn’t easy to pull off. This example is a great sample of what works for this type of company. Instant credibility!

My current website is simple, stable HTML. The only server-side scripts on the site are for the web forms, using ASP. Our quote-request form being the most important, of course.

Well, turns out the forms stopped working early on Monday. I didn’t figure that out until one of our salespeople told me he was getting a ‘corruption error’ when submitting an internal form via the website on Tuesday afternoon.

I guess I should have figured out that I hadn’t received any web-leads in over 24 hours, and there might be a problem. Or when one of the sales people faxed a printout of the internal form. Or when one of the reps indirectly suggested they were having problems.

Lessons learned:

• Customers don’t call and say ‘your website isn’t working’.
• Salespeople tend to think they did something wrong.
• The ISP didn’t know there was something wrong with their server.
• And I was too distracted to notice the drop in activity.

The really big lesson here is this, however:
You’d think we’d at least have seen a pick-up in calls since the web form wasn’t working. And one of these prospects would have complained.

NOPE.

Incoming calls weren’t any higher than normal. No one complained.

I can only assume that the normal web prospect got the error and moved on. Potential sales lost! Crap!

Kinda scary isn’t it? The prospect on your website who wants to fill out the request form, doesn’t want to call instead. It wasn’t that important after all. Or perhaps they didn’t want to break their ‘flow’ of web surfing. Either way, there’s not much I can do about it.

But for those marketers out there who just assume that ‘the customer will call’ if they have questions or problems on their website, the answer from this small debacle is no!

I hear about this one every day. Check it out (be aware audio involved):

My sales nightmare

Compelling stuff, in nice British accents. Don’t be afraid to click thru at the end.

I’m totally impressed in the quality, the product (online training for you hurried chickens, afraid to click the link), and the value.

I got my first B2B email offering a ‘free iPhone’ if I complete an insertion order for a directory listing of a major pub.

This promotion comes from MediaBrains, who say the offer is for IO’s worth $4,800 by June 30th. You can get a $500 gift card instead.

Dunno what else to really say, except that it is a very expensive premium to offer. But attention getting. Hope it doesn’t get the attention of anyone’s boss after they sign up for a listing just to get the phone.

A couple articles analyzing recent Enquiro research on B2B buyer behavior. The great thing about this research is that it looks at the different phases of purchase and how buyer behavior shifts.

Here is the juiciest bit of data:

Navigation to a Vendor vs. Industry Site via Search

Life Cycle Phase	Vendor Site	Industry Site
Awareness	12%	55%
Research	30%	34%
Negotiation	15%	31%
Purchase	17%	19%

I think the article by Jessica Bowman gives a pretty in-depth analysis of the results. No real surprises here: Google rules, but don’t ignore the B2B sites.

The Business Case for Expanding B2B SEM by Jessica Bowman
“B2B Vertical search engines ‘definitely have a place in the purchase process’ as well, according to the study. While general search engines (Google, Yahoo! and MSN) are used initially, buyers increase their use of B2B search as they move from basic awareness into the research, negotiation, and purchase phases.”

How do B2B Buyers Search? by Kevin Newcomb
“In the awareness phase, 65 percent of users said they would start their research with a general search engine. That number dropped to 52 percent in the research phase, 42 percent in the negotiation phase, and 42 percent in the purchase phase.

The study found that in the researching phase, a purchaser is five times more likely to turn to a generic search engine for information than a B2B search engine. As purchasers enter the later research phase and start compiling information to begin the actual negotiation, many rely on B2B vertical search engines, such as Business.com, KnowledgeStorm, or Thomasnet, to help gather the detailed information they require. B2B search engines were the first choice of 22.1 percent of respondents in the negotiation phase, and 18 percent of respondents in the purchase phase.”

Found in my ThomasNet “Link” email newsletter:

The Aerospace Industry Resource: “This resource provides supplier, part, product and other information pertaining to the aerospace industry. Find discussions on news and trends within the aerospace industry as well as tap into our collection of online tools including CAD drawings, standards, part specs and more.”

So, Thomas has decided to narrow up their content by industry. A brilliant step, however obvious it seems to be. But, as you know I’m going to point out, only as brilliant as the execution.

So what is on/in this aerospace portal?

• NASA picture of the day
• Search box, of course
• Browse by category (looks like handpicked categories for aerospace)
• Headlines from their ‘launch pad’ discussion forums in the left column
• Aerospace headlines in the right column
• Two featured vendors in the center column

All the basic vertical portal site stuff is there. What concerns me is that the search and vendor information is all the same TN content. It isn’t specialized in any way. I did test out the ‘browse by category’, and all the sub-categories are aerospace-related, which is good. But the search box doesn’t do this or offer an pull-down menu option to search just aerospace.

A decent start and a great idea, but I don’t see a lot to get aerospace engineers to bookmark this vertical site or return to it.

Found this email in my email this morning:

“With Our Ideal Lead Generation Program, Leads Are Cheaper, More Sales Happen Faster!

We are the only lead generation company in the world that can generate ideal leads. When you have ideal leads, you make lots of sales, faster and cheaper. When you make lots of sales faster, you grow. When you grow, you profit. When you profit, you win.

We have a program that gets news articles and feature stories published about your products. The articles generate many new leads.

Our ideal lead generation program: Your powerful marketing message, designed to attract interest, delivered by credible sources, as third-party endorsements, to qualified prospects, in volume, at low unit cost, with repetition, impingement, penetration and duplication, causing understanding of your message that results in two-way communication between you and your prospect about your product.

There is no lead generation more powerful. We are the only ones that do this. Your competitive advantage will be huge. We work for one company in each market niche. No competitors.

Ideal leads have a much smaller unit cost than advertising. There are more leads because your response rate is higher. Ideal leads are higher quality leads so you sell more of them and you sell them faster. Let us show you how it works.”

Is there one reason I should find this bluster credible? They describe the holy-grail of PR marketing and assume that I should believe them. Of course in the middle of all this, they assume that they can use “your power marketing message”. Really, if I had a powerful message to start with, I probably wouldn’t need them to get it out, would I?

I guess they are working their own program well, because they are going to get their ‘ideal leads’ with this email: gullible, desperate marketing managers or business owners.