B2B and Industrial Marketing Blog
While this report regards retail shoppers, one has to assume some carry-over to B2B sales.
Retailing: Shoppers Demand Decent Design: “What’s worse is that nearly 30 percent stop buying from their favorite offline store if their online experience is poor. “
I finally got a website I submitted (for the company Racar International) listed as The Daily Sucker on Vincent Flanders site. Finding sucky B2B websites is like shooting fish in a barrell. I dissed this company in this blog last year and still get hits because their website doesn’t show up on Google when people search for their name, even when in quotes.
The problem with their site is that they have a splash page that no one has ever seen. The web page simply points to the ‘designer’s’ hard drive to find the Flash file.
If I were to start a consulting business for B2B web marketing, finding potential clients looks extremely easy. But convincing companies to invest in their web presence looks like a very steep hill to climb when they aren’t even paying attention. Perhaps the only way would be to get the owner to have his wife or child try to navigate his website while he watches.
While I can say that search engines and PPC advertising are important to generate traffic to my company’s website, this takes it to another notch. What product or service can you target specifically to searchers, taking advantage of the immediacy of a PPC ad? This article makes a roadmap, if you’ve got a good idea. (Man, I’m trying to think of one after reading this.)
Traffick | The Seven-or-So Habits of Highly Profitable Pay-Per-Click Search Engine Campaigns
The proliferation of hotel-reservation websites trying to capture searchers annoyed me today. I just wanted to find the official website of a hotel, but couldn’t after at least three pages of results. The above article points that the niche play is the way to go. Most of these hotel websites aren’t successful because of searchers like me, who want information, not reservations. If we want reservations, we’re going to Expedia or another site.
Someone asked for more information and my opinion about log analysis, and its inaccuracy. The speaker was just warning us to know what our log-analysis software is doing. Mine tells me that about 25% of my pages served were cached. How it knows that, I’m not sure.
As far as the spider activity, the percentage is going to vary depending on your normal traffic (of course). My reps using my website adds up to a lot more traffic than any spider could, so yes, I don’t really care if the spiders are included in my traffic. I can exclude certain IP addresses, but nearly all my reps are on dial-up, with dynamic IPs.
I wrote out my notes from the Internet Marketing Seminar (email me for a copy) with little commentary. I’ve saved my comments for this blog.
Case study of EZ websites by Thomas Register
This segment didn’t delve into TR’s online strategy, but instead related John Gennaro’s experience in rolling out AdWords advertising and EZ websites, which is why I title this a ‘case study’. One could be disappionted by this, as while he has been successful and had the resources to do so, he didn’t make the case or try to explain how this should be integrated with an attendee’s web marketing.
The only thing he did say in this regard is that ‘small/med. businesses have the advantage in pulling traffic for people searching with 4 or more keywords.’ He then went on to show how TR can dominate these searches too, by combining content from multiple suppliers listed on their site.
How to make your website a success
The second segment was by web consultant Aaron Kahlow that focused on what makes a site successful–traffic. I think it was a very well tuned presentation.
Generating traffic:
No real news in what he said here. Content is king, same as John said. The more content the more likely you are to have the right keywords and the more valuable your visitors will find it.
Converting traffic
This is the part I liked the best. It was actually the biggest eye-opener for the audience. His basic point that ‘80% of the problems with your website is your home page’ is right on. And he helped show how to fix your home page, too. Your home page should be considered a navigation page, he said, to lead your visitor into the site.
Measuring traffic
This was the eye-opener for me. I’ve been happy using FastStats for years, but with my site redesign, the data is less useful because of the addition of multiple navigation pages. He recommended ‘client side’ tracking that measured actual user activity by including a small javascript on each page. This eliminates problems with cached pages not being logged, as well as forcing you to focus on the user experience, and not just numbers. I’ll let you know when I pick a tool to do this.
I went to a seminar put on by Thomas Register this morning. I’ll provide a detailed report of what I learned later this week. One presentation was on what TR is doing with the web and what they have learned, and the second regarded more general web marketing info. It was interesting to look around and see the number of people writing down the word “usability”, although there was plenty of material for a web-geek like me.
That’s an easy one…they are dying. According to this article, 150 have died in the last year, and ad pages are down 30%. B2B marketing is information rich, a natural for the web. That’s why I spend so much time in this blog discussing issues regarding my company’s website.
Jakob Nielsen is the guru for web usability. Finally, he writes a usability article for us small-time marketers. When all your competitors have websites that are three or more years old, you can really stand out if you spend some time fixing things up. Your users will notice. My additional advice…listen to your salespeople.
Usability For $200 (Alertbox June 2003)
I just stared and stared at this paragraph because it spoke the truth, especially for me and my company. No one is in charge of the product, no one is going to analyze customer needs. It’s more like a tree growing, than an organism that has a brain.
Adroit Consulting – summary of presentation at BMA conference
We will be making the argument that in B2B companies Marketing should own Customer Relationship Management and assume a P&L role. Marketing is the rightful steward of the customer lifecycle, but in many mid-sized, B2B companies, Marketing is being marginalized and is becoming strictly a marcom function with no upward mobility path. Whoever owns customer data and insight into customer behavior has the opportunity to improve the profitability of customers. But with ownership comes accountability for that improvement.
In the email I received from his consulting company, Stan Martin also makes the additional point that by knowing the customer, marketing is better prepared to control product marketing.
Check out this company’s explanation of their name, Forced Potato. Read on and find out the even funnier explanation of their parent company’s name, Pempek. This is even too wacky to be called a Purple Cow.