“As Content Marketing Goes from Optional to Obligatory for Business, Penton Suffers and Miller Electric Shines

Penton’s shift to online only for Welding Design & Fabrication symbolizes the decline of traditional media. At the same time, Miller Electric shows just how powerful content marketing can be as a replacement for traditional publishing—even when publishers take their acts to the web.”

via Content Marketing Today » B2B Media Burning Bridges to Print While Business Marketers Deliver Outstanding Online Content.

Whammy! Essentially, Newt Barrett is saying the flimsier publishers get, the less value they have…increasing the potential value of creating your own content. The example of Miller’s videos is great, as it is more than white papers.

This is a great whammy at the end of the article, in case you didn’t get it:

“Smart Business are Becoming the B2B Media—No longer out of Choice But out of Necessity.”

I guess this is more mainstream-trendy as they’ve written a book on the subject. Maybe my lack of use of trade-pub advertising has left me out of the loop. But I’m paying attention now!

Yep, a bargain ‘per click’ offer sucked me in from a low-performing, but reputable, B2B directory. At less than a quarter per click, I didn’t fear much. And for months I was right.

Who was this company? Somehow I feel it is too soon to say out loud. K*********h or  Z**b, both owned by R**d Publications.

In a nutshell

When the prepaid account was refilled for the second time (they sent me a notice that my credit card was being billed), I got curious, but didn’t investigate closely. Time passed and the account refilled just often enough for me not to pay attention.

Finally, a couple weeks ago, I received another notice and dived in. Their back-end let me look at stats of clicks and I saw activity pegging the $10 max for almost every day. And there was no way of knowing where in their ‘network’ my text-ad was showing.

We changed the settings on the listing to make it show less frequently. I also called their service line and talked to a knowledgeable guy who offered to streamline the account.

Knowledgeable guy never calls or emails back, so today I dive in again. I knew it was bad, but had to prove it to myself.

I called knowledgeable guy to close the account. Of course he asks why, and I tell him that I suspect click fraud. He is willing to ‘explain’ but also willing to just let me have my way. No show-down, good or bad.

The analysis

What was my evidence, besides a sudden jump in charges? Their reporting, while lacking sources, gives enough info to make my skin crawl with ickiness.

Prior to August, average clicks per day was 2. What I see now is that the account would go for a couple days with no clicks then get two or more in one day. Most likely a human doing their ’rounds’ and trying to stay under the radar. And a click-thru rate of 1-2%, while nominal, is still very high for contextual advertising.

August 6th, impressions and clicks start to jump. CTR hovers around 2% on average, although a few days it hits 10%. Cost per day is now $2.48 a day, versus $0.34 for July. Maybe they’ve expanded their network? Improved relevance? Or someone is starting to get greedy.

So it goes for months, increasing slightly even occasionally maxing out at the daily $10 amount.

Then someone got greedy!

December 23rd until we tweaked our settings, nearly every day was a $10 day.

I pulled my Google Analytics ‘visits’ report and laid it next to K**h’s report. Even in August I show six days where their clicks would have been 20% (and two 50%+) of my sites traffic. Analytics showed nothing, of course. That means bots were doing the dirty work and not triggering Google’s javascript.

Here’s the killer: The new year holiday weekend:

So they sent 136 visitors that weekend, when my whole site had a 164? I don’t think so!

The reality

So where were these clicks coming from? I took fragments of our text-ad and googled them. After clicking on the “repeat the search with the omitted results included” link that Google sometimes offers, I saw it was websites with *powerful* domain names such as furniturebestplus clothesbestresults blogfurniturezides , but each with multiple sub-domains. In all six pages of search results. These sites slickly morph their content based on the search text coming in, so I had to rely on Google’s cache to see my text-ad actually being displayed.

In the end it’s hard to tell if it was the publisher, or their network, that was at fault. Likely both. When talking to knowledgeable guy I told him I found my ad on ‘click farms’. He retorted “It depends what you mean by click farms, but if you mean parked domains, yes the ads can show there. Parked domains are pretty effective, actually.” Umyea, effective for them!

Constant vigilance

So, I didn’t lose a bunch of money, but I expect for the person(s) clicking, it is nice cha-ching! I could argue for it, but like most scams, it isn’t worth the effort.

And I had to swallow some humble pie to admit I made a bad choice. But I’ll feel better if my story helps someone out there. Someday soon I may add the real names and see what traffic the search-engines drive this way.

“Last week we made the pricing for Eloqua’s software product packages public on our website for the first time: The starting prices range from $1450 to $10,000 per month, depending on the level selected. Just hearing this likely makes everyone who has ever been a field sales rep cringe. Won’t this blow up deals? What if an Enterprise buyer hears of an SMB buyer making a purchase at 1/10th the price? Won’t you be excluded from deals based on the price being seen as too high or too low?”

Yes, salespeople cringe–just read the comments on that posting.

People walk away from products they should really buy. But others bookmark the page and write up their proposal to their boss. Then they come back. And buy! Those that got away might have been too fickle or budget conscious anyway. Good job Eloqua!

“Version A, with its main visual of the printer itself, enticed 37.2% more visitors to complete the online call-back form, thus generating more sales leads for the industrial printers.”

While an awareness of the customer’s use of your product is important, repeating what they already know (what an codes on a can look like) obscures the real information they want. And that’s what B2B marketing thrives on … information.

Do as I say, not as I do
At the trade show I was just at, this was the first time I displayed a sample of a user’s product, not our equipment. But it was the best way to show what our product does at a trade show where most visitors don’t know. In Anne’s example, the visitors had already clicked on a link, so they knew what to expect and were interested in the product.

So, choose the appropriate image based on the situation. But don’t feel guilty next time you put your product front-and-center.

1. Stepping out of the booth to check his phone?
2. Can’t make the long walk to the restroom?

moar funny pictures

This was right across from our show booth, and this guy was like this for ten minutes. Since men don’t take that long to water the bushes, we decided he must have been checking his BlackBerry.

• Trade show setup is unnatural combination of union guys and marketers.
• Marketing managers who want large flat-panels in the booth, probably also want flat panels for their house. Coincidence?
• What’s worse: missing your flight, losing your luggage, or you show crate not showing up?
• You pay for multiple power outlets at $250 each and find the junction box with six outlets is right behind your booth.
• Business cards? Yep those are in my desk’s right-hand drawer. Doh!
• No one back home thinks what you are doing is really work.
• That Windows XP log-in chime the whole floor can hear? Congratulations, you AV system is working perfectly.
• Hmm. Why didn’t I ‘need’ a flat panel in my home booth?
• It really saps your enthusiasm for a show when the padding for the carpet costs more than the carpet itself. Really!
• Why am I paying for an hour of labor I don’t need, while everyone else at the show seems happy hiring two union guys for the whole day?
• How much did you budget for the candy in your candy-bowl? Five bucks? Wow, you’re under budget, too? Good job :\
• Cool logo … Cool booth. Now what is it you exactly do?

After three days, I wish I had ordered the carpet padding no matter the cost.

It happened again. Some nutty customer attempts to rip the company off, and suddenly other customers have endure stricter screening and warranty rules. And as news of the revised policy spread, the jokes about the company followed.

See where I’m going with this?

We were looking at a supplier’s quotation today and the length of ‘terms and conditions’ dwarfed the actual product description and offer. Tons of rules about being a customer, whether you are even going to buy yet. But, because of ‘policy’ and past nutty customers, all that red tape is there for the company to CYA. Just like the TSA has you take off your shoes at the airport screening station.

At least at the airport, the ’security theater’ serves a purpose to reassure the regular passengers that they are being protected.

While some official terms with the proposal certainly give an air of formality, I see no reason to cover irrelevant facts and CYA rules that aren’t important at the proposal stage. In this particular case, the footer of every page listed the US and Canadian accounts-payable address. This is in addition to the eighteen itemized paragraphs at the end of the quote. Eighteen!

But as the manager in charge of the process, unfortunately you’re damned either way…

It was interesting that the Secretary of Homeland Security first say the system “worked really very, very smoothly”, then having to retract and clarify that statement. Accurately, the system’s reaction worked well, but that they had someone with explosives on the plane to begin with was an obvious FAIL. Amazingly, some pundits see the ‘very smoothly’ comment as an excuse to chase Janet Napolitano out of office. Now Obama is promising a review of procedures and policies. Yay, more procedures. (Similar situation now in India, too.)

Bad customers are those that sap our time, resources, control, and escalate to high visibility. And, like Ms. Napolitano, they make us look like a fool. So much better to add some CYA text that everyone can ignore. It doesn’t stop the bad customers, it just makes for an easier yardstick to measure them.

In B2B, don’t we hire smart people to be our front lines with the customer? To develop relationships and weed out the bad customers? And we still wimp out and throw all this meaningless red tape into the process. While business via a handshake may be too casual, a handshake says that we will work together and politely observe each other’s process.

To flip that all around, isn’t that one of the main reasons there are flight attendants on flights? To make a human connection to the plane, the company, and the rest of the crew? Oh, and they’re the ones who go thru the useless safety briefing at the beginning of the flight. Nevermind.

1. Browser size visualization tool

Google just released a screen overlay tool that shows you what percentage of average users can see what parts of your website. What’s visible to you may be ‘below the fold’ for half your site’s visitors. Also, it can serve as a handy tool to drag your browser window to the view that 90 or 95% of your customers have.

Me, I’ve got a right-hand side menu to worry about, but luckily the site is flexible-width so 90% of visitors can see the whole thing.

2. Web-form validation technology

Validation choices

What’s more important to a B2B marketer than the web-form that all your leads come from? Well, after looking at this review of web-form validation technology from Smashing Magazine, I feel like my site is only doing the minimum standard. At the end of the article is a number of resources to add form validation tricks to your site. Your visitors are already getting use to these techniques at other sites, and will be expecting similar technology at your site.

Keep on tweaking

We all want to redo our website all the time. But going back and tweaking details can make significant improvements in user experience and response. Don’t believe me? Start following Anne Holland’s new blog Which Test Won? where her A/B test examples can show dramatic gains from tweaking websites.

What are you tweaking?

We marketers of limited means (time and staff, as much as money) love the email tools out there. Fire up SurveyMonkey and/or MailChimp, and bam!–leads and responses.

But we should reconsider our actions based on split-testing reported at B2BMarketingSmarts: Email lead generation — perception vs. reality.

“Primarily using their in-house list… we mailed 100,000 surveys directing the recipient to a pURL (personalized URL)…We also emailed 30,000 surveys with the exact same messages.”

“The result: The postal mail pulled 3.1% (3,100 leads); the email pulled less than .25% (75 leads)… An interesting side note: of the 3,100 responses from the postal mail, 800 sent in the paper survey.”

So of course it depends on how much this was a survey, and how much it was a marketing piece. It always depends on details like that. But the differences in response rates are pretty definitive, that should influence your strategic choice.

I don’t usually blog about direct marketing, but I want us to know that if you are embarking in slamming out an email looking for response, “you’re doin’ it wrong”.

Of course we are humbled–or more likely irate–when we find out that they aren’t even reading the emails.

I thought making friendly sales-info videos was a way to make sure salespeople were paying attention, but if they were just setting-aside my emails, they never even knew about the video.

This column, When too much information harms the office, from Lucy Kellaway helps explain this behavior:

“She has noticed that her staff are responding to the information overload not by digesting too much of it, but by stopping to digest anything at all. She tells me that, in her company, the written word has lost almost all its power. No one reads e-mails any more – with the exception of those from the boss. Messages from anyone else are either deleted unread or given a cursory glance and then ignored.”

Sure, that makes sense. The emails that we require actual reading get set aside until the recipient has time and is mentally prepared. And, unfortunately gets buried.

Lucy goes on to opine that this is potentially a good thing:

“The trouble with the information age is that there are so many people talking simultaneously. Leaders surely need to do not more listening but more ignoring. More than ever, the good leader surely needs to learn how to become selectively deaf.”

There is a lot written about being better managers of our inboxes, and a lot about breaking thru the inbox as a direct marketer, but how do we as communicators of important information make sure our emails are opened, read, and comprehended regularly?

The easiest strategy based on the first quote is to be the boss. But marketers are not the boss of the salespeople. And sometimes even the sales manager isn’t listening.

Personally, I think what needs to occur is more personal (phone or in-person) talking to salespeople to make them aware of the value of what we are sending. Sounds stupid to call people and ask them ‘did you get my email’, but that may be what you need to do.  Not everyone every time, but just on a regular basis of some sort.

What ideas do you have? What has worked for you?