BlueFrog Marketing - Online toolshed or B2B by Justin Bruce

The online toolshed for B2B • 5 strategic things you must do, NOW! • 10 proven tactics • 25 (mostly FREE) cool tools

www.bluefrogmarketing.com.au

The online toolshed for B2B Marketing Strategy, tactics, tools and tricks

What is Online? By Online I mean A Website, Google Ad Words campaign, Search Engine Optimisation of your site, Creating Content and the Social Media Sites. Don’t get scared off by the jargon and new fangled technology stuff, the old rules still apply and here they are but with a web-bent…

Using our patented RAPID marketing model the following article will show you how to research, analyse, plan, implement and detect your online marketing success with a strategic focus.

1. Research Who are your customers and what do they want? What did they want and how has that changed? Have you ever asked a 14-year-old boy how his day at school was? ”Good” would be an elaborate answer but if you cut off his allowance I assure you the words will flow. Its not just teenagers, most people (clients included) enjoy the status quo and don’t complain if things stay the same (even if it includes a steady decline in the relationship). It wont be until your competitor has formed a relationship with them that you will hear the words you dread, “not good” Online provides opportunities for research that are easy, cost effective and sometimes FREE. Now that I have your attention, here’s a great tool survey monkey, www.surveymonkey.com. If you are thinking of launching a new product or service, where the new market opportunities are, or simply want to know what your customers think of you, ask them. You’d be surprised how many clients of ours say, “No one will do a survey”, and then when the results come in, they pour over them like kittens in milk. Here’s a tip, instead of launching straight into the “we are conducting a survey spiel…” wrap your survey around a specific question then branch off, eg., We are interested in your opinion about the latest government legislation, could you please answer a few questions so we can better deliver value after the change.” Another helpful hint is to consider an incentive. Complete this survey and go into the draw to win… There is an abundance of information of the web that you will be benefit from researching but how do you find it? Using google reader and google alerts (more free tools) you can research your industry including all relevant blog posts, websites, news articles and podcasts. You can search for any relevant topics, your brand and your competitor’s brands. This information will be delivered to you sorted and summarised for easy consumption. Another great online tool for research is social media. You can start by google searching a forum or blog about your topic then jump on and ask some questions, its free research! “Our company is looking into developing a new system to solve this problem…does anyone here think that's a good/bad idea?”

Please keep in mind that online social networks are just like real social networks, you wouldn’t go up to someone at a party and say, “Give me money for this product”. Here’s some tips; Listen first with two ears (or eyes) then contribute, use the same formal or informal tone of language as the others and if you want something then give something first. Here’s a forum with 20,000 members who probably own a small to medium business like you flying solo, http://www.flyingsolo.com.au/forums/ - have a go!

2. Analysis It also pays to follow your competitors, suppliers and prospects alike. They are all “out there” in the online world chatting and publishing information; some of them are even talking about you so you need to listen. Some great analysis tools that help you track trends around people searching for things and people chatting about topics are HowSociable, BlogPulse, and Google Insights. It makes sense that google delivers great analysis tools as most of the information passes by them somehow. Here’s a brief description about each but don’t take my word for it try for yourself, they’re FREE!

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Google AdWords Keyword tool shows how many people are looking locally (set location to Australia) or globally for your chosen key words or phrases and the competition.

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HowSociable is a free monitoring tool for measuring your brands or keywords using 32 social networking sites. •

Blog pulse is a free service, which tracks over 100 million blogs. It can also produce the information as a trend chart. •

Google Insights for Search shows you the interest in specific topics. It analyses a portion of worldwide Google web searches to determine how many searches have been done relative to the total number of searches done over time. It also predicts the future for one year.

3. Planning Planning is usually done in your head and so there aren’t many online tools I would recommend, however If you ever get frustrated with a gush of great creative ideas flowing down the plughole then this is the tool for you. Xmind is a very helpful

online application for collecting and sorting the ideas that flow out of a brainstorm meeting or to he with mind mapping your thoughts into a clear and easy to communicate presentation. When it comes to setting your objectives and measuring your success (or the “f” word) don’t be misguided by the chase for a dollar, it’s not about sales! If you keep sales metrics separate you will have a better chance of accurately measuring the success of the campaigns isolated from the other variables such as activities of the sales team, product innovation, operations deliverables, etc.

Online B2B marketing should include the following three key objectives and be measured by these criteria: 1.

New quality leads generated,

Valuable clients retained

Clients grown.

A good CRM will help you manage your database to ensure that you build and maintain strong relationships with your prospects and customers to feed your marketing pipeline. I personally prefer Zoho http://crm.zoho.com/crm/ for its low cost ($12US pcm) and easy use. It helps you track your sales and marketing and manage your leads through to prospects, customers then loyal advocates.

Don’t forget to be different! Even a bottle of water can be differentiated - it can look cool or function better with a pump lid or fit in your bike or come from a rare water fall the Swiss alps where magical nymphs bath. My 4yo looks at a gold fish and says nothing, but when she sees a few stripes on it, she shouts “Nimo Daddy…crown fishy!” (Close enough). With strong and clear positioning you will allow prospects to select you and become “Nimo” not just another fish in the sea! It doesn’t matter how, just do it - and remember price is not as important as you think, especially when things go wrong. Most of us pay a premium for piece of mind the trick is to communication this “peace of mind” as unique… eg.,“our water bottles are thicker so they stay cool for longer”.

4. Implementation With clear objectives and a good plan you’re ready to go. But where do you start? There is no right answer to which is the best media and message to achieve your goals but now, more than ever, you have a great opportunity to learn as you go without going broke. Start with your goals! Every question must come back to, “Will this help us meet our key marketing objectives?” Then test and measure everything you do. The following recommendations vary according to the industry so be mindful of how your prospects and customers behave (refer to research and analysis) Website Your website is your front door prospects visit to research and solve problems, is it open and inviting? Here’s some tips and tools that may help. Go to google analytics it's a free tool that your web developer can help you install and it is more powerful than a locomotive. When you get there, go to the “Content” tab on the left and to “In-Page Analytics” It’s an awesome new tool that shows you what people do on your site then you can scrap or alter the pages that no one clicks on. Here are some basics that are crucial to your website success, if you aren't doing them then stop everything and do it NOW! Start with an executive summary (the BBQ pitch) but don’t tell them all about yourself, tell them which of their problems you can solve, how, when, where and why. TRUST is the key, use case studies, testimonials and accreditations but don't bore them with it, try video it is often more credible. All your information must be clear and concise and avoid jargon. Make navigation paths obvious (don’t build an IKEA store where visitors get lost. Your images must entice your target market and engage with them, they want to see themselves benefitting from your services. If you are considering an ecommerce site, don’t! Research first. Run a small AdWords campaign (see below). First, drive prospects to a micro site (small website with a couple of pages) with a paypal link or order form. Make sure he micro site has only

information about that single product/service to help google. This small cost testing will help determine whether people are interested in your offer and whether they want to buy it online. If the results are bad after your testing you don’t need to spend money building a comprehensive ecommerce site with full payment functionality, if they do show interest in your micro site then run more tests and apply what you have learnt to your new shiny ecom-site. That’s a start. AdWords Google Adwords is where you show your small ads on the right-hand side (& sometimes the top right) of Google (sponsored inks). It allows you to be found on the first page of Google results for any word or phrase that you specify which is especially good when you are struggling to compete on the left hand side in the (organic) natural search results. What's more, you only pay to send that person to your website if and when they decide to click on your ad. AdWords is highly measurable and allows you to test many variables like, offers, images, and even small wording changes. For example, changing “work off that winter weight” to “works off that winter weight” can have a huge difference to your response rate as it takes the perceived effort out of the product. Subtle but there it is! You can use the results from your AdWords campaigns and apply the learnings across all your other marketing. We recently tested three creative images across google’s content network (Websites that feature google ads like Newspapers and Job sites) and we used the most popular image to design an expensive billboard. Tools: If you want to do it yourself, I thoroughly recommend doing the AdWords bootcamp training videos http://www.adwordsbootcamp.com.au/. Your investment in this bootcamp (time and money) will be returned when your AdWords account consistently delivers better quality leads for less spend. Tips: Test! Put all your themes into separate AdGroups and write two or three ads to test. Test the search network against the content network and try image ads; they work extremely well for certain products and services. If you don't have the time then contract a professional and trial it for at least three month with a big spend (if you fail, fail fast)

Social Media The Social Media landscape is daunting to a newcomer. Don’t let it scare you. Most B2B SME’s don’t have a facebook page or Twitter account. These tools are good for listening to others talk but require a huge amount of time and resources to run properly so my advice is don’t bother too much for now if you don't have one but perhaps register an account in your business name (its free) just to reserve it for later. You must get your business listed on google places with a logo and spiel about your company http://www.google.com/places/. This is my big tip for the future: google places will be BIG so if you can, get some customers to recommend you and build your presence here. You should also set up a personal page on linkedin http://www.linkedin.com/, join some groups from your industry. If you already have a linkedin profile, a facebook account and tweet often you can use hootsuite to aggregate all the information that floods in. Whether you embrace the social media networks or not I thoroughly recommend you write a blog and make videos. If you are new to the blog game, simply start by identifying 2 or 3 key blogs in your industry then just listen to people chat. Technoratti and Alltop are good free tools for finding relevant blogs. First listen to the tone of voice and kind of information from both the blog writer and then the response posts from the network. When you are confident and see an opportunity to contribute, jump in but only do so if you can add value and NEVER sell! Try to make friends with the writer as they have already built a network and you may need their help building yours. Writing a blog can be as simple as a paragraph a week and is great for encouraging (forcing) you to gather the content for your business to use later in brochures, ads, sales presentations, books etc. It helps you fine-tune your message and practice your pitch (Free R&D) and is terrific for helping google recognise you and put your site higher up the

results. It is terrific for building your network

prospects, customers and advocates. Finally it

helps

position you and your team as experts. I

recommend

you put it on your site as a subfolder (ask your IT to help and mention “wordpress”) and ALWAYS include a share-this button to encourage word-of-mouth, you can get this from http://sharethis.com/

You can also blog, using video. Talking to a camera in the privacy of your office is not that hard and it often makes a huge difference to the people at the other end. Firstly it’s entertaining and easy to watch a video as opposed to reading pages on your monitor. Secondly it helps with credibility, if you know what you are talking about it will come through. But here’s the clincher… invite friends and associates to talk with you or better yet, about you. Video testimonials are trustworthy and believable and you can even improve your image just by standing next to an expert. Email Email open rates may be on the decline as some professionals speculate however, if used right it can still produce excellent results. It is cheap and easy to use, flexible and fast. Whether emailing your clients about a new offer or special, or prospecting from a list or sending your newsletter you need to be able to plan and measure the results. MailChimp is an excellent resource for managing your email campaigns. MailChimp makes it easy easy to design exceptional email campaigns, share them on social networks, integrate with web services you already use, manage subscribers and track your

5. Detection If you are worried about your brand name being copied on the web, check your brand on namechk, and see which social media sites are available for you to register and who has taken the others ones. Many of these exist only overseas so don't worry too much if you have never heard of them. Assuming that the main objective of your online strategy is to drive prospects and customers to your website, then contact you via email, phone or visit, then Detection (or measurement) of your online success is best driven by google analytics (as mentioned in the Website section above). Here you can find out how many people are visiting you and where they came from, what they do when they get there and where they go after. What time of the day they cam and how long they stayed on each page they visited. There is so much information here that you can be confident that all your future web design decisions will be founded on fact not personal preference.

For the heavy social media user, you could look at HowSociable, Backtype and Social Mention - free tools for viewing your impact across the networks. Social mention gives an indication as the nature of the chat, positive or negative, and allows you to set up alerts to your email address for real-time tracking.

Finally use your CRM and google analytics to measure everything. Always measure against your objectives, mentioned in the Planning section above to ensure consistency and unification across your organisation. Sounds easy but think carefully about the wording of those goals, “quality” leads means leads that convert to sales or convert to referral. “Valuable clients” are those with a lifetime value that outweighs the expense of servicing them and investment in attracting them. “Growing clients” is usually a good measure of loyalty. You can measure this growth in various ways and all are important; growing the frequency they spend with you, the amount they spend, the number of products or services they purchase, the share of their spend with you over competitors, the times they refer you, etc.. The more you know the better decisions you make and we all know that that means better ROI!

So now that you know everything you need to know to RAPIDly improve your brand presence online and increase your leads and sales on a budget… go for it!