And we’re off!

It’s almost two weeks since we launched the B2B Marketing Manifesto, and now it’s time peel back the cloth for Project Open Kimono – our commitment to a transparent Manifesto campaign.

It’s a six month marathon, not a two week sprint, but every good B2B marketer knows the value of a good first impression.

So where are we now?
Well, we’re delighted and a little relieved (you never really know what’s going to happen) to say that now the kimono is open, there’s something substantial to show off (do tell us when this metaphor gets too… graphic).

It’s too early to report on everything but the top level stats are pleasing:

• 186 downloads from a target of 1000
• 158 completed forms from a target of 200
• 1 serious new business discussion from a target of 2
• 2 new business contacts to be fully explored
• 25 comments from a target of 50 (Join the debate and make your mark)
• 200 per cent rise in views of our existing content library

And we haven’t even promoted the Manifesto to our database yet — this is just from a very small dose of online PR and social media.

Not too shabby and a long, long way to go, but it’s fair to say that the experiment is already turning interesting.

Early Lessons
If you want a fast start then it makes sense to work with the channels that can spin on a sixpence: social media and online PR.

Doug’s already written about how to get the B2B marketing community working and here are two analytical lessons from that work.

Lesson One – Twitter Value
As you can see from our top graphic the Twitter response to the Manifesto has been phenomenal.

We’ve counted at least 80 tweets and retweets, from some of B2B marketing’s best known and respected faces, with literally thousands of followers (if I ever get a spare week I’ll count them all up). So you’d think that Twitter provides bulk of our visitors and downloads, right? Wrong.

As the Google Report shows the frenetic Twitter activity has actually delivered 55 visits (significantly below the number of tweets), and thanks to an above average abandonment rate, only 18 downloads.

Even if we take into consideration the preview books emailed out beforehand it’s a pretty revealing statistic. There are a couple conclusions to take away from this:

•    Creating a great Twitter vibe doesn’t always translate to your site
•    Getting content shared on Twitter isn’t just about the quality of your content

Does that mean Twitter is over-valued? That depends on what you’re after, but the data (so far) shows Twitter working harder as buzz generator than a lead generator. We like a buzz though.

2. Lesson Two – Online PR
We’ve also charted the impact of our online PR efforts with a number of bloggers, aggregators and media.

It’s harder to hear the noise, but it’s quietly (very) effective.

Our online PR activity performs well on visits, downloads and engagement against Twitter and, importantly to our campaign metrics, compares favourably to our campaign benchmark: the B2B Content Marketing Workbook launch.

A few respected, thoughtful bloggers can do more for your conversion rates than a multitude of Tweets. It’s important to follow measurement right down your funnel where unexpected results often appear.

Conclusion
A Twitter buzz if great but don’t mistake the noise as a sign that all your campaign metrics will be flowing. Sharing great content through your community with respect and reciprocity can overcome the barriers to conversion. We call it ‘earned influence’. It’s harder than a 140 character tweet but well worth the effort.

You might want to check out:

Project Open Kimono Part 1 – the one where we commit ourselves in public (Planning)

Project Open Kimono Part 2 – the one where it all kicks off (Thinking)

Project Open Kimono Part 3 – the one where confidence starts to rise (First results)

Project Open Kimono Part 4 – the one where the trick shots start (Cross-promotion)

Project Open Kimono Part 5 – the one where we share the first month’s results (Reviewing)

Project Open Kimono Part 6 – the one where we toughen up (Soul Searching)

Project Open Kimono Part 7 – the one where we find the world’s best marketers (Segmenting)

Project Open Kimono Part 8 – the one where we show that design isn’t everything (Style v Substance)

Project Open Kimono Part 9 – the one where lead nurturing proves its worth (Marketo)

Project Open Kimono Part 10 – the one where the form fights back (Form v No Form)

And of course, The B2B Marketing Manifesto itself.

© neilstoneman for Velocity Partners, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B content marketing, B2B marketing, B2B Marketing Analytics, B2B social media, Online PR, Twitter

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People are always sceptical about the benefits we promise. You lot always want a case study.

But many of our existing clients are reluctant to share the secrets of their ongoing B2B marketing success with you. They think you’ll steal their ideas even when we promise that you would never do that.

That leaves us in bit of a bind. So, we thought, let’s just do it to ourselves. Let’s be our own case study.

That’s what Project Open Kimono is all about: a living case study that will track our campaign around the B2B Marketing Manifesto.

So to get the ball rolling we’re going to show you the “warts and all” thinking for the B2B Marketing Manifesto. And that means we’re going to share the plan before we even start.

Now, we’re not saying all this is going to happen; we’re marketers, not soothsayers, and we’re expecting, almost hoping, for bits to fail. But we believe in our planning and that’s why we ask clients to believe in it.

Let the experiment begin.

What the B2B Marketing Manifesto is all about
It’s an attempt to make sense of all the new things that make B2B marketing such a confusing, exciting, challenging discipline right now. And it’s a call to action with some guideposts to what we consider to be effective B2B.

Who’s It For?
Anyone with an ambition to be a better B2B marketer and to show better results to the business.

Why are we doing it?
The bottom line: we want to attract one or two new clients who think the way we do. A marketer who reads the B2B Marketing Manifesto and wants to talk to us is our kind of marketer.

To do this, we need the B2B Marketing Manifesto to bring us a box of lovely goodies across our marketing funnel:

•    Generate a load of downloads in six months
•    Spark interest in our existing thought leadership library
•    Drive three new project discussions with existing clients
•    Incite two new business discussions with prospects
•    Improve Google ranking for our chosen keyphrases
•    Increase target audience site traffic and, crucially, conversions
•    Build a top-drawer case study for all you sceptics

How are we going to do it?
By fusing together the tools of our trade.

We’re not using any bought media this time (but sometimes we do). So it’s:

•    Our blog
•    The digital tom-toms of social media and online PR
•    A creative outlier or two
•    Word-of-mouth
•    Marketing automation with the might of Marketo
•    Our newsletter, the world-famous Velocity Vectors
•    Cross promotion with existing content
•    Industry presentations and webinars
•    A spot of SEO work and a dabble on Adwords
•    Doug’s loyal extended family
•    An endorsement here and there
•    Industry publication bylines

If you were buying all that then the whole project: copy, design and promotion would cost somewhere between £15,000 and £30,000. It’s great value, especially when you consider we’re the only people who don’t have to pay for our services.

And how are we going to measure it?
I thought you’d ask this one. You lot usually do.

And we’re not hiding anything so here’s all our key performance indicators which are, when relevant, benchmarked against one hell of a hard-act-to-follow: the B2B Content Marketing Workbook.

We’re setting the kind of KPIs we’d set for our clients: valuable, tough but achievable. They are all based on six months time period and will be measured thoroughly in Google Analytics.

Downloads
These sit at the top end of the campaign. We’ll be successful if we achieve lots of downloads. Here are our download metrics.

- 1000 downloads
- 200 volunteered names and email addresses
- 25 per cent spike in downloads for our thought leadership library
- 50 comments (not including those pimping Viagra or Penis enlargers)

And here’s how we’re going to do it.

Search
We are working with our core “B2B marketing” term to improve ranking, visits, conversions and backlinks. We know you’re obsessed with your funnel.

Ranking
We plan to up our Google ranking on our key term.

Reach the top 10 on Google from our current rank of 16.
Reach the top 5 on Google UK from our current rank of 7.

Visits
Of course you’re not really interested in ranking. It’s pretty useless if it doesn’t deliver more visitors on the term.  We’re going for:

Increase search term visitors by 50 per cent

Conversions
What do you mean visitors don’t count unless they actually download a paper, fill in a form, or, preferably both? Fair enough. We want to:

Increase conversion rate by 35 per cent for the “B2B marketing” term.

Backlinks
The Content Marketing Workbook, our benchmark, was much more than link bait, but that didn’t stop it from being great link bait. It got:

•    250 direct links to the download page
•    180 links with lovely anchor text
•    32 links with a PageRank of one or more.

And we plan to do just as well this time, if not beat it. A tall order for a piece that’s more general than instructive in its nature, but that’s what a target is all about.

Good Form?
The smart ones among you will have noticed we don’t plan to capture the details of everyone that downloads.

Why? Because we want to do some testing (for your benefit) so we can get some more data on what we gain (and lose) from a form.  We’ll let you know the results of our test as soon as we find out.

Database
Our standard click through rate (CTR) for our monthly newsletter is around 12 per cent, which, research shows is a pretty robust B2B campaign rate.

But with the power of marketing automation we’re looking to do better in our mail shots.

We’re running an automated campaign to bring prospects further down our funnel. That means:

- Segmented databases for behaviour and demographics
- Follow-up marketing materials based on key triggers

We’re looking for a  30 per cent jump in CTR for our key prospects with at least one concrete business meeting coming through our campaign funnel.

Social Media
As you might expect it’s a growing component of everything we do.  We did pretty well with the Content Marketing Workbook and plan to improve across the funnel.

The plan is to:

- Increase our visits from social media by 50 per cent
- Smash our conversion rates by a full 100 per cent
- Improve our engagement figures for time on site and bounce

Online PR
We use this term to mean bloggers and journalists. Again we want to build from the foundation of our content marketing workbook.

The eerily familiar plan is to:

- Increase our online visits from online PR by 50 per cent
- Smash our conversion rates by a full 100 per cent
- Improve our engagement figures for time on site and bounce

You can see what we strive to do, for ourselves and our clients. It’s content driven marketing that’s designed to work bring prospects into our funnel and spit out some business at the other end.

Summing Up
In a few months time we’ll transform this planning document into a case study that goes deeper into our tactics. But this is what we’re determined to achieve.

You’ll find out soon enough whether we made it or not.

Want to know more about how we think and plan then take a look at our Spin Cycle planning model.

Project Open Kimono Part 1 – the one where we commit ourselves in public (Planning)

Project Open Kimono Part 2 – the one where it all kicks off (Thinking)

Project Open Kimono Part 3 – the one where confidence starts to rise (First results)

Project Open Kimono Part 4 – the one where the trick shots start (Cross-promotion)

Project Open Kimono Part 5 – the one where we share the first month’s results (Reviewing)

Project Open Kimono Part 6 – the one where we toughen up (Soul Searching)

Project Open Kimono Part 7 – the one where we find the world’s best marketers (Segmenting)

Project Open Kimono Part 8 – the one where we show that design isn’t everything (Style v Substance)

Project Open Kimono Part 9 – the one where lead nurturing proves its worth (Marketo)

Project Open Kimono Part 10 – the one where the form fights back (Form v No Form)

——-

Photo Credit: happy_serendipity on Flickr Creative Commons

© neilstoneman for Velocity Partners, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B Case Study, B2B marketing, B2B marketing agency, B2B Marketing Analytics, Content Marketing, web analytics

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Photo credit: Anoldent

Am I normal?

Ask people about bounce rates and they’ll tell you that a high bounce rate is bad. Fair enough, it sounds pretty logical. You don’t want lots of people taking one look at your site and running away screaming. But how do you know what’s a high bounce rate? What is normal?

Trawl the internet for the answer to this and you’ll find everyone and their Auntie Fanny has an opinion on it, especially B2B marketers. Some people say that anywhere between 15-50% is normal, others that 60% is fine. That rather suggests that there’s no such thing as normal (which, fortunately for this office, is true in so many aspects of life).

The fact is that bounce is rate is highly variable, depending on specific circumstances. It’s too particular to your website to be comparable to anyone else’s. That’s not much help when you’re starting out. In that case you have to take the temperature of your bounce rate at the start and then compare with yourself over time.

Bounce rates are a very useful internal benchmark. But it’s just one tool in the B2B marketer’s toolkit, it’s not a guaranteed indicator of the health of your website. But, as one forum contributor said: “What should your bounce rate be? Lower than it was yesterday”.

A point to note:

There are occasions when a high bounce rate is a good thing. If you host lots of adverts on your site, you’re likely to get a high bounce rate – especially if the ads are really targeted and relevant. Or similarly if you’re an online publisher you may well get people visiting just one page: an article or a blog post. So the take home message is: stop looking at other people’s bounce rates and don’t panic.

© lucy for Velocity Partners, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B marketing, B2B Marketing Analytics, SEO, web analytics

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By that I mean the empty returns so many B2B websites deliver to their users.  They’re actually gold dust.  They allow us to extract value from exactly nothing.  And we do it without a magic wand in sight.

Ever get sick of searching B2B websites for an obvious business term and returning no results? I’m often confronted with a big fat zero on my travels.

As a user I’m disappointed.  I’m searching with intent but there’s nothing to speed me to my destination.  I’ll probably take my query elsewhere.

But this cloud has the glint of a silver lining.  As a website owner it’s top quality, real-time, HD feedback.  A search failure is often the manifestation of deep, painful and hard-to-fix core content issues – stuff I need to have my eye on.

Tech markets move fast.  Sometimes change is instant: Steve Jobs said iPad this week and, suddenly, a generation of websites are talking the wrong language.  But more often it’s constant, and internal search results help us stay in-touch.

Here’s just a snap-shot of the juicy goodies search can help answer:

Is my marketing positioning right?
Not if you’re positioned around ECM while users search for CRM in droves.

Do I have the right content?
If you’re not topical then you’re out of date fast.  It’s just one more reason to blog.

How can I evolve my SEO strategy?
Search tells you exactly what your customers are looking for right now.

Is my site architecture right?
Search use becomes more erratic when your site navigation breaks down and fails your users.

What kind of users do I have?
If you’ve lots of high intent users (lucky you) then you’d better speed things up for them.

How valuable is my search box?
Invariably people who search are more likely to buy.  Search is a weapon.

Analytics Customization
Now what B2B marketing team doesn’t want to know all the above and more?  Well, in true you-couldn’t-make-this stuff-up fashion: almost all of them, apparently.

Most firms don’t even have the Google Analytics search facility switched on.  It’s the first thing we do to customize marketing analytics packages for clients.

It’s customer research, user surveys and content testing all rolled into one.  And it costs a big fat zero.

© neilstoneman for Velocity Partners, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B content marketing, B2B marketing, B2B marketing agency, B2B Marketing Analytics, Market Positioning, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

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