We’ve been working on a number of ‘web engagement’ programs lately, where we’ve been helping clients to increase their web ‘footprint’ in order to improve their general SEO and awareness levels.

Now I’ve blogged and blabbed about this before, so I won’t go into the thinking - but if you’d like to get a sense of why social media and web engagement is so important then check out some recent posts such as ‘Your First (Free) Baby Steps in B2B Web Marketing,’ ‘Pico Branding‘ and our ‘web marketing trends for 2008‘.

This post, however, is all about the mechanics and how to do it.

In truth, it’s not hard. All you need is the following:

1. A dedication to publishing a regular stream of gold top content to your site (note: it needs to be good and valuable to the folks you’ll reach out to in #2)
2. A variety of web outlets in which to cost-effectively publish this stuff (note: per above, the idea here is not to abuse these places but to selectively publish your best stuff on them ….think sensibly about this as many of them are happy to ban content ’spammers’)

For help with #1, call us.

For #2, the mind map below gives you everything you need to do web / social media engagement by yourself. It’s easy. Just pin it on your wall and - once you’ve published a great piece of content to your site - follow the map clockwise and post it to the relevant destinations.

Let us know your thoughts (and results).

Note: your key to success here is to BE SOCIAL. Don’t just use these ‘outlets’ as a window for your own content. When you see other pages that you like, Stumbleupon/Digg/Reddit them - because this is their inherent value ….they exist to raise awareness of good, valuable web content. So, consider it your duty to promote everything that you really like, and not just the stuff you grow at home.

Here’s an experment for you to try.

Open your web stats app and check out which pieces of content are your top performers over the past month. (By top performers, I mean on key ‘attention measurements’ such as time on page - these are the things that tell you if people are really interested and engaged.)

What comes out top?

If you have a blog, or if you’re in the habit of publishing white papers or opinion pieces then my money’s on them. Am I right?

Here’s my hypothesis: for B2B web sites, the content that really matters in terms of positioning and prospecting isn’t your ‘markitecture’ pages - your product and services descriptions, corporate histories and such…. it’s your ‘thought leadership’ pages - the places where you express opinions and ideas rather than features and benefits.

More to the point, having done detailed analyses of a mass of B2B technology web sites, I can tell you that this rule holds firm for our entire industry, without exception (and, I’d hazard a guess, it does so in any information-hungry B2B market).

To give you a feel for it, here’s our top content stats for the year to date… (Note: we measure our content performance by establishing an ‘Attention Index’ - average time on page x number of page views…. and we only include those pages that have held people’s attention for more than two minutes.)

(Click to open!)

You’ll see that the most engaging pages are a bunch of white papers and blog posts.

Putting the blog aside for a moment, this is interesting because unlike most of the B2B technology industry, we make a point of giving our most interesting content away for free. Most firms take a strategic decision to lock prime content such as white papers away below a subscription line, and often within secure ‘walled gardens’ that render it almost completely inaccessible to all but the most motivated of site visitors.

The consequences are obvious. If you lock your most valuable, compelling content away beneath a subscription line, then you’re missing a proven opportunity to help your prospects select you.

The rationale for ‘content locking’ is straight forward. You hold out the promise of access to an interesting piece of content in exchange for a visitor’s personal information - usually a name and an email address. This is the concept on which ‘web-to-lead’ forms are built to support the growth of CRM ‘lead’ databases.

I think this approach is fundamentally flawed, and also detrimental to driving quality sales leads.

Why? Because if you lock your content below a subscription line, it’s not just sales prospects that you’re hiding from: you’re also hiding from Google.

Put simply, if your content is sat behind a firewall, then Google’s spiders can’t reach it. This means a big loss of SEO traction, since your ‘thought leader’ content is likely to be your most valuable in SEO terms - it’s going to be stuffed with all the key phrases and concepts that you want search engines to associate your site with. Also, if it’s sat beneath the subscription line then you’re discouraging other sites from linking to it - which is illogical from an SEO point of view (good SEO practice means helping sites to link to you).

Furthermore, what of the people that you lose along the way? To me, a commitment to form-filling is no great measurement of the quality of a sales lead. A far better tactic is to set your thought leadership content free and give people more ‘opportunities to engage‘ with who you are and what you stand for. In this way (and this is the flip side of ‘web-to-lead’ thinking) you give yourself more opportunities to convince the skeptics - the people who until this point believe in your competitors not you, or those who have chanced upon your site during some desk research. Let’s face it, most of us are commitment-phobes when it comes to the web anyway. Why not just accept this fact and move on?

Instead, we ought to be finding better, more intelligent and subtle ways of establishing leads. There are better deals to offer our prospects than ‘give me your names and I’ll give you some content’…. deals that don’t carry an SEO penalty. We can divide our content in different ways, and base a ‘lead generating’ offer on a really big ticket content item, after we’ve provided people with the opportunity to see all our other great stuff. For example, an offer for a piece of industry research can be embedded in a free white paper. Isn’t this a better place to pop the question? Wouldn’t the quality of resulting leads be better?

Whatever - my point is that a bog standard web-to-lead form slapped on as a firewall to the content that people (and Google) really care about is clumsy and negligent.

Here’s some questions to ask yourself:

• What’s your most valuable and engaging content?
• Do you make you accessible enough?
• What’s the upside of providing more opportunities to engage with it?
• What’s the downside of removing a subscription line?
• How scientific is your answer to the previous question? (Gut feeling, conventional wisdom, or based on small side-show experiment and validated by stats?)

I’d encourage you to play around with these thoughts and, if you’re not a fully paid up member of the free content brigade, to tweak the presentation of some of your content and see what it gives you…

OK, Listen Up

Your web site is not your field of dreams. Build it and most likely they will not come.

Nope, once it’s built your goal is to make it work as a sales sweat house – and this takes real effort and a bunch of web marketing smarts.

Your first order of business is to attract engaged and interested traffic to your site… with the ultimate goal of turning these people into qualified leads.

In order to do this effectively (and to filter out the tyre-kickers) you need to pull out your Web Marketing 101 Kit Bag. We’re talking SEO, social media, online PR and blogging.

Sound OK?

Don’t worry. It’s simple (and largely free to do). The key rule is ‘give to get’: you’ve just created a category-killing web site with a beautifully designed and executed value proposition…. now all you need to do is work hard to engage with the right kind of people and bring them to your door.

The idea is to increase your web ‘reach’ and improve your performance in search engines (ie, your SEO) so that you can engage with and drive high-value, motivated traffic to your web site.

Here are the techniques you need…

Step 1: Content Generation

Step 2: Backlinking

Step 3: ‘Rest of the Web’ engagement (via Social Media, Online PR and blogging)

And here’s how you can do it….

1) Content Generation

Put simply, you need to generate some content bait. Quality content is what will ultimately drive traffic to your site. You need to be publishing good content- and keyword-rich articles, papers, podcasts, and video regularly to your site. This will encourage those search spiders to return more often and, over time, it will give you a compelling body of work that you can publish off-site with the aim of steering people away from other web destinations and onto your site.

2) Backlinking

The links that are made back to your site are the number one influencing factor in Google’s PageRank algorithm. And the higher quality they are, they more influential they will be in boosting your ranking (for a full explanation of what ‘quality’ means in this respect, see our paper on SEO). To this end, you need to encourage as many of them as possible. How? By submitting your site to relevant, quality listings directories (such as the technology section in Yahoo’s business pages), creating reciprocal links with important partner sites and getting hip to…

3) ‘Rest of the Web’ enagagement via Social Media, Online PR and blogging

Here’s where you put that battery of superior content to use. You should be out there creating a variety of social media application profiles - YouTube, Squidoo, Flickr, Slideshare, etc - so that each time you create a new piece of content you can publish it on them, along with a healthy dose of linkage back to your site. Elsewhere we’ve described this effort as ‘Pico Branding’ - using top-flight content to engage with audiences elsewhere on the web with the intention of inviting everyone back to your place. It’s a fantastic way of driving interested traffic.

In addition, you should be taking a leaf out of the new book of PR and publishing all of your newsworthy content via online news distribution hubs. This is another means of backlinking - the hubs will take your content and distribute it far and wide across the web to ‘newsy’ destinations like Google and Yahoo News and others. Note - the aim here is not to convince a human being to write up your news story, but to have a web site somewhere deep in the interweb publish it, along with a link or two back to your key web pages.

Last but not least, you should start blogging your market-related ideas every time you hit on something of interest. Why? Well, we’ve already written on what we feel the value of blogging to be in B2B, but in short, blogging can be:

• Another reason for Google to pay you frequent visits
• A direct continuation of your sales discussions
• The place where your prospects head to to get a handle on the real people behind the product/service
• A great way of engaging with the fabric of the web and generating high quality backlinks

A word about measurement

Aside from all this content generation and ‘engagement’ activity, we’d also recommend that you measure what you do on a regular (monthly?) basis. Otherwise it’ll be hard to track the effectiveness of what you’re doing, and hard to convince other important people (like bosses!) that you ought to be dedicating more resources to the work.

Using a stats package like Google Analytics (which is free!), here’s a few simple yardsticks you can use to validate your work…

• Average page views per month
• Average time on site
• Average bounce rates
• Average number and cost of acquisitions per month (sign ups to newsletters, white papers, etc)

If you follow the above advice, I can guarantee you’ll soon have people beating a path to your door.

Alternatively, contact us and we can help you on your way!

Hey!

We just published a new web marketing white paper on the thorny subject of how to do PPC properly in an B2B environment.

Here’s a snippet:

If your goal is to generate leads and to contribute in a tangible way to the sales process, then PPC can be the ultimate tool in a B2B marketer’s armory.

At a basic level, B2B lead generation with PPC is not rocket surgery. It’s an old school tactic involving an ad, an offer, a coupon and a reward. And when executed well, the payoff is twofold: concrete sales leads and the healthy (and obvious) byproduct of increased traffic and raised awareness.

To get great results, we suggest you follow these five rules:

1) Set appropriate goals
2) Set appropriate conversion points
3) Set appropriate metrics
4) Set appropriate offers
5) Create appropriate landing pages

To learn more about it you can download the whole paper here…

I just returned from a great week away in the Inner Hebrides - the small cluster of islands to the west of Glasgow. The single malts were stunning, the weather bracing and the walks heartening. I’m missing it already.

None of this, of course, has anything to do with B2B lead generation, but I did have one holiday experience that made me realise how wide of the mark we are when it comes to using ‘web-to-lead-forms.’

Convention has it that you build up an arsenal of banner content - white papers, research reports, etc - and then hide them away unless visitors supply you with their names, email addresses and inside leg measurements.

But how does this play out in practice? I think I have an answer for you by way of a rambling analogy…

At the end of my stay, on the way back to Glasgow airport, my rental car wobbled to a halt alongside the mighty Castle Minard on the A83. A callout to the RAC breakdown service was in order.

Castle Minard is a stunning place on the banks of Loch Fyne, half a mile off the main road at the end of a dirt track. It’s a hotel. A three star establishment, apparently - a bit rusty and crumbling around the edges. If you weren’t looking for it, or if you hadn’t broken down in the area, then you’d probably miss it.

Anyway, I parked up. The castle lights were off, so I knocked. No answer. I made my call to the RAC and sat down to admire the view. 45 minutes later (and bang on estimate), a big orange and white van trundled into view. ‘Och-Aye’ said Steve the mechanic.

‘Och-Aye indeed!’ bellowed a voice from nowhere.

Like a troll, the castle’s owner had pounced upon us from his impressive lair. A mutated cross between The Simpsons’ Mr Burns and a miniature Bobby Charlton, he hit us with the following barrage:

WHO ARE YOU?
WHAT’S YOUR NAME?
THIS IS PRIVATE PROPERTY!
YOU NEED MY PERMISSION TO BE HERE!
WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU’RE UP TO?
…ETC, ETC

Golly - I jumped!

Composure regained, I reassured him that we meant no harm, we came in peace and that we were really quite happy (and lucky) to have broken down in such magnificent surroundings.

Privately, however, I’d decided that I really, really hated him. I was a long way from home in the middle of nowhere, I had a baby on the back seat wailing, a wife with a busted arm (seriously) and a car that patently didn’t work. I was really in need of some help.

At the same time, the accusation of trespassing seemed ludicrous against the backdrop of a once magnificent, but now empty and crumbling hotel. What was with this guy? As the proprietor, shouldn’t he be welcoming us?!

At this point, he turned and made a dash for the door. Steve the mechanic and I were expecting a musket in our noses. Instead, he reappeared brandishing business cards and a reassurance that “we have great guests rooms” and that “you can look us up on the web!”

We decided not to stick around. We fixed the car at the top of the track and shared a joke between us. This man was a sham, worse than Basil Fawlty. He seemed to revel in our twisted little exchange. But it all seemed so misguided and back to front. A grilling to greet us and a business card to say goodbye? No wonder his place was empty! My wife and I (and Steve) vowed never, ever to return.

Which, by the way, is what the majority of your web site users do when they’re presented with a web-to-lead form.

Think about it…. When you squirrel your content away and ask people to give you their email address before you’ve even said hello, you’re behaving exactly like Mr Burns. Is this any way to treat a valued prospect?

Here’s the context… I’ve worked so hard to find you: I have a problem to address; I Googled for ‘widgets’; I searched you out amongst a thicket of competitive pages; I see you might just have a white paper that interests me. Great! But then….

WHO ARE YOU?
WHAT’S YOUR NAME?
THIS IS PRIVATE PROPERTY!
YOU NEED MY PERMISSION TO BE HERE!
…ETC, ETC

Well sorry. Screw you! My life’s too short and I’m off to check out another site instead. Shouldn’t you be welcoming me on to your site? Isn’t life hard enough selling widgets without giving me the third degree?

It’s kind of insane really. Unless you’re giving a stack of cash away for free, then you’re making the following fatal assumptions with your jazzy ‘web-to-lead’ form:

• I need your stuff more than you need me
• I can’t find similar (or as good) stuff for free elsewhere

Which isn’t going to be true in most cases. So, why do it in the first place?

Here’s some questions to ask yourself…

• When was the last time a web to lead form clinched a sale?
• When was the last time a web to lead form ‘tipped’ a prospect into a customer?
• Can you afford for me to consider - even for a microsecond - that life would be easier (and more hospitable) on some other site?
• Is ‘WHO ARE YOU?’ really an appropriate question to ask me at this early stage of our relationship?
• If you were running a hotel, would you treat me in the same way?

Where content giveaways are concerned, please just ditch your web to lead forms right now - or those valued guests-to-be may decide to never, ever return.

Next up: “The value of free content: why giving it all away is good for your prospects and great for Google…”