We spend much of our time evangalising the basics of content marketing (and the rest on content marketing’s intrepid edge). The point of the content marketing exercise is to make yourself, your site and your people inherently interesting to the market, by sharing more of yourself, your ideas and your expertise. Much google-love automatically follows.

“You mean we just talk about our stuff, and it will sell itself?,” asks many the wondrous executive. Well, something like that. As long as you’re talking about stuff other people are already interested in (not just your own products), then, yes, that’s basically it.

The main point is this: You can draw people to you and get them to buy your products by providing compelling information on your site. Get them to come. Get them to stay. They’ll become customers in the course of time. That’s the basics anyway.

So how can you find out if your site is serving the content marketing purpose? How do you know if you’re really offering a compelling content marketing experience that will draw in the crowds, keep them around and convert them to paying customers?

For a client, we studied their website analytics to assess just this, and enroute we discovered three pretty core vital signs to see if a website’s content marketing chops are in place. (When I say “we”, I mean me and Neil. And, when I say “me”, I mean mostly Neil – our analytics guru).

Content Marketing Vital Sign #1: The Dead Cat Toss

You’ve heard of the dead cat bounce perhaps. It’s the upward blip of a market after it’s crashed and burned. The corpse bounces up briefly, before falling down again. Well, this is a different trajectory that I playfully call the dead cat toss. Here is one dead cat toss:

Generally, we see a site plugging along with steady traffic (note the typical weekdays to weekend rhythms), then sees a big spike – what I call “the toss”. Usually, this relates to some massive campaign, involving an SEO-keyphrase laden press release fired hither and thither, some guest post blogging and/or a big email blast. Traffic briefly spikes; the cat soars up and then falls back down.

The true measure of a website that is using content marketing well is its performance after the spike/toss. If it quickly drops back down to the normal pattern, then we’re looking at a site that fails to convince visitors to return for compelling content. If it goes back down to a level some degree higher than it started, that’s a content marketing success. The site above is a typical content marketing #fail. If you saw a graph of our site after our B2B Marketing Manifesto or Content Marketing Workbook were published, you’d see typical content marketing #win.

The Dead Cat Toss simply measures whether an effort to increase a company’s effective audience has had any success. Anyone with access to a mailing list or emailing software can create a little traffic spike, but only good content marketers will convert that spike into long-term repeat traffic.

Content Marketing Vital Sign #2: The hourglass figure

This vital sign can only be measured by visiting a dusty, often-neglected little corner of Google Analytics called “visitor loyalty”. Here you’ll see a bar graph that maps out how many times each of your visitors have come to your site. At the top, you have the people who came once and ran away screaming (they never came back). At the very bottom, you have the people who go to your site like pilgrims to a temple (say, your webmaster).

Here’s the same site we looked at above. As you’ll notice, most (almost all) of their traffic sees the site and flees in abject terror. That’s a dramatization meaning they found nothing of use or beauty there. They have very many first-time visitors, then the frequency of repeat visits scales down rapidly, and never rebounds.

It is this rebound of higher-frequency visitors that we expect to see with good content marketing sites. Generally, a site with a good content marketing experience will see high totals at the top of the graph (many people become aware), lower totals in the middle ground (non-following repeat visitors are a true rarity) then a rebound of totals toward the bottom (the followers).

We expect good content marketing sites to display a nice hourglass figure. Note: You usually have to discount the very top bar of one-visit-only visitors to see the hourglass (as the bouncers skew the trend).

Content Marketing Vital Sign #3: The Jesus Pizza

Our last content marketing vital sign plays off of a parable (because there’s nothing our MD likes more than Christian references): specifically, the parable of the feeding of the multitude. The scene is set in Google Analytics’ New vs. Returning visitors statistic.

This is closely related to the two preceding statistics, but puts things in a very black/white perspective. We see a pie, with our one-time visitors in blue and our returning visitors in green.

Content marketers want to increase the green share of the pie. Like the feeding of the multitude, where many people were fed by a constant, limited amount of sustenance, a website should be serving its visitors repeatedly. That little green pie piece should get big and fat.

Our own site has about a one-third/two-thirds ratio between returning and new visitors. Presumably, Google.com has a ratio of 99% returning to 1% new. Marketers shouldn’t be happy with anything less than a figure of returning visitors in the high 20s.

So marketers, do like JC or your own personal multitude-feeding saviour of choice, and feed people again and again from your content marketing pizza (probably the first time that term has ever been used, you think?).

Now, go to your site and see how you perform against the content marketing vital signs!

© Ryan Skinner for Velocity Partners, 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Content Marketing, Content Optimization, Google Analytics, metrics, web analytics

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Interactive tools to help customers get to know you better, while you get to know them better, are the thing.

I’ve spent far too much time looking for it: Simple(-seeming) interactive tools that allow web visitors to self-select what they want from an information provider.

Yes, that is the basic function of web-sites, and the interactivity is simply navigating the site. But I’ve been eager to find something that doesn’t require a new page to load each time the user refines his request. That’s too slow, too clunky. Sometimes you need tighter controls and a more fluid experience.

Rapid, interactive decision trees or something like it, was what I thought. Not a wildly successful search, though. The closest I came was a decision tree developed by the FDA to help big pharma determine how to market new drugs. It did the job, but it was neither nice to look at nor to build (total reverse engineering job).

Google and YouTube, ironically enough, created an interesting interactive decision tree. This uses YouTube’s newfound interactive functionality to allow viewers to answer their way forward to the ideal information. Lovely google, they provide an extensive wiki and how-to so that you can make it happen.

Then there’s Jellyvision. They’ve already made a product that can be taken off the shelf, and – with the help of a design company and some AV expertise – turned into a first-rate interactive customer experience.

Like all great things, it’s deceptively simple. Just a guy chatting with you and asking you the occasional question to bring you forward constructively. At the end of the play, visitor leaves happy (presumably), with the specific information he/she was after.

Crucially, the host comes away even happier, with specific information about the visitor and his or her preferences. That kind of information greases the wheels of any marketing automation programme, which is probably why Eloqua, for one, has already used it for their own ends.

I’ve never implemented a Jellyvision story, sadly. I’d love to, for anyone willing to take the jump.

And, for those who’ve done it already, I’d love to hear their experiences. How many people who started a journey hopped off? How much time did it take to design the decision tree, and how much time to program the marketing automation that can track it? What was the final conversion rate like?

Lastly, obviously, as someone who spent far too much time getting here, I really want to hear about any other people’s experiences with other interactive tools. What have you seen? Anything even better that does the same trick?

© Ryan Skinner for Velocity Partners, 2011. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: design, web analytics, Web Design

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The project name inside Econsultancy was LALP for ‘Long-Ass Landing Page (or Long-Arse for the Brits among us) and boy does it live up to its name. The page is over 400cm deep, which is longer than the wheelbase of a firetruck, taller than the average totem pole and higher than Neil standing on Stan’s shoulders.

It’s got six bright red calls-to-action after every chunk of text. It’s got two videos, 36 member logos, ten testimonial quotes and twelve bright, green tickmarks. It’s written in a fairly hard-sell tone but with a few winks to keep it within the Econsultancy brand voice.

Why did we want to go all long-ass on this one?  Partly because Econsultancy has a hell of a lot to tell prospective members – and there was nowhere where all this value was stacked up for all to see. But mainly because we studied a lot of landing pages (especially membership-focused ones) and believe it will sell more memberships. The idea is to test everything, so this hunch won’t be a hunch for much longer.

Here’s the page in all it’s glory, but to actually read it, you’ll have to visit the real thing. While you’re at it, become a member of Econsultancy – it will be the best career investment you ever make.

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2011. | Permalink | 17 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Conversion, digital marketing, Landing pages, web analytics, Web Marketing

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The URL, when fully unfurled, reveals the Google Analytics tracking code:

http://www.velocitypartners.co.uk/2010/09/20/b2b-marketing-manifesto-ebook/?utm_source=social&utm_medium=twitterautodm&utm_campaign=manifesto

I generated this with the Google URL builder, a simple tool that makes tracking links really easy (especially if you have a guy like Neil Stoneman to set up the Analytics).

For you closet geeks: you can decode the URL by looking at the stuff after these words:

?utm_source = social

?utm_medium = twitterautodm

?uth_campaign = manifesto

(Neil says I did it wrong — apparently the medium should have been ‘social’ and the source ‘twitterautodm’, but, hey, at least I tagged it.)

So anyway, this is the DM tweet that people get when they follow me:

I was worried it might be cheesy or crass (what do you think? comments welcome below), but thought it was worth a test. If no one came for the Manifesto, then we’d stop.  Of course, a chunk of new followers came to me from reading the Manifesto, so this offer wouldn’t be attractive to them, but anyway…

The idea of automating communication felt false to me at first. And I don’t always like the auto-DMs I get when I follow people: they often have that reek of false sincerity (“Hey! Thanks for the follow! I hope I can help you achieve the full potential of your personal brand!”).

But then the ‘pro’ rationale won out:

– it’s only polite to welcome new friends
– if you’re following me you really might like the Manifesto
– no one is twisting your arm, it’s easy to ignore the DM

Well, I’m still not convinced that this isn’t a diluted species of spam (SPAM lite! Less gristle!), but the results are in and…

It works.

After about eight weeks, Google Analytics (well, Neil) tells me that 20 people came to the website from this link. Okay, small numbers, but that’s from about 75 new followers, so it’s not a bad click through rate (26%).

More importantly, the goal conversion rate for these people – the ones who actually filled out the form and downloaded the Manifesto – is two-and-a-half times the site average. Here’s the Analytics snippet:

See? 15% of the visitors from this source converted versus 4.18% of traffic from all other sources. Okay, the numbers are tiny (Amazon we ain’t) but the principles hold up:

The Principles

– Test stuff!

– Tag your URLS! (so you can…)

– Track everything!

And one final conclusion: if your offer is relevant and your message not too crass or simpering and doesn’t mention the words ‘personal brand’, then go ahead and set up a Twitter Auto DM.  It works.

Hungry for more Project Open Kimono? Knock yourself 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)

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B content marketing, B2B social media, Google, Online PR, Social Media, Twitter, web analytics

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Hello measurement fans.

If you’ve been following  Project Open Kimono you will know that one of our top targets for our B2B Marketing Manifesto has been 1000 downloads in six months.

And we’ve made it – with over 100 days or so to spare. And in true hastily-written-press-release-style: “We’re delighted!”

It may only be one target, but it’s a big one: if we didn’t have downloads, we wouldn’t have much to say about the other metrics -  the conversations, conversions, contagion, content (and all the other not quite so alliterative stuff).

But we’ve only gone and bloody done it, which means we’ve got shed-loads still to tell you. And here’s the next installment.

B2B Form Investigators
In Open Kimono 5 we started to talk about the web form dilemma – it’s a tricky night’s sleep when you love lead nurturing, which relies on gathering leads, but hate scaring off 50% of your potential fans, advocates and prospects.

So we put on our deer stalkers, lit up our pipes, and launched a three week investigation into the Yin and Yang. Here’s what we’ve found out.

That’s a 39.1% conversion uplift by taking away the form. So if you click on our B2B Marketing Manifesto landing page, what do you expect to find there now?

Surprised to see the form back? The putative loser is through our, admittedly  contrary, eyes a pretty healthy winner. Sure some people run for the hills, but the form can’t take all the blame: it’s not the hideous ogre we first feared.

For us, the data the form giveth is worth more than the awareness the form taketh away.

The fact is that 40% of our traffic just doesn’t want the content even if it’s only a pushed button and a fraction of a second away. They probably wouldn’t go for it if we offered a year’s supply of the Kool-Aid.

Well, they might, but that’s another test, for yet another issue of this seemingly endless series of blogs!  There are B2B marketing mysteries waiting to be solved everywhere we look.

But there’s no doubt about it – the form stays. We’re keeping it because it serves as the start of a B2B marketing process upon which our campaign grows in strength. The figures simply don’t support taking it down.

A Few Caveats
While we hope there are lessons for everyone here, we would warn against extrapolating our experience into all campaigns. Our form:

• Asks for the bare minimum to start nurturing leads. Downloads would drop, along with information reliability, with every additional field.
• Is aimed at marketing people: people who build forms are more likely to fill them in – our bread and butter techies are more sceptical.
• Uses other marketing elements – such as comments and testimonials – to overcome form reticence.

The key take-away is the value of testing itself; applied to your unique content, audience, timescales, next steps, resources…

We’ve solved the debate, for now, but only for this campaign. The next time the results just might be different.

Want to catch up on the rest of Kimono? Here’s the full bifter.

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: Gregory Wake on Flickr Creative Commons

© neilstoneman for Velocity Partners, 2010. | Permalink | 9 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B analytics, B2B content marketing, B2B marketing, B2B Marketing Manifesto, Open Kimono, web analytics

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We believe the people who find and download the B2B Marketing Manifesto are our kind of people. It’s not just a plea for ambition. It’s a 46 page psychographic test.

So where should we be looking? Where are the B2B marketers who are prepared to sit eyeball-to-eyeball with their sales directors and give them hell?

We’re going to use analytics to find our idea of the world’s B2B marketing hotbed.

As our traffic is roughly split between Europe and the Americas it feels like the right place to start. Let the B2B Marketing Ryder Cup begin.

Europe has delivered the most site visits since we launched the B2B Manifesto. So Europe wins, right?

In many businesses the answer would be yes. Sites are often orientated to this basic demographic. If you’ve ever heard the immortal line: “the bulk of our traffic comes from…”, then you’ll know what I’m talking about.

But this isn’t just a numbers game, it’s a psychographic test. We need to know more.

Pack away the champagne and unload the Zinfandel! You’re twice as likely to respond to the message and download the Manifesto if you hail from the New World.

But it’s still not enough. The figures need still more focus. The graphic above includes everybody – the hawkers, the spammers, the spiders – that come to our site. They’re not marketers. Why would they ever download our book?

Can extra precision offer Europe a way back?

Because we’ve tagged our campaign links we can accurately measure the response of our target audience: the B2B marketing community.

We’re really interested in their visits and downloads and, although the gap tightens a little, the conversion rate stays higher in the Americas

Game, set and match. So it’s time to say au revoir to Europe in our search for world’s B2B marketing hotbed.

It’s been 17 years since a Canadian team won ice hockey’s Stanley Cup and there’s no respite in our B2B marketing version.

The United States scores a comprehensive victory  on every metric including the one that really counts – campaign goal conversions. The quest is nearly over but we want it down to a single dot on a map.

It’s tight, but it always is at the top. If you’re looking for enlightened, ambitious and progressive B2B marketers then look no further than Chicago. The city synonymous with Al Capone, the Sears Building and the Bears can now add progressive, ambitious B2B marketing to its Hall of Fame.

If you’re a B2B marketer based in Chicago then we’d love to hear from you: you’re our kind of B2B marketer.

B2B Marketing Analytics Conclusions
You can argue that downloading the B2B Marketing Manifesto is no guarantee of professional excellence. You might be right.

But the key point here is an illustration of what you can learn if you set up and manage your campaign data properly.

Good marketing relies on effective demographic or psychographic segmentation. You make (and save) money when you tailor your campaigns, messages and offers to the right groups.

We’ve cut the odds in our favour. Our analytics have taken us from Europe (population 731,000,000), to Chicago (population 2,800,000) in our bid to find the right kind of client and reduced our wastage by 99.7 per cent.

Where will your analytics take you?

Want the full Open Kimono picture? It’s all here:

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)

© neilstoneman for Velocity Partners, 2010. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B marketing, B2B marketing agency, Google Analytics, web analytics

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We’ll start out latest update with a terrifying statistic for anyone who’s been following our Open Kimono from day one – it’s already a month old. Where did that go?

But with one rapid one month on the B2B Marketing Manifesto clock and five still to run, we have much to report:

• 453 downloads from a target of 1000
• 2 serious new business discussions from a target of 2
• 1 new project with existing client from a target of 3
• 40 comments from a target of 50 (get involved, shoot from the hip)
• 222 per cent rise in views of our existing content library

We’ve long-term metric mountains to explore, but we’re still on track and morale at basecamp Velocity remains high.

Today as promised, we start our investigation into the impact of web forms.

The Form Factor
The rise and rise of lead generation programmes underpinned by, let’s be honest, amazing marketing automation tools has seen the number of data hungry forms multiply. A digital curtain has descended across B2B content.

Is it a good thing? On one hand, you can’t nurture a lead you don’t know anything about but, on the other, you don’t want to prevent people learning about your company and its services.

What have we learned? Well, our form has vanquished over 50 per cent of our traffic.

Some may argue that 45 per cent is a decent conversion rate. And if this was everyday web traffic I’d probably agree with them. But it’s not. Most of these people have come, with super-high intent but didn’t download. They came, they saw the form, and they left.

Let’s take a look at the culprit.

It’s not your text-book form villain: it’s not acting like an identity thief and it’s not threatening an unsolicited phone call within 24 hours. Yet despite all it’s benevolence we still lose over 50 per cent of our traffic (worth mentioning again, I think).

Lessons Learned
If your content is always guarded by forms that growl at prospects like a watchful sentry, then you are taking a big risk.

We have three new business leads and they’ve all contacted us after reading the Manifesto. If they’d never read it; they’d probably never heard of us, and we would certainly never have heard from them.

When you’re selling your thinking, processes and services, there’s something to be said for not hiding your content behind a 24 field bushel. Sometimes opening your own kimono is the right thing to do.

Will the form fight back?
Next week we’ll start to explore the other side of the coin as we start to nurture our own database, much of which has been built up with permission using forms. We’ll report back as soon as we get an idea of the pros as well as the cons of asking for information.

Let hot war commence.

Want the full Open Kimono picture?

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)

More to follow.

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

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A Velocity B2B Real-Time Segmentation Dynamics™ Report

Sometimes, when you forget your Google Analytics password and just need a quick look at the source of your downloads, it’s time for the Velocity Real-Time Segmentation Dynamics™ Report generator, developed with our partners at 3M (Post-It™ Division) and Pentel (Fineliner™ Division).  Fast insight, old school.

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: analytics, digital marketing, web analytics, Web Marketing

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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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“This is without a doubt the most exciting time in history to be a B2B marketer. It’s also the scariest.” That’s how our new eBook, The B2B Marketing Manifesto begins. It’s a lunatic rant, a call to arms and a plea for ambition in B2B marketing — with eleven specific recommendations for rising to the new challenges we all face.

The eBook is our attempt to make sense of a whole range of disruptions to the once-cozy world of B2B. Clearly, we’re no longer in the business of making brochures and exhibition graphics. We’re now in the business of filling sales funnels and we’re more accountable for it than ever before. Which is either a really, really good thing (if you’re confident and ambitious) or a really, really bad thing (if you just want a quiet life).

Now here’s what we’d love you to do: download the eBook; read it; then come back and comment, ideally on the landing page (though you can use the comment form below if you prefer). The end of the Manifesto makes clear why we’re asking.  So thank you in advance for that.

We’ll be blogging about the progress of our new baby in a living case study called ‘Project Open Kimono’ over the coming weeks and months, including sharing our goals, the tactics we’re using and the results (warts, winces and all), based on Neil’s ace analytics. So do come back.

We’re also happy to guest blog, speak or contribute to webinars on the topics raised in the Manifesto. Just ask!

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2010. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B content marketing, B2B lead generation, B2B marketing, B2B marketing agency, B2B social media, Corporate Message Development, Corporate Positioning, Lead Generation, lead nurturing, SEO, Thought Leadership, web analytics

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