Looking into the future of B2B online marketing

Jul 17th

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This is Part 5, and the final installment, of my interview with Dr. Ben Hanna, VP of Marketing for Business.com.
 
Ben, with your previous leadership experience with eBay and Iron Planet, you’ve been a true pioneer in online marketing. What parallels do you make between social media and other marketing revolutions you’ve experienced? What’s next for B2B marketing?

Well thank you, that’s very flattering. I may be biased toward the present, but I think the most interesting online marketing development is a trend we’re starting to see among the largest brands and agencies, both B2C and B2B – the re-integration of marketing channels.

We currently live in a world where B2B marketers largely trade off their budget between online marketing channels, or between online and offline channels — an ebb and flow we have seen in other historical contexts. Choices are made based on the individual ROI of each channel, historic or competitive precedent (e.g., “we’ve always run print ads in that publication, so we’ll continue to do so”), or some combination of the two. The strategy/budget discussion largely occurs around which channel performs best, rather than how multiple channels work TOGETHER to deliver results. This occurs because 1) the online channels are developing quickly, making it hard to keep up with changes, even with a staff dedicated to a single channel, and 2) solid cross-channel metrics are so hard to come by for the vast majority of B2B marketers.

This “either-or” approach to marketing channels makes little sense in B2C and even less sense in B2B where most purchases involve multiple decision-makers and longer sales cycles. Think paid search marketing on one of the “big three” general search engines performs vastly better than banner advertising? Research suggests they serve different roles in the buying process: general search engines getting undue credit for being the major online portals from which people navigate just prior to purchase (e.g., 71% of paid search clicks are navigational) and banner ads exposure – simple exposure, not a click – driving a hidden 22% increase in search marketing conversion rate.

Unfortunately, B2B marketers are largely blind to these types of interactions. A study we recently conducted of over 27,000 B2B websites found that only 6 percent used a web analytics solution that allowed them to see the influence of more than one campaign on conversion.

Thankfully, online marketing tools and techniques are catching up and enabling the discussion B2B marketers should be having – how different channels work together to deliver results, and what the optimal channel mix should be, based on these interactions and business goals.

It’s possible to see the impact of TV ads on web site traffic, or how banner ads increase the volume of branded searches on general search engines or how site visitors coming from branded vs. unbranded searches perform during later email-driven lead nurturing programs. As Craig Macdonald of Covario, one of my co-panelists on the search attribution panel during the recent Search Insider Summit, put it, measuring cross-channel impact is no longer a technology issue, it’s a “governance” issue involving people defending their specialties – those specialties they’ve worked so hard to build in a single channel.

This evolution – the re-integration of marketing channels as we remove technology barriers – is critically important for improving overall B2B marketing efficiency and should lead to a number of fascinating, useful insights in the coming years. Change is never easy, but shedding our “either-or” mentality for a more informed, integrated approach is a change worth making.

Next week in {grow}: Fanatic-focused marketing, a new series examining the ROI of social media marketing, and more.
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Social media in numbers too big to ignore

Jul 17th

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I recently read a post summarizing a few eye-popping social media trending stats that just demand attention. If the “powers that be” in your company think social media marketing is a fad and a waste of time, dangle a few of these gems in front of them …
5.0 billion … Minutes spent on Facebook every DAY
3.6 billion … Photos uploaded to Flickr as of June, 2009
100 million … YouTube videos viewed per DAY
13 million … Articles on Wikipedia
6.5 million … Dollars contributed to Obama campaign by online donors
3 million … Tweets per day on Twitter
1382% … Month-over-month growth rate of Twitter Jan-Feb 2009
93% …. Of social media users believe every company should have a social media presence
20 … Hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every MINUTE
Your customers are there. Your competitors are there. Get in the game.
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Social media time shock strategies

Jul 16th

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This is Part 4 of my interview with Dr. Ben Hanna, former eBay exec, online marketing pioneer and VP of Business.com.

One of the things most people learn is the tremendous amount of time it takes to effectively manage a social media campaign. How are you personally managing the time shock on top of your other traditional marketing duties?

Just like SEO, social media has a reputation as being “free” but both require a significant, ongoing time commitment to deliver a tangible impact on the business. The short answer to your question is that it is possible to manage the social media time commitment through a combination of pre-launch research, clear focus on goals and active project prioritization.

We researched the current state of B2B social media before we launched our blogs and Twitter accounts, and the time commitment issue came through loud and clear – the B2B social media success stories involved dedicated, consistent focus on initiatives over time, and the complaints about social media not working typically involved one shot campaigns which didn’t work as intended or consumed time/resources far beyond their value.

With about two FTEs worth of time to dedicate to the effort, and knowing the risk of over-commitment, we chose to launch a blog and Twitter account for each side of our business — @whatworks and the What Works for Business blog for general business challenges/solutions, and @B2BOnlineMktg and the B2B Online Marketing blog for B2B online marketing challenges/solutions. We felt we could learn most quickly by comparing performance of the blogs and Twitter accounts but, if driving immediate business results was more important, we would have focused more narrowly.

After launching our social media initiative, clear focus on goals and active project prioritization kept the time commitment manageable (with an emphasis on the “manageable” part – there are still times where the team and I have no choice but to power through an unforeseen time sink).

For example, it quickly became clear that the What Works for Business blog was performing much better in organic search results than the B2B Online Marketing blog, one reason being 2-3 new posts per day for What Works for Business vs. one post per week for the other blog. It’s easy to look at that as a problem and start putting in the considerable extra time necessary to keep both blogs at 2-3 posts per day. Our goal, however, wasn’t to maintain performance parity between the blogs, or hit certain performance targets in the initial phase – it was to learn from the differences between the blogs. Seeing how content volume can affect organic search performance is valuable input for future project planning and resource allocation, but it isn’t a “problem” to get sucked into fixing at this point.
Tomorrow: The final part of our interview — The next evolution of B2B marketing
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Business Twitter initiative in trouble? Here’s how to get it back on track!

Jul 16th

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More thoughts from online marketing pioneer Dr. Ben Hanna from his just-published report on his first 120 days of social media experiences at www.business.com.
Research shows 60 percent of those who try Twitter quit in the first week. It can be an incredibly frustrating experience, especially if you’re trying to build momentum in a corporate environment. Thoughts on getting your Twitter initiative back on track …
Be tenacious. Twitter is a viable business communication channel, end of story – “From what I’ve seen in the past four months, Twitter has a role as a business communication channel for most B2B companies,” Dr. Hanna said. “Whether Twitter figures out a way to monetize its business or not is irrelevant because, if Twitter fails, some other micro-blogging platform will take its place. If you’ve already tried Twitter for your business and struggled to make it work, it’s most likely because the B2B social media rules are still being written. Don’t give up.”
Twitter for business should be approached as mass communication - Conventional wisdom among many Twitter-advocates is that you are building a “community.” That is not necessarily so, according to Dr. Hanna. “If you plan to use Twitter for business, and you have more than a few hundred prospects/customers/influencers combined, you’re kidding yourself if you think interpersonal norms can govern how you use Twitter or other social media for your business. Why? Because Twitter is incredibly inefficient for forming interpersonal relationships. For the vast majority of businesses out there, “mass communication” is the model you should follow as you plan your Twitter strategy.”
You have a business contact list, so use it – As a business on Twitter, you don’t need to build a following like an individual would. This is a key advantage for business Twitter users who have either have forgotten or, more likely, ignored, this advantage out of some combination of a misplaced desire to not disrupt existing communication channels and the sheer revulsion many B2B marketers feel when considering how a P2P or B2C trend may apply to their business. Get over it. Establish a basic Twitter presence, make your prospects and customers aware of this new channel, and let them use it.
Focus on tweet quality over tweet quantity – Research shows that tweeting interesting things (e.g., tweets with links that more people click on) has a much bigger, positive influence on follower growth rate than does tweet volume (e.g., making sure you tweet very frequently to keep your tweets in front of your followers). The best practice for getting people’s attention and interest on Twitter is the same as it is across other business communication channels – talk when you have something important to say. Blanketing your followers with tweets doesn’t work any better than does blanketing the media with press releases about non-issues or hammering a direct mail list with irrelevant offers — One more reason to look at Twitter as a mass communication channel for business rather than a medium ruled by strict adherence to norms of interpersonal interaction.
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