Business Marketing Online: An Article A Day

The power of getting to the point

Chris — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 18:00:06 +0000

The B2B Rainmaker blog once again emphasises that a good slide-based sales presentation should be over and done with in ten slides, and no more. This fits in with Guy Kawasaki's classic 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint which I've referred to before. But as 10 slides to a better sales presentation says, "If you need more than 10 slides to convey your value and benefits, something is wrong. Limit yourself to 10 slides and challenge yourself to get to the main points faster. You don’t have the luxury of time with a prospect – you need to lock their interest early."

Actually, the ten suggested headings for the slides might work well in any sales piece, from a letter to a brochure. Now there's a thought.

You can't stop customers comparing, you know!

Chris — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 18:00:52 +0000

Comparing yourself to your competitors as part of your marketing content is a path which few B2B companies seem to be brave enough to go down. There are good reasons for this, although the traditional one from the sales director is a bad one: "We don't want to alert our customers to the competition's existence". Oh puh-lease. Go and Google the types of products you sell, which is exactly what your website visitors have done. The competitors are all there. Your prospects aren't daft. They know who's competing for their business.

So why should you compare yourself to the competition?

Simple. Your prospects will be making that comparison anyway, and if you do it for them, you show them the favourable features on which to make that comparison.

OK, so maybe there's no way you're going to be able to name your competitors on your website, the MD just won't stand for it. Why not make up a comparison table and populate it with "competitor A", "competitor B", etc.?

Still too adventurous? Then at least make up a table of the things you want to be compared on, and tell the visitor these are the things they should be looking at when making a comparison. Because they'll be making one, like it or not.

More on this subject at Compare to Your Competitors Before Your Visitors Do on the Marketing Optimization Blog.

Will we soon be waving instead of emailing?

Chris — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 18:00:48 +0000

Those of you who follow IT news will probably be aware of a new application called "Wave", which is being promoted by Google. Is it the next big thing? Well, if you think Twitter caught on because of its simplicity, the prospects aren't good, because the concept behind Wave is not for the fainthearted. However, it might succeed for a different reason: because it's just a great idea.

We all use email so much that we ignore its drawbacks. Multiple copies of messages, the difficulty of replying to individual points, the problem of spam …the list goes on. Wave sets out to reinvent email, to get over these problems and to enable this type of messaging to integrate with much more modern applications. A conversation becomes a document, and you'll probably only be immediately comfortable with this if you're a computer programmer at heart. But press on, because the advantages are intriguing.

The best guide I've seen so far is The Complete Guide to Google Wave, particularly the first chapter, which I'd thoroughly recommend you spend 15 minutes with.

A number of companies booked onto our Insider Programme Pro this year because they wanted some on-call handholding when it came to their online marketing, and I've really enjoyed helping them. One of the main subjects which came up frequently in 2009 was Twitter, and I'm proud to say I helped get a number of industrial companies successfully using this. In 2010 it might well be Wave which is the number one topic of discussion.

Thinking beyond disruptive advertising

Chris — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 18:00:38 +0000

A lot of advertising strategists are talking about the way traditional "disruptive" advertising is failing to keep pace with the ability of people to bypass it. Disruption has been the goal of most advertising for the past century or more – stop people doing what they were doing, and plant your message in their way instead. On TV, this manifests itself as "ad breaks", but with Sky+, who watches these any more except at 30x speed? Your audience is just saying no, don't get in my way or I'll go somewhere else.

Most of your advertising will be disruptive. The unrequested direct mailshot. The magazine ad breaking up an article. But have you noticed these are producing poorer results than they once did? Without knowing it, we're all developing ways to blank them out and get on with what we're doing.

The typical reaction in business-to-business marketing is "but my products will help people to do their jobs better, so they shouldn't resent the advertising message". But they're not stopping to see if the message could in fact be useful, they're just assuming it won't be, and ignoring it.

There is another way. It's a lot harder to do, but it involves advertising without getting in the way. On TV, it used to be the only way to advertise; it was called product placement, and it's making a big comeback, especially in movies. In business-to-business marketing, it involves finding out where people are actively looking for products like yours, and joining in the conversation. In a way, trade shows have always done this. Online, it means taking part in forums and blog comments, or doing pay-per-click advertising, where your ad only appears where it's wanted (alongside a search for that product).

Last week, to promote a website which was receiving a few dozen visitors a day, I went on a major forum where people were discussing ways to achieve exactly what my website offered. In a genuinely helpful post, in which I offered some other tips, I also mentioned my website. The result? Over 4,000 visitors in a single day. Not only that, but in the forum's "thanks" feature, dozens of readers "thanked" me for the post. When was the last time any of your clients thanked you for an advert?

Don't feed the lawyers' self-importance, please

Chris — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 18:00:44 +0000

I was reading a story about how the terms and conditions lost one company a sale and thoroughly agreed with the writer's conclusion: Don’t let the lawyers screw it up. Fear of the blame culture (and of the legal world) is a fact of business life these days, but it must not get in the way of your sales and marketing.

You probably have legal stuff on your website, from copyright and trademark symbols to disclaimers and T&Cs. Would you prefer not to have these? Of course. So at least give them the minimum exposure you can get away with. There is no reason whatsoever to give a link to legal mumbo-jumbo on every page of your website, and yet that's what so many companies do in the "footer". A link is a link, and it's valuable. You may not even link to details of your best-selling product on every page of your website, so why on earth link to stuff which nobody will ever read but which you have a feeling "needs to be there"?

On our website I put all the legal material on one page (it doesn't need its own multi-page mini-site) and gave it just one link, from the bottom of the "About Us" page. Then I could get back to highlighting the really important stuff.

A reminder that whoever's job it is to analyse how your company's website is performing needs to be at our forthcoming website analytics training day. Our 20% initial-bookers discount expires after today. Full details, and the online booking form can be found here.

Does spending less on a trade show provide better RoI?

Chris — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 18:00:47 +0000

Many companies seem to be attending trade shows a bit half-heartedly these days, which is a shame, because if an exhibition is worth so much of your time, it must surely be worth doing it properly. The B2B Sales and Marketing Blog tackles this topic in Do you have a strategy to maximize participation in your upcoming event? and bemoans the fact that for many companies, the strategy is just to be there to "show their faces."

The suggestions made in the article for exhibitions also apply if you're holding your own seminar or other customer day. A successful event requires more effort to be put into getting people there than arranging the day itself. And yes, that does mean if you're attending a four-day exhibition you should factor in devoting just as many days to getting visitors.

Stop, Look and Listen

Chris — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 18:00:13 +0000

Here's an interesting little tip to use in your creative writing: it's called the "Rule of Three". There have been many articles about it over the years and some make intriguing reading. The principle is that lists of three things are inherently satisfying, and can be more effective in getting a message across. On a wider scale, a three-part structure is a fundamental of comedy and even dramatic writing.

How do we use it in marketing? Try to keep your lists to three items. Two doesn't give enough choice (unless you're trying to make a simple yes/no argument) and more than three starts to make the reader work too hard. Make a point with the first item, build it up with the second, and break the thread with the third. The choice you want people to make might be the second (if your list was "good – better – bad") or the third ("bad – very bad – good"), but you should always be able to get your lists down to three if you want to guide your readers.

Note: The Rule of Three, as used in dramatic structure, also works really well with case studies. Divide your article into three parts: the complication, the resolution, and the example.

The considered approach to link-building

Chris — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 18:00:07 +0000

Unless you know someone across the office who's going to give you links to your website from theirs, when it comes to "link-building" you're going to have to write some effective emails. You've probably had those mass-produced, auto-generated emails which tell you how much you have in common with some site you've never heard of, and why you should swap links with them. That's how not to do it. The way you should do it is outlined in The Perfect Link Request Email on the Hobo blog. It's an altogether more laid-back, considered approach. It'll take a long while to get significant numbers of links, but the hit rate will be good, and the links will be effective ones.

A training day for you, as promised

Chris — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 18:00:21 +0000

We've promised this, on and off, to many Insider Programme members and readers of this blog, for many months now – a training day where we can meet up with other like-minded marketing people from industrial and scientific companies, and learn something from an authoritative trainer. The subject which most people have mentioned wanting to find out more about is how to really use website traffic analytics applications, such as Google Analytics, to actually help save money, and so we're delighted to say that's the main theme of our first-ever BMON training day.

The event takes place in a couple of weeks' time, in Milton Keynes, which we hope is a nice accessible venue for as many of you as possible. I'll be there to introduce the day, and I'm delighted to say that we have Niall Mckinney, ex-CMO for lastminute.com and now CEO of UTalkMarketing, as our main trainer. I'm genuinely determined that you'll come away from this with enough money-saving ideas for your internet marketing to easily pay for the day quite quickly.

Whoever's job it is to analyse how your company's website is performing needs to be at this training day. We've one or two surprises in store too. It'll only be a small event, so do sign up quickly if you'd like to come. Full details, and an online booking form, are at http://analyticsandoptimisation.eventbrite.com/

A Free Keyword Tool for a Friday

Chris — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 18:00:41 +0000

Here's something to play with on a Friday: the new Free Keyword Tool from Wordstream. If you're a purveyor of Blue Widgets and think that your website only needs to work well in Google for the search term "blue widgets", try seeing all the other related search terms which this little tool will highlight.

When putting together an AdWords campaign for a client recently, they said: "it should be easy, we only sell [xxx], and I think the only other way you could describe it would be [yyy]." After a bit of brainstorming and playing around, we came up with nearly 150 ways of writing [xxx] and [yyy], and that was before playing with tools like the one above.