The Results: Is B2B Content "Likeable"

A few months back, with Facebook’s announcement of a “Like” button for the web, I decided to run a quick, highly unscientific experiment to see if B2B content was “likeable”. Put more simply, is B2B content as likely to be shared in the social atmosphere of Facebook as it is to be shared in the more hybrid social/business atmosphere of Twitter.

While I will admit that I personally am more active on Twitter than on Facebook, I gave the “like” button a more prominent position at the top of the post to hopefully even the score a little bit. The results are dramatic – mentions of the content of this blog on Twitter generally fall around 20 or so mentions per post. Facebook, however, is lucky to get one or two likes or shares per post.

While many factors may explain this discrepancy, I suspect that the most reasonable explanation is the differences in social context between the two networks. Content must fit the context of the environment or it feels out of place and awkward, even if the participants are similar.



(as part of this post, I should mention that HubSpot's Blog Grader does a wonderful job of tallying all the Tweets/Shares/Likes for a blog)

Does this match with your experience of B2B content on Facebook?

Marketing Dashboard: Active Discovery

One of the most valuable areas to gain an understanding of is the current state of how your prospects actively discover your company and your solutions. The richness of insights that can be gained with a deep understanding of how buyers are using search is nearly without parallel. Each insight allows you to guide investments in a way that maximizes their effectiveness in driving your revenue performance.

Basics of Discovery

The first area to look at is the set of 10 or 12 “main terms” that buyers most commonly associate with your solution category or industry. These are the main search terms that would ideally lead prospective buyers to your web properties. A dashboard comparison of both the number of searches being performed on each search phrase (the search engines' webmaster tools provide this information quite readily), and the number of visitors to your content based on those main terms gives a very good understanding of if you are successfully being discovered through this avenue. A few powerful insights can be gained here that allow a reallocation of investments:

- Need More Category Awareness? The raw number of searches being performed gives a good indication of the upper limit of your success with active awareness efforts such as search engine marketing or search engine optimization. Broader awareness efforts such as analyst and public relations may be needed to increase interest in your solution category if this is the case.

- Are you Being Discovered? The number of visitors, and more importantly the percentage of visitors, who reach your site for each search term gives you a good indicator of how well your paid and organic search efforts are performing against each term. If a term is performing poorly, either an investment in search engine marketing against that term, or a focus on content around that term may improve your chances of being actively discovered by buyers seeking information on that term



Deeper Searches

As looked at earlier, however, the way in which buyers seek information is changing. With the average search phrase being more than three words in length, it is equally important to understand what is happening with the broader universe of search phrases being used by buyers. With a robust content strategy, the raw list of search phrases that are used by buyers to find you can be quite instructive in itself. However, as a high level dashboard to provide an understanding of the current state of your revenue performance, the best way to view the longer tail search phrases being used is to have it provide insight into what buyer stage your audiences can be loosely categorized into.

To understand this, divide the searches that guide visitors to your website into four main categories:

- Navigational: searches that are simply a replacement for typing in your website URL, usually just your company name

- Main Terms: searches for the main search terms you have deliberately optimized against

- Long Tail (branded): deeper searches, often with multiple words in the search phrase, or for specific content, and with your company or brand name in the search phrase

- Long Tail (unbranded): deeper searches, as above, but without your company or brand name in the search phrase

This dashboard view provides some rich insights into how well your company and solutions are being actively discovered. First, the relative amounts of visitors who discover your offerings based on long tail phrases vs main terms provides an indication of whether your content marketing strategies are working effectively. Given that the majority of searchers use lengthy search phrases, if the long tail columns are not larger than the main term and navigational columns, there is very likely an opportunity to be discovered by many buyers who are actively seeking solutions such as yours that is being missed. An increased investment in content creation may be warranted.

Second, a comparison of your relative strength between long tail search phrases with and without your brand name (ie, “Sourcefire intrusion detection products” vs. “intrusion detection system comparison”) provides an understanding of whether the buyers discovering you tend to be more at an education stage (understanding the category) or have moved more into the discovery stage and are looking to better understand your specific products.




Of course, overall trends are also very much of interest. The effectiveness of natural search or content marketing strategy grows slowly over time, and its success is best observed by following the trend in these high level numbers over time.

Paid vs. Organic Search

In order to deepen the insight gained from these views of your prospects’ active discovery of your content, it is important to understand what is driven by paid search (SEM) and what is driven by organic search (SEO) efforts in order to better coordinate efforts between them. Most B2B marketing organizations invest in paid search campaigns to drive awareness, and with most if not all of these efforts there is an ability to differentiate between traffic driven to your site via paid efforts vs. natural search efforts.

By splitting these two sources of traffic apart, and understanding the trends in each, you can better understand the performance of two very different categories of marketing investment. Paid search is predominantly a financial investment, and the results are generally directly in proportion to the monies invested (with a reasonable variation based on the skill of the search engine marketing team, of course). For this reason, you should expect the trend line of visitors from paid search to map closely to your SEM investments.

Organic search efforts, however, are very different. Effort, mostly in the form of time to create and promote great content, is invested, and slowly builds credibility with the search engines and with influencers in the industry. Consistent, meaningful investments in this avenue with therefore result in a slowly but steadily growing number of visitors driven by organic search results.

For this reason, a combination of investments can be very useful. Paid search (SEM) investments can be made in areas that are new, where results are weak, or where a short term boost is needed. Investments in content and influence to drive organic search results can be done over time in core areas of focus.

Evaluating Marketing Automation - 10 Questions To Ask

The market for marketing automation software is doing very well these days. This has lead to an unprecedented variety of options for marketers to choose from, and the range of options can be dizzying. While many of the discussions can focus on software and feature/function comparisons, this is only one element of success. To be truly successful, you need focus on the people, process, and technology changes with equal energy. As a big believer in the economics of smart buyers, I wanted to share ten question areas that are key to dive into when evaluating a marketing automation investment.

The people and process elements of the investment are often the most interesting. Some organizations have the skills in house to make the needed business process changes, and some organizations are more comfortable bringing in outside expertise in order to facilitate discussions, avoid mistakes, and gain consensus on the changes.

If you have not gone through this process before, you will want to ask your team, your consulting partner, or your chosen software vendor some deep questions in order to ensure that you will be able to succeed with your software implementation.

There are no "right" answers to look for, but these are areas to discuss, debate, and understand. These questions will differ based on your business and your team, but the following list of ten questions will hopefully get you started.

Ten questions to ask your team, your services partner, or your software vendor, in order to highlight key questions, process issues, and areas of concern:

1) How will we define a qualified lead for sales?

Having sales buy in to your definition is crucial, but reaching agreement between marketing and sales on the definition of a qualified lead is not as easy as it seems. What mistakes can be avoided? How will you score explicit (who) and implicit (how interested) activity? Are there multiple product lines that need to be scored separately?


2) What is marketing's service level agreement with the sales team?

How are leads routed to sales? Are there overlays for strategic accounts, specific product lines, or geographies we need to take into account when routing leads? How will these be handled? How is routing in “large” geographies like New York city or California handled – zip code? Area code? How quickly do leads need to get to sales? What happens when leads are passed to sales – does sales have a specific time frame for follow-up? What if this is missed, are leads clawed back?


3) What do we do with leads that are not yet ready for sales?

Can we establish a lead nurture program? Do we have the right content? How will we monitor whether the audience is losing interest? How will we make sure we are not over/under-communicating to each person? Do we have the content in place to guide buying criteria over time as we nurture?

4) How will our marketing automation data and CRM data integrate seamlessly?

What if a person doesn’t exist in the CRM system? What if they exist multiple times? If a person is influenced by multiple campaigns, how does this appear? How is digital body language presented to our sales team? How do the data, activities, and process aspects of the integration work together with our business?

5) How good is our data? How good does it need to be?

Are our titles/geographies/industries/revenues all standardized and normalized? Is new data from lists, web forms, CRM systems, and tradeshows standardized? Are we building rules for personalization, segmentation, lead scoring, or lead routing on top of data that is not standardized? Are there best practices for building a contact washing machine that we want to leverage?

6) Do we need to add data from external sources?

Are we going to ask prospects for every piece of information we need? Can we leverage sources like Dunn & Bradstreet to append data and avoid asking excess questions? Where in the process will we do this? What do we do about internally sourced info like sales territories or geographic regions – how can we append this data if we need to? Do we have an understanding of how to balance the customer experience between asking for too much, and too little data?

7) Do we understand how to maximize email deliverability?

How will we ensure that our emails are delivered? Do we have the right people to understand what technologies need to be in place to maximize email deliverabililty? Do we have the right relationships with ISPs and policy boards? Will emails appear to come from us, or from a third party? Can we allow our audience to manage their own preferences? What are the best approaches to use? What metrics will we look at to understand and report on email deliverability to see if we’re starting to encounter problems?

8) What analysis and dashboards will we present to management?

What are our key metrics? What industry benchmarks will we compare to? How will we define the stages of the buying process? How will we measure each of those stages? If there are many touchpoints in an overall buying process, how do we measure the effectiveness of an individual campaign? What will our executive marketing dashboards look like?


9) Where are we going? What is our strategy and roadmap for success?

Is there a marketing maturity framework we are using in order to guide our progress year over year? Do we know where we are currently on that framework? Do we have a plan for how we are going to make progress each quarter/year? Is management bought in to the goals?

10) How well do we understand the needs of our international colleagues?

Do we understand the cultural difference in marketing to each geography that we need to be aware of? Do we understand the regulatory differences in terms of permission and data management? How are we going to deploy a single platform to our international team? Do we understand the best approaches?


A few of these questions may not be relevant to your business, but many of them will, and they will take the discussion beyond feature comparisons in software platforms and into the realm of what it will take to truly drive success in your business. By taking a deep dive into each of these areas, you will gain a better understanding of your own needs, and the capabilities of various providers in meeting those needs. By doing so, you will move yourself one step closer to success.

Trust, Reputation, and Inside Sales

There is a significant shift underway in how we establish and build trust. Craig Newmark (of Craigslist fame) discussed this transition in quite some detail in an article on GigaOm that's worth a read.

The shifting of how trust is built has numerous profound implication for society in general, but more specifically, it is causing significant shifts in the way that people buy. While the general evolution of buyers is causing some challenges for field sales teams, the evolution of trust is opening up new opportunities for inside sales teams.

As the emphasis on face-to-face interaction as a way to build trust decreases in lieu of other ways of building trust, the need to be “in the field” also decreases. It is unlikely that field sales as a discipline will disappear any time soon, the economic bar at which a face-to-face interaction is “necessary” is in the middle of a dramatic shift.

Trust and Economics

The amount of trust we put into a vendor has a strong relationship with the size of a deal we are willing to sign. The economic value must of course be there, but without the element of trust, the deal is unlikely to close. This trust shift therefore has major implications on the size of deals that are likely to be closable through an inside (over the phone/web) sales model.

Whereas historically, inside sales teams would generally close deals with an average selling price (ASP) of below $20,000, these teams are now able to close deals at much larger ASPs. Some organizations are seeing effective use of inside sales up to $100,000 in ASP. This shift towards an inside sales model reduces both the cost and complexity of the sales process, and in doing so opens up a significant economic opportunity.

David Skok of Matrix Partners wrote an excellent piece that looked at sales cycle complexity as a driver of the economics of a business that explores this concept in great detail. His article is well worth a read, but the short story is that any reduction in sales cycle complexity (such as moving from a field sales model to an inside sales model) can remove an order of magnitude from your overall costs (and hence required price points).


Trust and Reputation

Inside sales teams are able to develop the level of effectiveness that is being seen in recent times by building trusted relationships through online interactions and presence in communities, and understanding key players in the buying committee through LinkedIn and other online tools.

These teams also relying on their company's reputation to a large amount. That company reputation, if built on a foundation of corporate openness and transparency, can contribute greatly to the amount of trust prospective buyers are willing to give to the salesperson they are dealing with.

Although face-to-face interactions remain immensely valuable in building trust, and will remain necessary for very large transactions, the efficiencies of the inside sales model give it a significant advantage in smaller transactions. This efficiency win, combined with the new ability to build trust through means other than eye contact, are moving inside sales in many organizations from small transactions to much larger transactions. This trend is likely to continue as the communication tools and trust-building approaches continue to tip the balance in favour of the inside sales model.

4 Quick Steps to Understand Search Discoverability

We are not all natural search experts, nor should we be. There is a lot of art and science to the field that makes it worthy of having a specialist on your marketing team focus on consistently. However, that does not mean understanding how well you are performing is outside of the reach of non-experts.

Here are 4 quick steps to understand how well you are performing. Only step 4 requires any tools or techniques that are not immediately available.

Step 1: What Will Buyers Look For?
Define a list of around 10-15 terms that, when buyers are searching for them, you would ideally be discovered. This requires putting yourself in the mindset of a buyer and avoiding any “internal speak” or terms that are not the most common terms. As an example, buyers generally search for “laptops”, even if you happen to call them “netbooks” internally.

One Step Further: To take this a step further, think about how buyers might “broaden” the term slightly and expand each of your 10 terms. For example, while “marketing automation” is a key phrase for us, buyers may be looking for a “marketing automation platform” or “marketing automation software”.


Step 2: Where Are You Ranked?
For each of the terms in your list of 10-15, do a quick search on Google and/or Bing. Find the first piece of content from your web properties, and record the rank. Search rankings change over time and by location, but this will give you a sense of whether you are discoverable.

One Step Further: While you are doing this exercise, it can be interesting to jot down the search ranks of your main competitors so you can compare your performance to theirs over time.


Step 3: Who’s Looking?
Go to Google Trends and look up each phrase in order to understand rough volumes of searches. You will likely find that buyers tend to look for some phrases more often than others. This gives you a relative volume, but will help you understand what is important.
One Step Further: Narrow your analysis by country. You may find that the phrases used differ significantly by country.

Step 4: When Are You Found?
Look at the people who land on your site from a search, and categorize them by the search phrase used. For each of your 10 main phrases, how many people are finding your content each month. At a raw traffic level alone, this can provide a lot of insight into the success of your efforts to get content ranked on the search engines.

One Step Further: Traffic is great, but understanding who these visitors are and whether they progress towards being marketing qualified leads and ultimately revenue is even more of interest. For each search term, see how many leads, opportunities, and dollars of revenue are ultimately created.


Performing well in the natural/organic search results requires a good understanding of search optimization techniques, and a robust discipline of content creation. However, understanding the basics of natural search performance is both accessible to all without any technical knowledge or tools, and important to understand in analyzing whether your buying funnel has any challenges with discoverability.