Best Practices in B2B Demand Generation - demandblog

Landing Pages and Paid Search

By Kirk Crenshaw  - August 20, 2006

"Why should I create landing pages for my paid search program vs. just taking searchers to my home page?"

I get asked this question frequently...So, I thought I'd post my thoughts to this blog:

1 – When searchers are dropped on a home page, odds are they will just leave, and continue searching. This is based on a lot of research, as well as personal experience. They clicked on your paid search ad, they arrive at your home page, and they are given too many options, so they just leave…I've seen this demonstrated on a number of occasions where clients experience a significant number of single page views –People came to the home page through paid search and left the home page – Possibly ending up on a competitor’s site.

Furthermore, most searchers are in the information discovery mode.  If they need to dig around your site to find valuable information about what they are searching on...Odds are they will leave...

2 – Searchers need to be given very few choices in terms of direction, and must be taken somewhere that is correlated to their search terms and where they stand in the purchase cycle. Studies show that you have 8 seconds to grab the searchers attention, and once you get their attention, they must have a clear path to follow.  The landing pages that are developed need to be tested/tuned to ensure that keywords/messaging/landing pages are performing up to the searchers expectations - The message is relevant. 

3 - You just spent money to get them to your site – So, you should get their information – and be sure to give them something of value…hence whitepapers or case studies are offered – and these offers are correlated with search terms and estimated status of their purchase cycle. By just dropping off people at your home page, you are just throwing away money in hopes of getting someone (who you do not know who they are) to do something.

4 – Your cost per click, impression rates and position are dependent on Google’s Quality Score of your campaigns – The more relevant the process (keyword ties into Google Ad ties into Landing Page), the higher the Quality score – Those who take people to the home page tend to have horrible quality scores, and thus higher costs and bad placement.

5 – The purpose of the Google Ad being tied into the landing page is to also act as a filter – It works to qualify and filter out a majority of the “garbage” that can potentially come in from search.

6 – By closing the loop with a landing page/form/offer – you can then better correlate spend to actual results. You can better track keyword performance, messaging validity, and correlate leads to search spend. This allows for improved camping tuning and more intelligent management of the paid search budget.

I'd like to hear your thoughts and experiences.  Please feel free to comment.

Measuring Google ROI

By Chris Golec - August 16, 2006

Advertisers familiar with Google Adwords already understand the basic metrics:

• Impressions: The number of times an ad was displayed in a given time period
• Click-thru-rate (CTR): Reported as a %, it is the number of times an ad was clicked divided by the number of impressions.
• Conversion Rate: Reported as a %, it is the number of transactions divided by the number of clicks. In a given time period, Conversion is also reported as an average cost per conversion.

For B2C advertisers, the metrics work wonderfully. CTR can be related to a Cost-per-Lead and Conversion Rate can be related to a customer acquisition cost assuming the Transaction measurement is an online sale.

The model, however, breaks down for B2B advertisers. I am by no means suggesting that Google isn’t a powerful and cost effective lead generation engine, just simply highlighting how B2B marketers need to measure campaign effectiveness differently than B2C marketers.

Consider the following waterfall analysis to compare B2C and B2B metrics (percentages are hypothetical):

As you can see in the above chart, the Click-thru's should not be translated as a measure of Cost-per-Lead for a B2B company.  I would even avoid using Google's Conversion Cost as a measure of cost-per-lead.  Instead, I would go one step further and measure the number of inquiries from Target Prospects in a time period divided by the total spend for that same period to get a true Cost-per-Lead. For example, if you spent $1,000 during the month and received 10 inquiries through your Google campaign, your cost per conversion as reported by Google would be $100. If, however, only 20% of those inquiries were from companies that match your target customer profile, your Cost-per-Lead would be $500 ($1,000 divided by 2 leads).   

While the above analysis illustrates a dramatic difference in acquisition cost between B2C and B2B companies (400X using the percentages listed), the ROI may still be very attractive for many B2B companies.  Marketers should also note that other benefits of running Adword campaigns, such as faster sales cycles and fewer resources, are not covered as part of this analysis.   

If you are interested in better managing your results from Google, Demandbase recommends that B2B companies set up or configure their CRM systems to automatically manage the metrics.  If you’re a Salesforce.com customer, take a look at Kieden. Their solution is designed to simplify the set up, management, and ongoing measurement of Google campaigns right from Salesforce.com.

B2B Spam - No End in Sight

By Chris Golec - August 7, 2006

If you're like me, you are probably getting annoyed by the growing quantity of meaningless emails that make their way thru your Outlook filters and into the Inbox.    I believe most of the senders of these communications have good intensions, but I am not quite sure why I was included in their “target” list.  I suspect they fell  victim to the challenges of buying a quality email list:

1. A high quality email list is difficult to find.   There are 10,000+ list owners, brokers, agents, etc. to choose from.   All claim better quality and more records than the other, making it difficult to really know who is better. 
2. Minimum purchases.   List owners force businesses to buy – actually rent - at least 5,000 names.   The more filters you want, the higher the cost.   The more names you buy, the lower cost.   This leads to less focused, higher volume campaigns to the wrong target audience.   
3. Lack of visibility. The data sample of 10-20 records sent to you by the list provider is seldom representative of the actual 5,000+ contacts you rent.   Of course, you cannot see the names or titles, because the list is rented. 
   
4. Improper categorization of job titles.  Figuring out which level and department a job title falls into is difficult to automate.   Some list companies get it right, but many are all over the map pushing some titles into multiple departments and multiple levels.   Why Office Manager makes its way on to every list I have rented for clients is beyond me.   

I have found some useful tools to help search and filter thru the thousands of lists (see NextMark), but it is the rental policies, minimum purchase requirements, and poor filtering that literally forces businesses to send their message to the wrong audience.     A few solutions have emerged like Spoke and Jigsaw which allow people to buy or sell individual contacts from their Outlook Addressbooks, but the model appears to have serious privacy and data currency issues.    

I'm not sure how companies can avoid sending 'unintentional spam', but the current economics of email marketing - and the policies of the list industry in general - are not about to change behavior.

Any suggestions or comments?  What have you done to  improve your results with list rentals and/or purchases?