Sensible Marketing for Small Business

Now that the calendar has rolled over, many people are reviewing their approved budgets, evaluating their project lists and setting their B2B marketing and communications priorities based on last year’s results. Management has handed down its business goals and objectives for the year and it is now the job of marketing to support those objectives. If social media is part of supporting those objectives, remember that all online engagement drives customers and prospects back to your website. This is the perfect time to review your website and make sure that it is in line with those business objectives as well.

As many websites have been around a while, they may not reflect your marketing initiatives and business strategies for this year. We offer the following suggestions to help guide your review of your site. Some of these may be small fixes to your site that can be easily accomplished. Others, however, may require you to shift your priorities and make a site redesign part of this year’s tasks.

1. Home Page Clarity and Functionality

When prospects arrive at your home page, it is clear what products or services your company offers? Objectively review your home page and view it as a first time visitor, whether your primary offerings have changed or not this year. You may have optimized your search results to drive great traffic, but if people can’t tell what you do at a glance, they are not sticking around. And by the way, if you have an animated flash landing page or auto playing music or video, remove it today. These outdated and slow-loading bits of media only slow down your site visitors and make it more likely that they will leave your site without taking action. Check your analytics to see what sites people came from or what keywords they searched to understand who stays on your site and who leaves.

2. Clear Path to Information

Prospects and customers arrive at your home page and they know they are in the right place, but can they find what they are looking for? As web sites have gotten fancier and technology more advanced, gadgets, widgets and sliding navigation have made it harder to find what your site visitors are looking for. Make sure your site has a clear path to get people to the information they need, whether it is product specs, customer service or finding a distributor. Again, your analytics tell you what pages people go to after your home page.

3. Call to Action

Is your site generating leads for your sales force? Are you trying to get new subscribers to content via RSS or to an email newsletter? Are you selling products directly from the web or passing all these prospects to a distributor? Whatever your call to action on your site is, make sure it is on every relevant page and customers and prospects know what to do. And make sure this is all trackable so you can match this up to your objectives. Review these numbers on a regular basis so you are not surprised by either success or failure. Your website is a living entity that should be easy to change to make it more effective. If you are constantly fighting with your IT department or a web vendor to make changes, you need to reevaluate that relationship. Your company’s success cannot be held back by technical limitations or the whims of your internal or external partners.

4. Social Media Profiles

Last year you started a blog, joined Twitter and created a Facebook fan page. Now is the time to get those social presences to the home page of your site. You want to grow these social communities and burying their existence on your about page, contact page or some random page that no one can find is not the way to do it.

MarketingSherpa just released its eighth annual 2012 Search Marketing Benchmark Report – SEO Edition. The 202-page report, which is organized by company size, primary market, industry sector, social media use and SEO maturity, examines the SEO habits and effectiveness of some 1,530 B2B and B2C marketers.

Its findings include some nice numbers that support the value of inbound marketing:

• Using social media boosted leads 30% and revenue 114%
• Finding and testing niche content increased organic traffic 40%
• Revamped and optimized Web content doubled lead conversions

But looking beyond individual SEO tactics to the companies’ big-picture B2B marketing strategies reveals some interesting insights about how today’s businesses are – or aren’t – leveraging their SEO techniques.

Of SEO techniques used by the businesses surveyed:

• Content creation works best, but takes the most work
• Incremental SEO improvements add up to large gains
• Future investments in SEO are supported by having an SEO process in place
• Local business listing tactics are underutilized
• Developing strategy is a top challenge but a bottom objective

That last point is particularly interesting, as it reveals a disconnect between what companies want from SEO and what they’re inclined to actually do.

Many organizations are sidestepping the discipline of charting out a strategic plan, choosing instead to put their immediate focus on tactical objectives like increasing website traffic, lead generation and measurable ROI. [...] They need to be strategic with their planning and processes, and ever-savvy with the creation and optimization of all digital assets. But developing a process to plan, measure and execute their SEO programs’ performance isn’t their top objective. In fact, increasing measurable ROI ranked higher as an objective than developing an actual strategy to do so!

So despite encouraging findings about companies that strategically implement formal processes for SEO optimization – for example, that they yield 150% more lead conversion than companies with no such processes in place – only 27% of companies surveyed said they considered planning an effective SEO strategy an important objective. This is a logic gap that companies will need to repair if they want to realize the top revenue results they crave in the long term.

It’s true that SEO and other inbound marketing techniques aren’t always easy. Content creation, in particular, was cited as the most difficult process – but also the one that yielded the greatest returns. See the graphic below for how the various techniques stack up.

Where to begin planning your SEO strategy? The white paper 3 Steps to B2B Marketing Optimization by Lee Odden of TopRank Marketing, Anna Talerico of Ion Interactive, and Maria Pergolino from Marketo is a great place to start.