Marketingsherpa Blog

I wanted to let you know about a new resource available from our sister company, MarketingExperiments. They’ve just released The MarketingExperiments Quarterly Research Journal.

This new publication collects the some of the best writing and research published during the last quarter by the three companies in the MECLABS Group: MarketingExperiments, MarketingSherpa, and InTouch. It’s free and available online for anyone to read.

This issue includes 22 articles to help you optimize your marketing, including:

• Analysis of the latest site, search and email optimization research by the MarketingExperiments team
• Lead nurturing and lead management advice from Brian Carroll, CEO, InTouch
• Social Media research and advice from Sergio Balegno, Research Director, MarketingSherpa

Here’s the link to get your free copy now:
http://www.marketingexperiments.com/marketing-optimization/Q12010.html

Enjoy! And if something you learn there helps you improve your own marketing campaigns, I’d love to hear about it.

Want to share your B2B marketing expertise with hundreds of your marketing peers, or recount a particularly successful campaign?

We’re looking for speakers to take the stage at our 7th-annual B2B Marketing Summit this fall. This year’s event takes place Oct. 4-5 in San Francisco and Oct. 25-26 in Boston. During those two days, we’ll be featuring a mix of research, hands-on training, panel discussions, case studies and how-to presentations that will help you optimize your lead generation process.

To be considered for a spot on that agenda, share the details of your speaking proposal here.

We’re looking for presentations that provide practical, actionable advice for B2B marketers based on measurable results and real-world experiences. Think about your own success stories in the following areas:
o Lead generation
o Lead nurturing
o Lead scoring
o International demand generation
o Email marketing
o Paid search advertising and SEO
o Content development
o Social media marketing
o Metrics and analytics

Once again, please use this form to provide details of your proposed session.
(Deadline: Wednesday, May 12)

And stay tuned to this blog, the MarketingSherpa home page, and our B2B marketing newsletter for more details on the Summit as we develop the program.

Thanks!

I spoke with several paid search experts over the last two weeks for an article about timing PPC ads to optimize performance, and an interesting side-topic came up.

Seeing which PPC clicks are helping your bottom line is not always crystal clear. For example, a consumer may click an ad on Saturday and purchase the advertised item on Tuesday. These slow-converting, or latent clicks help drive sales. But by how much?

One way you can help figure this out is by looking to see whether an ad’s search phrase contains branded terms. Branded searches are likely driven by another marketing channel — because the consumer knew your brand name. Conversions on generic, non-branded search terms signal that your PPC ad had a much stronger influence on the sale.

You can track these slow-converting clicks using cookies — but even that can be challenging. Consumers often search the Web at work on one computer, and surf at home on another. Unless you’re able to connect those two machines, you’ll likely be missing some clicks that later become sales.

The lesson here is you should track the behavior of consumers who click your ads as well as you can. Doing so will give you a better idea of which clicks are driving delayed sales, and that information can help you better allocate your spending.

Have you found a good way to uncover slow-converting clicks? Has it helped you much? Let us know in the comments…

Marketers wanting to be heard over the over the rabble in social media may soon have a new tool to capture more attention. On Tuesday, Twitter announced the launch of its first ever advertising program, Promoted Tweets.

The micro-blogging network will show promoted tweets at the top of some Twitter.com search results pages, essentially making the tweets a form of paid search advertising. The tweets look and act as normal tweets, but are clearly labeled as promoted by an advertiser.

This “first phase” of the ad platform is only open to a handful of advertisers, such as Best Buy and Starbucks, and is helping Twitter “get a better understanding of the resonance of Promoted Tweets, user experience and advertiser value,” according to the announcement’s blog post (linked above).

I personally assume a self-service, keyword-targeting ad platform will eventually be offered to a broad range of advertisers–but time will tell. For now, Twitter says they hope to later expand Promoted Tweets beyond their search tool, bring them to other partners’ spaces and into Twitter users’ tweet timelines.

This is yet another case of social media and search engine marketing finding common ground, this time in the area of paid search. Yesterday, we published part one of our two-part social media and SEO special report, which outlined five key trends in social and SEO marketing integration. Stay tuned for part two next week which will feature specific tactics.

Hopefully this announcement will be the first of many which help Twitter grow as a powerful marketing channel. My head is already spinning with different ways sponsored tweets can be tested to increase clickthrough rates and response.

What does this announcement mean to you? What else do you think is on the way?

This week marks the opening of MarketingSherpa’s Seventh Annual Search Marketing Benchmark Survey. If you’re involved in search marketing, please take the next 5 to 15 minutes to share data and insights via the following link:

http://www.surveygizmo.com/s/269878/k0tnd

As a thank you for your time, we are offering a complimentary Executive Summary Report that includes key charts and insightful commentary. You will also be invited to attend a free webinar to review highlights from the study.

In the last year, the search landscape has seen a number of dramatic changes. Between social media’s continual growth, search innovations like mobile search, real time search, and search personalization emerging and gaining importance, accompanied by increased competition, search marketers face greater challenges than ever before.

How are marketers perceiving and reacting to these new changes in search? This year’s Search Engine Marketing Benchmark Report will be stacked with information on balancing search and social media to achieve optimal success, as well as sections dedicated to search innovations.

In the meantime, let’s take a deeper look into the social media content that will be covered in this year’s report:

Applications and benefits of social media integration with search campaigns

-> Search Performance

The search landscape is growing more competitive, and this is partly due to social media. Social media has added another venue in which marketers must up their SEO ante, so to speak.

What tools and tactics are most effective these days in SEO? How many marketers are integrating social media into their search efforts? What are my industry’s current performance benchmarks? These are just some of the questions this year’s report will answer for you.

-> Search and Social Objectives

There are a number of target business objectives that can be achieved with social media, and improving search rankings is a popular one indeed.

Other popular objectives include:
o Increasing website traffic
o Increasing lead volume
o Driving sales revenue
o Improving brand reputation and awareness.

These objectives, of course, can also be achieved with SEO. The key is to balance your SEO efforts with social media in order to achieve success towards these common objectives.

Sections in this year’s report will include the effectiveness of search and social against key target objectives, and insights on search marketer’s greatest success stories and challenges.

-> The Impact of Social Integration

When used properly, social media can have a great impact on SEO. One of the most effective and most difficult SEO tactics is generating inbound links.

With social media, you can generate highly relevant inbound links to your site by attracting links from blogs, forums, social networking sites, and other social media channels.

Another great benefit search engine marketers are reaping from social media is increasing the number of listings that get displayed for their brand in the SERPs, pushing their competition to lower rankings and increasing the click through rates on their own listings.

We want to find out what specific goals are being most widely targeted for integrating social media into search campaigns, and what impact social media has had on results. As responses to this year’s survey start to come in, we’re becoming more anxious to see final results.

Stay tuned! The 2010 Search Marketing Benchmark Report is scheduled for release soon!

Please feel free to tweet or post the following invitation:

Search marketers share your insights. Take the 2010 Search Marketing Benchmark Survey http://www.surveygizmo.com/s/269878/k0tnd @MarketingSherpa

As a reporter, I will contact a company through any means necessary. I prefer using a phone number or an email address for a specific person — but sometimes I’m stuck filling out a ‘contact us’ form.

I’ve filled out more contact forms than I’d like to admit. I really dislike them. About a quarter of them do not work, and I’m never sure if my messages reach my intended audience: the marketing department.

Some common problems I’ve seen:
o Errors after clicking ‘submit’
o Tiny message length limits (such as 200 characters)
o Bounced emails in response
o Claims of ‘improper formatting’

Even worse is after receiving an error, you can lose your entire message. I learned long ago to write messages in a separate program and to copy-and-paste them into forms, in case I need to resubmit.

I’m just a reporter trying to get a marketer on the phone — can you imagine if I was a dissatisfied customer? My frustration level would skyrocket. If I was a potential business lead, I’d likely leave and never return.

‘Contact us’ forms are similar to social media in that they provide a way to receive customer feedback — which is very valuable. Broken ‘contact us’ forms send a clear message: “we don’t care about your feedback. Don’t contact us.”

But I’m sure that’s not true. You must care about your customers’ feedback. Their satisfaction keeps you in business.

So if you have a minute, check your website’s contact forms. Make sure they’re flexible, easy to use, and most importantly, that they work. A small effort can go a long way in preventing customers from walking away for good.