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B2B social media marketing 101: don’t sell, be a salesman

social media 101

In our last post, we showed you how email marketing pays off your other social media marketing efforts. Every other social media marketing tool is primarily a way to get people to your website so you can get them to give you their email address and kick-start marketing automation in order to generate further interest and sales.

For most B2B companies, social media networks are about making first contact with your target audience and positioning your company as an interesting and expert source worth their time. These networks are about amplifying your message and gaining trust. They’re NOT about direct sales.

Uh-oh. That doesn’t sound as appealing as the first couple paragraphs? You thought Gorilla 76 was a strategy-driven, lead-focused marketing agency? We are, I promise.

We’ve come to the part where successful corporate users of social media separate themselves from the thousands of companies that try social media for one month, achieve no success, and give up. Here it is. It’s the point that marketing agencies and social media gurus try to hammer home, the part that many executives ignore: social media is not “one-way,” it’s a “relationship.”

You’ve heard it before, but what does that actually mean? We’ll try to explain with a classic concept.

Putting relationship-based marketing in perspective: think like an inside sales guy

It appears counterintuitive, but it’s productive for B2B web marketers to think more like inside sales guys than like traditional marketers. Just ponder, for a moment, your purchaser’s buying cycle.

The people you want to reach work at companies that often have a long buying process when they pull the trigger on the products and services B2B companies sell. But those same people may also need to make lighting quick purchasing decisions in emergency situations. You want to succeed in both places. So, you want your marketers to have what account managers and inside sales guys already have with the accounts they manage: real trust.

Real trust, developed as part of a two-way dialogue over a length of time, gets you on bid lists and keeps you top of mind in last-minute buying cycles. Email marketing is about maintaining contact with your purchaser through the buying cycle. Social media is primarily about making first contact with your target purchaser, but secondarily about maintaining that contact.

The inside sales guy makes follow-up phone calls to maintain contact with his accounts. During those calls, many of the best sales guys don’t blabber on about sales points or company superlatives. Instead, those savvy salesman provide useful information to their contacts. That information helps their contacts research solutions and clarify questions, it helps those contacts in their businesses and it introduces those contacts to your company.

The principal of publishing social media posts

The posts you publish on your social media accounts should not be salesy but instead be as informative as your inside sales guys.

Why? Because every post is just like that follow-up phone call, aiming to inform your target audience in an actionable way that spurs them to listen to what you have to say. Every post gives you another chance to put out another resource or interact with other people’s resources by adding your own insights. When you’re a trusted resource, you stay top of mind, you get clicks to your website, and you get email addresses, aka leads.

People fail on social media when they’re not a resource and instead only talk about press releases, company events and company history. To quote Kipp Bodnar and Jeffrey L. Cohen from The Social Media B2B Book, “Every post must be exceptional.” Pure self-promotion just doesn’t cut it on social media.

Tired of talking about Likes and Followers instead of leads and sales? Click below to download our guide to measuring online marketing ROI.

How to convince your boss it’s time for a marketing overhaul

Speech bubble with bar graph inside

If you’re reading this blog post, congrats – you’re probably already an innovator at your company. Whether you’re an internal marketer there or just someone with a desire to initiate positive change, your company needs more people like you. But enough gushing – let’s get at it.

I’ll venture to guess that you’re the constant learner type – actively reading blogs and publications that help you generate ideas to do your job better.  You probably seek information online and exchange ideas with likeminded innovators. And because this is a part of who you are, you possess valuable knowledge. You see opportunity for your company to grow. And in this case, perhaps you envision some of that growth coming through more efficient, smarter marketing.

Learn how to grow your business online.

Our free Industrial Marketing Guide will show you how to attract qualified website visitors, convert them into real leads and nurture them through the buying process.

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But what if your boss is the roadblock? Maybe none of these characteristics described above accurately depict his or her mindset the way they do yours. Believe me, you’re not alone. I’ve seen it many, many times. When this is true, enacting change can be very difficult. So how do you build a case for a marketing overhaul that your boss will actually listen to?

A few quick notes

1. You possess a powerful tool

It’s first worth mentioning that you have something no outside marketing agency has: established credibility within your company. Your motivation will not be questioned as that of a third party consultant might. Your objectives are to make your company better. And your boss trusts you or he/she wouldn’t have hired you in the first place. Use this established trust to your advantage.

2. You need to come prepared

Your boss’ time is probably limited. So when you get in front of him/her, you want to have your ducks in a row. Preparation is key.

How to sell the marketing overhaul

Focus on the desired results – not the tactics

Think results from the get go. Don’t walk in and state that you need a new website, want to start a company blog or would like to try a new email marketing software. When you do this, the earmuffs go on. All your boss hears is “I want to spend more company money”. Start the conversation that way and you’ve already lost your battle.

Instead, state your objectives in his/her language – the language of desired results. If it’s a new website that you think your company needs, fantastic. But he/she doesn’t care about that right now, so save it for later. Focus instead on the what would happen to your business if that new website were actually built.

Begin your conversation by saying with confidence, “I see an opportunity for this company…” Focus on opportunities like establishing better awareness among a key target audience, generating more physical leads with real names and phone numbers attached to them, and converting more of your leads into paying customers. When you talk this way, those earmuffs stay in the closet.

Suggest without bashing

Once you’ve captured the attention of your decision maker, it’s time to start presenting your case. But be careful. You can walk a fine line between being seen as a source of valuable ideas and a know-it-all. Be sensitive to not insult or downplay whatever marketing infrastructure your boss may have already built up over the years. “I think attending trade shows and running print ads once a month is a waste of money” is probably not the right way to kick things off.

Pose thought-provoking questions instead. Do we know how effective our trade shows have been at producing leads over the past few years? Are we able to trace revenue and actual customer acquisition to our investment in print ads? Suggest there may be some more effective, innovative and measurable ways to attract the right prospects and turn them into leads and customers.

Start broad so you don’t overwhelm

Remember that you’re the expert here. You’re the one who has done the research and learned enough to present your case. If your boss is the type that needs convincing in the first place, you probably know more about the subject than he or she does. So don’t lose your boss in the technical details of online marketing. Instead introduce the bird’s eye concept of moving some of the marketing spend online.

Bring supporting data

It’s no secret that online marking drives results. So bring facts and statistics to the table that will strengthen and add credibility to your argument. Stats about the effectiveness of online marketing abound. Here are a few to get your started.

  • Businesses with websites of 401-1000 pages get 6x more leads than those with 51-100 pages
  • 75% of users never scroll past the first page of search results.
  • 79% of marketing leads never convert into sales. Lack of lead nurturing is the common cause of this poor performance.

Add more stats to your arsenal by exploring this page by marketing software company Hubsopt.

Demonstrate the opportunity at hand

Now it’s time to get a bit more specific. At this point you’ll want to introduce some tangible examples to tell a story about the opportunity being missed. USE VISUALS. While the concepts you’re about to demonstrate are familiar ones for you, they’re not for your boss. Visuals will paint a picture and frame your pitch in a way that’s relatable to the state of your own company.

Here’s an example of how you might tell that story.

Our client, The Korte Company, is a design-build construction firm that happens to be great at building medical facilities like hospitals and outpatient clinics. So they target potential clients looking to build or renovate hospitals by attracting them through search engines and social media channels with smart, keyword-driven content like these blog posts.

When targeted visitors arrive on their site, this content helps them learn about hospital construction and identifies The Korte Company an expert and potential partner. Calls-to-action like those you see at the bottom of these blog posts drive visitors to lead capture pages where more in-depth case studies or white papers are exchanged for names and email addresses of these prospects. That data is dropped into a marketing database for lead nurturing via email campaigns. Simultaneously, their sales professionals are alerted that a new lead has entered the system.

Go ahead and use that example. Or better yet, find a competitor in your own industry that has taken a similar and equally innovative approach. Nothing will light a fire under you boss more than the idea that someone else in your space has jumped ahead of the curve.

Present your solution

You’ve introduced the concept of online marketing, built a case for why it works and shown examples of how it works. Now it’s time to bring this back to your business. Don’t leave the meeting in limbo. Instead, have your proposed solution already laid out. That solution is up to you because you know your company. But be sure to cover all of the following:

  • The desired outcomes of your plan (be as specific as possible)
  • What specific tactics will be executed (ok, NOW you can talk about that shiny new website and email marketing software!)
  • Who at your company will need to be involved
  • What external resources will be needed (marketing strategy firm, web designer, copywriters/bloggers, etc.)
  • What budget will be required (do your homework and learn about the costs involved with implementation)
  • Where money can be saved (if you implement this plan, can you cut out your $4500/month print ad campaigns?)
  • The timeline for completion (lay out some top level milestones to paint a picture and make sure the first one is soon so you don’t lose steam after this meeting)
  • Next steps (DO NOT walk out of that room without clearly defined next steps in place, or this will get pushed to the wayside when the next fire arises at your company)

Build support from other innovators

The more people on board with your plan, the more influential you can be. Involve the sales or business development team from the beginning. Learn their challenges and incorporate those into your pitch. They already speak the language of lead generation and ROI well. And they’ll be your biggest advocates if you can help them generate more leads and sales opportunities.

Be confident – you’re the expert

Finally, remember throughout this process that you’re the educator here. It’s your time to teach. Obviously, you’ll use common sense in showing respect for your boss. But show confidence and be willing to make an argument for your case. You bring value to your company when you have a strong idea and can back it up. This is your chance to do just that, so don’t be passive.

Questions to ask when planning your B2B website rebuild

questions to ask for a b2b website rebuild

You wouldn’t build a house without a blueprint. Likewise, a B2B website rebuild will fail without a strategic plan.

These questions will guide both you and your agency through the website planning process. You may not be able to answer every question, but do your best to fill them in. Keep this by your side throughout the process and you’ll find yourself on the track to success.

Goal setting questions

  • Why are you considering a website rebuild in the first place?
  • What are three to five primary objectives you need to accomplish with your new site to consider it a success?
  • How much monthly traffic do you want to generate on your new website?
  • How many monthly leads do you want to capture for your sales team?

Audience identification questions

Answer these questions about each one of your primary audience segments.

  • Industry?
  • Size of company?
  • Geographic location?
  • Who at the company are you targeting (job title)?
  • What challenges does this person face?
  • How can your product or service help this person address those challenges?
  • How long is this person’s buying process and what does it look like?
  • Does this person conduct significant research before buying?
  • Or does he or she buy quickly?

Content planning questions

  • What are the top-level content areas needed on your website? Examine some of your competitors’ sites to help generate ideas.
  • What are the most important keywords that you’ll want to rank for in Google searches? Again, examine your competitors’ sites as a starting point.
  • What existing company assets such as sales presentations, brochures, sell sheets or other materials are available that may translate to website content? Go collect them.
  • Who at your company can play a role in developing valuable content for your audience?

Conversion path planning questions

  • What actions do you want a visitor to take once he or she arrives on your website?
  • What offers can you provide in exchange for a visitor’s contact information? (For example, downloadable white papers, case studies, free trials, buyer’s guides and webinars)

Lead nurturing questions

  • What will happen after someone fills out a contact form?
  • Who will be alerted?
  • Will he or she be added directly to a database?
  • How will new leads be nurtured over time so your company can build trust and remain top of mind?

This set of questions is just a starting point when planning your B2B website rebuild. And honestly, we’d recommend you take a hard look at whether a new B2B website is really what you need to drive the results you’re looking for in the first place. The following article  presents an alternative perspective to help you figure that out:

Why your old, crusty, dated B2B website DOESN’T need a redesign

If you move forward with it, we put together a more robust (and free) guide to help you through the process. You can download our Website Planning Handbook here.

Email marketing strategy at 10,000 feet

email marketing strategy

Email is a social media network. Many marketers give it far less attention than it deserves, but the numbers back it up. As of 2013, there were 3.6 billion email accounts worldwide, 91 percent of consumers checked their emails daily, and 66 percent of consumers have made an online purchase because of email marketing messages.

So people use email, they check it daily, and they buy directly as a result of email marketing. You can see how email marketing delivers a 4,300% ROI. It works. Period.

Email is a home

So why does email marketing work?”

It works because your email inbox is your personal online home. Just like your mailbox at your real home or your phone in your pocket, you check your email vigilantly because you use it to keep track of your life. It’s your central communications hub, reserved for trusted sources of information, business interactions and real people you know or want to know.

Just like direct mail marketing reaches people at their physical homes, email marketing is the best way to reach people on their online homes, where they personally check, every single day.

How is email a social media network?

Unlike direct mail marketing, email IS social. How? For starters, if you want to be successful, people have to give you permission to market to them through email, making it a personal medium. Most people only read emails from sources they know or from people who have mutual contacts. The law even protects consumers from receiving marketing emails from companies they don’t know.

At Gorilla 76, we follow standard practice and only send marketing messages to people who’ve given us their email addresses, either in-person through business cards or online through sign-up forms.

If we’re doing our job well, they look forward to hearing what we have to say as their trusted advisor on industrial web marketing. They don’t necessarily view our emails as marketing, hopefully, they view them as an educational resource. Since they’ve expressed an interest in web marketing materials, we count them as leads. Then we use a marketing automation system to further develop relationships with those leads so they become sales.

In addition to being a personal means of asking for marketing communications, email is also social because it’s many people’s primary way of sharing information with their closest contacts. People send emails to specific coworkers, clients or friends. When you send an email, you can dive more in-depth than you can with text message, personalize more than you can with a Tweet or a Facebook Post, and take up less of people’s time than you can with a phone call.

B2B email marketing strategy

Staying at a 10,000-foot level, think about the way we use email. We share ideas, tips, and guides. We quickly scan news. And we keep up with personal correspondence to maintain contact with friends, colleagues, coworkers, customers and clients.

Remember, your goal is to turn the leads (people who’ve shown interest in your offering by giving you an email address) into clients and customers. You want to send them information that will allow them to get to know your company. Send them information that’s useful and actionable and will lead them to keep coming back to your website. Send them information that educates them about your industry and about your business. Send them information that directly helps them in their business. And track everything so you know what brings them to your site and what ultimately drives sales.

You’ve got the strategy, now get the tactics that work. Click below to download our marketing automation guide and learn how to pay off your marketing

Jay Baer’s Youtility should be on your industrial marketing bookshelf

youtility

I try hard to be a student of industrial marketing. After all, today’s marketing is ever-evolving. To be successful, I believe you have to be constantly learning. While the objectives of marketing are much what they’ve always been, the tactics are changing daily. There really is no “master’s degree” that teaches the tactics of what we do. And “continuing education” requirements don’t really exist. So how do industrial marketers stay ahead of the curve? By reading books and blogs, attending industry events, networking with like-minded professionals and listening to Podcasts.

Several months back while listening to an episode of my favorite marketing podcast (Marketing Over Coffee), I heard an episode that featured Jay Baer talking about his book Youtility. The interview was really interesting, so I ordered the book. The book came and it ended up on a shelf for a good two or three months before I cracked it open. Once I did, I couldn’t put it down.

The book focuses on the idea of providing resources for your audience. The idea of not just selling to them, but helping them. The book argues that’s the difference between having a customer for a day versus a customer for a lifetime. And I agree. Baer points out that there are two ways for companies to succeed in the modern marketing era. Brands can either be “amazing” or useful.

Which do you think is more reliable and realistic to pull off?

Pretty interesting stuff, if you ask me. In addition to numerous examples of companies doing it right, the book provides strong data to support that “youtility” is the right way to “do” marketing. Here are four of my favorite excerpts from Jay Baer’s Youtility.

“In 2010, shoppers needed 3.5 sources of information before making a purchase decision. In 2011, shoppers needed 10.4 pieces of information before making a purchase decision.”

If you still haven’t bought in to the idea of helping your audience (versus focusing only on selling to them), it’s time to. I promise. The data is in, and your customers are researching their purchase way more than they were before. And a lot of that research is happening online. It’s your job, as someone who should be helping their customer versus only selling to them, to make sure that you are providing your customers with every single thing they could possibly be looking for.

Remember – help them first. You’ll be able to sell to them later.

Provide data sheets about your product, ebooks about your process, case studies about your success, examples of clients in your portfolio, profiles of key employees – you get the point. If it’s something that a customer might be curious about, make sure they have the information at their fingertips. In fact, if you give your website the attention it deserves, it’ll be the best salesman you have.

“In B2B, customers will contact a sales rep only after independently completing 60 percent of the purchasing-decision process.”

Building off the first featured stat from Baer’s book, nearly 60% of the B2B buying process is done before a buyer ever even thinks about picking up the phone. That means it’s extremely important to give your potential customers the information they’re craving. Answer their questions. Because if you don’t, someone else will. And guess what – your phone will never ring!

Think about how you use the web and research a buying decision. I’m guessing the two go hand-in-hand together. Perhaps, just perhaps, it’s time to quit flying your sales team across the country to set up an expensive tradeshow booth, and instead, shift your dollars to something that makes more fiscal sense – online lead generation efforts.

“Companies with websites with 101 to 200 pages generate two-and-a-half times more leads than companies with 50 or fewer pages.”

Pure and simple. The more quality content you have on the web, the better chance you have of getting found in the search engines. Additionally, the better chance you have of answering the myriad of questions your buyers just might be asking.

Don’t get me wrong, I get the argument for brevity and distilling information down to as few as words and pages as possible…in print. On the web, however, typically less is not more. In fact, more is more. And in the case of content marketing, currently, this is definitely the case. If coming up with content is what is holding you up, don’t sweat it. We’ve got you covered.

“By 2014 there will be more mobile Internet users than desktop Internet users.”

Is your site mobile friendly? It really needs to be. The data we’re seeing for our clients is staggering. More and more users are using mobile and tablet devices to browse the web.

If your site isn’t mobile friendly and provides a dismal browsing experience, don’t expect return visits or marketing qualified leads to come out of your online efforts. It simply won’t happen. I challenge you to think about how you use your mobile and tablet devices for research. I’m guessing if you land on a site and pinching and side-to-side scrolling are involved, you don’t stick around long. Neither will your customers.

Here’s what we can tell you: your website is at the core of it all

While the above relate to all aspects of the web-marketing experience, your website is at the core of it all. Without a strong foundation, you’re fighting an up-hill battle.

Click on the banner below and download our website redesign handbook. If you’re interested in a free assessment, click here, fill out the form and we’ll be in touch.

How we grew website traffic more than 1000 percent in less than a year

website traffic growth

Alton Materials is a scrap metal recycling business located in Alton, IL. They serve both the general public and businesses in industries like construction, demolition and manufacturing.

We began an inbound marketing initiative for Alton Materials in March of 2013 after developing their online marketing strategy and completing a website rebuild. One year after we began the engagement, we can report growth in website traffic by more than 1000 percent (from roughly 28 visits/day to more than 300 visits/day).

grow website traffic

Here’s how we did it

Our goal was to generate awareness. More qualified visitors means more business leads. More business leads means more revenue. In the online marketing world, awareness comes in the form of website traffic generation. And our best venue for generating traffic was that place where most people go to find information: Google.

We started with a thorough keyword research process, examining data around what keywords real people actually search in the scrap metal business and how difficult it would be to show up in Google searches for those keywords. We identified a variety of these best keyword opportunities and developed a business blogging strategy around them. Our goal was to both target these keywords in search engines like Google and provide useful, educational content on our client’s website to satisfy those searchers when they arrived. Blog posts included topics like the following:

What can be recycled? Common summer items that can make you money

Why construction recycling is important

Within the first month of our blogging initiative, we struck gold. Although a simple, common topic, very little content existed anywhere explaining the differences between ferrous and non ferrous metals. Who cares about this topic? It turns out their audience does. A lot. Our solution was to write a blog post answering that commonly asked question:

The differences between ferrous and non-ferrous scrap metal

Google quickly discovered and indexed the page and verified the topic was relevant to the content on the Alton Materials site. That single page has contributed to more than 60 percent of entry points to the Alton Materials website (more than 34,000 visits over the past year).

So… there IS an asterisk

Although this sounds like an absolutely overwhelming success, there is an asterisk. Alton Materials only serves companies within a 50-to-100-mile radius of their home in Alton. Sadly, that means those visits from London, Mumbai and even Chicago don’t do them much good when it comes to attracting paying customers. But here’s why this traffic growth still matters. Even though their website has attracted thousands of visitors from across the world, the concentration of visitors looks like this over the past year:

website traffic generation world

And the concentration of visitors within the United States during that same time period look like this:

website traffic generation in the US

Where is Alton Materials located? Smack in the middle of those two dark blue states (on the border of Missouri and Illinois).

Here’s your takeaway

If your customers demonstrate an overwhelming demand for something, you make sure they can get it from you, right? The same mindset applies in content marketing. Do the research, learn what information your audience craves and build content that demonstrates your expertise on the subject. This helps a qualified audience discover you, establishes trust in your expertise and creates opportunity to convert more potential customers into real leads on your website.

Six things to do before you start your B2B website build

 

website-planning
Whether you’re just starting to think about a website build or already in the thick of planning it out, the following six considerations will set you on a path to success.

Set concrete goals

Before you begin planning content, before you start searching for an agency, before you think about design or photography and before you approach your CEO with a proposed budget, set concrete goals. What motivation drives this rebuild in the first place? “Our site is really outdated and just doesn’t look professional” will not make your decision makers bite, even if that statement rings true. Bring the subjects of lead generation and customer acquisition to the table instead, and they will listen. Set real goals around these topics. By how much do you want to increase website traffic? How many leads do you want your website to produce over the next quarter and year? How many existing leads can this website move closer to a buying decision? When concrete goals come first, the strategy for your website build naturally follows.

Define your audience segments

Your website isn’t for you. It’s for your customer. Know exactly who that person is. If you’re targeting multiple audiences or verticals, know exactly what they are. Think about your audience at the company level. What size? What location? What industry? Think about them at the personal level. They’re real people after all. Who at these companies do you wish to attract? The CEO? A purchasing agent? A project manager? What problems consume them? Why should they want your product or service? Finally, think about your audience in terms of their buying cycle stage. Are they just researching? Are they actively looking to make a buying decision? Probably some of both, so be sure to appeal to both mindsets.

Define what your website visitors should do

Your website should think like a salesman, always asking your visitor to take action. Ask for white paper downloads and newsletter subscriptions from those researching. Ask for case study and buyer’s guide downloads from those evaluating. And ask for free consultations or product demo sign-ups from those closer to buying.

Examine existing website data

Before your start this process, gain an understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of your current website. If you haven’t yet, install Google Analytics today. It will take your IT guy or programmer five minutes to set up. At the very least, you’ll learn what pages attract the most visitors and what marketing channels (search, social, email, etc.) drive the most traffic. Go one small step further and install Google Webmaster Tools so you can learn what keywords currently expose prospects to your website in Google searches. This very basic intelligence will go a long way when planning content for your new website.

Evaluate competitor websites

Note the content and pages on your competitors’ websites that you find useful. Consider opportunities you believe their sites miss. Observe which competitors have business blogs and which particular blog posts your common audience probably finds valuable. Jot down the keywords that make up headlines in those blog posts. Search those keywords in Google and note whether or not their websites show up in the search results. If their sites don’t show up, note whose do. You probably know a lot about your competition already, so learn equally as much about their online marketing strategy. Then, go beat them.

Collect assets

Your website should burst with the knowledge that occupies the brains of your company’s best. Existing sales decks, white papers and presentations from your team will prove invaluable as you begin the rebuild process. Survey your company’s assets now and gather them in an organized manner. You’ll hit the ground running when it’s time to get started.

This article is just a short chapter in our B2B Website Planning Handbook. If you found it helpful, download our full guide below.

How to turn B2B website visitors into real contacts and leads

 

b2b website lead conversion
Lots of website traffic is a great thing. Lots of targeted, qualified website traffic is even better. But what good does that traffic do for you if you don’t know who these visitors are and therefore can’t contact them? Below I’ll show you how to turn your website traffic into real contacts and leads using the inbound methodology for your industrial marketing.

Four key components define a website’s lead conversion path:

1. Premium content offer

I use the following stat and the accompanying quote all the time, but for good reason.

According to a study by KISS metrics, 96 percent of website visitors are not ready to buy. So what are they doing? To quote Google,

“Our research has shown that, on average, business buyers do not contact suppliers directly until 57 percent of the purchase process is complete. That means for nearly two thirds of the buying process, your customers are out in the ether: Forming opinions, learning technical specifications, building requirements lists, and narrowing down their options, all on their own, with minimal influence from you.”

Website visitors come to learn, not to be “salesmanned.” They seek value, not an advertising message screaming:

“BUY FROM ME NOW!”

As a result, B2B companies become teachers that must educate their audience and earn their trust. Premium content offers exist for that exact purpose – to “sell” your audience value in exchange for the right to contact them. And just like a product or service, if the content is garbage, no one will pay for it.

Premium content offers come in many forms:

  • White papers
  • ebooks
  • Case studies
  • Buyer’s guides
  • Webinars
  • Recorded videos
  • Product demos
  • Manuals or handbooks

Publish premium content that makes the most sense for your particular audience. Write white papers and informational guides (like this B2B Website Planning Handbook) that appeal to those in the exploratory stages of their buying process. Write others that appeal to those closer to a buying decision. Develop a buyer’s guide for CEOs and a separate buyer’s guide for project managers. Host a live webinar targeting one key vertical and another webinar targeting a different vertical. Cover all key audiences by creating valuable resources just for them and your lead-capture ability will skyrocket. Remember that every buyer is different. Not all of these tactics make sense for everyone, so pick and choose those you feel add the most value for your audience segments.

Learn how to grow your business online.

Our free Industrial Marketing Guide will show you how to attract qualified website visitors, convert them into real leads and nurture them through the buying process.

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2. Call-to-action

Ask and you shall receive. But as we just explored, don’t only ask for the big sale. With content offers now established for your audience, exposure to those offers takes priority. Calls-to-action define the success of every individual page of your website. Think strategically and put yourself in the shoes of your audience. Consider the make-up and needs of visitors for every page, and think about their likely place in the buying process when they visit any given page. Include at least one call-to-action on each page for those in their research phase (“download our white paper to learn more about our philosophy on this topic”) and one call-to-action for those closer to buying (“download our case study to see how we helped another customer succeed”). This approach targets different individuals and their different needs rather than shouting at them to buy now.

3. Landing page

“Landing page” in marketer speak means “lead-capture page.” Any given call-to-action on your website should drive a visitor to a landing page that serves one purpose alone: capturing that visitor’s information. Think of landing pages as the checkout aisles of your website. The transaction happens here — your premium content is exchanged for your prospect’s contact info. Landing pages require a unique design compared to other pages on a website. Plan to strip away exit points from that page so your visitors focus only on completing the page’s information-collection form in exchange for your offer. Remove the top navigation and other prompts that might drive them away from the page. In terms of page content, focus on briefly summarizing the offer at hand. If you offer a case study download, include a one-paragraph summary of the case study and a few bullet points about results. Next to the summary, include your info-collection form with a clear reinforcement: “Download now.” The following links take you to a few sample landing pages we’ve created on our own website:

4. Form

Don’t under-think the forms that live on your landing pages. Collect the basics of course: name, company, phone number, email address. But then get creative. Ask questions that will prepare you or your team for a sales call — information that will help qualify your prospect as a good or bad lead. Ask visitors about their biggest challenges and what services they would find helpful. Ask about their industry and the size of their company. Ask if they’d be interested in talking to a sales rep or if they’re just researching. And ask what type of content they’d find valuable from a list of four or five topics so you can cater your email marketing approach toward each prospect accordingly.

Today, marketing automation software such as Hubspot elevates the collection of lead intelligence to another level. The term “progressive profiling” refers to a marketing automation system’s ability to gather different information from any given visitor every time he or she fills out a new form on your site. So while you might only ask for name, company, phone number and email address upon the first white paper or case study download, your website will recognize return visits and skip those questions in lieu of more insightful ones the second time around. Over time, the marketing profiles of individuals in your database become more robust. New information helps you score and segment leads and allows you to market accordingly to them moving forward. As a bonus, your sales team will love you for the lead intelligence you’ve provided before they ever make their first calls to prospects. Learn more about marketing automation here.

In conclusion…

Don’t let your website visitors get away! Because there’s no guarantee a visitor will return, visits become meaningless unless you create opportunity for dialogue.

This article is just a short chapter in our B2B Website Planning Handbook. If you found it helpful, download the full guide.

The critical components of a B2B website

 

Today’s B2B website has a specific job. Like any other salesman at your company, it exists to produce business. Anything short of that is unacceptable. Below, I’ve broken down five components of a B2B website that’s built for success.

Professional design and copywriting

As a company with pride, you care about your team’s appearance. You dress appropriately, tuck in shirts, shave and look presentable. You care about the appearance of your office in the presence of customers. So why not give the same level of care to the most visible and visited asset you own — your company’s website? Customers will often make their first point of contact with your company online, through your website. If your site turns them off, this interaction might just be their last. A successful B2B website boasts clean, mobile-friendly design and bursts with professionally crafted copy written for your current and prospective buyers.

Resourceful business blog

Data from the customer base (over 10,000 businesses) of marketing software company HubSpot shows that “customers who write just 3-4 blog posts per month get 20 more monthly lead submissions, get 800 more monthly site visits, have 60 more Twitter followers, and have 50 more Facebook likes than customers who only write 2 blog posts per month.” But why does blogging work? Here’s why.

Blogging strategy is rooted in keyword research, where individual blog posts are crafted to satisfy search engine results for topics related to your products or services. Click-throughs to your website produce engaged readers who want more of your content because it offers them value. Visitors explore other areas of your site that expose them to lead-capture opportunities, and they enter your sales funnel voluntarily. A constantly-growing business blog is absolutely critical to a B2B company’s success in search engine optimization, qualified traffic generation and lead conversion.

Strategic conversion paths

Exposure and website traffic are great. But what happens when a visitor actually arrives on your website? He reads your content. If it’s bad, he leaves and probably never comes back. If it’s good and he’s ready to buy something, he might contact you. If it’s good and he’s not ready to buy something, he leaves and maybe comes back (if you’re lucky).

My point? If you don’t capture that visitor’s information now, you’re likely to lose him for good. According to a study by KISS metrics, 96 percent of website visitors are not ready to buy. Prospective customers must be nurtured through their buying process. They’ll buy when they’re ready – not when you’re ready. The bottom line is this:

You can’t nurture website visitors if you don’t know who they are.

A website conversion path is made up of four components.

  1. Some kind of valuable offer
  2. Call-to-action
  3. Lead-capture landing page
  4. Form

Offer something of value to your website visitor – something that adds utility to his job. This could be a white paper such as “10 considerations when hiring a [fill in blank] company”. Throughout your website, place calls-to-action that ask your visitor to download that white paper. When he clicks on the call-to-action, direct him to a page where he can download this guide, but ask for something in return. In other words, “sell” him your white paper in exchange for his name, email address, phone number, company name, and whatever other bits of information will help you qualify or disqualify him as a potential business lead.

This is the conversion path. The concept is very simple. It’s the route you map out for your visitor from the point at which he arrives on your site to the point at which he becomes a real lead. Learn more about turning B2B website visitors into leads here.

Marketing database and CRM integration

The best lead-generating B2B websites tie directly into a business development ecosystem. The website itself houses valuable content and conversion paths to convert strangers into visitors into leads. But then what? When integrated with a marketing database and/or CRM (customer relationship management) software, your website becomes a real part of your sales process.

When you use forms to pull in contact information from visitors, a marketing database (ideally a marketing automation system) can track that visitor’s activity on your site moving forward. This function enables lead monitoring and as a result, better email marketing.

To go a step further, syncing a marketing database and CRM system like Salesforce allows lead information to pass directly into the hands of a company’s sales team. Lead intelligence gathered through forms provide background and context before sales calls, and allow sales professionals to document their ongoing touch points with leads.

Website analytics

Nielson ratings or estimated ad impressions have no home in online media. Thanks to tools like Google Analytics, we now have cold, hard numbers — always up-to-date, accurate and readily available. Today, as a result, much less guesswork inhibits our marketing success than in years past.

Use your analytics software to measure success and failure. Are qualified visitors finding you in search engines, on LinkedIn or through industry websites? What content on your site (specific blog posts and pages) drive the most visitors to lead-capture pages? What promotion channels convert the most visitors to leads? Email? Social media? Examine your data not only to self-validate your efforts, but to adjust strategy. Let the data drive your future marketing decisions. Proceed by doing less of what fails and more of what works.

Thanks for reading. If you want to learn more about building a website that produces real leads and business for your company, I recommend downloading our new guide The B2B Website Planning Handbook.

Five things a B2B website is NOT

what a b2b website is not

Welcome to a new era of marketing. Business executives today protect their budgets more than ever before. CMOs expect visible results from marketing investments (as they should). Readily-available numbers demonstrate successful and unsuccessful marketing initiatives. Marketing automation has stormed onto the scene. Social media no longer sparkles as a shiny new object.

Along with all this, the modern B2B website has staked out its claim in the business development world. This website aims not to brag about the superiority of your fantastic company, but to serve your prospective and existing customers. It works as a business tool designed to attract qualified prospects, provide utility in their search for a vendor/partner, and convert them into real leads with names and phone numbers. This modern B2B website also serves as your partner in nurturing leads until they become paying customers.

As an introduction to what a successful B2B website IS in today’s business environment, let’s look at five things it is NOT.

1. A website is NOT a brochure

In the early 2000s, the B2B website existed to demonstrate a professional brand image, describe your products or services, preach your greatness to visitors and list a contact phone number. But that was more than ten years ago. This “online capabilities brochure” retired from the business development world, and a much savvier successor has stepped in. Today’s B2B website boasts search-engine-optimized content, rooted in keyword research around real search engine data. As a result, it attracts YOUR audience in their Google searches. When your audience arrives, compelling content provides value as they research and learn about potential partners like you. That content demonstrates your undeniable expertise and positions you as the expert in your field. Most importantly, this modern B2B website initiates conversation by asking your visitors to take action.

2. A website is NOT a job for your IT team

A website involves technology. So does your washing machine. Neither require the hands of your IT team. Your website is a marketing and business development tool and must be conceptualized, developed and managed by marketing and business development professionals.

3. A website is NOT a project with an end date

The modern B2B website grows and evolves endlessly. If you nurture your website, your website will nurture your audience. This means consistently feeding your audience new blog content, white papers, buyer’s guides, case studies, videos and other content designed to provide utility. A healthy, growing B2B website establishes trust, enhances knowledge of your product or service and moves your audience further into their buying process, all in the absence of obnoxious sales messages.

4. A website is NOT the sole solution to your marketing problems

A B2B website takes center stage inside a much bigger online lead development infrastructure. It needs a supporting cast of strong tools to achieve success. This cast includes a seamlessly integrated marketing database to extract and store visitor information via website forms. It includes a marketing automation system to score the viability and credentials of new leads and initiate automated email campaigns to nurture them. It also includes a CRM (customer relationship management) system for your sales professionals to track interaction with prospects throughout their buying process.

5. A website is NOT a $5000 graphic design job

A business-generating website capable of demonstrating a positive ROI simply cannot be constructed for $5000. A website requires meticulous planning, sound strategy and the insights of your marketing and sales professionals. It’s not just a graphic design job. I repeat – it is not just a graphic design job. Success will require not only a financial commitment, but commitments in the form of time, energy and brain power from you and the key players within your business.

Thanks for reading. If you want to learn more about building a website that produces real leads and business for your company, I recommend downloading our new guide: The B2B Website Planning Handbook below.

 

Jon Franko gets interviewed by MediaShower on B2B Content Marketing

The folks over at Media Shower interviewed our very own Jon Franko. He’s my boss. He’s the co-owner of Gorilla 76. And he’ll never admit it, but he really is an expert in content marketing and a well-respected entrepreneur.

I know what you’re thinking. But I’m not just writing this stuff because he’s my boss. The St. Louis Business Journal featured him in their “30 under 30” class of 2010, and the St. Louis Small Business Monthly named him to their list of the “Top Young Entrepreneurs” in St. Louis.

I’ve had the pleasure of learning about content marketing, SEO and business from Jon (and from Joe Sullivan, who is an accomplished entrepreneur himself). Check out the interview over at Media Shower. It’s a five-minute read well worth your time.

While you’re on their site, read their SEO Manifesto. They’ve put together some useful information.

Mobile matters in industrial marketing

 

The new year is upon us. That means healthier eating, more time spent reading, getting to work earlier and making this the year of YOU! Well, at least for the first couple of weeks. Then it’s back to 99-cent heart attacks, tv and movie time on the couch (it’s Oscar season after all) and putting things off until next week (ha – that’s what I’ve been doing with this blog post). All joking aside, one thing that better be on your list of resolutions that actually gets checked off (not put off) is prepping your company’s website for mobile and tablet use.

We’ve done some digging on the data of sites that we’re managing here at Gorilla and all data points to users, even in the industrial marketing world, using mobile devices (iPhones, etc.) and tablets (iPads, etc.) more and more. Let’s dive in.

What analytics are telling us

Last week, I took a couple of hours one evening to investigate what kind of traffic our sites (the ones that we’ve built for our clients) are getting from mobile and tablet devices. I had a feeling that numbers were going to be up, but the rate at which they’re up really surprised me.

For the four retainer clients that we’ve worked with all of 2012 and 2013, we’ve seen the following positive increases in mobile traffic from 2012 to 2013.

  • Client 1 saw a 143.36% increase in mobile traffic
  • Client 2 saw a 97.05% increase in mobile traffic
  • Client 3 saw an 84.19% increase in mobile traffic
  • Client 4 saw a 26.91% increase in mobile traffic

Similarly, we have seen significant increases in tablet traffic for these same clients over the same time period. The numbers were as follows:

  • Client 1 saw an 81.60% increase in tablet traffic
  • Client 2 saw a 53.48% increase in tablet traffic
  • Client 3 saw a 74.16% increase in tablet traffic
  • Client 4 saw a 24.78% increase in tablet traffic

Making your site mobile and tablet friendly

As I wrote in this industrial marketing blog post back in May of last year, making your site mobile and tablet friendly doesn’t necessarily mean building a second website. In fact, it shouldn’t mean that at all. There are much better solutions to this – like responsive design. Responsive design ensures a good web experience for your users no matter the device they’re using.

What’s responsive design? Go to the bottom right corner of the American Piping Products site we built last year, clicking and dragging your mouse to the top left corner of your browser. The layout of the page will change as you make the screen closer to that of a tablet and eventually to that of a mobile phone. In essence, it’s responding to the size of the browser – hence the term responsive design.

Why this should matter to you as an industrial marketer

I could argue for days about why making your site mobile and tablet friendly is important. But in the interest of brevity, and a blog post that’s bearable to read, think of your web habits. Do you like pinching and zooming when you’re researching a potential vendor? Do you like when your fingers aim for one link but click another because the type on the screen is so small? Do you use your mobile and tablet devices more than you did, say, when your company last put any money into its website?

Hmmm… interesting, right?

Being in industrial marketing, I’m constantly perusing the web looking at industrial companies. And I’m absolutely floored at the number of companies that DON’T have a mobile friendly site. In today’s day and age, that’s just not going to cut it. But it’s okay – don’t feel overwhelmed. There are lots of companies that can help you, including ours. Simply click below for a free assessment to get started.

 

How to write an effective B2B blog post

 

blank B2b blog post with cursor icon at beginning
The first profile story I ever wrote detailed an inked-up tattoo artist in Columbia, Mo. He’s an interesting guy with interesting tales, but that profile story was awful. Fortunately, I’ve had the opportunity to work with some excellent editors, including some expert marketers and award-winning journalists. From experience, I can tell you it takes time and practice to write effective and engaging stories, articles and blog posts. You can always improve your writing skills, but you can never perfect them.

B2B blogging is about leads not perfection

Luckily for you, B2B blogging’s beauty lies in its practicality. It’s not about impressing editors with an interesting story; it’s about measuring progress with hard numbers and business leads. You can be successful without writing overly snarky and clever pieces or reporting Pulitzer Prize winning stories. You just have to write content that’s targeted, informative and clear.

Identify your audience

Blogging starts with targeting the right people with the right content. In blogging, marketing, and even newswriting, it’s all about the audience.

Know whom you want to reach. Is it potential customers, business partners who can refer you to clients, a journalist at the local paper? Answer this question before you start writing. The second post in our B2B blogging series gives you a step-by-step B2B blogging strategy and shows you how to organize all of your blog content for your B2B audience.

Satisfy your audience

Once you define your audience, intelligently answer a question in a way that will satisfy their information cravings. If I were writing for a healthcare construction company, I might tell hospital administrators about constructing buildings for better patient outcomes. Your blog posts should be as specific to your audience as possible. For more on what to write about, check out post three in our B2B blogging series on how to find great blog post ideas. You don’t have to provide expertise on everything or reach everyone. Just write for the people who can help you do business.

If you want to nail down in-depth answers to customer questions, put on your brand journalism hat and interview your coworkers. Once you have your answer to a common question, write it down as concisely as possible — ideally, in just a few short sentences.

Make your posts memorable by making them flow

As a writer, I’ve been asked from time to time to edit my friends’ essays, cover letters and reports. I’m happy to do it, but I’m amazed by one mistake that many people make: writing disjointed copy. Most people don’t expect writing to be perfect — I’m a bit of the perfectionist with my own writing — but everyone wants to understand precisely what your point is. At the very least, every blog post you write should flow from beginning to end so your audience gets the whole story.

The concise, three-sentence answer you jotted down will form the basis for your insightful company blog post. The short answer gives you an excellent introduction and overview, while the question itself can make up your blog post title. The long explanation — there’s always a long explanation — will provide you with the meaty content for your post.

Break your short answer down into three main points that you can write about in detail. When you sleep, your brain erases useless information from your memory and retains only the most important pieces of information. Make your three points so clear and memorable that your reader’s brain will hardwire them in and not forget them the next day.

Back up your main ideas with sub points

Then, dive a few meters deeper into your answer. Identify two to four sub points for each one of the memory-making main points that you highlight in your post. Think of these sub points as the quotes you used to put into your high school English papers — in fact, they can actually be quotes from the coworkers you interview. These sub points reinforce what you’re trying to say.

Vary them. Don’t say the same thing over and over with different quotes or reworded sentences. Keep the tasty, informative morsels coming. Once you have your main points and your sub points together, outline them into a logical flow that builds up to one, synchronous idea. Your words and points should snap into place and seamlessly carry your reader from beginning to end.

Stop. You’re almost ready to write, but take a step back and think about context.

Context is everything

If I told you Mizzou beat Oklahoma St. behind three rushing touchdowns from running back Henry Josey, you might be a smiling Tigers fan. If I told you Henry Josey overcame a horrific knee injury, grew up in Texas, and led Mizzou to a victory in the Cotton Bowl (in Dallas) and the most wins in school history, you might have a deeper appreciation for his performance.

Providing context unlocks your content to your audience.

Think about the basic questions that information foragers would ask if they wandered into your website and knew nothing about your industry. They might ask questions such as, “Who is the author and what does he do?” “What exactly does this company do?” “What is marketing automation?” “They’re promoting this Google Analytics case study, do they do design work or just blog?” (Yes, by the way, we have talented web designers on staff here.)

Write your article completely so someone first strolling into your industrial world can easily understand its context and answer all of his basic questions. Sometimes, you can’t cover everything in one blog post, so you can link to other articles — as I did earlier in this piece.

Okay, put the pen to paper and write this thing

Show. Don’t Tell. No, I’m not talking about pictures. You don’t need graphics or pictures to illustrate a nice blog post. I’m talking about splattering murals of color and thought across your blog with every key your fingers strike. Write so your audience can see your ideas as they read your words.

Write with your own, unique voice. If you read your words aloud, do you actually hear your voice? You’re the expert who’s been enlightening others on your work for years; it should sound like you — a clear and concise you.

Last step, proofreading and editing

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen great journalists and professional writers have editors tear apart their work. You have to learn to become detached from your beautiful writing. It’s just a fact of life.

Less is more. Be a snarling, bloodthirsty hyena when you edit your writing. Cackle with conniving villainy as you viciously shred your words and forget all emotional attachment you once had to your ideas. You probably used too many words and need to kill off a few hundred of them. Track the reduction of words in MS Word’s Word Count tool and take pride in their demise. Make it an art to say as much as you can in as few words as possible.

Some editing tips

As a rule of thumb, convey your thoughts so a 5th grader can understand them. Use only “qualified jargon.” Don’t fire out industry terms such as “EGR valve,” “Harmonic Balancer” or “Rolling Contact Fatigue” unless you clearly explain what they mean. When you do explain jargon, be an expert by writing an authoritative explanation.

Use an active voice, varied verbs and colorful language. Nothing bores readers more than to-be verbs. We don’t want everything to simply be, we want people, things and nouns to actively do things.

Pick one writing mistake you make consistently — you might consider the overuse of to-be verbs — and focus on improving that one thing in your next article. You will continually improve, and make a habit of writing excellent blog posts.

Have fun with it and be creative

Your experiences have given you a wealth of business knowledge. Share it and build up your audience to create business leads. Identify your audience and satisfy their cravings for actionable information. Write out a concise answer to a commonly asked question, break it down into three main points that drive that answer home, and support those points with sub-points. Finally, viciously edit your copy.

You know how to write effective business blog posts, but do you know the strategy behind them? Don’t let your blogging go to waste.

Brand journalism: interviewing your co-workers for your business blog

So you’re the marketing guy in charge of the company blog. You understand the benefits of blogging, you’ve got a lead-generating business blogging strategy, and you even have some great blog post ideas.

But you still have to pull it all together. Even though you know your business and your brand, you may not have been there in 1953 when your company first launched, and you’re not exactly an expert in actually installing solar panels on a job site. But you’re marketing the company as a whole, and it’s your job to tell the fascinating stories that unfold every day at every level of your company. So how do you find those stories?

Go “ad fontes” for your business blog

It’s not often I break out Latin in blog posts, but when I do, I like to remember my prematurely bald high school Western Civilization teacher who had us smash watermelons one day — don’t ask me why, I don’t remember the main idea of the lecture. Good, ole Mr. Knerr used to love telling his students to go “ad fontes,” which means “to the sources” or more literally “to the fountains” in Latin. Since we’re talking about serious brand journalism here, you will need to go to and interview sources for your stories.

Talk to the right people — your co-workers. You might know people in your company who were there in 1953 or at least know the story of your company inside and out. Interview them, and you’ll dig up some company gems.

But it’s not just the executives and c-level leaders who have great stories. Your business is full of hard-hat encyclopedias brimming with information. Yes, the sales VP sitting over there behind the computer. Yes, the project manager holding the iPad, overseeing 30 workers. Yes, the guy defying gravity on the scaffolding.

Spend 30 minutes with the guys who actually pour the concrete, and listen to them. You’ll get more blog post ideas than you could imagine. As a marketer, you’re not playing around all day on Facebook and Pinterest, you’re telling the past, present and future story of your company and building a brand.

So now you’re wondering how to actually get people to give you those interesting nuggets and hidden stories that will help you brand your blog posts. Check out these proven methods.

7 interview techniques from a journalist

As someone who’s written for a number of publications, I’ve interviewed a wide variety of people. From Libyan rebel political leaders to college football and NBA athletes to musicians, CEOs, entrepreneurs and Members of European Parliament, I’ve been blessed to have some fascinating conversations with some fascinating people. After you do enough interviews, eventually you stop being star-struck by anyone, and you realize that people are people. Follow these guidelines, and you’ll be able to confidently glean information from anyone.

Prepare for the interview

Technical and business writing for a business blog requires a learning curve. You have to prepare for your interviews so you can get the most from your sources. Google is your friend. If you’re going to write a case study about how your pipe-profiling services helped a partner company build an oil refinery, you’ll want to learn as much as you can about pipe profiling before you even interview the guy who tells you the story.

Then, once you’ve done some basic research on the topic, you’ll be able to write down a list of questions to ask your interview subject. I know this sounds rudimentary, but when you’re new to interviewing, it can be a little overwhelming to do an interview off-the-cuff.

As an aside, I have uncovered some great stories with just two or three prepared questions and the rest off-the-cuff. Spontaneity produces genuine conversation and works beautifully for Stephen Colbert every weeknight, but I wouldn’t recommend it when you’re first starting out.

Start with humanizing questions and keep the interview friendly

Imagine you don’t know your coworkers (you may not actually) and you have no idea what your company does. Ask the most basic questions just to get the conversation moving, and give your interview subjects an introduction to your blog post idea and why you’re interviewing them. To get your sources comfortable, start by asking them how they came to your company, how their personal experiences have given them passion for your business and what their company role is.

You want interviews to be friendly — few interviews, even in investigative journalism, are confrontational. You wouldn’t want to talk to someone who isn’t personable and human, would you? The best journalists develop professional relationships with sources that yield a steady stream of stories. Empathize with your interviewees. It keeps your interviews friendly, comfortable and open and allows you to get in the right mindset to truly understand their experiences and tell their story.

Clarify the basics that you don’t know

Don’t be afraid to ask what might seem like stupid questions. Those are often the ones that lead to the juiciest stories, since they get people talking. While you want to thoroughly research your topic, get up to speed and answer as many of these questions as possible before your interviews, it’s important to be humble enough to ask them if you need to. When someone laments about the press being biased or not fact checking, she’s often referring to a story that misquoted or mischaracterized her. Many of these cases arise because a journalist was too busy, too unconcerned or too shy to ask a basic clarification question or two. Even professional communicators have trouble communicating sometimes.

Ask open-ended questions.

Open-ended questions allow your interviewees to respond with stories, long answers and personal experiences. But most of us use a long list of questions that only draw out one-word answers. E.g., “How are you?” We all respond with, “Good.” I’ve provided a few examples below to help you better understand what I mean.

Avoid yes-or-no questions.

Ask: “What do you find fulfilling about installing solar panels?”
Don’t ask: “Do you enjoy installing solar panels?”

Ask top-level “questions” to understand processes.

Ask: “Describe your approach from start to finish to winning a contract.”
Don’t ask: “How do you win contract bids?”

Intelligently ask for emotive responses — no one likes talking about feelings with strangers.

Ask: “Take me through your thought process when you knew you had to kill the abc product line.”
Don’t ask: “How did it make you feel when you killed the abc product line.”

If you take my advice, you’ll avoid answers such as, “Yes,” “It’s a long process,” and, “Bad.” Instead, you’ll get real answers and real stories.

Guide the conversation, but don’t rule it

Make sure you’re guiding the conversation toward getting the answers you need, but let people talk — they’ll often tell you more than you would think. People love to talk, but we often get too busy to really listen to others. When someone really takes the time to listen, people will willingly provide answers — as long as they feel respected.

Set up an interview flow so you’re guiding the conversation and getting the answers you need. Be mindful of both your time and your sources’ time, but be willing to let them talk. It’s possible you might not get to ask a couple questions you wrote down. But you’ll often get more in-depth answers to the questions your source covers than you’ll get if you stick strictly to your pre-planned questions.

Use the age-old journalist’s trick

“Is there anything we didn’t cover that you’d like to touch on?”

Even seasoned PR people who’ve been interviewed 1,000 times will often give you something. They’ll say they know better than to answer that question — but invariably, something will pop into their minds. Many journalists have sneakily found brilliant stories with this one, last, little question. Any journalist worth his salt ends every interview with this question. And think about it, it makes sense.

It gives the interviewee a chance to clarify something or bring up a topic you forgot or didn’t even know to cover.

Pay attention to the small surprises.

Mike Alden, the 55-year-old Director of Athletics for the University of Missouri, dropped from 28 percent to 10 percent body fat and lost more than 20 pounds in 2011. When I featured Mizzou’s world-class athletic nutrition program for a local business magazine, I used that interesting tidbit as an intro to the story. That piece of information was an off-hand, somewhat unrelated comment from the person I interviewed. Then, I followed up with a quick email to Alden and got a two-sentence quote about taking nutrition seriously as a program. He couldn’t deny it because (why would he?) I quoted the person who said it and asked for a quick comment from him. The editor loved it, and I got compliments from people who read the article later and texted me about it out of the blue. That’s the detail that made the story worth reading. So, pay attention to any interesting tidbit that sticks out and follow-up on it. It may make the difference between a dry blog post and a memorable story.

In-person conversations are the best. Ideas can jump into people’s heads, and they’re not limited by time crunch and distractions while they’re typing emails. People have less of a filter for an in-person conversation than they do when they send an email. Just don’t abuse the conversational access you have. That means when you quote people, take out those natural uhs, ums and ‘ems that people say so they don’t sound like hillbillies.

It should go without saying, but respect people’s time. They don’t have to take the time to talk with you. They’re doing you a favor and taking time out of their busy days so you can have better B2B blog posts. Put a clear time limit on the interview. At Gorilla 76, we usually keep interviews to no more than 15-20 minutes when we talk to workers at our client companies.

Turn your stories into business leads

As a B2B marketer, you’re surrounded by a wealth of industry insider information. You and your co-workers have spent careers in your industry acquiring and hoarding trade secrets each day without even knowing it. It’s time you share your library of knowledge with the world — in exchange for some loyal customers and clients.

Click below to download our business blogging guide and learn how to turn stories and readers into leads and sales.

How to find great blog post ideas for your company blog


Finding great blog post ideas for your company blog is easy. No sweat. Well, maybe just a little sweat. But nothing that’ll make you want to punch your personal trainer. With a little effort, you can fill out your content calendar to start generating business leads and reaping the benefits of your B2B company blog.

3 starting points for effective company blog post ideas

In the second post of our B2B blogging series, we covered B2B blogging strategy and talked about identifying the people you want to reach. We covered the need to both deliver useful information to your readers and move them further down the sales funnel, since the ultimate goal of any blog post is to move your business forward. Here, in the third post, we’ll focus on three, high-payoff blog post categories.

  • Answer the most commonly asked questions that you or others in your company constantly address.
  • Provide original insights that show your thought leadership on the biggest issues affecting your industry and the industries of your clients or customers.
  • Tell people what’s going on at your company. This can be traditional marketing, like drafting press releases, but it can also be little things like pictures from the Christmas party. Your co-workers can sometimes be the best people to not only interview for stories but also spread your blog posts on social media channels.

Are you ready to dive in? We’ll give you the rundown so you can get your blog humming like Mizzou’s spread offense — if we could’ve stopped that Auburn triple option…

Answer the most commonly asked questions that your staff addresses all the time.

We can’t overemphasize the value of providing useful information. If you’re still reading this post, then I’m doing my job of informing you about blog post ideas and holding your attention. I mean, we’re 320 words in now. When people search Google and finally get their hands on useful, actionable information, it’s like chomping into that first bite of homemade apple pie.

Chances are, if your clients and customers are always asking you about the differences between precast concrete and tilt-up concrete, you can write a blog post about concrete that people will find useful.

The more that people find you informative, the more they interact with you. And the more likely they are to give you their contact information and become a lead. When you’re generating leads through your blog, you can put marketing automation to work for you and nurture those leads into sales. This is the concept of the sales funnel. Useful information lures in your hungry Google searchers, contact forms turn them into leads, and lead nurturing pays off the whole process.

So, how do you find these questions that people are dying to answer? Take some time to brainstorm occasions when you were frustrated because you had to explain something again and again to a client. You’ll think of something. Next, interview your co-workers to learn from their experiences. When you do put together these posts, you don’t have to make them pure FAQ posts, you can also write them as how-to articles and tip-sheets. These post formats are popular on the web and can help your site draw in search traffic because they’re designed for readers to instantly find the information they want.

Provide insights on your industry

If you’ve made it to the stage in your career where you’re managing the in-house marketing for an industrial brand, chances are you know a thing or two about giving a solid presentation. At the very least, you’ve explained important concepts to senior members of your company. You know how to communicate.

And you’ve probably been paying attention to what’s going on in your line of work. You’ve got experience, knowledge and opinions. That means you’ve got a wealth of blog post ideas. Start writing up trends you see unfolding in your industry. The price of solar panels is dropping and causing a change in your company’s future offering? Write about it. Be insightful, clear and concise. Give readers something no one else can give them.

Or, just write up posts that cover your own in-house observations and decisions. Our co-founder, Jon Franko, recently wrote a post detailing why we put Twitter on hold for a few of our clients. That’s the kind of stuff that people want to read.

Tell people about your company

Brand messaging is a beautiful thing. Companies have their own personality and they’ve never been more able to show it better than they can today.

Water cooler talk, job-site conversations, the blog post process, the company Christmas party. These aspects all make up a company’s culture. People inside and outside of a company want to learn more about how a company operates and about its people. Use your blog to detail the events that shape your company and your employee’s lives.

Corporate content can range from the company timeline that begins in 1912 to pictures of the youth basketball tournament your company sponsors. It can include press releases, volunteer event photos, and stories from your CEO’s travels across the country. It all depends on the voice and tone you want your brand to have and the company culture you want to show to people outside of your business.

Want to know more about content marketing?

Refreshingly useful and interesting blogging is part of an excellent content marketing strategy. But to make blogging an investment worthy of your time, you need to make your business blog pay off with real leads and sales. Click below to download our business blogging guide and learn how to turn your company blog into a real business asset.

Six things from 2013 we’re very thankful for

It’s hard to believe, but 2013 is pretty much in the rearview mirror at this point. It amazes me how fast the time goes. But hey, they say it flies when you’re having fun. And this year, well, we’ve had some fun.

As the year comes to a close, and before all the “Top (insert number) of 2013” lists inundate your feeds and streams, I thought I’d go ahead and list out the six best things that happened to Gorilla this year.

…(Drumroll Clark)…

  1. Our office has grown to a crew of six fantastic individuals. They say a company is only as good as the people that work there. With this group, we’re confident that we’re in great shape.
  2. From our work with The Korte Company, Thomas Industrial Coatings and TruQC, to the stuff we’re doing for American Piping Products, Recycling Consultants, cieTrade and now a new client we really can’t name yet, we’ve grown as specialists in industrial marketing. We’ve even put together some resources based off all that we’re learning. Check out our most popular white paper.
  3. We turned a few heads this year and received some hardware because of it. We were named one of St. Louis’ best web-design agencies, we won three more CMA Star Awards and added an eHealthcare Leadership Award to our non-existent trophy case.
  4. Gorilla76.com was rebuilt. Which, I’ll have you know, we’re already revising. A web-marketer’s work is never done…
  5. We celebrated five years of being in business. And we’re excited for five more.
  6. And of course, we continued to forge strong relationships with friends and supporters just like yourself. Thank you sincerely. The support means more than you could ever imagine.

Here’s to a strong – Gorilla strong – 2014! Thanks for reading.

How to create a lead-generating B2B blogging strategy


In the first part of our B2B blogging series, we explored the benefits of blogging for B2B businesses and showed why it’s a vital part of any marketing strategy. Blogging draws traffic to your website, sets you apart as an industry expert and generates leads for your B2B company. You get it.

But now you’re probably wondering what on Earth you’re actually going to blog about. Relax. You know you’re company’s brand and message better than anyone, and that’s the vital information you need to get started. Read through this article, and you’ll have all the tools you need to start making a strategy you’d be proud to show to your CEO.

Know your business and marketing goals

Captain obvious here, but you’d be amazed how many marketers hop up on their horses and ride out on a wild blogging adventure without the slightest bit of direction. This may sound like a given, but without knowing what you’re aiming for and defining success, you’re left hurling blog content at a mythical target. The end goal of any great blogging strategy — and any great marketing strategy — is to land new business. But, your specific company has its own overarching goals and marketing-specific goals. That’s where your expertise comes in.

If you’re directing marketing strategy for a firm that provides premium business services, your main goal may be to generate qualified sales leads and nurture them into clients. If you’re at a software company that offers web-based business solutions, your number one goal may be to drive traffic to your website and get visitors to start free trials. Without having well-defined goals and measuring your progress toward them, you’ll have a tough time convincing the boardroom that your blog posts are worth your time and their money.

Identify your B2B audience

Chances are, at some point during your time leading your company’s marketing efforts, you’ve had a conversation about who you’re trying to reach. This is the meat of high-level marketing; this is your world. You’re not just marketing; you’re managing a brand.

Some marketing agencies and departments will even go so far as to create client or customer personas to really nail down who their customers are. They will fill out fake Facebook profiles with interests, tendencies, Likes, statuses — the whole nine yards — just to gain a rich understanding of their target audiences. This is intense brand messaging, and it’s a conversation worth having, but fortunately, you don’t need to go crazy with Facebook to run an effective blog.

Just answer these few, basic questions and come up with 3-5 target audiences you aim to reach with your writing.

  • What interests do they have?
  • What drives them?
  • How old are they?
  • What industries do they work in?
  • What kinds of companies might they work for?
  • What positions might they hold at these companies?
  • What kinds of products or services are they trying to sell?
  • What business challenges do they have?
  • Who are they?

When you answer these questions, remember that you’re trying to identify audiences consisting of people who would benefit from the information you can provide.

These audiences should be the people who drive your business forward. They buy your products and services, increase your marketing reach or make your business better. You may be able to answer many of these questions by sitting down and having lunch with your company’s executives. Even you don’t have much access to your executives and can only get a very few minutes to ask a couple questions, you can still glean useful information for your company blog.

Identify the kinds of content that will satisfy your readers

You content has to balance a combination of being promotional and informative. Some of the best business blogs provide informative content that gives their readers a deeper understanding of their products and services while making them more likely to buy.

As an industrial marketing agency, we put a heavy emphasis on providing useful content, since people dislike being “salesmanned.” But we unabashedly ask our readers to request a marketing assessment so we can generate sales leads.

We’re informative, but we direct readers to the next step in the sales funnel with every blog post. Here are three great places to start when you’re thinking of content ideas to reach the people who make up your audiences:

  • List out the sales points that tend to convince the people in your target audiences to ultimately make a buying decision.
  • Write out answers to the commonly asked questions that you or others in your company are constantly addressing.
  • Create a list of original and insightful ideas that provide thought leadership on the issues that affect your industry. Think of issues that also intersect with the industries of the people who buy your products and services.

You can start in plenty of places and draft up a vast array of business content ideas, from photo shoots and animated shorts to guerilla marketing billboards. But at Gorilla 76, we believe simple marketing is smart marketing. Start with the low-hanging fruit.

One of the easiest ways to get content ideas is simply to interview people at every level of your company. They can provide you with the issues, answers and sales points that can drive your B2B blog.

Make a content bank and a content calendar to take action on your ideas

Once you’ve created lists of thought leadership issues, frequently asked questions and sales points, you can refine your content ideas and create a content bank. By this point, you’ve done a big chunk of the work. Your content bank is simply a place where you keep a running list of content ideas that you can turn into useful blog posts. We like to use Evernote, a cloud-based tool that’s perfect for professional writers who like to collaborate on ongoing projects. But you can use something as simple as a Word Doc to keep a list.

Next, plan out the all-important content calendar. You’re a marketing veteran, and you’ve led marketing projects, so you know the importance of doing things on a schedule. Google loves a regularly updated blog, so you need to plug and chug ideas into a timeline, with enough lead time to get posts published by your due dates. We use Google Calendar as a collaborative tool to plan Gorilla 76 events, and we use Basecamp to track our progress toward completing projects, but any old-fashioned calendar can work.

So, how often should you blog?

In B2B blogging, more is better. The bottom line is the more you blog, the more results you will get — and no, you don’t need to worry about diminishing returns with content creation.

The number one, highest payoff marketing platform is undisputed — email. And the best way to get email addresses is by generating website traffic from the marketing platform with the second highest payoff — organic search. Some statistics from Hubspot to ease your mind and show your CEO that blogging pays off:

  • 92 percent of companies that blog multiple times a day acquired a customer through their blog
  • 82 percent of marketers who blog once per day acquired a customer using their blog
  • 57 percent of marketers who blog monthly acquired a customer through their blog

The bottom line is just blog baby blog!

Even if you can only realistically pull off one blog post per month, it can make a positive impact for your business. At Gorilla 76, we have an experienced and talented content team that crafts a steady flow of content for us and for our clients.

A great blogging strategy is nothing without great execution.

Leads and sales will elude you if you lack a lead-driven blogging strategy. But all the strategizing in the world won’t get you anywhere without the content. Download and read our business blogging guide to learn both the strategy and the tactics that will turn your business blog into a lead-generating machine.

How to create a lead-generating LinkedIn products and services page


Social media is a wonderful waste of time. It exists so you can look at pictures, watch videos and debate college football on your Facebook status right? …Well, not quite. We use social media to get new business by driving qualified traffic to our website and to our clients’ websites. Long story made short, it’s important to leverage social media and the hundreds of millions of users (me included) who willingly and freely toss out their personal and professional information.

Brand mentions and brand credibility on social media networks have a documented effect on how businesses rank on Google and how much traffic their websites bring in. As a way to gain both brand mentions and build up your business’ reputation, we recommend building out robust LinkedIn Company Pages.

LinkedIn has its own search function that people use to find jobs, employees, and companies that provide services they need. Often, users stumble upon company profiles by reading LinkedIn articles, but people also find businesses that rank within LinkedIn for certain services and keywords.

Optimizing your products and services page

The products and services section within a LinkedIn company page allows you to list your services and target terms that people search — or keywords — so people can find your business. And it also allows you to build your reputation as an expert provider of your services by earning and showcasing recommendations for those specific services.

Hubspot documented a great example of a company using this section well. The Products and Services area of a LinkedIn profile doesn’t just showcase the services your company provides, it also provides valuable links back to specific service pages on your company website. It only takes a few simple steps to build out this section and turn it into an effective channel for driving qualified traffic to your site. Let’s dive in.

First, start by adding the products and services you want to highlight. These should already exist on your company website. The whole point of filling out these pages is to drive traffic to your website and convert visitors into potential clients or customers.

Adding your products and services

  • Log into LinkedIn and go the appropriate Company Page – in order to edit a LinkedIn Company Page, you have to have a LinkedIn account, and have access to the page. You will only have access if you created the page yourself or if the person who made the page gave you that access.
  • Click on the down arrow that’s part of the “edit tab.”
  • It will open up a drop-down list where you will click “add product or service.”

LinkedIn Company Page

You’ll be directed to an 11-step menu where you can fill out information about the product or service. You don’t have to fill in every menu item. Fill out the service description, choose a category, and mark whether the offering is a product or a service.

LinkedIn Company Page Edit

Give it a name (use a keyword phrase), add a profile image, add a tracked URL using the Google Analytics custom URL builder and add a contact person.

If you’ve already made a YouTube video related to that product or service, add a video link to it.

As a general rule, take existing information from the company website and tweak it such that it’s short, sweet and to the point. It should accurately tell the reader about the service and sell it to them quickly.

 

LinkedIn Products and ServicesHit the biggest sales points for your product or service in the description and use bullet points to highlight the value-added benefits of that service. You’ll have a limit of 45 characters in the bullet list section, so be concise and get the best bang for your bullet.

Add LinkedIn Products and ServicesThe profile pic is 100×80 pixels. You can use a resized company logo, but an image specific to the service is more visually appealing. Just make sure the image gives the reader the right visual impression and doesn’t look terribly stretched.

Formatting and finalizing the products and service page

Okay. Now you’ve put together the individual products and services, it’s time to make the products and services page look good. Click on the products and services tab at the top of your LinkedIn Company Page so you can see what it looks like.

To edit the products and services page, click on the edit button (not the dropdown arrow) on the top right (you have to be on the products and services page).

The first thing you’ll want to do is write up a description of your company and its products and services in the first form. This is the first thing a person sees when he comes to the Products and Services Page, so you want to write up what the company does in as succinct a way as possible and highlight the brand message you want to send.

LinkedIn’s company products and services area is designer friendly. It allows you to put up to three banner images in at the top and have them cycle through like they’re on a slider.

LinkedIn Products and Services Page

The importance — outside of just making the section look nice — is that you can stuff links to your website into the images. Don’t just make the section look good, tell the visitor in big, bright imagery about featured services and drive traffic directly to web pages that can convert visitors into leads. This can work especially well if there are downloadable guides on the company website.

You need banner images of the right size: 646×222 pixels

Any variety of three images works in these slots, but the images have to make sense for the brand you’re trying to promote. Here’s one setup I like.

  • A graphic that matches the company’s colors and brand and conveys on a high level the usefulness of the business’ value-added services
  • A picture related directly to the company’s most important product or service
  • A picture related directly to the company’s second most important product or service

Having nice images can be a game changer, but don’t let a perfectionist bent to get just the right images slow you down. You can drive traffic to your site from LinkedIn without three perfect pictures. Images are just one part of building out a successful LinkedIn Company Page. If you don’t have access to a designer, you can always pick one relevant image of the right size and insert it into your page along with a link to your website.

If you use the sample approach for picking out three images, use images that help you target the most important services first. By importance, I mean the product or service that you most want to drive traffic to on the company website.

You can also link to a relevant YouTube video in the profile to make this section more professional and visually appealing. Just remember, the purpose here is to create qualified leads and new business on your company website.

Customizing your products and services page

This brings us to the last level of customization in the products and services area. You can always change up the order of your products and services.

In your edit section, there is a tab just for this. The order of your services just depends on which service you want to promote the most. The higher a product or service is listed, the more visible it is to people on your products and services page.

Customize LinkedIn Products and Services Page

The most important aspect of this feature is that the product or service listed first (highest in the list) will show up on your LinkedIn homepage as a featured product or service. If you have something you particularly want to show off, then it belongs first in the menu.

Gorilla76 LinkedIn Company Page

And you can even setup multiple variations of this section that will look different to people in different LinkedIn “audiences.”

Target Audiences on LinkedIn Company Pages

Target audiences using LinkedIn Products and Services Pages

This feature allows you to customize this section for LinkedIn users in different professions or geographical regions. It’s a useful way to promote relevant services to the people you want to reach and not have to constantly update the order of services on the page.

But, using this function only makes sense if you want to reach multiple groups of specific people (e.g., CMOs at construction companies or CEOs at inventory-tracking software companies.)

It’s worth briefly noting that in November 2013, LinkedIn unveiled the company showcase page. If you’re overseeing marketing for a company that has several well-known products or sub-brands — e.g., an iPad, iPhone, and iTunes — it may make sense to use this feature. These pages go beyond just listing products and information; they allow you to have a publishing platform specifically for a particular product or service that you want to promote — e.g., if there were news about the iPad, iPhone or iTunes. It’s still early. The book is still open on this feature, and brands are exploring ways to use it effectively, so don’t get too caught up in it just yet. Build out your products and services area first.

Reaping the benefits of a LinkedIn products and services page

Now, your products and services area has all the bells and whistles and is helping you drive traffic to your website. You’re happy and content with it, and you’re not ashamed to show it off to people who know nothing about your business. But you’re not done yet, because it has one more important job to do for you. The beauty of LinkedIn is the ability not only to bring relevant people to your website and expose them to your business, it’s also the shining recommendations you can get for your products and services. The more recommendations you get — especially from people who have LinkedIn profiles like those of your target audience — the better your services look.

Ask for recommendations from people who have used your services. Draft up a list of people you wouldn’t mind asking, and all they have to do is press a button on your services profile to make your company look more credible. It especially helps if they have a lot of (more than 500) LinkedIn connections and fit into the target audience you want to reach.

 

LinkedIn Recommendations

That’s it. We hope you enjoyed your guide to building out a kick-ass products and services area on your LinkedIn Company Page. Go forth and generate some leads with your LinkedIn Page. Need more marketing and social media expertise? Click below to download our guide to measuring online marketing ROI or request a free marketing assessment.

 

 

Award-winning industrial marketing: all in a day’s work

We’re proud to announce that our hard-hat marketing team has brought home some awards. And both Gorilla and our clients are winning recognition.

Each year, the Construction Marketing Association hands out their CMA Star Awards to the best industrial brands. And in 2013, two of our clients won a total of three CMA Star Awards. Alton Materials won an award for search optimization for our blog post on the differences between ferrous and non-ferrous metals, which has drawn a large spike of search traffic to the Alton Materials website.

As an industrial marketing agency, we know any inbound marketing strategy needs traffic to succeed. But you can’t get results without a website, and a great website requires creativity. The Korte Company took home the CMA Star Awards for both web design and blog design for our work on their website.

Our designs have caught the attention of not only the CMA, but also the St. Louis Small Business Monthly. They recently featured us as one of St. Louis’ top web design companies in their November 2013 issue. Want to see more award-worthy work? Download the case studies below to learn about the industrial marketing programs we’ve developed.

Industrial marketing, Twitter and why we don’t think they’re necessarily always a fit

I’m a big fan of Twitter. I think it’s great. It never ceases to amaze me that messages limited to 140 characters have changed everything from corrupt governments to the way we use the restroom. Next to the Internet, Twitter (which to me is almost one in the same with the Internet) might be my pick for the best invention/innovation of the past 30 years.

If you follow me, you know that I use Twitter for everything from sports rants to restaurant reviews to Tweeting about hunts and haunts around town. I get the majority of my news from Twitter. I can’t watch sports, or TV in general, without it. And it’s my go-to for making a recommendation on a movie, book, magazine or musician. Lately, my stream seems to be all about the Missouri Tigers…the SEC East Champion Missouri Tigers, that is.

2013-12-03_16-20-23

But what I’ve come to realize is that I don’t like Twitter for marketing. Well, at least the kind I do – that of industrial marketing.

I know, I know, a marketer that is telling you that your company’s Twitter use COULD be in vain.

“Blasphemy!”

“Are you crazy?”

“This can’t be true!”

It’s hard to believe, right? Well, to a certain extent, it is for me as well. But at Gorilla 76, we’ve carefully watched the traffic patterns and we’ve concluded that at least right now, our time is best spent in other online marketing endeavors.

Gorilla 76 and our use of Twitter for industrial marketing

Before I can go on a rant about how Twitter simply isn’t working for our clients, I first should preface how we’ve been using it for said clients.

In short, we’ve been using Twitter the right way. Or at least in accordance with what all the social media pundits are recommending. We Tweet 4-5 times a day. We send links out to our own content, as well as links to curated content. We interact with industry thought leaders, potential customers, brand champions, members of the press, etc. We’ve grown our followings, being careful to actively block out spammers and inactive accounts. And we’ve always responded immediately to a response or request.

We’ve studied this stuff like mad and guess what. It’s not really working.

Fruits of our labor

At Gorilla, we’ve always believed in the importance of marketing with goals in mind. And currently, for all of our clients, our goals are to grow lead lists. This happens from on-site conversions – stuff like white paper downloads, newsletter signups, case study inquiries, etc. And from the numbers we’re seeing, Twitter simply isn’t acting as the conversion vehicle we thought it would.

For instance, for one of our clients, year to date, three, I repeat, THREE, leads have been gained from all of 2013’s Twitter use to date. And guess what – they weren’t good leads. One was a competitor, one was a vendor and one was a marketing agency (probably trying to sell the “power of Twitter”!). That same client, however, via Organic Search, had received 54 conversions to date this year. That’s 18 times more conversions. So think about it – where should we be spending our time? On Twitter? Or signed into the company blog writing keyword rich content increasing our chances of showing up in search? We decided on the latter.

Let’s look at another example. A large local industrial painting company. This client has seen less than 300 visits to their site this year from Twitter. Worse than that? Zero conversions. That’s right, no one has come from Twitter, submitted information and entered their sales funnel. The result? We’ve adjusted strategy and allocated more time to blogging, LinkedIn and other online endeavors.

One final example. This one, well, it’s actually not a client at all. It’s us. Now, one would think, for a marketing agency, even if it’s a B2B industrial marketing agency, Twitter must work well….wrong. The results are slightly better than what we’ve seen with the other clients, but since February of this year, we’ve seen 20 conversions from Twitter. Zero have been sales qualified leads. For Gorilla, we’re going to continue to play in the Twitter sandbox, keeping expectations within reason. But for our clients – it’s pretty much on pause across the board.

Screen Shot 2013-12-03 at 5.19.50 PM

Time investment for Twitter

Sure a Tweet might only be 140 characters and realistically doesn’t take that long to type, but finding the material, crafting the right message, and doing this several times a day…well…it all adds up. Not to mention there’s the account maintenance (constantly finding new people to follow and interact with), there’s the monthly scheduling out of calls-to-action on your site, there’s the scheduling out of company content and there’s the immediate response that’s needed if someone pings you. There’s the daily constant monitoring to see if anyone is speaking good, bad or otherwise in the first place. There are the journalists and industry thought leaders that you constantly try to connect with as well as the job-seekers and students that seem to inquire often.

Screen Shot 2013-12-03 at 5.13.14 PM

Long story short, using Twitter for industrial marketing requires serious human capital, and honestly, we just don’t think it’s worth it. To us, it’s very hard to dedicate 15-20 hours a month to something from which we’re not seeing results. We think it makes a lot more sense to instead focus on efforts that are paying off, increasing results in those arenas two- and threefold.

Too much buck, not enough bang

So, a lot of work requires a lot of money. A lot of money is, well, a lot of money. If we’re truly being good stewards of our clients’ money, how can we possibly recommend that they continue to use Twitter, when we know it’s simply not delivering the results we once were hoping for?

We can’t. At least if we’re smart we can’t.

Because while Twitter isn’t performing up to our expectations, other marketing avenues are. LinkedIn, content creation, Facebook (yes, Facebook) are delivering the results we’re after. We’re seeing high engagement rates as well as significant conversion rates (yes, we track everything to see how it leads to on-site conversions, etc.)

To do the above and to do it right, significant time must be allocated to Twitter use every month for our clients. After running campaigns for several of our clients for several years now, we’ve finally decided, it’s simply not worth the time investment. At least right now, it’s not. It’s our job to figure out when it’s relevant again for the industrial marketing space.

So social media doesn’t work in industrial marketing?

No. That’s certainly not the case at all. For our client base, we’re currently seeing great results with Facebook and LinkedIn.

Facebook is a great tool for fostering internal company culture and engaging the local community. Is it driving conversions on site? Well, technically no. But there’s still a high enough engagement rate that we can still justify using it as an awareness tool.

LinkedIn is perhaps the most valuable tool in our social media toolbox right now. We’re seeing the best traffic (meaning most conversions) come from LinkedIn. Our guess is that it’s due to the mindset of the audience. When signed into LinkedIn, one is in the business mindset. It’s business time.

Twitter and Gorilla

At Gorilla, we’re going to continue to play in the Twitter sandbox as far as our own marketing is concerned, keeping expectations within reason. But for our clients, we can’t afford to play around.

Now – share your thoughts and let the onslaught begin!

Industrial SEO: How to get discovered by qualified prospects

 

industrial seo
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a complex machine with many working parts. This article focuses on one of those essential parts that you can directly control – on-page SEO.

Industrial SEO starts with the content

We’ll dig in to the key tactics for optimizing a web page very shortly. But first I want to emphasize the importance to high-quality content on the page. SEO is about getting discovered by qualified searchers in Google, Bing, Yahoo or other search engines, which in turn generates website traffic. But when these visitors reach your website, read your content and fail to be engaged, what happens? They leave. If the content isn’t compelling, well-written and purpose-driven, you miss your opportunity. In short, good SEO doesn’t excuse bad content. I’m done preaching for now, so let’s get at it.

Optimizing on a page-by-page basis

Let’s say you’re a Green Bay Packers fan like me. It’s been a rough season so far, but you still want to buy that Aaron Rodgers jersey online. If you were to search in Google for “Aaron Rodgers jersey”, which page would you rather land on?

  1. The NFL Shop’s home page
  2. The Aaron Rodgers section of the NFL Shop

Probably the latter, right? If you land on the home page of the NFL Shop, you still need to navigate through teams or men’s clothing and find your way to that Aaron Rodgers jersey. But if you land directly on the Aaron Rodgers section, you’re a step closer to buying.

Think about SEO for your company the same way – on a page-by-page level. Each page should be optimized for the content on that specific page. As long as that content is relevant to your company and industry, you’ll be headed in the right direction.

Optimizing your page for a specific keyword (or key phrase)

We won’t dive into keyword research in this particular post, but I want to explain the basics of keyword targeting. The concept is actually pretty simple. You want to choose a keyword to focus on for each individual page on your site. Then you optimize each page accordingly. For a given page, that keyword should be:

  1. Relevant to the content on your page
  2. Searched frequently
  3. Not too difficult to show up for

There are lots of free and paid tools out there to help you gather this information. Once you learn to do it, you’ll find it’s far from rocket science. We’d recommend starting with Google’s Keyword Planner. You’ll have to set up a Google account if you don’t have one – but that will just take a couple of minutes.

If you’re not up for the research, at least focus on point number one above – choose a keyword that’s relevant to the content on your page.

For simplicity’s sake, I recommend focusing on just one keyword (more like a key phrase) per page. Remember, the content has to be great. Overstuffing your page with that keyword degrades the quality of the content. And like your website visitor, Google is getting smarter about recognizing poor content and discrediting it accordingly.

The key components of on-page industrial SEO

Time to get tactical. There are a handful of components that you can control on any given page of your website to help you better rank in searches for your targeted keyword. This illustration shows where they are on the page. The paragraphs that follow describe what they are.

industrial seo on page

1. URL

This is the website address. In an ideal world, your target keyword is incorporated here. You might need a little help from your web developer or whoever manages your website for this one, but it’s worth adjusting (because Google cares!).

2. Page title tag

At the top of your website browser window, you’ll find the title tag. It essentially serves as a description of what’s on this particular page. If Google agrees, you’ll be rewarded.

3. Headline text

Without getting too technical, the text in your headlines and sub-headlines are more heavily-weighted that text in your body copy. If you include your targeted keyword in one or two headlines – that same targeted keyword you already used in your URL and Title tag – you’re a step closer to optimizing your page.

4. Body copy text

As mentioned earlier, you don’t want to overstuff your copy with your keyword, but try to use it naturally two or three times if you can.

5. Image tags

If you’re using photos on your page, which is a good practice in general, your content management system should allow you to assign “ALT text” to each image. In the eyes of Google, ALT text serves as a label for that image. When relevant, incorporate your page’s targeted keyword in this tag.

Meta description (not displayed on page)

The meta description is a short summary of what’s on your page. Ideally about 160 characters in length and editable from your content management system, Google usually displays the description in search results to help a searcher learn what’s on the page before he or she clicks the link. Although adding your keyword to the meta description won’t necessarily boost your rankings, it increases the likelihood of a click-through to your page when someone’s search phrase aligns with your keyword.

In summary

SEO is complex, but an important component of online lead generation. When you can start driving qualified traffic from the search engines, you can shift focus to converting visitors into leads and nurturing leads through through their buying process.

Gorilla wins an award

We’re excited to announce that we were recently notified of our 2013 Distinction Award from the eHealthcare Leadership Awards. It was our content work for healthcare construction company The Korte Company that was recognized in the Best Health/Healthcare Content award category.

“While we don’t hang our hats on awards here at Gorilla 76, it’s always nice to be recognized for your work,” said Jon Franko, partner at Gorilla 76. “It’s validation that what we’re doing is top-notch.”

Other winning work in the category included healthcare content from Drugs.com, Hospital for Special Surgery, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, Customized Communications, Inc., and Private Health, Inc. You can view a complete list of winners here.

This marks our 11th industry award for Gorilla 76. A sincere thanks to The Korte Company for allowing us the opportunity to execute the work in the first place.

The B2B Social Media Book, a short reflection

By Kyle Fiehler

Despite the implication in the book’s title, that it focuses solely on social media, The B2B Social Media Book is really a book about inbound marketing strategy. Its authors cover everything from the evolution of search and keyword strategy, to business blogging and why there is absolutely, no way in hell you shouldn’t be doing it.B2B Social Media Book

Anyone seeking a primer on why content generation matters, how it increases visibility and drives traffic to your site and yes, how social media achieves these ends, would do well to read this joint effort of the social media sages Kipp Bodnar and Jeffrey Cohen.

The subtitle of the book, “Become a Marketing Superstar,” is a metaphor the authors return to throughout the book. At times, it has the effect of making the reader feel like a kindergartener striving for a sticker. But the overall strategies for reaching that level of “superstardom” are worth paying attention to.

Take Bodnar and Cohen’s formula for determining the ROI of a B2B social marketing effort, for instance. It goes something like this,

[Total Lifetime Value – Cost of Customer Acquisition (COCA)]/ COCA= ROI

Here the COCA includes all the associated costs of social media efforts, from an employee’s salary over the time spent on a given social media task, to overhead costs such as maintaining a blog or paying a designer to spruce up the post.

This formula allows marketers a way to justify the investment of time and money in social media, proving to the higher-ups that we’re not simply tweeting pictures of cute puppies and casually perusing Facebook. Concrete strategies like this one make the cutesy language (“Math not hugs”), and excessive use of the exclamation point easier to take.

As the authors mention in the introduction, the book is actionable, with each chapter accompanied by exercises to complete as you read. The B2B Social Media Book is filled with useful tools and advice, like the equation above, for maximizing the impact of social media efforts. These are ultimately what make the book a worthwhile read, rather than the motivational-speaker sort of reassurances that you can one day be a marketing superstar too!!!

 

 

Supply chain marketing: 5 ways to grow business when your customer isn’t the end user

Supply chain marketing

Cold calls, trade shows, spec sheets, brochures, more cold calls. Supply chain marketing can be monotonous. For the thousands of businesses out there that sell to companies who sell to other companies who in turn sell to the end user, marketing isn’t about flashy ads or big consumer marketing budgets. It’s about generating awareness among very niche markets and establishing, developing and maintaining strong customer relationships. But are there more effective ways to accomplish these goals? Yep. Here are five good starting points.

1. Answer common customer FAQs with robust content

One of the best ways to gain awareness and generate website traffic as a B2B supplier is to simply answer the questions your customers ask you on a regular basis and post them as separate pages on your website. This may sound counterintuitive. If a prospect doesn’t know who I am, how can I answer their FAQs? Well, the truth is that they’re probably going to ask similar questions in Google searches. And if you’ve stated those questions and sufficiently answered them in the form of blog posts or pages on your website, Google will point them in your direction. Once written, you can also email links to these blog posts to current prospects and customers. After all, you’re the expert and they value what you have to say.

Action steps:

  • Write down three questions you often receive from prospects during the sales process. Think about how you typically answer those questions. Then write down your answers in a few paragraphs and work with your marketing team to post them as separate pages or blog posts on your company site.
  • If you don’t have a company blog, or this sounds intimidating, read our post about The benefits of B2B blogging to learn a bit more about its importance as a supply chain marketing tool.

2. Give in order to get

Consumers guard their personal contact information today more than ten years ago. Yet email addresses and phone numbers remain the “currency” of B2B lead generation, and prospective customers will still “pay” you with that info under one condition: you give them something of value in return.

As a marketing strategy firm that specializes in industrial and supply chain marketing, the single strongest lead-generation tactic for our clients has been the downloadable guide. What (non-proprietary) information can your company package in the form of a downloadable PDF, post on your website and ask for a name, phone number and email address in exchange for it? For one of our clients – an industrial painting company trying to reach general contractors – it was a white paper called What to Consider When Hiring an Industrial Painting Contractor.

What’s the equivalent for your businesses? This concept is simple. Exchange your expertise for permission to start a conversation with a potential customer.

Action step:

  • Talk to your sales team (unless that’s you). Compile a few pages worth of content from sales decks or company literature that can provide value to your prospects in their vendor research process. Button it up and package it with a catchy title and work with your marketing team to place it behind a lead-capture page on your site.

3. Invest in lower cost, higher return, trackable advertising opportunities

Have you ever run a print advertisement in an industry trade publication? They’re not cheap! Sometimes a quarter page ad can cost a few thousand dollars or more to run once. Tracking effectiveness is no simple chore either. So what about this idea instead? Many of these same trade publications offer banner ads or email newsletter ads for as little as 10-20% the cost of a printed ad. And guess what? Because those ads are clickable, they’re also trackable. Try an experiment. Run a print ad that drives to a lead-capture-equipped page on your website. Now you’ll not only benefit from awareness generated by the ad, but also create opportunity to collect that valuable contact-info currency from a prospective customer.

Action steps:

  • Contact some of your industry’s trade publications and request the pricing for their website banner ads and e-newlsetter sponsorship ads. Request data on the amount of traffic their website receives and the size of their email distribution list to evaluate opportunity.
  • Run a campaign for three months with the right measurement systems in place to track effectiveness. Then evaluate the results.

4. Manage business leads with a CRM system

CRM stands for “customer relationship management.” As part of a B2B company, managing customer relationships is probably a familiar subject, but are you effectively managing and tracking your leads in an organized way? CRM systems like Salesforce, Highrise or SugarCRM provide a platform for you to record info on conversations, store email dialogue, set follow-up reminders and sync with your email marketing database. In short, a CRM system bridges marketing and sales to assure no prospects are forgotten or neglected.

Action step:

  • Watch a free demo of Salesforce – the industry-leading CRM software. Seeing it in action may open your eyes to a CRM’s place in the supply chain marketing process.

5. Support business development with email marketing automation

No two leads are created equal. And because your time is limited, you can’t spend the same amount of it with everyone. Email marketing automation lets you craft chains of marketing emails ahead of time and distribute them to prospects based on demographics or actions taken on your website. Whether you segment your lead database by industry, job title or hot/cold leads, automated email campaigns help you target your marketing messages for each individual.

Action steps:

About us

Gorilla 76 works with hard hat-wearing companies in industries like construction and manufacturing to generate and nurture leads online. We offer lots of free resources here on our industrial marketing strategy blog and through our downloadable guides like those that follow. Thanks for reading!

Industrial marketing: 5 stats that will get you crankin’

Awhile back, Hubspot, our marketing automation software partner, published a resource of all the marketing statistics you need. I saw it when it first came out, knew it was relevant for industrial marketing and threw it in my Pocket to read later.

Well, throw in early duck season (yes, I’m a duck hunter), a large backyard hardscape project and a Cardinals’ trip to the World Series, and, well, I just got to reading the resource last week.

My conclusion after reading? It’s great. A real must read. Especially if you’re trying to sell in modern web marketing to a higher up. Here are a few of my favorite learnings that I walked away with.

1. 70% of the links search users click on are organic, not paid

First of all, you need to know the difference between organic and paid search links. Organic search results happen naturally due to Google’s mysterious algorithm. They’re the results, based off a list of factors, that a user is encountered with after performing a search. No amount of money paid to Google can help you climb in these rankings. But, where a big check can help you, is in the paid portion of a Google search. In the below image, I’ve highlighted paid search results for “construction advertising” in red. And I’ve highlighted organic results for “construction advertising” in green. The organic results, according to the stat above, are 70% more likely to get clicked. Hmmm…looks like those Gorilla guys know what they’re doing!

Organic search vs. paid search in industrial marketing

So, the stat. What’s it mean that 70% of links clicked are organic vs. paid? It means you better be creating content that is search engine optimized and that people want to read. The more you can show up organically on the front page of Google for a relative search, the better chances you have for online lead generation and marketing success. Read our thoughts on SEO here.

This stat was from Marketing Sherpa, February 2007.

2. Businesses with websites of 401-1000 pages get 6x more leads than those with 51-100 pages

This figure is a fastball. The more good content you have on your site the better your chance of online marketing success. We’re not just talking an uptick in traffic either, we’re talking leads. Leads that you can slam on the table at your next company meeting. And after all, leads are what you’re after, right?

Now, what’s content? What makes up the 401-1000 pages you’re trying to build out? Well, the answer is there are lots of marketing tools that can take such form: blog posts, case studies, project pages, expanded service pages, landing pages and more.

Curious as to how many pages your site has in the first place? There are many ways to figure this out, but one of the easiest is to perform a site:url.com search in Google. For instance, check out the below for Gorilla 76. Pay attention to the green highlights.

2013-10-31_17-34-24

As you can see, Gorilla is north of 400 pages. So according to the stat from HubSpot Lead Generation Lessons from 4,000 Businesses, 2011, we’re positioned for success and getting stronger with each page we create.

3. 52% of marketers cite difficulties in accurately measuring ROI as their biggest source of frustration in social marketing

Marketers have always struggled with proving ROI. Especially in days of old. But today, with the web, everything is trackable and measurable. More than ever, in fact. If you fall into the 52% of marketers that have a difficulty accurately measuring your return on investment, you really should check out our guide to measuring online marketing ROI. Click here to download. It’s free.

This stat is from Adobe.

4. 79% of marketing leads never convert into sales; lack of lead nurturing is the common cause of this poor performance

Sales and marketing. The eternal tug-of-war, it seems. Marketing says sales doesn’t do anything with the leads provided. Sales says the leads provided are junk. Both groups like to butt heads. But today, this simply isn’t permissible. Sales and marketing must work together. Implementing a strong lead nurturing effort should be at the top of their list.

Now, what’s lead nurturing? It’s exactly what it sounds like – it’s nurturing leads through the buying process. It can take a traditional format like following up on phone calls and meetings as prompted by a CRM like Salesforce or Highrise. Or it can take the shape of an automate email drip campaign that gets activated the minute a potential customer submits a form on your site. In order for this to work, email marketing automation is a necessity.

Why nurture leads? In addition to the obvious, according to DemandGen Report, nurtured leads produce, on average, a 20% increase in sales opportunities versus non-nurtured leads. The takeaway? Nurture your leads. Pure and simple.

5. Relevant emails drive 18 times more revenue than broadcast emails

By now, the year 2013, more than likely, you’ve got an email marketing campaign in place. And you’re certainly on the receiving end of some. But, as a marketer, are you simply mass sending marketing messages with little to no list segmentation?

If so, there’s a huge opportunity for improvement. Email marketing continues to be a very popular and effective means of marketing communication, but only if it’s done right. This stat, provided by Jupiter Research, should encourage you to get it right. Check out this blog post my business partner wrote about automated email marketing.

Now, how can you fix what’s broken with your industrial marketing?

The above stats are great. But simply reading them won’t cure what ails you. How can you make adjustments to your online marketing strategy? Comment below to share your thoughts. We’re all ears. If you’re ready to learn more about what industrial marketing can look like powered by Hubspot, download the guide below.

The benefits of B2B blogging


The Internet is here. As of 2012, Google processed more than 5 billion searches per day worldwide. People constantly forage for information that can feed their business and personal needs and will willingly wander their way into your website if it’s full of fruitful information. Even better, if you continually stock it with tasty treats, they’ll keep coming back and eventually become loyal clients and customers. Here’s how it works.

B2B blogging and the modern shopping process

Since the advent of the Internet, the modern shopping process has changed dramatically. B2B shoppers now complete 57 percent of the B2B buying process before ever contacting a salesperson, according to a joint study conducted by the CEB Marketing Leadership Council and Google in Feb. 2013.

Stop. Take a step back. That is an astonishing statistic. For the first time in human history, the B2B business leader is finding products and services for her company by sitting down and typing search terms into a search engine.

B2B buyers want to know what they’re buying, and they want to research products and see what others think of those products. They discuss buying decisions internally and search the Internet to learn more about the products or services their companies need.

SEO – Help potential clients find your business

Let’s dive a little deeper into the numbers. 60 percent of searchers click on the top three results that Google shows them, according to MarketingSherpa, and 75 percent don’t even scroll to the second page of results, according to marketsharehitslink.com.

Your site must rank well (for the right terms) to pull in those hungry B2B purchasers scavenging for morsels of information. Luckily for you, regularly blogging can positively impact both your site’s search rank and your site’s customer conversion rate.

Let’s pour the creamy queso on the whole statistical enchilada. According to Hubspot, as of 2010, companies that blogged earned 97 percent more inbound links than companies that didn’t blog. A seasoned search engine optimizer (SEO) will tell you that Google uses the quantity and quality of inbound links as a major ranking factor for websites. According to Hubspot, 92 percent of companies that blog multiple times a day acquired a customer through their blog, 82 percent of marketers who blog once per day acquired a customer using their blog, and 57 percent of marketers who blog monthly acquired a customer through their blog.

Even blogging just once a month can bring you customers.

What’s the bottom line? Blog. Blog regularly and pack your posts full of useful information that leads people to buy your products or services.

You’re an industry expert, let the world know

The Internet churns out industry experts each day as their delicious content satisfies hungry readers. When you see experts on talk shows and listen to them on the radio, you may be surprised by how many of them got there by regularly blogging. The Internet has given everyone a loudspeaker, and the more you blog, the louder your loudspeaker.

The official marketing lingo for this is “reach.” It’s like being in St. Louis and having someone ask you where you went to high school. All it takes is one question to glean reams of information about a person or organization – “what is your reach?” Reach sums up the size of your audience when you add up the number of readers consuming content on your blog, Facebook, Twitter and all the other social networks you use as publishing platforms. The size of the audience consuming your content separates you as an expert from the hordes of knowledgeable but unknown workers and businesses. And having expertise makes you and your business valuable.

As you blog and reach more and more people, you build credibility in your industry as a thought leader, both individually and as a company. When your blog provides insightful information, you gain trust from your audience and begin to build a relationship with your readers. Those relationships lead to success in your business.

B2B blogging for sales leads – the good stuff

So now that you’ve read the blogging-for-blogging reasons to blog, here’s the Christmas ham, the Thanksgiving turkey, the Easter egg, the… I could go all day on these… the number one, most important reason you should run a B2B blog. Sales leads.

Your hard-working website and bakery-fresh, aromatically arousing blog exists above all else to generate sales leads for your business. Because you market a B2B company that focusses primarily on securing large accounts, you don’t need many leads to make blogging pay off for you, in fact, you probably only need one sale.

According to Hubspot, 43 percent of marketers in 2013 generated a customer via their blog, while blogging accounted for only 7 percent of their total marketing budget. Conversely, only 20 percent of B2B companies without a blog reported any ROI from other inbound marketing – social media for example. Blogging is the number one most important component of an inbound marketing strategy.

So, how do you turn blog readers into clients? Lead generation. It’s a blogging sin to create an insightful post, full of useful information, and fail to place a relevant “call-to-action” (CTA) in the article. CTAs direct readers to download a longer content piece, such as a whitepaper, in exchange for a name and email address. Businesses nurture those leads with follow-up emails that contain even more insightful information and requests for the reader to connect with the company.

Paying off your blogging investment

Your business blog can hum along as a lead-generating machine, but to start its engine, you’ll need a sound strategy and to-the-point tactics. Get your blog running at full speed. Click below to download and read our business blogging guide.

B2B marketing: What I learned at B2B Rising

Last week, I attended the B2B Rising Event at the Four Seasons Hotel in downtown St. Louis. I didn’t really know what to expect. To be honest, I was a bit reluctant to go.

It was a full day out of the office. I hate sitting in one place all day. The Cardinals were starting their 2013 playoff campaign in the afternoon.

The excuses were as plentiful as Carlos Beltran postseason home runs. And I’m kind of the Senor Octubre of signing up for things, and then at the last minute, buried by work, skipping them. Or asking someone else from the office to go.

But just as easy as these excuses are easy to make, so is manufacturing missed opportunities. So I went. And I’m glad I did. Lots of learnings. Here are a few of them.

IT folks are running B2B marketing programs…say what?

So the word “around the water cooler” is that many B2B-focused companies task their IT departments with executing their web-marketing. Notice I didn’t say “setting up”. I said “executing”.

Say it ain’t so.

This is equivalent to Walter White teaching English.

IT readership, don’t take this the wrong way. Nothing but love. I’m simply saying you’re not trained marketers. Which you’re not. Just like we’re not trained network guys. It’s not fair to task the IT crew with executing web-marketing. Web-marketing is a job for web-marketers. And a very important one at that.

IT and marketing – please, don’t get the two mixed up.

Pay attention to what Kathy Button-Bell is doing

Kathy was the opening speaker at the day-long event. She’s the Chief Marketing Officer for Emerson. While all the presenters were great (and I really mean that – very impressive lineup that delivered above lofty expectations), Kathy’s presentation really hit home.

And while her presentation was loaded with valuable information and stats about marketing leadership and innovation, I think what inspired me most about what she discussed was that she “got it”. She talked measurement. She talked goal-driven social media. She talked about bridging marketing and sales.

As we know, in the B2C environment, there are many renowned marketing innovators and big ad agencies. But these thought leaders are a little harder to find in the B2B space. Kathy is one that needs to be on your radar. Pay attention to what she’s doing and then replicate. Or at least try.

Here’s a promo video for the event where Kathy talks a bit about what she and the event would be covering.

In B2B marketing, focus on the metrics that matter

Anyone who has ever logged into Google Analytics or uses marketing automation software like Hubspot, knows that there’s now more data at your fingertips than ever before. Which is great. Until you drown in it.

It’s really important to know what your goals are and report accordingly. Is your website driving leads or on-site conversions? Is your email marketing leading to a spike in sales? Are you gathering good lead intelligence? Because that’s what you need to know and that’s what you need to be able to report at your monthly marketing meetings. Trust us – the boss cares much more about that kind of data than pages viewed, bounce rate, new visitor %, etc.

My business partner actually wrote a really great post about this. Check it out here.

B2B marketers, coexist with sales and HR and IT and…

We preach often about the importance of sales and marketing being on the same page. But company integration doesn’t stop there. In modern marketing, lines are blurred more now than ever. In order for an online marketing campaign to really take shape, the marketing department must not only get on the same page as the sales team, but they also have to be in sync with HR, IT, senior management, etc.

Silos must be destroyed. Partnerships and coalitions must be made.

As marketers, we must realize that today we have a “seat at the table” that is better and more prominent than ever before. It’s our job to make sure we show up and take that seat. And deliver sales-driven impact while sitting in it.

Focus on hiring the right talent, not training the wrong

If you can write, you can work. That’s one of the big takeaways I got from the BMA event. And this is especially true in B2B marketing and content marketing.

Nearly every speaker at B2B rising was a trained journalist. And nearly every speaker focused on the importance of the ability to communicate via the written word.

At Gorilla 76, more than half of our people (okay, small sample size I know – but there are six of us now) are Mizzou journalism majors. We take the written word seriously. You should too. It’s crucial for success in modern web-marketing.

The four Ps still exist…kind of

No, we’re not going to tell you that your five-figure college education was a waste. Or that $1.75 in late charges from the local library (said in my best Will Hunting voice) went to waste. The basics of marketing are much still the same. Like everything though, they’ve just changed a bit.

Instead of product, we must now focus on the solution that a product provides. Instead of place, we must focus on the access to the product at hand. Instead of price, we must highlight value. And instead of promotion, it’s all about education. The basics of the four Ps are still intact. They’ve just grown up a bit.

Branding still matters

With the rise of inbound marketing and sales-driven marketing, it’s easy to lose sight of the stuff that marketers clinched to so tightly for so many years. That stuff – from strong branding to creative print marketing and tradeshow displays – still matters. In fact, it’s always mattered and always will matter (going out on a limb here). Just because you use marketing automation software or have a strong inbound strategy in place, doesn’t mean you can be careless with your brand.

The reason? Emotion. Before you continue, check out this campaign from Grainger.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OoX0nG4lzI&list=PLzGQz6MjmcZLbAHNNYjtxYH5lWNuEd0bK

With B2B purchases – which are often really big purchases and/or relationships – a huge investment is at hand, whether monetary or resources allocated. Thus an emotional connection is relied upon. Personal risk is involved with these purchases. Reputation and maybe even a job are on the line. And while a company is making the purchase, it’s still really important to appeal to the person at the company making a purchase. While this is marketing 101, you have to have the foundation set before you can hammer out the highrise.

One more learning…

Attend the next BMA St. Louis event. You’ll be inspired if you do. There’s good stuff happening in this town.

 

A website redesign will not solve your problems

website rfp alternative

99% of our discussions with prospective clients about website design follow an eerily similar trajectory:
Them: “We’re looking to redesign our website.”
Us: “Why?”
Them: ” Our site is really outdated and just doesn’t look professional.”

OK, fair enough. Let’s get that fixed. But first, I have some pretty important news for you. There’s a bigger problem at work here and it has nothing to do with graphic design or fancy copywriting. The real problem is this:

Your website is not a business development tool

If this isn’t the case for you, congrats. You’re doing something right and you don’t need to spend your next ten minutes reading this blog post. But if it rings true, let’s temporarily put your concerns about aesthetics aside because this conversation should be about marketing strategy.

A website redesign will not solve your problems

It just won’t. It might be an exciting undertaking. It might draw some “oooohs” and “ahhhhs”. But it won’t bring you new customers – at least not all by itself. So hold tight on sending that website RFP.

A website needs something much more powerful surrounding it to thrive as a new business tool: an online business development ecosystem.

The online business development ecosystem

The fundamentals of business development in an online setting differ very little from those of traditional settings. The problem is, companies fear the technology hurdle associated with the online space and choose to stay away. The result? Missed opportunity. The truth of the matter is that, other than the technology itself, nothing here is fundamentally new or unique. Let’s use a classic business development venue – the trade show – to compare the online to the traditional.

Traditional business development

Before you invest in a trade show (floor space, booth design, travel expenses, meals, cost of labor, etc.), you invest some energy into carefully choosing the right show to attend. You need a targeted audience, present in a high-enough volume to justify the spend. When you arrive, you don’t set up your newly-designed booth and head back to your hotel room for the day, leaving it unattended. You instead staff it with sales professionals who engage visitors. You fill the booth with information and takeaways that help visitors make buying decisions. And most importantly, you don’t let them walk away before you’ve collected business cards. After the show, the work continues as your sales team calls on new leads, nurtures the relationships and develops opportunities to close sales.

The trade show business development strategy is pretty simple – a tried and true investment for many, many companies over the course of many, many years. Now, here’s where I’m going with this. If the trade show was a success, and you left with a pocket full of new leads, to what do you attribute that success? The fancy booth design? No, I don’t think so.

Now let’s shift back online.

Online business development

Think of your website as your online trade show booth.

Your website is a piece of a bigger system. It’s written to attract your ideal customers through Google searches as a booth might attract visitors at a trade show. It’s filled with valuable content for them to consume when they arrive – content like case studies and buyers guides that help influence their buying decisions. It’s staffed with lead-capture forms rather than employees. And because you’re content is so compelling, your visitors have no problem handing over some contact information in exchange for the content. When they fill out those forms, their contact info is automatically dropped into your marketing database – not so different from a business card dropped into the pocket of a salesman. Your marketing automation system helps you nurture your leads through their buying process with email drip campaigns, further educating them and moving them closer to buying decisions. And when they’re primed to buy, your real, live sales team steps in to close them as customers, just as they would in the traditional environment.

This online business development ecosystem is no different in theory from any traditional lead development infrastructure that’s ever existed. It’s built to mirror your sales process, but it has the added powers of increasing lead volume and strengthening your ability to attend to prospects throughout their buying process.

So I don’t need a website redesign?

OK – that’s a bold statement. I know. You may very well need just that. But without the infrastructure in place for an all-encompassing, online business development strategy, your website is like that empty trade show booth. If you send out that website RFP and invest in a redesign with the expectation of results, the surrounding ecosystem cannot be neglected.

Here’s what you do need

I’ll conclude by leaving you with the essential components of the online business development ecosystem and the functions served by each. Build this infrastructure and prepare to reap the benefits.

Business blog

Functions:

  • Attract your target audience to your website through keyword-driven blog posts, rooted in research around what your customers seek in Google searches
  • Educate your audience in a way that provides value
  • Drive visitors to important pages on your website that will help them make a buying decision

Website

Functions:

  • Continue educating and providing value
  • Create opportunity for dialogue with prospects through lead-capture landing pages

Marketing database

Functions:

  • Record and track information on leads captured through your website
  • Segment these leads by demographics, actions taken on your site and engagement with your company
  • Automatically score leads base on these criteria

Automated email marketing system

Function:

  • Trigger automated email drip campaigns based on lead segments and lead scores
  • Bring leads back to your website by promoting valuable content you have to offer

CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system

Functions:

  • Communicate with marketing database to place the best leads in front of your sales team
  • Record interactions with open sales leads

If you’re interested in talking about your own online business development ecosystem, we’d love to set up a free consultation with you. Click below to get started.

What to look for in a web marketing agency

what to look for in web marketing agency

Some pitches are fruitful, some aren’t. But frequently, we’re being invited to pitch our industrial marketing services because someone else isn’t doing their job (“someone else” being the web marketing agency of record). In fact, all too frequently this is the case.

For us, this is a great thing – as it leads to new opportunities, new relationships and new business. But for the industry, it’s a travesty. Try being the agency who has to go in after the dust settles from the past-relationship-gone-bad. It ain’t fun. Not because the potential client is mean or unruly or fire-breathing. More because they now have doubt in the profession and are generally wary (as they should be) of everything we preach.

That sucks.

Your web marketing agency must have experience

The first thing you need to consider is the experience of the agencies in the running. We’re not talking length of resumes or the impressiveness of a LinkedIn profile. We’re talking real-world, hands-on, web marketing experience. This is very important. In particular, they should have experience relevant to YOUR company. For example, at Gorilla 76 we’ve specialized in industrial marketing (in fact, we wrote the complete guide to industrial marketing).

As we all know, the idea of the ad agency isn’t a new one – anyone who’s seen Mad Men knows that. But while Don Draper can write the heck out of a giant piece of body copy or craft the perfect print headline, what would he know about interface design, effective use of hashtags, a strong CMS (content management system) or building an effective website? Well it’s your job to find out. And it’s your job to stay away from the traditional agency that now labels itself as a digital shop because their existence depends upon it.

Questions to ask include:

  1. How many clients have you provided digital services for?
  2. How many clients are you currently the web marketing agency of record for?
  3. What CMSs are you comfortable with?
  4. Tell me about how you market your brand?
  5. Do you practice what you preach?
  6. What focus do you put on on-site conversions, lead generation and lead nurturing?
  7. Do you use marketing automation software?
  8. What makes you different?

In fewer words, if they don’t have experience, don’t give them a chance. Unless you want to be the brand they learn on of course. If that’s the case, you’re a better person than me.

Your web marketing agency must be sales oriented

Long gone are the days of the brochure site. Or, at least they should be. Today, so much is possible on the web. Marketing automation works hard to link marketing and sales, and the data and analytics and insights into your audience that are readily available from your site will make your head swim. It can all be overwhelming. And that’s why we believe it’s your agency’s job to help you through the process of it all.

Questions to ask include:

  1. Do you have experience with marketing automation? If so, what software platform do you prefer?
  2. How can you help us bridge the gap between our sales department and our marketing department?
  3. Do you have experience in list segmentation?
  4. What’s your philosophy on strong lead nurturing practices?
  5. What role does content marketing play in your typical strategy? What about SEO and keyword exploration/implementation?

Qualifying whether or not a web marketing agency is sales oriented is a very important step. It’s often what will determine if your marketing is going to work hard for you, or hardly work.

Creativity matters at a good web marketing agency

Do they value creativity? This will be apparent from the moment you visit their site. While a trophy case of awards isn’t needed (at Gorilla, we don’t apply for them), it’s important that they value strong creative. In fact, it’s really, really important that they value strong creative. Doing such will help create a brand to which consumers can relate. This is the foundation of a personable brand and the beginning of a positive brand experience.

Questions to ask include:

  1. Who will be my designer?
  2. Who will be my writer?
  3. Will I have direct access to them?
  4. What is your philosophy on effective design?
  5. How does web design differ from other forms of design?
  6. How do you approach on-site conversion path design?
  7. How does good creative translate to increased sales?

Happy clients

Any digital agency worth their monthly retainer has a list of clients (past and current) that will vouch for them. After all, in today’s space, as an agency, you can prove your worth. Things are measurable. Results are real. Clients are happy – or at least they should be.

Make it a point to request references of at least three happy clients that are of a service offering or business model similar to yours. Don’t worry about intruding, it’s your money. If they want it bad enough, they’ll be more than happy to provide names, phone numbers and email addresses. Note: if you notice that your contact at the agency has the same last name as one of the references, beware.

Questions to ask the “happy clients” include:

  1. How have they been to work with?
  2. What was their process like and how involved were you in that process?
  3. Were they timely?
  4. Were they on-budget?
  5. How has technical support been post launch?
  6. How was the actual team you worked with?
  7. Were/are they involved on an ongoing basis? Why/why not?
  8. At ANY point, did they recommend a Flash intro?
  9. Would you hire them again?
  10. Was their focus on improving your bottom line?

Accountability of the web marketing agency

As we’ve mentioned time and time and time again, one of the best things about the modern marketing world is the level of accountability and measurability that is now possible. If you hire a PPC (pay-per-click) or SEO (search engine optimization) company, and they guarantee more traffic, well, there are hard numbers that they can, and should, provide you detailing the bang of your buck. And this isn’t something they should share once or twice, it’s an ongoing effort that you should be seeing regularly.

Furthermore, don’t just fall for the trick where they sign you up for Google Analytics and call it a day. It’s their job to make sure you not only understand these findings, but that there is a plan in place moving forward to adjust messaging, content, navigation, etc.

Questions to ask agencies in the running include:

  1. What are your thoughts on measuring?
  2. How often will I get statistics and findings in regard to our online efforts?
  3. When evaluating a site’s performance, what three metrics do you find most valuable and why?
  4. Describe how you’ll measure any other initiatives we hire you for, including Facebook, Twitter, enewsletter, etc.
  5. If you don’t do what you promise us you’ll do, can we terminate the agreement at any time?
  6. How do you evaluate your work?

Transparency

Transparency is almost a buzzword now. Companies are always told they should be transparent. People are told to be transparent. But what does that really mean? How is that applied to your website vendor?

A web marketing agency should be transparent in all of its dealings. They should be very open from the get-go about billing, how they work, who EXACTLY will be working on your project and quite a bit more.

If they’re not, or they’re not willing to share such intel, I’d be leery. After all, in today’s web space, there really aren’t any proprietary processes. Instead, there are simply people who know how to actually execute such best practices and commit to them.

Questions to ask include:

  1. Who is my team, will I have access to them and how often will I meet with them?
  2. How does billing work and what are your payment terms?
  3. Describe your process in short.
  4. How long will this project take?
  5. What are YOUR goals with this initiative?

“Beerability”

Last, but not least, how’s their “beerability”, meaning, are they the type of people with which you’d actually want to work and with which you’d want to enjoy an after-work drink? While this might sound foolish, it’s certainly very important. Will they understand your company culture, etcetera? Will you actually like hanging out with them if you have to spend time with them, or are you going to dread every meeting you ever have? If the latter, mark my words, the work and your brand will suffer.

Hope this helps. Look for a more in-depth piece about how to hire a digital marketing agency soon. And feel free to reach out to us if you have inquiries about what the answers to any of the above should be. We’re here to help.

Should you hire a marketing agency or an in-house marketing guy?

in-house-vs-marketing-agency

In an ideal world, you hire both. But maybe that’s not an option. If you CAN do both, hire someone with a business background in house to work WITH your marketing agency. Let that person sit in your executive meetings and develop marketing strategy that aligns with the company’s goals. And then let that person work with the agency to execute the plan. If you’re forced to choose between one or the other, we firmly believe you should choose the agency. Here’s why.

A marketing agency has a variety of skill sets

The in-house person probably has a business background. Maybe an MBA, or maybe not. Regardless, he or she is a strategy person. His or her job is to learn the market and develop a plan, and then go spread your brand message, gain awareness and capture leads. Great. But when it’s time to strengthen your website, develop advertising, interact daily on multiple social media channels, design an email campaign, etc, etc, how’s it going to get done? In PowerPoint? Or maybe Microsoft Word?

When you hire an agency, you get much more. That includes the strategy person (or people) with the business background, but also graphic designers, writers, web developers and social media gurus. You also get all the systems they’ve put in place that have worked successfully for other companies. Instead of paying for the time of one person to do one thing, you’re enlisting a team of experienced professionals who can do it all.

Learn how to grow your business online.

Our free Industrial Marketing Guide will show you how to attract qualified website visitors, convert them into real leads and nurture them through the buying process.

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It makes sense financially

Let’s say you have a $75K annual budget. What do you get with the in-house guy? A $75K employee with that one skill set, payroll taxes, benefits, office space, a computer, a smart phone and supplies to support them.

What do you get with the marketing agency on the other hand? $75K allocated to the development of a plan, followed by the creative execution of ads, website content, social media content, email content, and the tools to measure and evaluate the success of it all. You pay no payroll taxes or benefits on that agency, and they have their own hardware, software and office space.

Creativity is invaluable

The MBA brings a lot of incredibly valuable knowledge and insight to the table. But in most cases, that knowledge needs to be translated in a way that speaks to your customer. That’s where the agency comes in. If the agency is any good, they come to the table with knowledge and insights too. They understand that the purpose of your marketing communications are to brand your business with a message that supports your company’s goals while generating and nurturing leads. The difference is that a good marketing agency is full of creative minds that are prepared to craft targeted messaging and design buttoned-up communication pieces to distribute that message.

I won’t make the argument that an in-house marketing position isn’t valuable. As I said in the first paragraph, both are ideal. But if you’re faced with the decision, really evaluate the possible return on your investment and I think you’ll see the extra edge brought to the table by an experienced industrial marketing agency vs. an individual. Follow this link for the complete guide to industrial marketing.

Automated email marketing: leave no prospect unattended

Automated email marketing workflows

In the B2B world, many of us experience times where we’re too busy with the daily grind to focus on bigger picture business development. At Gorilla, we’re certainly not immune to this. Sometimes a handful of prospects wind up unattended because there just isn’t enough time to pursue them all or determine which are the right opportunities. And when we DO give the necessary attention to “hot” leads, there’s often no time remaining for the others. So what’s the answer?

This blog post is about one of our favorite solutions to this dilemma – automated email workflows. This is also the first in a series of posts about marketing automation – a concept that we believe is the future of marketing.

What’s an email workflow?

In short, an email workflow is a series of automated, pre-written emails triggered when a prospect takes a specific action on your website or meets a predetermined criteria in your marketing database.

Let’s look at an example to help illustrate what this means and why it’s valuable.

Example email workflow

Let’s say you’re a supplier of some kind of industrial equipment and your website has 2 different contact forms:

  1. Request a bid
  2. Download our Buyer’s Guide

And let’s say in a given week, you receive three “request a bid” submissions, but 15 Buyer’s Guide downloads.

In this scenario, those requesting a bid are the priority leads, right? They’re asking you about providing a service to them right now. The Buyer’s Guide downloaders on the other hand might still be researching and exploring options. They’re less ready to buy at this moment in time.

While you’d love to address every interested prospect personally, your business development time is limited. This week, it’s eaten up writing proposals for those three hot leads. So what happens to those 15 Buyer’s Guide downloaders? They might not be asking for a bid at this very moment, but they’ve certainly expressed enough interest to become potential customers in the foreseeable future.

This is where email workflows come into the picture.

A carefully constructed email workflow might look like this:

  • A prospect searches for your product or service in Google and stumbles across a page on your site.
  • He visits your site, reads a few pages and informative blog posts, and eventually clicks your call-to-action “Download our Buyer’s Guide”.
  • He’s taken to a page with a form, asking him for his name, company, email address, phone number and industry in exchange for the guide. He fills out the form and hits the “submit” button.
  • He immediately receives an automated, pre-written email that includes an attached Buyer’s Guide PDF, a thank you note, and links to a few informative blog posts on your company website.
  • Seven days later, he gets another automated email with a link to a case study documenting services you provided for a client similar to him.
  • A week after that, he receives yet a 3rd automated email, asking if he’d like to set up a consultation phone call.
  • He responds to set up a call with you, and you begin dialogue with a prospective customer that may have otherwise been left unattended.
  • In the meantime, the same automated workflow has been triggered for the remainder of those 15 Buyer’s Guide downloaders as well.

Just scratching the surface

The concept of automated workflows extends far beyond the example I used above, and even beyond email marketing. With the assistance of a smart marketing automation software like the one we implement for our clients, there are many workflow applications that strengthen your prospecting efforts. A few more examples follow:

  • Once a visitor returns to your website for the 3rd time (a sign of engagement), trigger an “engaged” leads email workflow.
  • When previous website visitors haven’t returned to your site in more than a month, trigger a “re-engagement”  workflow.
  • When a visitor indicates through a form on your website that she is a member of a key industry, trigger a workflow written specifically for her industry. And when another visitor indicates he’s part of another industry, trigger a different workflow targeting his industry.

Aren’t workflows an excuse for laziness?

Not at all. Email workflows are by no means a replacement for real dialogue with a human being. Rather, they exist to help you manage leads during the early stages of their buying processes – before they’re ready to have a conversation, and while you’re making 1-on-1 contact with others.

When you commit to a lead-generation marketing program for your company, you’ll inevitably begin seeing prospects come through the door at a higher rate. And when these new prospects begin piling up in your marketing database, staying on top of them all becomes difficult. Email workflows are there to support your sales efforts by mirroring your lead-nurturing process in an efficient way and leaving no prospect unattended.

Let’s talk about marketing automation

If you’re interested in a conversation about marketing automation for your company, sign up for a free assessment. We’d love to talk.

B2B lead scoring and lead qualification

 

b2b lead scoring and lead qualification
A smart B2B website is designed to fill the sales funnel with leads. But when website lead generation starts working, data overload can set in. Your sales team can quickly become overwhelmed with the quantity of leads on the table and the challenge of approaching them all. So how can you help them pinpoint the leads worth pursuing?

This article is about implementing an automated lead-scoring system based on predetermined criteria, so you can evaluate which leads are ready for the sales process, which need more nurturing, and which don’t fit the bill at all. With this information in hand, your sales team – as big or small as it might be – can prioritize its time pursuing the best opportunities, while letting an automated marketing campaign simultaneously tend to the rest.

Segmenting leads by more than demographics

The information we can gather about leads captured on a B2B website now transcends simple demographics (industry, geography, job title, etc.). Today we have the ability to answer more insightful, behavioral questions about specific visitors, such as:

  • How did they first discover you?
  • Did they come and go quickly? Or did they dig around on your site for 20 minutes?
  • Did they view your pricing page?
  • What blog posts or services pages captured their interest the most?
  • Have they opened the marketing emails you’ve sent them? What content in those emails did they click?

All of these bits of data are useful in their own way, but when you’re dealing with tens or hundreds of leads and a small sales team, the data needs to be harnessed to avoid paralysis in your sales process.

Enter lead scoring.

The purpose of lead scoring is to apply predetermined criteria about what defines a good lead to every new contact that comes in through your website. What results are manageable buckets of leads, marked as “qualified”, “maybe qualified” or “not qualified”. From here, actionable steps can take shape. Of course, to even start lead scoring you’ll need a website that’s built to attract and convert potential leads. Designing your own lead scoring system

Defining who you want to buy your products directs your whole lead-scoring strategy. When you can very specifically describe the traits of your ideal customer, it’s easy to assign points to good leads and bad leads.

So your first step is to answer the following questions for yourself:

  • What industries are you targeting?
  • How big is your ideal customer’s company? 10 people? 100? 50,000?
  • Who at the company are you trying to reach? A purchasing agent? A project manager? The CEO?
  • What products or services do your ideal customers typically seek?
  • What are the biggest business pains these people experience?

Answers to these kinds of questions form the makeup of a qualified lead for your business. So if you can successfully collect this information from website visitors, you can score them accordingly.

Collecting information through a lead generation-centric website

We recently wrote a blog post about gathering intelligence on website leads and this topic is explained in much greater depth there. But the general idea follows.

If your website has been strategically architected as a B2B lead-generation tool, it’s much more than a brochure for your company. Instead, it’s a resource filled with valuable content that provides utility for your audience. Keyword-targeted blog posts attract a specific audience from search engines. Strategically-written calls-to-action throughout the site prompt visitors to download free white papers, case studies, buyer’s guides and other resources. And visitors are asked to “pay” for this content by providing bits of information about themselves that answer the previously-posed questions. This information is in turn added to their profile in your marketing database, and the lead scoring can begin.

Automating the lead-scoring process

At Gorilla, we streamline the lead-scoring process by integrating a marketing-automation software called Hubspot. This software lets our clients integrate their website forms directly into their marketing database. Once website visitors have answered questions and provided demographic information, we’re able to track their activity on the site and store that data in their profile.

We’re at work for our clients developing blog content and white papers, designing and implementing lead capture pages, and nurturing contacts through email marketing. A marketing-automation system is simultaneously busy filtering through data on new leads, assigning points to them, and grouping them into “qualified”, “maybe qualified and “not qualified” buckets. Our clients take these filtered buckets of qualified leads and follow up to turn them into face-to-face interactions and real customers.

It sounds complicated

This idea of lead scoring might sound intimidating, but it’s not as complicated as it might seem. Whether you’d consider implementing a marketing-automation software now, later or never, it’s worth understanding what an incredibly huge asset this can be for both your marketing and sales processes. Let’s look at an example.

A real-life example of automated lead scoring

At Gorilla, we’ve practiced what we preach when it comes to lead scoring. Below are examples pulled from our own marketing-automation software that illustrate how we’ve assigned points to leads.

Lead scoring by demographic information

Because at Gorilla we work best with industrial companies (we wrote the complete guide to industrial marketing), below we’ve assigned 50 points to anyone who has indicated in a website form that his or her business fits into any of the following industries: Architecture, Engineering, Construction, Industrial Services, Manufacturing, or Real Estate and Development. These 50 points are also assigned to any leads who we manually mark as being a part of one of these industries.

Simultaneously, for anyone who has indicated they’re in the marketing industry or a student, we’ve deducted 2000 points. Note that this doesn’t mean we don’t want them as followers! Rather, our lead-scoring system is designed to flag those visitors who might be ideal customers.

b2b lead scoring

Lead scoring by interests

Because the primary service we offer at Gorilla 76 is a full-service marketing retainer, we want to flag anyone who indicates an interest in exactly that. Our website forms therefore ask visitors if they’re interested in such a retainer (as oppose to a website build or other services) and assign 200 points if so.

automated lead scoring

Lead scoring by level of engagement on our website

Moving beyond demographics, we assign points to leads based on their engagement on our website. Below, we assign points when visitors have returned to our site 4 or more times, and also when they’ve viewed 5 or more pages. Our marketing-automation system is able to track any specific visitor’s activity moving forward as long as he or she at some point in time filled out a form on our website.

scoring leads

Similarly, we assign points for engagement based on whether or not a lead has opened and clicked links in our marketing emails.

sales lead scoring

Lead scoring by specific actions taken

While engagement is a great way to measure interest, we also pinpoint specific actions taken by website visitors that help identify their needs. Here, we assign points when a visitor downloads one of our white papers or subscribes to our newsletter.

b2b lead grading

The end product: lists of segmented leads

In the end – once our automated lead-scoring system has done its work – we’re left with manageable, segmented lists of leads. Anyone with a lead score of 100 or higher is automatically dumped into our “marketing qualified” list. As you can see below, this list is made up of 63 people – a very manageable number.

scoring and segmenting leads

Our final step is to manually sort through this “marketing qualified” list and mark the best leads as “sales qualified”. We’ll contact them directly. The rest we leave in this “marketing qualified” list and trigger automated email workflows to continue nurturing them until they’re more primed to make a buying decision.

Automated lead scoring is just one aspect of making your website a business tool. For the complete, 28-page guide to developing your business online, download our Tactical Guide to Industrial Lead Generation.

 

How to gather intelligence on website leads

How to gather intelligence on website leads

Contact forms have been feeding on information since the dinosaur days of the Internet. Their purpose? To let interested visitors get in touch with you on their own accord. This has long been a starting point for conversation with business prospects in the B2B world. But today, forms can take on a powerful, new role when built around a smart strategy: mining lead intelligence.

This article is about gathering fundamental demographic and behavioral information – not only about your contact page submitters, but also your newsletter subscribers, case study requesters, bid seekers and white paper downloaders. Acquiring this information can help you market yourself and sell to your client base more effectively.

How website lead intelligence is gathered

At Gorilla, we use inbound marketing software for our clients to build profiles of their prospects. When a website visitor takes a form-submitting action like subscribing to a newsletter, downloading a white paper or case study, or requesting a bid, a profile for that person is automatically created in their marketing database.

Simultaneously, our client’s website sends a little piece of data to the visitor’s web browser, telling it to remember that visitor next time he or she returns. Moving forward, any information submitted through another website form is also added to that person’s profile. Useful, but pretty straightforward, right?

Well, here’s where it gets a little bit more interesting.

In addition to information volunteered through form submissions, ongoing data about that visitor’s actions on the website will now be documented within their profile. This information includes:

  • What Google keyword search originally brought them to their website
  • What specific pages they viewed
  • Time spent on those pages
  • How much time has passed since their last visit
  • How many marketing emails they’ve opened
  • Which links they clicked in those emails

Before long, the data paints an insightful picture and shows the sales team the strongest online leads in the system. This intelligence magnifies pain points of visitors, which in turn sets the stage for more customized and compelling sales calls.

A lead intelligence example case

What follows are real screenshots from our own marketing database that showcase intelligence we gathered about a lead captured on our website. For the privacy of this person, we’ve blurred certain data fields.

Demographic information gathered via form submission

The first form-submitting action this visitor took on our website was her download of our marketing manual called “Measuring Online Marketing ROI”. In exchange for the free guide, we asked for the following information, which we then added to her new marketing profile in our database.

intelligence from website leads

Because we specialize in marketing for industrial companies at Gorilla 76, we knew right off the bat this is a potentially good fit for us. She’s a marketing coordinator at a company in the building and construction industry – exactly the type of person we’d love to meet.

How she arrived on our site

Now that she’s entered our system, we can learn that she first discovered us on Facebook , where we promoted our blog post titled “Construction advertising in today’s business environment.”

website lead intelligence

Determining her level of engagement

At this point we can begin following her engagement on our website. We can see below that on April 17th she looked at a variety of pages on our site, notably our Web Marketing Audit page and our Pricing page. We might also note that these pageviews happened over a lengthy ,14-minute stretch – a good sign of engagement.

online lead intelligence

What we now know about this lead

Though the above screenshots are only a few of many interactions this person has had with our website and email campaigns, we’ve already answered the following questions – all critical in our sales process:

  • Industrial client? Check.
  • Potential decision maker? Check.
  • Interested in marketing that demonstrates ROI? Check.
  • Engaged in our website content? Check.
  • Familiar with our pricing? Check.
  • Explored our entry level services (Web Marketing Audit)? Check.

For ourselves (and many companies), this sort of information is incredibly valuable as we sort through our leads and determine which are ready to have a conversation about our offering.

When we enter that sales meeting, we also know a bit about the services they might seek and how much education they need on the value of our offering. And that’s probably a lot more than our competitor knows about them.

Let’s talk about a lead intelligence program for you

If you’re interested in having a conversation about a lead intelligence program for your company, sign up for our free marketing assessment. We’d love to talk.

This blog post is one in a series I’m currently writing on inbound marketing and marketing automation. For the others, click here.

Measuring marketing success: outcomes over tasks

outcomes tasks

We’ve begun a major shift at our agency in how we develop marketing strategy and plan campaigns for our clients.

This shift is all about moving from task-driven to outcome-driven marketing. In other words – constructing marketing plans not around a checklist of predetermined tasks, but rather an agenda of goal outcomes.

If you’re a B2B company considering an investment in online marketing services, which of the following sets of metrics would interest you more in the context of your marketing plan?

Metric set 1 (task-driven)

  • Number of blog posts written each month
  • Number of email blasts sent throughout the quarter
  • Number of Tweets Tweeted daily
  • Hours spent by agency per week

Or

Metric set 2 (outcome-driven)

  • Improvement in search engine rankings around important keywords
  • Percentage growth in website traffic
  • Number of new email addresses added to your marketing database
  • Number of inquiries for service received

The answer is a no-brainer

So why do marketing firms continue to measure the value of their services based on time spent and checklists of tasks completed? It’s because they’ve operated this way forever and they’re afraid of change. Marketing contracts have traditionally revolved around retainer hours or predetermined scopes of work. But in today’s business environment, these approaches are fundamentally flawed, particularly in the context of online marketing. Marketers today have more access to data than ever before. Results are at their fingertips. They can tell you what’s working and what’s not working.

It’s time for a mindset shift

In the end, what matters are results – outcomes that affect business growth and revenue. It’s time for a mindset shift around how scopes of work are defined. Rather than accepting your agency’s monthly task list of 5 blog posts, 50 Tweets and 3 emails blasts, challenge them to instead to drive 20% more traffic from Google for 5 important keywords, generate 20 more leads than last month from blog posts and re-engage 5 important prospects through your email marketing campaign. Then challenge them to flex their plan as needed in order to achieve those results. Encourage them to scour the data, learn and adjust. As you watch success unfold, you’ll never go back to that old task checklist gain.

Web design RFP: 5 essential questions to ask before sending

This article was written specifically for B2B companies preparing to send out an Request for Proposal (RFP) for a website build. It was written to challenge your thinking before heading down the long road of drafting the RFP, selecting an agency, overseeing the website build and being held accountable for the project’s success or failure.

How the web design RFP process usually plays out

At some point a light bulb goes on in the brain of someone in upper management. For one reason or another, he or she reaches the conclusion, “we need a new website”. And there’s a good chance that person is right. Unfortunately, what happens next is entirely wrong.

You’re instructed by the CEO or CMO to begin drafting the RFP and searching for agencies to which it can be sent. You begin asking friends, coworkers and colleagues if they know of any web design shops. Someone passes along their cousin’s son’s email address. Another person passes along the name of a freelancer that built her old company’s website seven years ago.

In the meantime, you begin frantically searching for RFP templates online and preparing to waste your next week putting together your own 10-20 page version full of legalize nonsense, sending it out to that cousin’s son, freelancer and some obscene number of other random agencies you discovered in a Google search. You’ll then spend the following two weeks attempting to evaluate the best candidate from a mess of answers to questions that weren’t really all that relevant in the first place. Whew!

Turn your website into a lead generation machine

Our free B2B Website Planning Handbook will help you strategize, plan and build a website that attracts qualified visitors and converts them into real leads.

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The website RFP is a broken process

A website design RFP is work for the sake of work – a massive drain of company time and resources. And it’s an ineffective method of finding the right agency for the job. More importantly, this process almost always begins before a company asks themselves some critically important business questions. We’ve boiled those questions down to five we believe are mandatory to answer before proceeding.

1. What is the single most important business problem that your new website is going to solve?

My mind is blown time after time after time during conversations with companies who have contacted US about a website rebuild, and they can’t even answer this question. They stumble over words.

Uhh… well… our current one is really outdated, so we need to look more innovative and modern.
Uhh… well… we need better SEO. I don’t really know how that stuff works, but we need it.
Uhh… well… our competitors just launched a new website and it looks really professional.

OK, great. But, again I ask: What is the single most important business problem that your new website is going to solve? Your answer should be echoed by your CEO, Director of Marketing, the agency you plan to hire and everyone at your company who will play a part in this job. And the answer should be more along the lines of “we want to increase leads by 50% over the course of the next year” or “we want to drive revenue from new customers up by 25%”. Looking professional and improved SEO are by-products of a new website worth paying for. Answer the higher level questions first. Shoot, you might even discover that a website build isn’t what you need to solve that business problem after all!

2. How exactly is a new website going to solve that problem for you?

NEWS FLASH: Fancy blinking banners and cute fonts ain’t gonna cut it. I promise you that much. Your website is a marketer and salesman alike. It’s there to generate business by attracting qualified visitors through search engines, validate your offering and convert visitors into leads that you can nurture and sell to when ready. You website will solve your business problems of lead generation and revenue growth when it’s designed to do these things. Don’t invest in the new website if it’s not planned with well-defined lead conversion paths and valuable, audience-centric content.

3. What additional marketing effort will be required to help solve my business problem(s)?

If your business goals include increasing lead volume and revenue, it’s unrealistic to think that launching a new website alone will accomplish these objectives in any significant way. It’s a first step – and an important one. But would a newly renovated brick and mortar store on a side street receive more foot traffic by default after that renovation? Sure, probably some. But not much without drawing some attention to it through advertising and some good reviews.

The point is that you need a marketing strategy in place during that website build. How will you attract qualified visitors to your newly renovated, lead-generation-ready website that you’ve built? Increasing the volume of qualified visitors to your site means more leads. More leads means more customers.

4. What are upper management’s expectations for the the results this website will generate?

This one is simple. It’s so critical to define these expectations before the job begins. When objectives come from up top, you can effectively guide your team and hired agency throughout the process with clear goals in mind.

5. How specifically will you measure success or failure?

Be specific. And then get buy off from those above you. If you’ve committed to answering the previous questions, you’ll already have clearly defined goals and objectives. So now you just need to put measurement systems in place. If increasing lead volume by 50% is your task as a marketer, set a benchmark for how much of that 50% should originate on your new website. You’ll need to measure leads captured through website forms and monitor analytics to learn what keyword searches in Google brought those qualified leads to your site in the first place.

A B2B website must be constantly growing and evolving. Ineffective content should be revisited. Effective content should be expanded and replicated. Gather intelligence, and use it to refine so you can accomplish those defined goals. If you’re interested in learning more about how to measure effectiveness, we recommend reading our guide Measuring Online Marketing Return on Investment.

So back to the whole RFP thing…

If you decide to go down the RFP route, be sure you’ve identified the project’s intended effect on your business. Know what those above you are trying to accomplish and build your strategy accordingly. Downloading our B2B website planning guide should help you identify specific goals to reach for with your new build. You’ll save yourself valuable time and be a lot happier with your results when it’s said and done.

 

And five years later, we’re still here

9 start-up lessons in 5 years

It’s hard to believe — this upcoming June 1 marks the fifth anniversary of us being full-time Gorilla Seventy Sixians. We technically launched  our business in July of 2006 — hence the 76  (seventh month of 2006) — but at that time we were still full-time employees at bigger St. Louis marketing agencies.

In the beginning, Gorilla was really nothing more than a glorified freelance effort. Actually, that’s exactly what it was. But on June 1, 2008, after writing a business plan, securing enough business to pay ourselves for three months and saying goodbye to fantastic first jobs, we officially hung the shingle and had our first day of full-time business. It’s a day I remember well. Lots of finger tapping, pencil sharpening and wondering when in the hell the phone was going to ring.

And while not immediately, our phones did eventually ring. Thanks to the calls that came in and delivering work we’re proud to have our name on, we’re still standing today. There’ve been many “learning opportunities” in these first few years — most of which came with bumps and bruises — and we’re stronger because of all of them. In our first year alone, we learned a lot. We even put out an email about it. And since then, well, let’s just say we’ve had five times more bumps and five times more bruises. Here are some thoughts on a few of them.

Cashflow is still king

And we’re fairly certain at this point, that ain’t ever gonna change. This has proved itself to be true time and time and time again. We’ve trusted a few strategies that seem to help with this. A monthly retainer billing focus is one. Breaking up project fees into a few individual payments spaced out over a month’s time (treating them almost like retainer billing) is another. Both not only bode well for us, but they work well for our clients as well. Ongoing work via our retainer agreement allows us to deliver more insightful work. And the smaller payments for the project work make it easier for clients to pay.

“It’s not how much you work, but how much you get done”

I think I read this on a conference room wall once or something but I have to say, the words have really resonated with us at Gorilla. In our business, and in any business really, it’s easy to go home and talk about how you’ve worked yet another 60+ hour week. But shouldn’t the conversation shift to being about how much you’ve gotten done? Isn’t that what really matters? This is something we’ve grown increasingly aware of at G76 and something that has helped us become more efficient. Are we 100% efficient? Absolutely not. But, we’re getting much better for a group of marketing guys with terribly short attention spans and an original Nintendo in the office.

Find your happy place

Take a note from Happy Gilmore and find that happy place. If you work best at a coffee shop, work there. If you work best with your yellow lab at your feet, bring him to the office. If you work best at midnight, work then. Wherever and whenever you work best, put yourself in these environments. It’ll help you be more efficient, as well as help you do better work.

Tackle the 800 lb. Gorillas

When it comes to your actual workload, focus on the big, hairy important stuff first. Put the small stuff on the back-burner, or maybe even in the trash. Be less task-oriented and more goal-oriented. At Gorilla, we’ve learned to really work to focus on first doing things that improve business (whether ours or that of our clients). There’s simply not time to do the things that don’t.

Do work that you love

When we first started, we had to take a few (read: a lot) of projects that weren’t exactly in our sweet spot. Or, on our list of “projects we wanted to do.” But, we were hungry. Starved at times. We couldn’t afford to turn down work. And while this wasn’t the ideal situation for us at the time, it proved to be very fruitful for development. As time went by, we found that we were delivering work that worked for B2B industrial clients. Not to mention, we were really enjoying it. It fit “us” – Joe from Milwaukee and me from Granite City. We grew up around this stuff. Hell, I worked trade for two summers. For us, marketing for these kinds of clients was work that we loved and to this day, we consider ourselves extremely fortunate to be doing it.

Specialize, specialize, specialize. Refer, refer, refer.

We work with B2B companies looking to deliver more qualified leads to their sales team. 90% of the tactics we use are web-based. That’s it. That’s what we do. Have a nonprofit that needs a website? Not us. But “we know a guy”. Need marketing work for a restaurant or another type of B2C business? We “know a guy.” Sure, this is a departure from the “we can do any and everything you need” mentality that we had at launch. But we’re not “at launch” anymore.

By specializing, we’ve been able to deliver work that is much more insightful because of the commonalities our clients share with each other. Additionally, by focusing on web-related work, we provide our clients with measurable results of whether or not their investment is paying off. That’s a long way off from where we were 5 years ago. And honestly, it’s a long way off from how many agencies are working today. This stuff is expensive and we get that. The least we can do is make sure what we’re doing does indeed work.

Learn to delegate. You can’t do it all.

With an increase in work comes the need to get others involved. That’s a challenge whenever what you’ve built is yours and has your name on it. I never really understood when I heard business owners say “it’s my baby.” But now I get it. More than ever in fact. The key is to hire talented folks that you can trust. To surround yourselves with true experts – people smarter than you. If they’re not, than you’re constantly reworking their work. And that’s counterintuitive. Similarly, we learned to oursource things we shouldn’t be doing. For instance – IT. I’m lucky if I can get my iPhone to work. So when my computer goes down, it’s a day-long episode. Or, it was. We’ve since tapped a local IT consultant who comes by the shop once a week. Vince. He’s great. Call him. He’ll help you.

The point is, learn to delegate and don’t always look at getting others involved as an expense. It’s actually not an expense at all. It allows you more time to focus on the things on which you should be focusing.

Over-deliver…but not too much

Seems like the opposite of everything you’ve ever heard, right? Well it kind of is. All of our lives we’ve been taught to overdeliver. To give 110%. Which is good…in theory. The problem, however, is that by over-delivering, you’re often spending time on something that’s not that important instead of spending time on what was agreed upon and in the original strategic plan of action. By over-delivering, you’re committing valuable resources (that of time, primarily) to something that might not be that necessary in the long-run. Stick with what matters. Tackle the big projects first. Don’t overcommit yourself. Everyone will benefit in the long run. That said, anything less than 100% is under-delivering and that’s certainly way worse than over-delivering. That’s a crime punishable by firing.

Learn. Constantly.

We’re students. We always will be. We put in a lot of professional development time to become the best at what we do. From constantly listening to podcasts (Marketing Over Coffee, The Accidental Creative, Duct Tape Marketing) to reading like mad men, we aim to make ourselves better, stronger, smarter. We’re committed to learning new software that can make our work better. For instance, we recently invested in Hubspot. It’s already changing the way we do business and making our work much stronger.

So that’s a recap…

…Of where we’ve been and where we’re going. We owe a tremendous amount of thanks to our clients, friends, families, significant others and yes, even pets, for the success we’ve been fortunate to have over the past five years. We’re very excited to see what the next five have in store.

To learn more about our marketing philosophy, download The Hardworking Web-Marketing Guide for B2B Industrial Companies.

10 examples why content marketing matters for industrial companies

Industrial search engine optimization

“Our business is about building relationships and the internet can’t do that for us:”
“We serve a very traditional audience. They’re not interested in blog posts.”
“What we offer is a niche service. People don’t look for that kind of thing online.”

I can’t blame a sceptic of online content marketing if it’s never been part of their world. But I will point fingers at those who write it off before educating themselves on its power. The goal of this short article is to encourage the skeptic to reconsider if any of the above sentiments sound familiar.

Why online content matters

Smart B2B companies publish content online to increase their reach among a defined audience and to answer potential customers’ questions before (and better than) their competitors. The concept is very simple. Attract your audience through targeted content, qualify your business by making that content great and convert visitors to leads through smart calls-to-action.

Although content can’t build a relationship the way a handshake does, it will vastly increase the pool of hands available to shake. And when you get around to shaking those hands, that same content has already given you a big head start in qualifying your business.

Opportunity knocks and here’s the proof

What follows are ten examples of miscellaneous key phrases within industrial verticals like construction, manufacturing and distribution. The numbers that accompany them are the volume of Google searches that are performed every single month for those exact phrases, as evidenced by Google’s Keyword Tool.

Whether any of the below are relevant to your business or not, the point is this: Prospective customers are looking for you online. When you develop high-quality, keyword-targeted, educational content that matches their Google searches, you create opportunity for business.

Foundation repair: 110,000 searches
Demolition contractors: 40,500 searches
Gear manufacturer: 33,100 searches
HVAC installation: 18,100 searches
Polyurethane coating: 22,000 searches
Asphalt supplier: 3,600 searches
Structural engineering companies: 6,600 searches
Excavation contractor: 8,100 searches
Construction equipment rental: 18,100 searches
Drilling services: 33,100 searches

We’re here to help

Gorilla 76 specializes in online marketing for industrial businesses. Our blog is designed as a resources for those kinds of companies. We’ve also written some guides and put on monthly webinars to help you learn more. See below.

Tips of the trade to construction advertising and industrial marketing

I’m normally not a fan of the “top # reasons”, “# essential things” and “# keys to” type of posts. But, here I am, writing one myself. Maybe, because as a writer, it’s an easy way to write a disjointed piece with several key takeaways. Actually, that’s probably the exact reason.

Anyway, lately, we’ve had a few opportunities where a few common pitfalls that we see with companies seeking construction advertising agencies have emerged. Here is what we wish everyone we talked to knew and believed in. We certainly do.

Name a marketing lead

In a perfect world, you have a CMO. In a perfectly adequate world, you have a marketing lead. This doesn’t even have to be someone that is well-educated in marketing. Obviously, the more education the better, but the lead certainly doesn’t HAVE to be an MBA candidate. Instead, your marketing lead needs to be organized, responsive and trusted. If you have someone like that at your company, you’re set. It makes the marketing process so much easier, more effective, and certainly more efficient.

If you’ve already got this taken care of, check out Joe’s advice to the marketing guys of the industrial world.

With that said, don’t hire an entire marketing team

It’s a lot of money. Really. A lot. Think about all the different hires you’d have to make to represent an entire marketing team – a writer, a designer, a programmer, someone to manage all of their work, a PR person – the list goes and goes. So you build a team of 5 really well-groomed Wharton grads…great…now what? Who’s going to design everything you need? Who is going to make sure your content is balanced between brand voice and style and best SEO practices? Who’s going to fix the website when it’s acting up? If your answer is “my IT company”, you got problems.

Take your opportunities seriously. No one else is. Few others are, at least.

The bar is set low in industrial marketing. Take a look for yourself. Have you seen some of the websites? No, really. Have you? They’re atrocious. Yet you can bet these companies all enforce a dress code in their office and insist that their letterheads and business cards look nice. But website – who uses the internet anyway these days?

Now, not next year, but NOW, is your opportunity to blow everyone else away. Take each and every marketing opportunity seriously. And don’t stop at good design and good copy. Stop after you’ve left a pile of leads on your sales teams’ desk. And you’ve said “boom goes the dynamite” on your way out the do (pronounced “doe”)!

RFPs…

Don’t issue them. Please. For the love of marketing and hiring the right agency for your needs, don’t issue an RFP. It’s just not an effective way to go about the business. Issuing an RPF is like hiring someone after only seeing their resume. Joe has some more thoughts on this.

Make sure you’re measuring all that you’re doing or that your marketing team is

graphs

Finally, after years and years of marketing agencies being able to slide by without ever really giving hard proof of their worth and value, you can demand actual metrics on success. Are your marketing efforts paying off? This is a question you need to be asking. The smart marketers are. You’ll be left in the dust if you don’t. Check out this white paper we recently wrote about measuring ROI.

Mobile is growing. Build accordingly.

This doesn’t necessarily mean you need to build a second website. There are better solutions to this. Make sure your agency of choice understands and implements responsive design. This will ensure that your web experience is top notch for your users no matter their device.

What’s responsive design? Go to the bottom right corner of the TruQC site we built, clicking and dragging your mouse to the top left corner. You’ll notice that the layout changes as you make the screen closer to that of a tablet and eventually to that of a mobile phone.

You get what you pay for

Just something to always think about. And while you’re thinking about it, go back to that 2nd bullet point about hiring an entire marketing team. Time and time again, we see agencies that hire a whole gaggle of folks to handle their marketing. Figure the average salary is $40K, and there are, say, three employees, and they get benefits, for which we’ll factor in $10K a person. That’s $150K in marketing staffing. And there’s a very strong chance they’ll still have to go outside of your walls to hire the right talent for different jobs.

DON’T fall into this trap. For 5-10K a month, you can get exceptional work from true experts. Don’t be cheap. You’ll spend more in the long run.

Your website is a lead generating machine….nothing else is acceptable

Your website is not a brochure. It’s a living and breathing thing that can land leads for you and be the best salesman you ever hire. It needs to be chocked full of great content that interests and engages users. Take it serious. Got it?

Cut the print budget

We once argued it had its time and place. And I guess, it still does. But if I was an owner and was looking to up my construction advertising and industrial marketing, I’d cut my print construction advertising budget. Pure and simple. It’s just too expensive for what you get. For a four digit figure, you get, at most, a month’s worth of exposure. Often, just a week or less. And really, it’s not even a full week. It’s one impression with a viewer. That’s absurd. I promise you, putting your money on a smart online initiative will prove to be much more effective. And guess what, if not, you can switch. Because you can measure online. Remember? You can see what’s working and what’s not working. To all the print world personnel – we’re not hating. We still see lots and lots of value in online sponsored ads, newsletter access, etc. But your print publications. Not really our thing.

Caterpillar talks thought-leadership, B2B social media at BMA event

By Kyle Fiehler

The folks at Caterpillar know a thing or two about the hard-hat-wearing lifestyle. They also know a thing or two about B2B social media strategy and industrial marketing.

Kevin Espinosa, social media manager at Caterpillar recently spoke at the Sheraton in Clayton, another quality event hosted by the Business Marketing Association of St. Louis. I was lucky enough to attend. Having recently come on board here at Gorilla76, I’ve been thinking a lot about maximizing the impact of social marketing in a B2B context.

Espinosa and Caterpillar jumped into the game before the playbook had been written up. While others were dismissing social media as a fad or something sketchy their kids were up to, they realized early on the power of social platforms in connecting buyers to sellers. After all, isn’t that what markets are all about?

Okay, so someone looking for a 150,000 lb dump truck probably doesn’t hop on Facebook right away to get one (although apparently it has happened). But that line of thinking dismisses one of the biggest opportunities a well-planned social media presence provides—establishing your company as an industry thought-leader. Filling info gaps with your hard-won expertise designates your company as a source worth keeping up with. Any armchair enthusiast can write a blog post about earth-movers, but only Cat knows what it takes to re-equip them for a winter trip across Antarctica.

Potential customers should already have you in mind when the right time in their buying cycle comes along, because you have been consistently providing them with innovative content. Lead-nurturing in its most classic form.

“People are sick of the advertising part,” Espinosa pointed out. And it’s true, whether it’s on the web or between the covers of a magazine; we’re so bombarded with advertisements that reading often feels like a hunt for actual content. What is far more persuasive (and a lot less expensive) is earning a retweet or repost from a respected industry source. Cat can blast the web and trade journals with ads for a new line of skid steer loaders, but if the unaffiliated @skidsteerloader showers it with 140 characters of praise, instant legitimacy.

Social media is just one tool in the B2B web marketing toolbox, but its usefulness in establishing your reputation can’t be underestimated.

5 B2B marketing strategy tips for a CMO

Marketing tips for a CMO

We’ve worked with lots of B2B companies – some with a Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), some without, some with a good one, some with a bad one. As an agency, we’ve not only observed, but also lived through a wealth of strategies and practices that have both worked and failed. From our experiences, these five bits of advice to the business-to-business CMO emerged.

1. Be your sales team’s best friend.

We can’t stress enough the importance of marketing and sales being in sync with one another. Yet at so many companies, they butt heads. When you as CMO fully understand the objectives of your sales team, your ability to generate qualified leads for them will improve dramatically. On the flip side, the sales team needs to respect the work marketing is putting in to bring these leads to the table. And they need to do something with those leads, tracking them in a CRM (customer relationship management) system like Salesforce throughout their buying process. The more you can facilitate a strong relationship between your two parties, the more effective you’ll both be.

2. Measure everything. Everything.

The overwhelming shift of B2B marketing to an online setting has made today’s marketing environment a land of measurable data. There are no subjective ratings or estimated ad impressions anymore. With tools like Google Analytics at our disposal, we instead have cold, hard numbers – always up-to-date, accurate and readily available to you. And that means measuring the ROI of every marketing effort is now possible. Define what marketing success means for your business – what actions a prospect might take that can be considered a win. These should include lead capture activities like newsletter subscriptions, case study downloads and consultation requests. Then learn how measure which marketing activities are contributing (and not contributing) to making those things happen.

3. Challenge your company’s marketing norm.

For years B2B marketing was about trade journal ads, trade shows and rounds of golf. Though still a part of the mix, the reality is that most people now start their research online. This article by Eloqua (a respected marketing voice) states that “78% of B2B buyers start their research with search.” In other words, more than 3/4 of your prospects are likely pretty far along in their research process before your sales team ever gets a chance to shake their hands at that trade show. As CMO, its your job to make sure your website has already started the sales process for you, educating prospects in the meantime. Shift your marketing mindset and challenge the traditional approach. Just because your company has done it in the past doesn’t mean its the right way to do it.

4. Start learning about marketing automation. Right now.

Marketing automation is the future of marketing. I’ll bet the farm on it. In short, it’s an software-based marketing system that involves nurturing leads from their first point of contact with your business to the point at which they become a customer. Marketing automation software platforms like Hubspot integrate business blogging, website calls-to-action, lead-capture forms and automated email to market to your prospects based on who they are as well as the actions they’ve taken on your website. The end result is highly targeted lead generation and nurturing that marries the marketing and sales processes. This is marketing intelligence at its finest, and right now presents the opportunity for you to be an innovator by embracing it.

5. Don’t go it alone.

Hire a good marketing agency. Yes, I’m biased – I co-own a marketing firm. But the truth is this: You as a CMO are one person. Your time and energy should not be spent making print ads in PowerPoint or adding pages to a website built in 1998. Your job is marketing strategy – and the result of your work should be qualified lead generation. That’s no small task and it needs your full attention. A good marketing agency will help you refine your strategy as well as execute it across multiple professional skill sets including writing, art direction / design, web development and project management. Those are more hats than one person can or should wear.

How to calculate online marketing ROI

 

“Marketing’s job is to contribute to revenue generation, not be a cost center for superficial activities with no clear return on investment (ROI).”

– The B2B Social Media Book

It’s time to think about marketing differently

When you hire employees, purchase new equipment or send team members to professional development training, you make an investment. You spend the money because you expect a return on your investment – a reward for taking a measured risk. When you invest in marketing, your expectations should be no different.

Online marketing is a land of measurable data

When we say “measurable”, we mean analyzing how effective your marketing activities are at moving prospective customers into your sales funnel. This means attracting qualified prospects in Google searches, drawing them to your website, engaging them with exceptional, targeted content, capturing their contact information and tracking their engagement with your business until they become customers.

What we’re NOT talking about are website page views, Facebook likes, email opens or retweets. There’s no denying that these kinds of metrics paint a picture of brand awareness and that brand awareness is important. But it’s not part of the ROI formula, so we’ll save it for another discussion.

A simple math equation

ROI is a formula that demonstrates the dollar amount you earn as a percentage of the dollar amount you spend to get it. It looks like this:

online marketing return on investment

Let’s put this in perspective

Let’s say you spend $100K on marketing this year and that investment results in new customers worth $300K over the course of their relationship with you. In this scenario, your ROI formula looks like this:

marketing return on investment formula

In other words, for every $1 you spent on marketing, you made $2 – a 200% return on investment.

So now what?

Now that you know how ROI is calculated, there are two big questions to answer:

  1. How can I attribute those leads to my web-marketing investment?
  2. How do I prove it to the boss man?

While this blog post touches the formula itself, we recently published a Marketing ROI Manual. We wrote the guide for business owners, CMOs, marketing managers and innovators at B2B companies who are more interested in building measurable marketing campaigns that turn dollars into more dollars than blowing marketing budgets on phone book ads and printed brochures.

If that sounds like you, give it a read-through. Click below to download the guide.

Website calls-to-action: Don’t ask and you shall not receive

 

Lend your website your salesman shoes

What do you do after you shake hands with a new lead at a trade show? Or when someone calls you and expresses interest in your services? How about after a round of golf with a prospective customer? I’ll take a leap and guess you don’t say:

“Thanks for your interest – hope to see ya around!”

There is always a next step in mind, right?

It’s time for a mindset shift about your website’s job

Your business website is the online face of your company. It’s also an aspiring salesman, begging for the right tools and training. It wants to set up that next step with your visitors and prospects. But it needs your help first.

Train your website as you would a salesman. A website visitor has freely chosen to learn about your business by visiting your site as they would have a storefront. They’ve volunteered their time to engage with your company. Respond. Help them move to the next step in their research process.

Think about what you want a visitor to do next

Then ask.

  • If you want them to call you about a consultation, ask.
  • If you want them to join your mailing list, ask.
  • If you want them to view a case study, ask.
  • If you want them to download an expert white paper you’ve composed, ask.

Don’t ask and you shall not receive. It’s common sense.

 

Why an effective B2B industrial website costs $25K+

We don’t have a ton of clients and we don’t build a ton of websites. We’re not one of the biggest agencies in the country… or our state… or our city. We’re a small company in an industrial midwest market that has carved out a very specific niche: We work intensively with a select number of industrial businesses to develop premium websites and lead-generating marketing campaigns.

Despite our size and small client base, our services aren’t cheap and naturally we’re often asked why. That’s a fair question and we think it warrants a fair response.

The short answer is actually pretty simple. 99% of website design companies build online versions of your leave behind-brochure. We, on the other hand, build lead-generating machines.

When we’re invited to share our capabilities presentation with an industrial business, we always show a slide that explains the 2 purposes of business-to-business online marketing:

  1. Generate qualified leads
  2. Nurture those leads through their buying process

A business website is the online center of these two activities, and a website that is no more than a digital brochure simply will not accomplish them.

The graphics that follow compare the anatomy of the average $5K industrial website to the anatomy of an industrial website worth paying for. We also went ahead and broke down where where those dollars go in a website build priced at $25K+.

A $5K industrial website

5K website

A $25K industrial website

25K website

The Basics: Value: $5K

Search Google for “cheap website design” and you’ll find thousands of companies who can build a $5K website that explains your company’s services, lists your clients and projects, and talks about your history and philosophy. Don’t get us wrong – all of this stuff is very important. In fact, they’re all required in our opinion. But don’t let yourself be fooled either. Simply putting this information online will not win you new business.

1. Service pages

Each of your key services should be highlighted and profiled. Include images and well-written copy, and link to related projects from within the content of that page.

2. About your company

Focus not only on your philosophy, mission statement and history, but on your value proposition. What sets your business apart from your competitors?

3. Client list and project examples

It’s important to validate your business. Project pages and a list of clients can help with this, so we recommend including them. The real validation, however, will come through case studies and other thought-leading content for your industry (more on that to follow…)

Brand Professionalism: Value $5K+

While thousands of web design companies can deliver the above, the pool begins shrinking quickly when great design and writing come into play. A website build is NOT a task for the IT department. It’s a marketing task, and should be executed by marketing professionals with skill sets ranging from marketing strategy to design, copywriting and programming.

4. Mobile-friendly, great design

If you care about how your employees dress, how your office looks and what kind of impression you have on prospects you meet, why should the online face of your business not be given that same attention? And in today’s business world, as mobile phone and tablet usage continues growing, that online storefront needs to adapt accordingly.

5. Well-branded, search engine-friendly copy

The manner in which your business communicates with customers speaks volumes. You communicate with confidence and pride. So must your marketing tools. And in an online setting, there’s another important member of your audience that can’t be forgotten. His name is Google, and you need him to find you if your prospects are going to find you. Smart, balanced online copywriting accomplishes all of this.

Lead-Generating Ability: Value $15K+

The real answer to the question posed in the title of this blog post lies here. Great design and writing separates the good from the average, but conversion-focused web design that turns visitors into leads separates the great from the good. Your website can be your greatest salesman if you give it that opportunity.

6. Business blog

Blog posts about topics your audience craves will help them find you in search engines. Well-written blog posts will earn their attention and trust. But without a blog infrastructure engrained in your website, you’ll miss these opportunities.

7. Calls-to-action

What do you want you website visitor to do? Think about it. Should they call you about a free consultation? Should they sign-up for updates by newsletter? Should they download a case study you’ve built about a current customer? Unless you ask, you visitor won’t do it.

8. Lead capture pages and forms

Not everyone is ready to call you and hire you for a $50M or even a $50K job. Most website visitors are just researching (at least for the moment). When your calls-to-action direct visitors to lead capture pages (example: fill out this form to download our case study), you create opportunity collect contact information. And then you can nurture these leads through newsletters and other relevant content until they’re done researching and are finally ready to talk with you.

9. Premium downloadable content

Case studies about client successes and white papers showcasing industry expertise give your qualified website visitors a reason to provide their name and email address. You’re “selling” valuable content, and the price they pay is permission for you to add them to your marketing database.

10. Lead conversion tracking and website analytics

It’s great to know how many visitors your website is receiving and how much time they’re spending on various pages. But website analytics become a lot more useful when you start tracking how a new lead found you in the first place and which marketing spends are producing qualified leads. All smart website builds include systems to collect meaningful data and analyze how it affects your bottom line.

Convinced yet?

If you’re still not convinced that a website could be worth $25K+, we won’t blame you. But we would encourage you to at least shift your mindset on what purpose your site serves. Why invest at all if it’s to be nothing more than a brochure? The savviest, most progressive businesses are learning that lead generation in industrial B2B markets is changing quickly. Your website can be your greatest ally if you equip it with the right tools.

Related articles

Construction advertising in today’s business environment

Meet the greatest salesman you’ll ever hire

The Duck Hunter’s Guide to B2B Web-Marketing

Construction marketing through the long sales cycle

Content marketing for Recycling Consultants and Alton Materials

Alton Materials and Recycling Consultants are sister companies in the scrap metal recycling business. The former is a scrap yard that also provides business services and the latter is scrap metal brokerage firm specializing in railroad scrap metals. We began our online marketing retainer with them in late 2012.

scrap metal marketing

Our assignment

Alton Materials (AM) and Recycling Consultants (RC) wanted to separate themselves from the pack and raise the industry standard on professionalism. Our challenge was to elevate their brands while simultaneously creating lead-generating opportunities online.

As a company serving both the general public (at their scrap yards near St. Louis) and businesses that produce scrap metal (construction, demolition, manufacturing…), we needed to target two separate large audiences for Alton Materials. For Recycling Consultants on the other hand, our target fell within an incredibly niche market  — railroad scrap metal.

Our strategy

Developing a brand voice and feel with overhauled websites

Both companies were operating with outdated websites that required overhauls to serve as content hubs to attract the appropriate audiences. Because the two are closely linked, we opted to draw a visual connection between the brands, as reflected in similar website design elements. Both sites were designed and written from scratch to establish a fresh brand look and voice.

scrap metal website design

Generating website traffic in a niche industry

As companies with very little web presence prior to their new websites, a higher volume of targeted traffic would be imperative to capturing leads. We made the business blog central to both companies’ marketing plans and have begun producing targeted content regularly for each of their audiences. We focused on choosing keywords these audiences might search in Google and writing blog content that would serve as useful resources for each. A few examples follow.

Targeting industrial businesses for scrap metal management:

Why we should recycle as construction and demolition professionals

Targeting the general public

The differences between ferrous and non-ferrous scrap metal

Targeting the railroad scrap market:

Controlling the chaos of train derailment recovery

Converting traffic to leads

subscribeOn the lead-generation front for AM, we built in an email subscribe option for a company newsletter and another for pricing sheet updates, as metal market prices fluctuate frequently. We also developed a Scrap Management Program guide for both companies. These downloadable PDFs serve as buyers’ guides, outlining how AM and RC conduct their business services. The guides were designed to gather contact information from further-down-the-sales-funnel prospects who were willing to trade their email address for the guide.

scrap industry leads

industrial lead generation

Nurturing leads through the buying cycle

By building a marketing database through these lead-capture forms, we’ve created opportunity for marketing directly to potential customers via email campaigns. We’ve structured the campaigns around promoting new scrap metal recycling resources we consistently publish for each target audience on the AM and RC websites.

Results

Although both websites just recently went live, we’ve begun to see positive results. We’ll update this section in a few months as more useful data becomes available. For now, a few highlights follow:

  • At the end of June 2013, AM total website traffic was up 126% compared to three months prior. Traffic from search engines was up 262%. The following graph represents the pattern of website traffic generation since the new site went live at the end of February.
    industrial website traffic generation
  • For the AM consumer market, we targeted the keyword “ferrous vs. non-ferrous” with a blog post, noting a high search volume and low competition to rank for that term. Shortly after The differences between ferrous and non-ferrous scrap metal went live, Alton Materials was ranking 4th in Google for this popular search among a relevant audience. This blog post alone drove more than 2000 visits to the AM website in Q2 of 2013.
  • For the first time, both AM and RC are organically building a marketing database through their websites, seeing a consistent flow of business leads through price list and newsletter subscribes and Scrap Management Program downloads.

The best construction advertisement…in my humble opinion

It’s been awhile since my last blog post (if I had a nickel for every time I said that!). A long while actually. I’ve just been busy. But this blog post was inspired by another project we’re doing at Gorilla so writing it, well, I couldn’t really come up with a good excuse not to write it.

For said project, I’ve been reviewing lots of company films. In reviewing these films, I stumbled across the below gem of a construction advertisement from The Korte Company and it reminded me that bar none, hands down, this is the best construction advertisement I’ve ever seen and has greatly inspired Gorilla’s work. I’d even argue it has indirectly influenced us to go down the path we have – that of specializing in construction advertising and B2B web-marketing.

Here’s the piece.

For what it’s worth – we didn’t do this piece. Not that you were assuming we did, but I just wanted to make it clear, as we handle all of The Korte Company’s current work (view case study). In fact, this project was done by Tom, Dick and Harry out of Chicago before we were ever even brought into the picture.

What makes this ad so great?

For one, it’s spot on. If you’ve met anyone from The Korte Company or have done any sort of business with them, this video captures their personality perfectly. They’re hard-working, not a bunch of suits, believe in the handshake and do the job right. Kudos to the creative team on this project – you wrote and directed a spot that felt as if you yourself worked at Korte. You created something ownable. That’s great advertising.

Second, it evokes emotion. If this point needs explanation, check your pulse. This piece makes me “believe in things again.” Makes me believe in a local company’s ability to go national. Makes me believe in the American dream and the idea that we can all leave our name on something big. After all, buildings affect all of us. A lot. But have you ever thought about the engineers and architects that crafted the masterpiece you call “the office” or “church” or “home?” Melodramatic? I say no. Watch the spot again. It’s that good.

With said emotion, comes the innate human need to share. And this spot makes me want to do just that. I remember the first time I saw this. I was an ad nerd. Still am actually (ask my friends). Immediately, I sent it to everyone I knew that would appreciate it. That’s because it evoked emotion in me. It’s because it had an element that I wanted again and again. It told a story I’d never grow tired of – still haven’t today, in fact. This construction advertisement had the components of viral advertising. I love that. Especially in unexpected places. But here’s a question – why is it unexpected? Why is the bar set so low in construction advertising and industrial marketing?

Finally, plain and simple, it’s beautiful. Flawless, really. Great copywriting is a disappearing trade. And I think we have the internet and mobile devices to thank for that. Yes, people are writing more than ever, but it’s all about “good enough” now. Not “perfection” like it used to be. I’m guilty. There’s no doubt. So it’s very apparent when a copywriter, who’s great at his craft, has had his hands on a piece. And this piece, well, such a writer has definitely penned.

How this all applies to construction advertising today

“Great” you’re probably thinking. “But how does this apply to me. I can’t afford a big budget piece like that. And really, what kind of ROI does such a piece deliver?”

To be honest, in today’s time and place in B2B marketing and construction advertising, and knowing the potential of web-marketing, I’d argue that it is tough to justify a large spend on a piece of construction advertising like this. After all, it’s no secret that budgets aren’t exactly fat in AEC marketing right now. And construction advertising like the above – it ain’t cheap. But the takeaway is this – take your marketing serious. Strive for perfection. Capture your brand in a way that others crave. Lose sleep over that eighth of an inch!

Whether a blog, online video series, or just a well-written website that is sales smart (lots of strategic calls-to-action), your online presence needs to do more than just be “cool”. It needs to deliver leads, nurturing and thought leadership. It needs to help you grow your business. We’ve put together a guide to help b2b industrial companies do just that.

Construction marketing through the long sales cycle

When a business hires a contractor, it’s not exactly like heading to the mall for a new pair of shoes. It’s a really big decision with a long sales cycle. And it’s a decision that often involves a lot of people, a lot of politics, a lot of money and therefore a lot of research.

construction marketing

New prospects come from many places – referrals, lists, trade show introductions, advertisements, Google searches. However they find you, they still need to qualify you. What’s your reputation? What similar work have you completed for other clients? Can you meet their budget requirements? So while a buyer of construction services researches, evaluates their options and narrows down their decision to a handful of potential contractors, what can you be doing to influence their buying decision?

You can qualify your business and educate your buyer with resources designed just for them. And there is no better avenue for this construction marketing approach than your company’s website.

Help your prospect research

Whether they find you on your own or through referral, prospective customers in the research stage need to qualify your business. They want to learn about you and believe that you’re potentially a good fit before they go any further. Descriptive website pages about your services as well as articles (blog posts) that demonstrate your philosophy and expertise are the perfect formula to capture their interest for the first time.

Help your prospect evaluate

After you’ve earned their attention and have established some baseline trust in your ability to serve them, they’ll require more in-depth information to further qualify you. Case studies are a great solution – and by case studies, I don’t mean project profiles with a picture, square footage and job location. I mean descriptive overviews of your client’s problem, how you solved it and what results you delivered. Did you come in under budget? Ahead of time? What hurdles did you overcome along the way? And what did your client have to say about working with you? This is what evaluators want to learn. White papers and more technical, detailed blog posts will also help move you onto their short list.

Help your prospect make a buying decision

Sometimes it comes down to low bid. We get it. But our construction marketing work (particularly with those targeting the private sector) has shown us that something needs to set you apart. What can you offer that helps shift a buyer’s focus to you? If your business provides free consultations, site visits, audits or other conversation-starting services, it’s a no-brainer to represent these entry-point offers on your website. Detail them on pages equipped with lead-capure opportunities and ask your prospect to inquire.

Ideas for construction marketing content

The infographic below illustrates content ideas to offer your prospect along their journey to a buying decision.

Content marketing for construction industry

Construction advertising in today’s business environment

 

Construction marketing has changed
Things have changed. In a competitive time where there are less jobs to bid on and more companies bidding, it’s no secret that the business development environment in building, construction and other industrial verticals is different now than in years past.

It’s time for construction advertising to follow suit

Traditionally, construction advertising has been a world of trade shows, printed ads, project sheets and leave-behind binders. I won’t discredit the value of these tactics (they certainly have their place), but the reality is that the world is evolving, becoming more digital and people are consuming information in new ways. Marketing a construction company, like all industrial marketing, has changed. The opportunities that come hand in hand with this shift are tremendous. As a marketing strategy firm that specializes in generating and nurturing leads for industrial, hard-hat-wearing businesses, we’ve experienced the power of this new era marketing approach first hand.

“My customers are not looking online for my services”

We’ve heard this statement time and again in the industrial space. And time and again we aggressively challenge it. Why? Take a look at the following data that I pulled today from Google’s Keyword Tool. This list displays the volume of actual Google searches in the United States (every month!) for the following key phrases.

  • top general contractors: 1600 searches
  • bank construction: 14,800 searches
  • concrete repair: 60,500 searches
  • roof repair contractors: 8100 searches
  • electrical engineers: 60,500 searches

This is real data and these are just a few examples. Not only is there demand for construction and industrial services, but your audience is looking for information about these services online. I often pull up the following two stats because I think they’re so telling on the subject:

81% of B2B industrial sector buyers research online before making a purchasing decision.

– Global Spec study

96% of website visitors are not ready to buy.

– KISS Metrics study

So what does this mean for your advertising approach?

It means a few things. First, it’s time to start giving your audience – that 80% who is researching and that 96% that’s not ready to buy yet – information and answers to the questions they seek. When a protective customer’s search in Google for “concrete repair” pulls up 4 different pages from your website on the first page of search results, there’s a pretty darn good chance they’ll click through to your website rather than your competitor’s site.

Secondly, if the content they find on your website qualifies you as a potential partner, asks them to join your email list and encourages them to call you about a consultation when they’re ready to talk, you’ve built a machine for converting website visitors into qualified leads. In the meantime your competitors are busy printing out project sheets from Microsoft Word and mailing them to cold call prospects who probably don’t want to hear from them in the first place.

How to get started

Content is the foundation of today’s online marketing environment. Think about the questions you get from prospects and customers all the time. What do they want to know to help them make a buying decision? Get inside their brains. What qualifies you? And what’s different about what you do vs. your competitors? Then answer these questions on your website. This content can live in many forms:

  • Articles about targeted, niche topics for your specific audience
  • White papers that dig deeper into your philosophy and process
  • Online tools that help them learn the value of your offering
  • Case studies that outline problems you were hired to solve and the results you achieved
  • Project portfolios showcasing the beauty and breadth of your accomplishments

These are the things your audience craves. Develop the content and they’ll find you. Develop GREAT content and they’ll trust you. Earn their trust and they’ll hire you. Still unsure if inbound marketing can complement your industrial marketing efforts? View our case studies below to see real results we’ve delivered.

How business to business leads are born online


81% of B2B industrial sector buyers research online before making a purchasing decision.

–2012 GlobalSpec study

Before you read on, let that marinate for a second. 81%. That’s a pretty powerful statistic. If the industrial sector includes you, this means that while your team is working the phones, shaking hands at trade shows and playing golf with prospects, 4 out of 5 of your potential customers are busy doing their homework on you and each of your top competitors online. That is of course, if you’re visible enough online to be found in the first place.

It’s your choice whether you ignore those 4 out of 5 or embrace what online marketing can offer you. Should you choose the latter, the rewards are plenty.

What follows is a visual representation of a prospect’s online journey from unaware to lead to customer. We’ve illustrated this idea with examples from one of our clients (TruQC). TruQC is a software company that has developed a quality control iPad application for use on job-sites. The app allows users to document required quality control data digitally, as oppose to the long-standing (and very much outdated) paper methods.

From unaware to lead to customer

Step 1: Make yourself visible to that 81%

Before a lead can become a lead they need to know you exist, and it’s likely that a good chunk of those 81% researching online don’t know who you are yet. You need to be discoverable, and the first question you need to ask yourself is this: If you were in your customer’s shoes, what words would you put into a Google search to find the services you offer? For TruQC, those key terms include things like “job-site documentation” and “quality control app”, so we work with TruQC to load the website with content about those topics, and as you see below, their service pages, blog posts and videos are among the top ranking pages in Google searches for those keywords.

Create visibility in Google searches

Step 2: Collect their email address before they leave your site

Google searchers like in the above example will find their way to your website. The next step in their journey to becoming a customer is assuring they stay engaged with your business. Asking for them to subscribe to a monthly newsletter is an appropriate move at this stage.

Create opportunity for email capture

Step 3: Keep them engaged through email marketing

As your email database grows through tactics like the above, your focus among those leads will shift from building awareness to building trust and qualifying your business as the right solution to their problem. Email marketing is the right vehicle for this task. The frequency of email blasts may vary from weekly to monthly or even quarterly depending on your industry and target market. The opportunity, regardless of frequency, is to create consistent touch points with your leads and become a valuable source of information to them. Focus less on the hard sell and more on bringing them back to your website to consume new blog posts and higher level content pieces (like downloadable white papers and guides) that offer significant value to them.

In the below example, TruQC promoted a case study for one of their clients. Their email blast provided a short teaser about the case study and encouraged visitors to come back to their site to download it as a PDF.

Promote website content with targeted email blasts

Step 4: Create opportunity to score your leads

Back in step 2, we talked about collecting email addresses to create new leads, but we haven’t known up to this point which of those leads are more likely to develop into a customer. Here in step 4, we’re creating opportunity for the more engaged leads to come forward. After driving visitors from their eblast to the case study on their website, TruQC asks the visitor to provide a little bit more information in order to view a higher level piece of content (in this instance an 8-page case study).

Trade higher level content for contact information

example of a pdf case study online

Step 5: Keep your leads organized

Whether you have a sales team or do the selling yourself, it’s important that the contact information collected from these more qualified leads finds its way into the right hands. We set up email alerts for our customers, like the below, so they know when someone has taken an action like downloading a case study.

Set up email alerts when website visitors download content

We strongly encourage the use of a CRM (customer relationship management) system such as Salesforce to keep your leads organized and track your engagement with them over time.

Use a CRM system to organize leads

 Step 6: Time to sell

We of course recognize that downloading a case study doesn’t mean a lead is ready to become a customer. But they’re one step closer than they were last week, and therefore a more qualified prospect. If things go as planned, members of this more engaged crowd will inquire for services when they’re ready to talk. But in the meantime you’ve created opportunity to start dialogue with them as well. You’ve given them resources and useful content that’s qualified your business in their eyes and begun to establish trust. They in turn have identified themselves as an interested prospect and willingly handed you a free pass to get in touch with them.

In conclusion

Even if you don’t physically sell a product or service online, remember that your prospects are still doing their research there to inform their buying decision. In the business to business world, including industries like construction and manufacturing, online lead generation is an powerful tool and the return on your investment can be incredibly rewarding.

Lead generation tool for industrial pipe supplier

A big focus of Gorilla 76 is developing useful resources and tools for the target audiences of our clients.

This helps prospects find our clients in the search engines, qualifies our clients as solutions for said prospects and encourages them to take action.

In the business-to-business world, this content typically takes the shape of product or service pages on the website, educational blog posts, thoroughly researched white papers and even video tutorials. But not always.

We recently had the opportunity to step back and take a look at the content we were developing for one of our clients and to evaluate really how hard (read “well”) it was working for them. We made the decision to shift our focus and attack online lead generation from a new direction. Our solution served the same overarching purpose (providing useful content for a specific audience) – just through a very different approach.

Lead-generating content for American Piping Products

American Piping Products is an industrial pipe supplier that serves businesses like contractors, engineers and fabricators. Put simply, they sell huge pieces of pipe.

Big piece of pipe

Through thorough search engine research and website analytics data, we found that a majority of their customers arrive on their site via Google searches for specific products (things like “a106 grade b”). Most of the page views and time spent on their site revolves around these very specific product pages as well. We also learned that a downloadable PDF pipe chart on their website was a big hit because it documents everything they stock. Makes sense, right?

pipe chart

What didn’t make sense, however, was the actual chart itself. The chart was very detail heavy, so viewing the PDF online involved a lot of zooming in and out and scrolling around to find what you’re looking for. Even if you chose to print it, the text would be small and the information tightly packed. And if you were hoping to view it on a mobile device, you might as well not even try.

So we came up with another solution. We took all the data from this 18-column, 82-row spreadsheet and built a tool that accomplishes three key objectives.

1. Easy to find what you’re looking for

The dropdown menus in our custom-built tool load dynamically. You first choose from one menu, then you’re offered a second menu based on your choice.

online lead generation tool

2. Seamless translation on mobile devices

We built this tool using responsive design — the idea of displaying information differently depending on the device you’re using to view it (desktop computer vs. tablet vs. mobile phone). In this case, the pipe calculator page responds with a layout that’s optimized for viewing on your device, making it feel as if it’s an actual app.

mobile lead generation tool

3. Natural call-to-action

While the PDF pipe chart might include a big phone number and email address, that call-to-action is way too passive. We took a more aggressive approach for American Piping Products by including a “Request Info” button that pops up after the specs have been selected. The button leads to a short form that fires a request for that specific product right into our client’s email inbox.

call-to-action for online lead capture

 Get creative with your content

As long as your website content serves a purpose, it can exist in many different forms. Think about what you can give your audience to make their job easier while positioning your company as the right company to call.

The Duck Hunter’s Guide to B2B Web-Marketing

by Jon Franko

Anyone who follows me on Twitter knows that this Fall, I spent my fair share of time in the duck blind. Probably more than my fair share actually. Just ask my girlfriend. Or my family. Or my business partner. Or even my neighbors who have been greeted by a lawn full of un-raked leaves for the past 60 days and an alley dumpster full (okay, maybe not full) of feathers on more than one occasion.

Yes – we harvested a good number of ducks this year, but there were many other moments and memories that made the year great. There was the time I ventured out alone for a before-work hunt and bagged two beautiful mallard drakes (pictured below). There was the mythical white duck we chased in vain all season. There were sunrises, sunsets, 4:30am bike rides, and more great mornings with great hunting partners than I deserve.

Looking back, thinking about one obsession of mine (duck hunting) and another (marketing), I couldn’t help but start to draw some parallels between web marketing and waterfowling. I always knew that somewhere, hidden in the 3am wakes-ups and the ice-cold marsh, was a business lesson or two. I knew that somewhere in the chamber of my three shooter or in the decoys that we place out and pick up every day, were some tried and true business principles.

Hey – I was right. Lots of commonalities and business principles in fact. So I compiled the following B2B web-marketing lessons and hope you find them helpful.

You have to have a good product, you have to be where the ducks wanna be

To kill a duck you have to be in a place where that duck wants to be. Period. To make a sale, you have to have a product that people want. Period. No amount of duck calling will convince a duck otherwise. No amount of web-marketing will convince a potential customer otherwise. If your product or service is one that doesn’t have demand, you don’t have a chance at long-term success.

Before you hire a web-marketing agency to build a strong, robust website or before you hire a social media agency to write a custom social media strategy, make sure you’re offering a product that’s being sought out by others. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself staring at empty skies without a buyer or lead in site.

Practice and homework lead to heavy game straps

This past season, I put a lot of time in preparing for the upcoming duck season. I joined a skeet league, practiced my calling, and read and watched everything I could duck and goose hunting related. I did my homework. Not because I’m some blood-thirsty, maniacal duck hunter. But if I was going to put in the time in the field, I wanted to make sure I got the most out of my hunts. Not to mention, I love the sport so I had to get my fix in one way or another.

All of the preparation and homework paid. We had our best season to date.

In B2B web marketing, such preparation is necessary as well. Before you can have any hope of stacking up the leads, you have to do your preparation. Goals need to be made. Keyword research needs to be done. Blogs need to be read. You need to make sure that your website user is finding a website that’s intuitively designed and full of the right calls-to-action. There’s much preparation to do. But doing it will give you a much better chance at marketing success.

Know what works, adjust accordingly

In duck hunting, there are various tactics and tools that we use to attempt to bring ducks in close enough to shoot. Calls, floating decoys, jerk-rigs, motion decoys, full-body decoys, blinds, pits, lay-down blinds – honestly, the list is long. It’s expensively long, in fact. Here’s the good news though – you don’t need everything.

For instance, often this year, on some of my best days in fact, I’d head out to the blind with a few full-bodied decoys, a few floating decoys and a motion decoy. I didn’t have a blind or high-tech concealment and performed minimal calling. But, per the first tip I wrote, I was in a place where the ducks wanted to be and a little reassurance was all that was needed.

The same can be said about business.

Just because you want to start a strong web-marketing initiative, doesn’t mean you have to head out with the whole shooting match. To start, you probably don’t need a $100K website rebuild. You also probably don’t need an active presence on each and every social channel. Email campaigns are most effective when your website can accommodate them with a good blog and lots of new content. And Search Engine Optimization and Pay-Per-Click only work once a strategic foundation has been laid. But, a good, basic website, that’s built to grow and evolve, well, that might be just the ticket.

Just because you have a limited budget, doesn’t mean you can’t make some significant progress and eventually grow that marketing budget. While you might want to eventually test and activate all the different tactics, my advice would be to start small and figure out what works. Know your customer that you’re targeting and grow accordingly.

Hunt smart, market smart

As duck hunters, we have to know what we’re targeting on a given day. We have to know what the birds look like in flight and even be able to identify them in low-light conditions. Anyone who hunts knows that this isn’t as easy as it sounds. Ducks fly fast, show up unexpectedly and require some very quick thinking – especially when you have an itchy trigger finger and are anticipating ducks with every tick of the clock. Before you enter the field, you have to know what you’re targeting and have a thorough understanding of your goals and objectives for the day.

In marketing, knowing your goals and objectives are crucial to your success as well. Before ever thinking about a website rebuild, a social media campaign or an SEO/blog undertaking, you must know what you’re aiming to accomplish and how you’ll measure said success. If you don’t, well, it’ll be tough to prove your campaign’s worth, and even yours if the boss comes a knockin’.

Your website is your decoy spread

As I mentioned earlier in this post, being in the right spot for ducks is the single most important thing you can do. Second, however, is having a realistic decoy spread. Throughout a duck season, that can mean many different things. It can mean having large amounts of decoys with lots of movement at times, and at other times, it can mean a smaller spread with limited movement. Regardless, all the calling you’re doing, the shot shell size you choose, the camo patterns you’re wearing – they all come back to your decoy spread and the spot you’re hunting. In short, this is your home base and it matters greatly.

The same can be said about your company’s website. You can have 10K Likes on Facebook, a strong email campaign, and a big budget PPC initiative. But, if your website isn’t set up to convert leads, to get the ducks to decoy if you will, you’re wasting your time. A lead-generating website is absolutely critical to modern business and if you don’t have one that’s built to work hard for you with smart landing pages and good content, well, to keep it in theme, you’re hunting without decoys.

I recently read a story that noted that the number of people who first research any buying decision online is well north of 90%. Consider that the first pass of the ducks. And when they pass, if there ain’t decoys in the water, the ducks are going to keep beating their wings until they find the guys who are hunting with a well-marketed spread. Similarly, if your website isn’t set up with calls-to-action and information that will pique a reader’s interest time and time again, you’re going home empty-handed.

Let your target come to you

Ducks have extremely keen eyesight so hiding and waiting for them to come to you is typically the most effective way of hunting them. Anyone who has ever tried to sneak up on a group of birds knows that it’s extremely difficult and often leaves you hot, sweaty and holding a goose-egg. So instead, as duck hunters, we set up our decoy spread, hide the best we can, and (attempt) to call the birds to us.

This is very similar to the idea of inbound marketing. In the marketing days of old, we had to constantly use outbound marketing techniques in which we would “go out” and attempt to seek out our consumer to tell them our brand message. But now, with a well-designed website, a strong blogging strategy and good use of the B2B web-marketing channels, we can make our leads come to us. When they come, we capture them and nurture them until the sale happens. It’s a simple theory, that if done with precision and planning, can be relatively simple to execute.

Technology is better

Times are changing. Decoys are better. Calls are better. Camo is better. As duck hunters, we used to head to the marsh with a green coat and dark colored coat. Now, with 3D camo patterns, face masks that are wearable (meaning they don’t drive you crazy) and clothes that are warmer, we have the ability to hunt longer and more effectively.

Hmmm… seems to ring true with marketing too, doesn’t it? Let’s look at the website for instance. What once was a very complicated task, day-to-day updates to your website are simpler than ever. Or at least they should be. At Gorilla, we build all of our websites using a CMS (Content Management System). This makes it easier for us, and our clients, to update their website on a regular basis and encourages effective marketing by doing such. Today, a healthy site is a growing site. This is only possible if a strong CMS is in place.

Above is just one example of how technology is making marketing more effective than ever. The takeaway is this: make sure your B2B company is using the tools available to make the most of your online marketing opportunities.

Record success

This is where my duck nerdom reaches unprecedented levels. Daily, after I hunt, I record the day’s hunt. What the decoys were like, what the weather was like, where I was set up, weather, wind – stuff like that. And of course, I keep track of duck kill as well. With that information, as the year progresses, and even in future seasons, I can reference the data I’ve kept to give myself a better chance of success in the future.

This is true in marketing as well. To replicate success, you must first record and measure it. Whether you choose a down and dirty spreadsheet or a more sophisticated tool, tracking your progress and referencing it from time to time will help you greatly as you continue to pursues a strong web strategy.

As the day comes to a close

Or, as they say, at the end of the day, it’s safe to say that B2B web-marketing and hunting, especially waterfowl hunting, share numerous similarities. Think about your hobbies. What similarities do they share with B2B marketing? How can you use this to make yourself a better marketer?

Happy hunting!

Meet the greatest salesman you’ll ever hire

Website as salesman

What’s a sale worth to your business? $100? $100,000? $10M? And how much have you invested in your sales force? Probably a lot. After all, someone needs to discover new prospects, get in front of them and convince them your business is the solution they seek. So you equip them with the training and tools they need to be successful. In return they bring you new prospects, new business, repeat business and more repeat business.

But what about your website?

The purpose of this article is not to convince you that your salesmen aren’t important. Believe us – we know what they mean to the success of your company and we’d never argue against it. But…we would like to hint at the possibility that this very important member of that team might be rather neglected. That team member is your website.

Business owner, meet your new star salesman

This salesman doesn’t sleep – he talks to prospects around the clock while you’re sleeping. He doesn’t take holidays or long lunches. This salesman doesn’t get paid on commission – he’s just happy to make a sale for you if you treat him right. This salesman doesn’t need expensive trade show tickets to close sales and certainly doesn’t require a fancy booth at that show. No hotels, per diems or flights are required to get in front of execs in California, New York or Dubai. And there are no checked bags full of elaborate print brochures to bring along either. This salesman isn’t an iPhone or Blackberry guy. He doesn’t need either – or a cell phone contract or a data plan to accompany it. He doesn’t require health or dental insurance. He’s never had a cavity.

But this salesman does require respect

He needs a foundation. He needs training on how to educate your prospects about your business. He needs to communicate how your business is different from the competition. He needs to understand what customers are looking for and be able to deliver that information before that customer walks away. And he needs to keep providing that customer with resources, updates and information that will help build trust and earn repeat business. He needs to understand when the time is right to ask for their business, and know when asking for their email address is enough.

His only challenge is that he can’t do it without your support. Give him what he needs to be successful and here’s what he’ll do for you.

He’ll discover new, qualified leads

When prospects search Google for the services and benefits your company offers, you can thank this salesman for having already provided Google with links to targeted articles, white papers and other resources that fill the prospect’s needs.

He’ll convince prospects you’re the right fit

When he visits with prospects, he’s buttoned up, eloquent and even a little bit charming. He has the right information and the personality that competitors lack.

He’ll always have a next step in mind

He never ends a conversation without asking for the next meeting. He asks them to visit him again next week to take a look at the new resources he’s going to post. He leaves prospects with PDF white papers for them to download for their bosses to demonstrate you’re the right fit. And he makes sure to grab their email address so he can follow up through a monthly newsletter.

He’ll continue conversation offline

He’s not pushy, but isn’t afraid to ask your prospects to call or fill out a form so you can take conversation offline. He understands some prospects are more comfortable with that, and he’s not offended by it.

He’ll blow away the competition

When trained and equipped with what he needs, this salesman is better than any the competitors have ever sent. He’s available around the clock and is constantly producing valuable resources, information and ideas for your prospects. He shows an understanding for their needs instead of just preaching about how great the company is. And because of that, he earns the respect of his customers and is always top of mind when they have a need to fill.

It’s time to invest in this salesman

He’s craving attention right now and if you choose to invest in him, he’s promising a very worthwhile return on that investment.

___

photo credit: John Fraissinet via photopin cc

 

Related content

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How a B2B blog will win you new business

Understanding web marketing in less than 2 minutes

Customer nurturing content in a local grocery store

We talk a lot about business-to-business lead nurturing at Gorilla. Lead nurturing is the idea of demonstrating expertise, building trust and remaining top of mind among prospects that have already discovered you. When a company can do all of these things by making themselves a valuable resource throughout their prospect’s (sometimes very long) buying cycle, they often become candidates to win the job when the time is right.

A majority of the marketing work we do for our clients comes in the form of online content – targeted blog posts, white papers and web-based tools designed for niche audiences. These content pieces are designed to be valuable, lead nurturing resources for their prospects. And considering the importance of repeat business and customer retention for most businesses, this content is also developed for the purpose of nurturing existing customers.

Although we don’t play much in the business-to-consumer world, I came across a pretty interesting B2C nurturing piece the other day at my local grocery store (Schnucks) and it inspired me. I do 90% of my grocery shopping at this store already. It’s close, they have everything I need and it’s a nice store. But they also do little things that add extra value to my shopping experience, like this:

customer nurturing example

At the butcher counter there’s a stack of these envelopes for the taking. I can bring one home and next week come back and drop off a knife for sharpening. I’ve always been a little paranoid about ruining a pretty nice set of knives by sharpening them myself. Schnucks recognized that a lot of people probably share that sentiment, so they provided a smart, simple solution to address that pain for their customers.

We think the best lead nurturing content in the business-to-business world is born the same way:

  • Consider the challenges and pains that your prospects and current customers experience in their workday
  • Tap the expertise in your brain
  • Nurture prospects and customers with solutions to those challenges

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Don’t be a wimp – give it away for free

When it comes to web-marketing, it’s still important to "look nice"

by Jon Franko

First of all, here’s my obligatory sentence about how I haven’t posted in a long time and I’m really sorry and it won’t happen again and etcetera. But hey – cut me some slack. I’ve been busy. In the past few months, we’ve been running wild at Gorilla. Not complaining, as we all know, busy is a good thing. But busy nonetheless. We’ve a new face around the office, wished another well as he left to pursue a new venture, and we’re in the process of hiring another writer. Oh, and it’s duck season – which anyone who follows me on Twitter  probably knows.

Oh yeah, the blog post. Sorry.

Recently, Joe and I had the opportunity to show some work and tell a little bit about ourselves to a local B2B industrial company. I can’t tell you much more than that, but it’s really not important. These guys are very good at what they do and we’d love the opportunity to explore some work with them. They’re on our new business board and have been a prospect for quite some time now.

Anyway, upon arriving at the office of the company, we found ourselves with about a five-minute wait until our invitee was available to meet. Which was great. Their reception area was one of the more interesting ones I’ve been in. There were lots and lots of framed pictures, awards, news clippings, miniature replicas representing the work they did. It was like a little museum for the company. They had a great story to tell and they clearly cared about the perception that anyone walking through their doors would have of their company.

Unfortunately, none of this passion translated to their marketing materials.

Not online. Not in print. Not even in their email addresses (yep – you guessed it – some @hotmail.com’ers). This was a company with some of the richest history we’ve ever come across, with award-winning project after project and a history that roots back more than a half a century. It’s a family-owned business gone huge. A five-minute wait in their reception area will tell you that.

But, their website won’t. Nor will any of their marketing materials. And to me, fundamentally, that’s a problem. A huge problem.

Yes, B2B marketing is much bigger than branding now, but…

Let me go on the record and state that there’s so much more to what we can do as marketers now than simply build brand image. The rise of web marketing has made that very apparent. And because of all there is for us to do, we’ve succeeded as a company at Gorilla. But, if you refuse to buy into online marketing, if you believe that every customer that you can possibly do business with already knows about you (which they don’t by the way), and you can scientifically, mathematically prove that web-marketing doesn’t matter, well, I won’t argue with you.

But, looking nice still matters. And I will argue that until I’m thrown out of your office.

As a company, you care about how your employees dress…

Shirts must be tucked in and nothing short of a golf shirt and khakis are acceptable. You make sure that every damn thing you touch has a giant company logo emblazoned on it. You worry about the appearance of your office (is it clean?) when a client is coming by.

Yet, your company’s website, the most visible and visited asset you have as a B2B serving company, well, you don’t give it a second thought. Your cousin’s sister’s roommate’s mechanic’s dog’s uncle’s aunt’s wife’s nephew built it eight years ago in between sessions with the Sims. What the hell do you need to update your site for?

Our answer?

Lots. Mobile devices, new best web practices, projects you need to be showing off, and a consumer that is way more digitally savvy than you’d ever imagine. So do yourself a favor – give your website the due attention it deserves. After all, it’s often the first touchpoint any of your potential consumers will ever make with your brand. If it’s bad, it might just be their last.

Business blogging in less than 2 minutes

The ultimate purpose of a business blog is to develop content that will get discovered by new leads in places like search engines and social media and to keep those leads engaged with your business throughout their sales cycle. This quick video demonstrates the keys to successful business blogging in less than 2 minutes.

photo credit: ogimogi via photopin cc

photo credit: Tall Chris via photopin cc

Online marketing ain’t the wild west

Strategy and online marketing

Marketers today have certain a luxury available to them called data. As long as you can identify where your business needs to go, you can track which tactics are getting you there and which aren’t. And when you can do that, you have the opportunity to replicate your successes and correct your failures. In other words, no more shooting from the hip.

Set goals

Identify clear business objectives. Zero in on a target audience and decide what you want from them. Make sure your goals are specific and realistic. I’m talking about things like more inquiry phone calls, more awareness within a specific audience segment or more sales of a key product or service you offer.

Make a plan

Choose the marketing tactics that make the most sense for your goals. Understand where you can reach your audience, whether that’s in Google searches, at trade shows, via email, on LinkedIn or elsewhere. Construct an integrated campaign that not only helps you go get them, but also helps them discover you.

Try things

In the wild west “trying things” meant paying for 10,000 direct mailers to be designed, printed and distributed and sending 5 sales guys to 10 trade shows. Today it means a series of targeted, keyword-rich business blog posts that will populate Google searches, a white paper showcasing your company’s expertise and email / social media campaigns to promote those things. It also means a thorough and instantly available portfolio of data to determine the value of those tactics.

Analyze the results

Some tactics will work and some won’t. Every audience is different and consumes marketing messages in unique ways. Immerse yourself in the data. Most of it is free. Understand it and learn from it.

Replicate what worked

Which blog posts resulted in heavy traffic from Google searches to your most important product or service pages? Write more posts similar to those ones. Which links in your email blasts drove the most click-thoughs to your website? Develop more content around those topics. Which trade publications are picking up your news and blog posts in the social media channels and sharing with their audiences? Keep conversing with them. Good marketers look at positive results and replicate the decisions that got them there.

Correct the miscues

A marketing email every week may be bothering your audience and leading to unsubscribes. Try cutting back on the frequency. Facebook might be a ghost town in your market. Try focusing on LinkedIn and Twitter. Certain blog topics might not be reaching the right audience. Try refocusing your topics around keywords they’re more likely to search for in Google. Good marketers understand that it takes failures to identify new opportunities for success.

Related articles

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photo credit: williac via photopin cc

Gorilla 76 adds two Construction Marketing Association awards to trophy case

Gorilla 76, a St. Louis-based B2B web-marketing agency, was recently awarded CMA STAR and CMA SuperSTAR awards from the Construction Marketing Association (CMA) for excellence in marketing. The STAR was given for the company’s work in the Product Video category on the TruQC product video, a project in which they partnered with St. Louis video production studio – Anchor Media Studio. The SuperSTAR was awarded for outstanding Employee Communications for Gorilla 76’s work with The Korte Company, creating, writing and managing the Korte-Wire, the company’s e-newsletter.

“Throughout the past few years, we’ve worked almost exclusively with companies that we describe as ‘hard-hat wearing companies’,” said Joe Sullivan, partner at Gorilla 76. “So it’s nice when your work is recognized by others in the industry as being thought-leading.”

The CMA STAR awards recognize excellence in 16 different categories and 81 sub-categories including advertising, branding, website design, social media, brochures, catalogs, new product launches, packaging, photography, promotions, publicity, merchandising, trade shows, videos, employee communications and integrated marketing campaigns.

“Gorilla 76 was recognized as the winner for Employee Communications and Product Video in the construction industry,” states CMA Chairman Neil M. Brown. “The CMA STAR Awards showcase the very best in marketing, effectiveness and creative execution.”

How a B2B blog will win you new business

Business blogging and content marketing for lead generation

Blogging is not just for hipsters

Nor is just for teenagers with green hair, parents of newborns, your cousin who has too much time on her hands, social media addicts or technology start-ups who think they’re building the next Facebook. Blogging is for YOU, business executive.

For the next five minutes as you read this blog post article, make me a deal and put aside any stigma associated with the word “blog”. In return I’ll teach you how a company blog will become your most effective new business tool.

The first thing I want you to do is redefine the word blog in your head. Throw away your preconceptions and think about it this way: A blog is nothing more than a very easy way to write and instantly publish words online. That’s it. Now process that thought from a business perspective. If you could write and  instantly publish anything you want, what would you write about?

You’d probably write about things that will:

  • Showcase your company’s competitive points-of-difference
  • Provide your prospects with answers to their questions
  • Validate your business in the mind of a potential customer
  • Encourage a qualified lead pick up the phone and call you

Blog content ideas that accomplish the above:

  • Information about a new service or product offering
  • Why your new piece of equipment makes you twice as efficient as your top competitor
  • Commentary on the most important thing happening if your industry right now
  • A profile on an employee who is the absolute best in the business at what he or she does
  • How you managed to come in ahead of time and under budget on a recent customer job
  • The 5 most important considerations when hiring a company that does what you do

How you make sure your prospects see your blog posts:

  • Email newsletters. Send one out monthly to all of your current customers and leads. Include teasers that link to your blog posts.
  • Google searches. If you’re publishing multiple blog posts per month about a specific topic that your prospects search for in Google, your blog posts will find them.
  • LinkedIn. It’s Facebook for business. If you’re not familiar, it’s time to learn – I promise that it’s far from rocket science. Posting a link to a new blog post on LinkedIn takes 10 seconds and the targeted audience you’ll reach simply cannot be overlooked. Learn more here.

How a blog post reader becomes a customer:

So here’s where the payoff comes. When prospects discovers your blog posts and the content resonates with them, you earn their respect and you become top of mind. You’ve tackled the brand awareness challenge. But this is where the road ends for a lot of less savvy companies. Why? Because they fail to engage the customer beyond this critical juncture. If you met a prospect a trade show, a business event or on the street and that person expressed interest in your services, would you shake their hand and walk away? Absolutely not.

There is an online equivalent to handing a business card to an interested party, asking for the opportunity to follow up or sending them a brochure in the mail. That equivalent is the strategically placed call-to-action on your website. Ask for their email address on the same page as your blog post so you can send them a monthly newsletter. Ask them to fill out a short form so your sales team can get in touch with them. Prominently place your phone number on the page and suggest that they call you to ask questions about your offering. When you put these calls-to-action in place, converting visitors to leads becomes a reality.

What you need to get started right now:

  • A leader. Business blogging success comes from top down. Whether it’s the leader of your department or the leader of your company, you need a respected figure to say “this matters”.
  • Educated employees who buy in. Team members need to understand the purpose of a business blog. Communicate the points in this article to them. Educate them. Make them believers.
  • A website with the right infrastructure. There’s no getting around this one. Your website needs a shell to house this content in a way that’s easy for your audience to consume. Without that, you lose them.
  • A content calendar. Blogging is not a 3-week project or a 3-month project. It’s an ongoing operation and it won’t produce results without strategy, consistency and persistence. A calendar that lets your business plan blog topics and dates while also assigning them to specific people will get you on that track.

Get movin’

If you’re not convinced, feel free to reassign any of those stigmas to the word “blog”. Otherwise, there no better time than now to get rolling.

Related posts and content

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Lead capture landing pages in less than 2 minutes

A landing page isn’t your website’s home page. Rather, it’s a page designed for a specific audience and with one real purpose: lead capture. This two minute video identifies the components of an effective landing page and demonstrates how we constructed one for a client.

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Understanding web marketing in less than 2 minutes

Understanding web marketing in less than 2 minutes

This is one of a series of video posts we’re calling “in less than 2 minutes”. Consider it a concise introduction to online marketing for business-to-business companies. If you’re not sure how things like Twitter, LinkedIn, email campaigns and your website can work together to generate new leads for your business, let this wet your palette.

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Don’t overthink – but still think – before you post

Think before you make a social media post

Last week a Facebook post rolled across our company’s stream and caught our eye – just not exactly in a good way. Out of respect to this business, we’ll refrain from identifying them (even though a screenshot of their post would have made a great visual here, dang it!). The post read:

“Don’t forget to listen to our radio ad playing tonight during the [town] vs. [other town] football game on [radio station]!”

Think about that for a second. In other words, “we would like to advertise that we’ll be advertising tonight. Make sure you listen to our ad so we can convince you to buy something!” If this were 10 years ago, I wonder if they would have sent direct mailer postcards the week before the big game to advertise their ad? That would have been expensive, so yay for social media!

Believe me when I say that social media posts should not be over-thought. Success is about reacting quickly. Long approval processes eliminate the opportunity to post something timely. If companies buy into this, kudos to them. BUT – that doesn’t mean you should post without thinking.

Consider these questions before going post-happy:

  • Does this post support what my company is trying to accomplish as a business?
  • Does it provide valuable information for my audience that will help them do their job better? Or am I just promoting my company?
  • Is the content of this post relevant and appropriate for my brand’s image? Does it support the culture and brand perception we wish to project?

Now don’t forget to sign up for the Gorilla newsletter. We’ll be sending out tips on how to not miss the print ad we’re running next week!

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Infographic as lead generator

People respond better to images than long paragraphs of copy online, and infographics provide a solution for presenting information visually.

So what have marketers done with that little nugget of insight over the past few years? They’ve compiled and spit out out piles of useless visual information for the sake of creating infographics of course!

Infographics as lead generation tools

An infographic is a tactic for achieving an end goal. Period. Like a print ad, a direct mailer, a trade show booth, a website, a blog post or any other marketing tool, an infographic should be designed to fulfill a specific business goal.

How we did it

Last month, we completed an infographic (in unison with SEO firm Evolve Digital Labs) for The Korte Company, a Design-Build contractor in the St. Louis area. But this wasn’t just some haphazard effort. No siree Bob. We had a process in place.

  1. Our client identified business opportunity in hospital construction.
  2. It then made sense to investigate marketing opportunities in the healthcare construction market.
  3. We observed high volume of Google searches already sending traffic to Korte website for terms like “hospital floor plans”.
  4. We interviewed an internal expert at Korte about best practices in designing hospital floor plans.
  5. Our team combined this research with links to 50 quality hospital floor plans we helped compile.
  6. Gorilla 76 designed and wrote a keyword-driven, visual “hospital floor plans” infographic to use in social media channels and distribute to healthcare media sources

This infographic was centered around a specific business goal and was supported by research. The end product was a branded marketing piece that further solidified our client as an expert and provided a useful, relevant, targeted resource for a very niche audience. Click here to view the infographic.

Infographic for lead generation

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Integrating trade shows and digital marketing

Yep, the ol’ trade show is still relevant

Despite our focus on industrial marketing, we won’t deny that the trade show is still a pertinent marketing channel for a lot of construction, manufacturing and other B2B companies. Why? Attendees are typically part of a niche group and therefore very targeted. That’s often enough reason to be there. 99% of businesses, however, are missing opportunities to turn these events into something bigger and this is where web marketing comes into play.

Here are 6 ways to get more return on your trade show investment through use of digital marketing media.

1. Create a landing page and a unique URL

Why send people to YourCompany.com if you could send them to YourCompany.com/Specific-Information? Attendees at a trade show are there for a specific topic, so information most relevant to this show’s audience should be compiled for them. Create a page on your site with that information, a unique URL and an email capture form to convert those visitors into leads. For more on landing pages, click here.

2. Replace the printed brochure with a branded USB drive

How many brochures can a person carry around at a trade show? Eventually they wind up in the garbage. Abandon the brochure and bring along a box of branded jump drives with useful company resources on them. Include a white paper pdf on a related topic that includes links to the appropriate pages on your site. Jump drives fit in pockets, and at the very least can be reused by your visitors. The same can’t be said for printed brochures.

3. Collect email addresses!

Whatever you do, don’t miss the opportunity to collect email addresses and plug them into the appropriate database. That database may be a CRM system, email marketing software or some combination of the two. Be sure that the email addresses get plugged into the segmented lists so you can market specifically to this group in the future as well. This trade show is the first step in a sometimes long lead nurturing effort, so don’t miss here.

4. Follow up on LinkedIn

If you know their name and company you can find them on LinkedIn after the show. Connect, send a simple “nice to meet you message” and follow their company to learn some more. Even if they might not be the right person to talk with at their company, you’ve at least created a potential inroad to the right person. Click here for more on using LinkedIn for new business.

5. Ask to write a guest blog post on the trade show website

Here’s a request trade show organizers probably don’t receive too often. Reach out and ask them if you could write a guest post on their site. Provide useful information for the upcoming show’s audience and you’ve gained free publicity. Tell the organizer that you’ll promote the post on LinkedIn and other social channels, which will only drive more traffic to their site. And then do it. Win, win.

6. Use the appropriate Twitter hashtag while you’re there

At bigger trade shows, common hashtags often emerge on Twitter that are specifically related to that show. In other words, attendees add a topic identifier to their Tweets that essentially says “this tweet has to do with this trade show”.  If you’re a Twitter user, look for those hashtags and participate in the conversation. You may open doors to new connections and potential leads. If you’re not a Twitter user, become a Twitter user.

Much of this post was inspired by my findings in The B2B Social Media Book. This one is a highly recommended read for anyone involved in marketing, sales or management at B2B companies. If you’re a doubter on social media and/or b2b web design focused on inbound marketing, you won’t be after this.

Turn your website into a lead generation machine

Our free B2B Website Planning Handbook will help you strategize, plan and build a website that attracts qualified visitors and converts them into real leads.

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Search engine success for B2B companies depends heavily upon social media

Two consistent observations follow from our experience working with B2B companies on their web marketing strategies:

A. Most businesses care considerably about placement in Google search results
B. Many don’t believe social media is relevant for their company

As for point A, they’re right on. Search engine optimization matters – a lot. What they don’t often realize is that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to achieve positive search results without participation in social media. Fast Company posted a great article a couple weeks ago titled “SEO isn’t what you think it is” and it concluded with this point:

So rather than asking yourself, “How do I optimize my website to better rank with search engines?” ask, “How can I optimize my brand so that it’s a sought-after participant in relevant conversations?” Answering that will bring you top rankings on the search engines and much, much more.

I’d highly recommend reading that full article – it’s short but full of good insights. In the meantime, I’d like to dispute point B from above.

In the context of search engine optimization, what follows are two big time misconceptions about B2B social media marketing that should be put to rest.

Misconception: My customers are old school and don’t use social media, so neither should I.

Good point on the traditional customer base – we see that often. But I’ll make a very strong argument here that your customers aren’t your only audience. When you share original content like blog posts or white papers and they get picked up by an industry journalist or publication, you gain exposure among their audience (just like when you send out a press release). What does this have to do with search engine optimization? Everything. Google rewards you in search results because you’ve gained additional credibility. Think of it this way. When the village newspaper picks up your story and links to your site, you get some points from Google. When CNN picks up your story and links to your site, you get lots and lots of points from Google. Consider everything in between part of a sliding scale.

Misconception: No one cares that I’m having a double cheeseburger for lunch (or about any other status updates at that).

OK, I kind of tricked you with that headline. Though I do love cheeseburgers, it’s true – that stuff doesn’t matter. In fact, businesses who are sharing that kind of information are completely missing the mark. But here’s the reality. Search engines (like Google) are all looking at your activity in social media. Those participating in discussions about your industry and contributing valuable content and opinions about things that do matter to your audience are being recognized by Google as influential parties. Google rewards these influencers with better placement in search results. Period.

We’d love to hear your stories about success or failure with social media in search. Please share your comments below. And if you want to talk social media strategy, get it touch with us. Thanks for reading.

Related articles that you might find useful:

LinkedIn for new business part 1: lead prospecting

Twitter fixed my sh*tter

How to market with patience in a tough economy

Boom goes the dynamite for B2B companies

If “Boom goes the dynamite” means nothing to you – particularly if you’re a sports fan – I’m gonna need you to take a couple minutes and watch this classic. At least watch from minutes 2:00 to 2:30.

From emails in my inbox to (real) sportscasters on ESPN to conversations in bars, people have been quoting this poor guy for more than 6 years. And it’s been viewed over 7 million times on YouTube.

Boom Goes the Dynamite became an instant hit because it’s hilarious and happened unexpectedly. But the purpose of this blog post is to communicate that “hilarious” and “unexpected” aren’t the only characteristics of content that gets shared. That’s good news for companies because “unexpected” is something you can’t control (it just happens), and “hilarious” is pretty tough to replicate if you’re not Will Ferrell.

So instead, we’ll take a look at the highly attainable traits of content that get people excited to the point they’re inclined to share it with others. I did some digging, followed by some thinking. Here’s where I landed.

Inspiring or thought-provoking

Grasshopper is a communications company that helps you “run your business using cell phones”. Because they target entrepreneurs, they developed this video to inspire entrepreneurship. It’s seen close to 1 million views on YouTube.

http://youtu.be/T6MhAwQ64c0

Entertaining

How can you use a little creativity to make an ordinary product or service a bit more interesting or easier to grasp? Here’s how ShipServ, a marketplace for buyers and suppliers in the shipping industry pulled it off with a little help from some Lego men.

http://youtu.be/IOxnD8lvF-A

Example of a useful infographicQuestion-answering

One of the best questions you can ask when planning content is “What is my audience searching for in Google?” One of our clients is a design-build contractor (The Korte Company) and they’ve been pursuing the healthcare industry as builders. We learned that there was a high search volume around “hospital floor plans”, so our response was to write and design this infographic to fill that need.

White paper success exampleEducational

Another client of ours is an investment banking organization that specializes in employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs). These guys are experts – they’re full of knowledge and experience on the topic. So what better way to demonstrate that than by writing an educational white paper and making it available for download on their website? Take a look.

RelatableExample of infographic flowchart

When two people meet in St. Louis and they discover that they’re both natives, a strange phenomenon occurs where one instinctively asks the other “where did you go to high school?” As someone who moved to St. Louis after high school, my ability to successfully initiate conversation with another St. Louis native has been put at a serious disadvantage. Luckily, a local newspaper (The Riverfront Times) put together this flowchart graphic for us transplants so I can at least tell some where I should have gone to high school. While this isn’t a B2B example, it is an example of highly relatable content. You see it and you feel a connection.

Example of calculator tool on a websiteUseful

Think about tools that your audience might find useful. Can you build any of them and house them on your website? American Piping Products, a huge industrial pipe supplier, put a variety of pipe specification calculators on their site to make it easier for their customers to figure out what they need. They’re simple, but very useful.

Conclusion

7 million YouTube views by our boy from Boom Goes the Dynamite sets the bar pretty high, but there’s no reason business-related content can’t be worthy of sharing. Focus on content that will excite your leads, current customers, industry journals or whoever your audience might be.

Related articles

Don’t be a wimp – give it away for free

Marketing lessons from The Dollar Shave Club

Is content marketing a load of BS?

How to market with patience in a tough economy

Don’t be a wimp – give it away for free

“The reason many businesses don’t produce remarkable content is fear — fear of giving away too much information, fear of saying something wrong, fear of giving competitors an advantage. These were all rational twentieth century fears. In the twenty-first century, these fears are the quickest path to failure.”

No fear!

This quote comes from The B2B Social Media Book (highly recommended by the way) and I couldn’t agree more. The kind of marketing we preach at Gorilla presumes that not every member of your target audience is ready to buy from you now. When that’s the case, nurturing that audience with valuable content will often keep the door open to a sale. The kicker: people don’t want to buy your blog posts, white papers, videos, etc. You have to give that stuff away for free – and it has to be really good.

This is where a lot of businesses get held up and here’s why we think the fear of giving something away needs to be shelved.

When you freely offer good content to your specific audience, you:

  1. Demonstrate your expertise with confidence
  2. Give visitors new ways to engage with your brand
  3. Increase your chances of being found in Google searches
  4. Open up the door to capturing leads

On the flip side, when you let fear win, you miss the opportunity to:

  1. Open dialogue with prospects who may have never known you existed
  2. Keep dialogue open with prospects who might buy later instead of now
  3. Do something your competitors likely aren’t doing – yet

Fear not – start writing!

Related articles:

How to market with patience in a tough economy

Is content marketing a load of BS?

The best content is right under your nose

Trade ad campaign for general contractor

We try to make the most of every marketing opportunity – even the little ones.

This tiny, black and white trade ad campaign for one of our  clients – The Korte Company – specifically targets the healthcare industry. Throughout the last few months, a one-off ad has evolved into a series of four.

Our goal was to not only develop a compelling, audience-centric concept, but to encourage viewers to take action. As a web marketing agency, we emphasize driving audience online. So for this campaign we designed a landing page specifically for the healthcare construction audience and placed a unique URL on the print ads to drive viewers there. This accomplishes a few things:

  1. It gives a targeted audience content written specifically for them.
  2. It creates the opportunity to capture a lead.
  3. It allows us to measure and track the actions of those who reacted to this specific campaign.

Let us know what you think. We’re proud of this campaign.

Healthcare construction advertising

Healthcare construction advertising

Healthcare construction advertising

Healthcare construction advertising

Joe Sullivan named to 30 Under 30 list by St. Louis Business Journal

Last Friday The St. Louis Business Journal published its annual “30 Under 30” list, recognizing a group of up-and-coming young professionals in the St. Louis area.

We’re proud to announce that our own “thinker and designer” Joe Sullivan is among this year’s honorees. Below is Joe’s section.

Joe Sullivan of Gorilla 76 – St. Louis Business Journal 30 Under 30 2012

Marketing lessons from The Dollar Shave Club

The evolution of the men’s shaving razor probably could have stopped with the Mach3. But three blades weren’t enough, were they? Schick needed to add that fourth one so you’d really feel ready to start your day fresh. And then when Gillette decided to squeeze number five in there, we found ourselves staring straight into the eyes of innovation.

So where could things go from here? Maybe a wishbone-shaped handle that shaves both sides of your face at once? Or an all-in-one shaving cream / razor combo that shoots out shaving gel between the blades? OR – what about a razor with a Facebook button on the handle that let’s you automatically post how far along you are in your shave?!

While the R&D guys at Gillette and Schick continue slaving away on their next mind-blowing innovation, take a look at this company:

The Dollar Shave Club

Ever heard of them? They’re small and serve a niche market, so most likely not.

Dollar Shave Club

Someone sent me a link to their site recently because it was funny. I couldn’t help spending 10 minutes on the site reading about it. And their minute and thirty second promo video pretty much says it all:

So these guys took an ultra-simple, indistinguishable product– the razor blade – that every man (other than James Harden of the OKC Thunder) needs, offered it up in new way and used pure marketing to make it look awesome.

You can certainly argue that they’re distinguished because of their business model. You subscribe to their service and they send you new blades in the mail each month. But let’s be realistic here. I can grab new razor blades any time I’m at the grocery store, or pop in to any of the eight Walgreens locations within a mile radius of my home once a month and choose from a wide selection of blades. In other words, The Dollar Shave Club isn’t selling you convenience or a better razor blade. They’re selling you the feeling of being part of something fun, kind of ridiculous, and best of all – something that makes for a great topic of conversation.

Now on to the big question

Did they win my business? Well, no. I’ll admit that I’ve stuck with my Mach 3. But guess what? I wrote this article about them. And from a little bit of research, it’s clear that I’m far from the only one who’s done that. I’ve emailed their site to a ton of people, Tweeted links to it and posted it in other social networks. And as for that video? Almost five million views on Youtube. These little guys have created some serious buzz – about razor blades! I have trouble believing that Gillette could pull that off when they add blades number seven and eight.

Lesson learned

Your product or service offering might seem nondescript or boring, but you’re in business because someone needs it. If you can deliver it in a unique way with smart marketing, you might find you’re more interesting than you thought possible.

Other blog posts you might like

Speak to your audience as if they were…real people

Twitter fixed my sh*tter

Marketing lessons from long and short phone calls with friends

 

Branding an industrial software company

As our business has evolved, we’ve shifted from an agency that delivers project-based work for lots of clients to one that works on a retainer business with a select client base. While this shift was helped us grow into a true business growth partner with our clients, it has also meant less of the logo and branding jobs that we’ve always enjoyed.

Then along came TruQC…

First off, the product. It’s the result of an innovative spirit and lots of hard work. Put simply, TruQC is job-site (painting, construction, etc.) documentation software built for the iPad. It was created because a group of innovative guys knew there had to be a better way to do something. To date, all documentation was done with pencils and papers and lots of room for error. This is the era of the iPad – a tool that is making numerous industries more efficient. Why not industrial painting?

The logo

Our marketing work for TruQC has been extensive (read our full case study here), but the first task was branding.

The name was already provided and the color palette was influenced by our clients’ alma mater (M-I-Z…). So the logo was really where we started to get involved. The logo needed to reflect the overall sleek, innovative nature of the product itself and be easily extendable to an app icon for the iTunes store. We’d also need to extend the look to the app’s website, advertising campaign, sell sheets, printed materials, etcetera.

A number of ideas and iterations led us to our final logo, a nod to the traditional executed-by-hand paperwork, but with a modern look representative of the future of job-site documentation.

TruQC case study - logo design

A worthy tagline

As for writing a tagline, we wanted to deliver something that was less of a catch phrase and more of a description of the product. TruQC was a concept very new to its market. Experience tells us that clearly communicating what it is that a product does is priority number one. Once you have an established brand presence, then you can go the more “creative” tagline route.

Tagline

More on our work for TruQC

We’ve served as the marketing agency of record for TruQC since their inception. For a look at the work we’ve executed for them and the results achieved, view our case study: Generating industrial leads for TruQC.

Brand positioning and email marketing for distribution company

American Piping Products is one of the world’s largest distributors of steel pipe and one of St. Louis’ fastest growing companies. In 2012, they asked us to build brand positioning and a consistent look, while supporting their sales team through email lead nurturing.

Brand positioning

We started the American Piping Products work by first taking a close look at brand positioning. In order to do work that was smart and effective, we knew we had to tap into the brains of their sales team. We conducted phone interviews with numerous team members in order to learn the ins and outs of their business. We used our learning to develop brand positioning that would work as the core of all their marketing materials moving forward.

Brand positioning for B2B industrial pipe supplier

Trade journal advertising

As with many of our clients, American Piping Products has a very nice list of trade journals in which they advertise. The advertising that is done in said publications, however, is often poor in execution. So our goal with American Piping Products’ trade advertising is to create work that provides leads and functions as a welcome relief to industry readers — hell, maybe even spark a laugh or too.

B2B trade journal advertising for pipe supplier

B2B trade journal advertising for pipe supplier

Supporting the sales team through email marketing and print

American Piping Products has a very robust database in place, so our next task would be to put their message in the inboxes of their clients and potential clients. Our focus is on building a monthly email campaign to drive visitors back to the site where lead-capture forms exist. We’re proud to say that site traffic has reached record numbers since we began working with American Piping Products.

Email marketing for B2B pipe supplier

As part of our offline efforts, we were tasked with giving their sales team something they could use day in and day out, when cold calls turned into real-live leads looking for more information. We worked hand-in-hand with the sales team, creating a piece that was simple, to the point, but still very, very informational.

Sales materials for B2B industrial pipe supplier

What’s next?

Our relationship with the folks at American Piping Products is still young and we’ve lots still to do for them. What exactly? We’re not really at liberty to tell you. Guess you’ll just have to come back and check in on us.

Other stuff that may be of interest

Download our free web marketing guide for B2B industrial companies

Website design and lead generation marketing for an industrial painting company

Our targeted trade journal campaign for a construction company

Website development for property management company

Red Brick is a St. Louis-based property management company that owns many-a-square-foot in cool, old (but renovated) buildings in St. Louis’ most popular neighborhoods. The locally renowned company has been around for more than 40 years, so we were honored when they approached us about building a robust website.

Tasks were many on this project, and it proved to be a great challenge for Gorilla. Not only did we have to overhaul the look of their existing site but we had to move a massive database of hundreds of rental properties and present them in an organized manner for a more user friendly experience. We focused on specific calls-to-action all throughout the site to control a user’s on-site experience.

Additionally, best search optimization practices were very important so we had to pay particularly close attention to page titles, URLs, headlines and site copy.Real estate website design

Organizing a massive database of properties

Red Brick has hundreds of properties spanning multiple St. Louis neighborhoods and they include both commercial spaces and residential spaces. A refinement of search and filters was at the heart of this site’s reorganization and it had to be easy for Red Brick to manage internally.

Calls to actionFocus on specific calls-to-action

Red Brick wanted to focus on their unique form of open houses (in short, self-led tours), so strategically placed calls-to-action throughout the site drive visitors to a page that explains this unique process. Users then have the ability to flag properties of interest and download a print-friendly PDF property sheet to make their physical apartment search even easier.

Real estate and property management web design

Existing customer service

From the initial briefing, we knew we had to make it easy for existing tenants to put in maintenance requests, find information they needed, and generally speaking, navigate the site. So, we did. The result is a site and experience that is a win-win for both the tenant and Red Brick as making a request, managing a request and documenting a request are a breeze.

Search engine optimization

To satisfy the search side of things, we focused on using keywords like “st. louis apartments” and the names of the neighborhoods in the the URLs, page titles and headlines throughout the site. Though the new site is relatively young, we’ve already seen major improvements.

URL structure in website development

Other stuff that may be of interest

Brand image, voice and content strategy for an investment banking firm

Branding, web design and full-service marketing for an iPad construction app developer

Website design services

B2B website design for a professional services firm

Merchant banking. Ever heard of it? We hadn’t either. But the guys at Butcher Joseph Hayes had and they called on us to help with some early marketing efforts. We did what any smart marketing company would do – we learned their industry.

As a quick briefing, Butcher Joseph Hayes is a start-up investment banking firm made up of guys with a whole lot of experience and smarts. They specialize in ESOPs (employee stock ownership plans) and were specifically targeting those in that market. It was our job to help them create their message, their look, and make sure that both were hitting their audience. They needed a personality in their voice and a look that wasn’t stodgy like so many of their competitors.

Stage one of our relationship was devoted to developing a brand look, voice and website, as well as basic marketing tools like an email template. Stage two was focused on lead generation among that ESOP-seeking target audience.

website design for investment banking firm

Targeted content strategy for nurturing B2B leads

We worked closely with the guys at Butcher Joseph Hayes, as well as the folks at a local SEO firm, developing a content strategy to build out targeted materials on their site. We helped create a variety of articles and blog posts, a white paper and on-site keyword optimization for that specific ESOP-audience.

B2B website content development

White paper for investment banking firm

Enabling lead capture opportunities

Our work with Butcher Joseph Hayes focused heavily on calls-to-action at all stages of the sales funnel in an effort to generate more leads. The e-newsletter sign-up forms were for those at the top of the funnel so lead nurturing could actually begin. We then had a white paper download for those further along in the sales cycle. And for those ready to talk, we had inquiry forms. No matter the stage of the lead, we had designed the site so that it would be useful for visitors.

B2B website calls to action

Other stuff that may be of interest

Web design and development for a property management company with over 1000 properties

Website design and lead generation marketing for an industrial painting company

Branding, web design and full-service marketing for an iPad construction app developer

Gorilla 76 tapped for work with American Piping Products

St. Louis-based B2B web marketing agency Gorilla 76 has been hired as the digital marketing agency of record for Chesterfield, Missouri-based American Piping Products, a world leader in steel pipe supply. The agency will be working on a multitude of tasks for the oil and gas pipe supplier, ranging from traditional and digital advertising duties to monthly content creation and email marketing.

“The opportunity with the gentlemen at American Piping Products is a very important one for Gorilla 76 and one we’re very excited about,” said Joe Sullivan, a thinker + designer here at Gorilla. “They’ve trusted us with the responsibility of further building their brand and that’s really an honor. We’re pumped for the opportunity to deliver exceptional work for them.”

American Piping Products was recently listed as a Top 150 Company in the St. Louis area, as well as the seventh fastest growing company in the area. Both lists were compiled by the St. Louis Business Journal.

LinkedIn for new business part 3: promoting your company

This is the third of three blog posts on using LinkedIn as a new business tool. Here’s how I’ve divided them up.

On to part 3: promoting your company.

A few rules of thumb

Promoting in the social media channels is all about making connections and nurturing relationships. Here are a few pointers:

  • Be consistent. This isn’t like running a TV spot where the commercial aires and then you sit back waiting for calls to come in. Social media marketing takes time, effort and patience. Either be consistent or don’t do it at all.
  • Don’t be pushy. It’s very easy to unfollow or block people in social media. Learn through experimentation how to balance promotion and other communication with your prospects.
  • Be genuine. People want to converse with real people. Act as you would in person and you’ll earn the respect of your audience.

LinkedIn profile completion tipsWrite a thorough personal profile

Consider your personal profile to be your online resume. When potential customers or partners seek you out, what do you want them to know about you? LinkedIn will guide you through completion of your profile in a few easy steps. Be sure to give some thought to the “skills and expertise” section. These labels become searchable categories, so include the areas of expertise that you want to show up for in searches. A missed opportunity by many is the “websites” field. Create descriptive links to important pages on your company website. Not only will these links help drive traffic to your site, but they’ll help with search engine optimization of your site as well.

LinkedIn 3 links to your website

Fill out your company profile

LinkedIn is more about individual people than it is about companies. At this point in time, there’s not a whole lot you can do with a company profile. That said, a complete, well-written profile demonstrates a level of professionalism expected by those who seek you out. Craft a descriptive  company overview that paints an accurate picture of what your business does and how you differentiate yourself from the competition. Take advantage of the products/services tab and write succinct descriptions of your most important offerings.

Share news and articles to drive traffic to your company website

LinkedIn allows you to add updates to your business and personal profiles. When you write a press release, news update or blog post on your website, make a habit of adding a summary and link on LinkedIn back to that page on your website. You can even automate it by including a RSS feed from your company blog (click here if you’re not familiar with RSS feeds) or other free add-ons like the WordPress plug-in that I use.

LinkedIn WordPress plug-in

If your website/blog is well designed and full of valuable information for your customer, then actively utilizing social media channels like LinkedIn provides a big opportunity to promote the content on your site, drive visitors there and further engage them.

Connect with industry organizations and media

One of the biggest complaints we hear about LinkedIn (and social media in general) is that “my customers are not using it”. First of all, it’s worth finding out for sure whether or not that assumption is true. You may be surprised. If you do in fact find it to be true, don’t underestimate the power of connecting with and capturing the attention of journalists, trade organizations, business journals, bloggers and leaders that have the power to spread your message to their big and likely qualified audiences. Believe us, they are on LinkedIn. Think of LinkedIn the way you might think of traditional PR. If you consistently push out good content, it’s likely to be picked up.

Promoting on LinkedIn

Give and you’ll receive

Consider how you can help other people on LinkedIn. Make introductions between contacts that you think would benefit from knowing each other by sending a LinkedIn message. Write recommendations on the pages of impressive people with whom you’ve done business. Comment on interesting posts written by others and share ones you enjoyed. Be genuine and others will be happy to help you as well.

Thanks for reading. I’d love to hear about how you’ve found success with LinkedIn and any tips your might have, so please feel free to add comments below.

Related articles

LinkedIn for new business part 1: lead prospecting

LinkedIn for new business part 2: monitoring your industry

How to market with patience in a tough economy

From the archives: A print ad campaign for a pre-construction company

LinkedIn for new business part 2: monitoring your industry

This is the second of three blog posts on using LinkedIn as a new business tool. Here’s how I’ve divided them up.

Now, on to part 2: monitoring your industry.

Observe competitor activity

The idea of monitoring, observing and researching your industry is a missed opportunity by many – not just on LinkedIn – but across social media and web marketingConnections at competing companies channels in general. There is now so much information in the public space.

At the very least, locate your competitors on LinkedIn and see what they’re doing. What kind of content are they posting to their company page? Who is following this company? With whom do you share connections to this company? Look also at their list of employees and take a peek at their profiles. After all, LinkedIn is more focused on individuals than companies. See who their project managers are communicating with and connecting to recently. This may lead to insights on new opportunities.

Join and participate in industry groups

LinkedIn discussion groups are like public forums where articles and industry topics of conversation are shared and discussed. Here’s a short overview:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5CF1FEm_oA&feature=player_embedded

Try searching for relevant industry groups using keywords.

Search for relevant LinkedIn industry groups

Consider groups that your target market will be a part of. If you’re a subcontractor that seeks business among general contractors, join groups where general contractors are likely to be. Once you’re viewing a group page, you can:

  • See who in your network is part of this group
  • Identify who the most influential group members are and follow them
  • Identify the most popular discussion topics and consider joining the conversation. Remember not to over-promote yourself. This is a place to make connections and nurture relationships.

Insights from LinkedIn groups

Customize your news feed to follow industry chatter

LinkedIn Today is a news feed that displays the most read and shared articles about topics in your industry. You can check in periodically right there on LinkedIn to see what’s new in the news, or opt in to receive daily/weekly email feeds of the most popular articles.

LinkedIn Today news feed

The news feed can also be customized, allowing you to follow a variety of industries that interest you.

Customize your LinkedIn news feed

Part 3 of 3

The next post in this series will focus on marketing your business with LinkedIn. I’ll touch on:

  • Setting up your company profile
  • Connecting with industry organizations, trade journals and writers
  • Sharing articles and press releases
  • Driving traffic to your website

Related articles

LinkedIn for new business part 1: lead prospecting

How to market with patience in a tough economy

From the archives: A print ad campaign for a pre-construction company

LinkedIn for new business part 1: lead prospecting

“I don’t think social media can help me find new clients”

We work with and meet lots of people at very industrial companies (building and construction, painting, industrial suppliers) and I’m always surprised at how few use LinkedIn. Either they’re not very familiar or they don’t believe in social media.

LinkedIn logo - Using LinkedIn for new businessFor many of these guys, business gets done the old fashioned way. Leads come from lists clipped out of trade journals. Prospecting happens via sales calls, handshakes, trade shows or maybe a round of golf. Follow ups take the form of phone calls, emails and shiny direct mailers.

Who needs all this new technology, right?

Well, by no means do I advocate abandoning what’s worked for years. But for 95% of us out there, the last few years haven’t exactly led us to a gold mine. I’m suggesting that maybe it’s a good time to at least get familiar with this tool that’s full of data, contacts and potential opportunity.

This is the first of three blog posts on using LinkedIn as a new business tool. Here’s how I’ve divided them up.

  1. Lead prospecting
  2. Monitoring your industry
  3. Marketing your business

Let’s go ahead and jump into Part 1: Lead prospecting.

Search for prospects and make new connections

LinkedIn search bar

In the search bar, LinkedIn lets you filter your search by people, companies or topics. You can also conduct an advanced search to add additional criteria like job position, industry or location.

Let’s take a quick look at how the advanced search feature works.

Ask for introductions and referrals

In addition to searching for people, you can search for a company to find connections there. For example, let’s say I’m a specialty subcontractor and I want an “in” with a big general contractor called Sullivan & Bros Construction. I can select “companies” from the search drop down menu, search for Sullivan & Bros, and up comes a list of all 68 employees there that have LinkedIn profiles.

Shard connections on LinkedIn

OK, so maybe that’s not all that exciting. But here’s where you can put your traditional salesman’s hat on. In that list of 68 people who show up, notice how each person has a “shared connections” link (see the yellow box above). This will show you anyone you’re already connected to that happens to also be connected to that person. So if you’re the type that believes in referrals (I sure as heck am), you’ve got your “in”.

Find out who has been looking at your profile

When we educate our clients on how to use website analytics to monitor visitor data, the most commonly asked question is, “can I see which specific people are looking at my website?”. Well, no – not exactly. You can get an idea for what companies might have sent visitors to your site, but not individual people. With LinkedIn, it’s different.

Who's viewed my profile on LinkedIn?In the right column, you’ll see the “Who’s Viewed Your Profile?” box. With a basic LinkedIn account you can see who’s taken a look the past couple of weeks. And if you choose to upgrade to a Premium LinkedIn account, you can a full list of viewers. What to do with that information is up to you.

Contact anyone by upgrading to LinkedIn Premium

One of the most useful lead prospecting features of LinkedIn Premium is called InMail. The upgrade lets you send a direct message to any LinkedIn member, without an introduction. So while all your competitors are leaving voicemails with purchasing agents, you’re hitting CEOs with direct messages. Here’s a quick overview video of InMail:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqwOJe6Ho70

Part 2 of 3

The next post in this series will focus on monitoring and observing your industry on Linked In. I’ll touch on:

  • Competitor research
  • Using industry groups to identify opportunities and connections
  • Customizing your news feed to follow industry chatter

Related articles

LinkedIn for new business part 2: monitoring your industry

Why B2B companies need good landing pages

How to market with patience in a tough economy

From the archives: A print ad campaign for a pre-construction company

How we pick a content management system

We like to preach that a website is a living and breathing thing, meant to change often. Our clients agree and take an active interest in editing content by themselves. So we set up content management systems (CMSs) that make updating a site as simple as updating Facebook.

There are hundreds (if not thousands) of CMSs in the wild. After years of trying different software (and even writing our own), we’ve settled on two options: WordPress and Drupal. Here’s what makes them special and most appropriate for the companies that hire us.

Free, open-source software

As a small company, we of course love the “free” (as in beer) part. But it’s not just about cost. Free, open-source software is also free (as in speech) to modify, redistribute, even resell. That means that we and our clients are “free” from worry about licensing costs or artificial limitations. We can customize and deploy free, open-source software how ever makes the most sense, which is crucial for a company’s ever-changing needs and unique online identity.

Maturity

Older software has been more thoroughly tested and improved over time. That also means its documentation is more thorough and easier to follow. If a bug pops up, a solution is usually a Google search away. And certainly in the case of CMSs, older software has a richer ecosystem of freely reusable, expertly developed add-ons that significantly reduce development time (and cost).

Active development

Running somewhat counter to maturity is development activity. Developers often gravitate to new software, while older software tends to stagnate. We’ve found that WordPress and Drupal strike a perfect balance between maturity and ongoing improvement. In fact, WordPress was released in 2003 and has been regularly updated since 2001, while Drupal has been around since 1999, exploded in popularity in 2005, and has more than 17,000 registered developers worldwide.

Popularity among developers

Core developers aside, it’s important that a CMS is popular among third-party developers and web companies (like us). We respect that clients can always choose new vendors to work with. So the technical work we do should be usable by as many other developers as possible. In other words, picking popular software (with plenty of qualified developers) prevents clients from feeling locked-in with us or anyone else. It’s the responsible thing to do.

Support among web hosts

Similarly, we don’t want to lock clients into a particular web host. WordPress and Drupal run on the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) platform, which is by far the most popular and well-supported platform among hosting providers. That makes client sites most portable, should a hosting change ever become necessary.

So, WordPress or Drupal?

Given that WordPress and Drupal both satisfy all of the above, how do we choose one over the other? Well, it’s getting more difficult. In the past, Drupal was a harder-to-use, but much more flexible CMS that accommodated any type of content. And WordPress was a simpler, more limited blog platform that wasn’t really designed for types of content besides blog posts and basic pages.

Within the past year however, huge usability improvements have been made to the Drupal 7 backend. And WordPress 3 has added support for custom types of content. So in a way, the built-in capabilities of both CMSs are converging. But in general, our larger sites with lots of image handling, geographical data, and different user privileges are better suited for Drupal. And simpler sites with regular pages, blog posts, and public commenting are easier to manage on WordPress.

 

Gorilla 76 officially renews 501(c)Free partnership with Brightside St. Louis

St. Louis-based B2b web marketing agency Gorilla 76 has officially renewed its 501(c)Free agreement with Brightside St. Louis (formerly Operation Brightside) and will be listed as group’s digital marketing agency of record moving forward. All of Gorilla 76’s services are provided to Brightside St. Louis at no cost.

“It’s a fantastic opportunity to get to use our marketing knowledge to help grow a nonprofit that does so much for our city,” said Joe Sullivan, thinker and designer at Gorilla 76. “We’re excited that Mary Lou and team have agreed to have us back for another year. It’s a cool way for us to sort of say ‘thanks’ to Brightside, as residents and business owners in the city.”

Gorilla 76 kicked off year one of its initiative with Brightside St. Louis in summer of 2011. Year-one work has included rebranding, social media development and an entirely new web presence. Year-two services will include continued website development, increased social media efforts and an email marketing strategy, as well as additional services as needs arise.

“We wanted to be their go-to guys for anything web-marketing related,” said Dan Rashid, thinker and coder at Gorilla 76.  “It looks like we’re going to get that opportunity and we couldn’t be happier.”

2012 marks the 30th anniversary of Brightside St. Louis, a nonprofit that cleans and greens the city of St. Louis. Programs include graffiti eradication, their Demonstration Garden, daffodil plantings along the area’s highways, plantings at City Hall, beautification projects across the city, and the group’s annual, multi-week, city-wide clean-up event – Project Blitz.

“We could not be more excited to have the guys from Gorilla 76 helping Brightside for another year. They give real meaning to the phrase ‘freshen a brand’,” said Mary Lou Green, Brightside St. Louis Executive Director.  “Jon, Joe and Dan are creative, enthusiastic and willing to tackle any project and this positve energy comes across in everything that they do.”

Speak to your audience as if they were…real people

Terms of service

Spend about 30 seconds looking through the page linked below. It’s a terms of service agreement for a photo-sharing website, and it’s pretty awesome.

http://500px.com/terms

What a novel idea – this company has chosen to write an agreement that human beings can actually understand! So you mean to say that their audience isn’t made up of 100% Harvard Law School grads? Who would have thought it?

My point in writing this isn’t to bash lawyers – I’m confident there are enough people out there handling that role just fine. And after all, it’s a lawyer’s job to write a buttoned up contract. Instead, the lesson learned here is this:

Consider who your audience is. Then communicate with them in terms they will understand.

In marketing terms, here are a few pointers:

Try speaking conversationally

Your audience doesn’t want to hear from a big company. They want to hear from real people – like you.

Don’t be wordy

They don’t have a lot of time to listen. Say what you need to say and include an opportunity for them to learn more.

Avoid making assumptions about what they know and don’t know

Just because you’re an expert doesn’t mean they are too.

Create a real representation of your brand

Let the design and tone of your communications reflect what you’re about. If you’re a hard-hat-wearing company, embrace it. If you’re not, don’t pretend you are.

Anything I forgot? Feel free to chime in below. Thanks for reading.

If you liked this article, you might enjoy these ones too:

Even in B2B web-marketing, don’t get hung up on perfection

Marketing lessons from long and short phone calls with friends

How to find your voice

BaptistMedicalGroup.org brings home the hardware

Baptist Medical Group website designWe’re excited to announce that we recently won a Merit Award from the Healthcare Marketing Report for our work on BaptistMedicalGroup.org. We launched the site in early 2011 and have received nothing but positive feedback since. This is the second award the work has received in fact. The first was a Silver Addy from the local Pensacola AAF.

As we state in our portfolio, Baptist Medical Group is a Pensacola-based medical professional network with a primary focus to do what they love for the community they love. And to do it very, very well at that. It was our task to bring that to life online.

Now, we must be honest in stating that we’ve never been the award type. Great marketing, in our opinion, focuses on selling something first, winning awards second. With all that said, we’re certainly proud to add some more hardware to the Gorilla trophy case.

Why B2B companies need good landing pages

At Gorilla, we work primarily with B2B companies – often service providers in the building and construction space – on developing their brand image and capturing leads. In these industries, we see a lot of missed opportunity as far as web marketing goes, and landing pages are one of those glaring opportunities.

If it’s a term you’re not familiar with, no worries. Read on. If you are familiar, but could use some pointers, hopefully there are a few tips below that can help.

A landing page is not your home pageA landing page is not your home page

So what is it then?

In short, it’s a page on your website that’s designed for lead capture. It’s built as a destination for a specific audience, and is focused on a topic specifically relevant to that audience. You might send a visitor there from any of the following:

  • A unique URL that you list on a print ad
  • An email blast
  • Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter or other social media
  • A pay-per-click ad in Google
  • A web banner ad on another website
  • Another page on your own site

So why wouldn’t you just send visitors to your home page?

First of all, a good landing page allows you to segment the different audiences your company is targeting and put the most relevant information in front of each of them. If you’re a construction company focused on building both churches and banks, you’d want to talk to each of those audiences differently, right? Directing them to pages that are unique to their needs is much more efficient that sending them to a more generalized home page.

Secondly, a good landing page gives you a better chance of moving that audience member into your sales funnel. If the page is constructed with thought, it’s been designed to capture leads. The page is architected to keep the visitor focused on the topic that brought them to your site. The content on that page is meant to validate you in the visitor’s eyes, put you in their consideration set and encourage them to get in touch with you.

Let’s look at an example

Salesforce is a CRM (customer relationship management) software that helps you manage contacts, follow leads, set reminders, etc. They use some very simple, yet effective landing pages for people looking for a CRM software.

Below is a screenshot, marked with four things that make it smart. This of course is a software product, but there are valuable takeaways here for any B2B service-based company.

Example landing page

Point number 1Identify the topic

The first thing your eye is drawn to on the page is a very short, clear headline that identifies the topic of this page. If you got here by clicking an ad or link that was promoting a CRM software, you know immediately that you’ve landed on a relevant page.

Point number 2State your benefits

An article about effective landing pages on SearchEngineLand.com says “All marketers tend to focus on how great their company is, but business buyers want to know “what’s in it for me”. ” A landing page should be written to best suit the mindset of your audience. How can the service you provide satisfy their need?

Point number 3Keep the visitor focused

The visitor arrived on this specific page for a reason. They expressed interest on the topic at hand, and the page keeps them focused on that topic. In this example, Salesforce went as far as to remove their site’s main navigation. They’ve put the most relevant information in front of their visitor and nothing more.

Point number 4Call to action

This is the most important element of a landing page. The page was built to encourage a targeted member of your audience to do something. Whether that something is contacting you for more info, signing up for your newsletter, buying a product, or anything else, the page needs to encourage the visitor to take action so you can further engage them.

A lead-capture form is the classic landing page call-to-action. Marketing software company Hubspot says, “Your goal should be to collect enough information through your form to enable you to both contact and qualify the lead.” Listing a big phone number and email address is never a bad idea either.

In summary

Landing pages are about smart, targeted marketing, and they are a huge part of your overall B2B website design. Though there’s a science to them, a lot of it is just common sense. Target your audience, give them the most relevant info and encourage them to get in touch.

 

Construction industry advertising: A trade journal campaign

Though we’ve watched ourselves morph into a web-marketing-focused shop in recent years, we still recognize that the print ad has its place…here and there…every once in a while.

In case you haven’t gathered from our site, we work with a lot of companies that do business in “hard hat” industries – building and construction, industrial painting, distribution, etc., and as a result, we have plenty of experience building strategic ad campaigns for trade publications. We believe many of the same core principles apply whether you’re online or offline:

  • You must have strong, targeted messaging with a distinct brand voice.
  • Well-branded and ownable design are very important.
  • You must work to reach a specific audience in the right place.

Here’s an example of some of Gorilla’s earliest work, and to be honest, we don’t recall if these ads ever made it to print. But we always liked them, and still do.

Learn how to grow your business online.

Our free Industrial Marketing Guide will show you how to attract qualified website visitors, convert them into real leads and nurture them through the buying process.

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Background about the client

St. Louis Prestress is a construction company that pre-casts really, really big concrete panels and beams for structures like bridges and parking garages. The company has always taken pride in its quality materials and great service, but the major points of difference we needed to sell were time efficiency and durability.

  1. Time efficiency: As work on the job-site gets underway, these massive wall panels and beams are being constructed off-site and are delivered in one piece when ready.
  2. Durability: Strong, fireproof concrete panels cut back on both building maintenance and insurance expenses.

Our campaign concept

To highlight these benefits in a creative, memorable way, our concept was to reference iconic historical structures and use a touch (or maybe a little more than a touch) of exaggeration to hammer them home.

St. Louis Prestress ad - Rome

Body copy reads: Stretch? Maybe. But a shortened construction process is one of our biggest benefits. By building large portions of your project off-site, we can cut your on-site time in half. You have our word on that. And you have our word on quality and service too.

St. Louis Prestress ad - London Bridge

Body copy reads: That ain’t no nursery rhyme either. For almost 30 years now, we’ve been providing the strength for buildings and bridges. Our name is trusted, our work is solid – our dedication is to quality and service.

St. Louis Prestress ad - Great Pyramid

Body copy reads: Our products are built to last, our company was built to last – all thanks to a dedication to quality and service. It’s what we believe in. It’s what drives us. Guess you could say it’s what we hang our hard hats on.

Related content:

Our work for The Korte Company – a design-build construction company

Our work for Thomas Industrial Coatings – a large scale painter or bridges, water towers, power plants, etc.

Branding a small engine shop

Rebranding and relaunching Operation Brightside as Brightside St. Louis

Background

Brightside St. Louis is Gorilla’s first partner in our 501cFREE program. The idea behind 501cFREE is to commit to a full-scale, one-year digital marketing relationship at no cost with one local nonprofit. As residents of the city of St. Louis (both our homes and our office), we see everyday the difference Brightside makes all around town, and we identified an opportunity to help them spread awareness and activate community members to get involved.

Old Operation Brightside logoThe problem at hand

Historically known as Operation Brightside, the organization has strong roots in St. Louis and would be celebrating its 30th anniversary of cleaning and greening St. Louis. One of the most glaring challenges was a lack of awareness of the brand and resonance among younger members of the community. The military-like look of the brand felt a bit stodgy and dated, and didn’t help out an organization that needed to feel fresh, young and active. It was time for a refresh.

RebrandingBrightside St. Louis logo

We began with a logo redesign. Daffodils are a huge part of Brightside’s planting efforts throughout the city, and they really wanted to “own” the iconic flower. We breathed some life into their everyday business papers (letterhead, business cards, note cards, etc.) as well.

Brightside St. Louis business cards

Website overhaul

Redesigning their website wasn’t just about that fresh look. We needed to provide Brightside with a sustainable online presence that they could manage moving forward.

Brightside St. Louis old website

Brightside St. Louis new website

We wantedWebsite calls to action Brightside St. Louis to include a blog that would focus not only on event recaps, but also on educating the community on how they can make a difference in keeping St. Louis clean and beautiful, while providing resources to help do just that.

Calls-to-action were big. As an organization that leans so heavily on volunteer involvement and private grants, we made sure that it was as easy as possible for someone to get in touch by placing a call-to-action side bar on every page.

Social media strategy for Brightside St. LouisSocial media strategy

We knew social media would play a big part in reaching the younger members of the community and in positioning Brightside as a progressive and forward-looking organization. We designed their strategy for Twitter, Facebook and Google+ around three specific goals. If every move they made in the social sphere worked toward accomplishing one of more of these three things, they’d be headed down the right path.

Brightside St. Louis on Twitter

What’s next?

Now that branding, a fresh website and a social media strategy are in place, we’ll be helping Brightside promote their organization throughout the rest of the year while transitioning them to a place where their marketing efforts can be self-sustainable.

If you’re interested in our 501cFREE program or have a good candidate in mind for next year, visit this page or get in touch with us.

5 recent web marketing articles you should read

I’m always flagging useful articles and blog posts that I think would be benefit our audience – articles about new trends, technologies, or just insightful ideas. Sometimes I’ll Tweet links to them, post them on Google+ or email them to an individual, but usually after I read them, they just become bookmarks that die. So I’d like to make a habit of putting them together in a blog post from time to time. This compilation of articles from February and March is my first crack at that.

5 Reasons You Need to Meet in Person | Inc.com

So this one might not be a marketing article like the next four, but it’s a pretty common topic of discussion at Gorilla and I wanted to include it. We’ve worked with clients from California to Florida to DC. GoToMeeting is a great tool and phone calls certainly work, but there’s nothing quite like sitting down in the same room and hammering it out. My favorite point from this article: “Most business conversations are focused on solving a problem quickly and efficiently, while business relationships are built when people take the time to share and learn more about each other.” We’re a big believer in that. Read the article

Google’s Search, Plus Your World | Social Media Examiner

OK, so the full article is actually titled “8 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Site With Google+” and it’s a good one. But the point I wanted to highlight is a few paragraphs in: Google’s new “Search Plus Your World” rollout.

Over the past few months, Google has lead the charge in allowing your search results to be influenced by your social network. Google wants to give searchers the best possible results when they’re trying to find something; that’s how they remain the best search engine. So when someone does a Google search and they see that 8 of their friends recommend a company that appears in the results, isn’t it logical that that they’ll be more likely to chose based on such a personally-qualified endorsement? This trend of social media influencing search results will only grow, so take note. Read the article

8 Social SEO Strategies To Start Using Right Now | Search Engine Land

The last article gave you a sense for what Google is starting to do. This one gives you some ideas for applying it. If you care about search engine optimization for your business, your strategic participation in social media is now an absolute requirement. Read the article

Facebook Brand Timelines: 6 Big Changes Every Marketer Needs to Understand | Mashable

If you haven’t paid much attention to the new Facebook brand timelines, here’s a good starting place for learning about the changes and picking up a few ideas on how to use them to your benefit. Read the article

Facebook brand timelines

How Pinterest Is Becoming the Next Big Thing in Social Media for Business | Entrepreneur.com

If you work in marketing, you probably couldn’t be more sick of hearing about Pintrest at this point. PintrestBut if you’re a business owner and you haven’t dabbled in it yet, it’s certainly worth seeing what all the hype is about. Pintrest is essentially a web-based bulletin board for posting photos and commenting others’ photos. It’s probably most beneficial to businesses who sell something visual – like food, or shiny objects. But if you’re in the B2B marketing world and willing to be creative, there are certainly possibilities. I’m just diving in myself. Read the article

Some other articles by Gorilla that you might like:

How can I use Google+ for business?

Twitter fixed my sh*tter

How to market with patience in a tough economy

Twitter fixed my sh*tter

Well, shower actually. But the rhyme was just too good to pass up.

Last week, I woke up for my morning shower only to find a shower from the previous morning still standing there. Having a house built in the early 1900s, I really wasn’t surprised. Having a wallet that resembled the early 1930s, I had to figure out how to do it myself. Having a meeting in 30 minutes, I bit the bullet and did some early season wading.

The first attempted fix would come later that evening after I made a trip to the hardware store to pick up a drain snake and some chemicals. The liquid un-clogger worked – but not convincingly. I knew there was something that lurked beneath. More than likely remnants of yellow labrador retriever hair and human hair all matted into a nice little sewer puck.

Enter the plumbing snake and low-rise trousers. Time to get to work…for about thirty seconds until I got my snake all tangled up and stuck in the drain. Not kind of stuck. Not sort of stuck. Stuck, stuck. Stuck like put-two-feet-on-the-wall-and-pull-horizontal stuck. The serious kind of stuck. And, well, pardon the toilet humor, stuck and sh*t out of luck. While I wouldn’t be showering with three inches of fermenting water today, I would be showering with a plumbing snake until I could figure out how in the hell to unclog it.

And that’s exactly when it hit me. That St. Louis plumber I’d seen tweeting on Twitter. Maybe he could help…

So I gave it a shot:

Within 10 minutes – TEN MINUTES – I got a response (two actually, plus a retweet) from the man himself:

This was really cool. A guy who could have easily tried to charge me for his expertise, instead, decided to opt to capitalize on one of the biggest business benefits of Twitter, that of two-way communication that engages a potential customer, and try to help me out. A method of lead nurturing if you will.

My response was as follows:

That night, I got home and gave the ol’ plumbing snake the counter-clockwise spin. It worked. In about ten seconds of time, my shower was back to normal.

So, while Mr. LaMartina may have missed out on the business this time around, he’s got it the next time the water rises. I promise that. Congrats to guys like Tony LaMartina for being forward thinking and using tech to cost efficiently and effectively market their small businesses.

Thanks for reading.

 

How to market with patience in a tough economy

Nurture your leads in a bad economySo it’s ugly out there right now. No one is buying. Leads aren’t converting. Business has been better. I’m no economist, but if the past is any indication of the future, people will start buying again.

So what in the meantime?

As we use every morsel of patience we can drum up, it’s time to nurture our leads and prep our potential buyers for when the time is right. Here are some things we can do right now.

  • Commit to content creation. Start a blog on your website and provide valuable articles and resources there for your customer.
  • Add social media sharing buttons (like the ones below) to your blog posts so readers can more easily share your content with others.
  • Install a newsletter sign-up form on your website to start collecting email addresses from interested parties.
  • Then send periodic e-blasts with resources and updates on your company. Make the e-blasts short, and include links back to pages and blog posts on your site where you can further engage them.
  • Use social media channels like Twitter and LinkedIn to identify and follow potential customers, journalists, trade publications and industry authorities.
  • Then start conversations with those people. Don’t be pushy or sell to hard. Be genuine and build relationships.
  • Participate in LinkedIn discussion groups. There are probably a few, if not many, that are relevant to your industry.
  • If you’re running print ads, include unique URLs that direct readers to great landing pages with the most relevant content for that specific audience.
  • Perform an audit on your website. Is the information there useful to your customer? Is it easy for them to find what they’re looking for? Are there clear calls to action that allow them to get in touch? If not, fix it.

Unless you practice some kind of sales wizardry, there’s only so much you can do to change someone’s mind when they’re not ready to buy. But if you nurture relationships and become a valuable resource for them, you’ll be top of mind when they are ready. Don’t sit around waiting for a better economy. Get back to marketing.

Related articles

Should you hire a marketing agency or an in-house “marketing guy”?

Best practices for B2B email marketing campaigns

Is content marketing a load of BS?

How to make your website a REAL business tool: Part 1 of 3

Even in B2B web-marketing, don't get hung up on perfection

First and foremost, let me clearly state that I don’t blame clients on wanting perfection. Let me repeat that: I don’t blame clients on wanting perfection. They should want perfection. I too strive for perfection. The idea of a missing comma or the inconsistent use of punctuation in a bulleted list is enough to drive me up a wall. I hate the idea of publishing something that poorly represents myself or the Gorilla brand.

But, in today’s B2B web marketing world, if you continually focus on the micro, you’ll get buried by savvy competitors who are more focused on the macro. While you’re perfecting a blog post that was meant to be timely, your competitor will write three more that are “good enough” and will steal engagement from your potential readers. While you tweak and tweak and tweak your website before it launches, your rival will launch their site and will then be revising an improved round two version based off of real customer feedback before yours ever hits the web.

See where I’m going with this?

Just a little more than a year ago, I read Rework by the gents at 37 Signals – a really, really successful web application company based in Chicago. At Gorilla, this text has almost become holy and is one of the seminal reads for our current beliefs on best web-marketing and general business practices.

Throughout the book, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, examine a theme of going with “good enough” and an idea of creating something that can be turned into great later – that is, if it even needs to be. In one instance, they even say: “It’s OK to wing it. Just get on the plane and go. You can pick up a nicer shirt, shaving cream, and a toothbrush once you get there.”

To me, that’s a really powerful idea. I don’t know about you, but this is very relevant to projects we’ve worked on, and are currently working on, at Gorilla. I can’t tell you the number of times we’ve seen blog posts or e-newsletter blasts get knit picked to the point of irrelevance.

Don’t let this happen in your B2B marketing initiatives. Don’t get hung up on the minute details. Yes – whatever you put your name on, absolutely has to be good. But “good” can be closer to “good enough” than it is to “perfection.”

Thanks for reading my rant.

Best practices for B2B email marketing campaigns

Seems like more and more, we’re being hired to execute email marketing campaigns for the companies with which we work. And really, that’s to no surprise.

Besides being extremely cost efficient, especially when compared to their print counterparts, and quite effective (we see open rates often in the 40% range – top that direct mail!), they’re a breeze to build, simple to edit and can be measured to extents that would make Claude C. Hopkins’ head explode.

Let’s take a look at a few best practices so that you can build and launch a successful email marketing initiative.

1. Pick a good email marketing platform

At Gorilla, we currently use Campaign Monitor for our marketing newsletter and all of our clients’ newsletters. It’s very easy to use, customizable, provides terrific analytics and is really cheap to send (5 bucks per campaign, one cent per recipient). The backend dashboard is as intuitive as it gets, and there are lots of tools that can be used for the more savvy user (A/B testing, etc.).

There are lots of great options for email marketing software. The key is to simply find one with which you’re comfortable. We’re really comfortable with Campaign Monitor – it’s hard not to be.

2. People are visual

Stop and think about what messages/emails get your attention, and more importantly, your precious time. Chances are, they’re going to be visually strong and copy short. Make sure you consider how you can deliver your message visually when writing your next campaign. And remember – the visual and the text don’t have to tell the exact same story – but instead, work as complements. Like beer and brats.

3. Know your audience; master your message

Marketing 101, right? Correct. But it seems like the majority of email marketers don’t get this. Chances are, any company that has access to your inbox has a product that at some point you were really interested in. But now, their messages get deleted before they even have a chance to tell their story. Part of that could be due to a dull product. But more than likely that’s due to not knowing one’s audience, and not knowing the message to tell that audience.

Stop and think about your subscribers: are they the right subscribers in the first place? Are you giving them a message they’ll want to read? Some of the newsletters I receive might only have one story that interests me. But that’s one more than most of the newsletters that hit my inbox.

4. Don’t personalize

Seems like weird advice, right? Well, normally it is. But in the case of an e-newsletter that is accompanied by a custom template, don’t feel like just because your software allows you to insert your recipients name (Dear Fred) that you have to. In fact, I’d probably advise against it. It feels cheap, less premium and definitely canned.

Your eblast is simply a piece of communication from your brand – embrace it. Don’t feel that you have to try to make it look personalized; if that was the case, you’d probably just send it from your regular email anyway.

5. Write a killer subject line

It needs to interesting enough to get someone to give you 10 seconds plus of their already overbooked day. And it needs to have a compelling call-t0-action that drives one to click through.

6. Short and sweet

When it comes to an ebast, the one thing you have to remember is less is often more. Spare the 9 paragraph story, and instead, post it on your site. Then simply give your campaign list a taste of the story, giving them the ability to click through if they want more.

7. Figure out what’s working and adjust accordingly

As we mentioned, software like Campaign Monitor will let you measure your campaign’s splash. You’ll quickly notice which stories were the most popular, and which stories would’ve best been left on the editing room floor. Regardless, it’s your job to take this data and form it into a more successful campaign the next time around.

Thanks for reading. We’ll see you in the inboxes!

 

 

Why we pay more for hosting

Every once in a while, a new client asks where we intend to host their website. Usually they’ve done some research, found plenty of plans under $10/mo, and maybe already signed up.

But to be frank, cheap hosting is a mistake, and we do our best to steer clients away from it. Instead we rent virtual private servers (VPSs) and insist that clients use them. Here’s why.

Security

Cheap hosting means shared hosting. Shared hosting means you and hundreds of strangers are running software on the same computer. You have no idea who else is on your machine or what they might be doing.

This introduces a slew of risks. Shared hosts frequently report security issues and require customers to change passwords or update software. Database break-ins by unruly neighbors are often to blame.

On the other hand, private or dedicated hosting means you have the whole machine to yourself. Only the software you chose is running, and you’re the only person running it. It’s like using your home computer versus one at the library.

Resources

On shared hosting, everyone competes for resources: processor time, memory, disk throughput, bandwidth, etc. Since each machine has finite resources, the performance you expect may be sucked away by high-traffic or poorly coded sites.

But on private hosting, your server resources are guaranteed. There are upper limits (which dictate pricing), but performance-wise, you know what to expect. And should your site become a huge success, most VPS hosts let you upgrade resources instantly.

Optimization

Shared hosting is designed for the masses. Only standard features are included, with default settings. You cannot change those settings on your own because that may disrupt the other people on your server. So you’re stuck with vanilla.

However, because a VPS is your machine, you can install, remove, and reconfigure whatever you want. For our clients, we make heavy use of external web services. So we don’t need to worry about things like tracking users, organizing comments, or streaming video on the server itself.

Instead we can focus resources on quickly loading frontend assets and serving cached, compressed content. The result is higher performance that can only be achieved by tweaking the server to specific needs.

Efficiency

Like any other skilled labor, our work depends on efficiently using a familiar set of tools — namely a LAMP stack with access to ssh, bash, svn, nano, tar, rsync, curl, crontab, screen, tail, top, dig…

Some of those tools are prohibited on shared hosting for security reasons. Yet they’re essential to the efficient operation of a remote server. And efficiency means using less of our time and our clients’ money. That’s where a VPS begins to pay for itself.

Support

Occasionally we’ll mess up using one of those tools above. When we do, we call a number, talk to a real human being, and a team of professional server administrators helps us out right away.

It doesn’t happen often, but if it does, we know waiting 24 hours for email support is unacceptable. Unfortunately, shared hosting companies see things differently, and give you what you pay for.

Is content marketing a load of BS?

Last night we had a meeting over a beer (that’s how we roll) with an advisor of ours. He mentioned how much he enjoyed a video blog entry about Google Analytics that we recently posted. He said he’s watched the video multiple times, taken his learnings to others at his company and even put it to use. In the interest of full disclosure, he is a friend as well as an advisor so I don’t want to overreact and give ourselves a huge pat on the back. But it was a really rewarding thing to hear for a few reasons:

  • the content added value for him
  • his company fits the mold of the type of business we’re targeting
  • we had enough credibility in their eyes to be an authority on the subject at hand

Internally at Gorilla, we’ve been talking, debating and formulating opinions quite a bit throughout the past year about the idea of “content marketing” – a term that has become quite the buzzword  in our industry. So much so though, that it makes you wonder: Is it a bubble that’s going to burst? Is it all hype? Is is just a load of BS?

My example from last night validated my belief that the answer to these questions is in short, “no”. But it’s not that simple.

As marketing professionals, everything we read and hear today from industry leaders tells us that as business owners and marketers, we all need to be publishers of content. We’re told that we need to be cranking out blog posts left and right, designing or hiring illustrators to make infographics, writing white papers, and then sharing all that stuff through Facebook and Twitter and Google+ and LinkedIn and Pintrest and email campaigns, all to drive traffic to our site. We’re taught that we (and every other company out there) need to give our audience something to read that is created by us.

But here’s another question: As this trend continues, and more and more “publishers” enter the mix, how can we ensure that our stuff rises to the top?

1. Make it exceptional

You can’t half-ass it. You just can’t. Your brand is on the line and you live or die by the perception you create for your business. If you’re going to write a blog post, make sure it serves a purpose, takes a strong stance on something, and is valuable to whoever you’re targeting. And remember – it’s not just about driving traffic to your site. It’s much, much bigger than that. It’s about proving your worth and giving your potential customers something that is remarkably useful.

2. Know and narrow your audience

There are probably a lot of other companies and individuals producing very similar content to your own. And that trend isn’t slowing down any time soon. If you’re a general contractor, don’t target people looking to build a building. Target CEOs of growing Midwestern privately-owned financial institutions worth $50-100M who may be looking to build a building. In other words, narrow your audience and create exceptional content that will be of value to them specifically. When your content is tightly focused, it will rise to the surface for that niche audience because it has been created specifically for them.

3. Build credibility and authority

This is most likely the biggest challenge you’ll face. Unless you’re already a big, established, well-respected player in your industry, this one is out of your control in many ways. But, if you focus on numbers 1 and 2 above, you’ll start to establish credibility within your niche of the marketplace. And as more and more people find you credible and a good source for information, you’ll begin to establish authority. It takes time and dedication, but it’s achievable. We’ve seen it happen with our clients and watching that process unfold is really rewarding.

So is content marketing a load of BS?

Only if your content is.

Other posts you might enjoy reading:

The best content is right under your nose

How to measure your online marketing success

What to look for in a web marketing agency

Get Digital Seminar highlights: Measuring your web marketing performance

This past November, along with SEO agency Evolve Digital Labs, Gorilla 76 co-hosted and presented at our second Get Digital Seminar in St. Louis. The event was an all-day, learning-intensive introduction to web marketing. Above is a 5-minute highlight video from my presentation on measuring results across across web marketing channels, including your website, social media and search engines. A summary of my session follows.

So much data out there

What you can measure vs. what you should measureThe quantity of raw data available to marketers today can be totally overwhelming if you don’t know how to parse through it. The first third of my presentation focused on how to distinguish between what can be measured and what should be measured. The key is in understanding how to filter through it all, make sense of what bits matter and infuse your learnings into adjustments to your web marketing strategy.

What dictates success or failure?

A common thread from one presentation to the next throughout the day was constructing a web marketing strategy around real business goals. In this session on measurement, I emphasized the importance of measuring against these goals and counting your successes and failures not just by direct sales, but rather by other critical factors for your business such as lead generation, brand awareness and thought leadership.

Measuring business goals

Measuring the performance of your website

During the middle third of my session I shifted the focus from “what” to “how” in measurement. I used the pyramid graphic below to illustrate the crucial idea that your website is home base. Measurement needs to begin there because your website is your property and you have total control over what happens there. It’s your place to capture leads, publish valuable content for your audience and define who your brand really is. Using tools like conversion tracking in Google Analytics lets you understand your success or failure in doing these things.

Measuring the channels online

Measuring the traffic drivers to your site

After measuring your site’s success and or failure, your attention can turn to the social channels where your content is promoted and the search engines where your content is found by active searchers. Measurement in these channels revolve around your ability to engage your audience and drive traffic to your website, where you then can funnel visitors toward conversions.

Measuring opportunity

Measurement of your own performance is only a piece of the pie. From keyword research to content publishing opportunities to identifying influencers in the social channels, there is plenty to be learned about your marketplace. While tools exist to help you get the job done, there’s plenty of grunt work to do as well.

Reporting and adjusting

Analytics reportingAll these learnings go to waste unless you do something with them. I concluded the day by emphasizing that you must make use of the data you’ve collected by generating reports for yourself, your boss, your business partners or whoever would benefit from seeing it. Then figure out how it can be used to make your marketing strategy more effective.

Future seminars and corporate consultation

While no future seminars are planned at the moment, you can check out the Get Digital site for updates. We also put on 1-2 day private, customized seminars to help businesses implement a web marketing strategy. You can contact me (Joe Sullivan) at joe@gorilla76.com if you’d like to discuss a corporate consultation engagement like this.

How can I use Google+ for business?

Let me begin by saying that I’m no Google+ expert. In fact, I’m a rookie. That’s why this blog post is a book review and not a lesson from Joe Sullivan on how to succeed on this platform. I read Google+ for Business, by Chris Brogan to jumpstart my own experimentation in this relatively new social network and I’m writing this post to share my biggest takeaways.

Though Google+ for Business provides a good intro to how the platform works and its basic features, I found that the value of the book is less about technicalities and more about applying business knowledge in a way that will make this social network a valuable tool for you. That said, it’s a good read both for those who want to learn how to physically use the platform as well as those who are looking for more strategic applications.

Here are the four most important things I walked away with:

Google+ presents a big opportunity for SEO and findability

Google indexes the content posted on Google+. Google never had access to the content posted in Facebook, and though they once had an agreement with Twitter that allowed Tweets to show up in search results, that agreement no longer exists. What’s posted on Google+, however, is different. Google owns this new social network and it’s sure to use the content posted there to serve up better results when people are looking for something in their search engine.

To take it a step further, when someone follows you on Google+, your content is more likely to show up in their Google searches. Why? Again, Google wants to show people the most relevant search results, and since that person has chosen to follow you, they’ve essentially already told Google that they’re interested in you or your busienss. So Google listens and responds accordingly.

Use Google+ to target and segment

The interface is strongly focused around the ability to segment both your audience and who you’re listening to. When you post something, you can choose who sees it by organizing your connections into “Circles”. What you share with one prospective client base might be different from what you share with another. What you share with your family or friends might be different than what you share with any prospective client base.

Similarly, you can (and should) segment those you follow. Create a circle of journalists. Read what they’re posting and get in the habit of commenting. Build relationships with them. Create a circle of competitors and keep an eye on what they’re doing. Create a circle of prospective clients. Observe what they’re talking about. Build relationships before you have the opportunity to sell to them.

Share and comment. Results will follow.

Comment on what other people are saying and offer interesting opinions on the matter. You would do that in real life conversations, wouldn’t you? So why not do it here?

Look for interesting things to share with your audience that will bring value to them. Actively seek out content that they will appreciate reading. Brogan emphasizes the importance of putting a system in place for sharing. Set up a RSS reader like Google Reader and subscribe to relevant blogs. Or at least make a list of websites that produce content of value to your audience. Check them out daily and see what you can find to share.

To be successful, you need to schedule time in your day for reading, finding info, sharing and commenting. Once you’ve made a habit out of being active, people will begin looking to you as a good source for information. The content you post doesn’t have to be yours. In fact, only some of it should be. The point is that you’ve become a curator of valuable stuff for your audience.

Be a real person. People buy from people they like.

This was the most valuable takeaway for me. It’s a an obvious truth in business, but I think it’s easy to overlook this one when you get caught up in a shiny new tool like G+.

Brogan says, “People want to follow your interests, not just your company updates.” Think about conversations you have in real life, and put yourself in that mind set. Your interactions with people on Google+ (and really any social network) should mimic them.

Brogan encourages sharing not just business-related content, but bits of personal things too. He poses the question, “Do you prefer buying from someone pushing a sales agenda, or do you prefer buying from someone you feel understands you and you feel you understand? Several reports and studies over the years boil down to the same thing: We buy from people we like.” This doesn’t mean that you have to post pics of your family vacations. It means allowing your audience to see that you have real human interests.

Find creative ways and unexpected ways to show you’re an interesting person. Give your audience a window into what happens behind the scenes at your company. Post photos and if possible, videos. Share some of the process in your work, rather than just case studies or end results. Depending on your business, try out the live group video chat feature –Hangouts. I’ve been helping my sister launch her pastry chef business over the past month. Think how engaging a live webinar-style Hangout might be for her audience. “Watch and learn and I prepare the world’s best German chocolate cake.” What’s the equivalent of that for your business?

In conclusion…

However you choose to use Google+, think of it as an extension of how you do business already. Engage with people like you would in real life and you’ll figure out how to make it a successful tool for you.

Like many, I’m in the learning and experimenting phase with this platform. I’d love to hear how you’re using Google+, successes and failures you’ve seen, as well as any ideas. Please comment below. Or, uhh, comment on my Google+ page.

Great ideas always win

A good friend sent this to me today and I had to share it. In today’s marketing world, I think great ideas sometimes get lost. Here, however, is an example of the kind of work that made me want to get into advertising in the first place.

Killer headline, killer tagline, killer idea.

I always thought monogrammed shirts were the most ridiculous concept. Now, I have to admit, I kind of want one.

One question though: Do you think they monogram flannel?

Branding a lawn mower shop

Franko Small Engines is a lawn mower shop in Granite City, Illinois that may or may not be owned by a family member of a certain Gorilla 76 team member.

These guys sell heavy-duty lawn-care equipment, both to the average Joe as well as landscapers and lawn-care service providers. Our job was to represent the brand they’ve been building since 1959 with a logo, tagline and small website focused on helping them get more people through the doors.

Getting started

We started the job by heading over to the shop, exploring, talking extensively with the owner, Kevin, about the company’s history, customer base, challenges as a business owner and goals. Visual inspiration for the design came not only from all the shiny new mowers, but from the old peg boards that covered the walls, the old-school paper “for sale” tags, Kevin’s uniform, old signage, family photos and a finger on Kevin’s right hand that seemed fitting for a guy who’s been repairing lawn mowers his whole life.

Visual inspiration Franko Small Engines lawn mower shop

After the visit, we had a pretty solid idea for where we wanted to take the brand. It was to be about tradition and the local customer base that Kevin and his family had built through the years because of great service and relationships.

Rolling back the sleeves

We explored several clean, retro-feeling typestyles and graphic ideas for the logo before finally landing on the colored one represented below.

Franko Small Engines logo exploration

The gear container for the type was meant to hint at the mechanics of what they do and the typeface was intended to bring out the classic, down-to-earth characteristics that really define their business. The final tagline: Family owned. Lawn trusted. Since 1959. hammered that tradition home as well.

Jumping into the website, we made use of the visual assets we collected at our visit to the shop for textures, background images, etc. We had access to Toro’s dealer library of images as well, which we made use of to represent some of their products. The copy was intended to have personality but still be informative. We represented the types of products they sell, the maintenance services offered and the history of their shop. The primary calls-to-action hang down the right side of the layout regardless of the page you’re viewing making it a customer friendly site.

Website screenshot from Franko Small Engines

It was a small project but a lot of fun, and one that we’re certainly proud to put our name on…

Related blog posts

Every logo we’ve ever designed

10 tips to a stronger, harder-working, no-nonsense tagline

How to begin search engine optimization

We’d like to thank Derek Mabie, President of SEO company Evolve Digital Labs, for contributing this post to our blog. With no further ado, here’s Derek.

After executing so many search campaigns, I find it hard to imagine starting any place except keyword research. I suppose you could begin by tearing into a site revamp if you absolutely wanted to, but in pretty short order you will need a keyword strategy to start making educated, influential decisions. I HAVE consulted for brands and clients who, so it seems, can only move forward if they break it or their backs are against the wall. So if you are the type of person who refuses to read the directions, maybe you should consider abandoning this read and just start breaking things that appear in your website audit. Remember before you go, correlation is not causation. If you are looking for an overview of search engines’ functionally and why it works that way, I recommend this read, The SEO Guide for Beginners.

For those not ready to fly solo, let us begin.

I would like to dive right into the tactics, starting with keyword research. If you are just beginning, don’t be concerned with mastering the art and science of keyword research. So what should you be concerned with? Gaining two primary insights: the volume of relevant searches performed and the level of competition. You can achieve this through the completion of two simple tasks using two simple tools.

First understand that any and all keyword research is completed with the aid of Google’s data, specifically the external keyword research tool. This is the same data any search marketing company could, should, and does use.

Google Keyword Tool for keyword research

The tool is about as difficult to operate as the search engine itself. Simply enter industry key terms or your website (domain or page) – and voila! Idea, volume, and competition are all there.

Before you start jumping up for joy, let’s debunk the info just a bit.

  1. Local volume refers to searches performed in the United States, not your town or specific location.
  2. The volume is not a fact, but an educated estimate (although sometimes I question this).
  3. The competition is only correlated with the pay-per-click campaigns, not organic results.

Google Keyword Tool for keyword research

Unless you have ” ” or [ ] wrapped around the term, you don’t necessarily have an accurate volume for the term. Instead, Google is giving you the volume of term or phrase query frequency. As an example, Google may show “shoe” searched hundreds of thousands times a month. Unless you include a filter (“” or [ ]) for the data, however, Google is displaying the overall, inclusive usage of the word shoe in a query. It could be referring to women’s shoe, kids shoe, shoe sale, or even shoe sales in St. Louis MO.

Now that the first action is complete, it’s time for the much easier step two: the underrated and underutilized Eye-Test. To me this is a common sense approach to SEO, quickly accomplished by visiting the search engines and asking yourself, “would my company and domain fit in with this list of ten domains or brands?” If you are a small Bed and Breakfast in Orlando, Florida and you search “hotel rooms, Orlando,” it only takes a quick glance to realize what a difficult climb that could be.

By no means is this a compilation of cutting edge Search tactics, but it is common sense discovery. In my opinion, the Eye Test is for motivation. Those who are new to Search need this incentive and sense of reality. Those two actions can help provide both. If you are not one that is shy on motivation, but do need affirmation, you will need to develop an acute sense of competitive balance. That takes time and effort. Sometimes a professional.

These exercises will provide you with a solid starting point for your SEO journey. Understanding the opportunity of organic search success for your business, should guide your investment, whether it is dollars or time. Compared to other marketing initiatives, SEO provides you with generous amounts of insight that allows you to strategically shape your digital plan. Forget expensive, hit-or-miss focus groups; Google’s keyword research tools yield reliable, valuable answers to the question: What are people searching for? The revealed lists of terms will direct you to tackle a myriad of on-site and off-site improvements, such as content creation (how much and which kind) and Paid Search campaign implementation.

Steal the news and make it your own

If you have any interest in pr, search engine optimization, how to use social media to promote your business or how to find ideas for blog posts, I have a great resource for you. Newsjacking by Newsjacking by David Meerman ScottDavid Meerman Scott – about a 2-hour read by the way – is all about reacting in real time to real world occurrences and injecting yourself into the story. The basic takeaway is that today you have a huge opportunity to get noticed if you are willing to act fast.

As things happen in the news, journalists look for information. To distinguish their story from those of their competitors, they need a hook, or details for the “second paragraph” of the story that might offer a fresh perspective. That’s where the opportunity lies – but only if you act RIGHT AWAY. Create commentary on what’s happening in the news via blog posts, tie it back to your business and you may find your commentary listed as a resource in Google searches for related keywords before other have the chance to own it. Then take it a step further by promoting your blog post in the social channels, emaling and/or Tweeting writers who might be looking for other information, and posting it on press release sources like Business Wire or PR Newswire.

Scott also spends a chapter identifying how you can find news to “jack”. Being active online and using the right tools plays a huge role here. Consistently monitoring relevant industry and non-industry news sources and blogs through a RSS reader like Google Reader, following relevant hash tags on Twitter and setting up Google Alerts for important key phrases are starting points.

As a small business owner, one of the strongest takeaways for me was the idea that you don’t need to be a corporate giant to successfully jack news. In fact, your chances might be better as a small or medium-sized business, or even as an individual. To quote chapter 7,

“Like a dinosaur’s tail that wants to twitch, requests to act must travel a long way up to the slow-moving corporate brain, then all the way back down before anything can happen.”

If your business is nimble, this isn’t the case.

Newsjacking is a quick, worthwhile read. Check it out here.

Related blog posts

The best content is right under your nose

How to measure your online marketing success

Five ways to make your business more efficient using social media

Marketing lessons from long and short phone calls with friends

I got a call from an out-of-town buddy a few weeks ago asking me for advice on which of two running backs he should start in his big fantasy football matchup that weekend (it was between Cedric Benson and Willis McGahee for you other NFL nerds out there). For some reason, that call – which was not at all an uncommon sort of call from this particular friend – got me thinking.

Marketing lessons from long and short calls with friendsYou know how you have those out-of-town friends who you talk to about once every six or twelve months, and when you see their name pop up on your ringing cell phone you go, “Oh man, I can’t take this right now”? It’s not because you don’t want to talk with them – in fact they might be one of your best friends and you feel a little bit guilty for not answering. It’s because you know it’s gonna be an hour-long conversation to really catch up. And you don’t have an hour right now. Too much of a commitment, right?

Well, I have plenty of those friends too and I do the same thing. But when the guy I mentioned in the first paragraph calls, I always pick up. So I started thinking about why that’s the case. Here are the things that came to mind:

  1. The conversations are almost always quick (usually 5-10 minutes long)
  2. The topics of our conversations are about simple, timely things 90% of the time (football, something funny that happened, a quick question, etc.). In other words, we don’t begin by catching each other up for 20 minutes each on our lives because we already know what’s going on.
  3. He’s an entertaining guy, and the call consistently ends in us laughing about something absurd

What’s really interesting to me is that when I compare the cumulative, quick and manageable conversations that I’ve had with this friend over the past year or so, I’m certain the minutes spent talking far surpasses the minutes spend talking to any of my hour-long-conversation buddies. And the relationship is stronger. Furthermore, when he or I might have something of greater importance to talk about, we both know the other will be reachable.

So why am I writing about this on a marketing blog?

It’s because I believe the exact same parallels can be drawn to the way a successful business-to-business brand in today’s marketing environment captures the attention and builds a relationship with their customer.

I love a reading a great business book, navigating a well-thought-out and engaging website or reading a well-crafted white paper that educates me on a topic of interest. But putting these big, time-consuming works together is a massive project for those who developed that content. Comparison: hour-long-conversation. It’s a commitment and not something that can be done every day or week. More like every few months or years.

The strongest and most engaging business-to-business brands on the other hand, embrace the idea that not every piece of content they produce for their audience has to be a masterpiece. They realize they don’t have to wait until the perfect time to release it. That’s why these brands write multiple blog posts a week, create infographics, produce raw viral videos, put on half-hour long lunchtime webinars, etc., etc.

Great brands develop and maintain a strong relationship with their audience through frequent and simple engagements. Though they might hang their hat on their bigger productions, they complement those with smaller pieces that keep their audience interested all the time. Compare the following to the bullet points listed previously in this post:

  1. Their content is short and sweet (again – blog posts, infographics, etc.)
  2. The topics of their content are timely and focused so they can be delivered quickly (not broad and all-encompasing)
  3. Their content is engaging and/or entertaining and relates to their customer at a human level.

See the parallels? I think they exist because customers are real people. Business-to-business brands that actually think about how real people interact in their daily lives have much a better chance of capturing the interest of their customers and building a long-lasting relationship.

I’d love to hear your comments on this one below. Please feel free to contribute.

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The best content is right under your nose

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The best content is right under your nose

I’ve always believed that even the smallest of shops, like our own three-person digital marketing agency, can (and does) generate enough content to satisfy even the hungriest of content calendars – provided that that content calendar lines up with the desired capacity of the market at hand. I know, it seems hard to believe, but really, it’s true.

And it looks like Jason Fried is buying in too (actually, I’m buying in to HIS thinking, but you get the gist). Or at least an article in the most recent issue of Inc. magazine indicates such. The only link I can find is this one  – I know, these kind of suck. But it serves the purpose just fine.

Here’s an excerpt…

“There’s a new story at your business every day. Maybe you dreamed up a great idea or shot down a bad one. Maybe a customer surprised you with the way he or she uses your product. Perhaps a client or an employee came to you with a suggestion for something you’ve never thought of before. There are hidden opportunities in these everyday moments. They make great stories – and in today’s business world, you’re missing an opportunity if you ignore a great story. That’s because great brands are the ones that tell the best stories. Sure, good products and service matter, but stories are what connect people with companies.”

So, to capture such moments, he’s hired a full-time film guy to document their every move. Their goal is to push out 25 videos in the next year.

Wow – what a great idea.

And not just for them. For you too. Think of all the stuff that happens in your given office in a given day. I know the interactions at Gorilla are many. And while they certainly might not all be film worthy, who knows what, when recorded and reviewed, they could lead to – ideas, new business ventures, refined products, humorous and serious blog content, social content, etc., etc. And while a full-time video guy might be tough to justify, think about how you could better document the stuff happening inside your own walls. This is actually a really important part of your brand’s marketing.

Remember, stories connect people to brands. Once again, our caps our off to Mr. Fried and his team up north. Love the thinking. Very anxious to see his video content in 2012.

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