Tuesday Marketing Notes (Number 68—February 6th, 2007)
A B2B Marketing Newsletter for BMA Members
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Targeting a New Market (Part 4: The Four Principles for Launching Your New Marketing Program on the Internet)
by Eric Gagnon
Last week, we discussed the role of trade shows for launches into new markets, and detailed the essential elements of trade show promotion. This week, we’ll discuss the role played by your company’s Web site, and other Internet-based marketing methods, in your new market launch.
Your Net-based marketing efforts act in two ways for new market launches: First, as a “backstop,” your Web site serves your other, offline marketing efforts, such as print advertising and direct mail, when prospects link to your site after they see your ad or mailing piece. Second, your online marketing efforts are an active marketing channel all their own, if you run keyword search marketing programs using Google AdWords and other search site programs.
The ease of Internet search is transforming your prospects from yesterday’s passive trade publication page-flippers into today’s active product information seekers, as more and more of the potential prospects in your market use Google and other search sites to actively research the products, companies, solutions, and applications they are interested in purchasing for their companies. Even if you’re not running keyword search advertising, your potential prospects will use the Internet to search for products such as those sold by your company anyway, so you need to button up your company’s Web presence.
According to a recent article written by Josh Stailey of The Pursuit Group, 85% of industrial buyers access supplier Web sites, and 83% tap Internet search sites like Google during their buying process. Josh adds: “buyers find and short-list suppliers based on their Web presence even before making contact. The decision has been made before you are even aware…and you’ll never know you failed to make the cut.” There’s much more in Josh’s article that’s important to all of us B2B marketers, and you can access it here.
In any new market, the degree to which any interested prospect can readily find your product, and the critical first impression you make with your marketing presentation means the difference between getting the lead, or losing it to someone else.
Four Principles to Developing an Effective Online Marketing Process
The fact that any potential buyer can now use the Internet to find and buy your product can also make it easier for you to sell them your product, if:
1.) You make it easy for them to find you;
2.) You quickly explain to your Web viewer how how your product solves their business problem;
3.) You give them all the information they need that answers their most likely questions on your product;
4.) You establish an ongoing communications channel to open a continuous dialogue with your prospect
Effective online marketing requires solutions and facts, not hype: One of the major consequences of Web users searching out the products they’re interested in buying is that this activity places a premium on clear presentation of factual information about your product or service, and not the usual marketing buzzwords found in most company product brochures.
Web searchers want the hard facts about your product, and are certain to compare the information you provide on your product side-by-side with the information your competition provides on their products. The more clearly you present your product’s major, compelling benefits, and applications to these searchers, the more you’ll eliminate the doubt that your online marketing program could have been more effective for your new market.
1.) Make it Easy for Potential Prospects to Find You
Start your online marketing program off right: When entering a new marketing with an existing product, but with new messaging and positioning that’s customized for this new market, it’s a good idea to create a sub-site under your main Web site domain to handle all of the Net marketing activity for this new market.
By hanging a relevant, easily-entered term at the end your company’s Web address, like so:
—and printing this URL on your ads, in your mailing pieces, and in all of your offline marketing projects for your new market, you’ll drive potential prospects in this new market to the specialized Web pages you’ll be creating for this new market. It’s easy for prospects to enter, it keeps all your Web content in one location and, best of all, it’s very easy to measure response to your marketing programs this way. Measurement is good!
Tag your pages: One of the first things you can do improve the chances your company’s Web pages will rise higher in Web search results on sites like Google is to make it easy for the “robots” used by search engines to locate and index Web sites is to fill in the “title” and “meta” tags on every page of your site, like so:
<TITLE>Your Page Title, Company Name, Product Name Goes Here</TITLE>
<META name="description" content="Put your site’s description here">
<META name="keywords" content="list keywords here, each separated by a comma">
This is something your IT staff, Web programmer, or site’s Webmaster can easily include on your company’s site pages and your dedicated new-market sub-pages on your site.
Start working with Google AdWords: I’ve heard mixed results about the value of Google AdWords campaigns from B2B marketers I’ve spoken to on the subject. Some have had great success—especially for information or IT-related products serving tech-savvy computer-bound buyers. Others say the response just isn’t there, because the audience of searchers in their market isn’t large enough.
I say you’ll never know unless you try, and since I also believe marketing via keyword search will eventually be a major part of every B2B marketing program, even in vertical markets, as a marketing manager or agency pro you have to get in this game. It doesn’t cost much to test these programs, so put some marketing dollars aside to make a Google AdWords program a part of every new market launch, and scale your program up if it works for you.
The best use of an AdWords marketing program is to build opt-in e-mail lists for informational premiums related to your product, or with promotional offers, to generate sales leads. You can offer access to free reports, white papers, booklets, or software highlighting the problems, issues, or applications solved by your company’s product or service. Of course, you can also make promotional savings offers, such as discounts on the first order, free trial offers, etc., to give online searchers the incentive to contact your company’s sales team.
Your landing pages—i.e., the pages your text ads link to when a user clicks on them, are as important as the text ads that got them there. The purpose of the landing page is to describe and sell the premium you are offering, and your goal is to get the user to enter their e-mail address in exchange for receive your premium or promotional offer.
On your landing page, describe your premium clearly, and the benefits of your product, and reassure users you won’t rent out or spam the e-mail address they give you.
Here’s an excellent example of a Google AdWords text ad and the landing page it links to, implemented by Rich Sheridan of Menlo Innovations, an IT consulting company:
Keyword selection choices: Aside from the obvious keywords for your product or industry, you should also test keyword phrases that define the problem which is solved by your product. For example, if you were selling pipeline assemblies that can withstand hostile environments such as high heat or corrosive chemicals, in addition to the obvious keywords—“non-corrosive pipe,” “heat resistant valves,” etc., test keywords describing the problem solved by your product: “pipeline heat failure,” “valve corrosion,” “thermal pipeline expansion.” Do this and you get your product in front of the searchers who have an acute need for your product, because their problem is driving them to the Internet to search for a solution. It doesn’t take an MBA to tell you that these are your best prospects.
Keyword search optimization: There are all kinds of tweaks you can make to pages on your Web site to move your page ranking up on Google and other search sites, to make it easier for keyword search users to find your company’s products on the Web.
Google has trained its site indexing system to watch out for the obvious tricks, like invisible page keywords, Web site owners once used to boost their page rankings. So, if you hear about some search ranking trick somewhere that sounds to good to be true, it probably is.
Rising to the top of Google’s keyword search rankings means developing great content that Web searchers want: If you work for quality and depth, the search sites will find you. According to Google AdWords experts, one of the changes Google has made to their search programming is to rank sites based on the amount and quality of actual relevant content on their sites, so the more solid, high-quality content that you can produce for your Web site that’s relevant to the keywords you want users to find you with, the higher up you’ll move in Google’s page rankings.
There’s no quick and easy way to do this—it takes hard work to build good content, but that’s how to boost your search rankings over the long term, and that’s what we’ll talk about next week.
Next week, we’ll cover some techniques for clearly presenting how your product solves your potential prospect’s problem, methods for filling in all the information your prospects want to know about your product, and how to keep sales leads active by working with your company’s sales team to establish an ongoing communications channel with your prospects . . .
Comments? Questions? Send them to me at: eric@realmarkets.net
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Attention Marketing Managers:
Get a Second Opinion on Your Marketing Program. . . FREE
Think you should be spending less and getting more from your current marketing program? Tired of hearing empty “branding” promises from your ad agency that never seem to translate to actual, measurable sales results?
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Eric Gagnon (eric@realmarkets.net), is president of GAA (www.realmarkets.net), a sales and business development consulting firm, and is the author of The Marketing Manager’s Handbook, the master study guide for the Business Marketing Association’s Marketing Skills Assessment, Skill Builder, and Certification (MSA/B/C) programs.
For more information on The Marketing Manager’s Handbook, available to BMA members at a special discount, link to:
http://www.businessmarketinginstitute.com/book.html
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Test, Train, and Build Your B2B Marketing Skills for Better Sales Success: BMA Announces New Assessment, Training, and Certification for B2B Marketing Managers
For more information on the new BMA Marketing Skills Assessment, Skill Building and Certification (MSA/B/C) training and professional development program, visit http://www.businessmarketinginstitute.com
