Greener than Thou: Fad or Fiction?

May 29, 2008 by · Leave a Comment

You can’t turn on the TV or read the newspaper (and never mind the blogosphere!) these days without someone berating you for being insufficiently green or having too big an environmental footprint. It’s as though Al Gore and Kermit had suddenly been crowned kings of all media.

The result of all the hype – so far – has been to make greenness yet another metric being increasingly applied to individuals and businesses …including your B2B. It’s no longer enough to be merely compliant with the Clean Air and Rivers & Streams Acts (which is a snap for most tech companies, anyway); now you’ve got to be on the bleeding edge of lowering CO2 emissions, reducing power consumption, recycling heat, and a host of other items that weren’t even on the radar screen 10 years ago. (It’s almost like winning the Nobel Prize really does focus people’s attention …who knew?) And you’ve got to do some chest-thumping about it too, or your silence could create an unjustified presumption of guilt in the court of buyer opinion.

Obviously there’s a lot your B2B can do company-wide to earn green points, but what can you as a lone marketer do? [Read more...]

Filed Under: B2B Web Strategy, Online Marketing ·

Marketing on the Social Web: it’s not your father’s Oldsmobile

May 23, 2008 by · Leave a Comment

Suddenly, there’s no end of buzz around social media… companies are scratching their (metaphoric) heads and saying things like, “Surely there must be some effective way to leverage these vehicles like Facebook and MySpace…”

We all kinda knew this day would come, for the simple reason that buyers are people, too. In fact, they’re people first, and consumers and/or employees later. If you don’t think the day has arrived, take a look around LinkedIn; there will almost certainly be some content about your company there, and most likely it wasn’t generated by your current HR or marketing folks.

It’s become a predictable pattern with Web marketing that [Read more...]

Filed Under: B2B Web Strategy, Online Marketing, Social Media ·

Online Content Distribution: Myth vs. Reality

May 16, 2008 by ·

Ah, the conventional wisdom. It’s what most of us fall back on when we think we’ve seen the answer “somewhere” …or flat-out just don’t know the answer, but don’t want to say so. It’s also, no doubt, a key factor in explaining the incredible persistence of myths.

The ultimate antidote to myths, of course, is research. That’s why we at eMagine track current research of importance to our work …and our clients’ success. One real goldmine (on which we’ve based several of these articles) is KnowledgeStorm and MarketingSherpa’s Connecting through Content joint study, in which we found a number of interesting and myth-debunking nuggets, mostly relating to search marketing and conversion.

We’ll bet that at least one of your favorite myths appears in their list… [Read more...]

Filed Under: B2B Web Strategy, Conversion Metrics, Search Engine Marketing ·

You Gotta Get On Board the Search Train!

May 12, 2008 by ·

It may be tempting to think of search engine optimization (SEO) as an optional expense or activity… something that can be put off almost indefinitely, with no real harm done.

In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. By failing to optimize your website, your B2B is probably missing much if not most of the business impact that you built a site for in the first place …which is to generate leads and ultimately sales.

And this effect can be quite dramatic. eMagine recently redid a website for one of our clients, a software/SaaS provider. Although a number of things were changing at once, their raw content remained much the same; so the biggest change affecting lead generation was simply optimizing the site properly for the very first time. The result? …their search-engine-originated leads increased by more than five fold! [Read more...]

Filed Under: B2B Web Strategy, Lead Generation, Search Engine Marketing, Traffic Generation ·

Does Your Company Stand Still? Neither Should Your Website.

May 5, 2008 by ·

Like every organism in nature, your company is constantly evolving: developing new products or services, addressing new markets, changing its image to the world (aka branding). That means that your website – as the company’s “front door” these days – absolutely must evolve to keep pace. Few things are more off-putting to prospects than learning that they just spent a lot of time researching an older version of your product: “Oh no, the latest doc on that is this pdf that we put together awhile back… I’ll email it to you, OK?” You can certainly forgive the prospect for thinking, “Why wasn’t this content on their site?” The more critical question is, will (s)he forgive you?

And beyond just staying current, even content that isn’t rendered obsolete by events needs to be freshened periodically. According to KnowledgeStorm and MarketingSherpa’s Connecting through Content joint study of over 4,000 technology marketers and buyers, more than 79% of technology buyers [Read more...]

Filed Under: B2B Web Strategy, Engagement, Search Engine Marketing, Traffic Generation ·