Linking Social Media with Search Engine Marketing

July 31, 2008 by · Leave a Comment

In a recent blogpost, we talked about how the new social media shouldn’t be thought of only as a means to raise your Google page rank.  While that’s still true, there is a rapidly growing relationship between social media and search engine marketing (SEM) that’s worth exploring.

In his recent ClickZ piece, “When Does Social Media Matter in SEM?”, Erik Dafforn offers this clear-cut test:  “Social media officially matters to SEM when search engines’ algorithmic treatment of social media sites intersects with user queries.”  I.e., when social media pages start showing up in search-engine results pages, it’s time – maybe past time – to take notice.  And it’s easy to verify that they are indeed hitting the SERPs more and more these days.

What this means, of course, is that [Read more...]

Filed Under: B2B Web Strategy, Search Engine Marketing, Social Media ·

B2B Marketing in a Recession: a Modest How-To

July 24, 2008 by · Leave a Comment

OMG!!  We just came across this absolute killer article (actually, only a few bricks shy of being a white paper!) by Jon Miller, “The Definitive Guide to Business-to-Business Marketing in a Recession.”  OK, so that may be the most overblown title since Douglas Adams’  “Life, the Universe and Everything”;  but please, don’t let that stop you putting it way up on your must-read list.

In part, we liked this piece because it agrees with many of the points made in our own recent blogposts on the topic of the current “maybe/maybe-not” recession (or the worst possible non-recession, as Jon says he likes to call it);  and it includes research backup for several of them.  For example: [Read more...]

Filed Under: B2B Web Strategy, Online Marketing ·

Link Building and SEO: Time to Get Back to Basics?

July 17, 2008 by · 2 Comments

We’re continually amazed by the number of our good clients who are happy for us to help them with search engine optimization (SEO) …until it comes time for link building.  They’re quite happy for us to worry about their keyword/keyphrase identification, page or H1 tags, alt-tags …all that gritty technoid stuff.  But mention inbound links, and often as not we observe a glazed-over expression and hear, “Yeah, yeah, we’ll take care of that over the next month or so.”

Come to find out, on our 3rd or 4th monthly SEO checkup, that virtually nothing was done on the link-building front.  Result? …their site is hovering on about the 9th or so page of SERP results, when everything else [Read more...]

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

Does your nurturing process leak leads?

July 10, 2008 by · Leave a Comment

It’s an article of well-placed faith among B2B companies – where sales cycles are nearly always lengthy – that lead nurturing is vitally important.

And that’s in good times, when you may have gotten used to picking off new business like it was low-hanging fruit.  But as Anne Holland says in her SherpaBlog post, How to Ride Out the Storm:  “In bad times, the branches raise themselves up.  Landing new customers is harder – more expensive – just at the time when your CEO holds that ‘How can we cut marketing costs?’ discussion with your department.”

Anne’s worthwhile piece goes on to discuss tactics for [Read more...]

Filed Under: B2B Web Strategy, Conversion Metrics, Lead Generation ·

Social Networks – Not just for Marketing

July 3, 2008 by · Leave a Comment

A joint survey by BtoB and the Association of National Advertisers last year revealed a gap we’ve gotten used to seeing:  whereas only 10% of B2B marketers surveyed viewed social networking as effective, 36% of B2C marketers saw it as effective.  The B2B respondents said they used social networks, blogs and virtual spaces such as Second Life primarily for brand-building, rather than generating new leads.

While B2B marketers grapple with how best to utilize social media – and we passed along some pointers on the topic in a recent blogpost – their companies are charging ahead with implementing other uses beyond marketing.  So reports Rebekah Tsadik in her worthy BtoBonline piece, “Social networks starting to click”.

Much of this activity is aimed at setting up intra-company, unbranded or “white label” social networks, which have the potential [Read more...]

Filed Under: B2B Web Strategy, Social Media ·