Getting your Web marketing in gear – without a site rebuild

October 23, 2008 by · Leave a Comment

Perhaps in the present economy you’re a bit reluctant to spring for a website re-do.  Hey, your site’s not that bad just yet …but then, you’re also not totally happy with its performance, either.

We’ve blogged before about the option of simply freshening your site’s design (aka “skins”), and about plugging holes in a site that leaks leads …both improvements that can be made in times of tight budgets.  In a similar vein, we recently came across some timeless advice in Lisa Wehr’s article, “15 ways to get your website in gear”, drawn from a white paper done late last year by her firm, Oneupweb.com, and declared a “Best of 2008 So Far (September) – Website Design” by Tom Pick on his WebMarketCentral blog.

No, we won’t go through all 15 ways here (that’s why we give you the link);  but we’ve picked out several that we think are most critical [Read more...]

Filed Under: B2B Web Strategy ·

If you’re not tracking visitor behavior, you’re not really scoring leads

October 16, 2008 by · Leave a Comment

We’ve blogged in the past about the importance of classifying leads into some sort of A//B/C scheme and nurturing the ones in the research phase, vs. simply shipping all the leads over to Sales;  and of being able to identify the occasional hot ones so as to get those to Sales a.s.a.p.  But how does a B2B marketer do this in practice, really?

The answer is lead scoring, which many marketers say they do.  Unfortunately, too many resort to shortcuts with it, such as… [Read more...]

Filed Under: B2B Web Strategy, Online Marketing ·

PPC “vs.” SEO – a choice that really needn’t be made

October 9, 2008 by · Leave a Comment

It seems like once a week – at least – a client asks me, “Should we be doing SEO …or PPC??”  So it was nice to come across a piece by Julie Batten for ClickZ, “Coordinating Organic, Paid Search Efforts” …with its title giving a pretty strong hint that the answer isn’t going to be one or the other.

Some of this persistently perceived dichotomy probably stems from the illusion that SEO is somehow “free”, which then begs the query:  “why should I pay for a ranking when I can get one for free?”  Of course, the last time that was even somewhat true was back when all you had to do was throw some keywords in your meta data and you scored a great position.  But that was back when Larry and Sergey were still undergraduates …certainly before “google” became a verb.  These days, it requires quite a bit more effort and dedication to secure and maintain strong organic search rankings.

As background to debunking the forced choice of our mythical client’s question, Julie presents a nifty summary of [Read more...]

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

You don’t generate demand anymore… you simply help it find you

October 2, 2008 by · Leave a Comment

Got to thinking the other day about how strange it is that marketers still talk in terms of generating demand (as though they actually have some control over it).  In fact, many of them will tell you that that task is very high on their priority list.

And for most of history, they were right:  B2B marketing was pretty much a one-way flow.  Sellers had all the information, and they released it when and as they saw fit… in the form of targeted “messages” about specs, features, prices, motivation to buy.

What changed all that, of course, was [Read more...]

Filed Under: B2B Web Strategy, Lead Generation, Online Marketing ·