What is an internet conversion, and why is it important?

Leading vs. Lagging Conversions
Many online marketers focus on lagging conversions. By lagging conversions, we are referring to events which occur at the end of the customer’s buying journey, like buying a product or paying to become a member. That works well if you sell a product or service online with a relatively short buying cycle.

For online marketers who do not sell a product or service online, for products with a longer buying cycle, and site owners who are looking to impact future performance, the focus must turn to leading conversions. By definition, these are actions which lead up to a person becoming a customer.

Examples of Leading Website Conversions

• When a guest sees your telephone number, taps it on their smartphone, and calls
• When a guest clicks or taps on your address and gets directions to your office
• When a website visitor signs up to receive coupons or a newsletter
• When a guest shares or “likes” a blog post on your website
• When a guest fills out a form and asks for more information or a follow-up call

Lead Generation Forms
Lead Generation form submissions – when a guest fills out a form – are one of the most important leading conversions a business or organization can focus on since they put you directly in touch with potential customers.

Lead Gen Form Best Practice
When it comes to Lead Gen Forms, there are good and there are bad. To get the most benefit, here are some best practices for how to present a form on your site and how to handle submissions.

1. Make Your Case
   You need a strong Call to Action. Explain why filling out the form will be of benefit to your guest. Make sure you know their pain points, and then make sure you have a compelling reason why filling out the form will help.
2. Placement
   Forms do best when they are above the fold and on the right-hand side of the page. This is sort of intuitive. You want your guests to see the form, so it’s best to keep it high enough on the page so most everyone can see it without scrolling down. Since most people read from left to right, forms get filled out more when they are on the right-hand side of the page.
3. Short vs. Long
   This is a classic tradeoff between quantity and quality of leads. Be sure to ask for only the information you need! We recommend that unless you have a compelling reason not to limit responses, simpler is always better. Don’t get greedy. Some reports have shown a 30% reduction in response rate by adding one required field beyond name, phone number, and email address.



4. Save Submissions
   Make sure your form is saving the entries to a database so you can export them into a spreadsheet. As well as making your data exportable, this is a handy backup you can occasionally check to ensure you’re not missing email notifications for submissions.
5. Skip the Captcha
   No one likes to guess what letters and numbers those squiggly lines actually are, and if a guest fails the test even once, you can lose them. We say, skip the captcha test unless you’re getting a lot of spam, and we do mean a lot of it.
6. Integrate with Mail Chimp or Constant Contact
   These days there’s no reason not to integrate your form with your email management software. Keep it simple. So when your new lead clicks “add me to your newsletter list,” it’s taken care of automatically.
7. Email Notifications
   Be sure to send your new lead an email that confirms you received their request. It’s a great opportunity to reinforce your brand. That immediate response to their request will show you appreciate and value them.
8. Follow Up
   Always respond to people who fill out the form, and do so quickly — ideally, within one hour. Few things will harm your brand image more than not responding to a lead gen form submission. Remember it’s possible to have the form send information to more than one email address. Be sure you have someone who will see the submissions and who will respond to them promptly.

What Are Your Leading Conversions?
Take a look at your site and imagine what steps your guests could take that would indicate they are moving toward becoming a customer. Do you track these events over time? If you aren’t doing that yet, now might be a great time to start!

The post 8 Best Practices for Lead Gen Forms appeared first on 435 Digital.

In my last blog post I provided an introduction, definition and guide to one of the hottest topics in the B2B Marketing space: Content Marketing. In that post titled Content Marketing: The Engine that Drives B2B Marketing I noted that you’ll want to consider ways to repurpose existing content to make it more useful; more easily understood or simply more interesting, and that’s true. But there’s another reason to repurpose your content.

Why Repurpose Content?

Let’s use the Content Marketing blog article as an example. We took the time to research and write the article, and then we made sure it contained the right key words so it would help us for search. We posted the article on our blog, shared it on Facebook, Twitter and via LinkedIn. But maybe you missed it or maybe you’re just not the kind of person who likes to read blog posts.

There are people who would rather watch a video or quickly scan a slideshow, and repurposing the content simply means we take that blog article and create something new, like a PowerPoint Presentation. By way of demonstration we created a Power Point Presentation based on the blog post.

But what can we do with a presentation that will allow us to reach more people? We can use Slideshare!

What is Slideshare?

SlideShare is an online community where you can share PowerPoint, PDF, Video and Webinar presentations. And the site gets an amazing 60 million visitors a month, which ranks it as one of the 200 most visited websites on the internet.

By posting our new PowerPoint Presentation on Slideshare, we offer our potential clients a new way to interact us, we get a second use for the work we put into researching and writing the article, and we expand our reach to the 60 Million visitors slideshare has.

A Quick Overview of Slideshare:

• Upload PowerPoint, Video and PDF presentations
• Search for and View presentations
• Share your presentations on Twitter, Facebook and Link
• Embed your Presentations on your blog or in your website
• Create your own Channel just like on YouTube
• Slidecast: sync your slideshows with sound

Here is an example of a slideshare presentation summarizing content marketing.

The post Content Marketing Strategies: Repurpose Content with Slideshare appeared first on 435 Digital.

Why Content Marketing?

Every few years there are ideas that significantly dominate the “internet marketing” discussion. Mobile Marketing and Social Media Marketing are examples, and today the topic at the forefront of nearly every B2B (business to business) marketing discussion is Content Marketing.

David Kirkpatrick, Senior Reporter at MarketingSherpa recently wrote, “According to research from the 2012 Lead Generation Benchmark Report, content marketing was one of the top four channels for lead generation budgets for this year (2012). And, as a less quantitative measure of the importance of content marketing, it was featured in almost every presentation at the recent B2B Summit 2012, whether the main focus was lead gen, email, social media or event marketing.”

At the core of this trend is the fundamental desire for most B2B Buyers to conduct online research before we know they are interested in making a purchase decision.

According to SiriusDecisions 2012 – 70% of B2B buyers’ journey is complete before they ever become a sales lead. Which leads us to the fundamental question: “How do we influence a buyer before we even know who they are? Or if they are interested in our product or service?” For a growing majority of B2B marketers, the answer is Content Marketing.

Content Marketing Overview

Despite all the discussion and focus, there can be a lot of confusion around what Content Marketing is, and isn’t.

Content Marketing is not a direct sales tactic. It’s not fast, cheap or easy. Content Marketing is about understanding your target audience, systematically learning what pain they experience, what information they are likely to need at each stage in the buying cycle and then providing it to them, even if that information does not directly relate to your specific product and or service.

Content Marketing is about building a reputation within your market as a thought leader, as an information aggregator and as an industry collaborator. It’s about establishing a connection with buyers by providing information across multiple channels without the expectation of immediate gain or short term sales. Because in the process of helping your market, you are given the opportunity to build trust and respect with potential buyers in the first 70% of the buyers journey.

Content Needs Identification, Acquisition and Repurposing

So let’s say you’re interested in getting started and you’re wondering “What’s the next step? In answer to that question we put together a 4 point list.

· Create a Content Needs Assessment: Reach out to your current clients and ask them a few questions about what information they found helpful or what information they wished they could have found during their purchasing journey. Try to gather information that corresponds to the stages in the buying cycle. You may also want to creatively envision an improved buying journey to provide information or help your current clients may not have considered.

· Audit your existing resources for content: Your website, blog, sales presentations, research and sales collateral materials are good places to look for existing content.

· Use User Generated Content (UGC): Social media networks are a good place to look for unsolicited testimonials and customer experiences.

· Repurpose The Content You Have: Consider ways to repurpose the existing content to make it more useful; more easily understood or simply more interesting. Using information you have to create a SlideShow, or a Video or Podcast are examples of repurposing content.

Content Creation

At some point you will have exhausted your existing content resources and the focus will turn to content creation, which is neither easy nor free.

Daniel Burstein, of MECLABS recently shared this three point strategy for content creation:

“Identify your audience and understand their needs. Everyone, everyone, everyone has pain points.”

“Invest aggressively. Social media, especially blogs, aren’t free, and they’re not even cheap. This may be as simple as investing your time in writing rich blog posts that address those pain points in step 1. It may be investing your Subject Matter Experts’ time on the blog. Or it may go so far as a monetary investment in a brand journalist or social media manager.”

“Focus on helping your customers, not selling. And for this reason…I do not recommend sticking a copywriter on your blog. But if you do, make it clear to that copywriter that the point of the blog is not to sell.”

Unfortunately, as Daniel points out, new content creation isn’t easy and it’s certainly not inexpensive. There is no magic bullet and it will take both time and investment. Because of this we recommend you make plan that identifies your most important content needs, and sets a realistic goal for steady / ongoing new content creation.

Long Term Steady Gains

Remember Content Marketing is a long term effort and it’s focused on long term gains. Steady consistent progress is best. The goal is to develop trust and name recognition during that crucial first 70% of the buying journey, so that when they are ready to take the next step, they have been nurtured and guided to consider your solution set.

Content Marketing In a Nutshell

· 70% of B2B buyers’ journey is complete before they ever become a sales lead.

· Content Marketing is how we influence a buyer before we know who they are.

· Content Marketing is about understanding your target audience, systematically learning what pain they experience, what information they are likely to need at each stage in the buying cycle and then providing it to them, even if that information does not directly relate to your specific product and or service.

· Ask current clients what information they found helpful or would have liked during their purchasing journey to identify currently available resources and opportunities for new content creation.

· Mine your website, blog, social media, sales presentations and collateral materials for existing content.

· Repurpose existing content to make it more useful; more easily understood or simply more interesting.

· Invest aggressively in content creation.

· Focus on helping your customers, not selling.

· Make a plan for the consistent production of new content.

The post Content Marketing: The Engine that Drives B2B Marketing appeared first on 435 Digital.

Have you considered what might happen if a website was entered into the Employee of the Month contest?

We aren’t expecting to see a picture of a URL hanging at the entrance of buildings any time soon, and we’re not downplaying the value of hard working employees. We will, however, make a case that a website could be one of your most valuable employees.

A good website is available to answer questions, field requests, and generally be of assistance 365 days a year. Even if we ignore sick days, vacation time and National holidays, it would take three full-time employees to provide the same coverage as a website. Even at minimum wage and not including benefits, this is a $45,000 value per year.

Additional Responsibilities

Even a relatively simple non-ecommerce website is routinely ready to undertake these additional responsibilities:

• Be the First to Meet Most Potential Customers
• Establish Credibility by Presenting a Clear Value Proposition
• Engage People and Provide Timely Customer Service to their Requests
• Reinforce Brand Identity by Making Direct Presentations
• Qualify Leads, Build Trust and Help Close Sales
• Assist Human Resources and Recruiting

Plus a website will perform all these duties simultaneously and without error.

Undervalued Employee?

What would you expect to pay if you were looking to hire a person who could perform these responsibilities? Given the above requirements, you’re not likely to find one person who could handle the work load an effective website will carry with ease.

At the same time, especially within medium to small sized businesses, budgets for websites are routinely less than the cost to hire even one minimum wage employee. This surely is a limiting factor on those companies’ bottom lines.

Successful businesses — both those with and without bricks and mortar — need to understand the inherent leveraged value of a website. They also are well advised to benchmark against their known competitors and carefully monitor how potential and existing clients interact with this amazing employee.

Breaking through the limited budget barrier for a website is essential.

Thinking in terms of a website-to-employee comparison can be a helpful exercise for people who are struggling with the idea of investing in an improved website.

So the next time you walk past the Employee of the Month plaque, remember your website and the leveraged value it represents. Not to mention that it rarely complains and almost never eats your favorite doughnut in the break room!

The post Is Your Website Your MVP? appeared first on 435 Digital.