These are somewhat scary times at some B2Bs.  Despite expert advice about becoming more aggressive in a downturn (some of it summarized in our posting “B2B Marketing in a Recession”), their top management is more inclined to be cutting marketing expense than approving increased spending.  Leads are harder to come by and taking noticeably longer to close. – B2B Web Strategy – Fast fixes for B2B marketing in a sour economy

The slow economy may have given you a little bit of extra time on your hands.  Now is a great time to take a look at your business marketing plan and procedures and do some housecleaning.  B2B Web Strategy has some good information to get started, which can apply to both B2B and B2C companies.  Here are some more suggestions:

• Measurement – Take a look at your analytics and sales measurement tools and make sure you are getting the information you need to make good decisions.
• Advertising – Re-evaluate any advertising you’re doing – display, print, AdWords, etc.  What’s working well and what’s not?  Are the ways to improve what isn’t working as well?
• Customer List – Spring clean your CRM or customer list.  Are there some customers/potential customers who should be moved to the bottom shelf?  Are there customers you should be spending more time with?
• Lead Generation – Are your lead generation processes working well? Are there improvements you can make to increase leads or the quality of leads?
• Sales Funnel – Once you get qualified leads, are they becoming sales?  What can be improved to increase the percentage of leads that convert to sales?

Remember that to increase sales on your website (and in general), you need to increase traffic to your site (and keep the same conversion percentage) or increase the conversion percentage (for the same amount of traffic) or both.  Periodically re-evaluating your business marketing plan and how well it is working can help you achieve whichever goal you choose.

What fast fixes work for your business marketing?

Technorati Tags: business marketing, marketing, internet marketing, internet consulting, internet business strategy

If you are a business-to-business (B2B) company, your website audience is quite a bit different than a company who targets consumers (B2C).  To get the most of your business website, you’ll need to account for these differences in both your design and content.

Intent

Website visitors to a B2B website are people from other companies who are also trying to do business.  Their intent with visiting your site is to help them make money – by purchasing your products or services, gathering information, etc.  The B2B audience is usually online from their workplace, so time is valuable.

Small, targeted audience

The audience for B2B sites is usually much smaller than B2C, but is much more targeted.  Keep your targeted audience in mind when designing the site and writing content.  You have an opportunity to reach just the audience that you want – your customers.

Behavior

Because they are using your website for business decisions, the B2B audience will be focused on finding the information they need to make those decisions.  If they can’t easily find it, they’ll quickly move elsewhere.  However, B2B visitors are also looking to build relationships with companies and people they can trust.  If you provide valuable information, products and services, there is an opportunity for long-term partnerships.

Expertise

Your B2B visitors are experts in their field and expect the same expertise in potential partners and vendors.  They probably know your products or services better than you, so website content and layout needs to focus on this sophisticated audience.

Buying Process

The buying process in B2B is much longer and more involved than in B2C.  B2B customers are making rational purchase decisions based on business value.  They want products that will help their business be successful.  B2C customers make emotional purchase decisions based on personal value.  Information about your products and services needs to focus on business value and information necessary to make a rational purchase decision.

Value of Sale

Purchases made by B2B customers are typically much larger than B2C customers, so there is a great deal of value in the sale to your company.  It is worthwhile to put the time and effort into providing your customers exactly what they need to succeed – they will reward you with sales.

Listen

Because your B2B customers are experts in their fields, they are a valuable resource to your company.  Listen to what they have to say about your products, services and website.  Since they are looking for long-term relationships, they are often more likely to spend the time to help you improve.  Your B2B website should include opportunities to interact with your customers and for them to interact with each other.  You’ll find valueable information that usually comes with the high costs of a customer research firm.

If you have a B2B website, how do you use your website to reach your B2B audience?

For more information:

• B2B Audiences
• B2B Usability Basics – Introduction
• B2B Usability Basics – Part 2 – Layout
• B2B Usability Basics – Part 3 – Testing
• Good vs. Bad B2B Websites
• Website Content for the B2B Audience
• B2B Website Design

Technorati Tags: B2B, b2b website, business to business, b2b web design, internet consulting, internet business strategy

I’ll be honest, its Friday.  Its gorgeous outside. I’m doing research on this post by watching shows on ustream.tv.

In truth it is hard to pull myself away from the high quality live broadcasts that sit up at the top of the ustream select channels.  Shows like Buzz Out Loud (a CNET property) are slickly produced and highly engaging examples of what businesses can do with ustream’s distribution technology. While CNET may have more polish in their delivery, their setup really isn’t much beyond a set on a show floor, two suits in front of a a good mic and a stationary camera.  Replace that show floor with a conference booth, or a marketing board room, store opening or factory floor and now you’re a broadcaster for your business.

ustream.tv has an interesting backstory.  Co-founders John Ham and Brad Hunstable met as cadets at the Army’s West Point Academy.  While serving as officers during wartime they experienced the troubles soldiers had in contacting many family members and friends within the short time given.  They started ustream as a way to connect many people to one soldier broadcasting over the internet.  From millitary to civilian, ustreams interactive technology fit comfortably into the Live Streaming space being left open by more established video hosting players.  In a Fox News interview the founders seem comfortable in their monitization plans which involve traditional silos as Ad revenue, partnerships and sponserships.  Funding for the live internet broadcaster has involved Angel funding from Ross Perot and the young company claim to list General Wesley Clark as a board member.

Getting away from the corporate About Us page for a moment, ustream does have a good man-on-the-street reputation.  Their video community is well policed for copyright and inapporporate content, lending to their legit rep.  Streaming tools available are intuitive to use, which is a must have for the competitve market.  Offering Javascript embedding, pre-recorded video, and chat capability is also standard selection.  Their monitization model is standard enough to say that most small broadcasters will be able to use their service for free.  Really for me the distinctive asset is a customer base which includes CNET, Penny Arcade and Digg.

Someday Sazbean will ready yet for live broadcasting.  When that day comes ustream will have our business.  Unless, you know… there is someone better by then.  Im looking at you justin.tv

As Dharmesh Shah said in our interview, HubSpot sells a product, not a service, and intends on giving small businesses the tools they need to do their own search engine optimization (SEO).  HubSpot Inbound Marketing System has a three step approach:

1. Qualified Traffic – Traffic is nice, but if the visitors to your website are not going to purchase from you, they won’t make you any money.
2. Convert to Leads – Once you have qualified visitors, convert them into sales opportunities.
3. Measure & Optimize – Take a look at how well your strategy is doing, make adjustments and continue to improve.

How HubSpot helps accomplish these steps:

Qualified Traffic

• Keyword Grader – Keywords are very important to SEO, but need to be implemented properly to avoid spamming search engines (and getting blacklisted) and, more importantly, annoying your customers.  HubSpot’s keyword grader lets you enter up to 500 keywords which are then each graded based on their relevance (which you can assign), monthly search volume (how often is the keyword being searched on), difficulty (how many competitors are there for that keyword), cost per click (if you want to buy the keyword), and competitors view (which allows you to track keywords for up to 5 different websites).  The keyword grader will give you an idea of what keywords to use in content on your website in order to build up organic authority for those keywords.
• Link Grader Tool - Websites that link to your website help improve your search engine rankings.  This tool shows those incoming links and their quality in terms of SEO (the anchor text and title tags).
• Blog – One of the best ways to increase SEO is to post relevant content as frequently as possible.  Blogging is an easy way to regularly post valuable content.  HubSpot provides a hosted blogging platform which is very easy to use and incorporates proper SEO functionality and links to social networks.  Although hosted on HubSpot’s servers, the blog is counted in your SEO by using a sub-domain of your site (ex. blog.sazbean.com) and is fully compatible with outside analytics that use tagging methods (such as Google Analytics).

Convert to Leads

• Forms – Providing a way for your potential customers to make requests from your website is key to generating leads from your visitors.  Obviously the best way to get people to provide you with their information through a form is to offer them something in return – a free white paper, consultation, etc.
• Information – What your leads looked at, which forms they submitted, etc. helps you get a better idea of what each particular lead is interested in to help you tailor your communications to their needs.
• Conversions graph – How many of your visitors are converting to leads, and how many leads are converting to customers.
• Lead Funnel – Where and how many leads are in the process of converting them to a customer.

Measure & Optimize

• Traffic – Views, visits, leads, customers for your website.  This is pretty similar to other analytics programs (like Google), but it does allow you to add events to the graphs so you can account for marketing campaigns, blog entries, etc.
• Referrers – Understanding where you are getting traffic from is important since these links help your search engine ranking.
• Visits by Keywords – This will show you which keywords are working as far as getting traffic and converting to leads/customers.

Conclusion

HubSpot nicely integrates SEO information into one easy-to-use product. The pricetag, $750 for the first month, $250/month thereafter, includes about 4 hours of consulting time on SEO practices and how to effectively use HubSpot’s product.   Most companies will make up the $3500, which is cheaper than most SEO services, in converting just one lead to a customer.  If you are willing to dedicate 4-5 hours per week to SEO, HubSpot’s ease-of-use, dedication to educating their customers and the several hours of included consulting time are worth a look.

Technorati Tags: HubSpot, inbound marketing, internet marketing, seo

The New York Times is speculating [no longer speculation] that an announcement from Google at the Advertising Research Foundation meeting this week will unveil a new product called AdPlanner.  Details are understandably sketchy, though the NYT quotes an anonymous source on the product as saying it will help Ad Agencies to find demographics that match an ads target audience.

Valleywag, though, makes the logical connection by envisioning a tool that could eliminate the need for Ad Agencies all together.  If Google is successful and all the data that an Ad Agency needs is available through this tool, it could easily be rebranded for the direct market.   This is certainly within SOA for Google; they use technology to eliminate redundancy and establish direct, dependent markets.  Some of these efforts like AdSense, AdWords and GMail are clear winners.  Others, like Google’s little know newspaper and radio ad placement drive, are mired in the mud.

My personal opinion is that Google will succeed in creating a very useful tool that will in no way replace the unique talents and skills of Ad Placement Agencies.  This is going to raise the bar for Ad Agencies expectations on reporting and information within content networks which can only be a plus for the Ad Agency’s clients; business owners buying up online ad space.

Mento, now in public beta, is a link-sharing and tagging website, similar to Del.icio.us or Pownce, with expanded functionality to create conversations around the link sharing. Creator and CEO Greg Hochmuth took a few minutes to explain how Mento is different and to share his vision for business users. Look for an upcoming Sazbean review of Mento. Greg was kind enough to provide a number of invites to Mento for our readers.

How do you see people using Mento for business? What functions do you feel are attractive to the business audience? What additional functionality are you planning that may be of interest for business use?

Greg: Our vision for Mento has three parts: at the core, it should be the central place for you to share, manage and discover links — with a strong emphasis on people you know and trust. In the current release of Mento, the first part of that vision is the most complete one and focuses on the casual, personal exchange of links among friends.

The second part and third part, which are now under active development, extend that use case in more professional and structured. In our planning, they are indeed targeted at businesses and knowledge workers. Mento will enhance the collaborative nature of its link sharing capabilities so that it will be easy for workgroups to gather links in a secure environment, discuss and annotate those links, and make them fully searchable (“re-findable”). Mento’s current “private groups” feature gives a hint of this direction and it will be vastly improved with the next release, which we have scheduled for early fall.

The third part of our vision will open Mento as a platform for publishers and businesses who want to create a branded, editorial stream of links for interested subscribers. Imagine a health care provider that publishes a weekly digest of relevant health links — or a business publication that selects the day’s highlights of industry analyses. Mento will give such publishers easy tools for compiling, editing and publishing such link streams while providing end users with a variety of subscription and personalization options.

Ultimately, our goal is to help our users manage their incoming information streams more effectively, connect with relevant content (that they wouldn’t find otherwise), and make it easy to share what they discover. Although we’re far from that goal, Mento’s tools will increasingly be valuable to business users who depend on relevant and manageable information on a daily basis.

The ability to share links with friends and coworkers on Facebook, Del.icio.us, Tumbler, Twitter, Magnolia, Friend Feed, etc. is very useful. Being able to import bookmarks from these and other services is very important to business users (and bloggers) who may already have a “wealth” of links invested in those services. Will you be adding the ability to import links from other services? And if so, when do you expect this functionality to be available?

Greg: A feature for importing links is surely in the works. In building the initial set of features, we focused mostly on “new” links that you find and want to share on a daily basis. We held back on importing links because we knew that Mento still needed better tools for managing larger collections of links. Once those are in place, we’ll gladly welcome users who want to keep their entire link archive on Mento. This will likely coincide with the release of our upgraded collaboration features that I talked about earlier.

Your service is very similar to Pownce. What do you see as your key differentiators from their service?

Greg: Pownce is a well-designed service and has a great team behind it — we like them a lot. Yes, Pownce is similar to Mento because of its feature to send links to friends — but it isn’t very different from instant messaging in that respect and it doesn’t make those shared links more manageable. Because Pownce also does file sharing and event publishing, we feel that it can focus less on the specific needs of sharing and saving just links. Mento tells who clicked on your links (so that you can create a conversation) and who visited a page together with you; it lets you create channels and use tags for your archive, personalization and higher relevancy; and it integrates much more with other services you may already use like delicious, Facebook or Twitter. And then of course, there is the screenshot feature, which has been a run-away success with our users (we recently released a Mac-friendly version by integrating with Skitch)

Being able to share a Mento feed on a blog or company website via a widget is also important to business users. Do you have any plans to add this functionality? And if so, when will it become available?

Greg: Indeed, we plan to release both widgets and a public API in the coming months. The API will be delicious-compatible so that you can use any delicious-based tool for managing and working with your Mento links.

How do you envision people using the ability to add screenshots to saved links with Firefox?

Greg: It’s been the feature that our users have loved the most so far. Many say that it makes it easier for them to highlight the important, noteworthy part of the page that they’re sharing, to “crop” a larger image on the page, or to give a better impression of the overall experience (especially for dynamic interfaces like Maps or Flash-driven content). Personally speaking, I also find that it helps make my links more memorable, which will be even more useful once we add alternate ways of exploring your archives and browsing larger aggregates of Mento links.

Why did you decide to create Mento? What are your plans for the future?

Greg: There is more and more noise in our information environment every day and it’s getting harder and harder to filter the meaningful signals. We’re on a mission to make your daily information streams more manageable and more meaningful. With that in mind, there is a lot left to build and a lot of room for improvement.

You seem to get quite a bit done with a very small development team. What’s your secret?

Greg: There is no secret other than dedication and knowing what’s important to us. We think that we’re slow, to be honest — we would love to iterate at the speed of thought but until that’s possible, we’ll work long hours and enjoy what we’re building!

Technorati Tags: mento, social bookmarking, B2B social bookmarking

I have mentioned before that hosting Rails applications is one of those great opportunities to avail yourself of assistance. The guys behind Engine Yard saw their chance to help the community and build out a solid foundation for a business. I had a chance to talk with Lance Walley, CEO of the San Francisco based hosting company about Ruby, Rails and their business model.

Sazbean: What problem is Engine Yard solving?
Lance: We make deployment and scaling of Ruby on Rails applications easy and largely hands-off. Our customers pay for great infrastructure and excellent people running it, all focused on Rails apps. In the end, they see us as inexpensive payroll on top of great hosting infrastructure. Some of the basic technologies (Ruby and Rails) can be improved or augmented our support of Rubinius and Merb are helping both move forward and grow to answer customer needs. We are hosting + expertise + software development to make Ruby and Rails better for all!

Sazbean: So how can EY help the average B2B company?
Lance: B2B companies will certainly want to develop web apps to support internal needs and external needs (customers). Ruby on Rails is great for fast development of those apps. Engine Yard is great for no-thinking, just-get-it-done-without-me deployment and management of those apps once they’re developed.

Sazbean: Obie Fernandez wrote in a January 2008 article that there was a waiting list for new customers. Is this still true?
Lacnce: We massively built up our support organization, which includes sys admins, Rails experts, and database admins. That solved the waiting list issue. We now have a queue of about 5 days, mostly because customers take time getting info to our guys that our guys need to deploy customers’ apps.

Sazbean: Does EY consider itself a silicon valley startup?
Lance: We’re a Sacramento / San Francisco startup. We modeled this business to be profitable and not need VC [Venture Capital ~ed]. We later took VC to pursue areas that represent a huge opportunity, and which we could not pursue quickly without VC and we’re about 2 years old and didn’t take VC until we were 1.5 years old so I’m not sure if that all adds up to traditional valley startup.

Sazbean: Unlike startups with a software product, hosting solutions like EY have a large barrier to entry. You need hardware, you need specialized skills and you need capital. So, why hosting?
Lance: It was a natural outgrowth of a previous business. We have an older company that does consulting; we saw that clients didn’t want to do this stuff, but they wanted really good solutions run by top-notch people. We created Engine Yard. while it did take some capital up front, we knew from the experience of others that it’s a quick cash generator vs. some other businesses. We literally saw it as a pretty quick path to cash generation and profitability. We’re now doing a lot of stuff that goes beyond that original idea, but we always saw hosting as a good business in which to start in a new market like Rails.

Sazbean: Many B2B companies are untrusting of startups and of new ventures. It means something that you are profitable and stable and up front about it.

Lance: Yeah, we experienced some of that back when we started in 2006. People had to get to trust us and our financial footing also helps when they know that we founders are all small business guys in the past… never huge companies, but real, profitable, decade or more companies each Now, of course, with pretty big VCs involved, that’s also a good thing, but I suppose VC makes some people suspicious, too. We have still kept our basic business philosophies of running a tight ship, not burning cash without need, etc.

Sazbean: You mentioned your people a few times tonight. Do you consider your people the distinguishing part of the equation?
Lance: There are 3 distinguishing parts.

1. The infrastructure we designed is extremely solid, very redundant, etc. We’ve been at it for 2 years and the architects are incredible people. Customers are buying that.
2. The staff that supports our customers directly is top-notch. There are between 35-40 people in Support now, spread from CA to NY to UK to Australia. Customers are paying for the ability to get help and wisdom from this staff 24/7. As well as stuff like database tuning, etc. The people component is very important to customers.
3. We have some of the best people working on those open-source projects that promise to improve Ruby and Rails for everyone. Our customers are indirectly buying into those people, too. There is a general feeling by customers that they get all this expertise for a relatively low price in terms of human costs.

Sazbean: Any well known Rails websites using EY that you can disclose?
Lance: Sure If you check out http://rails100.pbwiki.com/ we are literally involved thru Engine Yard or Quality Humans, Inc with 33-50% of those sites. Hulu (#3) for instance is NBC + Fox we helped them build that site back in 2006 or 2007. Seeking Alpha is a cool financial info site, they provide data to Yahoo Finance. Kongregate was a VERY early EY customer. I think they just took an investment from Jeff Bezos, who does not invest lightly.

Sazbean: Impressive.

Lance: It’s not yahoo or google, but they’re coming.

Technorati Tags: engine yard, rails, rails hosting, internet consulting

In Part 1 , we discussed how to know when and what are said about your company and products on Twitter. Now that you know, how do you respond? Let’s start with a story….

I recently had my Internet service go out when I was working from my home office (which I twittered about). It often seems to go out in the afternoons during the week, but usually only for 20 minutes or so. This time it was over an hour and a half, so I got fed up and called Comcast. They could see a signal going to my house, but couldn’t see the cable modem. They even tried resetting the signal, but suggested that I schedule a tech to come out the next morning to check everything out. Two minutes after I got off the phone, my service came back on. I twittered about this and suddenly received a response on twitter from comcastcares that this was normal. We had a bit of a sarcastic conversation back and forth, but the point is that Comcast almost immediately responded to my tweet (my second one, not my first):

• sarahworsham: Called Comcast – they said poor signal strength – now suddenly I’m back

• comcastcares: @sarahworsham That can happen with signal quality. If it keeps up, let us know

• sarahworsham: @comcastcares Kind of strange that it came back immediately after the phone call, don’t you think?

• comcastcares: @sarahworsham Not usually. If signal quality is weak they should have you check cables, then they reset signals

• comcastcares: @sarahworsham Sometime that corrects the problem

• sarahworsham: @comcastcares or they turn the pipe back up

• comcastcares: @sarahworsham Actually they do not control that. There is limited abilities representatives would have

• sarahworsham: @comcastcares trying to sell me phone service when my internet isn’t working wasn’t helpful tho

• comcastcares: @sarahworsham I would agree with that. First priority is resolution

• comcastcares: @sarahworsham I apologize for the trouble

Their immediate response to me seemed a bit creepy and I already had scheduled an appointment for the techs to come out. I’m not sure what else they intended other than to respond to my public tweet. Mostly it seemed like a PR ploy because they could have easily replied to me directly instead of publicly. However, I did appreciate the apology. Comcastcares is manned by Frank Eliason from Comcast Customer Outreach. Browsing his twitter feed you can see that he obviously is trying to help. The question is, does the company follow up and actually fix the problems? (Our Internet did get fixed – so far) Has their customer service improved because of this outreach?

In my opinion, monitor twitter for comments about your company or products, but take the conversation offline to protect and respect the privacy of your customers and avoid the possible PR nightmare. Follow up with great customer service and work to improve your products. Your customers will write and share the great experience they had – which is the most valuable kind of PR.

What are your thoughts on using twitter to respond to your customers?

Technorati Tags: twitter, comcast, customer service, B2B, B2C, internet consulting, B2B internet consulting, B2C internet consulting, business internet consulting

We’ve been discussing how to know what your customers are saying about you on the Web. Posting opinions or comments on a company doesn’t even require a blog, as we saw in the post about MicroBlogging with Twitter. So if your customers are tweeting (the verb of to twitter) about your company, how do you know (Part 1) and how do you respond (Part 2)?

One tool I like to use, TweetScan, allows you to search Tweets by keyword, user, and time. Once you have your keyword search, you can then subscribe to that search using RSS to keep track of what people are saying about your company and products. Or you can link to it and come back to see who else is talking about you. I suggest adding the RSS feed of the search of your company name and major products to your RSS reader and checking it with the rest of your feeds every day.

You can also take a look at the Public Timeline on Twitter to see what’s going on.

Here are some links to more tools, etc. about Twitter:

• Twitter Toolbox (Mashable)
• Five New Twitter Tools You Should Know (Online Marketing Blog)
• Five Twitter Tools We Love (GigaOm)
• 8 Cool Twitter Tools (Wired)

In Part 2, we’ll discuss how to respond to all these tweets about your product or company.

Technorati Tags: twitter, micro-blogging, tweetscan, B2B, B2C, internet consulting, B2B internet consulting, business internet consulting

Interesting information regarding online consumer use of blogs, video and podcasts:

Groundswell: From the chart: In the US, of online consumers, 25% read blogs, 14% comment on blogs, 29% watch user generated video, and 11% listen to podcasts. The US is the clear leader in both creation and viewing of user-generated video, which is at least partly due to the fact that YouTube is mostly in English….Podcasts still haven’t caught on the US after years of availability.”

These numbers will be different for the B2B audience, but are very important for the B2C audience.  B2B often follows directly in the footsteps of the consumer market, so they’re interesting from a trend point-of-view. Looks like video is still pretty important.