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B2B Hot Content – Video

Following the B2C world, video is now the hot content in the B2B world.  With the popularity of YouTube, iTunes and watching tv over the web, B2B audiences are ready to watch video on your website.  Take the opportunity to show how your products, services or processes can help your customers.  Post regular video updates on your website about what your company is doing instead of just written press releases.  Post these same videos on B2B industry sites with links to your own website to entice your customers (remember to use a unique landing page with a call-to-action).

Video does not have to be high quality on the web.  Using just a home video camera and some inexpensive or free video editing software, you can create short videos of interest to your customers.  If you have a Mac, try out iMovie which comes with the computer (if you purchased it in the past couple of years) or QuickTime Pro, which runs about $30 (and also runs on Windows).  For Windows users, take a look at Windows Movie Maker which comes on most new computers, Ulead (about $60), or Adobe Premiere Elements ($100).

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B2B Business Networking

Read/Write Web: 2008 Will Be The Year of Business Networking – Business Networking models and services will evolve and there will be a lot of room for innovation. Reducing the cost of B2B business development is a really, really big deal. Today’s services are only scratching the surface of the potential. Niche feature-specific start-ups will be acquired by the big networks.

Look for more B2B websites to add community aspects and networking features in 2008. With their niche audiences, this is the perfect place for specific professionals to connect. This is a perfect opportunity to promote your own firm – both by adding your own company information into their network and to advertise or sponsor within that section of the website.

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B2B Advertising – Measuring Success

You’re promoting your B2B website through Google AdWords, contextual ads, display ads and print ads. The phone seems to be ringing more often and you’ve been getting more emails for RFP (request for proposal). Which ads are working? What is worth continuing?

Similar to statistics for a website, advertising has its own set of analytics. The online advertising measurement basics are:

  • Impressions: The number of times the ad is shown on the web. This may include everywhere the ad is shown if it is on different sites or sections or it may be broken down by ad spots (which are specific places it was shown).
  • Clicks: The number of times the ad was clicked on. Online ads usually include a call-to-action or a phrase enticing people to click on the ad. Once they click on the ad, they are taken to your website.
  • CTR (Click-Through-Rate): The number of clicks divided by the number of impressions – usually displayed as a percentage.

How many impressions your ad gets depends on the website you are advertising on – huge sites can get millions of impressions per day. Smaller sites only get tens of thousands impressions per month. The cost of advertising is usually calculated based on CPM (cost per thousand impressions). Obviously the larger sites have larger audiences so it will be more expensive to advertise on them.

Clicks will also depend on the size of the website you are advertising on and how many impressions your ads get. CTR will tell you how effective your ad is at getting people to click. However, this also varies quite a bit depending on the industry, size of the ad, where it is placed on the site and whether it is rich media (interactive).

The best way to measure which particular ad is working is to have a unique landing page for each ad (basics of creating unique landing pages) to measure how many people are actually getting to your site. Using your website analytics, you should be able to track on each landing page how many visitors actually make a purchase or email for more information (have these calls-to-action right on the landing page).

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