How to Leverage SEO for B2B Lead Generation

Author: Nate Dame

Too many marketing activities still happen in silos, and search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most isolated. While SEO and lead generation are primary drivers of new leads for most B2B organizations, these teams typically only collaborate when new content needs an SEO review (if that).

The general understanding seems to be that SEO helps the website—and all the content therein—get noticed online, which generates leads in a big-picture sense, while lead generation is a completely separate set of tasks targeted specifically at acquiring new leads.

But a changing marketplace is placing new demands on how marketers (and sales reps, and…just about every part of an organization) relate to their target audiences. Lead generation strategies are evolving to meet new expectations, but the one element still missing from most play books may be the one that could make the most dramatic improvement: SEO.

Modern SEO Strategies Need User Intent Research

Marrying SEO and lead generation strategies starts with a modern understanding of SEO—specifically a concept called “user intent.” User intent is the real meaning behind the keywords people type in a search engine text box.

There are two primary types of user intent:

• Inform: When someone is looking to learn about a topic
• Purchase: When someone is shopping for something described by the keyword

Discovering what your audience really means when they use your keywords is as simple as Googling them. The pages that rank highest for a keyword represent the type of content people are looking for most often when searching that particular keyword. How do we know? Because Google is heavily invested in providing the best user experience, and their algorithms are working 24/7/365 to decipher the intent behind every search term.

For example, a search for the term “email marketing” yields search results that are mostly marketing software companies trying to sell their platforms. In other words, when most people search for “email marketing,” they have a purchase intent. They want to buy software. The term “marketing automation” yields very different results. Most of the Page 1 results are definitions and basic information about the concept of marketing automation. People are looking for information.

This is valuable insight for any part of your SEO campaign. When you know users’ intentions, you can steer them to content that meets their needs. For example, based on the information above, a business selling email marketing should make sure their content includes a strong product page that targets “email marketing” and related keywords. Whereas, a business selling marketing automation, on the other hand, should focus on creating high-quality, informative content for that keyword.

Lead Generation Needs User Intent Research

Buyers and are self-educating further into the sales funnel than ever before. They are unconcerned with your carefully crafted buyer’s journey model—entering the funnel wherever they like and proceeding through it completely at their own pace.

Most marketers recognize this and are adapting their lead generation strategies to keep up with evolving trends and expectations. Many are hard at work developing engaging, helpful content. That’s an encouraging first step, but, as with any digital content, it’s important to pause and ask yourself whether it’s reaching the buyers who need it, when they need it.

Building content doesn’t mean the leads will come. While sharing your own content is important, a digital marketplace commonly turns to search engines when they’re ready to research or make a purchase. That means the content you create for every stage of the sales funnel has to be search engine optimized for the user for their unique buyer’s journey.

Buyers at the top-of-the-funnel, or the beginning of their buyers’ journeys, are looking for educational or entertaining information: definitions of key lingo, simple explanations of core industry principles, infographics, and other easily digestible media. That means the keywords that are generating those kinds of search results are the ones most likely being used by the segment of your audience that is at the top-of-the-funnel. Those are the keywords your entry-level content should be targeting.

By contrast, the keywords that generate strong purchase intent search results are likely being used by the portion of your audience that is ready (or almost ready) to buy. Those results include a lot of product pages, vendor comparisons, price sheets, etc. As you create that kind of content, target the keywords that are being used by people who are ready to make a purchase.

How to Use SEO for Lead Generation

From start to finish, here are five steps to use SEO to improve your lead generation strategies:

1. Make a list of relevant keywords. If you’ve never done this before, you can use free tools like Google’s Keyword Planner, Google Trends, and/or Keyword Tool.io. You can also start with a list of your key products and services, and terms that are important to your industry.
2. Google them. You may want to use spreadsheets for this step to help keep everything organized. Google each of your keywords, and make a note about whether the search results primarily reflect an inform or purchase intent, and to what degree. Some will be heavily skewed, and others will be fairly balanced.
3. Organize the results along your sales funnel. Keywords that generate a strong inform intent are most likely going to represent users at the top-of-the-funnel. Those that generate search results with a strong purchase intent are likely being used by people closer to the bottom-of-the-funnel.
4. Optimize existing content. Review content you have already created. If some assets were developed specifically for one stage of the funnel, make sure it is using appropriate language. If a piece of content was created to target a specific keyword, make sure it is addressing the user intent behind that keyword.
5. Create content to fill in the gaps. There will be gaps, and that is where you really get to work. If you have the wrong type of content for a particular keyword/user intent, you don’t necessarily need to remove it, but you do need to create additional content. For example, if an important keyword yields a strong inform intent in search results and all your website has is a product page for that term, you need to start building some informative content assets, such as blog posts, landing pages, and ebooks. If a keyword has a fairly balanced user intent—a few informative pages and a few product pages—it’s 100% okay to create a few (high-quality, engaging, helpful) pages based on related keywords for each user intent.

SEO and Lead Generation

The market is changing, and while most marketers are aware and are working hard to keep up, it can be difficult to stay on top of all of it. SEO itself is constantly evolving, and generating a steady flow of qualified leads is every marketer’s eternal priority. Both strategies can benefit from tearing down some silos and working together.

Start by conducting user intent research on a few of your top keywords. See if the results are what you expected, and, if not, how your company’s content meets the need. With some strategic content, properly optimized for the people who need it most, your lead generation strategy could quickly take on a whole new life.

Have you started marrying your SEO and lead generation strategies? What other tips do you have? Share them in the comments below!

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How to Leverage SEO for B2B Lead Generation was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

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3 Effective Ways to Incorporate Direct Mail Into Your Multi-Channel Campaigns

Author: Patrick Groover

Have you taken a close look at your direct mail lately? You may have noticed a pleasant surprise: offers and newsletters that you’re actually interested in.

To some, direct mail may seem like a marketing method of the past. However, coupled with a sophisticated marketing automation platform, direct mail is getting a facelift that may make it a channel that helps you differentiate your go-to-market strategy.

Rethinking Direct Mail

Historic approaches to direct mail largely centered around long hours of preparing one-off mailers to large audiences that were painstakingly pulled together. Back then, executing direct mail campaigns meant developing lists, developing content, printing content, and then shipping it out—step-by-step.

Marketing messages are only effective when they engage audiences at the right time within their buying journey, so it’s no wonder that the effectiveness of direct mail was called into question. Besides the potential for misalignment between timing, mass media approaches to direct mail were often impersonal and contained generic messaging. Traditional direct mail campaigns usually targeted a large number of individuals with the same piece of communication.

To reduce gaps between timing and personalization of messages, direct mail marketers began focusing heavily on audience segmentation using cohort analysis, which incorporates data-driven information and groups individuals with similar characteristics together. While audience segmentation remains a vital part of a solid go-to-market strategy and has a solid impact on open and response rates, it doesn’t address targeting and one-to-one communication. This requires defining and acting on real-time signals of buyer interest with highly personalized content that matches the exact target audience, which is where marketing automation excels.

Marketing automation leverages previously configured audiences and dynamically personalized content assets that are already tied to your overall campaign strategy and connects time-released materials to buying signals—enabling personalized direct mail at scale. With a sophisticated marketing automation solution, direct mail campaigns can be incorporated directly into your programs, so you can run, measure, and optimize them within one platform for true cross-channel marketing. 

Here are three ways to use direct mail in your cross-channel marketing campaigns:

1. Personalization

Personalization increases the likelihood that buyers will interact with your content and respond with the desired call-to-action. Advanced direct mail providers can integrate with your marketing automation platform through APIs, which makes it possible to pass information about individuals who perform a specific behavior to print houses in real-time to develop personalized content using customer names, specific offers, and more.

If you’ve pre-configured the creative, it’s easy to call upon the correct template, add elements of personalization, print the final mail piece, and package it up for mailing—all on the same day. For multi-dimensional mailers, or mail pieces that aren’t flat, providers can pre-stock materials and send out batches according to agreed-upon terms.

A great example of a relevant and personalized direct mail campaign is delivering coupon offers to customers a few days before their birthday. A complete marketing automation platform allows you to configure rules that will pass information to direct mail printers with each individual’s name and specific offer. The unique format and timely delivery of this offer through the mail increases the likelihood that the customer will take action, capturing a portion of their birthday spend.

2. Time-Released Nurturing

As you’re graduating from a batch-and-blast approach to a personalized one, consider augmenting your communication format. Using an advanced marketing automation platform, you can integrate a variety of marketing channels for a single campaign. Instead of using emails for every form of communication in your nurture campaign, add a flow step that incorporates direct mail.

Direct mail adds a tangible element to your email nurturing campaign that makes your audience feel hand-selected and valuable. And aided by dynamic personalization, your offers and content can reflect the specific person and their buying stage, a relevant message, and other aspects through pre-set criteria. The addition of this step to your nurture campaigns adjusts the customer’s perception of your overall interactions by making it more personal, and if you’ve been missing them through email, it’s an opportunity to reconnect.

3. Focus Efforts on Key Audiences

Direct mail can seem like a cost-prohibitive investment as sending dimensional mailers or even basic content to your audiences can quickly add up. However, marketing automation platforms provide added value to managing the overall cost of this channel by allowing you to configure criteria that only target the most valuable audiences with something more tangible.

Previously, it was very time-consuming and cumbersome to align the right audiences to direct mail. Marketing automation allows you to quickly identify the most valuable leads or contacts and send them highly relevant collateral. With the right platform, these lists are self-sustaining as your leads or contacts exhibit specific behaviors or match identified criteria. If you’re a B2B marketer, this capability is prime for account-based marketing. For example, if you’re targeting prospects in at higher education institutions, you could send them a direct mail piece after they download a specific asset on your website.

If it’s been a while since you took a look at direct mail, it may be time to take a look again. Evaluate whether your marketing automation platform supports multi-channel marketing and tie together all of your communications efforts. The right platform and approach will help you increase results, lower costs, and time messaging for the greatest impact.

Have you had success using marketing automation to support your direct mail efforts? Share your tips and tricks below.

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Facebook Launches a Simple Event App

Have you ever wondered if you were missing a party your friends were having or an event in your community? Facebook has launched a simple to use app that organizes all of the events of your friends and public community activities and festivals that will prevent you from missing out.

Could it be the beginning of a Facebook competition with Google Calendar? Possibly, but at this point it is clearly a consumer targeted feature, although small businesses and community groups will love the marketing potential of having their events put in front of locals without having to get them to Like their page.

"Every day, more than 100 million people use Facebook events to discover things they can do with their friends — from festivals and 5Ks to neighborhood fairs and nightlife," says Aditya Koolwal, who is a Product Manager at Facebook. "With hundreds of millions of events shared on Facebook every year, the fear of missing out is becoming a thing of the past."

The app lets the user pick topics of interest and sorts them by date. You can also view events from areas outside of your current location that you might be traveling to. If any event you are attending is updated the app will send a notification.

"If you’re looking for something to do this weekend or even right now, you can easily browse event recommendations based on time, location and your interests," said Koolwal. "Explore events happening where you are or in places you like to go using the interactive map. You can also search for events in any city if you’re planning ahead for a trip."

You can also merge your calendars into the app, although I couldn't link Google Calendar to the app although I assume that will be added soon.

The app is available for download now from the iOS app store and is coming soon to Android.

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Journey Through the World of Visual Content [Infographic]

Author: Elaine Ip

Content marketing is a mix of art and science, and as such, always presents opportunities for fine-tuning and mastering the craft. As buyer expectations rise and new mediums emerge, even tried-and-true strategies may not continue to be evergreen.

The Power of Visual Storytelling

When it comes to captivating your audience, creating engaging content is a critical piece of the puzzle that relies not only on the written content, but also the format. Visuals offer proven success when it comes to getting your audience to notice, engage and retain your content. Have you considered visualizing some of your content? Depending on your objectives, it can be an effective way to conceptualize your content:

• People following directions with text and illustrations do 323% better than people following directions without illustrations. — NeoMam
• Visual content is more than 40X more likely to get shared on social media than other types of content. — Buffer
• Content with relevant images gets 94% more views than content without relevant images. — KISSMetrics

Make Your Mark

The world of visual content can be tough to navigate, with some content cleverly disguised as entertainment. If you’re just getting started with visual content, or looking to optimize your visual content we’ve broken it down into three key categories:

Static: Static content represents stationary images that don’t change based on the reader’s actions. This includes images, infographics, and slideshows.

Interactive: Interactive content, like apps, assessments, calculators, and quizzes, requires your audience’s active engagement and displays content that responds to their actions.

Live Motion: Video content, which includes (as the name implies) videos and webinars, is broadcasted through live video or recorded and then distributed on-demand.

Ready to take a journey through the delectable world of content visualization? Check out our infographic, Content Land: Find the Best Type of Visual for Your Objectives and Content, and find out which method may work best to captivate your audience.

View the infographic in a new window here.

Please use the HTML code below to embed this graphic

<a href="journey-through-the-world-of-visual-content-infographic"><img alt="Journey Through the World of Visual Content [Infographic]" src="http://blog.marketo.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Content-Land-Marketo.png" width="100%" /></a><br><p><small>Brought to you by <a href="http://www.marketo.com/marketing-automation">Marketing Automation Software by Marketo</a></small>

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Hubcast 112: #INBOUND16 Sponsor Reviews, Optimizing Time & Education

Welcome back to The Hubcast, folks: A weekly podcast all about HubSpot news, tips, and tricks. Please also note the extensive show notes below, including some new HubSpot video tutorials ...

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5 Best Practices for Improving Sales Enablement

Author: Jeff Day

In today’s frenetic, go-go-go B2B sales environment, it can be hard to ensure that your sales team is having the right—or optimal—conversations with their prospects to deliver value and drive deals forward. The biggest blocker, unfortunately, is a seemingly easy, but in reality complex, problem to solve: equipping sales with the right content based on their unique prospects and specific selling situation.

Shared drives, social file sharing, and cloud document delivery services can hurt our ability to effectively enable sales because they feed the beast of one-off, random, reactive content management. This leads to waste: wasted time, wasted budget, and wasted opportunities for more closed deals. Beyond the content distribution problem lies another issue: inefficient processes for sales teams.

Solving these sales enablement challenges breaks open the floodgates to better content quality, better sales and marketing alignment, and more closed deals. In fact, research from Aberdeen Group reveals that best-of-breed sales organizations are implementing sales enablement practices and seeing incredible results, such as:

• 99% overall team attainment of sales quota
• 9% advantage in year-to-year revenue growth over the industry average
• 4% year over year growth in average deal size

Odds are, your organization already has some form of sales enablement in place, as 80% of organizations with sales teams bigger than ten people currently use sales enablement tools and practices, according to research from Highspot and Heinz Marketing. But are you getting the best results from your efforts?

If you want to make an immediate impact on sales enablement, consider these five best practices to ensure your content creation and distribution efforts drive measurable, bottom-line results:

1. Reduce the Time Sales Spends on Non-Selling Activities

This seems a little straightforward, but most organizations have multiple portals or tools where sales reps are supposed to go to find what they need, and reps are spending between four to eight hours a week just searching for the right marketing content to send their prospects. SiriusDecisions’ webcast Activity-Based Enablement: Helping Reps How and Where They Work provides a great framework for analyzing and eliminating inefficient activities by focusing sales on revenue producing activities and allowing marketing to gain better insight into content usage and impact.

2. Give Your Reps Easy Access to Content

The fact is, 90% of content goes unused by sales, according to the American Marketing Association. This is largely because sales simply can’t find it. Is your sales enablement system flexible? Can your content be organized in a meaningful way for your sales team in one centralized library? Flexible content organization and content recommendations based on performance, informed by your marketing automation platform, help keep conversations on point and accelerate conversions. You might also want to consider adopting a modern sales enablement platform that provides a single, easy-to-manage repository for all your content and tools, and integrates with your existing systems to help streamline the selling process.

3. Make Sharing Best Practices a Best Practice

Sales is a very dynamic environment with products and messaging changing regularly and buyers’ needs varying across industry, company size, and buying stage. Good sales reps constantly communicate with their peers about what is working well in order to improve performance, so it’s important to create a closed-loop feedback process around content, training, and best practices.

Having a platform in place that enables data-driven analysis of what content, strategies, and processes are most effective in various situations lifts the performance of the entire sales team. This applies to them sharing insights with your marketing team as well. Aberdeen Group reports that 60% of best-in-class firms have a formal, current competency around knowledge management whereby marketing has visibility into the sales teams’ utilization of content and assets.

4. Get on the Training Train

According to our own study, the 2016 Sales Enablement Practitioner Survey, 65% of practitioners stated that improving sales training was a top priority for their sales organizations. The idea that you can train an entire sales force—regardless of size—on new products, new methodology, new features, new resources, and even new sales techniques in two days once a quarter is dead. It’s been proven wrong many times, and yet so many organizations are hanging onto this idea as “the way it’s done.” Successful organizations integrate ongoing training and communications into their content and tools workflow so that sales reps know exactly what will be most effective throughout the entire sales cycle.

5. Turn to Technology to Close the Gap

Many sales departments don’t have the time or resources to evaluate and implement new technology. And yet, the right technology solution can help them be more effective in hitting their numbers and closing deals. This is an area where marketing can step in and help. As you’re vetting, deploying, and implementing best-of-breed solutions, consider what applications, features, or solutions can help sales prioritize leads and work more efficiently and effectively, driving results across the entire organization.

Organizations that commit to a structured, measurable sales enablement process through dedicated resources and modern technology are seeing significant improvements across the board. What other tips do you have for improving sales enablement? Share them in the comments below.

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Technology Helps Salespeople and the Customer Connect

Technology is impacting sales in a way never seen before as evidenced by Salesforce's massive integration of artificial intelligence into all of their various clouds and products. At the Salesforce Dreamforce event much of the discussion is about how technology is changing the sales landscape requiring salespeople to adapt or fail.

There are so many trends really impacting sales right now," says Tim Clarke, Director of Product Marketing at Salesforce. "You can't lead with products anymore, as Brent Adamson of CEB said, 57% of the buying process is completed before they engage the salesperson. We know that with a lot of the purchasing decisions that we make we'll just do our research online, so the professional sales person now needs to truly add value."

He noted what we all know, that the most effective sales strategy relies on having the right conversation at the right time, at the right place and on the right channel. However, it's really more than that, it's about standing out knowing everything there is to know. "We've probably all received those prospecting emails which are just generic, and then you get the second one saying, I didn't hear from you and then the third one asking, did you get hit by a car?" said Clarke. "Clearly, prospecting and sales development is really an exciting area right now and there's so much technology that really can support sales professionals to be successful."

Salespeople Must Stand Out From the Herd

An extreme depth of knowledge about the customer is becoming more important. "First, the customer is obviously much more educated today than they were even 5 or 10 years ago," said Will Anastas, SVP of Enterprise Corporate Sales at Salesforce. "The proliferation of technology that enables customers to be smart is also at our disposal as well in sales."

He noted that it is key for salespeople to "stand out from the herd of salespeople" that literally have the same information as we do. "So how do we change our perspective and how do we do discovery so that we can show up literally like your customers customer?" Anastas asks. "By providing that point of view that is authentic, genuine and empathetic that will help you break through and separate yourself from really everyone that is trying to sell to this individual. I think it's a challenging time, but I think it is full of opportunity."

Try Different Things to Get in Front of Your Prospects

"We launched a project with a company called Somersault Innovation which is led by Ashley Welch and her co-founder Justin Jones," said Anastas. "What they did was take the principals of design thinking and applied it to a sales process, a sales discovery methodology. There were 3 main components of it, empathy, customer centricity and curiosity."

Salesforce rolled out their program internally in order to improve their own sales. "What I've noticed is that as we've rolled out this training to our salespeople they have found themselves in situations that they didn't expect to find themselves in," noted Anastas. "For instance, one of my executives has Greyhound as a prospect account and we been trying to get into Greyhound for years, doing the same thing over and over again, looking at LinkedIn and looking at the available information on the web.

"Finally, after we did this training, our account executive just went and got on a bus," he said. "Instead of flying to LA for the weekend, he took a Greyhound from San Francisco to LA, he talked to a bunch of people at Greyhound and he figured out a bunch of insights that he would never have gotten by sitting at his desk and looking at the web."

Later, Anastas said that when the salesperson phoned up Greyhound he was able to talk about his personal experience of the bus ride and as their customer. "That warm, empathetic intro has taken him all the way to the office of the CEO at Greyhound in a very short period of time."

"So to me, it's really about separating yourself out and trying different things to get you in front of your prospects faster."

The Personal Connection is Also Important

The CEO of CCI Global Holdings, Walter Rodgers, says that technology has become available that really allows a seller to become much more knowledgable about their buyer, their buyers customers, their buyers needs, both personal and professional. However, he says making a personal connection with these individuals and leveraging all of this information enables the salesperson to make an "impact" on the potential customer.

"We talked a lot about the impact of technology on sales," he said. "I want to sidestep and talk about the personal connection with a Human being. That's something that I personally experienced working in partnership with Amazon Web Services. I've actually gone deep into their sales cycles as they try to convince customers to move from on premises to a cloud based infrastructure."

"There was one customer that we were working with that just did not want to move," Rodgers said. "They were very efficient in how they were running their operation and they felt they would not save any money. However, when we dug really really deep, his personal motivator was impacting the public education system."

He said that showing the customer that moving their data from to the cloud, would allow them to correlate information across many other databases and build out a predictive analytics model. "This let them spot students before they got in trouble, by looking at various trends, such as did the parents just go on welfare, those types of things," says Rodgers. "Because we are able to make that human personal connection, this company is beginning to make a migration across the AWS infrastructure."

"We can't ever overlook the impact of the human connection," he said. "You'd be amazed at what a difference it can make in getting email response when you take the words me, I and we out of your emails completely and focus them all on the word you and what's important to the other person. The response rates will go up about 50%."

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