Home page complexity

In our business we visit many websites as we need to evaluate if the sign-up for the 30-Day Free Trial can be granted or not.
In many cases it is hard to know what exactly the business of a company is:
- What they are selling
- Who they are selling to: consumers or businesses or both.

Apparently it is rather difficult to explain briefly the business of any company using a few titles and a few sentences on the home page. Many companies assume the visitor has a certain knowledge of their business and immediately address advantages or benefits.
Getting the right mix between explaining the business, positioning and benefits is a challenge.

In several cases the short intro on the “About us” or “The Company” page was the clearest explication.

The LEADSExplorer home page

Then we looked at our own home page and probably weren’t doing any better although we had a clear statement in the banner picture, which was probably overlooked by many as there the functionality wasn’t explained visually. The blurred picture hinted the solution, but didn’t clearly explain it.

We investigated our competitors to see how well or not they managed to communicate their web service for lead generation revealing the company name of the website visitors. Some of the competitors had good phrases or clear statements, but none had an appealing visual presentation.

Thus we decided to take action by changing:
- The first series of headers on the home page.
- The visuals.

Headers:
The first series of headers are important as they are key to the decision to investigate further or not on a webpage.

The visuals:
Just a picture and text aren’t enough as people want a video explaining the functionality. Preferably using a minimalist story in order to have a clear message.
This made us decide on using a flash movie explaining visually the main functionality of the web service in a banner.

Minimal and visual messages

The problem we encountered was to explain briefly what main functionalities of the LEADSExplorer web service:
- The unknown website visitors getting identified by company name.
- The indication of their interest.

 

We avoided mentioning all other functions, features and benefits as these would only clutter the story. The goal is to have people understand the basics in less than 10 seconds.

As a basis we wanted to re-use the picture that was in place in order not to confuse the regular visitors as the main image and layout would remain the same.

We have trialed several versions before finally settling on this more sophisticated version with intriguing flashes which you can watch here.

Now we are curious about the effect on our visitors.
And eager to know your comments and remarks on these changes.

Here is a video about persuasion by Robert Cialdini president at Influence at work, who is best known for his popular book: Influence – The Psychology of Persuasion.

You need to watch this video too concerning persuasive techniques as 5,000 people have seen it already.
Don’t lag behind!

In any case Robert Cialdini very good in persuasion as he claims to have 7 techniques but only presents 6 as number 5 is missing:
1. Reciprocation
2. Scarcity
3. Authority
4. Commitment
5. ?
6. Liking
7. Consensus

Could we use any of these methods in the complex B2B sale or are we already using them ?
We probably are.

The effectiveness of persuasion can be seen in this tribal dance video: (1.5mio views)

A single man engages everybody to dance with him in his tribal dance. It becomes a mass movement in the end.

Persuasion techniques can be applied in the complex B2b sale too.

How often do you use persuasion in your marketing or sales process?

Cars and people

For anybody in this world, their car is important as it is a part of their own personality.
A car can express:
- The social environment a person is part of
- Their status or lack of status
- Their psychology
- Their thinking
- Their passion
- Their importance in life or what they find important in their life.

The car owned can even be a statement of the meaning of life.

For example:
People who buy a BMW differ from people who buy a Mercedes and differ again from those driving a Lexus although these cars can be quite similar but the reasons for buying are quite different.

Even not owning or not driving a car is a big statement as this can mean:
- No drivers’ license: you can start wondering why a manager didn’t achieve to obtain a drivers license.
- Being a hard core ecologist.
- Major personal credit problems

The cars of your leads or customers

If you know about the car of the people you are dealing with as lead or customer, you will know and learn more about them in a very short amount of time.
If you can get them talking during a meeting about:
- Their current car: the current status
- Their next car: the expectance for the near future
- Their dream car: their aspiration
- Their once owned super car: they have had their best times behind them
You will learn more about them in 5 minutes than over several meetings or telephone calls. People who have been avoiding to tell anything personally, sometimes open up while talking about their car as passion emerges which is something they cannot hide.

Also investigate about the car of the decision maker. It can tell about what he finds important in your offering, quote or references.

The car in the sales process

Your customer’s car offers insight in his psyche.
Alter your sales tactic by the car your client is driving or want to be driving next.
Know how to handle your customer by talking about his car.

The car of the salesman

In any case, as a salesman you should avoid talking about your car as your potential buyer will learn also about you, which can be interpreted both positive and negative. You can’t know upfront.

Even if you have the same car as your potential buyer, be careful if you express yourself about it, as the potential buyer might not like it that you drive the same car.

Avoid by all means talking about your once owned super car that you can’t afford anymore: this indicates you are on your way back as a salesman: you are no longer the hot-shot you used to be.
You light even have turned into a loser or you have been downgraded on the ladder of sales people to have to work for this less great or less outstanding company.

Do avoid to park your Porsche (or similar) on the visitor parking space of the company you are visiting and trying to sell to: it will not help you selling as all employees will talk about it and the customer will feel as if he has or will be paying for your luxury.

Cars as insight

Cars are a hot item of conversation for all parts and levels of the population.
People do have very specific opinions, judgments and attitudes concerning and towards cars.
Inquire carefully with the people you are dealing with (lead or customer) about their car in order to know and learn more about them and to adjust your sales process.

What’s the car you are driving currently and what’s your next car?

Since ever marketing used to be a controlled process that is straightforward for most B2B companies:
- Advertising: create and pay.
- Advertorial: write and pay.
- Press releases: write and let distribute (pay).
- Leaflets and Product sheets: create, print and distribute.
- Trade shows: hire a booth, put up messages and be present.

All these methods and processes were clearly defined and easily controlled processes. They all are one way communications in specific channels.

Social media marketing disruption

Since the event of the social media the marketing processes are changing.
Not only because of the additional channel that is being offered, but mainly because of the un-controllability of the new medium and communication channel.

Anybody can post and publish anything about your company, products, solutions or customer service on these new social media channels.
This media is without any controlling organization or person.

Marketing is evolving from the well protected and almost isolated world of one way communications, into an open system of two-way communications that can even turn into conversations or even get virally distributed over large populations.
All of a sudden your B2B marketing is exposed to all the possible mishaps of social media that are beyond your control.

1. The world has become transparent:
In the past a few well-known gatekeepers controlled the distribution of information.
These people worked for newspapers, magazines, radio or television.

The change:
In the new world of influence there are no controlling people or organizations: no secrets.
Openness and transparency is required for marketing.

2. The world has turned to a conversational approach:
Previously there was no conversation: just one way communication – with the response from the audience by buying or not buying: To buy or not to buy that was the answer.

The change:
The marketing and advertising needs to be conversational and should encourage interaction.
Marketing campaigns needs to become part of the conversation and marketing should join in on the conversation.
If people post on a forum, in a blog or a comment on a blog, your marketing needs to consider to respond appropriately within a short time.

3. Everybody can become an influencer:
Previously the number of influencers was limited.
These people were highly appraised and had obtained recognition in one way or another.
Sometimes by just being in the same privileged position since many years.

The change:
On the Internet anybody can become an influencer for a short or a longer time span.
Still there are the less and the more influential people: like bloggers that have an audience.

The change in marketing due to social media

The change is in marketing disruptive having disadvantages and benefits:
- Disadvantages: un-controlled, unpredictability, uncertainty.
- Benefits: interaction, feed-back, conversation, possibility of viral spreading.

In any case your marketing needs to adjust and adopt as there is no way back. Those companies that take advantage early will benefit.

How is your company experiencing this disruption?
How is your marketing reacting upon this change?
Is marketing already taking part in the conversation?

One of the main current problems of marketing is to create relations through the use of advertising instead of just sending out promotional campaigns as marketing used to do.

Sales has the advantaged position to create relations with their leads, prospects and customers as they have one-to-one communications and even have face-to-face meetings. They do have two way interaction or a conversation.
They even can bring advice or even bring free consultancy in order to build further the relationship.

Marketing will only:
- Communicate using one-to-many channels
- Push the marketing message through the communication channels to the audience.
Hopefully the target audience is listening.
Building a relation using these communication channels is hard to do.

Transactional vs relational advertising

Previously most advertising was and still is transactional by addressing to the transactional customers who are people that are ready to buy and probably looking at the best price or price/value on the market.
Transactional customers will easily switch if a better deal offered.

On the other hand relational customers mainly care if you meet their needs and your relational advertisement brings valuable content to them. The relational advertising needs to have affinity to the potential buyer to build the relation.
The content of the advertisement needs to start a conversation that should turn into a “Conversational Currency” as Jay Deragon describes it.

Create relations for relational customers

Esthetically superb looking advertisements or amazing technology effects in ads will not create relations: they might just impress but not create value.

What is needed is content that affects or influences the target audience.
The content needs to be relational that has context to the target audience.
Those in the audience that relates to this content will propagate your information and even add content to it.

Relational customers will listen and switch to you only:
- If you communicate the right thing and keep on saying it.
- If they can identify with the situation or person in the advertising.

The change from transactional advertising to relational advertising that creates a relation through the content is a disruptive revolution.

Is your marketing still brewing transactional advertisements? Or are they already into relational ads?

If you have a new domain name and website, you would like to have it listed on Google, Yahoo, Bing (Microsoft) and others as fast as possible.
- Forget about free or paid website submission to search engines.
- Forget about submitting to free or paid directories.
- Forget about DMOZ as this organization will probably never include your website.
All this will only cost you time, money and will not bring you satisfaction.

First: Get a website

Register your domain name (mywebsite.com) and select a hosting provider.
Set up an email address with your hoster at the same domain name as you website.
Like: info@mywebsite.com

Second: Create minimal content

Make sure you have minimal content on your website: at least one page that explains the purpose. Preferably several pages that link to each other.
Creating a simple website can easily be achieved with NVU (free)
Else Google hasn’t got anything to index.

Third: Submit to Google & Co

Submit your website to Google, Yahoo and Bing.
Use the email address of your website.

Fourth: Get accounts on Social Media: Twitter, Plurk, Jaiku

Then create accounts on:
Twitter
Plurk
Jaiku

Use the website name as username or screen name.
- First name: first part of your website name or use “The”
- Name: second part of your website name: in order to have full name
Examples:
If your website is www.LEADSExplorer.com then use as First name: “The” and as Name: “LEADSExplorer”
If your website is www.generate_leads.com then use as First: “Generate” and as Name: “Leads”

Use the email address of your website as:
- This is required for verification (in some cases)
- People can reach you through this email.

Fifth: Complete information

Make sure you complete the profile:
- Include the link to your website: the url (www.mywebsite.com): This is utmost important
- The bio: write up a short information about your website and include the url again in the bio.
The bio is limited to 160 or 140 characters on the social media sites. Consider this as a challenge and a benefit as you have to explain in minimal wording.

Sixth: Write a few micro posts

Then post 2 to 3 micro blog posts on each of these micro blogging websites.
Again these posts are limited to 140 characters.
Avoid using the same text on the three social websites: just change a few words in each post.
Include in at least one post the website url: htt://www.mywebsite.com

Seventh: Wait 24 hours for Google

Wait 24 hours in order to give Google the time to index your website.
Compared to other methods this is many (50 or more) times faster.
Then Google your website or search on a part of a sentence used on the website.
The website might even end up high on the search page on specific keywords if these keywords have been used in the micro blog posts and on your website pages.

Conclusion

It is better to collect links to your site, instead of submitting to many search engines and directories as the blog posts on these social websites are ranked as important by the search engines.
Social media speeds up the process as Google pays a very biased attention to them.

Continue

Once you have started this game, you need to keep on feeding both your website and the social websites with new content.
You need to create new content on your website (at least every month) and you need to post new micro posts several times a week.

The relational versus the attention process

Selling is a relational process.
Marketing is a getting attention process in the hope to obtain a relation afterwards.

A relation begins with a communication and become a conversation that can end up even in collaboration.
Attention begins with a communication that hopefully gets attention from the target market.

Context content for the potential buyers

Selling involves a communication from person to person with immediate response or feedback, whereas marketing is mainly a communication from one to many with no direct response, feedback or involvement from the addressed persons.

Thus marketing can miss completely their intended goal and has no chance to adjust their message during their communication. Sales people have the advantage of being in immediate communication exchange that is supported by other signs of interest like body language, facial expression or the tone of the voice.

The question for marketing is how to create a marketing communication or message consisting of content that has context for the potential buyers as relations can only be formed by an affinity to “content”.

Relational content

Only in case the content creates a relation it has any value for both the receivers and the company paying for the marketing.

Relational content creates value the receivers:
- Any sales conversation should create value for the potential customer
- Any marketing communication should create value for the target audience

Relational content creates value for the broadcaster:
- The value is in the interest gathered from the potential customers.

Reaching the potential buyers

Even if there is an affinity to the “content” communicated, it can reach the wrong audience or interest the wrong audience.
In the case of a sales process a potential customer is clearly identified and qualified thus less error will occur.

Hence marketing needs to measure in order to prove the effectiveness and efficiency of the content broadcasted.

Sales has only a few communication channels: email, telephone and meetings, whereas marketing has many channels to choose from: advertising (print – online – television – radio), press releases, direct mail, email, letters, post cards, leaflets, billboards, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and social media.
The more channels there are being used the more difficult to control the communication process and the more difficult to measure the efficiency of each channel.

Still all marketing channels have one thing in common: they all refer to the company website.
Currently in Business to Business it is very likely potential buyers will first visit the company website before any other action, communication, internal sales or decision.

Measuring marketing

Sales can prove their existence by just showing the revenue generated or the funnel value.
Marketing needs to measure everything as that is their only way to prove their existence.

In B2B if marketing could measure the number of really interested potential buyers that are visitors from companies of their target market, marketing would know and would be able to prove their efforts and spending. Additionally they could adjust their message real fast if fewer visitors should show up on the website.
It is important to segregate the company visitors from the residential Internet visitors as the latter are unlikely to buy from a company in the B2B market.
In order to measure marketing in B2B, all marketing needs to know is the names of the companies visiting and their level of interest (at least exclude the bouncers).

Measuring is the only way to know if your content is in context and bring relational value.

How does your Marketing dept. measure their marketing efforts?

The change of decision makers

In the era before Cloud computing and Saas (Software-as-a-Service) for on premise software solutions, one of the important decision makers in the B2B complex sale was the CIO, IT Executive or EDP manager.

Currently the key decision maker or buyer for web services is the business process owner or the executive managing the line of business. The involvement of the IT department has diminished. There are no specific IT requirements needed in order to use a web service: any browser will do just fine.

The manager and the users are getting more involved in the decision process as it is a service for their use. Usually it’s also possible to get a free trial period: just sign op and start using. Goodbye to the day-long installation procedures where database and client/server installations are required.

The change from monolithic to best of breed solutions

Instead of buying one monolithic solution suite that needed to solve and cover all problems of the entire enterprise the Saas trend has enabled to embrace best of breed solutions. Thus several separate solutions that excel in their area will be selected, driving down the costs at the same time.

The change to shorter sales processes

This shift has changed the B2B complex sale for software solutions for ever.
Instead of having one long sales cycle, the different main functionalities are segregated leading to smaller separate buying decisions. Each of them has a shorter sales process with the goal optimizing the cost benefit for each separate function.
Due to this a new problem is created as all these individual processes need to collaborate and exchange data: driving up the total cost of ownership again.

The Marketing shift

These changes in decision makers and buying process implies also change of focus in marketing as the CIO, IT Executive or EDP Manager are no longer involved and concerned directly.
The marketing message can even put more focus on the benefits, advantages of the solution addressing the business process owners or the executive line manager. It is no longer about great technology, but usability and usefulness. A large part of the decision making process has often shifted to the actual end users, as they have been able to try the solution in advance.

For the entire software business this is a tremendous marketing shift as information technology started out to be marketed very technically and has now become a non-technical product.
Just like cars the function is known: cars drive fine – web services operate neatly.
Features and usability can make the difference.
Passion is lurking around the corner.

Has your marketing evolved from technical to practical?

The end of interruptive marketing

For many years companies have been pounding their market with outbound marketing:
- Direct mailing campaigns
- Cold calling call-operators
- Email marketing

People have had enough and are getting immune to these messages.

People just don’t open direct mail letters
Occasionally they do if the packaging is different: but those are expensive campaigns.

People just don’t want listen to a call operator asking questions from a script.
The script doesn’t engage into a conversation as the knowledge of the caller on the subject is limited.
Some people have even been getting so annoyed that they thought up ‘anti-telemarketing counterscripts’.

People just don’t open (spam) emails.
Many of these emails get filtered out by the spam filter before reaching their inbox
These emails get a spam scoring in the subject line.

People just don’t like to get pushed anymore.
People don’t want interruptive marketing.
People have become educated enough in using the Internet to pose questions, search, find answers and solutions on a multitude of platforms.
This is making spending large amounts of money on outbound push marketing less and less evident.

Social media

The last few years have seen an explosion of social media. Not solely on interests and subjects that matter to the consumers, but also for business people:
- Blogs
- Forums on industry specific websites
- Specific section on professional websites like Answers on LinkedIn.

Companies can have an almost infinite number of “findable” touch points in every area or segment of the Internet.
Thus the direction of marketing is shifting towards inbound marketing as the people of the target market have moved to these sites and as it offers much more opportunities.

The shift to inbound marketing

The shift from outbound marketing to inbound marketing will become more and more important as marketers will need to follow and adapt to the people and their habits on the Internet.

The definition of inbound marketing is a combination of:
- Getting found on the Internet
- SEO: Search Engine Optimization
- SEM: Search Engine Marketing
- Blogging
- Micro blogging like Twitter
- Being referenced in blogs
- Social media in general

The inbound marketing problem

People will visit your website. Thus your leads are already on your website.

The problem inbound marketing poses is the fact hardly anyone of the visitors will ever contact the company, register for a white paper download, a web seminar or a pod cast: you don’t know who they are and probably never will.
Only 2 to 3% (4% according to some sources) of your website visitors will give you their name and email address. From those 2 to 3% a significant part will even use a generic web email address like Hotmail, Yahoomail, GMail, …

Solving the inbound marketing problem

In order to solve the problem of the incognito visitors, a way of revealing the company names of the website visitors is key.
Additionally the interest and the level of interest is required for scoring of the visitors leading to qualification of the visitor into a lead.
Once you know you have a lead, you can start approaching the ‘warm’ company with ‘warm’ (instead of cold) calling as there is obvious interest in your solutions, products or services. According to the inbound marketing purists this might not be 100% pure inbound marketing, but who cares if it works!

Look at it this way: if you only contact 4-5% of the most interested visitors who aren’t contacting you by themselves, you have a big chance of doubling your amount of leads. And you’ll only be contacting people who have shown an obvious interest in your service or product.

In today’s recession economy, can you afford not to try?

Are you ready for the shift from outbound to inbound marketing?

Marketing actions

If the market is not ready for purchasing your products or services, why:

- Issue Press releases
- Write blog posts
- Place advertising
- Email marketing
- Participate in Trade shows
- Set-up Events
- Attend conferences
- Present at conferences
- Tweet

Recession economy

Nobody seems to notice your press releases.
Nobody comments on your blog.
Nobody clicks on the bookmark if the blog post gets bookmarked.
Nobody inquires because of the advertising.
Nobody opens your email.
Nobody pays interest on your booth at the trade show.
Nobody comes to your event as travel is restricted and visits during business hours not allowed.
Nobody listens to your presentation on conferences.
Nobody hears your tweets as there are too many.

In the current recession economy:
- People are more interested in keeping their jobs
- Companies need to maintain their income stream
But are not interested in experimenting and putting their business at stake with new solutions as they represent risks.

No market demand

Thus currently people and companies stick with what they are used to and has a solid, proven track record.

Only companies that are failing to make any sales or are at the end of their possibilities will change to other solutions. Maybe these are not exactly the type of customers you want as they might go out of business before due date of the first invoice.

Be ready for

Whenever business picks up again, both people and companies will take decisions to take advantage of the new opportunities. Then it’s time to be shouting about your new solutions and products.

For the time being, whether shouting or whispering, it will make little difference… no one is listening.

Do you agree?
Do you keep on shouting when no one is listening?