From Content to Converting

Getting found on the Internet is the start.
Having interesting content is good for traffic.
Having much traffic is quite an achievement.
Converting visitors into leads is the main goal.
Converting more visitors into leads is the challenge which requires Conversion Rate Optimization (also called CRO).

The 12 keys for Conversion Rate Optimization

1. Fast loading pages in order to show the message
2. Avoid redirects, this consumes too much time of the 3 second attention span
3. The subject of the page should match the reason why the visitors landed there
4. The title should closely resemble the key phrase used to drive traffic
5. One page = One simple easy to understand message
6. Relevant images, which people understand an remember, supporting your message
7. A clear proposition
8. Information that is useful and will be remembered
9. Create content beyond your products or services
10. Generate trust with badges, certifications or references
11. One call to action per page, don’t confuse the visitors
12. Short forms with minimal fields to complete

Test and re-test on a regular basis as drivers and reasons to buy change over time.

How efficient is your conversion rate ?

Most B2B websites are designed from a vendor or supplier prospective.
- The design should be approached as if you were your potential customer.
- The content should be written abut what the customer is looking for.

When designing and creating content for your website think like your probable customers.

The design of your website should not be defined by your products or solutions, but by the problems and issues the customer are looking to solve.
What is the intention of the visitor? What is he looking for and what will he be expecting to find next? More information, contact details, specs sheets, local resellers?

The content should not solely be about the greatness of your products but should address how your solutions solve their problems and issues.

How customer minded is your website?

Quantity or Quality Content

Writing great interesting content is a challenge and hard work.
Writing a lot of content pages is also a challenge and hard work.

The best is of course if you could create an overwhelming amount of great content but that is probably not feasible as it is too hard to achieve.

Creating quality content requires expertise, sufficient knowledge and experience which is not obvious.
Creating quantity content is easier as you will be able reusing available information from the internet.

best of both worlds?

Thus you need to make the choice between quality content and large number of content pages as both is unlikely to be created.
The massive content will attract more traffic than the qualitative content as it will pop-up in more searches. However the conversion rate will be lesser than of the qualitative content.
The qualitative content might fail to drive enough traffic but have a high conversion rate.

The best probably to have a few pages of quality content supported by massive number of pages with lesser content in order to generate more traffic.

Attention span

One more important problem for your creativity is the content needs not only to be interesting but also not boring. You can have the most interesting content but when it is difficult to read or being presented like a math course then it is likely your content will not retain the attention of your audience.

Is your content qualitative or quantitative ?

Hoarding expertise and information is history

All the information and expertise of a salesman that allowed getting an appointment is now available on the Internet. This can be provided by your competitors or by peers on social media (forums, LinkedIn, Youtube, Vimeo, Facebook, etc).

If you keep your expertise and information to yourself then your potential customers will find it on the Internet from another source. Thus bypassing you completely. This could make your company and its’ products obsolete as people won’t find you on the Internet.
Not getting found increases missing sales deals. Hence hoarding information and expertise is history.

Share your expertise, knowledge and information

Instead you should share your expertise, knowledge and information in order to keep up with competitors and make sure you are being considered for all the possible shortlists. It is not solely your products, the feature and functions of your products, the quality of products and after service and the brand name that will get you on the short list as your company and products might get overlooked or simply net found during the research phase of the purchase cycle.

Not gating for content

In most cases influencers and decision takers will not contact you before they have made up their short list. In order to get on the short list it is better to provide information and expertise without gating for this content as this is part of the sales cycle. Asking for contact details is a hurdle in your sales process and won’t help sales.

Instead of waiting and hoping getting invited to present all of your knowledge, expertise and information during a sales meeting, you need to publish this as it will:
- Bring traffic of interested parties
- Build your authority in the business
- Get you on the short list
Only when on the short list you will be contacted for information about your solution and price negotiations. This kills the concept of opportunities moving through the funnel as it has become ultra short.

Are you still hoarding your expertise ?

Email Marketing Data

Every day we get an email with the proposition to buy at bargain prices their Email & Direct marketing data as their division or the even company is closing down.
It seems the business of contact data is no longer profitable which might be due to the contact information available on the social website LinkedIn, Xing, Viadeo, Ecademy or in online data bases like Jigsaw, Spoke or Zoominfo.

Free search Internet data bases

It is not just that abundant information is available for those who have an account, but you can easily search for free on these data bases using Google or Bing.

In many cases you can just search on the company which will return names of people working in this company. Once you get names of possible contact persons in a company, you can search for the email address of this person by searching on his name and the website (‘company.com’) without the ‘www’.
If not successful then it is most cases not difficult to build the email address as you can find the email address pattern by searching on the website (‘company.com’) without ‘www’.
Some companies use a different domain name for their email which is easily checked on their website as they all provide a generic contact or a press responsible in the press releases or an investor relations.

Mass mailings & B2B

Additionally in B2B mass mailings are no longer effective as people do expect personalized and relevant messages that relate to their current problems and issues.
That can only be achieved by having insight in their needs or demands, which is revealed when they visit your website by the search terms used and the pages people from the company have visited. Using such knowledge you can re-target these visiting companies with an appropriate and timely message, having a high likelihood of generating interest or responses.
As Email & Direct marketing lists can only provide static information and not the required dynamic information about when and what people and companies want and search for this is again a major drawback.

The business of email marketing data bases has certainly come under threat by all the available Internet data.

Do you still use Email & Direct marketing lists ?

Even the best and distinguished companies forget about SEO as they keep the default settings of their CMS (Content Management System) in place. In this case Joomla!.

Joomla! – dynamische Portal-Engine und Content-Management-System.
Joomla! – the dynamic portal engine and content management system
In both cases is not about their business but about Joomla!.

Even if the company domain shows up in the search engine result pages, it is likely very few people will click on the link. Only those who know the company will.

It is clear no-one in these two example companies ever searched for the company website on a search engine.
Or is Joomla! so complex nobody knows internally how to change these default texts ?

The English example is one out of 3.8mio if you search on Google for “Joomla! – the dynamic portal engine and content management system”
The German is one out of 9.8mio
Why do all these companies have a presence on the Internet ?

Wondering if this is any good for Joomla ! As it gives the impression Joomla is difficult to handle CMS.

Leads no longer enter funnel and pipeline

Funnel and pipeline have been legacy for most companies as it still seems to function for most of them.

However times and attitudes have changed, especially with buyers, decision makers and their influencers.
Instead of addressing to a company for requesting information people search on the Internet. This can be in various type of websites: company website, forums, reviews and social media.
- They have no intention to become a lead
- They won’t fill out an online form to request information
- They will not send a reply card
- They will not call you
- They will not send you an email
Thus they don’t enter your funnel or pipeline as they don’t identify themselves for requesting information.

Remainders of the past: funnel and pipeline

Even worse: up to a certain level in their purchase process:
- They will not take your sales calls
- They will not be interested in an appointment
Instead of spending half an hour on a phone call with a salesman, an hour in a webinar or over an hour during a meeting, they will find themselves more effective by searching the Internet and posing questions on discussion boards and forums for getting less biased responses from peers.

As identifying, qualifying, appointment setting, tracking and managing the relationship have become impossible, the funnel and pipeline have become obsolete: they are remainders of the past.

No sales meeting but technical meeting

Only once they have taken their main decision that a purchase of a certain solution is required, they will invite a limited number of companies with apparently matching solutions they have selected during their purchase process. They are not so much interested in meeting the salesman as due to their research, investigations and discussions they probably know more than the average salesman. Hence they are more interested in meeting the sales engineer, the product manager, the project manager or even the CTO for getting information and explications about technical or implementation matters.

As it is only then when you can qualify your lead your funnel and pipeline are very short as the moment of purchase decision is apparent.
So what’s the value of an ultra short funnel or pipeline where leads will only briefly be present and have only two or three stages:
- First meeting
- Price quotation given
- Deal closed or deal lost

Do you still make your monthly funnel or pipeline?
Is it still relevant to predict your business and revenue?

Business goals

The business of Google is selling advertising on their search engine (Adwords) and aside content which they analyze (Adsense).
In most cases your business is related to getting found on Google. The more people find your website, the more likely to get leads.

These two goals don’t exactly match up.

Online marketing techniques

In order to get found and appear high in the SERP (Search Engine Result Pages) you will use SEO (Search Engine Optimization) techniques, Content marketing, Link building and Social Media Marketing. The better you score:
- The more your business will get found on the Internet
- The lesser you will buy advertising from Google

The power of Google

In order to counter all possible marketing techniques, Google can and will change the parameters of their search engine with the aim of selling more advertising.
Apparently they change it all too frequently in order to change the rules of the game.

Of course Google can change all possible parameters but still the search results need to propose valid and valuable content on websites which limits somewhat their possibilities.

Staying on top of Google

The best online marketing for your business is to excel in all possible aspects of online marketing, which requires;
- Abundant of content in relation to your products, solutions, market, industry segments or verticals
- SEO for each page of content
- Link building for as many pages possible
- Distributing your content beyond your website
- Engaging customers on Social Media in order to get even more content and links

The online marketing battle is not so much against your competitors but obtaining more presence on the Internet than any of your competitors in order to oblige Google to show your content high is as many search engine results.

How well does your company score on Google ?

The Internet as virtual trade show

The Internet has become a virtual trade show as buyers and decision makers can find all possible solutions and products.

However the main problem of the website is that the visitors want to remain unknown and incognito on the website of vendors: they are moving around like ghosts.
Knowing who your visitors are is a challenge but feasible.

As people will land on your website using search terms and will look for their points of interest on your website you will be able to determine what products or solutions they are really interested in.
This will allow you to re-target contacts in those visiting companies by sending a relevant email as contacts are provided and their interest is known.

On your website it is rather unlikely they will fill out a form or click to send you an email with a question. Even online chat boxes have very little uptake in B2B although the technology is available and free (open source)

The real virtual expo

The benefit for a decision maker or influencer on a virtual trade show is that products and solutions of an industry are grouped in one place and requires limited amount of search.
The benefit for the exhibitor is to reach out to interested parties that might not be found using the company website.

Real virtual expos require to register before entering the virtual trade show website. Question is if the visitors will give their company address or use a free web mail (hotmail, gmail, aol, yahoo, …) which have little value.

As visitors can wander around from booth to booth, it can be more difficult to identify their needs than on the Internet where they have to make an effort by searching to find your website.

Still you will know the visitors are interested or have a problem to solve as they have taken the effort to register and visit the virtual trade show.
After the show all seemingly interested visitors can be emailed – hopefully with a message relevant to their needs or problems.

Breaking the ice: starting a conversation

The main advantage of a virtual trade show should be that the visitor will pose a question or start a conversation when visiting your virtual booth.
The breaking of the ice and engaging into a conversation should be the main advantage of virtual trade shows.

The conversation might be a greater challenge as not only people do need to click to chat, but your staff needs to be more than a call center operator or an assistant having generic knowledge. Writing down the question to be followed-up is not the idea of a trade show – even a virtual one.

Your experienced staff ‘present’ on the virtual booth needs to consist of employees who are aware and knowledgeable of all solutions presented on the expo. This requires an investment in employees as they need to be available and focused during the entire virtual trade show.
- That can lead to boredom as nothing happens over long periods of time.
- Not just an additional task on top of their normal work as they need to be instantly responding to questions of possible interested visitors.

The virtual trade show is a great concept, but making it successful is quite a challenge and it has to compete with your company website too.

What is your experience of effectiveness of virtual trade shows ?
Did you engage into a conversation ?

Unpredictability of SERP

Whatever the specialists say or pretend SEO is a gamble with an uncertain outcome.
Even with many years of experience there is no certain outcome or result for SEO efforts.

This is due to several reasons of uncertainty:
- What content your competitors are publishing
- What content bloggers are publishing on the same matters
- How effective keywords will be in the future: people change interest and attitudes
- What people will click on in searches
- What people are looking for
- Event beyond your business, market or industry which can promote certain content
- Of change in: business, market, industry and world business
- Getting links – getting high scoring links

Of course the more time and effort is put into selecting the best matching keywords to your target group, the more internal links your create and the more external links your website obtains the better you will score.
However the predictability of high Search Engine Result Page (SERP) for a page is very low due to all the other content, influences and changes.
Moreover the results change over time as a new page can be presented at first high in search results, but when hardly anybody clicks on the link or a high bounce rate is registered, then the search engines will devalue your search engine result due to apparently less interesting or less relevant content.

SEO is not a science but a gamble

You can have the best SEO implemented and still score mediocre: not reaching the first page on a search due to all the parameters beyond your control.

Search engine results are a very unpredictable as there are too many parameters and events influencing your results.
As SEO is not a science but a gamble then in order to win is to play many games.
In order to play many games in content marketing, the sole solution is to create as much content about your products and solutions in as many possible variations as possible in order to have a higher chance to score high in searches.
- Fight the unpredictability massively.
- Create at least one page on each possible topic related to your business
- Apply the best SEO on each page

How is your website scoring in the search engine searches ?