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 ?

Failing corporate blogging for marketing: the products or the CEO

Most corporate blogs are about the new features of the products or the CEO writing about personal experiences and events.
Both are hardly interesting and will have little success getting traction and interest from current and potential customers as there is no added value in this type of content marketing. Who cares about the CEO of your supplier? For interesting blog you can find some guidelines here.

The idea behind corporate blogging is communicating with the audiences of a company for generating interest and leads.
Blogging could achieve this in an apparently less expensive way than advertising or using typical marketing channels like direct mailings or email marketing. “Apparently” meaning the hidden costs are greater than expected, although they are not necessarily out-of-pocket money. The costs involved with blogging are: the ideas, the concepts, the subjects, the time, the writing, the editing and the promotion of the blog.
This is an investment your company needs to make on a regular basis throughout the year and while hoping it grabs the attention of the targeted audience.

Blogging requires assets

Most corporate blogs are unimaginative failures as blogging requires several skills and abilities.
The ability and capability of someone in the company to:
- Generate new ideas and concepts related to the business
- Write and edit in a comprehensible way
- Explain in an understandable manner and interesting to read
- Entertain the audience

Not every company is gifted with a creative blogger in a company who is able to write a good read about matters that matter for their customer-audience.

The blog becomes an asset

In case the corporate blog in interesting, getting attention, regular readers and links
then the blog website and the content of the blog will become an asset for the company. This asset can last many years as people will visit the blog posts even years after being written and published by finding the posts through search engines and bookmarks. We have blog posts from years ago that still receive interested readers every day (not exactly our best posts).
As such the blog becomes an asset for the company created by the asset of having someone with the ability and the skills to write great, interesting and entertaining content that lasts. In most cases this is not the CEO which is probably the reason why most corporate blogs are not that interesting as the CEO wants to put his mark on the blog.

Do you have the ability and skills for creating the asset of a blog for your company or does your CEO thinks he can ?

Some websites have massive traffic – some have very little traffic although they haven been doing their best for years.

Sticking to one tactic to attract traffic
The company marketer has stuck with one method (like article marketing) which he has mastered and might have been very successful once, but no longer so due to addressing the same group of people over and over again.

Multiple methods and tactics are needed. Try not to depend on just one source of traffic.

Never depend solely on paid traffic either, there are always fools who don’t know what they’re doing and/or have more money to spend than you do.

Jumping tactics
Jumping from one tactic to another without waiting long enough to measure the effect.
You need to take time to measure in order to get significant results. Less measurements = less accurate results.

Moreover everything takes time on the Internet as people really aren’t waiting for you or your message.

Automated services
There are many services that can bring traffic: they show effects at first use but on the long run their system can decrease in efficiency.
Using too many of these automated web services which will replicate your original content over an over again, will result in a lower SERP (Search Engine Results Page) as your content will seem like duplicated content.

If you trick the search engines somehow, they will catch on sooner or later. And if your tricks don’t survive a manual inspection, you might get reported by your competitors.

Old content
The older your content becomes the less important is is regarded by search engines. Only when you keep getting new inbound links, and people still frequently click on your links in the serps then you’ll keep a good score on search result pages.

Probably inspired by Twitter’s popularity, fresh content is the driving force these days.

Not indexed pages
Most website have only half of their content indexed by the search engines. Unindexed content will not show up in searches and not generate traffic.

For a start create internal links between all of your pages. Not just one link on each page, but multiple links to multiple pages on each page. Make sure you have a well interlinked site. If this doesn’t seem easy, consider if such a multi-column link footer would help. They don’t interfere with your content, and people almost expect them to be there these days.

Next, try to obtain more external links. Preferably of high-authority sites. Easier said than done. According to the search engines, more external links pointing to your site = a more important and interesting site = more pages of your site will get crawled = more of your pages in the serps.

Additionally create a site map page to please the search engines: submit your xml site map to Google (WebMasterTools), Bing and Yahoo .

External links
Internal links are easy to achieve and a first step to increase your ranking. However the real challenge is in external links (backlinks or inbound links): other sites linking to yours.

This is the hard work:
- Having really interesting content, rising above the internet noise
- Persuading the others to link to you. Easier when you have interesting or remarkable content.
- Various tactics, like commenting on blogs. Often hard not to regard this as a form of spamming.
- Participating in linkwheels or buying links: frowned upon.

It’s often said by ‘SEO Experts’ (beware, a lot of these people are the modern variant of snake oil peddlers) that forged links to your site could result in a penalty from the search engines.
We seriously doubt this though. If an external, off-site factor could result in a penalty, surely lots of people would use this to bring penalties to their competitor’s sites.

Don’t think of content as only text on a webpage. Content can be anything: movies, screencasts, audiobooks, tools, games, photo’s, cartoons,…

Domain age
The older the domain the more weight it obtains in any search result.
Apparently old means trustworthy.
Moreover older content is likely to have more links than new content.
If the links don’t increase though, the content is regarded as outdated or stale which might have an averse effect.

Don’t depend on only one source of traffic. Key is having content interesting, remarkable or useful enough to get others to link to you.

The hate of ads
We all hate ads for their interruption, attention grabbing and disturbance.
Even worse: the blatant lies – the portraying of fake life styles – for selling them something they don’t want have made people hate ads even more.
We even have developed an ad-adverse attitude due to this, which has brought us to filter out the ads or to click them away or even to leave the website instantly.

The luring SEO
However when we get lured by SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to visit a website that was not our intention, we don’t care.
We seem to find it normal that the links provided by the search engines can sometimes end up on a less interesting site. This happens to us all several times a day.

Still irrelevant search results suck as we probably waste at least as much time visiting the wrong websites as with ads, but we seem to perceive this differently.

Probably because ads are intrusive, whereas clicking links in a search engine result page (SERP) is upon our own decision as we have a need for this type of information or information related to these links.

The perception differences of ads and SEO
Ads are intrusive – SEO is part of the canvas of the Internet: invisible.
Ads are aimed at a large audience or the ‘average’ potential buyer, whereas SEO is almost personal as it matches your personal search.

Put time, effort and money into SEO instead of spending it on ads as you will gain in appreciation or even popularity.

Do you hate ads and don’t care if you get lured by SEO ?