Not to miss content:

• Website Conversion Optimization: Top Tactics for a Step Change in Engagement and Converting Visits to Leads – NetApp Customer Case Study session on Tuesday May 22nd at either 8:30 am – 9:15 am and again at 9:25 am – 10:10. Our own CMO, Greg Ott will be presenting with our customer NetApp.
• Realizing the Promise of Marketing Automation -Wednesday May 23rd 1:05pm to 1:35pm, presenters Jonathan Block and Jay Famico present at this key session.

And for fun….

• Get ready for some Sirius fun at the Summit after party May 22nd at 8pm at the beautiful Phoenician Hotel. Hosted by Limelight, Marketo and Demandbase.

• DemandGen and Demandbase are hosting a poolside cocktail party: After a long day of networking and learning, you might want a cocktail – join us at the Oasis Bar 9pm Wednesday May 23rd.

Most B2Bs segment and target their markets – not all companies are created equally after all, and we don’t sell to them the same way.  You might have a consumer/SMB and Enterprise messaging strategy, or sell differently to Business Services vs Financial Services vs the Public Sector.  Therefore, your website should not be a one size fits all experience…but we’ll get to that later.  First you need to understand how your key segments are converting generally, and relative to each other.

Webex found that those Free Trial and Buy Online buttons were working amazingly well for the SMB and Mid Markets – converting around 16% … compared to a less than impressive .07% conversion rate of the Enterprise.

…”we were able to discover that a very large % of potential future revenue for us is not being catered to optimally on our site.”  – Joe Schwartz, Dir Marketing Cisco Webex

We will continue to post this month,  metrics 3-5, or you can download the complete  Top 5 KPI’s PDF Reference Guide now.

Is your target market reaching the content created for them? Is the content effective? How often are your competitors cruising your site, and what they are looking at?

Can you show your CXO how you can measure the success of your content creation?  How your specific content strategy is driving revenue? Chances are, you would LOVE to be able to answer these questions – but your ability to take action is limited.

In the aftermath of a very successful Adobe Summit in March, and interviewing several of our key customers using us with their analytics packages, we have come up with the 5 KPIs that you, the B2B Marketer, MUST know if you want to effectively measure and optimize your marketing programs, ultimately enabling you to build an optimized, revenue generating website.

Below is the first in the series of 5:

1. Overall Visits by Industry, Company Size and Audience

If you were asked to categorize the type of traffic visiting your website, you would automatically recite your target market:  the Fortune 500.  Companies with more than $10M in revenue in Healthcare, mid-market.  You may also pause, take a look at your form submit data or marketing automation system and quickly cluster by industry or size.

But you really have no idea.

Webex had an assumption that the majority of their visitors were coming from SMB and Mid Market companies. Their site was thus geared to that market with Free Trials and Buy Online buttons.  After they plugged Demandbase into Adobe Site Catalyst, they found 50% of their non-residential traffic was actually Enterprise.

How could WebEx create an optimal experience for each of their segments? What segments were engaging and converting?

Next week we will be adding the additional metrics, or you can download a Top 5 KPI’s PDF Reference Guide now.

Revenue Performance Management is all the rage in B2B Marketing nowadays. Sometimes, it sounds like the wonder drug that will cure B2B marketing of all its ailments. But as is the case with any promising cure, there’s a lot that it cannot do for B2B marketers. However with everyone so excited about this new thinking and capability, we’re noticing a disturbing trend of over-prescription, that tends to over-simplify and trivialize other capabilities and challenges that marketers need to deal with.

In this podcast we talk about some of the side effects of RPM and how ironically it can actually get marketers further pigeon holed into a Sales Support function. (Greg came especially incensed about this issue to our Podcast today. And got us charged up too!) Here’s the no holds-barred, somewhat therapeutic and maybe controversial, but definitely thought provoking discussion today.

Show Notes:

00:19 Introduction

01:09 Are the Pundits talking down to Marketers?

02:00 We review the content that got Greg riled up

03:07 The content that does marketers disservice

03:54 More metrics and measurability should help elevate not paint marketing further into a “support” role

05:30 A lot of pundits are just repeating the buzz words without much thought to what it really means to a B2B Marketer

07:10 What should analysts be talking about?

07:42 Marketers need to have self awareness. Do you know your business? What is the marketer’s role?

09:20 Who’s role is it to optimize the business? It is the marketer that needs to own business growth, product, strategy

11:15 Analysts should advance the case of B2B Marketing maturity rather than the mouthpiece for Lead Management maturity. And B2B Marketing maturity will include both measurable and not so easily measurable objectives.

12:59 Another side effect of such material. Job descriptions out of sync of actual organization asks of marketing.

16:15 Wrap up

Podcasters: Greg Ott, CMO Demandbase, Jason Stewart, Director of Marketing, Demandbase and Amit Varshneya, VP of Strategic Services Demandbase.

We hope you enjoy listening to our podcasts. We would like to hear from you – feedback for improvement, comments on our discussion, suggestions for future topics. Looking forward to your comments below.

Demandbase B2B Marketing Podcast. Play by clicking here

This one took a little longer to publish. We recorded it fresh after our visits to Adobe (previously Omniture) Summit and DrupalCon, but are getting to publishing it just now. The discussion is however freshly brewed fresh! And there’s some great theme music to get you in the mood! Do not miss

Show Notes:

00:19 Introduction

01:31 Adobe Digital Summit

02:20 Mature marketers go to Adobe Summit

03:12 More B2B marketers trying to figure out their Digital Marketing Strategy

04:10 The web is more critical to B2B

05:40 Top buzz at the event – personalization

07:29 …finally fourteen years later, personalization

08:10 adoption of performance measurement becoming mainstream

09:45 Big data & Analytics

11:35 DrupalCon

11:42 What is Drupal?

12:40 Interesting tidbits about Drupal

13:31 Community ownership of the platform

14:01 Amit lllikes the Drupal community!

15:02 As platforms become more mainstream they (have to) become more user-friendly

15:41 The Mobile-first push for Drupal8

16:39 Unifying theme – personalization and analytics is driven by a mature CMS

18:12 Wrap-up of this double feature

Podcasters: Greg Ott, CMO Demandbase, Jason Stewart, Director of Marketing, Demandbase and Amit Varshneya, VP of Strategic Services Demandbase

We hope you enjoy listening to our podcasts. We would like to hear from you – feedback for improvement, comments on our discussion, suggestions for future topics. Looking forward to your comments below.

Demandbase B2B Marketing Podcast 5. Play by clicking here

In and of itself, that is pretty strange. OS is something Google Analytics usually just knows. But the mystery deepens…almost 100% of those “not set” visits occurred during a traffic spike we were experiencing during a live event we were sponsors at … the Adobe Digital Marketing Summit in Salt Lake City, UT.

Thoughts? Ideas? This is typically something that GA handles no sweat, so it is puzzling to say the least.

Side note, the mobile traffic is still pretty low, extremely small percentage of overall traffic. Is there some sort of guideline to consider, or a benchmark for when you need to seriously consider a mobile version of a B2B website? In our case, home page and website content is already built using HTML5 so it is typically fine for mobile devices. What do you think?

Part 2 of the three part series on B2B Marketing vs B2C. In this show, we talk about the changes happening in B2B that make it an incredibly exciting space. Specifically the advent of Data Driven Marketing and Marketing Analytics.

Show Notes

00:01 Introductions

00:20 Exciting changes in B2B marketing – New roles, competencies and specialties

02:05 B2B is becoming Data Driven Marketing

02:30 How does this emphasis on Data and Metrics compare to B2C?

05:20 Low volume, high impact makes data more critical

06:04 Change in consumer behavior – online buying; buying behavior

08:40 What data is available to B2B Marketers today?

09:20 1st phase – tracking Known Visitors on their website (deeper in the funnel)

10:11 2nd phase – analytics about unknown visitors on their website (top of the funnel)

12:00 Marketers focus on getting more traffic, but is it the right traffic? Analytics

Quotable Quotes: “I’d rather share my credit card information than give you my email address.”

Podcasters: Greg Ott (CMO, Demandbase), Amit Varshneya (VP Strategic Services, Demandbase) and Jason Stewart (Director of Marketing, Demandbase)

We hope you’ve enjoyed listening to our podcasts. We would like to hear from you – feedback for improvement, comments on our discussion, suggestions for future topics. Looking forward to hearing from you in the comments section below.

Demandbase B2B Marketing Podcast 4. Play by clicking here

A few fun facts…our booth team handed out 300 pieces of Demandbase Dark chocolate. We enjoyed networking at a handful of fun events and dinners and of course working the floor talking to all the great Summit-ers’ and current customers!

On Wednesday we presented our session to a standing room only crowd entitled: “Not all web visitors were created equally – Learn how to target your sweet spot” along with our customer David Maxson from Avery. If you missed not to worry, his story is covered in our “Sweet Spot Marketing – How Account-Based Web Analytics are Powering B2B Marketing to New Heights” whitepaper as well.

Adam Greco at Adobe and Demandbase Video Shoot

Another highlight was our Adobe and Demandbase video, highlighting customers and partners who have embraced the sweet spot concept, focusing their B2B marketing campaigns on the prospects that represent future revenue. Here you will see Web Analytics Demysified partner, Adam Greco speaking on Sweet Spot marketing on the show floor.

Back at the booth we also spoke to our new “5 Key B2B metrics you need to Know”.  This includes  5 SiteCatalyst reports that every B2B marketer should be measuring. In case you missed it, you can review the “Top 5 KPI’s” in this PDF.

Our team now back at the home front in San Francisco, working hard with the companies who took us up on our Sweet Spot Conversion Report requests. We are excited to get these together and help provide insights to help drive business by optimizing to their sweet spot and convert more opportunities!

Kudos to Adobe for a well put on show, looking forward to 2013!

These were the messages broadcast in the now-standard opening video that precedes a Dreamforce/Cloudforce opening keynote. I really like the message, though. I have been talking so much lately about Buyer 2.0, and how social media and e-commerce buying behaviors are influencing how our prospects research our products and services. But what Salesforce.com is doing with Cloudforce is examine how social media and the changing face of online interaction influence how we work together and help our customers.

To me, the challenge with how the enterprise uses tools like Chatter, the “community” inside my Salesforce.com instance wherein, theoretically, our entire organization can communicate and collaborate. It was a challenge at first, with few people actually using it to share progress or ask for advice. Then, free “Chatter” seats allowing the entire company to access the social aspects of SFDC were introduced, along with the desktop app enabling those folks who don’t normally work inside of SFDC to easily take part. That’s when Chatter really became much more widely used inside of Demandbase.

So how does the enterprise bridge the social divide? Is the employee social network where it happens first? With customer interaction and community coming second? Could be, as there has been a recurring fear within the C-Suite to “opening the blinds” and building a community where customers and prospects can speak freely about us. What if we build a community and people say bad things? Or even worse…what if we build a community and no one comes?

It looks like the focus, at least initially, of this keynote is going to be on the employee social network. Examples of Chatter “success” from the NBC Universal testimonial (and from purely unscientific, anecdotal information I have gathered from friends and colleagues) primarily involve marketing and product management widely, visibly broadcasting and sharing information to the sales team. In my experience, it has been a one-way street though, with the sales team appearing more hesitant to utilize the tools the way they were intended. I was reminded of a conversation I had at Dreamforce with an analyst last fall, and which I blogged about here.

…I asked him about the usage of Chatter across sales teams as a place to discuss objection handling and seek advice or assistance in closing deals. While he is a fan of Chatter and the idea of cross-company information sharing, he was more cagey about how widely salespeople have adopted these types of tools and tied it back to the age-old struggle of trying to get salespeople to record more detailed notes in whatever the system of record may be.

“Salespeople,” he indicated, “are very protective of their perceived value to the company and want to privatize as much of their process as possible. They see the withholding of their detailed notes as a factor that contributes to their job security. It’s their secret sauce.”

George Hu, Chief Operating Officer of Salesforce.com introduced a new product called Salesforce Rypple (borne from the SFDC acquisition of Rypple) and called it “performance management for the social enterprise.” Social performance management geared towards improving “people performance” and attempting to make performance reviews more dynamic. It operates a bit like foursquare, with management and coworkers rewarding their colleagues with “badges” for the completion of certain tasks. Badges are applied to an employee’s profile and are visible to everyone in the company when an employee earns one. Positive reinforcement, like getting a gold sticker or a cookie when you do a good job. It seems like the claim that it is the equivalent of a performance review is too strong, but I can definitely see the value here.

At Demandbase we have recently launched a customer success portal using a tool called Influitive that works on a similar model, but as a method of creating and encouraging happy customers to become advocates for our company. So far so good, it seems to be a method that encourages action.

Salesforce.com customer advocate Kimberly-Clark came next, talking about “social selling” and the social front office. Certainly doing some amazing things, utilizing mobile technology to communicate and interact with a prospect to assess their needs and quickly and dynamically create proposals from the field. The “social” aspects involve the sales team coordinating and communicating with each other about the proposal using chatter, and then everyone across the organization seeing when the deal closes inside Chatter. And the coolest part might be how it all integrates with their SAP back-end.

Activision was up next, and this is where I think Chatter really shines. Customer success, support, happiness. If someone doesn’t know the answer to a customer question, they can expose it across the organization to get immediate feedback from lots of smart people. Our customer success team has been using Chatter internally with great success. Activision shared a fascinating example of tagging gaming issues exposed on social networks like Facebook or Youtube and automatically creating cases from them.

HP was up next, using another Salesforce.com acquisition (Radian6) to monitor their reputation on social networks. They did a fun “live” contest that served as a demo on the power of quickly and easily creating social campaigns in the cloud. They had folks in the room tweet a picture of their Cloudforce keynote experience, printed a selected photo to a wireless HP printer in the room.

It finished off with a brief look at Toyota and their “Toyota Friend” program, a private social network for Toyota owners and their cars, powered by Salesforce Chatter. Another interesting application of the Chatter product.

Another compelling presentation from Marc Benioff and the Salesforce.com organization. As I have witnessed firsthand, my own company is becoming more social every week. It started internally, and as we grow so does our social reach. It looks like Salesforce.com is poised to help other companies do the same.

Register here.
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Landing page optimization (LPO) is a booming business, in both B2B and B2C. There are several outstanding firms, including both SiteTuners and Marketing Experiments, that specialize in helping their customers implement and exhaustively test changes to their pages, some minute and some major, that will ultimately help them to increase conversions.

Some common best practices you will here with regard to LPO include:

Deliver What They Expect
If the landing page does not match the offer that the browser clicked on, you will lose them. For example, if you post an ad for a case study, but the link in the ad points to your home page you are much less likely to convert the visitor … even if you think the link to the case study is very clear and obvious on your home page.

Clear Offer/Call to Action
If the offer is for a white paper, make sure the content on the landing page talks about the white paper … not who your company is and what you do. The white paper offer needs to be the focal point of the landing page. If you pull a “bait and switch” they will not convert.

Content Above the Fold
Images can add compelling context to a landing page. However, if those images dominate the page and push the actual text of the offer and/or form to below the “fold” of the page (requiring the browser to scroll down) then there could be an impact on conversions.

Focus On Payoff
Remind people what they get in exchange for their contact information, and why they will benefit from it.

Test, Test, Test
Testing has always seemed like eating your vegetables when you were a kid. It’s that thing that we all know we should be doing because it is “good for you” but is hard to execute. This is, of course, where the leading optimization firms excel. They will relentlessly test their suggestions to determine the combinations that drive conversions, and sometimes find that the winning pages do not adhere to any best practices whatsoever! That’s why you test. Every use case is different.

Shorten Your Forms
The single most common piece of advice you will get is to shorten your forms, and those forms have been the topic of the other two pieces in this series so I will not talk to much more about them .. I’ll just refer you to the posts HERE and HERE.

Don’t Stop There
There is more to increasing conversions than shorter forms and optimizing landing pages. Consider the performance of a two-step conversion funnel. Step one is the home page, step two is the offer page. In this first chart, out of an initial 5000 home page visitors, 250 of them find and click on a white page offer that is interesting to them (5% of the total home page visitors).

Out of that 250 clicks, 10 visitors fill out a form and convert to leads, resulting in a very average 4% conversion rate on that offer page.
Now consider landing page optimization. By making some adjustments and doing some tests on the landing page according to some of the most common best practices (mentioned above) a 2% boost in conversion rates on the offer page would increase conversions by 50% (15 leads vs. 10 leads).

But what would the impact be if we increased the number of clicks from the home page to the offer page? What would happen if we could boost the conversion from home page to offer by 2% as well, resulting in an additional 100 visitors hitting the offer page?

We would boost total versions by another 6 leads, a 40% increase in total leads produced over landing page optimization alone.

Home Page Optimization
The inference is obvious … we need to drive more of our traffic through our home pages and into the meat of the website, where visitors are more likely to convert to leads. Take a close look at your home page. How much space is consumed by “one-size-fits-all” descriptions of your company, and how much of it is dedicated to offers designed to entice your top prospects to identify themselves and become leads?