FEED Your Website. FEED IT.

Use SEO to Feed your Website. Feed it with valuable B-to-B leads.

Organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the number one, proven, effective, technique to feed quality visitors to a website and produce valuable leads as a consequence. Just like a lawn, a website needs to be fed in order to be healthy. SEO acts as a powerful 'fertilizer', feeding your website with a constant stream of quality business leads.

Using SEO as the key foundation for a productive lead-generating website is equivalent to one of nature's laws... ignore or downplay SEO at your peril.

Your Website With SEO:

This Website Used Search Engine Optimization and THRIVED.

A website well-fed with effective SEO will produce leads and quality visitors. SEO is a constant process, however, and needs to be conducted on a routine basis. Search Engines and Competitors mean that content is constantly being updated on Search Engine Results, so good SEO means regular "weed and feed" practices are in order.

Your Website Without SEO:

This Website Didn't Use Search Engine Optimization and WILTED.

I am constantly surprised when encountering people who deliberately take actions to harm their website's SEO effectiveness. Such SEO self-saboteurs can be a bit delusional. They often don't comprehend how SEO works, or try 'shortcuts' a fly-by-night agency has suggested (spammy link-building or keyword stuffing, anyone?), or they'll reject the dedicated work-ethic needed to be successful with long-tail search success. The result? An ugly website full of dead pages, barren pages, weedy pages, and poor lead generation.

Some of the worst offenders don't like nor understand SEO and think it is a messy process. They want it all stopped, now. SEO gives them a headache. Make it go away. This mentality always provides a gift to their competitors who do understand and exploit SEO.

The simple mantra "Feed Your Website. Feed It." using good search engine optimization practices will ultimately produce a beautiful, lush, website sprouting vigorous growth full of quality business leads.

Want Good Web Leads? Then SEO Matters.

Want B2B Leads? Pay Close Attention to Google Search and Content.

A recent study by Mathew Sweezey, Marketing Evangelist for Pardot, reinforces the key role of search engine marketing for lead generation. In his paper "The State of Demand Generation 2013", the results of a user survey clearly list the main effective ingredients needed to enjoy successful B2B lead generation:

1. Obtain Search Engine Marketing Success, especially Google Search Engine Success.

2. Employ Short Content on Webpages and White Papers.... Concise, Precise, and Relevant.

In summary, B2B Buyers use Google Search, and like Relevant and Short Content on Webpages and White Papers. Worth Repeating: "B2B Buyers use Google Search and like Relevant and Short Content."

The same study indicated that an impressive "72% of product research for a future business purchase begins on Google." Nearly 3 out of 4 B2B leads start on Google.

72% of B2B Leads Begin on Google Search, per Mathew Sweezey, Pardot.

No amount of creative branding content or social media chatter will mitigate this fact. If you're not focused on winning with search engine marketing, you're at risk of missing nearly 3 out of 4 potential leads!

From my own experience, this simple formula of efficient content and effective SEO has produced over 10 years of outstanding organic search engine marketing lead generation success for B2B niche markets. I've focused on what our potential customers need and are looking for, in order to provide solutions to their problems.

Like a good consultative selling sales pitch, my webpages provide features which bring benefits to meet the prospective customer's needs. This customer-centric approach works for Google SERPs as well, based upon the superior search ranking results I commonly enjoy.

To optimize your lead generation success, craft webpage content to be efficient and relevant, focused, and concise. Content should be as short as reasonably possible, to best provide key information easily to a hectic, busy, potential client. Quickly give them the facts they need in order to be educated and motivated to contact you as a quality business lead.

Potential clients will not waste their valuable time attempting to sift through wordy webpages or white papers full of flowery, self-important, lightweight "content". They want straight facts and answers, and they want them now.

Include and use appropriate technical terms, acronyms, and jargon, because that specialized vocabulary is a key component in the business language of the targeted niche clientele. It is also good practice to spell these abbreviations out at least once on the page, as appropriate, both for visitor comprehension and search engine optimization. Make content simple and relevant for the potential client.

B2B lead generation content is usually designed to reach and influence lucrative and small market niches, not a mass audiences. You want that "1%" of the global potential audience, so talk directly to them. Don't worry about the other "99%" who will not give you any business under any circumstances.

Avoid creating excessive content. Don't 'tell a story' and yammer on telling the world how wonderful and great your company is. Potential clients can see right through this self-centered hype and quickly move on to a competitor who is more focused on the client.

In short, for superior B2B lead generation, focus on search engine marketing combined with concise and precise webpages, white papers, and other content. Include a clear call-to-action. These best practices are true big B2B lead generation winners.

A special thanks is given to Ayaz Nanji, with MarketingProfs, for his post which alerted me to Mathew Sweezey's paper. Ayaz gives an excellent overview of the Pardot report at: B2B Buyers Prefer Short Content; Rely Heavily on Google Searches.

B-to-B Web Marketing Should Help Sales People Sell.

FEED Your Website. FEED IT.

Give Your Sales Teams What They Crave This Valentine's Day - Good Leads

Give your sales teams that special Valentine's Day gift they will love - good, actionable business leads with potential, profit, and success. 

Surprise your sales teams with a few real diamond-quality leads, not a lot of zirconium, and they'll be asking for more.

Cupid knew a thing or two about
effective sales and marketing. 

Staying focused on good lead generation helps validate you and the marketing campaigns you are responsible for in the eyes of Sales and Executive Management. Good lead generation, done well, helps feed the business with opportunities to grow market share, enter new markets, and raise top-line gross margins and profitability.

Though I have a business administration degree with a specialization in marketing, I've also spent many happy, productive, and lucrative years in B-to-B technical and industrial sales.

I know first-hand when my marketing departments were feeding me juicy leads laden with potential, or burdening me with near-worthless piles of junk. A worst-case scenario happens when jaded sales people ignore marketing leads because so many are a waste of time - resulting in high-value leads being lost or ignored.

As a consequence, it's been my top priority as a marketer to feed the best sales leads I can to the top of the sales funnel, as many as possible, by all marketing channels, by all possible means.

Quality B-to-B lead generation should be a Prime Directive for any marketer. Certainly other marketing priorities are important, such as branding and PR, but lead generation should be a central core value and a top priority.

The bottom line is that quality leads are better than quantity leads.

Search Engine Marketing is Industrial Strength Lead Generation (Or Should Be)

B-to-B Web Marketing Should Help Sales People Sell.

What Web Marketing can do for you in 2017.

Updated February 2017.

B-to-B Lead Generation: The Rise of the Web.

Lead Gen Revolution: 

Dramatic change to Business-to-Business (B-to-B) lead generation in just 10 years.

Over the last decade, promoting technical services to businesses has been transformed, going from mostly 'physical' tactics like sales rep cold calls, trade shows, print ads and stamped mail shots to new technologies including dynamic websites, paid search, organic search, banner ads, social media, and email campaigns. 

Various web experts are saying that in 2010 around 58% of all B-to-B leads were web generated in the USA. That number is expected to rise to 75% in 2015. Already, 80% of buyers said they contacted the vendor, presumably most of them referenced the web for research. Only 10% of buyers came from traditional cold calls. These figures state what we now take for granted: the web has radically changed how a business does business with another business.

I am very lucky and privileged to have been a full and deep 'brick-and-mortar' web marketing player in this unique period of human history - when the business world became wired and went global. When marketing began to transform from 'analog' to 'digital'. Back in 2000, business websites were rather simple, static, 'brochure-ware webpages', not really written nor geared to this novel new way people could find and scan (not read) information on the web. Most people had only thin copper wire connectivity to the web. Broadband was expanding but a rarity. Worse, many sites were not search-engine friendly  because search engines like Google and Overture were not a big factor in search engine traffic.... yet. Remember those disastrous 'framed' content management systems?

I had the pleasure of seeing my first web-leads generated in 1998, they came from extremely qualified customers who were technology savvy, early adapters - - they saw and understood the fantastic potential of the internet, and also appreciated it as extremely cool. They were the customers who kept asking me why we didn't have a website. After months of advocating and pushing, I secured agreement and resources to get the new site built. And surprise! We started to get visitors, and real live leads. That first web-lead in 1998 was very exciting, the beginning of a dramatic shift in lead gen, and a big surprise to skeptics and doubters. 

How did the clients find us in those pioneer days? Promotion. Mostly because I insisted we have our URL domain and an email address printed on business cards, ads, listings, and promotional giveaways. Promotion was our primary way to build awareness of the site, search engines were not an important factor back then. I first heard about Google in 2000, and my first impression was that the name was pretty funny. Little did I know that because of Google, I would spend literally thousands of hours working on webpages, Adwords and Analytics to generate tens of thousands of B-to-B leads a year.

Once Google, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, MSN (AKA: Paleolithic Bing), Copernicus, and many other search engines became popular, lead generation from B-to-B websites really took off. I am honored to have been involved in the exciting, early stages of this revolutionary change.

Organic and Paid search became extremely important for generating leads. A potential customer could now find that needle-in-the-haystack with relative ease - - you being that needle, that lucrative niche service, for example, if you did your job right!
                                        
The customer now controlled the lead generation process, to your advantage. If you took the initiative in, say 2003, with fresh web content and innovative paid search, and your competitors were oblivious (and most of them were), you could enjoy a near-monopoly on key search terms and web leads.... an enviable situation which is still possible today if you are dedicated, creative and focused.