So you got a click on your PPC ad. Now what do you do? The job of the
B2B search marketer is only beginning when a prospect clicks. As
MarketingSherpa points out, the decision to click is microscopically
unimportant compared to all the things you are asking from a prospect
after they've clicked: Stick around and read your copy, fill out a
form, risk getting their privacy invaded, take a meeting, recommend
your product, make a purchase, and so on.
Without each of these following steps in place, a click is just a click, and a click by itself is a waste of time and money.
Optimized landing pages
A good landing page provides two main benefits to a PPC campaign.
First, search engines like Google care about the relevancy of the
landing page when ranking ads, meaning a high-quality landing page gets
better ranking (and more clicks) for less money. Second, a relevant and
optimized landing page can have dramatically higher conversion rates,
meaning you get more leads for your money. These two factors combine to
drive dramatic ROI for landing page improvements.
Despite this, few B2B marketers use landing pages to their fullest
advantage. According to Forrester Research, only about a quarter of B2B
search ads take the prospective customer to keyword specific landing
pages. The challenge is that landing page optimization requires
building and maintaining dozens of landing pages, one for each ad group
– and testing multiplies the complexity of the problem.
Lead analytics and scoring
Even if you do get a conversion, it turns out that only 25% of
conversions are sales-ready. You need the ability to find these hot
leads and pass them to your sales team as soon as possible, before they
get cold or a competitor contacts them first.
You can do this with lead scoring, which requires two kinds of
information: (1) demographic/behavioral and (2) lead source. Examples
of demographic/behavioral information include title, company, and BANT
criteria (budget, authority, need, and timing); examples of lead source
information include where the lead came from, what kind of offer
created the lead, and lead age.
Demographic and behavioral information represent the biggest
challenge for online marketers. The most obvious way to get it is when
the prospect fills out the registration form—but research shows
that every additional field on the form reduces conversion rates. A
more subtle problem is that the searcher is likely to be an influencer,
not a decision maker, and asking certain BANT questions can be
off-putting.
There are two main solutions. The first is called progressive
profiling, in which you get to know a lead over time by asking
additional questions each time you interact (kind of like dating). One
quick way to do this is to ask the prospect for additional information
on the thank you page after submitting the form. Prospects who make it
this far have expressed quite a bit of interest so they may be willing
to give you more data now that you've built trust by sharing useful
content.
A second solution is to use directed behavioral segmentation.
Rather than sending clicks to a single landing page, this approach uses
a "landing path" – a series of pages that collect information
based on how the prospect navigates.
Lead nurturing
If only 25% of leads are sales-ready, what do you do with the other
75%? Some of those prospects may be truly unqualified, but as many of
70% of them will eventually buy a product from you—or your
competitors. Prematurely passing this type of lead to sales is a recipe
for disaster. Since sales reps are compensated for driving short-term
revenue, a long-term lead like this creates the impression that
search-generated leads are no good. As a result, the sales rep is more
likely to ignore the next lead he receives—which is why reps end
up ignoring 80% of all search-generated leads.
The solution is to use lead nurturing, a disciplined
marketing-driven process of helping qualified prospects who are not yet
sales-ready move through their buying process. Lead nurturing is not
just sending a monthly email newsletter to your entire database, or
calling prospects every few weeks to see if they are ready to buy yet.
It is about progressively understanding more about the prospect's
needs, and using targeted one-to-one communications to build your
company's position as a trusted advisor.
The benefits of lead nurturing go beyond better sales-marketing
alignment and higher win rates. Research shows that prospects that are
nurtured buy more, require less discounting, and have shorter sales
cycles than prospects who bought but were not nurtured.
Closed-loop measurement
Once the lead is passed to sales, the B2B search marketer's job is
still not finished. Unlike B2C marketing, the time between the first
click and a closed sale can be weeks or months or even years. Also,
most analytic and search marketing solutions don't have automated
access to the CRM system (such as salesforce.com) to know which leads
become opportunities and ultimately generate revenue. This can make the
process of measuring success and fine-tuning the search marketing
campaign much more difficult.
There are two ways most companies try to solve this problem, both
unsatisfactory. The first is to ignore it and measure PPC success
solely on conversions. This is certainly easy to do because it is what
the search engines support, but it creates a significant disconnect
between marketing and the realities of what drives revenue for the
business—always an uncomfortable situation. The second approach
is to tie search marketing results to opportunities and revenue using
manual analytics. In other words, generate a report in Google, another
in salesforce.com, and spend a lot of time in Excel trying to tie
everything together. I'm sure this scenario is familiar to many B2B
search marketers. A better approach is to use analytics that automates
this process by unifying your search marketing data with your CRM data.
Crossing The Click Chasm
For too many B2B companies, there is a chasm between the campaigns
that generate clicks to a website and the activities that turn clicks
into customers. This chasm creates lower response rates, inadequate
lead follow-up, and poorly optimized campaigns. To succeed in B2B,
search marketing needs to become an integrated part of a complete
demand generation process that includes landing pages, lead analytics,
lead nurturing, and closed-loop measurement. Only by focusing on what
happens after the click will B2B marketers be able to ensure optimal
results for their PPC campaigns.
About The Author
provider of marketing automation software that helps B2B marketing
professionals drive revenue and improve accountability. Jon's blog,
Modern B2B Marketing, explores best practices in business marketing,
ranging from pay-per-click management to lead nurturing to marketing
accountability. The Strictly Business column appears Wednesdays at
Search Engine Land.
http://blog.marketo.com
http://www.marketo.com/about/
http://www.marketo.com
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Distributed by Hasan Shrek, independence blogger. Also run online business , matrix, internet marketing solution , online store script .
Beside he is writing some others blogs for notebook computer , computer training , computer software and personal computer
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