Bundles of research (here<\/a> and here<\/a>, for instance) suggest that your B2B prospects will be well into their research on possible solutions to their pain before they want to speak to you or any other vendor. That means that until they\u2019re ready to speak to anyone, they\u2019re doing their homework, mostly on the web. Here\u2019s how to make sure you\u2019re found when they\u2019re looking.<\/p>\n \n Tactic 1: SEO<\/strong><\/p>\n Much has been written about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) \u2013 making sure you\u2019re findable on Google, Bing and, Yahoo. A lot of consultants make a lot of money on SEO. And a lot of confusion reigns. Here\u2019s what you need to know. Whenever you put content up on the web (your website, your blog, web versions of your email, your landing pages) try and keep it all under the same domain name (e.g. www.YourCompany.com), and<\/p>\n make sure your content adds value to the quest your best prospects are on.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n What quest are they on? They have a business pain that they want to relieve and, as it happens, you have a solution that uniquely addresses that pain (or it should\u2026 see the Value Proposition discussion in Step 1<\/a>). Your job is to make their lives easier as they search for a solution.<\/p>\n To help your best prospects find this useful content you\u2019ve created, you need to understand what kinds of keywords your best prospects will use to search for solutions to their pain (your \u201cbest customer\u201d interviews in Step 1<\/a> can furnish you with many of these keywords). You can also use free tools like Google Trends<\/a> and Google\u2019s Keyword\u00a0Tool<\/a> to discover variations on these words and phrases.<\/p>\n The idea is:<\/p>\n 1)<\/strong> to use search terms that are meaningful to your prospects;<\/p>\n 2)<\/strong> to create content your prospects value that actually addresses and supports those search terms, and then;<\/p>\n 3)<\/strong> to make sure those search terms are seeded through the relevant web pages.<\/p>\n In this way, the search engines are more likely to include you in a search for those keyword phrases. How well you do in the search results will be a function of how much competition exists around the keyword phrases you select, and how highly your site is regarded by the search engines based on your site traffic and the quality of the sites linking back to you.<\/p>\n Two comments here:<\/p>\n 1)<\/strong>\u00a0The keyword phrases you use in your content have to be relevant to your content. This all gets back to the value proposition<\/a> we developed in Part 1. You need to consistently promote a handful of ideas that are relevant to and likely to be searched on by your best prospects.<\/p>\n 2)<\/strong> These same keyword phrases need to be placed in your HTML \u201ctitle tags\u201d and in your \u201cheadline (H1, H2) tags\u201d, and then two or three times more in the body of your content. The coding part of this is dead-simple for whoever manages your web properties.<\/p>\n Believe it or not, what you\u2019ve just read is over 90% of what\u2019s worth doing in SEO.<\/p>\n Tactic 2: An Engagement Path for Your Website<\/strong><\/p>\n Once your best prospects find your website, you need to try and convert them from unknown visitors to known prospects. One way you can do this is by making sure that you have banner ads on every page of your website that promote one of the offers we reviewed in Part 1<\/a>. This provides an \u201cengagement path\u201d for them through your website.<\/p>\n Your banner ads would most often feature one of your general offers (e.g. a \u201cwhat\u2019s possible\u201d whitepaper), but you might choose to use a banner ad that promotes different offers in different areas of your site. You can quite easily test different offers and see which produce the highest conversions.<\/p>\n If the content you developed has teeth, and you\u2019ve done a good job attracting the right prospects to your site, you will get clickthroughs on your banner ads. Clicking through will lead your prospects to the corresponding Engagement Page (see Step 2<\/a>) where they will decide whether the content offer you\u2019ve developed is worth their handing over their contact information and becoming \u201cknown\u201d to you.<\/p>\n Tactic 3: Stalking Your Best Prospects<\/strong><\/p>\n Google has an excellent and underused service called \u201cRemarketing<\/a>\u201d that your web guy (or girl) can easily set-up for you. When you\u2019ve successfully attracted a prospect to your website, the Remarketing code will drop a cookie on your prospect\u2019s computer (it\u2019s completely legit, not to worry). From that point forward, as your prospect goes out across the internet, Google will insert an ad for one of your offers on whatever website your best prospects are visiting (as long as they’re in the Google Ad Network \u2013\u00a0which includes most commercial websites). You can control what kind of websites your ads show up on through \u201cContextual Targeting<\/a>\u201d.<\/p>\n You only pay if your prospect clicks on your ad, and you can control how much you\u2019re willing to spend until you get a better sense of the payback. In the meantime, your offers follow your prospects around the web providing you with a fantastic, no-cost awareness campaign.<\/p>\n Importantly, to avoid having your prospects feel like they\u2019re being stalked, you can set frequency caps (the maximum number of times a prospect sees your ad), and you can decide to only remarket to those prospects \u00a0who have gone through a certain number of pages on your site (suggesting a certain interest level), rather than remarketing to everyone who lands on, say, only your home page.<\/p>\n You can find some detailed \u201chow-to\u201d information on remarketing here<\/a>.<\/p>\n Tactic 4: Pay-per-Click<\/strong><\/p>\n There are two kinds of search results: organic and paid-for. Organic search results are those that a search engine deems to be a best-fit with the term you’ve searched on. Organic search results are generally considered preferable to paid-for search results because they are perceived to be more credible and less commercially biased. SEO, which I discussed above, is all about trying to earn a position on page one of the organic search results.<\/p>\n Because you\u2019ll probably find that it\u2019s a little challenging showing up on page one of search results (unless you\u2019re in a category with lower competition), you might find that paying to be there is worth your while. Paid search results (or pay-per-click) are purchased, and appear in a highlighted box at the top of your search page results. Your position in pay-per-click (i.e. whether you show-up on the top of the page, down the side, or on page 2 or worse of the search results) depends on how competitive the keyword phrase you\u2019re \u201cbidding on\u201d is.<\/p>\n As with Remarketing, you can cap your monthly expenditure until you understand the payback of your various campaigns and keyword phrases. I won\u2019t get into the details of pay-per-click now, but you can find a good primer here<\/a>,\u00a0if you\u2019re interested.<\/p>\n The point is, PPC lets you improve your chances of showing-up on page one of the search results when your prospect is researching solutions to the business pain they\u2019re grappling with. Most importantly, your pay-per-click ads (PPC ads) need to promote the content offers you developed in Step 1<\/a>.<\/strong> If your prospect clicks on one of your ads, they should be delivered to the corresponding Engagement Page for that content offer so you have an opportunity to convert them from unknown<\/em> to known<\/em>. Never have a PPC ad point to a generic page on your website unless your goal is something other than lead conversion.<\/p>\n Tactic 5: A Blog<\/strong><\/p>\n Blogs are considered by many to be one of the strongest \u201cattract\u201d tactics there is. I would agree, except I would add that your blog has to be really good.<\/p>\n What makes a blog really good? This should start sounding familiar. A really good blog offers your prospects valuable perspective on the business problem they have. Your understanding of your best prospects from Step 1<\/a> should provide guidance here.<\/p>\n That said, blogs are hard to do well, consistently. It has been said that the life of the average blog is about one month. Like newsletters before them, blogs seem like a good idea, but the actual execution requires tremendous resources if your plan is to create remarkable content (which is what your goal should be). See Canadian telecom operator Allstream\u2019s blog<\/a>\u00a0for remarkable content. (You might also enjoy Seth Godin’s TED talk <\/a>on how remarkable ideas travel).<\/p>\n However, if you have time and love writing, are able to find excellent guest bloggers, or are willing to pay to have someone write your blog, really good blogs can create tremendous engagement with your target audience and significant SEO value for your main website. Of course, you also have to promote the heck out of your blog through social and traditional channels to give it any kind of traction.<\/p>\n Tactic 6: Social Networking<\/strong><\/p>\n CAUTION. This tactic will completely wipe out whatever remaining time you have, if you want to do it well. There are no shortcuts, no matter what anyone tells you. For B2B, you might want to mostly consider Twitter and LinkedIn for your social networking.<\/p>\n First, you need to build the right followers \u2013 those that match your Best Prospect Profile (see Step 1<\/a>). You do this on Twitter by using filters on tools like HootSuite<\/a> or Pluggio<\/a> to find individuals who rank highly against certain keywords or hashtags.<\/p>\n Then you follow them. Many will follow you back. Slowly, you will build up a following of the right people. But to keep them following you, you have to provide them with remarkable value (again). You can do this by:<\/p>\n 1) Retweeting their tweets.<\/strong> RTs are the greatest currency on Twitter and people generally value your effort to share their Tweets and will often take greater note of you as a result of it. But you must discriminate, sharing only that which you think your best prospects will value. And you should always try to add your 2 cents to give the retweet context, all in 140 characters. You should plan on 5 retweets for every original tweet you make.<\/p>\n 2)<\/strong> Tweet about your original content<\/strong> where that content helps relieve your best prospects\u2019 pain. You can tweet about each blog posting you make or about the content offers<\/a> you developed in Step 1. You can tweet news when you\u2019re at an event, you can ask questions about other\u2019s tweets, or you can share really useful content you find elsewhere on the web. Be careful with this last one, because everyone\u2019s doing it, and the value is limited. Try and dig for valuable content where few are looking.<\/p>\n 3)<\/strong> Tweet often.<\/strong> Believe that you will get buried in the landslide of tweets that your followers receive, so don\u2019t be shy about repeating your tweets in different forms. Your goal is to get on your best prospects\u2019 Twitter lists. These are shortlists that users create of individuals they actually want to read\/follow because the tweets from those individuals address some need they have.<\/p>\n LinkedIn is actually a bit trickier.<\/strong> If the majority of your LinkedIn contacts are best prospects, you\u2019re all set. When you post updates on your home page (these should be updates concerning your relevant, high value content, as discussed above), your connections will see them and have the opportunity to explore and share them with their networks. Because LinkedIn feeds don\u2019t turn over as rapidly as Twitter feeds, you may want to be a little more judicious in how often you post an update, especially if that post is a repeat of an earlier post.<\/p>\n However, if the majority of your contacts are colleagues, peers, and associates, and these people aren\u2019t your best prospects, then LinkedIn will become a little less useful to you because it\u2019s very difficult to link-in to people with whom you have no prior connection. In that case, you may want to use LinkedIn to promote other career-building objectives among your peers.<\/p>\n If you still insist on using LinkedIn to try and reach your best prospects, you can try spreading your wisdom through the appropriate LinkedIn groups that contain your best prospects, and hope that individuals in those groups will either \u201cfollow\u201d you and therefore see your posts (easy to do via the link under everyone\u2019s picture inside groups) or visit your LinkedIn profile page wherein you need to make sure there are ample links back to your blog and\/or website.<\/p>\n Wrapping-Up<\/strong><\/p>\n So to sum up your One-Minute Marketing Plan<\/strong>, you\u2019ll have worked with your best customers<\/em> to refine your targeting, value proposition, and offers; you\u2019ll be proactively going out to find your best prospects<\/em> via email, drawing them back to your Engagement Pages to start building relationships with them; you\u2019ll be enlisting your best customers to help you find more prospects just like them through referral programs; and you\u2019ll be optimizing your website Engagement Path, SEO, remarketing, PPC, blog, and social networking to help your best prospects find you<\/em> when they\u2019re actively looking for the kind of solution you offer.<\/p>\n![\"The](\"http:\/\/blog.feedthebeast.biz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/03\/attract_workflow1.jpg\" "\\"The")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Sample](\"http:\/\/blog.feedthebeast.biz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/03\/seo.jpg\" "\\"Sample")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Banner](\"http:\/\/blog.feedthebeast.biz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/03\/engagement_path.jpg\" "\\"Banner")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Engagement](\"http:\/\/blog.feedthebeast.biz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/03\/engage_page.jpg\" "\\"Engagement")
<\/a>Sample Engagement Page<\/address>\n\u00a0<\/address>\n![\"Remarketing\"](\"http:\/\/blog.feedthebeast.biz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/03\/remarketing.jpg\" "\\"Remarketing\\"")
<\/a>Sample Remarketing Ad<\/address>\n\u00a0<\/address>\n![\"Pay-per-Click](\"http:\/\/blog.feedthebeast.biz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/03\/ppc.jpg\" "\\"Pay-per-Click")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Allstream's](\"http:\/\/blog.feedthebeast.biz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/03\/allstream_blog.jpg\" "\\"Allstream's")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Pluggio](\"http:\/\/blog.feedthebeast.biz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/03\/pluggio.jpg\" "\\"Pluggio")
<\/a>Pluggio’s Follower Search Agent<\/em><\/address>\n\u00a0<\/address>\n![\"Linkedin](\"http:\/\/blog.feedthebeast.biz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/03\/linkedin_follow.jpg\" "\\"Linkedin")
<\/a><\/p>\n
![\"A](\"http:\/\/blog.feedthebeast.biz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/03\/all_workflow1.jpg\" "\\"A")
<\/a><\/p>\n