B2B Insider | A Media II Blog for the Marketing Executive

4 Keyword Strategies That Improve Your Pay-Per-Click ROI

Posted on March 29, 2013 by admin

Make sure that your Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ad shows up as a top result in front of your most qualified prospects with these underlying keyword strategies that help increase your ad’s Click-Through Rate (CTR) and conversion rate, and therefore, increase your Return-On-Investment (ROI).

1. Long-Tail Keywords – The more niche-specific long-tail keywords you rank for, the more focused and targeted the generated traffic will be. This helps to ensure that the only people clicking on your ads are those with genuine interest.

Furthermore, displaying your ad in front of highly targeted traffic increases the chance that it will be clicked on. This increase in your ad’s CTR will help improve your Quality Score; a metric that Google uses to rank the relevancy of your ad campaigns that can lead to lower campaign costs and better ad positioning.

2. Negative Keywords – These are keywords that are irrelevant to your offer and for which you do not want your ad to appear in the search results. Identify and define these keywords within your PPC ad groups so that you do not end up paying for irrelevant clicks.

3. Google AdWords Keyword Matching Options – Google AdWords offers five different matching options to help you further define the keywords that your ad will rank for. Briefly, these five matching options are:

a. Exact Match – Rank for those searches that are an exact match to your designated keywords.

b. Broad Match – Rank for exact matches, close variations, related searches, and all synonyms of your designated keywords.

c. Modified Broad Match – Rank only for exact matches and close variations of your designated keywords.

d. Phrase Match – Rank for this exact phrase and close variations of it.

e. Negative Match – Rank for those searches that include exact match, close variations, and related searches for your designated keywords but not if these negative keywords are also included.

4. Keyword Placement – Where your keywords appear within the ad itself, as well as the ad’s landing page, are important strategies in and of themselves. Perhaps most importantly is the use of your ad’s keywords on your ad’s landing page, considering that the relevancy of your landing page is another contributing factor to your Quality Score.

Identify niche-specific long-tail keywords that are most relevant to your products and services so that the people who are exposed to your ads are those most likely to convert. Don’t skimp on your keyword research; make sure it is thorough and well executed to guarantee the greatest ROI.

B2B Content Marketing: Your sales team can be your biggest asset.

Posted on February 22, 2013 by admin

Brand storytelling is an old concept but with the growth of social media it has become the core of today’s content marketing phenomenon. Social media provides marketers with a self-publishing platform that offers great accessibility thus causing content marketing and a push towards inbound marketing to become one of today’s top strategic priorities.

B2B content marketing is important. Why?

Buyers are doing more to educate themselves online prior to making a purchasing decision.
Content adds credibility to your sales claims, and increases web traffic, SEO and online presence.
Content provides your sales team with the tools they need to properly advise prospects in all phases of the buying process.

91% of B2B marketers are currently using some form of content marketing, and social media has become the number one content marketing tactic used. B2B marketers have realized that their buyers are social buyers as the result of an increase in web use for information seeking and information sharing. Social buyers turn to the internet to educate themselves about your product, service or company; this is why developing your own content and making it available to your prospects online is a top priority. *Source: 2013 B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks–North America: CMI/MarketingProfs.

When your prospects need clarification, they contact your sales representatives for guidance. Your sales team becomes the point of contact for information about market trends, best practices and product comparisons, making them your biggest asset in creating valuable content. Your sales reps have a better understanding of your audience’s needs and are capable of identifying their most frequently asked questions, pain points and preferences.

This valuable insight should be focused towards creating engaging content for your audience that best suits their needs. B2B marketers should focus on creating different forms of content catered to each specific need and desired outcome. For example, ROI calculators and case studies can be used to assist prospects in making a decision, while product comparison charts help measure alternative solutions.

Additionally, content should be created specifically for use by your sales team. B2B marketers should equip their sales reps with the tools needed, such as decision trees, to properly assess a prospect’s concerns while ultimately guiding them through the conversion funnel.

How to Improve Conversion Rate and Boost Sales Online

Posted on January 25, 2013 by admin

Improve your conversion rate by optimizing the usability of each webpage in the buying process to help guide your users through the conversion funnel. Don’t forget, your message is communicated to your users with both words and design; make sure your message is clear, trustworthy and full of value.

Headlines are the first thing a user reads and is what convinces them to stay on your webpage in search for more information. Headlines should be engaging but straightforward; describe your product clearly and fully.

Sales copy is your opportunity to provide value
to the customer and to encourage them to take action. This includes product features, benefits, unique selling propositions, technical specifications, price and call-to-actions. Most importantly, establish trust and instill confidence in the buyer; don’t be afraid to state the obvious, a customer who is uncertain about the details will not purchase your product. Provide the necessary information for your customers to make an informed and confident decision.

Don’t skimp on product photography. High-quality product images are critical to selling your products online because these buyers don’t have the ability to physically touch, hold, feel, or experience your products. These images have to convey to your customers what their senses would otherwise confirm. They need to be high-quality and should display your products in a way that reinforces the message you wish to deliver.

Video improves the shopper experience by offering an engaging and interactive source of information and is a great way to demonstrate product quality and key selling points to your customers. Product videos should be used in addition to product images and should also reinforce your message.

Using social proof such as customer reviews and testimonials on your website will instill trust and confidence in your customers and help to increase conversion rate.

Enabling a live chat function can help increase conversion rate by providing the customer with a real-time product specialist capable of clarifying product confusion and dismissing buyer uncertainty while the customer is still within the conversion funnel. Simply offering a live chat option will help build trust with a user.

Avoid confusion and don’t offer too many offers at once to a user. Studies have shown that too many choices can make an individual indecisive. Focus on one product per page.

Be consistent on every web page that is displayed to the user throughout the buying process. Each page should reiterate the same message, from the ad to the landing page, shopping cart and checkout. This will help to avoid confusion and build confidence in the buyer.

Call-to-Actions should be clear and simple. Try highlighting these buttons with a bright color and surround them with sufficient white space. Refresh the design and copy of your CTAs periodically to encourage action.

Streamline the conversion funnel and show checkout progress; studies show that the fewer number of clicks a user has to take to complete an action, the greater the conversion rate is. Customers are turned off if they feel they have to jump through hoops to make a purchase. If you need to use multiple pages for conversion, include a status bar that clearly indicates their progression.

How to Beat the Rising Costs of Search-Driven Business

Posted on December 21, 2012 by admin

The success of AdWords pay-per-click (PPC) advertising has caused an increase in competition among businesses; driving prices up and making it harder to afford to compete. This is a growing concern among businesses seeking and currently using online paid advertising because while the instant and measureable benefits are more than desirable, the increase in cost-per-click (CPC) can be a sore spot for many. Small businesses especially find the competition steep with costly keyword bids and only a small AdWords budget.

There are however, several key strategies involved in PPC advertising that can help to reduce the overall costs of your campaign. Of these strategies is unpaid or organic search engine optimization (SEO) which is obtained in part by optimizing the content and coding of your website with high-performing niche specific keywords. Organic SEO should be implemented both alone and complementary of paid SEO for best online marketing results. Organic SEO can help improve PPC advertising performance by increasing keyword search, ad and landing page relevancy; large determining factors of improving AdWords Quality Score which can ultimately lead to lower cost-per-click and better ad position.

Media II can help your business improve organic SEO and AdWords Quality Score helping to reduce costs and enhance PPC performance in the face of expensive competition and rising costs.

Read the original New York Times article here

MediaMate Mobile Website Conversion Tool Featured in Crain’s Cleveland Business

Posted on November 21, 2012 by admin

MediaMate mobile website conversion tool powered by Media II has been featured in Crain’s Cleveland Business as a complete mobile website solution capable of conveniently reconfiguring your existing corporate website into a mobile-friendly one.

To view the featured article Click Here

Or, for more information visit www.Mediaii.com/MediaMate

Why Customers Hate Your Website

Posted on October 26, 2012 by admin

Mobile web-user experiences are somewhat horrible when it comes to viewing and navigating websites on their phones. Websites that have not been optimized for mobile viewing are too cluttered and hard to use and negatively impact the visitor’s ability to locate information.

It all affects your bottom line.

Click here to download the entire white paper.

The Importance of Online Video Marketing for B2B

Posted on October 2, 2012 by admin

Online video viewing and sharing continues to increase at a rapidly growing rate. YouTube, the world’s largest video hosting and sharing site, is ranked as the #2 most visited website worldwide and the #2 search engine behind none other than Google. This means that users are searching YouTube for information much like they do Google or any other search engine. Additionally, YouTube videos appear in the search engine result pages (SERPs), so, as much as organic and paid search engine optimization (SEO) are part of your online marketing strategy, video marketing and SEO should be too.

According to a recent Forbes study, 75% of executives watched work-related videos on business-related websites at least weekly while 52% watched work-related videos on YouTube. Overall, 65% of these executives visited a vendor’s website after watching a video. In fact, Media II created a personalized YouTube channel for a client who now credits a 30% sales increase to the 8,500 views its channel has received in just 4 months. These statistics should jumpstart your consideration of online video as a B2B marketing strategy for your company; listed below are additional benefits to consider.

Informative but Brief – Video allows you to deliver a quick and concise message in a timely matter. This is important given that today’s busy executive is likely to be under strict time constraints. The ideal length for a video is 2.5 to 3 minutes.

Increased Engagement – Many individuals would rather watch than read, and humans can process visuals much faster than text alone. The combination of visuals and audio stimulates the human senses and emotions creating an engaging source of information that is likely to be enjoyed, remembered and shared.

Enables Demonstration – Oftentimes B2B products and services are too complex to illustrate using text only. In this case, showing is better than telling. Video allows for dynamic product demonstrations, case studies, client testimonials, and interviews with key people in the industry.

Mobile Friendly – The demands of today’s mobile executive require that they become increasingly reliant on mobile devices for purchase decision information; videos present a dynamic, concise, and convenient method of delivery on handheld devices.

SEO Friendly - Videos can be optimized for search and do appear in search engine result pages.

Sharable Content - According to a Forbes study, more than 50% of senior executives shared videos with and received videos from fellow colleagues at least weekly. Video can be embedded all across the web including video hosting and sharing sites like YouTube, other social media sites, corporate websites, email campaigns and more.

Measurable – Video marketing efforts and the demographics of your viewing audience are measurable with YouTube Analytics.

Consider having a personalized YouTube channel created for your company and develop a video marketing strategy that will deliver interested prospects to your website.

Putting the ‘Quality’ in AdWords Quality Score

Posted on September 12, 2012 by admin

Quality Score is a metric created by Google used to measure the relevancy of your Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ad campaign. This is Google’s way of guaranteeing that only the most relevant ads display in front of their users. A high Quality Score can ultimately reduce your campaign costs while improving your ad’s rank. This score is a calculation of several factors including these three most influential variables:

1. Ad Clickthrough Rate (CTR)

Google weighs your ad’s CTR as a strong indication of its relevance to your ad’s keywords. Therefore, the higher the CTR the more relevant your ad must be and Google will rank your Quality Score higher because if this.

2. Ad Relevancy

This is a measure of how relevant your ad is to the keywords it ranks for. Keyword placement strategies such as using your keywords in the ad headline, ad copy, and the site URL if possible will help increase your ad’s relevancy and thus, increase your Quality Score.

3. Landing Page Quality

The purpose of your PPC ad is to redirect people to your landing page, so don’t lead them awry. Google will increase your Quality Score if your ad landing page is user-friendly, nicely organized, contains useful information, and is relevant to your ad’s keywords.

Furthermore, your landing page should maintain good use of your keywords and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) practices both on-page and off (in the HTML code).

Oftentimes, it is most efficient to have a professional create a custom landing page specifically for your PPC ad campaign to ensure its efficacy.

RE: Message Delivery Failure

Posted on August 24, 2012 by admin

8 Best Practices that Improve Your Email Deliverability Rate

Email can be a powerful marketing channel and a great way to educate your audience about your business, products and services; however, your message is no good if your intended recipients are not receiving it. One of the major email marketing challenges you are confronted with is deliverability. Your deliverability rate is calculated by the following formula:

% of Emails Delivered / Total # of Emails Sent

Your undeliverable emails are said to have “bounced back” and are categorized as either a soft bounce or a hard bounce. A soft bounce occurs because of a temporary problem with the recipient’s mail client or inbox, and a hard bounce occurs as the result of a permanent error. Understanding the difference between these two is important because having a low deliverability rate can get you banned by Internet Service Providers ISP’s, and while contacts resulting in hard bounces should be deleted from your distribution list, soft bounces should not necessarily be.

8 best practices that improve your email deliverability rate:

1. Remove all email addresses from your distribution list that have resulted in a hard bounce back.

2. Remove all email addresses with no active engagement (low open rate, low click thru rate, etc.); these contacts are simply not interested and you don’t want to take the risk of them potentially marking you as spam.

3. Consider a double opt-in process to ensure subscribers’ interest and to verify that the correct email address was entered.

4. Do include an unsubscribe link as well as your contact information; this is required by the United States CAN-SPAM anti-spam Act.

5. Do include an “update your email preferences” link allowing your readers to modify their subscription preferences and update their email addresses.

6. Use the 80/20 text-to-image ratio as a rule of thumb; emails with a large number of images and little amount of text are likely to be caught in spam filters.

7. Avoid using spammy words such as “FREE”.

8. Always test your email on several different mail clients to ensure its deliverability before distribution.

SEO. It’s What Competitors Are Using to Kill Your Business

Posted on August 16, 2012 by admin

SEO, Search Engine Optimization, has become a competitive threat over the last few years. Why? Companies, including your competition, are using SEO to get to the top of search engine rankings. What’s the big deal about that? Here are a couple of facts:

- According to a 2010 Forrester Research report, 90% of purchasing decisions begin online.

- The average Google search is comprised of only three pages.

Search engine ranking factors are some of the most closely guarded secrets in online business. Google, Bing and other search engines don’t publish exactly how they rank webpages in search results, because that would lead to massive gaming of the system and produce non-useful results.

Fortunately, you don’t have to figure out how Google determines search engine rankings all by yourself. There’s an entire industry of professionals (Media II is in that Club) who have a good handle on how search engine placement works based on their cumulative experiences.

Click here for the top 10 factors that positively affect your search engine rankings.