Industrial MarCom Blog

Driving Traffic to Your Homepage All the Time May Be a Big Mistake

You’ve read up on all the traffic generation tactics and optimized your site to rank high on major search engines.

You begin to see great results with hundreds of new visitors coming to your site everyday. You are excited until you see two key site statistics that burst your bubble. They are:

1. High bounce rate -- is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entry page. A high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance pages aren't relevant to your visitors.

2. Low conversion rate -- is the percent of site visitors who take a desired and measurable action. For example, fill out a form to download a white paper, register for a webinar, submit an order etc.

The above two web analytics are not mere statistics for your webmaster. They have a direct impact on your bottom line.

Why? Hordes of traffic that convert poorly are useless for generating qualified leads that convert well into paying customers.

What’s the solution? Let’s look at the bounce rate first. The primary reason for high bounce rates is a strong disconnect between the visitor’s intent for coming to your site and the purpose of the page where they land.

That’s why your Home page may not always be the best entry point. A Home page is great for attracting prospects at the top of the sales funnel that may have found your site using generic search terms and are just looking for information on companies in your market. For example, the search term “industrial valves” yields 238,000 pages in Google.

You do want your Home page to rank high here if your intent is to increase awareness about your company and its industrial valve line. However, about all you can expect here is the visitor bookmarking your site for future visits.

On the other hand, if your goal is to attract qualified traffic for “safety relief valves” and your visitors land on the home page that has very little information relevant to their search, you will get a quick exit.

What’s the solution? Create landing pages that are specific to the visitor’s intent. Drive traffic to these landing pages and your bounce rates will decline and conversion rate will climb.

101 Tips from 50 Small Business Bloggers

I came across an incredible blog post recently that I think every small business owner should read. As an entrepreneur your days are probably packed with items that need your immediate attention. As a result, it becomes increasingly difficult to stay on top of things.

This article has actionable tips and advice from people like Seth Godin, Mark Cuban and Michael McLaughlin just to name a few.

Click here to read 101 Tips from 50 Small Business Bloggers.

Manufacturing Sector Showing Hopeful Signs

In a recent survey done by Prime Advantage, 80% of manufacturers polled expected their revenues to either stay the same or increase in the second half of the year. This compares very favorably to the findings from their findings in February of this year. Back then, only 38% of the respondents said they expected their revenues to stay the same or increase over 2008.

More good news coming out of the survey by Prime Advantage is that only 31% of the manufacturers expect their capital expenditures to decrease versus 66% who expected capital spending to decrease in the earlier study.

25% of business owners, purchasing execs and professionals anticipate revenue increases up to 10% in the second half of the year.

Source: BtoB Magazine, September issue. www.btobonline.com

Email marketing — what was old is new again

With the current buzz about social media, you’d think email marketing, the old standby of b-to-b marketing would be a forgotten strategy.

Not so fast according to many marketers as they plan their 2010 budgets. Email marketing is once again playing a prominent role as more and more companies seek the most effective return on their marketing spend.

80% of marketers report that email is their strongest performing media buy ahead of search and display ads according to Datran Media.

And here’s a report from shop.org stating, “Email is delivering sales at an average cost per order of less than $7, compared to $71.89 for banner ads, $26.75 for paid search and $17.47 for affiliate programs.”

If you are in the industrial sector, you may need to modify those numbers a bit since they are from the State of Retailing Online report.

Here’s a chart from MarketingSherpa’s most recent Email Marketing Benchmark Guide.

(Click on chart to see larger version)

 

Bottom line – don’t cut back on email marketing. It is relatively inexpensive compared to other marketing tactics and with some testing, tweaking and following best practices, it can yield very impressive results. ROI is easily measurable and is a powerful selling tool to existing customers, which may be the key to your survival in this economy.

How to Measure Social Media ROI

Lately, B2B marketers have really taken to using social media marketing. As everything else in this business marketing, measuring ROI is vital.

However, there's a lot of confusion over how to measure ROI for social media. I recently read a post by Paul Gillin, www.gillin.com where he provides 10 simple tactics to measure social media's ROI.

1. Focus
2. Know what works
3. Understand influence
4. That was a trick question
5. Make everything unique
6. It's not just about your site
7. Coax conversations back to your site
8. Monitor the competition
9. Use one big-picture metric
10. Give it time

Head over to his original post to learn more about the above points.

How Buyers are Being Influenced by Information Resources

The chart below shows the changes in information resources used during the first half of 2009 (Source: MarketingSherpa.com).

Click on the chart to see a larger version.

Business Value of Social Networking

Saw a very interesting video where Seth Godin talks about how useful social media is to businesses. Even though the use of social media like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn is growing exponentially, there is a raging debate about measuring its ROI.

I use LinkedIn and Twitter quite a lot in my online networking and sure, I've grown my network in a short period of time. But like many b-to-b marketers, I'm not sure how it has impacted my business. So, I'm leaning more towards Seth's point of view.

Take a look at this video and decide for yourself. After all, when Seth Godin speaks, people listen.

What's working for you? Leave me your comments below.

A tribute to Billy Mays - an extraordinarily gifted pitch-man

I read a really good article by Jeff Sexton on grokdot.com.  Yeah, Billy could get on your nerves with his booming voice but there's no denying the man's ability to pitch a product and convince a lot of people to buy it.

I think Jeff sums it up nicely when he wrote, "What Billy knew that so many of us forget, is that a conclusion that the audience comes to on their own is a conclusion they’ll believe and act on. No normal advertising claim can achieve that, no matter how much evidence you throw behind it."

You can read the rest of his post at http://bit.ly/60TN9.