2. www.act-on.com | @ActOnSoftware | #ActOnSW
Janelle Johnson
Director, Demand Gen
janelle.johnson@act-
on.com
@janelle_johnson
Linda West
Manager, Demand Gen
linda.west@act-on.com
@misslindawest
Today’s Presenters
3. www.act-on.com | @ActOnSoftware | #ActOnSW
1. Your Website, Your Greatest Marketing
Asset
2. Web Analytics vs Website Visitor
Tracking
3. 5 Must-Have Website Features:
1. Search Engine Optimization
2. Website Visitor Tracking
3. Landing Pages & Optimization
4. Lead Scoring
5. Sales Insights
Agenda
5. www.act-on.com | @ActOnSoftware | #ActOnSW
More than 100 Billion searches
each month
Over 82% of all product research
begins with a web search
Inbound leads have an
8x greater likelihood of closing
compared to other leads
Sources: McKinsey & Company, Pew Research, Act-On
Did you know?
7. www.act-on.com | @ActOnSoftware | #ActOnSW
Website Visitor Tracking vs Website Analytics
Web analytics
• Broad focus on website
optimization and performance
• Measures traffic patterns to help
optimize site functionality &
online experience
• Common metrics include:
– Unique visits & page views
– New visitor rates
– Bounce rates
– Average time on site
Website visitor tracking
• Narrow focus
• Individuals’ behaviour while
they’re on your website
• Includes:
– Who they are
– Where they came from
– What precisely they’re clicking on
and engaging with
9. www.act-on.com | @ActOnSoftware | #ActOnSW
What is Search Engine Marketing?
Putting content in front of people who
OVERTLY AND EXPLICITLY
express a desire, via keywords,
for a particular PRODUCT, SERVICE
OR PIECE OF INFORMATION.
10. www.act-on.com | @ActOnSoftware | #ActOnSW
What is Search Engine Optimization?
• The process of making a site and its content highly relevant
for both search engines and searchers.
• Successful search marketing helps a site gain top positioning
for relevant words and phrases.
11. www.act-on.com | @ActOnSoftware | #ActOnSW
Make Your SERP Compelling
• Optimize the search
results listing
• Crafted from the
Title and
Description
• It doesn’t matter how
high you rank if
nobody clicks on
your listing
12. www.act-on.com | @ActOnSoftware | #ActOnSW
Don’t Ignore the Long Tail
• Higher conversion rates and better quality traffic
• Long tail keywords are less competitive
• Long tail search helps you rank for difficult
terms.
• 70% of search traffic is from long tail search
terms
16. www.act-on.com | @ActOnSoftware | #ActOnSW
56% of advanced B2B marketers said
content-based offers were their most
successful campaigns.
- Demand Gen Report Research
Create Killer CTAs
20. www.act-on.com | @ActOnSoftware | #ActOnSW
Don’t Get Stuck On Your Homepage
44% of clicks for B2B companies are
directed to a home page, not a landing
page
- MarketingSherpa
21. www.act-on.com | @ActOnSoftware | #ActOnSW
For 2 years running, A/B
Testing is the most used
method for Improving
Conversion.
- Econsultancy
Test, Test, Test!
22. www.act-on.com | @ActOnSoftware | #ActOnSW
What to Test
Subject Line Headline Copy Length
Offers Button copy Colors
Images
Form
placement
# of Form
Fields
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Live Experiment: Actual Results
Versions CR Rel. Diff Stat. Conf
Control – Single Offer, Short Form 58% -- ---
Treatment 1 – Choice of Offer, Short Form 57% -1.3%
Treatment 2 – Choice of Offer, Long Form 51% -11.9%
31%
99%
Control Treatment 1 Treatment2
✓
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Lead scoring gives your company an objective
system for ranking your leads.
Most scoring systems use ranking criteria that fall
into two categories:
Group 1: Profile Group 2:
Behavior
Is the user qualified to buy? Is the user engaged w/ the
brand?
Demographi
cs
map
Personauser
Behaviordesktop
Lead Scoring
30. www.act-on.com | @ActOnSoftware | #ActOnSW
Behaviour Point
Value
Visitor visited the pricing page. 10
Visitor downloaded the How Do We Compare To Our
Competition white paper 5
Visitor browsed company website multiple times in the past 7
days. 5
Visitor downloaded the Evaluation Guide. 5
Visitor clicked on company's Jobs web page. -5
Behavioral Lead Scoring: Online Engagement
31. www.act-on.com | @ActOnSoftware | #ActOnSW
Source: Gartner Research
UPTO
70
%
of sales leads are not properly
leveraged or are completely
ignored, thus wasting
marketing program dollars.
Why Use Lead Scoring?
32. www.act-on.com | @ActOnSoftware | #ActOnSW
Source: MarketingSherpa - Jan 2012
The average lead
generation ROI for
organizations using a
lead scoring process
is
138%
lead generation ROI from
those surveyed who were
not using a lead scoring
process.
78%
VS.
Impact of Lead Scoring
34. www.act-on.com | @ActOnSoftware | #ActOnSW
Real-time notifications
• Know when prospects or
customers visit the site (or
even a key page)
Timely engagement
• Be alerted when
prospects are most likely
ready for a conversation
Sales Intelligence
35. www.act-on.com | @ActOnSoftware | #ActOnSW
• Use every
engagement
opportunity to learn
more
• Share profile data
with sales – both
demographic and
behavioral information
• Gathering intelligence
will save sales time
and make will allow
them to tailor their
conversation to the
individual
Sales Intelligence
36. www.act-on.com | @ActOnSoftware | #ActOnSW
Next Steps
1.
Conduct an SEO Audit
on your website.
2.
Identify your lowest
performing pages, and start
A/B testing to improve
results
3.
Implement website
visitor tracking &
behavioral lead scoring
37. www.act-on.com | @ActOnSoftware | #ActOnSW
Free SEO Audit - Act-On Software
Get Started with a Free SEO
Audit
Call +1 (877) 530-1555
Email sales@act-on.com
Web www.act-on.com
THE FORRESTER
WAVE™ LEADERS
QUADRANT
38. www.act-on.com | @ActOnSoftware | #ActOnSW
Janelle Johnson
Director, Demand Gen
janelle.johnson@act-
on.com
@janelle_johnson
Linda West
Manager, Demand Gen
linda.west@act-on.com
@misslindawest
Q&A
Notas do Editor
[Read off stats]With the evolution of technology, a consumer’s access to information and choice is virtually unlimited. This puts consumers in the drivers seat. They have the power to find and discover products at their own leisure, and direct their own buying journey. So from a marketing perspective, this means that advertising and media saturation is not as significant as it used to be. What is significant? Intelligence. Now, it’s important to understand what customers are looking for online through search, and how consumers respond online to your brand presence. Consumers drive the bus; businesses just need to understand what consumers want, and where they are in their decision making process so that they can they can serve up targeted messages that will trigger a purchase or a next-step toward a purchase.
Website visitor tracking is a specialized subset of the generic category called Web Analytics.They’re interrelated and complementary, but not all web analytics tools offer website visitor tracking. For those that do, it might be included in the overall solution or available as an additional for-fee service. (The Act-On platform includes website visitor tracking.) For simplicity here’s a way to parse the terms:Web analytics has a broad focus on website optimization and performance. It measures traffic patterns to help companies optimize site functionality, the online experience, and marketing initiatives. Common metrics include unique visits, page views, pages per visit, new visitor rates, bounce rates, average time on site, and conversions (note that “conversion” covers many actions, depending on the business and/or campaign). Website visitor tracking has a narrow focus on individuals’ behaviour while they’re on your website, including who they are, where they came from, what precisely they’re clicking on and downloading and engaging with, how recently, and how frequently. The combined use of both capabilities forges a powerful tool for sales and marketing efforts. Web analytics provides the solid understanding of how your site is working … or not. And website visitor tracking provides in-depth information about the specific individuals and companies engaging with your site.The net:net is a veritable motherload of knowledge that directly benefits your lead-gen and sales efforts, including their efficiency and their revenue numbers.
The average searcher spends less than 6 seconds on the SERP before taking an action. They glance through the titles to see what looks most relevant to them and then read the description to make sure they are likely to find relevant content if they click through. Use the SEO audit and pay attention to the SERP preview at the top. This is what a searcher will see in the results. Make sure it is compelling!
Don’t ignore the long tail. It is great to rank for major industry terms, but these are often extremely competitive. Long tail terms (5-7 words) are usually less competitive and are often better quality. For example, you don’t know much about someone that searches for “computer”, but you know exactly what someone that searches for “where do I buy a gaming computer in San Francisco, CA” is looking for.
When selecting keywords, you want to consider three primary factors:Monthlysearch volume – if you rank for a term that only generates a few hundred searched a month, you won’t get much yield out of that. The long tail is certainly important, but make sure you balance that against the effort it will take you to rank for the keyword in question. You also want to target search terms with low competition from other content providers. Pick the low-hanging fruit first. Then, if there are a couple higher-competition words you want to rank for, you can work on those over time. Lastly, and probably most importantly, the keyword needs to have high relevance to your product or a clear intent that might indicate the right type of interest.
Website visitor tracking allows you to see – often in real time – who is visiting your website and, based of their trackablebehaviors: why they’re on your site, what their issues, interests, and/or pain points are, and where they are in the buying process.The ability to “see” what individuals – both known and anonymous visitors – are doing on your website gives you the ability to target them; meaning you can deliver valuable content that’s tailored to their needs and encourages them to take the next step. (Yes, this is possible with anonymous visitors. It just takes a little bit of investigative work using visitor-tracking filters and integration into a tool such as Data.com.)As a result, processes are streamlined for everyone; marketers can gauge the effectiveness of their content and nurture campaigns, sales teams can optimize their time by focusing on the highest-priority leads, and prospective customers can move at their own pace to a purchase decision.
So, Linda spoke about attracting visitors to your site. Once you’ve got them looking at your content, it’s time to find out who they are.Converting visitors to leads–is a crucial step in the demand gen process. It focuses on the ability to drive prospects to specific call to actions where a company can capture an individual’s contact information for future marketing activities. The use of web forms, landing pages, surveys, offers, newsletters and website visitor tracking comes into play. This step focuses on turning unknown visitors into an identifiable lead that you can then market and sell to. For example, the Act-On home page offers a variety of actions a visitor can take to get more information, such as signing up for a webinar.
According to DemandGenReport, 56% of advanced B2B marketers said content based offers were most successful. Content is critical throughout all stages of the demand gen process – from attracting visitors to your site, to converting them to leads – and into customers.
The best advice I can give when creating calls to action is to mix it up. When trying to convert visitors to leads, offer a variety of different content types, such as video, surveys, whitepapers and webinars. Different folks prefer to consume content in different ways – some want to attend a webinar and get the information, others would prefer to download a whitepaper they can print out and review later. By offering a variety of formats, you’ll increase the number of visitors that engage with you.
If you’ve implemented website visitor tracking, and you’re doing an awesome job ranking well in search engines, then chances are you’ll have a lot of “anonymous” or unknown visitors coming to your site. An important feature to look for in a website visitor tracking system is the ability to identify anonymous visitor IP addresses so that you can tie the activity back to at minimum, a specific company. That way, you can target communications and calls to companies that have visited your site, but may not have made their way to your lead database. Also, make sure you have a system implemented that can connect that anonymous user data directly to a profile, once that user is identified by filling in a form, or clicking on an email that you’ve sent.
To optimize something, quite literally, means to make as effective, perfect, or useful as possible. So, to optimize a landing page would be to make it as effective as possible to achieve the goals it was created for. Generally, within direct marketing or demand gen, it’s to get the visitor to take a specific action – perhaps filling out a form.So, let’s look at a couple ways we can optimize landing pages.
It’s interesting to note that many B2B companies are directing clicks to their home page rather than a specific landing page. This puts a lot of pressure on the web visitor to sort through your site to find what they are interested in. Think of your home-page as a store entrance. It’s a menu of content, which highlights key areas that might interest people most. It’s an entrance point. In the context of search or online ads, or email, the last thing you want to do if someone raises their hand to indicate interest is direct them to the front-door. You want to take them inside, and show them the exact shelf and product they need. Direct them to the specific piece of content that will solve their problem, meet their need, or answer their question.
But how can you ensure that the landing pages that you are directing traffic to are optimized for converting leads? You’ll want to test these pages to ensure the best possible results.A/B testing is the preferred method for marketers to test best performing elements – including emails, landing pages and forms.
There are a lot of things that you can tests! As long as you isolate each variable, and test one thing at a time, you can test a plethora of page elements to make sure that the effort that you put into developing a page is actually paying off. A/B testing will incrementally improve your results so that you’re getting the maximum conversion rate on your page.Let’s talk a look at a test we did a couple months ago with our friends over at MarketingSherpa.
At the lead gen summit last fall, we partnered with Sherpa to test landing page conversion. This was a very interactive test, with conference attendees voting on some of the elements being tested. Testing starts with a control. The control for our test – seen on this slide – featured a single whitepaper with 4 data fields required to get the paper.
There were two other treatments that we tested – one being a choice of offers and the other being number of fields requested on a form with the choice of forms. These treatments stemmed from 2 hypotheses:Hypothesis A By offering prospects a choice between three incentive options, we will add to the perceived value of the offer and increase the Lead Gen Rate.Hypothesis B By increasing the perceived value with the additional incentive options, we can collect additional information without negatively impacting the overall Lead Gen Rate.The question we were trying to anwer was: Which incentive approach is more effective for generating leads?
It’s interesting to note why testing is so important. It’s based on actual data with your target audience – not just what you as the marketer BELIEVE will happen. Often times in marketing, we go with a “gut feel” or “belief” that something will perform better. But with running a test, you can get proof with actual data.So, in the instance of our test, we asked the audience to predict which treatment would win. As you can see on this chart, the audience overwhelmngly believed treatment 1 would be the winner.Were they correct?
In actuality, the control won out! For this specific test, with our target audience, we had 3 key learnings:Learning: A choice of incentive does not increase perceived valueLearning: The perceived value does not outweigh the perceived cost Learning: The additional Job Title field reduced Lead Gen Rate by 11%So, before changing your landing pages based on a hunch – test it out!
I’m going to switch gears a bit and focus on how you can continue to engage, track and measure your web visitors. Lead scoring provides a great way of doing this. Once someone has filled out a form on your site, converting from a visitor to a lead, you can continue to learn about their needs and base your interactions on their behaviors. Let’s dive into this a bit more.
Lead scoring gives your company an objective system for ranking your leads.Most scoring systems use ranking criteria that fall into two categories:In Group 1, the user profile, we are looking at whether are not the contact is an ideal customer, and whether or not the individual is qualified to buy the product. This group is primarily composed of demographic and firmographic data, but some elements of psychographic or persona data might also come into play here. In group two, the behavioral data, we are measuring the contact’s engagement with the brand, and their readiness to buy. This is where we use all of that awesome website visitor tracking data to understand where they are in the buying process, and how close they are to making a purchase decision.
So we’re tracking online interactions like email clicks, whitepaper downloads, and the pages they have visited online. Here’s a quick example from the act-on website. Here are two unique pages on our website. One is our pricing page, and the second is our careers page. If a contact visits our pricing page, that indicates a certain amount of intent, and it indicates that they are interested enough in our product to investigate cost. This is often one of the last steps in the buying process, so we know that someone visiting our pricing page is a really hot prospect, so we attribute a high lead score to anyone who visits that page. If a contact visits the second page you see on screen, our careers page, we can definitely infer an intent from that, but it’s not an intent to buy. That’s a strong indication that this person is interested in seeking employment with the company, and they aren’t very likely to buy the product. Therefore, we attribute a negative lead score to anyone who visits our career page.
So, how does that translate into a lead scoring program? If you recall from a couple of slides back, a lead scoring program looks at two major groups of information. Group 1 looks at profile data, which includes demographic and firmographic data. Group 2 looks at behavioral data, most of which is going to be collected on your website. Your marketing team most likely already has a lot of great demographic and firmographic data that they can score, but the missing piece of the puzzle is often this behavioral layer. Here’s an example of a behavioral lead scoring program that looks at website activity.
Let’s look at a few stats on the importance of lead scoring. 70% of sales leads are not properly leveraged or are completely ignored, thus wasting marketing program dollars. And leads aren’t being ignored because sales is lazy – it’s because they need to prioritize their time. Lead scoring can help with this prioritization.
And lastly, according to MarketingSherpa, the average lead generation ROI for organizations using a lead scoring process is 138%.In comparison to 78% from those who were not using a lead scoring process. Lead scoring not only increases lead gen ROI, but also helps bring sales and marketing into alignment on common, agreed-upon goals and objectives.
Website visitor tracking provides sales reps with a real-time monitor and alerts system for prospect engagement. The salesperson can set alerts to get real-time notifications when prospects or customers visit the site (or even a key page), allowing for timely engagement when prospects are most likely ready to have a conversation.Marketing automation has the ability to identify and surface those prospects with the highest probability of buying or moving to the next stage of the buying process.
Intelligence. Think of this as aggregate data for reporting and trend watching, and aggregate data on an individual that indicates next steps.Campaign Results and Conversions – Marketing automation reports on campaign results and conversions help marketing become accountable for a portion of sales revenue. Traditionallysilo’ed form sales, Marketing is now part of the profit continuum.Inbound Marketing – these features can track AdWords conversions, providing intelligence and guidance for media buys,budget establishment, and keyword optimization for organic search.Marketing Database Access – Salespeople can access entries in the marketing database (from their sales force automation dashboard, so it’s not disruptive) to see aggregate data including demographic and behavioral, search terms used, etc. Seen holistically, the data provides intelligence the sales rep uses to take the next step – including knowing when the customer is ready to buy and it’s time to close the deal.
Ready to Learn MoreWe already have quite a few questions coming in, so really quickly before moving to Q&A, you probably are ready to learn more, so please feel free to give us a call, send us an email, or visit us on the web to get more information on what Act-On’s marketing automation solution can do for you and your business. As you may know, Act-On Software is a leading provider of cloud-based integrated marketing automation software and was named a leader among lead-to-revenue management vendors in the 2014 Forrester Wave, was rank on the Inc. 500 List of America’s Fastest Growing Companies, named to the Forbes "America's Most Promising Companies" list of 100 U.S.-based, privately held, high-growth companies and ranked 48th on Deloitte’s 2013 Technology Fast 500 list of fastest growing technology companies in North America.