3 Key Ways B2B SEO Impacts Demand Generation Efforts

Pardot recently announced the launch of their 2013 State of Demand Generation Report, surveying 400 B2B buyers and 138 B2B companies to get insight into their demand generation habits and best practices.

As the concept of demand generation takes greater hold in online marketing discussions, here are critical points B2B SEO professionals need to consider, based on select research highlights and evolving trends.

What Is Demand Generation?

Demand generation as a concept is meant to cover all marketing initiatives that drive awareness of a company and it's products and solutions. Demand generation is sometimes confused with lead generation, but the latter is more focused on building the sales funnel and arguably places less relevance on initiatives that are not directly related to that effort (such as brand development).

image Credit: Online Demand Generation – Strategy and Metrics

Here are a few popular definitions of demand generation:

• Demand generation covers all marketing activities that create awareness about your product, company and industry. It includes a mix of inbound and outbound marketing. via LeadFormix
• Focused on targeted marketing programs, demand generation drive awareness and interest in a company's products and/or services. Predominant in BtoB marketing, demand generation marries marketing programs and structures sales processes. via DemandGenReport
• Create, nurture, and manage buying interest through campaign management, lead management, marketing analysis, and data management. via Eloqua

SEO plays a key role in demand generation initiatives because of the significance of organic search traffic and leads as a percentage of total inbound marketing efforts. I would also argue that a B2B SEO strategy can gain even more traction when marketers take into consideration link building and social media impact in outbound sales efforts as well (example: link placement in tradeshow sponsorships or 301 redirects when using "marketing friendly" promotional links).

In Pardot's launch of their demand generation Report, three key findings highlighted the announcement and should catch the B2B SEO professional's attention.

1. Search Engines (Google) Dominate First Phase Research

Finding: 72 percent of product research for a future business purchase begins on Google.

While this finding is a major boon for B2B SEO professionals a critical component to continued strategic buy-in for SEO is performance metric development. As illustrated in a recent MarketingSherpa article, even though organic search can be a significant contributing channel for lead volume, a fair percentage B2B marketers are skeptical of SEO in particular. Google's recent move to encrypted search by default, rendering all keyword traffic "(not provided)", certainly complicates measurement as well.

Ray "Catfish" Comstock just wrote a column on moving forward with SEO in a "(not provided)" world and I've also talked about performance measurement late last year.

At a high level, evolving benchmarks SEO professionals need to consider include:

• Developing multiple levels of conversion goals
• Integration of lead scoring universally and specific to SEO leads
• Web traffic performance measurement and comparisons between channels
• Integration of Google and Bing Webmaster Tools report evaluation, especially when considering significant "(not provided)" traffic percentages.

Bottom line: inbound marketing analysis of search engine performance is an even greater component of significance for SEO professionals. "(Not provided)" is an inconvenience but doesn't really restrict our ability to demonstrate impact of SEO initiatives.

2. Content Must Be Optimized Across Buying Stages

Finding: 76 percent of buyers prefer different content at each stage of their research.

I've been a proponent of content marketing for quite some time, but content solely for the sake of SEO is short-sighted. Marketers have a better understanding of the fact that content marketing assets need to be built with multiple goals for lead development in mind.

SEO professionals can be more valuable in the research and measurement components of content marketing development, regardless of its place in the sales funnel.

For example, Google Webmaster Tools report on search queries provides SEO professionals with insight into phrases visitors used to find content marketing assets on site. This data can be used to make more informed decisions on new content assets to create and SEO performance of optimized pages as well.

IMG webmaster-tools-impressions.png

Coupling this information with conversion metrics in Google Analytics or marketing automation solution provides a more complete picture of SEO, content marketing, and ROI.

For content assets meant more for brand awareness, SEO professionals can tie in inbound link reports (such as Google Webmaster Tools) and reporting data from social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. I wrote about the advancement of reporting elements in social media platforms in a recent blog post as well.

3. Technological Innovation Creates Opportunity & Challenges for B2B SEO

Finding: 76 percent of the top 17 SaaS companies are already using marketing automation.

While this finding might not have significant face value to B2B organizations outside of this industry niche, what's important for B2B SEO professionals to takeaway is that marketers are gaining greater access to information related to buyer behavior. Technological innovation puts every marketing program into the spotlight for scrutiny in effectiveness.

B2B SEO professionals need to stay aware of the vendors developing new resources for marketing performance management, gaining at least high level understanding of features and functionality. Destinations for research directly related to Search Engine Watch include ClickZ's Stats and Tools section, ClickZ Intel for white papers across marketing disciplines, and the Online Marketing Institute.

Final Thoughts

Demand generation is a concept B2B SEO professionals need to understand because of the impact (or lack of impact) we can have in the process. While tactical SEO is a given, taking ownership of performance initiatives around the success of demand generation initiatives, with an emphasis on organic search, is also important.

Are your SEO initiatives coinciding more closely with broader demand generation initiatives? I would love to read your perspective via comments below.

Original Article Post by Derek Edmond @ Search Engine Watch

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How B2B Advertisers Can Win on Facebook, Just Like Salesforce

While many B2Bs focus on Facebook for organic interaction with current customers, B2Cs often look to advertising on Facebook to drive sales. But a new case study coming from Facebook's advertising unit shows positive lead gen results in a B2B social environment.

In the case study, Facebook showed Salesforce’s News Feed ad campaign exceeded goals for lead generation, yielding 3.5 times more qualified leads than the original goal with a 50 percent reduction in cost per lead from its target.

Salesforce originally approached the campaign as an experiment to see how Facebook ads could help it drive leads through a demo of its product:

In the end, the campaign drove more than 200 leads with "10 percent of those leads converting to opportunities," according to the study. After this run, Salesforce ran another Facebook advertising lead gen campaign by driving prospects to its website through ads like the following:

In addition to exceeding its goals, Salesforce saw a fan base increase of 24,000 more fans through the advertising campaign as part of an unforeseen result.

Facebook Advertising for B2Bs: Tips for Getting Started

Facebook advertising might be a new concept for B2B companies, and it could be challenging to know how to approach it. Merry Morud, social advertising director at aimClear, gave her top tips for B2B advertising on Facebook.

"Invest time upfront," Morud said. "Just like keyword research, Facebook targeting can take some time, and it should. Facebook targeting segments are an asset that you can use over and over, and use them to analyze your own community with the ad targeting tool."

Morud followed up with the following tips for B2Bs:

• Mine "interest" targeting for job titles, for example, "logistics specialist," "restaurant owner," "cardiac surgeon," "hardware engineer" and "manufacturing specialists"
• Create a custom audience. Have an email list that has never converted? Create a Facebook custom audience in "Power Editor."
• Use category and partner targeting. We love using category target, for example, "small business owner," or partner target, for example, "international business traveler," as qualifiers to our interest segments.

"Smart, focused Facebook targeting is the foundation of your success," Morud said.

What other tips did she have up her sleeve?

"Try various Facebook ad units. The traditional offsite ads found in the right column are generally more expensive than 'organic'-looking ad units. For example, Facebook is now offering News Feed ads tied to Facebook Pages to offsite content. We love these because they offer huge ad real estate in the News Feed, more characters for text copy, they tend to be cheaper than traditional right column ads, and often have better CTRs, which is great for Facebook qScore," Morud said.

"Not only will these ads get your targets to the content (or landing page) on your site, but will often garner page likes and post engagement," Morud said. "Think of the social actions as a bonus, and on-going community building and content delivery because, well, Facebook distribution of your content just ain’t what it used to be."

Morud said don’t forget to customize the landing pages you drive Facebook users to, as well.

"Users coming off social have some of the shortest attention spans. Make sure you deliver on the ad copy with the landing page. Steer away from too much content and make the lead-gen form super simple. There are a lot of affordable options out there for creating dynamic landing pages."
Her final tip?

"Understand that traffic from Facebook isn't looking for you. Qualify your audience with smart targeting, qualify the click with ad copy, and hook them on the landing page – quickly.

Original Article Post by Jessica Lee @ Search Engine Watch

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