While it may seem simple, I’m amazed at how often a simple unique phone number for paid search campaigns is overlooked by clients and agencies.  At the very least, the landing pages of your B2B AdWords campaigns should have a unique phone number that can report the quantity of calls, and ideally record each call for reference, quality assurance, and training purposes.  Telecapture is a very easy and...

Why do so few B2B marketing stakeholders pay attention to their website conversion rates?  Why are so many B2B marketers hung up on and obsessed with generating more traffic and ‘buzz’ via social marketing and search engine marketing? If their business was a pizza shop and only 2 out of every 100 people who walked by actually walked in, and for every 100 people who walked in, only 5 bought  some...

All we need is yet another acronym in our bowl of search engine marketing alphabet soup that already includes ROI, ROAS, CT, SEO. But there is one more worth mentioning, one you should be aware of and avoid at all costs: Ranking Obsession Syndrome, or ROS. You don’t have to search hard to find someone who’s obsessed with whether their company’s search engine rankings has moved from position...

Let’s imagine you learned of a mechanic who could double your gas mileage. You could take your car in and, after paying for a few modifications (which are legal, moral, and ethical), your gas mileage would be forever doubled. You would get to enjoy the savings and efficiency for as long as you own your car. Would you do it? While I know of no such mileage-doubling opportunity, I am aware of a sales-doubling...

In the spirit of not continuing to waste time, money, and trees, I propose agencies and consultants adopt the immediate use of The Happy Face Report as the primary way to periodically communicate your progress on projects and results from campaigns. The idea for The Happy Face Report came to me in the form of a tirade that a prospect of mine was having one day.  “I’m so sick of reams of meaningless data...

Ok, so I’m really passionate about looking for ways to improve conversion rates - I admit it.  I’m kind of a conversion junkie. But sometimes I make the mistake of getting so focused on conversions that I can lose site of the bigger picture. I end up only staring at the trees right in front of me, without taking the time to take inventory of the forest. Such a shortsighted viewpoint can undermine a B2B...

I’ve got a hypothesis that companies will steadily and dramatically begin increasing the derived value of early stage website marketing inquiries. In other words, the same marketer that puts a goal value of $150 for a whitepaper download in google analytics, may very well increase that number overtime. The reason for this is three fold. Firstly, b2b marketers are rapidly learning and sharing best practices...