Should you continue promoting your company in a business downturn? Of course you should, even if it has to be at a reduced level, because a dip in the market is the easiest time to increase market share, history has taught us that. But should your marketing message change? In Ten Tips for Effective Creative in Difficult Times on the B2B Insights Blog it’s suggested that you make more effort to understand the situation in which your customers find themselves (and I should add that their situation might just be “Crisis? What Crisis?”). In addition, reduced resources might mean you have to get to the point more quickly - and, to borrow a grammatically-challenged slogan from Apple, you need to Think Different.

This is the final observation I’d like to make from seeing so many UK industrial companies’ online marketing operations this summer: my surprise at how much companies are spending on pay-per-click advertising - and my concern at how much they may be wasting.
By pay-per-click advertising, effectively I mean Google AdWords, which dominates the market. If you’d asked me to have made an educated guess at how much this was being used in UK industrial marketing, I’d have probably said maybe a quarter of companies might have tried it, but maybe only one or two percent would be spending serious money on it regularly. I would have been underestimating the situation significantly.
From the small sample of companies I’ve been speaking to, I’d say that most companies have at least tried it, perhaps a quarter are spending on it regularly, and for as many as 10%, it’s quickly become single biggest advertising expenditure. I have met more than one company where the scenario is that once upon a time the advertising budget was several thousand pounds a month, but in recent years that has fallen to no more than several hundred …until they got into Google AdWords. Now their advertising expenditure has risen back up to two or three thousand pounds a month again, nearly all of it going on AdWords. If you have a competitor who you know is spending money on marketing and whose profile seems to be rising amongst customers, but which has been conspicuously absent from the trade press, exhibitions etc., this may be what they’re doing.
Now, I’m not going to criticise substantial investment in Google AdWords, although I know how easy it is to get carried away with this advertising outlet. Indeed, it’s an almost unbeatable way of getting people to your website, so it fits in well with my suggested marketing priority list for 2009, which is:
1. Make sure your website is as good as it can be;
2. Drive traffic towards it;
3. (A distant third) Everything else.
However, it can be very easy to overspend on Google AdWords without realising it. Remember the old adage “I know that only half of my advertising works, but the trouble is, I don’t know which half?” The problem with Google AdWords is that the effectiveness of your investment per pound spent peaks at a certain point, and the more you spend, the more likely it is you’ve passed that peak in the curve.
The key to efficient Google AdWords spending is not drive just anyone to your website. You need to be driving the right people to actionable pages where you can measure if they’re valuable to you, and calculate a value for that visitor. Learning how to do this will save you thousands of pounds in the long term, which is why we look at this inside the first few months of our Insider Programme.
So the fourth thing I learned this summer is that far more UK industrial companies are investing heavily in Google AdWords than I expected. I’m really encouraged by the initiative they’re showing, and it seems their increasing expenditure shows they’re pleased with the results. But I’d caution them to make their campaigns more specific and measurable.

What else did I learn this summer, while talking to loads of UK industrial companies about their websites? I learned that many companies do not have website traffic analytics data, and even fewer are actually using it to calculate return on investment from online campaigns, or their website as a whole.
At many companies, I asked what analytics data they had on their website visitors, and they pointed to some horribly crude log analysis program provided for free by their website host - something like AWStats or Webalizer. A chart of “hits” (whatever they mean) and very little more. As long as that chart was going up, they felt that was enough.
Well, secretly, they didn’t feel that was enough. Most marketing managers are quite aware that this data doesn’t really mean much, but they aren’t sure what else they should be using, what it could offer them, and how they would get it working on their website. So web data analysis has been discreetly pushed under the nearest available carpet, along with many other aspects of online marketing which seem like hard work.
The strange thing is, installing proper traffic analysis applications on your website can be very easy. It can also be free (how about that?), and for anyone who likes to see if their marketing investment is working, it can be fascinating, as well as very profitable. Putting something like Google Analytics on your website is so important that we cover it in week 1 (yes, week 1) of our Insider Programme. We explain how to set up “goals” and start measuring what your web traffic is worth soon afterwards, but anyone can do this with one of the many books available on the subject.
There are many excuses for not analysing who your website visitors are, what they’re worth to you, and if your investment in getting them there is paying for itself. But in the end, they’re all excuses. So the third thing I learned this summer is how many people don’t realise how straightforward and affordable it is to analyse website traffic. I hope we can start to change that, because as people start to spend more money on online marketing, it’s crucial that they don’t start to waste more too.

As I mentioned yesterday, while travelling around the UK this summer introducing our Insider Programme, I’ve started to see the challenges involved in online marketing in UK industry, and have discovered some common problems and mistakes, which I thought I’d bring to you all this week. Today: the Splash Page lives!
Now, you’re probably thinking: “The Splash Page? Does Chris mean those movies people used to make you watch before being able to access their websites? The ones which made half the visitors hurriedly scroll around for the “skip this” link, and the other half go straight to the “back” button?”
Well, sort of.
The Splash Page which involved spinning logos was long ago discredited as an own goal, and I think almost everyone knows this. In addition, most people understand that the home page of a website is the most important page on it, and the one where you absolutely must have plenty of text describing your company’s capability, using all the critical key search terms. There’s a reason why newspapers and magazines have the headlines and contents up front, and there are even stronger reasons to do this on a website.
No, the Splash Page which I’m referring to here is just as much of a barrier as the spinning logos from 1999. It’s the home page which just says: “what country are you in?”
Not only is this unnecessary, it’s an utter chore which massively handicaps a website’s effectiveness for two reasons: firstly, it throws away the opportunity to fill the most important page on the website with the most important terms for the search engines, and secondly, it will send a significant proportion of visitors right back to where they came from. Other sites are only a click away, and they don’t put a bouncer on the door, like the bridgekeeper at the Gorge of Eternal Peril in Monty Python and the Holy Grail: (”Who approaches the Bridge of Death must answer me these questions three, ‘ere the other side he see”).
From a user point of view, the worst thing about these “what country are you in?” questions, is that for half of the world (including the UK), you have to scroll way, way down the list to find your country. You need a good mouse and a steady hand, and if you’re using an iPhone or something you may as well give up now. US companies often put the USA at the top, and then everyone else underneath, which just says to me “you want to make it easier for yourselves but don’t care about the rest of us” and makes me even more irritated. As a UK resident, I like to select “United States Minor Outlying Islands” for a laugh, because that’s probably how most Americans see us.
Of course, it’s totally unnecessary. If you must know where I am, then detect it automatically and stop making your customers do the work for you. If your IT department doesn’t know how to do that, get a new IT department.
And that’s the second thing I learned this summer. Many companies still know so little about how to build an effective, customer-centred website that they still have Splash Pages. Amazing.

This week, rather than refer you to other people’s articles, I thought I’d write about some of my own recent experiences. In the course of launching our Insider Programme this summer, I’ve visited many industrial companies around the UK, and spoken to many more at the series of seminars we held. In doing so, I’ve started to get an idea of the state of online marketing in UK industry, and it’s been most revealing - in some cases, pleasantly surprising, in others, quite shocking. While my small sample of a few dozen companies isn’t a definitive snapshot, I think you might like to know what I found, if only as a rough gauge of how your company compares.
Each day this week I’ll discuss surprises which I then came across frequently (and subsequently ceased to be surprising). Today: the continued existence of regional variations being shoehorned into a one-size-fits-all website.
By this, I don’t mean the websites of companies who only have one sales office and whose product offerings are the same the world over - they obviously don’t need to have different websites for different countries anyway. I’m referring to the websites of multinationals which hoard all the content creation at head office but try to suggest what you’re seeing is some sort of “local” site, despite it being patently clear that the local office (such as the one in the UK) has had no input at all. This totally insults the intelligence of the website visitor.
If I’m looking at doing business with (say) an American multinational, I don’t have a problem with being referred to the US site for product data etc. But I want to be referred there by a proper UK site with all the news and “regional” information which is clearly maintained in the UK. Otherwise, it’s implied (often accurately) that the UK operations of the company are very much second-rate, and the support I’ll get as a customer will be equally poor.
One major giveaway is being asked, when I arrive at a website, which country I’m in. Oh dear. That might have been necessary in 1998, but in 2008 it’s unforgivably bad customer relations. Then there’s the glance at the website address, which instead of being www.redwidgetcompany.co.uk, is probably something like www.redwidgetcompany.de/a-bit-of/complicated-code/grossbritannien - that doesn’t exactly make me feel close to the manufacturer. There is no excuse for not having a .co.uk website address other than “we can’t be bothered with making our system do that”.
Worst of all are the bad (or missing) translations - and that can be from “US English” as well as more obviously “foreign” languages. It’s comical how many “UK” websites from US companies have the telephone numbers written in US format with hyphens, or lapse into US spellings. Telephone +44 (1462) 489-060? What’s that?
It’s even more astonishing how many “UK” websites from German companies have menu items on them like “Kontakt”. Did nobody in the UK get to proof-read the website?
The answer, from my travels this summer, is almost certainly no. In company after company, I hear the same refrain: “Our website is maintained by the German (or American, or whatever) head office, and presented as a done deal.” To which I ask: “But can’t you tell them to change things which are obviously wrong, and damaging to your image in this country?”, only to be met with a resigned shake of the head, and an explanation that it takes so long, and embarrasses people at corporate HQ, that they stopped asking long ago.
One of my favourites is “Welcome to the Red Widget Company EMEA”. What the flip does “EMEA” mean outside of sales and marketing departments? I suspect the reaction of many customers is that this company sadly doesn’t operate in the UK (which is a shame, because they seem to have some pretty good products available to customers living in EMEA, wherever that is).
If you’re a UK marketing manager in non-UK-based multinational, you’re probably thinking: “What does he know about the problems I’ve got? Challenging cultural imperialism from head office is not going to make my job any easier”, and of course you’re right. But please make a renewed effort in 2009 to get some degree of local control online. Customers get their first - and often only - impression of your company from your website, and if that impression is that they’re going to have to deal with people in Japan rather than the UK (however untrue that is), they’ll turn to somwhere apparently closer to home.
So the first thing I learned this summer was that far too many multinationals don’t let their worldwide subsidiaries have anything like the autonomy with online marketing that they do with other elements of the marketing mix. It’s absurd: the parent company wouldn’t fly over from Frankfurt to do WidgetEx’08 at the NEC for them, and they wouldn’t do a local mailshot to UK customers from the HQ in Arkansas. What’s different about the website then? Could it be that the uncomfortable truth is that the UK marketing department has never actually argued sufficiently that it needs to do its own thing, because running an independent UK website is a little outside its comfort zone?

To know how to write web pages to do well in Google, it can be helpful to know a bit about Google itself. And there’s a nice little introductory article on the official Google Blog, called Introduction to Google Search Quality, which puts a human face on what they do. Obviously it doesn’t reveal any trade secrets, but it reinforces the fact that there are people behind all this technology. As well as a staggering number of PCs.

I’ve mentioned “error pages” before, but I’ll revisit the subject regularly until everyone’s sorted theirs out. Do you know what happens if someone types in a page on your site which doesn’t exist? Here’s what happens on our site. Is your “error page” as user-friendly? Try typing a load of nonsense after your domain name and see what happens.

Even if you think what you’re providing is OK, it may still be worth reading 404 error pages, news sites and user experience on the E-consultancy blog, where they investigate what happens on some of the big news sites (such as the BBC or FT) to see if there’s anything we can learn. One thing to remember when designing your error page (also known as the “404 page”) is that visitors might have followed a broken link from another site, and therefore it’s not their fault they’re seeing your error page - so don’t imply they’re idiots who can’t type.

I know many industrial marketing managers don’t like free gifts, perhaps considering them to be in some way unprofessional. I disagree - some of the best branding I’ve experienced over the years has come from decent freebies. I can even name (without looking) many things which have hung around my home and office for years: a Telemecanique umbrella, a Rose+Krieger pen, an Adept Scientific calculator, and some SMC Pneumatics golf balls - and that’s straight off the top of my head.
But what have freebies got to do with online marketing, Chris? Well, here’s my current recommended approach to getting information out of people on your website. If your form asks for too much, you’ll put people off, we know that. So here’s the plan. Ask them for the minimum of information, then incentivise them to give you the rest. The sequence goes as follows:
1. (First screen) Please fill in your name and email address to receive the data sheet on this product.
2. (New screen) Thank you. The data sheet will be sent to you by email in a moment. If you’d like a paper copy, along with our latest catalogue, and a free Parker pen to say thank you, please enter your job title and company address here.
To me, that seems to attack the problem successfully.
Of course, if you disagree, feel free to let me know here, or if you have some suggestions as to the best corporate free gifts you’ve ever seen (or provided), share your thoughts here.

I was inspired to write this by an article called Rock Your Tchotkes (no, me neither) on the B2B Lead Blog. Very American (Tchotkes? Booths? Buttons? Two nations divided by a common language indeed) but worth a read.

Analysing your website visitors is one of the great exercises in marketing today. It genuinely excites me to follow who they are, where they came from and what they do on my website. I never had this level of insight into the customer with any traditional marketing technique. But there’s another fascinating exercise which online marketing has given us, and that’s the ability to test everything easily. We’re all daft if we don’t find the time to do it, if only because it was so much more difficult to do in the past (testing direct mail pieces, for example).
In Experiment or Die. Five Reasons And Awesome Testing Ideas on the always compelling Occam’s Razor blog, there’s a whole list of things you can test on your website to see what works best. The article is written in fairly excitable US English, but there are a lot of ideas to take away for even conservative UK industrial websites. Be bold! You only have to expose a small number of visitors to your riskier ideas.

An excellent article has just appeared on the E-consultancy blog about content for your B2B website. In Creating Cracking Corporate Content author Kevin Gibbons reminds us that the days of writing stilted web pages full of key search terms have long gone, and nowadays there’s little difference between copy which “works” for human visitors and that which “works” for search engines. The content requirements for technology guides, press releases, product descriptions and blogs are all discussed. Well worth digesting.