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.

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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.

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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.

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Here’s one of the best articles ever on email newsletter writing. How To Build a Successful Email Newsletter on Problogger points out that you need to start out by defining what you’re trying to do with the publication, and letting the potential readers know this. Then you need a voice, and a clear idea of the value you’re offering the readers (in exchange for their time). Your content needs to be scannable, have trackable results, and good subject lines. Finally you need a good distribution service, and a reliable opt-in/opt-out procedure. Don’t miss the three extra tips at the end, either.

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Last week we completed a series of four seminars for marketing managers from UK engineering, scientific and construction sector suppliers. If you were one of the 60 or 70 people who attended, we hope you enjoyed your day with us and found it useful. Certainly the feedback (100% positive!) leads us to believe we got it right. We hope you found the introduction of our Insider Programme on a face-to-face basis to be revealing, and we know that many of you got quite a few ideas from my presentation on measuring all aspects of your marketing via your website. Our guest speaker Paul Bragg’s session on his own experiences of small-to-medium-sized business-to-business marketing was clearly inspirational to one or two of you, as one of the most frequently heard comments from delegates over lunch was how they’d started off thinking “we could never do that” and ended up wondering “why can’t we do that?” Finally, our afternoon “workshop sessions” looking at delegates’ websites was illuminating - I think many people who were initially hesitant to put their sites forward ended up surprised at how much they were getting right!

We may be able to hold further seminars in the next few weeks, and we’ll contact you if we have one which we think you might be able to get to. But if you’re interested in the Insider Programme, I’ll be spending some time out “on the road” around the UK between now and Christmas, and I’d be more than happy to drop by, wherever you are, to discuss what we’re up to: just email me.

If it’s passed you by, the Insider Programme is an affordable way of getting my colleagues and I to analyse your online marketing and show you everything you need to know in 2009. This goes way beyond any quick website analysis - instead, we go through each topic, one week at a time, in a steady, manageable way, giving you the information you need to get your online marketing working properly. Whether you work on your website yourself, or whether you instruct a team or external agency, the Insider Programme will give you everything you need to know - and you can do it all in just the odd hour here or there, or you can use it as the basis for instructing a team working full-time. It’s up to you. But you can master this yourself - in fact, we believe it’s essential to do so.

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A week ago I wrote an article which suggested that many “search engine optimisation” (SEO) consultants out there were little more than charlatans, and I’d like to thank the many of you who emailed me with sympathetic messages based on your own experiences. There are some great ones out there, although they rightly expect decent fees, and I do understand that it’s often a sign of the immaturity of the customers that forces even good SEO consultants to resort to claiming they’ll “get you to number one on Google”, because that’s what the customers want.
For what it’s worth, the “SEO industry” is wrestling with its conscience: I’m sure many of us will, at one point in our careers, have been the “good guys” in a market where the snake oil salesmen have moved in, and it’s an infuriating situation. There was a time in the nineties, when I was a trade magazine editor, which saw the market swamped by the “colour separations” cowboys, many of whom were peddling entries in magazines which weren’t even going to be published. I thought the only way to let everyone know that my own magazine, Industrial Technology, wasn’t in that market, was to shout from the rooftops that “colour separations” was a meaningless term being used to avoid the term “paid-for editorial”, and fortunately our advertisers got the message. I believe the magazine remains an example of honest practice to this day.
If you want to see a highly-regarded SEO consultant discuss the problems in his own industry, read Guaranteed Search Engine Ranking - Guaranteed Search Engine Optimization by Michael Martinez on the SEO Theory and Analysis blog. Often a contrarian in his industry, this time the author thoroughly agrees with the conventional SEO wisdom that if anyone offers you “guaranteed search engine ranking” or “guaranteed search engine optimization”, run far, far away. Very fast.
For my part, I think the best approach is to learn what this is all about yourself and to manage your website’s SEO optimisation yourself. Getting the basics right really isn’t that difficult, as the best SEO consultants would agree.

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Thanks to BeRelevant for pointing out that a nice little e-book called The Practical Guide to Email Marketing is available for free download - go get your copy now while it’s still available. If you do any sort of promotional emailing for your company, I’m pretty certain you’ll find some good tips inside.

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Putting forms on your website is hard enough work, but making the form appealing is even harder. However, having got someone this far, it’s a tragedy to lose them at the last hurdle because your form is offputting. One of the reasons people don’t litter their websites with individual landing pages for every promotion they do is the pain involved with creating good ones. At a recent seminar, I asked industrial marketing managers if they’d be interested in a service which enabled them to create landing pages, with response forms, just by filling in a few details (on a form!) and uploading some images. The response was “very interested” and we’ll have something to offer you soon.
However, that won’t get over the fact that you need forms on your website, not only for the generic “more information” page but for specific projects, especially newsletter signups, if you’re producing such a thing. In Guidelines for an Effective Subscription Form on B2B Marketing ROI there’s a good summary of an article from the Infobox Newsletter called 11 Tips to Create a Great Subscriber Form. I suspect few of you will ever create forms yourself, so it’s a good checklist to go through before briefing your website manager or designer if you’re going to be asking them to create a form.

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Here’s an article which backs up something I’d been fairly sure about for quite a while. According to Improve click-throughs with the right URL names on Industrial Search Engine Marketing, the actual URL (the web page address) in Google results (the bit in green) is becoming more important. I agree. If I type in “widget review” into Google, I know that 9 out of 10 results which come up are not going to be reviews of widgets, but shopping sites selling widgets which have managed to score well for the term “widget review” without having any decent reviews. I’m sure you’ve seen the same thing. So I then scan down the URLs to see the site names, and if one of them is “www.widget-world-magazine.com” or something similar, that’s the one I click.

This becomes a habit after a while, even when it’s not strictly necessary. So what do we take away from this? If your system allows you to give your web pages decent names, use that capability. If you’re reading this page on the web, look at the URL (or if you’re reading my email, click here). The URL is in the “address bar” at the top of your browser window. If you glanced at that in a set of Google results, it would be a lot more clickable than some long string of random numbers, wouldn’t it?

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Most of the people looking for your products and services online use the search engines. Some of them will find you because they’ve typed in search terms - or “keywords” - for which you do well in the search results. You can see what they typed in by consulting your visitor statistics. But others type in keywords which you don’t do well for, and they never find you. What are they typing in? It’s imperative you find out, and work on ranking highly for those keywords too. You can guess some of them - others you can find out by research. But ranking reasonably well for everything relating to your products and services is only half of the battle. You then need to determine which keywords get you customers, not just any old visitors. They’re the ones you should focus on.

Finding them takes analysis and patience. But it’s one of the most fundamental aspects of a successful B2B website. That’s why we launch into the subject in weeks 2 and 3 of the Insider Programme, which I hope you’ll consider joining.

A short article on Marketing Profs Daily Fix called Keywords, Keywords, Keywords talks about a good presentation which you might like to download. Follow the link there and the PDF slideshow you want is called Keyword Research - Do’s and Don’ts (September 16, 2008).

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