4 Tips for B2B Social Media Marketing Success

No surprise here—we love social media marketing at ion. We’re passionate about optimizing ROI, and really enjoy talking about it and getting to know smart marketers like you. Based on our years of managing social media campaigns, here are 4 tips for B2B social media marketing success that you can put into action immediately.

1. Be Human

How many times have you heard the saying, “People don’t buy from companies, they buy from people”? Well, it’s true, and social networks really allow your prospects and customers to get to know the people and faces behind your organization. So, post photos of your team, talk about what’s going in the office—not just from a business standpoint, but from a personal standpoint as well. The more emotionally connected your audience feels to your organization, the more likely they will be to buy from you.

2. Develop Meaningful Relationships with Your Ideal Customer

Twitter is the perfect opportunity for you to pinpoint your ideal customer and begin to develop relationships with them. Ask them questions, invite them to events, retweet their content. The best part? So few companies do this well, so if you do, you will have a huge advantage over your competition.

3. Monitor Keywords

I really love Twitter, not just because it allows me to develop meaningful relationships with our audience, but also because I can monitor, in real-time, the conversations our audience is having. One of the best ways to do this is to set up notifications for key terms that your potential prospects many tweet, such as your competitors’ company names, pain points, and more. This allows you to follow highly relevant Twitter users, and engage in meaningful conversations when it makes sense.

4. Integrate Conversion Points

Engagement, likes, and tweets are nice. But conversions are where the ROI is. Make sure to introduce conversion points, such as webinar and white paper offers, within your social media campaigns.  Simply direct anyone you are engaging with to a targeted, socailzed landing page where they can get your content. That way, you can give your highly engaged audience an easy opportunity to become a lead (and hopefully, a customer!).

Has social media marketing driven results for your organization? Let us know in the comments below.

5 Conversion Basics to Remember for Any Landing Page

When you skip over the basic conversion optimization fundamentals, your conversion rate will suffer.  As we create more and more advanced pages and are focused on incorporating the coolest new technology, we can loose site of these basic best practices.

What are these landing page basics? Let’s take a look and see if your landing page strategy is missing any of these essentials:

5 Conversion Basics to Remember for Any Landing Page

1. Focus on one thing

When it comes to creating or modifying your landing page, always keep to one goal – converting your visitor into a lead. Too often, landing pages include all kinds of added offers or verbiage that detract from simply converting the reader.

Although it may seem like a good idea to add more offers or try to sell something else, keep your conversion optimization basics in mind and just focus on the goal, and nothing else. 

2. Keep messaging uniform

Here’s one I’ve seen often: I click on a link from a PPC ad or an offer for a free demo, but instead of showing that same offer, the landing page gives me a switched message to sell me something different.

Your messages need to be consistent. That means maintaining message consistency from lead source (i.e. email, ad, blog post, etc.) to landing page – don’t try to “bait and switch” anyone. If you do, you’ll watch your abandon rates increase and conversion rates plummet. 

3. Wow with your headline

Just as with any other piece of content, if your headline doesn’t wow your reader, they won’t want to read the next line. Don’t skimp or think your headline isn’t worth putting in some effort and thought – it is and you’re conversion rates will prove it to you.

4. Remember spelling and grammar

You can have all the conversion optimization techniques down pat, but it won’t make much of a difference if your copy has errors in punctuation and grammar.

Bottom line is that errors diminish the reader’s confidence in your business and your offer. After all, many phishing sites and other risky webpages are riddled with spelling errors. For me, if I encounter poor grammar on a landing page I tend to err on the side of safety and click on the back button until I find a competing offer that displays professionalism throughout. 

5. Don’t confuse, just convert

Speaking of your landing page’s copy, don’t confuse your reader with a bunch of techno jargon – unless you’re confident that language will connect with target prospects. This isn’t just basic practice for landing pages: it’s just good writing. If you’re writing your copy aimed at sales professionals, but include words only engineers understand, you’ll surely see a drop in conversions.

Simply put, keep your copy easy to understand and write for your intended audience, without a bunch of overly complicated words or jargon that no one cares about. Impress your visitors with your service or product, not your vocabulary. To ensure your copy doesn’t become overly complex, ask a colleague to review. Often a fresh set of eyes will help point out any unnecessary or confusing text.

There you have it ‘5 Conversion Basics to Remember for Any Landing Page’. Remember, it’s not just about trying all the new and shiny strategies, it’s about converting prospects into leads and sometimes that requires getting back to basics.

Have any tips you’d like to share? Leave us a comment and let us know! 

Content's Triangle of Relevance

There’s a concept used by engineers to choose project completion biases which involves three things: Good, Fast and Cheap. The idea is that one tends to choose two out of the three qualities to determine a course of action, possibly at the expense of the third. For example, projects can be done fast at a low cost, but quality might suffer – or it could be done well and cheap, but it will take more time.

Now, did you also know there is a triangle concept for effective content that can be applied to landing pages?

Applying the Triangle Concept to Landing Pages

Developed by Angie Schotmuller, the ‘Triangle of Relevance’ is a content strategy that recognizes the following marketing project completion biases: Business interest, user interest and time significance. The content created by a brand, like a landing page, can be business interest focused and timed right, but might lack user interest. Alternatively, it could be timed perfectly and get users very interested, but lack a business focus.

How does a marketer find the perfect balance that encorporates all three points – particularly when it comes to landing pages?

Schotmuller wrote a great post that gives more detail on the triangle concept and how it can be applied to content marketing on Jay Baer’s Blog, Convince and Convert.

Schottmuller writes:

The key to magnetizing your content is effectively incorporating ALL three angles of relevance. The foundation of the triangle is business and user interests, but any angle can be used to initiate a relevant content concept. Time significance is often forgotten, and it’s also usually the most challenging to include.

Simply put, when crafting your landing page, ask yourself 3 questions: 

1. Does the landing page appeal to the user’s interests?
2. Is the landing page relevant now to visitors?
3. Does the landing page serve our business objective? 

Yes, it’s simple and it works – it’s just many marketers forget to plan, think about what their audience wants and tie it into what’s happening during that time frame.

Have you applied the triangle method when developing landing pages? Leave us a comment and let us know!

Week 1: Best of A/B Testing - DHL Ethnicity & Gender Testing

Welcome to our six-part blog series entitled “Best of A/B Testing.”  Every week we will be showcasing a customer A/B test, along with testing results and learning. 

This Tuesday, we are  showcasing a two-part A/B test from DHL Australia, an international leader in courier, express and parcel delivery services.

Which courier image increased lead conversion rates 30%?

Test 1: European vs Asian
Traffic source: Pay-per click advertising on Google
Market: Australia 
Test Type: Imagery; testing ethnicity & gender

Hypothesis: A European courier image will drive more lead conversions than an Asian courier image because Australian searchers will find a strong emotional connection to a European courier (90% of Australia’s population is of European descent).
 

Results: Surprisingly, the Asian courier drove 30% more lead conversions than the European courier. It is interesting to note that over 8% of the Australian population is of Asian descent (predominantly Chinese, Vietnamese, Filipino and Indian).

After the initial ethnicity test, DHL continued to test imagery. The second A/B split tested gender, a female against a male courier of Asian descent.

Which courier image increased lead conversion rates 15%? 

Test 2: Female vs Male
Traffic source: Pay-per click advertising on Google
Market: Australia 
Test Type: Imagery; testing gender 

Hypothesis: A female courier will drive more lead conversions than an male courier because previous testing results (in Norway) showed female imagery as a strong driver of conversion.

Results: The female Asian courier drove 15% more lead conversions than the European courier, similar to results in Norway, where female imagery resulted in a 25% increase in lead conversions.

DHL operates in over 220 countries and territories, and specializes in providing customers with customized transportation solutions from a single source. 

In 2010, Global Digital Marketing Specialist, Rolf Inge Holden, adopted LiveBall and deployed the software to marketing departments in 50 markets. Since, DHL has created landing pages in over and 200 countries and territories in the Americas, Europe and Asia. Learn more.

7 Ways to Add "WOW" Factor to Your Landing Pages

Looking for a way to engage your visitors or present content in an interactive way?

Consider adding rich, layered and interactive motion content to your pages to help you add the wow factor your competitors are lacking. Rather than spending exorbitant amounts of money on custom Flash or javascript, utilize a landing page platform that gives you sophisticated, dynamic templates that empowers you to make beautiful pages with lots of “wow” — no code or development resources needed. 

• Improve your speed to market
• Reduce your reliance on production resources
• Entirely dynamic for marketer-managed updates

Tabs, accordions, rotators and lighboxes allow for “on page” content exploration, without sacrificing conversions. Make the most of your landing page real estate by incorporating one or more of these seven interactive elements.

1. Tabbed Content
Try using tabbed content to showcase product and/or service features.

2. Accordions
Accordions allow you to maximize space and and offer an interactive way to display and control large amounts of content. Accordions are especially useful for displaying information within mobile experiences.

3. & 4. Content & Product Rotators
Interactive rotators give you several dynamic ways to feature product imagery, testimonials and reviews.

5. Layered Content
Try layering content over images, without outsourcing to a designer. 

6. Lightboxes
Trigger forms, special offers, or additional information (such as privacy policy) to be displayed in lightboxes. 

7. Social Widgets
Last, but not least, add social widgets allowing visitors to ‘Like’ your page on Facebook, share on Google+ or tweet from their handle. 

So, where, you may ask, can I find a landing page platform that can offer these “wow” features? Right here, of course!

Every “off the shelf” LiveBall platform comes with the above functionality. No code or Flash required. Ready-Made Widgets are completely dynamic and customizable — just use the widget editor to add your images, content, links. Many of the elements even support conditional logic!