Back to the Basics: A Method for B2B Success in 2018

Hi, and welcome to today's Biznology digital marketing webinar. I'm Mike Moran, founder of Biznology and senior strategist at Converzion, Revealed Context, and Solo Segment. I'm the author of Search Engine Marketing Inc. and Outside-In Marketing and sole author of Do It Wrong Quickly. I'm a veteran of IBM, managing groups on IBM.com for 8 years and retiring from IBM in 2008 as a distinguished engineer. Today you'll be hearing from Garrett Meergut, who will present Back to Basics: A Method for B2B Success in 2018. But before we start, we need to recognize our sponsors. Garrus Corp., a full-service digital strategy firm that reaches deeper into the conversation than any other agency anywhere. Mountaintop Data is a B2B marketing intelligence company providing marketing lists as well as data cleaning, data appending, and data maintenance services. SoloSegment, analytics that unlock the revenue trapped in your site search. And Directive Consulting, the B2B search marketing agency. As we wait for a few more attendees to join, let's review the format of our webinar. Our Biznology webinars last just 30 minutes. You can easily fit them into your busy schedule. We record each webinar and we'll email you that link later this week. During our presentation, you can use BigMarker to chat with your fellow attendees. Just type in the chat tab. There you can also see tweets about our webinar. Feel free to tweet with the hashtag #BizNoWebinar. If you have a question to ask our speaker, click the Q&A tab. I'll select a few questions at the end of our webinar and pose them to Garrett. Lastly, in the handouts tab, you can find a PDF of today's presentation. Thanks again to all of you for spending 30 minutes with us. We know how valuable your time is, so let's introduce today's speaker. Garrett Margutte is the CEO of Directive Consulting, an industry-leading B2B marketing agency serving mid-level enterprise firms with Industry-trusted SEO, PPC, content, and social. On average, Directive Consulting increases organic traffic by 135%, decreases cost per acquisition by 32%, and increases inbound lead volume by 84%, all in the first 6 months. So if you've ever struggled with B2B digital marketing, this is certainly the webinar for you. Garrett, take it away.

Hey, thanks, Mike. Those are some nice words, and I appreciate the introduction. Thanks to everybody joining us. I'm excited to dive in with you today. It's a little bit more of how we can get back to the basics of search marketing and start to make a larger impact on our results. The big thing that we see here at Directive Consulting and that I'm confronted with every day is we have an industry that's chasing the latest shiny toy and the latest tactic all the time. And tactics and latest tendencies are great. They make big impacts. And I personally love to do it, right? There's these little tiny shiny objects and tricks and hacks, and this is what somebody over at this other company is trying. And I'd say the reality is, is for almost all of us, if we focused on some basics and were more consistent there, we'd actually get a lot more results from everything that we're doing in our B2B marketing. And so today we're gonna dive into what those can look like and how we as B2B marketers can start to unpack these kind of hidden gems for success that are right in front of us. The first kind of basic that we wanna look into and understand is design. And the reason design is so critical is because the perceived value of your product or service is what matters most at first. And so the reason I want to harp on design is because I think we have a tendency as marketers to think that all we need to do is increase our traffic. And I know Mike can probably agree with me on this, given his kind of background and what he focuses on. And the reality is that sometimes the bucket, our business, isn't ready for more water. There is a certain lack of value that our bucket can capture because we don't communicate effectively the value of our product or service through our design. You see, if you sell a SaaS product and you sell software, the perceived interactions of the actual software that are going to be used are driven by the website. In other words, someone lands on your website, and if they really like the website, their natural assumption is I will also like this product. Let's look at a couple examples. Both of these companies give a marketing CRM, okay? So you have Zoho as one option or HubSpot. And you might say, okay, but HubSpot has this far larger budget, right? And you can start to see what's the brand quality between Zoho, who has this type of design work, or HubSpot, with this, and I think that it's quite evident that HubSpot would be a superior product by only the design. Now if that's actually true, you won't know until you actually sign up, but if you're doing your research, which one will you sign up for, right? And so I think a lot of what we drive our conversions from is the design and the value and the perception. And I think the reason we get in trouble Is that we've been kind of tricked. We think as marketers that we want to go to one agency to just handle our website for us. This is what I hear all the time. Now, by the way, I don't even sell web design work or this type of design work, so this is just coming from somebody who works with clients in the B2B space every day and sees the same struggles. People are spending $125,000 on their new website. $200,000 on their new website, though it's $50,000, whatever that price is, depending on the company and what type of website they're building, they can always spend less and, in my opinion, get a better product if they separate the design from the developer. And so step 1 of this process is to find a designer you love. So go through freelancers, go through individuals. If you want to try to figure out how to build and rebrand at an affordable rate, Here's kind of my recommendation. Find a freelance designer that you love. Have them wireframe out the perfect design for your website that you approve of, that you can sign off on. Have them build it in Zeplin. Zeplin's an interactive app. It allows you to essentially build a fully clickable website, fully functioning wireframe without any backend. In other words, the designer can do this and the designer specializes only in doing this part of it. Then once you have it all approved and you love exactly what you've done, take that design, which you can get for less than $5,000, by the way, depending on the designer and the freelancer. But I mean, you can find a world-class designer to do this for you or do it— have an in-house designer do it and just have it completely approved. Then once it's fully approved and you love what you've built and you signed off on it, then go to a place like Codable. And you can find a vetted, approved WordPress developer who's awesome, that you have all your money in escrow, so you're protected from the risk, who they can replace if the developer isn't working well for you and you just need someone different, all for the same quote you initially got based off your fully built-out wireframe. And by the way, developers love this because now there's no scope creep as long as you stick to your fully built-out wireframe, which you approved. And because of this, you can get your web project done exponentially faster and you can get a world-class website by having people do only what they're best at. And I truthfully love specialization. I think it's one of the most powerful things as marketers we can do is find specialists. That's why at Directive Consulting, we only do deep SEO expertise, deep PPC expertise, and the person who does the SEO isn't the same person who does the PPC. These are critical differentiators that allow you to do great work when you have deep specialists. The next basic we want to talk about today is audience research. I think what we've come to in the B2B space is we've completely just forgotten and kind of missed a step in our marketing strategy to ask ourselves, how does your target market actually do their research online? How do they actually find things? So what I found is that traditionally, people are buying things now and doing their discovery online through kind of what I call the Amazon or Yelp effect. So Amazon and Yelp have changed the way buyers, B2B included, are doing their research. Instead of taking Let's see, just going straight to some ERP software you've heard about like NetSuite. They're instead asking themselves 3 different types of questions: top ERP software, best ERP software, and ERP software reviews, and they're doing their research. In fact, Google knows this so well that if you search top ERP software into Google, the number 1 result is an ad buy. So ad buys are— this is something I talk about and write about all the time. It's a tactic called share of SERP. So what's happening is these brands and Google is now ranking third-party sites that are doing independent research. By the way, you can pay for how high you are on these lists traditionally, and that is where you can drive paying for SEO. So Software Advice is a— is like a best top 10 type list. Capterra, another paid list. Finances Online, paid list. Paid list, paid list, paid list, and paid list. No result in the top 10 for the keyword top ERP software, which has the highest cost per click from Google AdWords, is any individual website. Every industry is going there. My own industry, if you search best SEO agencies, you're going to find clutch.co. That's a paid list. You're going to find 10 Best SEO. That's a paid list. You're going to find Top SEOs. That's a paid list. Every industry, product, software or services is going towards paid lists. Now, this is critical for us to understand because if you can be number 1 on a paid list, you can 6x your lead volume for the same keyword that you would be getting from AdWords because AdWords on average has a 2% to 5% click-through rate while the number 1 organic result for the same keyword has around a 30% click-through rate for B2B commercial queries. So what you're able to do is drastically increase your lead volume at a lower cost per opportunity by capturing third-party sites that are ranking for your bottom-of-funnel keywords. That's why it's so critical that you actually do your research and say, how would I buy ERP software when going through this process digitally? Now I want to show you some data from our accounts at Directive Consulting. We've built our own proprietary closed-loop analytics system running on MySQL and Data Studio. With this, you're going to find something incredibly shocking that we see across the board for our B2B clients. Now, most of my industry, and probably yourself, rely almost exclusively on their digital advertising and digital budget analysis and time and resource analysis on cost per conversion. They look in their Google Analytics, they see how expensive a conversion is. and how many it's driving, and then they reposition their spend. Now the problem is, is that your conversions from Google Analytics are not the same as sales accepted opportunities. In other words, you might think from your data that one channel is driving revenue, but in reality, it's another. So look at this data, and we see this across the board. AdWords is $126 in the cost per conversion. Software advice is $104. Remember, most of the time software advice is ranking organically and AdWords is above that for the same keyword, okay? So it's a fairly same marketplace, okay? So different channels, same marketplace. There's only a $22 cost per conversion difference in Google Analytics between software advice and AdWords. Now, because we use a bunch of different APIs to plug into their marketing CRM and their sales CRM, we can see their direct cost per opportunity. Notice software advice at $289 and 238 sales accepted opportunities. AdWords, $1,400 with 48 sales accepted opportunities. And what is that? 48 times 6, you're almost right around that same 6x volume number that we were talking about from the click-through rates. That right there is why it's so important to rethink how your audience actually buys, because the cost per opportunities are drastically lower when you can leverage third-party independent sites with reviews that leverage social proof, and that can really start to drive results for you. For basic number 3, we want to dive into content marketing, and content marketing has become this convoluted, poorly defined space. And I think we need to simplify it and just get back to the basics and ask yourself, what questions does your audience have before, during, and after they buy what you're selling? So if I'm a PPC agency, what you can do is a little trick called the wildcard. And I don't think I have a slide on this. No, I don't. So we're just going to talk about it. So if you were a PPC agency, let's say like ourselves, you would type PPC space agency and then use the underscore right after the Y. What that will then do for your target keywords you're looking at, we call this the wildcard, is it will show what all the top suggested keywords are from Google for around that, so the long tail. Now remember, your users are typing in your keywords, Google's giving them suggestions They're then modifying their query to satisfy the need they brought to that initial search. And what we found was pricing was a huge question that people had around PPC agencies. So what that lets us do then is write an article on PPC agency pricing to then educate the customer. You can set up retargeting and then show ads to them after they leave. The same principles will work for your business. So to do this, here's an amazing free tool. So the free tool I'm showing you right now It's called Answer the Public. With Answer the Public, you can take a seed keyword. Okay, let's say you're selling women's shoes. To do great content marketing for your women's shoe brand, you need to understand all the questions people have regarding women's shoes. So how wide are women's shoes? How to buy women's shoes? Are women's shoes narrower than men's? What women's shoes to wear with jeans? Right. So what you can start to say is, OK, what if we had an outfits column for all of our women's shoes and we talked about everything that you could pair our shoes with? Would that differentiate our shopping process and align ourselves with our customer? From this free research, yes, it would. Right. So everything you're trying to do is understand what does this buying journey look like and how can I create a world-class product and buying experience and then have content that satisfies both of those? Then you can even look at prepositions. So what are the women's shoes for? Can they do? Is near to with. So women's shoes with best arch support, women's shoes with best ankle support, right? So now you can say, oh, when we're doing our product pages, what are some of the features? What should we be able to filter our shoes by? What if we filtered our shoes by those with good arch support, or what if we filtered our shoes with those that go well with jeans, and you can start to do functional shopping that matches buying intent of why women are actually buying the shoes in the first place. You see, by understanding your audience and doing good content, you can reposition your product throughout the buying funnel. So let's go through this process. Step 1, we put our main keyword in AnswerThePublic and start to understand the questions people have. And the prepositions and the use cases they have. From that, we want to actually— in AnswerThePublic, you can export a CSV file, okay? Then what you want to do is upload that CSV file so you can start to prioritize. Now that you know all the different questions women have when looking for shoes, that's a great first step, but which articles do you write first? And what we like to prioritize our content by is search volume, difficulty, and brand fit. So you can upload those terms into a tool like Moz or Ahrefs or SEMrush, and you can start to see how difficult that keyword would be to rank for. What are the chances of getting a click-through rate from organic? And it'll give you a priority number based on these 3 metrics. From that, you can start to drive what content you should write first and what content you should write last, because prioritization is an important thing we do as marketers. Now, lastly, we're going to talk about attribution. Attribution is so important mainly because if you are doing all this awesome marketing and you're proud of what you're doing and you're driving all this success, you need to be able to attribute it to what's actually driving the success and convey that value so that your role as a marketer can be fully appreciated by the executive team, the finance team, and the sales team, all of which are directly involved in the funding and resources and respect you as a marketer in your department have internally or as an agency. And so because of that, we want to double down on asking this: are we creating opportunities, deals, and revenue from our efforts? It is 2018, guys, and simply reporting on traffic, conversions, keywords, and cost per conversion is not enough, you're essentially delineating yourself from what anyone cares about. If at any one time your conversions aren't directly correlated to opportunities, deals, and revenue, you literally marginalize and mitigate all of your hard work by misaligning yourself with those who are actually funding your efforts by not tying it back to the cash that actually comes back to you. And so because of that, it's important that you build a closed-loop analytics system so you can see that. You know, one way people are trying to do this is conversions, right? So this is what you'll see under your Acquisition tab in Google Analytics under Channels. You can see your different channels and what's driving conversions. But if you want to go to the next level, there's a tool that we use called Bizible, and Bizible actually lets you see how many contacts, opportunities, and deals have been created from all your different channels. This is a critical thing to look at because then you can start to see your cost per contact, cost per opportunity, and cost per deal. In other words, how is your top of funnel powering your bottom of the funnel? And if it isn't, maybe you need to reallocate spend into different channels. So Bizible is a great tool for attribution, or as a shameless self-plug, We've built our own tool that ties directly into your advertising APIs, SEO software like Majestic, SEMrush, Moz, and more, and ties directly into your marketing CRM, your sales CRM, all your advertising APIs, Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and more so that all your data is in one place and can directly be correlated to revenue. In other words, you've increased your link building, but what has that done to opportunities, deals, and revenue? Okay, you've driven down your cost per acquisition from Bing, what has that done for opportunities, deals, and revenue? And we always have to come back to that so we can align ourselves with what funds the business. So thank you so much, and I'm excited to answer any questions you all have.

Thanks, Garrett. I'm sure attendees have a much stronger idea of how to succeed in B2B marketing, but you didn't answer every question. I've got several good questions teed up for you, and I'd like to remind our audience that it's not too late to ask your own question. by typing it into the Q&A tab. We're about to start firing questions at Garrett, but first we need to thank our sponsors once again. Garrus Corp, a full-service digital strategy firm that reaches deeper into the conversation than any other agency anywhere. Mountaintop Data, a B2B marketing intelligence company providing marketing lists as well as data cleaning, data appending, and data maintenance services. SoloSegment, analytics that unlock the revenue trapped in your site search, and Directive Consulting, the B2B search marketing agency. So Garrett, first question is from me. I've got, uh, I've got a lot of experience working with site search, um, with SoloSegment and site, and SoloSegment spends a lot of time helping companies understand What kind of keywords people are using, understand which ones are working and which ones are not. And as you were talking about the need to understand what questions your customers are asking during the buyer journey, it struck me that site search is, is kind of an oft-overlooked way to do that. What's your take on that?

Yeah, no, I think site search is awesome. I think the problem is, is that With the site search, I think a lot of the B2B companies that we work with don't get a lot of searches unless they're e-commerce driven. So, I think obviously, you know, on the B2B side, I'd say majority of our clients are lead gen driven and not e-commerce, only just because the majority of the B2B market hasn't pivoted to e-commerce yet. I think that'll be happening within the next 2 years, and a lot of them are still going through distribution models there. Now, I would say if you have a critical mass, so after a certain amount of visitors, There's going to be a certain— a lot more traction in site search. I have like a small Shopify site I run on the side, and that'll actually pull my most frequented searches into my dashboard. And you can set that up in GA as well if you understand kind of the query string within the URLs. But I do believe site search is a great way to pull information from. The question is just how many searches are you getting a month? And then are those searches then based on questions people have due to your user experience and UI within your site compared to that of what they have in the buying journey for initially discovering your product or service. And so it really just depends on where they're at in the funnel. I think the site search is amazing data for conversions and making sure you're focusing on the right categories, collections, and products within the e-commerce site so that you can focus content into the right areas.

That's great. Yeah, our experience is that B2B companies often do have plenty of site searches if they're larger. So, but your points are really well taken. The next question I've got teed up for you is, I really was interested in understanding how you walk people through that design process. I thought that was a very clever approach of splitting the design from the coding and a good way to make that efficient. The question I have that I'm reading here is, How do you pick a good designer? And I'll just add to that, I myself don't really feel like I have a lot of skills in design. And so I think I understand what the questioner is asking. How do you go about knowing that someone's a good designer? I love the process that you had that split design from coding, but how do you know you have a good designer in the first place?

Well, I think past work is indicative of future work. And so what I would be looking for is for the designer that has a proposal, like a portfolio that you love. In other words, does everything that they're sending you— so their quote sheet, when they send you a quote, do you love the design of the quote sheet? Their portfolio, do you like what they've done in their portfolio? Does it look like they have their own style or they're always driven by the client? So does their work all look similar? Does it all look unique? If it's all looking different, and you're not a naturally designer person, I would shield away from it because that means that they're leaning very much on client feedback instead of their own system of design. And if you find one where all of them look the same, now you might get something less unique, but the reality is most freelance designers haven't designed that much within a marketplace that you're gonna probably still look fairly unique in your own marketplace. And at least then you're gonna have something that's gonna be predictive of what you've seen them design. And so I think the key for hiring and finding a good designer is looking at their portfolio to make sure that you resonate with that. And then also their own brand, their own website, their own quote sheet, their own email signature, their own logo. Like, do you love every part of what they've done for themselves and from others? And if you do, then move forward with them and have some fun.

Sounds great. Sounds great. You had mentioned earlier about the difficulty when B2B companies don't have any kind of e-commerce. And I know you had mentioned some difficulties with how to use the data from Site Search. It would seem to me that the attribution work that you were talking about is even a bigger difficulty. So the next— and that leads us to the next question that we've— that I'm reading here, which is, if you sell offline, What are the ways for you to connect the web experience to your offline experience so that you really are driving revenue? You're not just driving online conversions.

Well, all right, so what would be an example of an industry, Mike? Would you say like a software? So someone who sells software but doesn't like have self-signup on the site, so someone who does more demo-based selling?

Yeah, I think that would be a good example. I mean, other examples would be, people who sell services like you.

Yeah.

So you don't have a shopping cart, and so you're trying to figure out how to move people from online. Some people might have a CRM system, some people might be driving people to resellers or dealers, and I think that what the— I mean, I'm guessing here, but what I think the question means is what is it that you're doing That helps people to connect the dots when all the thing, all the action doesn't happen online.

Yeah, what we're really trying to do is you just need to bring your, all of your digital data and your sales data into the same database. And then you gotta be able to correlate where your sales data came from to what initially generated it. And you usually do that through a marketing CRM. That's the in-between. That's the Marketos, Pardots, and HubSpots of the world. And then what you're trying to do is then take where you initially acquired the lead from, document that in your marketing CRM, and then communicate that in your sales. Now, here's why what we built works and is so important, is because you don't necessarily get cost data from GA to marketing CRM to sales data in the same place. And so what we've done is we take the advertising APIs as well, and then you bring the advertising actual API, not the GA data. Into the database. And by going straight from all the APIs directly, you can get cost data into the same equation, into the same equation, which then gives you real return on ad spend because you can see directly how much it costs that deal to get into your Salesforce and then how much that deal closed for in your Salesforce when you change the category to Closed Won. And because of that, now you have a full picture of the actual cost per acquisition, not just cost per conversion.

Terrific, terrific. We've got time for just one more question. It says, what can we do to prepare ranking for voice search results? So I think really they're asking, as we go to more voice-first interfaces, how— what can we do to think about how SEO really works under those circumstances where being the number one result is everything?

Yeah. Well, first, I'm not necessarily convinced voice search is taking over as much as everybody else writing their clicky blog posts is. I just, I don't know. To me, there's still where voice search is not more efficient nor effective than typing yet. And so until that happens, I don't think we need to worry more about voice than written. But to take that into consideration, if you wanted to prepare yourself for voice search results, I would start to just ask myself, what would I— like, what voice searches would I make if I was looking for the product or service I'm selling? Run those, see who's showing up, and then look at the search engine results page and see what type of content is Google surfacing from those voice search queries that you're making on your own. And then after analyzing those results in the top 10, ask yourself, could I make a better answer to this question? and focus on better answering people's questions, and you're naturally going to do better. In regards to anything technically with JSON or schema or markup that'll help with voice, I'm not an expert in that. I don't do a ton of stuff on voice search. I would just ask yourself more, if someone was doing a voice search, what would that search even be? And then I would do it yourself, look at the results, and then say, okay, where are we positioned in this, and could we create a better answer for this voice search?

Well, that's all the time we have for today. I apologize, I think some of the— we had a little video problem there, but I just want to wrap up here and thank Garrett for these great ideas, and especially to our audience for your participation and your questions. If any of you had questions we didn't have time to answer, you can email your questions to eileen@mikemoran.com, and we'll do our best to get back to you.

Thank you, That's Mike.

eileen@mikemoran.com, and she'll be sure to get them to Garrett for the answer. Later this week, we'll send you all a link to the recording of this webinar to listen to again and to share with others. We also invite you to mark your calendars for our next Biznology webinar, Keyword Knowledge Graphs: Using AI to Create Outside-In Taxonomies, with James Mathewson, scheduled for 11 AM US Eastern Time on May 1st. We hope to see everybody back there then. Bye everyone.