About Matt Lazas

Matt is the Content Expert at Informous.

Follow Matt on Twitter or LinkedIn.

Matt Lazas

By Matt Lazas
On October 20, 2011
View Comments Comments

E-commerce in B2B

E-commerce is booming in B2B.  According to a recent study performed by BtoB Magazine,  only about 35% of Business-to-Business marketers are involved in some way with selling directly online, but a whopping 58% of companies have an increasing commitment to the channel.

Given that consumer e-commerce is completely mainstream, it’s not surprising that B2B also is going “e-tail.”

Of course, part of what is moving B2B players to adding clicks to bricks when it comes to selling is the prevalence of simple, low-cost “online store platforms” such as Shopify and Spree Commerce.The conventional wisdom has been that e-commerce is too “impersonal” to move complex, big-ticket items.  However, companies like Willow Grove, PA-based Manncorp Inc., which sells robotic equipment for making circuit boards, are true believers in BtoB e-commerce.

Manncorp’s products range in cost from $50K to $200K, and are sold only online.  The firm, which was founded in 1968, has technical sales people readily available via phone and email, but amazingly, has NO outside sales people.

Tracking E-commerce Performance

If you’re considering e-commerce, a key metric to understand is  ”shopping cart abandonment,” whereby a user fills a cart with one or more items, but then does not conclude the buying process.  Some imagine that all abandoned carts are bad news, but the fact is a high percentage of users will “game their purchase” in your online store, then call, email, or enter into Live Chat, to close the deal.

It’s the need for new sales opportunities that’s driving Packaging, Plastics and other industrial companies toward greater involvement in B2B e-commerce.

Referring back to the  survey,  34% of the BtoB Magazine respondents indicated new sales as their key motivation, and 24% said they’re compelled by the expectations of their customers that some form of online purchasing be available.

B2B transactions are much more complex than B2C transactions, and often require the involvement of multiple decision makers.  The survey’s results support this notion, citing that 73% of respondents reported having to deal with an average of more than three individual decision-makers during an e-commerce transaction, and 28% reported five decision-makers are typically engaged in the process.

To support this additional complexity, B2B online stores need to deliver the following:

  • Volume Pricing Discounts
  • Custom Quotes
  • Credit cards as well as traditional purchase orders and perhaps even lines of credit
  • Easy access to support personnel via phone, email and live chat and with extended hours beyond 8 am – 5 pm Monday through Friday.  LivePerson is an example of a leading chat platform provider
  • Resellers as needed, perhaps with a quasi e-commerce process, whereby the final transaction is handed off to a channel partner, or the partner is compensated for online transactions that originate in their geographic area.

This increased complexity causes much longer sales cycles, 82% of  the survey respondents said the e-commerce transaction period averages “weeks or months.”  So while e-commerce in B2B is not as swift and simple (one decision-maker) as in B2C, it is still well worth pursuing.

Comment below if you agree, or disagree, based on what you’re seeing in your market.

 

View Comments

Share
Matt Lazas

By Matt Lazas
On October 7, 2011
View Comments Comments

Content is Good, More is Better

Companies these days don’t just need to build great products … they also need great content (and distribution!) to raise awareness of these products.

According to the Maria Pergolino, Senior Director of Marketing at Marketo (a company that offers a  hosted platform for Revenue Performance Management), marketing and other supporting content should be shared across all platforms such as blogs, white papers, videos, widgets, tweets, email and direct email, email or snail mail to support an organizations products and offerings.

Per Ms. Pergolino:  “Content also helps build trust and consistency for your brand. When your sales team’s messages match your other content you become a reliable, trusted source of information.”

Once you create contextual, current and compelling content (three Cs), what do you do with it?  The quick, and often too simple answer is post it on your website and share it via Twitter et al.  It’s a good start, but there are many other ways to gain free distribution.

Do the research to identify precisely where your prospective buyers go on the web. Say that buyers in your world go to the website associated with a traditional trade magazine, a content-based platform such as Informous, and a traditional directory  site.

Check out www.compete.com and type in the URLs of your target sites to see just how many visitors each one attracts. You can then prioritize the resulting list based on unique monthly visitors. Down the road, you can further refine your list based upon which segments convert to customers at the highest rates.

But don’t just trust YOUR view of where your prospects go on the web– ask them, you may be surprised.  Given the decline of most B2B print magazines, the key sources of information on the web have shifted significantly in the last 24 months. In fact, most B2B purchasing research now begins on the web.

So creating and adding lots of content to your site is great for horizontal search as Google will spider your content and index it.   But also seriously consider Vertical Search as prospects are increasingly using very specific ‘narrowcast’ sites to make their search for products far more efficient, and to easily go from being in a research mindset to purchase mode.

How are you using content to generate business? Comment and let us know.

 

 

View Comments

Share
Matt Lazas

By Matt Lazas
On September 22, 2011
View Comments Comments

Building A High-Performing LinkedIn Company Page

LinkedIn Company pages have dramatically increased the opportunities for small-to-medium sized businesses to level the playing field with the larger, better-capitalized firms.

LinkedIn has about 100 million registered users worldwide, and is still rapidly growing– see it here.

Creating your LinkedIn Company page is FREE and can really drive visibility of your business.

Begin by determining if you’re creating a page for your Company from scratch– or one already exists.  Search here.

And here’s the information you’ll need to complete to make your firm standout on the #1 business networking platform–

Company Name
Make sure the Company name listing matches the exact name you and other employees use in your personal profiles.

Admins
Two choices: either all employees with a valid email address registered to your domain or you can designate certain users to be Admins.

Logos
Logos can be uploaded as a standard logo as well as a square logo that will be used for network updates; this is very important to make your Company page pop.

Company Description
Describe your firm’s offerings and who you sell to.  You can even add tabs reflecting discrete Products & Services.

Specialties
Include keywords that describe what you do in this section; remember LinkedIn is a search-centric content platform. LinkedIn only gives you 256 characters to describe your Company’s specialties, so be succinct.  Two or three word descriptions are acceptable, too.

Twitter & Company Blog
LinkedIn will automatically add your Twitter updates and blog feeds so your Company page stays current.

News Module
This optional module displays search results that shares news about your Company, however, it may ALSO show stories that don’t relate to your Company, except in search terms.  If your Company is not making a ton of news, it’s best to pick “don’t show news about my Company.”

Company Type, Size, URL
Under Company type and Company size, you’ll select from options.

Industry, Operating Status, Year Founded
Main Company industry means you choose from the LinkedIn categories.  Then select Company operating status and the year founded.

Locations
The last step is physical locations:  You can add up to five different “bricks & mortar” addresses.

Careers
JOBS is one of the biggest growth areas for LinkedIn– you can post a job on your Company’s careers page with ease.

Here’s the Informous Company page; naturally it talks about our Plastics and our Packaging websites.  And of course, we’d love to connect with you on LinkedIn, I am here.

 

View Comments

Share
Matt Lazas

By Matt Lazas
On September 8, 2011
View Comments Comments

The Importance of Keywords in Website Design

Websites are increasingly well designed these days—the graphics pop, the layout is crisp and clean.  Gone are the days of flashing banners and crazy fonts.  Yet a major challenge still remains, once my site it built, how are people finding it?

The first, best, and least expensive way is to make sure that you identify and use the right keywords within your site so that the search engines can understand what your site is all about.  Many  good looking B2B websites are masterfully designed to maximize user experience and emphasize the right prose. Nonetheless, digital marketers still find they rank too low on search engine results and end up missing a large volume of potential visitors.  When this happens, it’s time for Keyword Research.

Keyword research should always be where you begin in any Search Engine Optimization (SEO) project.  It’s best done before you redesign a website, but you can also do it later by going back and updating any poorly performing web pages. Building a high quality keyword library may seem like an overwhelming task, but there are actually hundreds of free online tools that remove a huge portion of the time and effort from the process.  One tool, a personal favorite of mine, is www.wordtracker.com. It has a free level as well as a premium level (thus “Freemium), and is arguably the industry’s leading keyword research tool with a giant database containing over 300 million search terms.

With a few clicks on freekeywords.wordtracker.com you can discover:

     

  1. The related words you should consider when designing your site
  2. Long Tail versions of the word or phrase you type in (70% of searches are Long Tail, or 3+ words)
  3. The number of searches per day across the top search engines notably, Google and Bing

Wordtracker and similar tools charge around $50/month for their premium offerings. Subscribers to these premium services can typically utilize a Thesaurus to find related phrases and synonyms, then click on interesting words and easily add them to a “basket.”  Also, one of the most valuable keyword tools offered allows you to  find out precisely what keywords your competitors are using, giving you an opportunity to evaluate their tactics, while tailoring your competitive strategy.

So however you play the Search game –  Organic or Pay-Per-Click, words matter. Find the right words, and build them into the content on your site.  Have any other tools you find useful? Comment away below….

View Comments

Share
Matt Lazas

By Matt Lazas
On August 24, 2011
View Comments Comments

Digital Content Marketers: PDFs Matter

You’ve seen PDFs — it’s a very common and effective file-format, and deploying them right on your own website is easy … and essential.

Created by Adobe Systems in 1993, the Portable Document Format (PDF) is an open standard for document exchange.  This file format is used for representing documents in a manner independent of application software, hardware and operating systems.  Each PDF file encapsulates a complete description of a fixed-layout flat document, including the text, fonts, graphics, and other information needed to display it.  Very “WYSIWYG” – What You See Is What You Get.

This file-type allows you to digitally share your documents with anybody, without worrying about the information in the documents being altered or rearranged in any way.  Essentially, a PDF is a digital piece of paper that you can share with whomever you’d like, just as you would a conventional document.

There are 3  good reasons to have key documents on your website also available as PDFs—

1.  PDF Files Print Better – When you include a PDF format of important content on your website such as a product brochure, it gives your audience an easy, reliable way to correctly print the information.  Unlike HTML code, PDF documents faithfully print in the exact same format as seen on the computer screen.

2.  Portability – Including a PDF format also gives your audience a facile way to download the information they need.  This thus gives any given user the effortless ability to share your content with others inside or outside their organization.

3.  Syndication – Reaching the right customers with your Sales & Marketing content is not a simple function of placing it on your website.  It’s smart to “fish where the fish are” — disseminate your content to the very vertical search sites and content portals where your prospective buyers are conducting product research … and make sure you have metrics regarding how your content plays month-in-and-month-out.  PDFs are a smart way to seed your content in other places, because it then shows up on user screens precisely as you intended.

Don’t have PDF documents now?  Worry not, there are good free services such as PDFcrowd that allow you to take HTML and other document types and create good-looking PDFs with just a mouseclick.

How do you deploy content on your site, and other relevant industry sites?  Comment below; we want to hear from you.

Matt Lazas is the Content Expert at Informous, working with Plastics & Packaging companies to make sure they leverage every inch of the Informous Content Marketing Platform.

View Comments

Share