Earlier this month the Marketingsherpa Blog featured some tips from our very own Pardot partner, B2B marketing consultant Todd Miechiels. I thought the information was valuable and worth repeating. Todd’s “7 Cardinal Sins of B2B Search Engine Marketing” includes tips like setting a concrete goal such as cost per qualified lead, focusing on developing your value proposition and investing time and money early on to see if PPC is right for you (if not, just move on).

Marketingsherpa jumped in with one final idea:

- Sin #8. Neglecting your PPC landing pages

The focus of this advice is on taking the time to refine your pages, keeping in mind that it all well and good if your keyword gets a prospect to the page, but then you have to get them to convert. An easy way to start optimizing your landing pages for conversion is to make sure your headlines and images speak directly to the corresponding keywords. If they click on an ad about email marketing, make sure the page they land on is about email marketing and not just a general page with your company logo. Other things to keep in mind are the basics we always preach – form length, call to action message and a compelling offer.

Find more optimization tips in our Forms and Landing Pages Best Practices area.

In terms of lead generation efforts, HubSpot’s Brian Halligan suggests marketers concentrate their efforts on inbound, rather than outbound, marketing.  What exactly is the difference?  Outbound involves pushing your message out to consumers, in the hopes that you will catch their eye.  However, as consumers are faced with a glut of mass media, standing out becomes more and more difficult and your audience becomes less and less willing to lend a listening ear.  You will get the best response if you’re reaching out to those who sought you first – enter inbound marketing.

Inbound marketing involves attracting prospects to your online content via search engines, blogs, or social media sites.  Reaching out to these specific individuals is a lot more effective than casting a wide net because you have already established a degree of familiarity and credibility with this audience.  This means the rules are also different, as Mark Roberge, VP of Sales at HubSpot, explains in this video. Roberge offers tips for sales professionals at the front lines and at the top.

The Sales Representative, he says, must remember that the lead found you and already has a degree of familiarity with your product and service such that it’s unnecessary to keep emphasizing your selling points.  Rather, focus your communication on finding out more about them, discovering their pain points in order to tailor your company’s offering to their particular needs.

His advice to the Sales Manager involves measuring the performance of the sales representative.  He suggests measuring the yield on each lead, as opposed to a rep’s dials and opportunities.  Also, encourage sales reps to research their leads in terms of where they are coming from, and their previous engagement with your company and web content.

Lastly, for the Sales Executive, Roberge’s advice is to focus on the right leads.  There will be a large number of leads, meaning you might be tempted to change your company to satisfy all of their business needs.  To that point, he gives the advice, “Focus on the leads that are right for your business, and think about expanding your business later.”

This advice points to the benefits of having a marketing automation system that allows you to manage your inbound leads effectively.  To be able to filter those inbound leads by quality, and focus only on those farthest along in the sales cycle, lead scoring and grading is key.  The online body language that goes into these metrics is then useful to the sales representative, as they frame their informed conversation with the prospect.

MarketingProfs featured a blog post earlier this week from Listrak, an email marketing vendor, who offered some quick best practices to follow when putting together a new email marketing campaign. These tips are also great for starting a drip program, which is essentially just an automated email campaign that takes all the work out of it for you.

• Advertise What’s Next -In our drip programs, we include an introduction email that lets people know that they can expect several emails over time that will provide them additional information about their area of interest. You could also preview a topic that will be coming soon to keep reader’s interest. This ties directly in to the next tip…
• Tell a Story – If possible, it can help keep a prospect’s interest if you tell a story with your emails. This way they are all connected in the reader’s mind and they may even be excited to see what will come next. Center your campaign around a common theme or idea and consider using something catchy like a “Top 10″ list.
• Respect & Empower Subscribers – Of course, all emails sent through Pardot will include the required unsubscribe tag, so you’ve built in the ability for uninterested prospects to opt out. However, a better idea is to give them a chance to hang on but update their preferences. Maybe their interest has changed, or perhaps they don’t want to be part of the educational series but do want to stay up to date on new product information. The public preference center is easy to activate and can be inserted using a tag in your emails.

Read the full Listrak post.

Many companies implement marketing automation to take care of one specific need. Perhaps for you it was an email solution, a landing page builder or a way to track anonymous visitors on your site. Well, we’re glad you’ve joined us. Now that you’re here, you’ve hopefully got your initial needs all taken care of.

Pardot has a lot of different functionality and we know that not everyone has the time and resources to jump in head first during your first couple of months. In the next few blog posts, I’ll discuss some specific areas of the marketing automation suite that you may want to take advantage of and address frequently asked questions about advanced functionality. Look for tips on site search, scoring, useful custom field ideas, drip marketing and more.

In addition, for many of you, it won’t be long until you get a call from Kathryn Honderd, our Pardot Client Advocate. Kathryn is the newest member of our services team, but unlike those you’ve worked with in the past, she will focus on building post-implementation relationships with all clients to make sure you are taken care of throughout your time with Pardot. Kathryn can help introduce you to any features you’ve yet to try and get you started on the right track.

If there are specific areas of the application you want to learn more about, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us here on the blog or let Kathryn know if you speak with her!