Last Minute Landing Pages that Pay...

We’re all guilty of this one:

Your boss says, “We’ve got to generate more leads quickly – the sales meeting is next week. What can you do to help? Oh… and by the way, we don’t have any additional budget.”

So you spring into action with a low-cost email marketing campaign using your house list, but you don’t have the time to mobilize your already overcommitted web team to create a landing page. And you also don’t have the budget to use a more substantial call to action. So instead, your call to action is “click here for more information” – weak, but it’ll have to do.

At least avoid a common mistake that many marketers make. Don’t send your visitors to a generic upper level web page such as “Services” or even worse, a home page. Not only is it bad email marketing manners, it’s a real let down for your visitors who are expecting the message from the email to be continued with more details in the link. You’ll kill your response rate and even worse, frustrate your visitors. It also sends a bad brand message.

See for yourself. Try the following test and tell me what you think.

Destination #1
Pretend you’ve just received my email touting a method that will help your staff writers develop completely integrated campaigns in 25-30% less time. There’s no fancy call to action… just a hyperlink, “Click here to learn more.” Go ahead, click the link and see where you land.

Destination #2
Same scenario as above except the destination link is different. Click this link and see where you land.

Tell me which destination you preferred?

Click here for Destination #1

Click here for Destination #2

What not to do with your blog...

Here's another lesson straight from the "school of hard knocks."
In order for a blog to be successful, one of the first lessons is make it real.
Stop with the shameless self-promotion and provide relevant content written by a genuine person.

Well, Wal-Mart learned that lesson the hard way. Their blog, "Wal-Marting Across America," turned out to be a total fake... completely staged and written by professionals.

The blog was ghostwritten by a so-called average American couple traveling across America in their RV. Of course, they stopped at Wal-Marts along the way and blogged about the savings they encountered. I suppose it sounded a little too self-serving and the real identities of the actual writer's were revealed.

The moral of the story... blog readers will always sniff out a fake. It's o.k. to hire a writer to help you keep up with your blog, but the tone and approach must be geniune and not promotional.

Read the full story here.

Surefire Recipe for social Marketing Failure...

Wal-Mart, tried to apply conventional marketing and promotional tactics to its social marketing foray -- "The Hub." The result... "The Hub" got the snub!

Here's why. According to MediaPost's Shankar Gupta, visitors could tell that the site was all about promotion and less about community. It wasn't a genuine community of the people, for the people and by the people.

So what did Wal-Mart do about it? They abandoned the hub and put up a MySpace page, which the article says has been more successful. Read the full article here.

And what's the lesson here for B2B social marketers?
Don't be selfish... social marketing isn't about you, it's about your audience. What do they want, how do they want it and what can you do to facilitate the process? Here's a hint: sometimes the content comes from sites other than your own.

Now integrate this into your promotional campaigns and you've got the recipe for a successful program.

More on "Engagement"

A week ago I talked about a new marketing metric -- engagement.

Apparently it's taking the marketing world by storm. In fact, there was a recent Consumer Engagement Conference, sponsored by the Advertising Research Foundation and the American Association of Advertising Agencies.

Here's an interesting blog post about engagement by Max Kalehoff. He's a writer for Media Post's Online Spin blog.

Could MySpace "Corporate" Be Far Off?

Social marketing is definitely fashionable for B2C marketers. They're cleverly integrating it into their marketing mix to build their brands and get more business. So what's that have to do with B2B marketing?

Well, you don't necessarily have to slap up a MySpace profile to integrate social marketing in your B2B programs. When you think about it, social marketing has been around for a long time in the B2B space. Trade shows, conferences and other events are forms of social marketing and networking. However, web 2.0 is making online social marketing easily accessible to the masses.

By creating communities around specific business challenges and enabling a dialog between you, your customers and prospects, you'll establish a social marketing network. It's a great way to leverage your companies intellectual assets.

IBM thinks so too. In fact, according to a recent CNET article, IBM's Lotus Division is including a social networking funtion into its collaboration suite.

Wow... that could be great for knowledge transfer. It could also become the"virtual water cooler."