Online Marketers are Creepy, but they don’t have to be! Last week, I shared the results of an informal survey about banner ads promoting a site or product you recently viewed. More than 90% of the people I spoke with had a distinctly negative view of these ads and the few that liked them were marketers.

However, retargeting does not need to make online marketers creepy. Here are 7 points to keep retargeting from turning you into a creepy B2B web design marketer.

Frequency Cap

Retargeting ads often run with high frequency caps because the results are good and marketers try to “buy more.” The problem is, you can only buy more by reaching the same people more often, inundating your audience with retargeting. Set your frequency cap at one to two impressions per day.

Opt Out Customers

Do not continue to retarget someone after they have converted. Adding a pixel to a conversion page is an easy step, but don’t forget other pages that would indicate someone has already converted, like client logins.

The experience Jure Klepic commented on last week (see his comment) indicates Hostgator isn’t thinking about how to identify customers. Most likely, they remove people from retargeting when they convert (purchase hosting), this is an easy step and one most providers recommend. However, Hostgator likely didn’t consider the fact customers come to their homepage to login to their account, and did not add an optout pixel to the login process or on customer pages, an easy solution.

Consider Context

Limit your retargeting campaign to content that is contextually relevant or on an adjacent topic (for instance, business content for an enterprise technology offering). For example, most B2B marketing is very out of context on sites like Parents.com or WebMD.com, and drawing your audience back from a personal context to your business offer or content is a significant hurdle, even when you are reaching the right person.

Staying in contextually relevant areas limits the chance your audience feels your banner ads are following them around the web.

Use a Single Provider

You cannot apply a frequency cap if you use more than one provider. If multiple networks are running retargeting, each network will apply the frequency cap separately. A frequency cap of two run with three networks or providers is an effective frequency cap of six!

Restrict Performance Based Buys

Because retargeting is often one of the best performing tactics, performance based advertising buys (buys that either guarantee results or are optimized by the network provider based on results) often use retargeting without a specific lineitem. You can control this by limiting the pages each network’s tracking pixels are placed on.

Be Creative

Consider how you would follow up with a prospect by email or in other channels, and apply that same thinking to the creative you use in retargeting. When implemented correctly, retargeting reaches some of your best prospects, make the investment in creative that positions your offering and addresses potential concerns. Price-based offers are ok, but the same offer repeatedly quickly wears out.

Monitor

Visit your site regularly from your home computer or mobile to see how you are then retargeted. Assuming all of your buys are with OBA compliant providers (they should be, learn more at www.aboutads.info), you can easily tell what provider is running an ad.

Bonus: Add an Opt Out

I have never seen this done, but it would be simple to execute. Add a small Opt Out button to your banner that links to a page that includes your optout pixel and a brief explanation of how they just opted out.

Your Turn

As an individual, are these steps enough to make retargeting ads acceptable? As a marketer, is this too restrictive? What other steps do marketers need to take to limit the negative impact of retargeting ads.

Twitter announced a new interface, rolling out over the next few weeks, this morning. You can preview the interface and the new features at fly.twitter.com.

Compared to this change, the previous change to New Twitter (the current interface) was minor. This is a major change and for marketers, it is a far more interesting change. New brand pages give marketers a new home, but the changes to everyone’s stream is where the real opportunities are.

As a marketer, and particularly if you are a B2B marketer or focused on a niche market, here is why I believe you should care about the #NewNewTwitter (as it is being called today on Twitter) individuals are using:

1. Discover. Discover. Discover.

The integration of the Discover tab is a huge change for marketers. Individuals and marketers can be “discovered” now through their updates or the content they are sharing on a topic.

2. Media Integration

The integration of images has been significantly improved and video has been added. Small “View Image” and video links with a small icon give tweets that include media additional visual weight in the interface.

Here are things marketers will need to do to quickly take advantage of these changes as they are rolled out.

1. Use Keywords and Hashtags

Discover will make the use of keywords and hashtags more important than ever. Twitter’s “power users” have used search and followed hashtags or keywords, but the new Discover tab makes this a much more integral part of the interface and will increase the use of these features. Historically, content was shared on Twitter to be acted on (retweeted, replied to or clicked). Now, marketers will need to craft tweets for both discover and action.

2. Use Photos and Videos Liberally

The integration of photos and videos effectively allows you to share significantly more information directly on Twitter with a single tweet. B2B Marketing should integrate photo and video sharing if they have not already to take advantage of the additional visual weight these tweets have in the interface and the additional engagement they are likely to drive.

Aside: hopefully this is the end of “This video of you made me laugh” twitter spam tactics, now a “real” video could be attached directly to the tweet!

As a Twitter user, for me this is a primarily a new interface. However, as a marketer, the new interface looks to unlock a number of new opportunities to be discovered, share information and increase engagement. This might be the most important update to Twitter yet for marketers.

All marketing is integrated, even if it is unintentional, poorly done or working against itself. Marketing activity does not happen in a vacuum void of other influences.

What is the ROI of your social media activity? What is the ROI of search? What is the ROI of TV? Most marketers don’t actually know.

Traditional marketing organizational structures and measurements are built around individual components. Integrated B2B Marketing measurement requires focusing on the final outcome.

Imagine if you took the best individual ingredients, judged on their own merits, and made lasagna. Here are some of the ingredients my lasagna would have:

• Blue Cheese and Very Sharp Cheddar
• Spicy Pork Sausage
• Tomato Sauce with extra Basil and Fresh Tomatoes
• Noodles (actually, I prefer corn tortillas and a Mexican style lasagna, but we will keep a little tradition here)

Each individual ingredient is excellent, but the combination is horrific. (No, I’m not going to try it). By focusing on the ingredients, I created something far less valuable than its ingredients.

Like lasagna, marketing needs to be judged by the overall outcome, not the individual components. /> If your effort to improve an individual part of your integrated marketing mix isn’t improving the whole of your integrated marketing or your understanding of your marketing, then it has no ROI.

Here are two examples that will be familiar to people involved in online advertising in the last decade:

1. Search attribution. Search can be prompted by, and therefore often captures the response to, other online and offline marketing. The ability of online advertising and TV to lift search results is well documented. DRTV or online display campaigns managed in a silo may be prematurely cancelled. Likewise, search may receive larger budgets because it appears to be far more cost effective than it actually is.

2. Viewthrough tracking. If a company begins using an ad network and includes view through their tracking, performance can be dramatically overstated. I once worked with a client that was seeing flat revenue, but the online marketing group, based on view through tracking metrics, was claiming they had increased business by about 20%.

If you are measuring marketing activity in a silo, you are not measuring ROI. In fact, the measurement may be dangerous, providing bad data and leading to bad decisions. Measurement of individual marketing channels or activities provides information, not results.

So you want real social media ROI? Focus on the lasagna.

Many B2B marketers look to content marketing as a key part of establishing thought leadership. However, companies frequently expect the same content marketing program to capture contacts or leads as well.

The problem is, registration and thought leadership are at odds with each other. Thought leadership requires your point of view to be broadly distributed and recognized across a peer group, where it can drive discussion and shape opinions.

Requiring registration limits distribution and recognition of the content that is supposed to position your company as a thought leader.

Instead, thought leadership should be your door opener. As companies gain recognition for their perspectives or thought leadership, expectations of the quality of their content increase, and more people are willing to register for access.

Consider the lead generation activities of the following three types of marketers. Utilize your B2B web design to capitalize on them.

An Average Market Participant

Your company is known to a few, but the audience doesn’t recognize you for your research or perspective. Capturing registrations is an uphill battle, requiring you to establish the credibility and relevancy of every piece of content you offer in your lead generation program.

A Company Recognized for its Research or Insight

You have a distinct advantage if your company is already recognized for its research or content. The content you are using for lead generation is expected to be valuable, you only need to establish the information’s relevance to the audience.

The Category Thought Leader

Companies who are recognized as thought leaders have a sizable advantage. Not only do people trust the information will be valuable, they believe it is information they need to have to stay on top of their category. There is significant demand for access to their content and perspectives, and this demand translates directly into lead generation volume.

One of the best examples of this is Hubspot and the incredibly successful webcasts with Dan Zarella. Rather than receiving the hundreds or a couple thousand registrations that many publishers and marketers get for successful webcasts, Dan has done webcasts with more than 30,000 people. That’s bigger than a sold-out crowd at the largest NBA stadium!

Dan’s recognition as a thought leader allows Hubspot to run lead generation programs that are the envy of many marketers. But this success isn’t the result of their lead generation prowess, it is the result of the foundation of thought leadership they have developed.

If Hubspot had directly measured their initial thought leadership on lead generation, they would have missed the real long term lead generation benefits of their thought leadership efforts.

I was recently informed that every marketing blogger must publish their predictions for the year ahead. So to claim my status as a blogger and not put my right to use WordPress at risk, here are my 12 serious predictions for B2B marketing in 2012.

Content Marketing

Name recognition will rule. Flooded with content, audiences will turn to recognized sources. High quality editorial, analysts and recognized thought leaders will rise above the clutter based on their names and reputations.

Video will come into its own for B2B marketers in 2012. B2B marketers will use video as a way for subject matter experts to more easily create content. In addition, video will move beyond the website and social outlets and will be used to add depth to advertising messages.

Content will be designed to be easy to consume and share. Even today’s longer-form content will be broken into smaller pieces that facilitate quick consumption, feedback and sharing, which will be adopted as part of the quality evaluation of content.

Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing will continue to accelerate and will be a competitive advantage for companies providing high quality content. As inbound attracts more attention, 2012 will see more inbound marketing failures from companies that are not committed to content creation.

Social Media

Where is the ROI? The ROI debate will wage all year. While adoption will increase, without clear success measures of incremental business results, many businesses will continue to question ROI.

Social advertising. As companies enter social media late, they will turn to social advertising to develop an “audience” and as ways to extend digital media buys while satisfying internal requirements to test social media.

Media Buying

Brand advertising will shift towards demand. With complex messages and positions, advertising will be seen as the starting point for communication that supports a brand’s message and position. Creative and measurement will need to shift quickly to meet the new requirements.

Real time bidding platforms, ad exchanges and data exchanges will get a real foothold in B2B media buying. Fueled by availability of better data for display ad buying and increased accessibility of these platform, B2B marketers will use these platforms as a cost effective compliment to current online advertising.

Demand generation

Marketers goals will shift from capturing leads to nurturing contacts in order to create demand. This shift will extend nurturing from email and phone into advertising and social media in order to nurture earlier stage contacts.

Mobile

It will be the year of mobile . Mobile adoption will increase and marketers will progress. However, many B2B marketers will not have mobile websites or apps that are core to their business and few will make mobile a key consideration in the design of their corporate sites. In September, pundits will point to 2013 as the year of mobile in B2B.

Marketing Automation

Low cost providers and simplified solutions will make marketing automation accessible to even the smallest B2B marketers. This conversion will happen in part as email providers purchase smaller marketing automation providers and as lower cost solutions become a viable alternative to a traditional email service provider.

Marketing Analytics

Data isn’t enough, marketers will need to be smarter about how they use data. More B2B companies will adopt media mix modeling to judge the effectiveness of their channel mix and determine marketing’s incremental contributions. In addition, analytics will be used to refine existing segmentation and develop adaptive black box segmentation models.

Your Turn

What are your predictions for 2012 and where do I have it all wrong?

Innovative marketers constantly put new ideas into practice, and some of the most effective new ideas quickly become marketing best practices or emerging trends.

However, when marketing ideas initially move from early adopters to the majority of marketers, they tend to lose their luster. The incredible results the early adopters reported are not repeated.

This happens for two primary reasons:

• Early adopters have an intrinsic advantage. Unique marketing stands out, it is differentiated simply because very few companies are doing it.
• Early adopters have vision. Early adopters are not looking at a best practice and checklist, they are focused on reaching their audience in a way they believe will deliver marketing results. They have a clear vision for why their approach should work and they continue to evolve their approach in order to achieve their vision.

When you follow best practices and chase trends, you allow someone else’s vision to dictate your marketing approach. Essentially, you become a check-the-box marketer, with a list of marketing activities you need to accomplish. Without your own cohesive marketing vision, you risk taking good ideas and ruining them. Use good B2B SEO marketing approaches.

Consider the following examples:

• Social listening. A great opportunity for marketers focused on serving their audience, but it has been degraded into an excuse for spamming by some marketers. If you use Twitter, you have likely experienced this first hand.
• Retargeting ads. A great way to reach an interesting audience, retargeting has become annoying and even creepy.
• Content marketing. Content marketing is still on the rise, but we are already seeing the ill effect of marketers that are slaves to their editorial calendars and required content quantity leading to a deluge of mediocre undifferentiated content that doesn’t serve the audience.

Marketers are ruining these good ideas, proven by early adopters, by executing without a clear focus on their audience.

You cannot counter the intrinsic advantages of a successful early adopter. By definition, they had fewer competing marketing messages.

However, you can learn from their successes and mistakes and develop your own vision by focusing on how your marketing will uniquely meet the needs of your audience. Step away from your own marketing plan and look at your marketing through your audience’s perspective. Is it merely marketing noise or is it valuable?

If you are a B2B marketer entering 2012 with increased budgets for social media, content marketing, mobile marketing and marketing automation, consider how your investments will benefit your audience. Otherwise, you will become one more marketer ruining a great marketing opportunity.

Without marketing metrics, marketers cannot manage investments or show the value of marketing. However, without careful selection of metrics, diligent analysis and a clear overarching vision, those same metrics can become the biggest barrier to successful long-term marketing programs.

Short term metrics are easily gamed, and it often happens unintentionally. Here are a few common metrics for B2B marketing users and ways some businesses influence the metric without driving long-term results.

• Is social sharing a success measurement for your content? If so, as Mark Schaefer’s post shows, a few more posts about Klout will make you successful on paper.
• Is traffic a key goal? High volume, low cost traffic sources will immediately help your metrics, but they may not improve your business.
• Is cost per lead a key metric? Reducing online display and traditional advertising investments based on performance will quickly lower cost per lead, but long-term it will hurt search results and leads from organic traffic.
• Is revenue key? Increasing your use of time sensitive promotions will definitely give you a short-term lift but it also creates a reliance on margin-eroding promotions.

Even good metrics can be misleading. If you don’t do all three items below, your marketing metrics will eventually mislead your marketing.

1. Pick the Right Marketing Metrics

With the wrong metrics, your investment in analysis and optimization is wasted. This should be obvious to everyone, yet we continue to hear about click rates on banner ads, a metric that is easily accessible but wrong for nearly everyone.

The wrong metrics lead to the wrong marketing investments.

2. Do the Analysis

Simply optimizing a campaign based on your success metrics may quickly improve measured results, but you will be left with a subset of your original plan.

Insight into why elements of your marketing performed well or missed the mark is critical. More than driving tactical decisions, insights improve all the marketing decisions that follow.

3. Follow Your Vision

If you are in enterprise B2B marketing, your metrics will never reflect the entirety of your vision and purpose and be granular and timely enough to use for ongoing management. Metrics may inform your vision, but purely following your metrics will lead you away from it.

Your Turn

How have you seen metrics mislead marketing or what other critical steps would you add? Share your views and find out more information with me on our B2B Marketing website.

In our most recent discussion, we looked at a number of social networks and how B2B marketers can take advantage of them, and once again I was pleased to have the opportunity to moderate the lively discussion.

Rather than a deep dive into a single network or objective, the discussion quickly touched on a number of social networks or platforms.

Participants identified a number of specific opportunities, however what was most apparent throughout the discussion is that social media is moving quickly. B2B marketers need to stay on top of the market if they are to identify and take advantage of new opportunities.

Note to self: It’s not going away so you need to learn more about Google+, Tumblr, Signal and Pinterest.

Highlights from the Twitter chat along with my comments on elements of the discussion are below, or you can view more information on the internet regarding the topic.

Join the Discussion

Add your own answer or additional thoughts to any of the questions in the comments below and join us for future discussions!

Are you a B2B marketer or interested in B2B marketing? Join #B2Bchat on Twitter, every Thursday at 8:00 PM Eastern time, follow our B2B Web Design site for more information on the topic.

Quite simply, the marketing content you create will never be good enough. You will need to produce better content every single day.

Today, someone trumped your content. Just now, they become a more useful source of information to your audience.

How Your Content was Trumped

Content quality is relative. As more companies focus on developing and producing quality content, the overall quality of content will improve and the expectations of content will increase. Your content may have been good when it was created, but now it’s merely average.

In content marketing, your competitors are not just product competitors. Analyst firms (irony: whose papers you may listen and distribute), media companies (who you purchase advertising from) and individual influencers are all competing to be your audience’s primary information source. B2B PPC campaigns also drive the inetnert maket.

Publishing companies are experts at building and serving an audience by meeting their needs. Increasingly, content marketers are vying for this position.

Breaking Your Internal Mindset

As content standards increase, focusing content on your internal needs while meeting the audience’s needs is increasingly difficult.

Despite the proliferation of persona development and buyer-centric marketing, a true external mindset continues to be a challenge for most corporate marketers. Consider how you handle situations like the following:

• Your audience’s priorities are mobile, cloud and security. Your solution doesn’t work on mobile devices or manage cloud-based applications.
• A key competitor released a major upgrade that includes a number of firsts in the category. These features have been well received in the market.
• You are sunsetting a product and dictating to your clients that they need to upgrade. The market sees it as a bad move and an opportunity for your competitors.

As a modern content marketer, how do you respond to these situations? If you publish research and best practices, but ignore mobile and cloud (first bullet), you are not serving your audience’s needs. Someone else will.

If you provide perspectives on the industry, but are not willing to cover the industry advances your competitors are making, someone else will. When they do, they will become the information source that is meeting your audience’s needs.

When you sunset a product, do you focus on the positives while sweeping the negative implications of resources or costs under the rug. When you minimize the negative implications your customers see, you send the message you are not listening to them. If you are not listening, you certainly cannot meet their needs.

Your audience is gold. Maintaining your audience requires putting them first. You cannot be a news source for only the favorable news, or the source of analysis that only shares analysis that fits your products perfectly.

In Summary

Content marketing is a never ending journey of continuing to refine your focus on meeting the needs of your audience better than anyone else. Last quarter’s content won’t be good enough this quarter.

Google, Plus Your World was rolled out just over a week ago, and the online world has adopted the rallying call to get onto Google+ for the SEO benefits.

Multiple articles point to brand pages as the solution. Publications from mainstream (“get your Google+ brand page into as many influential people’s circles as possible“) to niche “brands need to invest more time into promoting their Google Plus brand pages“ are misleading marketers.

The problem is, Google+ Brand Pages are not the ticket to SEO success. In fact, if you focus your Google+ efforts on your new brand page, you will miss the most important search benefits of Google+.

How “Google, Plus Your World” Works: A Brief Summary

Google, Plus Your World adds search results from your circles to Google’s traditional search results. To see SEO benefits from Google+, your site, pages and content need to become part of “Your Audience’s World” on Google+.

To maximize the traffic benefits, you need the Google+ account that shared the information to be an account your audience trusts. When this happens, you are in “Your Audience’s Trusted World”. This is the position that will improve B2B SEO search ranking and traffic.

Getting Into Your Audience’s Trusted World

There are three ways to get into Your Audience’s Trusted World. Each has its challenges.

1. Your Brand Shares Content With Its Audience /> When your brand shares content, your brands followers will be more likely to see that content in Google search results along with your logo.

Brand pages for SEO benefit have three key challenges:

• Developing an audience. There is no notification when you circle someone through your brand page (and hence no opportunity for reciprical follower development).
• Brands are not people. Following and engaging with people is more natural than engaging with brands, particularly lesser-known brands that don’t already have a strong following that naturally will migrate to social media.
• A brand’s recommendation doesn’t create an endorsement. Of course Ford Motor Company has shared information about the new Ford vehicles and Ford.com. In this case, Ford doesn’t have the necessary independence to to recommend a vehicle or a review.

2. Your Employee Shares Content With Their Audience /> Even if you have a well recognized brand, your employees are in more people’s circles than your brand page is. When your employees share your content, it will be in more of Your Audience’s Trusted Circles, as your employees have also established a level of trust with their connections.

Having your employees share your content presents its own unique challenges.

• Process. G+ still offers very limited automation, so employees need to be notified and then manually share content.
• Business and Personal separation. Many people separate their business and personal activity. Having employees share your businesses content may require changing corporate and employee culture.

How much further can employees reach?

According to Wikipedia, Ford has 164,000 employees. On Google+, Ford Motor Company is in 4,968 people’s circles.

The first 27 employees of Ford listed in Google+ search results (excluding Scott Monty) are in 9,923 people’s circles. Or put another way, just 0.016% of Ford’s employees can reach nearly twice as many people on Google+ as Ford’s brand page can, without including Scott Monty’s following of nearly 23,000.

3. Other People Share Your Content With Their Audience /> Third parties have the greatest independence, their recommendation of your content will have the greatest influence.

You have complete control over your brand page and have considerable influence over employees. When you focus on other people, you need to rely on the same three keys to social sharing you should be using in other social channels:

• Make your content easy to share. If Google+ is a key focus, you will want to experiment with the placement of the +1 button.
• Create content that is worth sharing.
• Promote your site and content to your audience.

In Summary

Can a brand page help? Yes, it certainly can. Some of the search benefits of Google+ Brand Pages were documented well before Google, Plus Your World was released. However, if your objective is to capitalize on SEO improvements using Google, Plus Your World, you need to get into Your Audience’s Trusted World through employees and independent sharing.