Sean Parnell
#fail: How to Completely Screw Up Your B2B SEO
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the most thoroughly understood subjects in digital marketing – just ask 20 different SEO experts for help and you’ll get 20 different plans.
Hire them all and presto! You’ve got… a lot of plans.
If that seems confusing, you could try to learn it on your own. Keeping up with Google is fun – there are only 500-600 ranking algorithm updates per year.
We’ve Seen It All
With a landscape that changes every couple of clicks, SEO know-how requires a lot of keeping up. But SEO know-how-not-to is its own kind of expertise as well.
We’ve optimized websites since the days of Lycos and AltaVista.
... Continue Reading >>5 Key Building Blocks of Successful B2B SEO
There are numerous components to search engine optimization (SEO) in business-to-business (B2B) marketing, so how do you know where to start. Here are five key building blocks that, once mastered, will increase traffic for any website by 30-300% or more.
Keyword Rankings
“The power of keyword research lies in better understanding your target market and how they are searching for your content, services, or products.” – Moz
Tracking keyword rankings is central to the success of all SEO activities. Keywords are a leading indicator for lead generation, along with organic search traffic and lead generation. Rank for the wrong keywords, and you will have wasted a lot of time and money.
... Continue Reading >>#fail: How to Suck at B2B Marketing Strategy
They say 80% of businesses fail, so it’s actually pretty easy to suck at B2B marketing strategy.
Still, a broken clock is right twice a day and you could get lucky, so here are some tips for covering all the bases in your next strategic marketing debacle.
Don’t Listen to Your Customers
The quickest way to fail is to ignore the people who might actually buy from you.
You know what’s best for your channel partners and customers, so why bother with getting their input? After all, it would be better if we didn’t have to deal with them at all, right? So why would we want to [gulp] actually talk to them?
... Continue Reading >>Why SEO?
Before you jump into the bottomless pool of opinion on how to do B2B search engine optimization (SEO), it’s important to consider an often-overlooked question in the overheated debate around SEO strategy: Why do it? What is the underlying goal?
SEO is perhaps the single most misunderstood factor around the process of creating a B2B website in the hope of converting visitors into customers: if you don’t have high-quality content aligned to a sales and marketing strategy, an SEO strategy is worthless.
The Whole Point
Strange but true – SEO efforts often overlook the fundamental purpose behind the whole exercise: delivering information to a target audience in a way that will prompt them to buy what you’re selling.
... Continue Reading >>B2B Messaging Under Duress: 3 Recommendations for Managing COVID-19 Communications
Your clients have a lot of things to worry about right now. First of course, is protecting the health and safety of their employees and others around them.
But while that’s the priority, the economic risks are hard to separate from our other worries right now. Your clients, like all of us, are navigating the health threat while also scrambling to keep it from spilling over into a threat to their businesses.
How do you communicate with them without simply adding to the noise, or worse – creating the impression that you put profits ahead of public health?
Here are three recommendations on how to communicate with your customers or prospective customers during this crisis:
Share the State of Your Operations
Your customers need to know if there are changes to your capacity or availability.
... Continue Reading >>The ABCs of SEO
It is most wise to beware of companies promising you the world in the form of a 1st page or #1 Google rankings. These inflated claims often come along with a range of dubious Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tricks that the major search engines have long factored in to their algorithms. The results might not be just disappointing they can cause irreparable harm to legitimate businesses. This is called “black hat SEO.” Just ask JC Penney.
We believe that good SEO or “white hat SEO” is a product of high quality, original site content combined with a collection of proven best practices for site management and link building. Our methods produce sustainably high organic search results for our clients and also lay the groundwork for successful Search Engine Marketing (SEM) campaigns.
... Continue Reading >>B2B Marketing Automation Software: The Case For & Against
Thanks to aggressive sales reps from HubSpot, Pardot, Act-On, Marketo, SharpSpring, and others, many businesses get excited about B2B marketing automation software. It’s the definition of the proverbial “shiny object.”
However, the vast majority of businesses, especially SMBs, are not ready to take advantage of marketing automation software and its myriad features. Why?
When Marketing Automation Makes Perfect Sense
- You have a written marketing plan at least for this year that connects the dots between your financial goals and marketing activities
- You have a website that already generates good search engine rankings for keywords and subsequent lead generation
- You have good website content and some higher level marketing collateral (e.g.
B2B Storytelling that Cuts Through the Clutter
In a world full of countless, noisy marketing messages vying for our attention from a multiplying list of platforms, many companies mistakenly try to compete with messaging that is louder. HEY! LOOK AT US, LOOK AT WHAT WE CAN DO!
Meanwhile, your prospects are struggling to figure out whether you are a good fit for helping them do what they do. Hey, look over here! Look at what we need…
Brand Story marketing, adapted from sources like Donald Miller’s book, Building a StoryBrand and Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, reframes the traditional view of marketing, placing the customer at the center of the message rather than the company.
... Continue Reading >>Tell Your Prospects a Better Story: Theirs
Do you want prospects to see you as just another vendor or a trusted business advisor?
Many companies make the same mistake in their messaging and branding: they lead with their products and services, features and benefits. You know Sandler preaches against this, so why is it so… everywhere in marketing? It’s the same tired story. Prospects have heard it so many times… blah, blah, blah. It’s just noise to them.
Problems Solved vs. Features & Benefits
Lead with the problems you solve and the people you solve them for instead – and you’re likely to find prospects who want to share their problems with you.
... Continue Reading >>Innovaxis Named to List of Chicago’s Top Marketing Consultants
As a B2B-focused digital marketing firm with a track record of creating lead-generating marketing content and strategy for a wide variety of businesses, we are proud to have been named to a list of the top marketing and consulting firms serving Chicago.
The ranking, created by Seattle-based research firm Expertise, used 25 variables across five categories that include reputation, credibility, experience, availability and professionalism to establish its list. The agencies on the list were culled from a starting point of more than 600 marketing consultants serving Chicago.
B2B Expertise that Drives Lead Generation
Our president Sean Parnell said the ranking reflects the hard work and specialized expertise that the Innovaxis Marketing team brings to its B2B clients both in Chicago and across the United States.
... Continue Reading >>