I spend a lot of time on my iPad now, and while I’m searching, reading and buying, I pay close attention to what works and what doesn’t. I want to use my “hands on” experience with consumer sites to make my clients’ B2B sites better. What works for consumer sites works for B2B, too.

In this Response Magazine article, Consumer Electronics Market: Toying with Tablets, for which I was interviewed, reporter Jackie Jones talks about the rise of iPads and how they’ve given marketers a plethora of opportunities to connect with consumers.

A couple of takeaways for B2B marketers:

1. Mobile devices untether us from our desks. I know this is a “duh” thing, but what this means is that we’re spending more time accessing information from our devices — and this information needs to be mobile friendly and instantly accessible.

“The common factor [of what people can do with iPads / tablets] is the real-time sense of immediacy that comes with the modern consumer’s drive to purchase, a trend buoyed by the instant access and on-the-go capabilities afforded by tablet devices,” says Jones. “Most industry experts agree this puts more control in the consumers’ hands, and marketers must meet their customers literally wherever they go now.”

I know that for me, having the iBooks app built right into the iPad has made is *super easy* to buy books. It’s so easy, I haven’t visited my local library in weeks. In addition, I find it very easy to make purchases for consumer goods — provided the consumer site is mobile-friendly. Surprisingly, some still aren’t.

2. Mobile devices have their own challenges.

It’s not enough to test your site across the different browsers. You must also test it on various devices, including smartphones and tablets /iPad.

We’ve been trained to want everything now — if a site loads too slowly or a video is too long, we just click right back out. Ensuring your customers can access your site no matter which device they’re using or where they’re located improves the customer experience — and ultimately sales.

If you don’t have an iPad or a tablet on which to test your site, go visit an Apple store and play around with one of the many devices on display. No one will mind.

Be sure to read Jackie Jones’ article — you’ll find it full of excellent tips from marketers.

I needed to reprogram my thermostat, so I carried my iPad over to it and looked up the product name in order to find the manual online.

Ha! The company’s Website looked good on my iPad but for some reason I couldn’t access the drop down menus, nor could I find a sitemap link on the home page.

I had to boot up my Mac to navigate the site. If I hadn’t needed the manual, I would have ditched this company and its site seconds after encountering it on my iPad.

Here’s the deal: Apple sold 8 million iPads last quarter. It sold 15 million iPads last year. It sold 4 million iPhone 4ses in the first 24 hours.

That’s a lot of mobile devices people, and judging from what I see simply walking around in the world (e.g. the mall, restaurants, airport, grocery store, etc.), these iPad- / iPhone-toting people use them — a lot. I’m finding that I leave my Mac turned off unless I need it to do work and am using my iPad for everything else.

Before purchasing my toaster oven, for example, I researched prices on my iPad and then called the store closest to me to make sure they had one in stock. If this company’s Website hadn’t “worked” on my iPad, they would have lost a sale — without knowing it.

To make sure your Website works on the iPad or any mobile device, you can do the following:

Ask your Web designer to look at your site on all devices. This is something I do for clients as part of my value add even though I’m not a designer. Personally, I think all designers should have these devices for testing sites before they go live as it’s part of their job. #justsayin

Make sure you can access pages if you have drop down menus. I had a similar problem to RiteTemp when I first converted my site to WordPress and couldn’t navigate my site using my iPhone. I fixed that pretty fast.

Put your phone number at the top of every page of your site. Crazy busy people (and we all are) don’t want to spend the extra seconds hunting around for your phone number — especially if they’re on a smart phone. Put your number at the top of every page and no matter where they land on your site, they’ll have it. They can then “touch to call” you. Easy.

Ditto for email.

Test carts and downloads. If you sell stuff on your site, test your shopping cart to make sure it’s easy to buy stuff. If you have reports or other PDF documents, make sure people can easily download them, save them to the iBooks app — and most important — open them. I downloaded one PDF from a company and couldn’t save it as it was “password protected,” which necessitated a call to the company.

Do you have an iPad or iPhone? What are some of your Website pet peeves that you’ve encountered using these devices? Feel free to post them below.

Last week Google clamped down on companies that use questionable methods to manipulate search results. According to Search Engine Land, these methods include paid links (sites that pay for links from other sites), and content farms (sites that have “shallow or low quality content“) to use Google’s words.

For months now, SEOers and content marketers have been complaining about Google’s search results. Top results for searches often include crap content from sites like Ezine Articles (a site that got penalized by Google in its crackdown — and about time, too), scraper sites and spam blogs.

The problem with all this crap content is that it’s hard for legitimate sites that practice ethical SEO and provide high quality content to rank well for competitive search phrases. The crappy stuff clogs up the search results, making it difficult for people (searchers) to find relevant and insightful information.

So what exactly is “shallow and low quality content” as it applies to B2B? Basically, it’s content you create to help your site rank better versus helping prospects make purchasing decisions. Shallow and low quality content is based on:

Keywords — Content is created based on keyword searches; these keywords are then used in the Title / meta tags and through out the article or blog post.

Quantity — The more content that’s created around a specific grouping of keywords, the better.

Lack of depth — Shallow content is usually a blog post or article that doesn’t give much in the way of insightful analysis or is filled with information you probably already know. It’s usually written by non-experts who write dozens of articles at slave wages.

High quality, in-depth B2B content, on the other hand, takes time (and yes, money) to create. Generally it’s created by companies who genuinely want to help prospects and customers do their jobs better.

If you’re a company like Eloqua (@Eloqua), you’re creating “Grande Guides” that help prospects learn about content marketing, lead generation and the like.

If you’re Ardath Albee (@Ardath421), you’re creating original blog posts filled with insightful information on how to create content that moves prospects along a complex sales cycle (or, how to create better Tweets — love this post, Ardath!)

If you’re Dow Corning (@DowCorning), you’re creating videos that communicate your company’s values to potential employees as well as educate prospects and customers about new products and services.

If you’re Exact Target (@ExactTarget), it’s offering your followers and fans reports, posts and Webinars about social media — and how you can do it better. (Be sure to sign up for their Webinar, The Social Breakup.)

The point is, developing this high-value content takes time. You have to:

• Determine why you’re creating it in the first place (to help people decide to do business with you, to generate leads, to show your thought-leadership and expertise, to get people to work at your company).
• Map out a strategy for creating it and then publicizing it.
• Create the content (the hard part).
• Get it formatted, designed, etc.
• Publicize it.
• Publicize it some more.
• Rinse. Repeat.

This stuff is not easy — and yes, it is much easier to write 15 crap blog posts and pay someone $25 for doing so.

As Google continues its crackdown, creating consistently great, high value content will only become more important — and given that its vaunted search results have taken a real hit of late, we’ll continue to see more sites get downgraded due to poor content and questionable SEO tactics.

I like to tell my small B2B clients that while having top rankings is important, it’s not the end all be all. What really counts are results: are you getting the calls and emails (inquiries / leads) that become sales? To get these results, you need content — content that’s been written for people, not search engines.

What’s your opinion of Google’s crack down?

While doing a Website audit for both a B2B Website design firm and a B2B marketing services company last week, I noted that the firms’ owners simply showed screen shots of some of the projects their companies had completed in the last couple of years.

The screen shots, while pretty, lacked any supporting copy.

Here’s the problem with showing just pictures: they don’t tell the story behind the picture. You think they tell a story because you know what the picture is about. Your prospects don’t know the story, however, making the photos pretty much useless as sales tools.

How to get around this? Tell the story!

Telling stories is what made the J.Peterman Co. so successful in its heydey. It wasn’t the products themselves that were so wonderful, it was the story behind them — like this one about the “Secret Thoughts Cape.”

For both the Web design firm and the marketing services company, I recommended that the owners pull out three to five of their best projects and create case study pages for each one. Each case study should include:

1. The business challenge and the solution
2. The implementation
3. The results

Even better, these stories should include quotes from the clients and their names / business titles plus some interesting “bits” to lend color and depth.

Two things happen when you present case studies (or success stories) on your site: You show your company’s expertise, and prospects see themselves in these stories and say, “Hey! This company solved this particular problem, which we’re experiencing, too. I bet they can help us.”

I’m such a believer in telling success stories with words AND pictures that I now include developing a couple of case studies as part of my proposal when quoting New Websites and Website Overhauls.

Story Contest!

B2B marketers — here’s a chance to have some fun. In 100 words or less, tell me the story behind these sneakers and why a collector would want to add them to a “canvas sneaker collection.” Post your story in the comments section. Contest ends Friday, January 21, 2011.

The writers of the top five winning stories will receive Godiva Chocolates plus recognition on this blog. Have fun!

One thing that drives me insane is seeing pictures of buildings on company Websites (whether large or small companies).

As I’ve said on numerous occasions, people do business with people, not buildings, so why not add pictures of your team on your About Us page? Even better, why not include video, that way savvy companies are now doing?

I’ve also been promoting the idea of going for a walkabout through your company in order to glean ideas for Web content. I’ve always thought this a great idea, but how do you do implement it if you’re a company where people sit in cubicles and peck away on keyboards all day? What exactly do you tour?

How to combine the two?

I scratched my head about this for awhile and hit on the idea of asking companies if I could tour them in order to feature their people on my blog. I needed a test subject, so I called Jonathan Kay, Ambassador of Buzz for Grasshopper Group, and asked if he would be my guinea pig. He immediately said yes.

The result is my first video — Let’s Tour Grasshopper. In it you’ll find four brief interviews of the people inside the building where Grasshopper is located.

The video gives you only a brief sense of just how much Grasshopper interacts with customers as well as how busy they’ve been developing new products. Since filming the video, Grasshopper has come out with Spreadable, the product Jonathan talks about in the video. (Spreadable lets companies increase word of mouth referrals; Grasshopper Group has also developed Chargify — a simple recurring billing system).

This was a real learning experience

Let me just say that while it sounds easy to go out and buy a cool Flip video camera, interview some people, and then upload the video to YouTube, it’s actually not. I made all kinds of filming errors, such as talking over my subjects.

I also had to figure out how to cut down about 60 minutes of “tape” into the three and half minute video you see above. That took awhile and a lot of back and forth between me and my video editor.

Despite all the mistakes and the humble product, I’m very happy and can’t wait to do the next one.

Thank you, Jonathan, and everyone at Grasshopper Group. You were welcoming and hospitable and open with your information. I wish I could have shown the interviews in their entirety. I’m really impressed at what you’ve accomplished and where you’re going as a company — and I’m honored to showcase you on my blog.

For a long time I had one type of bird feeder in my backyard, a feeder I kept filled with one type of food: black sunflower seeds.

The feeder attracted the typical birds you see in New England backyards: Blue Jays, Chickadees, and Cardinals, to name a few.

A few weeks ago, however, I added two new feeders, a nut feeder and a bowl feeder filled with millet in order to attract smaller birds.

Over night my backyard went from being the equivalent of a sleepy small town airstrip to a busy municipal airport.

Birds of all kinds flocked to my feeders — Woodpeckers, Titmice, Nuthatches, Rose Breasted Grosbeaks, Grackles, Finches, Mourning Doves, Sparrows and others I have yet to identify.

In fact, the bowl feeder / millet proved so successful, I now have five to six Sparrows sitting in the bowl eating seed at any given time, others fighting for a position on the bowl and more milling around on the ground waiting for seed to drop.

Wow!

Attract more B2B buyers with multiple offers

Generally, companies offer people something in return for “raising their hand” to be identified. I ask people to give me their first name and email address in exchange for my monthly newsletter, for example.

Other companies ask for additional information when it comes to Webinars, white papers and the like.

Giving people free information is good. The problem, however, is that people respond to offers depending on where they are in the buying cycle.

• Someone just starting research will download white papers or checklists but definitely doesn’t want a sales person to call and isn’t ready for a demo.
• Someone who is narrowing down the vendor selection list has probably already read a half dozen white papers and now is now ready to participate in a Webinar and/or read case studies.
• And a team that’s ready to make a buying decision may want to talk to a sales person or have a demo.

Having just one type of offer, i.e. white papers, will attract some buyers, but these buyers will most likely not be ready to buy for months, which is why you need to include offers that attract buyers no matter where they are in the buying cycle.

Instead of attracting people who are “just looking,” you’ll also attract those who are serious about finding a vendor / partner and making a purchase.

As to my new found birding love, I’m now researching platform feeders. My buddy Mac McIntosh (who inspired this post) said to put out cut up oranges, grapes, and bread crusts. He also recommended suet feeders. What’s your recommendation?

(Photo credit: Liz Leyden)

In the last month or so I’ve written a few blog posts for other blogs — original content that you won’t find on this blog. I’ve included links to this content below.

Content Marketing Institute
One question I’m asked frequently is how to to generate ideas for Web content. I’ve written frequently about this topic, see here and here. One tactic I haven’t talked about, but use all the time when dealing with clients, is trolling through Web analytics keyword reports.

You can learn more about the nuggets of gold you can find in your own reports by reading, “How to Find Content Ideas in Your Web Analytics Reports.”

Be sure to check out the rest of the blog — you’ll find some really great content and ideas!

NetLine’s Blog Notions Marketers Blog
Do you think small businesses can still effectively do their own marketing? I don’t — and I explain why in my article, “DIY Marketing No Longer Cuts the Mustard.”

I also wrote “Is Your Website Short on Content and Long on ‘Blah’?” where I discuss how to answer the unspoken questions posed by site visitors.

The Wealthy Freelancer Blog
For this blog I’ve written two parts of a three-part article on Web marketing for freelancers and consultants. Check out “Three Penny-Wise, Pound Foolish Marketing Mistakes” and “Three Tips for Developing a Kick-Butt Website on a Budget.”

The Wealthy Freelancer is a fabulous site full of great content on how to create a thriving freelance business AND have a life, too.

Also be sure to check out my other blog — The Profitable Consultant. During the month of June I challenged myself to work on my own marketing one hour a day. Obviously it paid off!

I get lots of email from people asking if they can write guest blog posts for me. If the request fits my audience, I do reply to people — but they never respond back.

Marc Gordon, who does a video blog, is one of the people who emailed me about doing a video blog post, which I found intriguing.

Instead of writing about marketing, Marc talks about it at his blog,
marctv.net. He’s getting about 50,000 views per video these days, so I’m thrilled to feature him here on my blog.

I love how he took my blog post about Intuit and made it into a pretty cool marketing lesson. Now you can see the power of video — and now I see I need to go buy a Flip.

Marc, thanks for the great video and guest blog post — I love it!

A Quiet Mistake Everyone Heard from marc gordon on Vimeo.

GlobalSpec recently published its latest survey report: Understanding the Industrial Buy Cycle: How to Align Your Marketing with Your Customers’ Buying Process.

The 17-page report covers ground most marketers (should) already know regarding the four stages of the B2B buy cycle: Needs Awareness, Research, Comparison and Consideration, and Procurement.

Buyers in each stage use various sources to find the information they need to make purchasing decisions, including supplier Websites, print catalogs, trade publications, tradeshows, and of course search engines and social media.

In fact, a whopping 69% of survey respondents indicated they use social media (defined as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn) to find information in the “Needs Awareness and Research” phase while 60% use blogs and 55% use search engines.

Even more important for B2B marketers, 33% of respondents indicated that supplier Websites and catalogs are the most important information sources by the time the “buyer reaches the Procurement stage.”

While it’s easy to read into the survey results that traditional marketing tactics no longer work or that marketers should move all marketing activities to social media, the exact opposite is true: Buyers need to be exposed to your company and its products / services before they know they need you.

This means that you must engage in a long-term strategic marketing campaign that includes tradeshows, direct mail, e-newsletters, social media, and industry portal Websites, Webinars etc. — on a continual basis. As the GlobalSpec survey authors point out:

From the beginning of the buy cycle to the end, the supplier that is eventually selected is exposed to the buyer many times. The company may have first become visible through an Internet search, or exposure to its online catalog, or a banner ad on an industrial site, or any number of ways. A marketer may not always know what specific exposure initiated the process that culminated in a sale.

In fact, the survey goes on to say, 62% of respondents type company names they know into a search box versus typing the URL directly as it saves time and reduces error (this is very true for how I search).

What matters in the end, however, is that in order to make a buyer’s “short list,” you must ensure your company and its content get found by potential buyers.

During the initial Research phase, 42% of buyers evaluate four or more suppliers but as buyers move toward the Procurement stage, only 26% get quotes from those four suppliers — meaning 74% go with fewer suppliers.

Those that drop off the list are often those who did not provide the right level of information to buyers or did not meet some other perceived or real need in the buyer.

So, what does this mean for small and mid-sized B2B companies?

1. Continually add new content to your site that helps buyers at all stages of the buy cycle make purchasing decisions and that educates them about how you’ll help solve their problems / challenges.

2. Optimize this content — and push it out via social media and other tactics — so that buyers can find it no matter where they are (i.e. using search engines or lurking on LinkedIn) as well as driving them back to your site.

3. Develop methods for keeping your company top of mind for not-yet-ready-to-buy prospects, including Webinars, e-newsletters and other methods.

4. Ask your prospects what kind of information they need to make purchasing decisions — and then give it to them.

5. Rinse, repeat.

Related posts:

• Your B2B Small Business Website is Not a Brochure
• Is Your Website a Small Town or a Thriving Metropolis?
• Leads from Websites Best B2B Lead Gen Tactic

Joe Pulizzi of the Junta42 blog published his third annual 2010 Content Marketing Spending Survey. (Registration for this survey is free.)

One question the survey addressed: “Products deemed important to know about in order to execute marketing strategies” — with all of the usual suspects listed: social media, blogs, video, e-newsletters, etc.

What I found interesting is that respondents decreased the importance of all of these tactics from 2009 (e-newsletters, for example, decreased from a whopping 61% to 38%!) with one exception: mobile content. Mobile content increased from 24% to 38%.

Pulizzi doesn’t define “mobile content” in his survey. Hence, my question is, with the advent of smart phones, especially the iPhone and now Google’s Android operating system, isn’t *all* content mobile?

I bought my iPhone in August 2009 after fierce resistance. All I wanted was a phone that did its job — namely, make and receive phone calls.

Now that I have the iPhone, I don’t know how I lived without it and that’s because my iPhone is not just a “phone.” I use it for almost everything *but* a phone:

E-book reader – Thanks to the iPhone Amazon Kindle app, I now read business books using my phone. I love it.

Blog reader — Using Google Reader, I read blogs while waiting in the carpool line or while standing in line at the grocery store.

E-commerce — I particularly like the Fandango app, which lets me order movie tickets.

Social media – With apps for LinkedIn and Twitter, I can keep up with my network and respond to people, too, whether I’m at home, the office, or out and about.

Calendar — I used to struggle with keeping track of events and tasks as my life was tied up in ACT!, a desktop CRM application. Now I use Google Calendar and Google Tasks — and all of the information I need is available at the push of a button. (I ditched ACT! six months ago. What a relief.)

Yellow pages — With the iPhone, I can go to a company or business Website and click on a phone number and the iPhone will automatically call it. It will also map directions. Yet, I can’t tell you how hard companies make finding this important information. Even worse, some company sites don’t show up in the Google search results on my phone — which means they lose my business. (It also means that if your business isn’t optimized for local search, you are hosed.)

Restaurant finder — Thanks to the Urban Spoon app, my son and I found a *real* Mexican food restaurant in Massachusetts. (I mean real, as in California standard real.) Like everyone else, we rated it five stars. We often use Urban Spoon to see what others think of restaurants we’ve seen around town, which means that positive online reviews have become critical to many businesses.

Flashlight — Ok, I admit it. I LOVE the Flashlight app! I often use my iPhone to light my way in dark places.

Suffice to say, smart phones like the iPhone are no longer just for making phone calls. It also means content is no longer consumed by people sitting in a chair in front a desktop computer. It’s consumed by people in bits and chunks while on the go.

You can spend a great deal of time and money creating content for mobile applications. Or, you can take that marketing budget and ensure the content you already have is accessible to people on the go.

If you own an iPhone or other smart phone, how has it changed your content viewing / consumption habits?