The B2B Marketing Top 40 Takeaways from the Online Marketing Summit

The OMS 2010 23-City Tour stopped in Atlanta last week at the beautiful Hotel Palomar. The tour had already visited cities across the U.S. and Canada, and includes 400 expert speakers, exclusive OMI training workshops and countless peer networking opportunities.

Billy Mitchell, Glenn Taylor, Dave Morris and I thought we’d share our 40 takeaways for B2B marketing from the day. Here’s a random collection of our notes, tweets, and observations:

The single answer to problems around the world, in your company and with your marketing efforts is EDUCATION. – Aaron Kahlow of Online Marketing Connection
Write guest posts to build links. Submit ideas to other blogs within your industry. Begin by following and commenting.
The center of customer engagement is now online.
Behavior can be changed, just like habits.
Calls-to-action should be specific, measurable, and achievable, with measured goals.
States of change model starts with an “A-ha!” moment, then preparation, then trial and moving to a new habit (maintenance).
Health model starts with education, adds motivations, offset by barriers, which moves to the recommended action.
Volitional control – have to demonstrate you can make things easier by using your product or service.
Out of market > learner > shoppers > buyers > current customers. All of these groups are reached through marketing efforts.
Marcom systems need to have patience. Most all contacts are learners. They need engagement, nurturing.
It’s a buying cycle, not a sales cycle.
Apple.com – example of container-only site.
Right-hand side items are not seen very often, lower conversion.
Search box for sites over 25 pages is critical.
Blogs are expected to have right-handed navigation, etc.
Touchscreen usage is different based on context, need and control differences.
Scoreboard footers work very well. Dell is an example.
Top of page is scanned 17 times more than lower items
Trend is to use home page as brand engagement and not as much for SEO.
Use natural language instead of industry jargon – better for user and SEO.
Task-based architecture. Example: Rail Europe – I have a ticket, I don’t have a ticket.
Engage customers with conversation, build communities, listen and respond.
Audience-based navigation is good if you know your customers mix well.
Images trump text for attention. Size is king. Think newspaper layout.
Use controls on rotating graphic fields to allow user to go back and forth, etc.
Give clear clues to next steps and calls-to-action.
Long info forms kill interaction rates – just get the basics.
Denote clicked and non-clicked items.
Divide info into five to nine meaningful chunks. The brain works this way. Example: phone numbers are not ten numbers, but groups of three to four digits.
Create a mobile version of website. Big opportunities here and in the future.
Free your content, long content is going away, shorter/versatile is better.
Integrate to innovative online and offline.
Be mobile, be everywhere, be relevant.
Tear down the silos, all messaging must be consistent across barriers.
Automate the science of marketing. Be maniacal, prove ROI.
The accessibility of your website, including the download speed, is increasingly impacting Google rankings.
User actions – specifically, your click-through rate from Google results pages – can affect your organic rankings.
Google’s recent “Mayday” algorithm update mostly affected “long tail” (multiple word) searches. Previously, a poor-quality web page could rank high for a long tail keyword fairly easily, simply by working that keyword into its content. Now, the entire site must be of good quality in order for that page to rank high.
Google’s new left sidebar, which allows searchers to choose from social results, images, shopping sites, etc., reinforces the notion that you really need to have all your digital assets optimized for a wide variety of types of searches.
Social media has surpassed corporate websites as places people go for information about a company, so you must ensure that your social media content ranks high as well as your website!