When you recognize that well over ninety percent of product and service searches done by business people start on the Web and 98% of those start with Google, the importance of web marketing in the BtB world is beyond obvious. Add to these now old facts about business peoples’ behavior, the increasing role of the social web and you have a mix that calls for new and more disciplined approaches to web marketing.

For startups and small business there are two interrelated tough issues; (1) how to formulate a productive web marketing strategy that reaches my target customers with the right balance of methods, content, and accessibility; and (2) how do I support, sustain, and improve the strategy and tactics over the long haul. Small organizations have a lot of difficulty sorting out the meaningful and effective from the blizzard of action in the web world. And, small organizations can not afford high-priced solutions.

Recently, I became reacquainted with HubSpot, Inc. an internet marketing software company (opens new window). HubSpot provides tools and guidance for how to optimize the chances that your website will pop up in the first page of Google searches for words approrpriate to your business. They do not take the hard work out of achieving this, but they do provide a really quite thorough suite of tools and the metrics to help drive you forward.

To get a flavor of their approach to the web marketing world take advantage of a webinar offerings:

Five Tips to Turn Your Website into a Marketing Machine

Let me know what you think of HubSpot and their approach. It seems very much a high-powered solution to a critical web marketing problem in a very accessible package.

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In my continuing search to understand more about web-marketing, I have now read through Join the Conversation: How to Engage Marketing-Weary Consumers with the Power of Community, Dialogue and Partnership by Joseph Jaffe (Hoboken, NJ: Joseph Wiley & Sons, 2007). This book is written in a somewhat tiring style of froth, frenzy, and chattiness. Nevertheless, it adds further fuel to the

notion that the traditional marketing categories of the four Ps (in case you have forgotten: Product, Place,

Price, and Promotion) are now quite outmoded. In place of the old tradition, Jaffe introduces the “Six Cs”: Content, Context, Customization, Community, Conversation, Commerce. Unfortunately, Jaffe does not develop the ideas behind Contecxt and Customization with any real vigor and in the end it is not clear even what these Cs mean.

Content is king. Content that is real, meaningful, and fresh in the eyes of the visitors to your website is king. There is a consensus that content is king. And, for most companies generating content is really hard work.

Jaffe spends most of his energies around Conversation, what is it, how to get it started, how to participate (listen), and how to build relationships on it. There are some good lists of characteristics of conversations and Dos and Don’ts.

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Marketing and selling over the Web has been a required activity for almost every business I have been involved in for over ten years. In the last couple of years, the web has continued to evolve and now in some undeniably novel ways. The most notable are the appearance and enormous growth of “communities” or “social networks”. It is clear that the existing web marketing paradigm that focuses on pay-for-click advertising and search engine optimization (SEO) is being enormously enriched by the opportunities presented by social or community oriented environments. This later change requires real shifts in the approach and objectives for marketing on the web.

Just as I have begun to attempt my own synthesis of these changes, I have come upon Marketing to the Social Web: how digital communities build your business by Larry Weber (John Wiley & Sons, New York 2007). The author has extensive experience in the Web world and provides more than enough examples and anecdotes to illustrate his case.

The basic argument of the book is that the interactivity of the web is now producing completely new ways in which companies and customers can interact.

Weber develops seven steps to marketing on the social web:

1. Observe - see where, what and how your customers do in the social web. Check out blogs, conversations, relevant content, etc.
2. Recruit - enlist core participants who want to talk about your company, its products and services.
3. Evaluate platforms - which platforms are best to reach your marketing objectives - blogs, reputation aggregators, social networks?
4. Engage - this is all about developing and maintaining content - user generated and yours.
5. Measure - develop metrics relevant to the objectives and measure.
6. Promote - connect with other communities in the web.
7. Improve.

Weber provides lots of discussion and anecdotes to illustrate each of these seven steps. Then he adds four strategies to expanding the reach of marketing on the social network - (1) SEO, (2) blogs, (3) e-communities, and (4) social networks.

This book is a solid contribution to understanding and participating in the ongoing development of the web world. This is esepcially so for creating a more productive balance between traditional web marketing, pay-for -click advertising and SEO, and the emerging world of the social web.

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An important step for every business manager is to understand where profits are coming from. Too many managers are relying on  the basic Profit and Loss statement that comes to them from their accountant. This is not always a useful management tool.

Lets take a look at a situation where a web-based services company is experiencing good growth and reasonable profits. They have four lines of business addressing their single basic service to four different markets. Based on their market analysis, they decide that they will focus their marketing dollars and development resources on one of the four for the next year.

Six months into the mission, sales have continued upwards, but profits are not tracking along at the same rate, the quality of earnings is suffering. Why is this happening?

First they muscled their way through some spreadsheet work sorting out their COGS (Cost Of Goods Sold) and reassigning previously Fixed Expenses in marketing that really could be assigned to each of their four market areas. Then they discovered that the the market segment that they had focused their efforts on had never been very profitable and they had made the situation worse by increasing the sales volume through it.

On closer analysis it became evident that the lack of profitability came from two sources. First, the marketing costs of acquiring customers in  this market channel had been 60% higher than in  the others. Second, the vendor providing the back office services supporting this channel was 30% more expensive than vendors supporting the other market segments. In the short run, the managers decided to shift their focus to another one of their markets. In the long run they decided to search for a better vendor and conduct some research on why the marketing costs were so high.

So, if you have a business where you are selling more than one product or service to more than a lone customer, think about developing the financial management tools that will tell you where your sales and profits are actually coming from.

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We have recently added a new feature to our operations improvement work for services firms.

To improve the productivity, responsiveness, and quality of services, a common and very valuable approach is to organize a cross-functional team and value stream map the activities. This quickly produces many opportunities to improve flow, simplify tasks, and shrink response times. One frustration with this technique is that it provides no approach to how to model the “moments of truth” that are really the focal points for all service production.

Moments of truth are those interactions with customers (these can be in person, over the telephone, and via a web interface amongst others) during which a service is created and delivered. It is the moment when a question is asked and an answer provided. Or, it is the more complex environment in which the service provider and the customer collaborate, even if briefly, to solve some problem with a product.

In the end, even if you get all of the other aspects of your service production right, if the moment of truth goes awry, the customer leaves feeling less than satisfied. The customer perceives the service to be inadequate.

So, building on work by Christian Gronroos and others, we have started working with a service model that we call “MT” to capture all of the key elements required for a successful service event. This is adding significantly to the richness of our value stream mapping and filling this gap in performance improvement.

For a challenging introduction to moments of truth, see Christian Gronroos, Service Management and Marketing: managing the moments of truth in service competitition (Lexington Books, Boston 1988).

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