Lead generation programs are becoming more mainstream. In fact, 74% of B2B marketing professionals are participating in lead-gen practices, with 48% “very” or “fully” involved. While lead generation companies often filter through leads to ensure marketers are receiving high-quality contacts, not every lead will be in the same stage of the purchase process. An effective lead scoring system can help your marketing, sales and lead generation efforts be more successful. Here are 5 steps your business can take to a stronger lead scoring system.

Related: Get started with your own lead generation campaign to connect with business buyers.

1.     Define Your Lead Scoring Goals

Before you even get started with creating lead scoring criteria or building a system to abide by, your business needs to define its lead scoring goals. What is it that you hope to achieve with lead scoring and the corresponding filtering system? Are you looking for ways to rule out poor lead generation campaigns, make the most of your lead generation spend, and/or optimize your current lead generation pool and efforts? Define your goals before moving forward.

2.     Understand Your Lead Scoring Criteria

Creating and understanding lead scoring criteria is crucial to the success of your scoring system. Going back through the data your business already has available can help you find traits and trends that are closely associated with closed deals and bad leads. While timelines and purchase cycles may differ from one company to the next, you’ll want to ask yourself the following questions to establish what criteria your lead scoring system will be based upon:

• What lead characteristics lead to a close in a short-period of time, moderate period of time, or long period of time?
• What does our business consider a bad lead? Do we communicate this to our lead generation company to ensure our goals are aligned?
• What types of behaviors are an essential part of our buyer’s purchase process and how are we generating leads and making an impact at each point?

Related: Lead Nurturing Through Scoring: Part I

3.     Establish a Lead Scoring System

A lead scoring system is a must for any business that wants to optimize its lead generation efforts. Most scoring systems fall into two main categories: demographic scoring or behavioral scoring.

• Demographic: The key demographic factors you’ll want to pay attention to are title and department, company size, revenue and industry. More managers are involved in the buying process than ever before so pay attention to demographics to provide each lead and decision-maker with relevant content.
• Behavioral: The behavior of a prospect includes their website visits, responses to email campaigns, content downloads and willingness to complete an online form.

Your system should take into account both of these qualifications and where the buyer is in the purchase process. This is often indicated by the behaviors of the lead and what led them to become a lead in the first place. Decide what does and doesn’t matter as some criteria will matter far more than others. Your lead scoring system should have thresholds that take into account the two main categories and the purchase cycle.

4.     Create a Plan of Action

How will your business put the lead scoring system into place? Having a plan of action can make the adoption of the system much smoother for sales, marketing and your lead generation team. How will the highest scoring leads be delivered to sales reps and with what frequency? Middle tier leads will need nurturing, so you can’t disregard these prospects. Studies show that the majority of these leads will make a purchase in the next 24 months. You’ll also need to decide what your business will do with cold leads that made it through the filters.

Related: Hipsters Beware: Lead Generation Becoming More Mainstream

5.     Measure and Refine Your Process

After using your lead scoring system for some time, evaluate its success to ensure there isn’t disconnect and that ready-to-purchase leads aren’t being lost. More sales and engagement, a faster response time from your sales staff as well as marketing delivering the right content to middle-tier leads at the right time are all indicators of whether or not your scoring system is effective. Measure your progress in lead generation and conversions and then determine if your process needs to be refined. Every few months, look for patterns that could indicate a buyer shift.

Keep your lead scoring system simple. This process is aimed at helping your marketing and sales team be more efficient. Experiment with your scoring system until you find what works best and analyze your data to ensure the system is truly helping with lead generation and nurturing efforts.

Does your business score leads? What criteria do you use?

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Many studies have shown that the faster a company responds to a lead, the more likely that company is to close. One survey found that responding to a completed form within 5 minutes versus 10 minutes led to a 900% increase in contact rate (Tweet this!). In a recent study by InsideSales, companies were asked about how they respond to leads, focusing on lead response time, persistence, ratio between phone calls and emails, and what method companies use to make their first response. What this study found is that many companies are overestimating their lead response efforts. Here’s what the study found and steps your business can take to improve lead response contact rate and conversions.

Related: Follow Up With Leads for Maximum Conversions

A Response Reality Check

Many businesses who responded to the InsideSales survey overestimate their response time and initial contact methods. If your business isn’t seeing success with lead generation, it may be time for a response strategy reality check. According to the InsideSales study, immediacy refers to the amount of time it takes for sales reps to attempt their first phone call and most companies tend to have an optimistic position as to how quickly their business responds. Nearly 25% of businesses think they respond to leads within 5 minutes. The interesting part: only 5% actually do (Tweet this!). Many businesses are more delayed in their outreach to leads thank they think and this slow response time negatively impacts their results and conversions. 20% think their company takes over a day to respond, but the truth is that 30.6% do. When just about one-third of businesses take over a day to respond, your business can gain a serious advantage over them with a faster response.

Related: Get started with a new lead generation campaign.

Stepping Up Your Sales Strategy

It’s time to step up your sales strategy. Since most people are likely not contacted on the first attempt (in fact, probably under half), statistically, companies need to make between four and eleven attempts to contact over 90% of leads. While most companies estimate their team makes “more than five” calls, the most common number of attempts is zero. Getting in contact with leads often requires more than one or two attempts, so make sure your sales team isn’t calling the contact only once before calling it done. Here are a few other steps you can take to step up your leads and sales strategies.

• Respond to all leads. Of the companies with web forms, only 58.6% responded to the lead. Typically, the response rate is below 70% and is an area where many companies could improve. With such a low response rate, companies are essentially throwing away a good portion of their web-based leads.
• Establish a more equal split between phone and email responses. Sales employees are brought on because of their selling skills and abilities. InsideSales found that 66.6% make their first contact attempt through email, though only 9.3% think this is the case (Tweet this!). Only sending out an email is a waste of skills team members can use over the phone.
• Test different types of outreach with each lead. Some people prefer to be contacted over the phone and others prefer to receive an email in their inbox. If your form has an option for preferred contact method, make sure you’re paying attention to what the lead selects. If the form doesn’t, ask the customer in your first call and/or first email to ensure you’re providing them with the best experience.
• Use your content as part of your initial outreach. Content marketing doesn’t stop when a lead fills out a form. Your sales team can use content as a way to incentivize action from a previously unresponsive lead. Provide industry-oriented or other relevant content in your first outreach to establish the one-on-one connection.

Related: How to Nurture Leads with Auto Response Emails

Is your business one of the many that overestimates its response time and balance in initial outreach? If so, it’s time for a reality check. Low lead conversions could be the result of a poor response rate and turnaround time. Reevaluate your lead response strategy to determine whether or not your expectations are being met and if your team is following up as often as they should.

How fast does your business respond to leads?

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There’s no doubt about it – content came, saw and conquered the marketing world. Unlike the empires of past that did the same, content marketing isn’t going away. Google, Bing and major search engines are placing more emphasis on the content businesses, bloggers and marketers deliver in an effort to provide users and customers with better experiences. Content marketing is a top priority for B2B marketers and in this post we’ll share insights into the best tactics and strategies.

Related: 3 Content Marketing Trends to Pay Attention to in 2013

A Dominating Trend

A recent infographic from Uberflip pulled data from eMarketer, Content Marketing Institute (CMI) and IDG Knowledge Hub to find out just how B2B marketers are using content. In case you’re still skeptical of the impact content marketing can make, studies show that more than two-thirds of CMOs plan to increase their content marketing budgets in 2013 (Tweet this!). This marketing trend isn’t just a fad – it’s an idea and concept that is here to stay. CMI found that the top content marketing objectives for B2B marketers include:

• Engaging customers/prospects (82%)
• Driving sales (55%)
• Educating the marketing (44%)
• Building thought leadership (43%)
• Increasing web traffic (43%)

It seems that, across the board, the content marketing objectives remain the same. The KPIs and metrics your business looks at, however, will differ depending on what you do with the content created. If your goal is to increase web traffic, sharing plays an important role. If your measurements of success are dependent upon lead quality for your sales team, you’ll need to have a lead nurturing plan that works cohesively with your content marketing strategy.  The top 5 measurement criteria among B2B content marketers are: web traffic, sales lead quality, social media sharing, sales lead quantity, and direct sales.

Related: Increase Sales Opportunities with Lead Nurturing Campaigns

B2B Content Best Practices

The best types of content vary from business to business so it’s up to you to find what will work for you and your audience. Video marketing, podcasts, email newsletters and white papers are just a few of the options available. Content marketing is about creating pieces of content that will engage your audience and prompt them to take an action. As you develop a content marketing strategy, or redefine the one you already have, consider what your content goals are and how creation and distribution need to take place in order for those goals to be met.

• Be valuable. Your content can’t be spun so far that it’s no longer valuable to your audience. Focus on providing content that adds value. White papers, industry case studies and relevant blog posts are all places you can get started.
• Learn from your audience. Measure the types of content your audience has the most positive response to. You’ll gain insight into what your customers are looking for in terms of content, be able to provide tips that touch their pain points and receive feedback that can help your business redefine products or processes for greater success in the long run.
• Understand your customer and your sales cycle. The sales cycle has lengthened for many businesses according to recent studies and more people are involved in the decision making process than ever before. Understand who your content needs to reach directly and indirectly and where they need to receive it in the buying process.
• Repurpose. The majority of marketers create their content from scratch, but a common challenge is finding enough to create fresh, engaging content. If your business is constantly creating brand new content, you are wasting time and energy. Repurpose your own older content, repost or share new insight from third-parties, and look for ways to up-cycle the content you already own.

Now that you’ve determined your goals and the content needed to meet those, determine what social networks your business can distribute that content on. 83% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn, followed by 80% for Facebook and another 80% using Twitter. In order for your business to conquer with content marketing, you need to create content that your audience is after and distribute it to them directly, whether it’s through an email newsletter, LinkedIn or an in-person meeting.

Related: Connect with buyers and reach a new audience via the white paper content marketing offering from Business.com – email sales@business.com.

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Lead generation is a term many B2B marketers are familiar with. However, the B2B buying process is shifting and just as sales and marketing funnels have shifted, so has the lead landscape. Lead generation is often broken into two areas: marketing, which generates leads, and sales, which follows up and closes with those same leads. This is where lead generation and demand generation differ. Demand generation involves multiple areas of marketing and is really an integrated suite of marketing programs coupled with a structured sales process. Eloqua found that an integrated demand generation program lead to 16.5% higher campaign response rates and conversion rates as well as a 50% decrease in the time it took to execute campaigns (Tweet this!). Dominating with demand generation requires two things: buyer-obsession and integrated marketing efforts.

Become Buyer-Obsessed

The first step in becoming buyer-obsessed is finding out who your buyers are and then getting your business and products/services in front of them. In this case, becoming buyer-obsessed means focusing more on the buyer than on your own product or business. Customers want to feel important, so place your priorities on making their experience and interactions with your business better. Here are 4 steps you can take to become more buyer-obsessed and more dominate with demand generation:

• Focus on the buyer network. You’ll want to ask yourself who is involved in the buying process? You want to reach the individual buyer and their network. Promote your products with new takes targeted to each person involved.
• Evaluate typical buyer behavior. What prompts your business’s average buyer to seek out information or make a purchase? Look for ways to reach the buyer during their decision making process with the right content based on their behaviors, industry and role within their company.
• Improve the buyer experience. Experience is everything. Customers who receive a bad experience will take their business elsewhere. Constantly be evaluating the experience you are providing customers and seek out ways to improve it.
• Accurately segment buyers. From email newsletters to sales follow-up calls, segment your buyers so that they are getting information that’s relevant and valuable. You also want to ensure that if a buyer is getting on the phone with someone from your business, your sales rep is the most qualified person to be speaking to this particular buyer.

Integrate Your Efforts

In order for your business to dominate with demand generation, you need to integrate your efforts. Paid media, owned media and earned media must be cohesive. Getting in front of the right audience is only part of what it takes to be successful with online marketing and demand generation. A cohesive and fluid customer experience is key!

• Paid Media – This includes forms of traditional and digital advertising such as online banner ads, pay-per-click search, advertorials, and sponsorships.
• Owned Media – This is corporate content owned by the business, including digital assets like websites, social media accounts and pages, branded blogs, and YouTube videos. Internal social marketing efforts fall in this category.
• Earned Media – This is content produced by users, including social media posts, product reviews, tweets, online communities, and media mentions.

A multi-channel marketing approach needs to be supported by analytics that can produce real-time data for sales and marketing to utilize in their real-time efforts. The indirect connections between these different channels and the platforms your business is active on can be better recognized and exploited for greater success. Integrating earned, paid and owned media will alter your customer acquisition cost, so be prepared to reallocate marketing budgets depending on which channels perform better.

B2B purchasing and marketing are transitioning from business focused to buyer focused. Those who want to be successful with their demand generation efforts need to recognize this and change their strategies. Becoming more buyer-obsessed and integrating marketing efforts have to be a focus for marketers who really want to make an impact and dominate with their demand generation efforts.

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Outbound marketing, where marketers and businesses push their content out to a wide audience, is no longer the most effective strategy – inbound marketing is on the rise. Inbound marketing is when a company essentially advertises themselves and engages their audience through content, such as white papers, newsletters and social media to earn their audience. HubSpot gives inbound marketing this definition:

Inbound marketing is a holistic, data-driven strategy that involves attracting and converting visitors into customers through personalized, relevant information and content –- not interruptive messages – and following them through the sales experience with ongoing engagement.

According to the HubSpot 2013 State of Inbound Marketing Report, 65% of B2B companies report embracing inbound practices this year (Tweet this!). If your business is just getting started or is looking for new ways to improve its inbound marketing strategy, here are four insights that can help you evaluate and redefine your inbound strategies.

Measuring Inbound Marketing

Perhaps the most impactful insight worth noting is that of inbound marketing measurement. With their efforts to determine ROI, B2B marketing experts are struggling. B2B companies struggle to prove the ROI of inbound marketing much more than other companies, with 27% reporting this struggle versus the 21% average. Some marketers are unsure which of their tactics qualify as inbound marketing, and perhaps this is where part of their struggle in determining ROI lies. If you’re unsure about the metrics that matter the most to your executives, company revenue or customers/wins generated from inbound marketing is a great place to start. While marketers may be focusing on engagement more than ever before, it comes down to the numbers and according to this report, they’re not as clear as they could be.

Overcome Obstacles with Teamwork

Sales, marketing, IT and design all need to work together in order for a business to be successful with inbound marketing. Respondents from the study say that 26% of B2B IT groups impede inbound efforts. B2B firms likely struggle for IT resources because it’s harder to draw a direct line to ROI for lead generation efforts. B2B sales teams also lag in supporting B2B inbound efforts, with nearly 14% of responses. When it comes to allocating resources to support inbound efforts, only 11% of company executives and 17% of sales teams lend their full support. Testing inbound marketing, which requires an investment from your tech department, analysts and design team, is a team effort and companies who test are 75% more likely to show ROI for inbound marketing than those who don’t test. Get your team working together to test, execute, and measure your inbound marketing strategies.

Booming Inbound Marketing Budgets

Nearly 50% of all marketers are increasing their inbound marketing budgets in 2013. While determining ROI may be a difficult task, those who can do so are seeing success. When looking at budget ratings by business model, HubSpot found that success with inbound marketing nets a significant boost among B2B firms, with 45% indicating positive ROI as the reason to grow their inbound budgets (Tweet this!). Inbound marketing campaigns can generate new leads, incite new impressions, and build brand awareness. If you think lead generation is out of the question, consider the numbers. According to the HubSpot report, twice as many marketers say inbound delivers below average cost per lead vs. outbound strategies (Tweet this!). A white paper lead generation campaign is one example of inbound marketing perfect for B2B businesses.

Capitalize with Customer-Focused Initiatives

Content marketing isn’t news. Businesses need to tailor and personalize the content they’re sending out to prospects and leads. Inbound marketers need to focus on “content plus context” to truly add value to their audience and generate more business as the end result. According to HubSpot, “Customer-centric marketing directly works to meet and serve the needs of its customer base by offering them thought leadership content and educational material, rather than content that “pitches” your wares.” Customer-centric business will have less of a problem developing the best inbound content marketing strategies as they’ll understand the problems of their audience and should be able to provide solutions. 42% of customer-focused companies calculated positive ROI from inbound marketing compared to just 38% of sales-focused companies (Tweet this!)

Inbound marketing is growing. More businesses are adopting inbound strategies and directing larger portions of their budget towards these efforts. Inbound marketing is maturing as customers become more educated and involved before ever making a purchase. Make sure your business’s inbound efforts exceed expectations.

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BtoB Online partnered with InterCall to reveal new insight into one online marketing tactic that is gaining ground: lead generation. Lead generation is becoming more mainstream as businesses are seeing potential and then success with this type of marketing tactic. According to this study, 74% of the B2B marketing professionals that responded are at least moderate participants in lead-gen practices (tweet this!), while 48% are “very” or “fully” involved. If your business wants to be more successful with lead generation programs, consider improving these three areas of your business.

Marketing-Sales Alignment

Lead generation efforts are the most successful when sales and marketing teams can work together effectively. On average, 66% of marketers are working relatively closely with sales. There is, however, a gap between those who are the most effective with lead generation and those who are not. 80% of highly effective marketers work closely with sales in the process of lead generation. Among the least-effective marketers, 57% work intimately with sales in developing lead-gen programs. Marketers and sales employees need to work together effectively, especially when it comes to lead generation. A lead can be more accurately scored when input is drawn from the different departments and both are able to create and deliver the right content at the right time. This brings us to the next point.

Lead Nurturing

Lead generation isn’t a one-step process. Leads need to be nurtured from the initial touch point up until they make a purchase. If you want that purchase to be with your business, become a thought leader and trusted resource. 74% of highly effective respondents from the study indicate that they use lead nurturing, compared with just 26% of low-effectiveness marketers. Among high-achievers, webcasts, email newsletters, white papers, thought leadership and videos are considered more valuable. With the low achievers, by contrast, sales calls, tele-prospecting, blogging and advertorial material are valued more highly. Different businesses and marketers will see different successes with the types of tactics they choose to use. If you’re unsure about what will yield the greatest ROI for your business, test different types of content and times to reconnect with each lead to develop the most effective lead nurturing strategy possible.

Overcoming LeadGen Obstacles

As with nearly every business process, there’s obstacles to overcome with the launch of a new program or the revamp of one that is failing. 67% of the BtoB survey cited a lack of resources as the biggest obstacle overall. This is followed by depth and accuracy of their customer database (40%). Without an accurate, unified database of prospects, it is very difficult to present compelling, personalized and timely content and offers, much less understand the meaning of responses and score prospects as leads. In order for a lead generation campaign to be successful, the entire company must be behind the process and participating in optimizing their lead generation and nurturing strategies with the best outreach, content, pitches and more. 55% of marketers who describe themselves as highly effective said they have “full participation” in lead-gen practices within their companies (tweet this!).

Lead generation programs offer small and large businesses the opportunity to connect with a new audience and prospects. However, in order for these types of campaigns to be successful, marketers need to work with sale to nurture leads effectively and efficiently. Not only that, as obstacles arise, marketers and sales professionals working on lead generation programs need to be able to count on their colleagues and be confident that they can reach out to the rest of the company for insight into how the business as a whole can be more successful with a lead generation campaign.

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Digital advertising revenues climbed to a high of $36.6 billion in 2012, according to the IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report for the full-year of 2012. That historic number marks a 15 percent rise over 2011’s full-year number, which itself had been the highest on record, at $31.7 billion. Digital advertising now surpasses newspapers and magazines and is bigger than any other media in the U.S. with the exception of broadcast TV, which hit $40 billion. Customers are moving to digital mediums at a greater pace than ever before and advertisers are taking note.

Display Advertising Makes a Dent

Display-related advertising revenues totaled $12 billion, up almost 9%. With display advertising, an advertiser pays an online company for space on one or more of the online company’s pages to display a static or linked banner or logo. Streaming digital video, one component of display-related advertising, continues to grow the breadth and quality of content online. As advertisers follow their customer to digital channels the increased spend on those channels should be expected. According to the IAB report, here’s how display advertising revenues break down.

• Display/Banner Ads (21% or $7.7 billion)
• Rich Media (3% or $1.1 billion)
• Digital Video (6% or $2.3 billion)
• Sponsorship (2% or $845 million).

The Leverage in Lead Generation

Lead generation is another area of the digital advertising sphere that is experiencing growth. IAB found that lead generation revenues accounted for 5% of FY 2012 revenues, or $1.7 billion, up 11% from the $1.5 billion (5% of total) reported in FY 2011. Lead generation is when fees are paid by advertisers to online companies that refer qualified potential customers or provide consumer information where the consumer opts in to being contacted by a marketer. These processes are priced on a performance basis (e.g., cost-per-action, -lead or –inquiry). Performance-based pricing is gaining interest from marketers. Approximately 66% of FY 2012 revenues were priced on a performance basis, up from the 65% reported in FY 2011. Another report, the 2012 Lead Generation Benchmark Report from Marketing Sherpa, discovered that the forms of online advertising used in correlation with lead generation are webinars, emails, search media, and whitepapers though most marketers are choosing to send their messages out across multiple channels. The top strategic priorities for lead generation in the next 12 months are:

• Achieving or increasing measurable ROI (52%)
• Optimizing the marketing-sales funnel (51%)
• Gaining greater insight of audience (51%)
• Maximizing the lifetime value of customers (47%)

Massive Mobile Moves

As mobile and tablet devices become more popular, they’ll continue to drive investment and strategies from businesses. Mobile marketing provides businesses with new ways to reach consumers IAB found that for the second year in a row, mobile achieved triple-digit growth year-over-year. The mobile category grew 111% to $3.4 billion and accounted for 9% of total internet ad revenue in 2012. Mobile app environment continues to grow and mature as business models develop and advertising budgets grow to support the market. From payment options to utilities and local services, the best apps are no longer concentrated to just one vertical. IAB suggests that the growth in mobile adversting comes from:

• Growth in device penetration (Smartphone and tablet), led by Apple and Google
• Faster connection speeds as infrastructure and device upgrades occur
• Improved screen resolutions that allow more ads onto the mobile screen
• Greater sophistication in incorporating ads into mobile apps and websites
• Social media consumed on mobile devices

Digital advertising budgets are shifting as the best places to find a customer does. Online marketing is a must for businesses looking to expand, reach new customers and cultivate current customer relationships. In the digital space, display advertising, mobile marketing and lead generation are three areas that continue to grow each year. Customers browse the web, are active on social networks and marketers want to reach them. As customers become more tech-savvy, businesses need to become more digital-friendly in their marketing strategies.

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In the midst of social media, email marketing and SEO, landing pages can get lost. Creating the best subject lines, attention-grabbing intros and fresh content are just a few of the tasks modern B2B marketers are tasked with. With all that going on, landing pages are sometimes forgetten about. However, they are crucial to the success of your website and business. In fact, HubSpot’s 2012 Marketing Benchmarks Report found that companies see a 55% increase in leads when increasing their number of landing pages from just 10 to 15. More landing pages provide your business more opportunities to deliver a connected and continuous experience to customers. In order to create the best landing pages for your business, consider these best practices.

Integrate the Source with the Page

Landing pages are often the first step in a lead nurturing campaign. Don’t confuse your prospect right off the bat by having broken continuity from a link to a landing page. You want to keep a consistent experience for the user, using similar language, design, etc. Integrate the source of the landing page with the page itself. If your landing page is for a link sent out on a social network, you’ve got to make sure you have a more information built out on your landing page, since a tweet or status update isn’t going to give those clicking through as much information as an email or newsletter snippet might. You also want to give the prospect a sense of continuation. They should feel the brand extending from your email or tweet to the landing page in terms of design, copy and offers.

Keep Social Media in Mind

In the past, marketing professionals have had the idea to create landing pages specifically for those accessing the page through their mobile device. While some companies may still continue along this route, marketers need to consider streamlining all landing pages to accommodate those visitors who may be coming in from a friend’s “forward,” a mobile search or a social media post. One example would be to reduce the number of form fields for those visiting a landing page on a mobile device versus a laptop. Eloqua found that there is a significant drop-off in overall conversion rates after both three and seven fields in a landing page form. You can nurture those leads and gradually collect more information by directing them to other content that requires minimal, but additional information to be accessed such as related whitepaper or case study.

When it comes to social media traffic,  the share-ability of your landing page is important to keep in mind to generate future traffic. Having social share buttons is a must – you could even include social proof once a page is successful. One example is eye glasses and lens provider ACLens which experienced a 41% increase in conversions and 58% increase in value per transaction after incorporating customer testimonials in their landing page.

Don’t Lose Out on Layout

The layout of your landing page matters. While the source may be a factor, it isn’t the only thing to keep in mind with layout formatting and design. According to MarketingSherpa’s Landing Page Optimization Benchmarks Report, page layout came out on top when analyzing which elements of a landing page had the greatest impact on overall website performance. The layout of a page can affect its load time,which can cause a business to lose conversions and customer satisfaction. According to the Aberdeen Group, a one-second delay in page-load time results in 11% fewer page views, a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction, and a 7% loss in conversions.

Different landing pages will be successful for different tests. The best practice your business can take is to ABT, or “Always Be Testing.” Test different layouts, form fields, and designs to determine what type of landing page will be the most successful for your business. Consider your customers and what they would be expecting when landing on a page. You want to leave a positive and lasting impact so that in the event a prospect chooses not to fill out a form, they keep your business in mind for when they are ready.

How many landing pages does your business currently optimize?

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These past few days, members of the Business.com marketing team have been attending Social Media Marketing World 2013 in San Diego. With just about 1,000 social media and marketing professionals in attendance, Social Media Examiner was able to create a large-scale networking conference with special events such as a boat cruise in the bay and 45 minute learning sessions from industry experts. While some speakers spoke more to those in roles at B2C companies, many suggested tips and strategies that B2B marketers can use.

Lock On to LinkedIn

Sales and marketing professionals who are looking to generate new leads for their business or strengthen their relationships with those they’ve established a connection with, LinkedIn is the network you must be on. In the opening keynote, Social Media Examiner shared some stats from a study that has yet to be released. According to their survey, 49% of the 3,000 marketers responded saying Facebook is the most important social network they use followed by LinkedIn at 16%. While there were a number of presenters who spoke to LinkedIn directly, here are a few things B2B marketers can begin to use immediately to find greater success on the social network.

• Use banners – Your Products/Services section of your company page allows your business to upload three banners. This display advertising is often an untapped section of company pages.
• Add new audiences – It’s all about relevance and targeting your audience is one way you can deliver the great content your site has to offer to the right people.
• Choose keywords – On your personal page, in URLs and in product descriptions, use keywords so that people conducting searches on LinkedIn can find you and your business easily.

Cultivate Communities

B2B marketers are making a shift. As the behavior of buyers has altered, marketers are taking note and altering their strategies. B2B buyers are doing more and more research before ever getting in touch with a provider. Forums and online communities enable businesses to build their own social networks and target communities.  Technorati found that 54% of consumers say smaller communities are more influential. As this is the case, it makes sense that 29% of marketers plan to increase forums activity (Social Media Examiner). Social community marketing strategies are becoming more important as it’s yet another way for businesses to connect with their target audience on a more personal level. Your business can cultivate communities with:

• Forums or industry-specific communities hosted on your site or by your business on LinkedIn. These can create conversations, opportunities and leads for your business.
• FAQ podcasts and YouTube videos enable your business to address customers and audiences directly. Podcasts and videos show the people behind a business and encourage discussion.

Build Your Blog

Does your business want to be influential? Do you want people within your organization to be considered influencers in your industry? If you answered yes to either one of these questions, you need to be blogging. Technorati found that 86% of industry influencers blog. In the Social Media Examiner survey, 14% responded that blogging was the most important network for their business and 62% of marketers want to learn more about blogging. As different industry leaders and experts discussed their blogging, there were a few trends that kept appearing.

• Add value – Your blog should add value to its readers. Pay attention the demographics and actions of your audience to create content that will benefit them.
• Fascinate – In the closing keynote of Day 1, Sally Hogshead noted that the average attention span is now 9 second. In order to capture your audience’s attention in that time, you need to fascinate them with your blog’s content.

Some of the major points from Social Media Marketing World is that businesses who want to connect with customers need to realize that what those customers and buyers want are connections. It’s about the relationship and social media is how your B2B businesses can cultivate those relationships so that as a buyer moves closer to their purchase decision, they don’t just think of the business or brand, but the people behind it.

Did you attend SMMW? What did you take away from the events?

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Small businesses and major corporations are both constantly trying to generate new business. Lead generation can be done a number of ways: through lead generation services, online marketing, tradeshows and more. Social media is the talk of the town for B2C businesses, but B2B companies are just getting on board. Successful B2B online marketers are using social media and seeing a positive impact from doing so. Did you know that the companies who actively manage social media campaigns have seen comparatively high conversion rates as well as healthy engagement rates (Optify’s B2B Marketing Benchmark Report)? If you’re wondering how to nurture those leads you’ve generated on social networks, take these 3 steps for greater success.

Step One: Connect

You may have made contact with a lead once… or maybe you haven’t. Social networks are a great way to reach out leads directly through mediums other than email or the phone. Optify found that Twitter is the strongest social media channel for generating leads. It even outperforms Facebook and LinkedIn 9-to-1 with 82% of social media leads coming from Twitter. Lead generation and lead nurturing efforts can be improved as your sales and marketing teams connect with these people and business decision-makers on social networks.

• How to Find Them: You have their contact information. Use it to find and connect with these prospects on networks such as LinkedIn and Twitter.
• How to Connect: Personalize your connection requests, especially with LinkedIn. If you’re asking someone to become a fan of your company on Facebook, provide them with a valid reason they should.

Step Two: Engage

Engagement with prospects can mean different things for different businesses, but the often overall goal is to create a deeper relationship with those potential customers. Engagement involves your business providing value to these leads via social networks. According to Optify, website engagement from different social media channels varies, but LinkedIn leads the pack while Twitter shows the lowest page views per visit.

• Tweet prospects directly to let them know when an event is taking place in their industry.
• Aim to become a thought leader for your customers to turn to by providing content that can help them gain new insight into how to be more successful. Share your content and the content of others – you don’t want to be overly self-promotional.

Step 3: Convert

Conversion is the ultimate goal. Connecting and engaging a lead are necessary steps in order to convert a lead into a customer. Social media can be the final point of contact between a prospect and your business or brand, so make each touch point count. Facebook is the strongest driver of traffic among the three (Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn), but Twitter leads the way for lead generation.  While Facebook drove the highest percentage of visits from social media, Twitter outperforms it in terms of lead conversion by over a 9-to-1 ratio.

• The B2B buying process has changed and now customers are more likely to come to you when they are ready instead of responding to advertisements. Provide ways for prospects to become customers on your social networks such as with applications, social media specific discounts, etc.
• Optimize your landing pages so that as a customer comes to your pages via social networks, they don’t become lost and have a way to carry on the conversation, via live chat or easy social sharing.

Some may not see the value in lead nurturing via social media. However, it is time to open your eyes to the possibility of these expanding networks. The 2012 Social Media Marketing Industry Report, sponsored by Social Media Examiner, found that 58% of marketers who have been using social media for more than three years report it has helped them improve sales. Social media is where you business can truly become creative in how to attract, engage and convert leads you have generated. Lead nurturing isn’t restricted to follow-up calls and emails. Brand out and stand out with a social media nurturing campaign.

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