B2B Marketing Analytics: Project Open Robe

People are always sceptical about the benefits we promise. You lot always want a case study.

But many of our existing clients are reluctant to share the secrets of their ongoing B2B marketing success with you. They think you’ll steal their ideas even when we promise that you would never do that.

That leaves us in bit of a bind. So, we thought, let’s just do it to ourselves. Let’s be our own case study.

That’s what Project Open Robe is all about: a living case study that will track our campaign around the B2B Marketing Manifesto.

So to get the ball rolling we’re going to show you the “warts and all” thinking for the B2B Marketing Manifesto. And that means we’re going to share the plan before we even start.

Now, we’re not saying all this is going to happen; we’re marketers, not soothsayers, and we’re expecting, almost hoping, for bits to fail. But we believe in our planning and that’s why we ask clients to believe in it.

Let the experiment begin.

What the B2B Marketing Manifesto is all about
It’s an attempt to make sense of all the new things that make B2B marketing such a confusing, exciting, challenging discipline right now. And it’s a call to action with some guideposts to what we consider to be effective B2B.

Who’s It For?
Anyone with an ambition to be a better B2B marketer and to show better results to the business.

Why are we doing it?
The bottom line: we want to attract one or two new clients who think the way we do. A marketer who reads the B2B Marketing Manifesto and wants to talk to us is our kind of marketer.

To do this, we need the B2B Marketing Manifesto to bring us a box of lovely goodies across our marketing funnel:

•    Generate a load of downloads in six months
•    Spark interest in our existing thought leadership library
•    Drive three new project discussions with existing clients
•    Incite two new business discussions with prospects
•    Improve Google ranking for our chosen keyphrases
•    Increase target audience site traffic and, crucially, conversions
•    Build a top-drawer case study for all you sceptics

How are we going to do it?
By fusing together the tools of our trade.

We’re not using any bought media this time (but sometimes we do). So it’s:

•    Our blog
•    The digital tom-toms of social media and online PR
•    A creative outlier or two
•    Word-of-mouth
•    Marketing automation with the might of Marketo
•    Our newsletter, the world-famous Velocity Vectors
•    Cross promotion with existing content
•    Industry presentations and webinars
•    A spot of SEO work and a dabble on Adwords
•    Doug’s loyal extended family
•    An endorsement here and there
•    Industry publication bylines

If you were buying all that then the whole project: copy, design and promotion would cost somewhere between £15,000 and £30,000. It’s great value, especially when you consider we’re the only people who don’t have to pay for our services.

And how are we going to measure it?
I thought you’d ask this one. You lot usually do.

And we’re not hiding anything so here’s all our key performance indicators which are, when relevant, benchmarked against one hell of a hard-act-to-follow: the B2B Content Marketing Workbook.

We’re setting the kind of KPIs we’d set for our clients: valuable, tough but achievable. They are all based on six months time period and will be measured thoroughly in Google Analytics.

Downloads
These sit at the top end of the campaign. We’ll be successful if we achieve lots of downloads. Here are our download metrics.

– 1000 downloads
– 200 volunteered names and email addresses
– 25 per cent spike in downloads for our thought leadership library
– 50 comments (not including those pimping Viagra or Penis enlargers)

And here’s how we’re going to do it.

Search
We are working with our core “B2B marketing” term to improve ranking, visits, conversions and backlinks. We know you’re obsessed with your funnel.

Ranking
We plan to up our Google ranking on our key term.

Reach the top 10 on Google from our current rank of 16.
Reach the top 5 on Google UK from our current rank of 7.

Visits
Of course you’re not really interested in ranking. It’s pretty useless if it doesn’t deliver more visitors on the term.  We’re going for:

Increase search term visitors by 50 per cent

Conversions
What do you mean visitors don’t count unless they actually download a paper, fill in a form, or, preferably both? Fair enough. We want to:

Increase conversion rate by 35 per cent for the “B2B marketing” term.

Backlinks
The Content Marketing Workbook, our benchmark, was much more than link bait, but that didn’t stop it from being great link bait. It got:

•    250 direct links to the download page
•    180 links with lovely anchor text
•    32 links with a PageRank of one or more.

And we plan to do just as well this time, if not beat it. A tall order for a piece that’s more general than instructive in its nature, but that’s what a target is all about.

Good Form?
The smart ones among you will have noticed we don’t plan to capture the details of everyone that downloads.

Why? Because we want to do some testing (for your benefit) so we can get some more data on what we gain (and lose) from a form.  We’ll let you know the results of our test as soon as we find out.

Database
Our standard click through rate (CTR) for our monthly newsletter is around 12 per cent, which, research shows is a pretty robust B2B campaign rate.

But with the power of marketing automation we’re looking to do better in our mail shots.

We’re running an automated campaign to bring prospects further down our funnel. That means:

– Segmented databases for behaviour and demographics
– Follow-up marketing materials based on key triggers

We’re looking for a  30 per cent jump in CTR for our key prospects with at least one concrete business meeting coming through our campaign funnel.

Social Media
As you might expect it’s a growing component of everything we do.  We did pretty well with the Content Marketing Workbook and plan to improve across the funnel.

The plan is to:

– Increase our visits from social media by 50 per cent
– Smash our conversion rates by a full 100 per cent
– Improve our engagement figures for time on site and bounce

Online PR
We use this term to mean bloggers and journalists. Again we want to build from the foundation of our content marketing workbook.

The eerily familiar plan is to:

– Increase our online visits from online PR by 50 per cent
– Smash our conversion rates by a full 100 per cent
– Improve our engagement figures for time on site and bounce

You can see what we strive to do, for ourselves and our clients. It’s content driven marketing that’s designed to work bring prospects into our funnel and spit out some business at the other end.

Summing Up
In a few months time we’ll transform this planning document into a case study that goes deeper into our tactics. But this is what we’re determined to achieve.

You’ll find out soon enough whether we made it or not.

Project Open Robe Part 1 – the one where we commit ourselves in public (Planning)

Project Open Robe Part 2 – the one where it all kicks off (Thinking)

Project Open Robe Part 3 – the one where confidence starts to rise (First results)

Project Open Robe Part 4 – the one where the trick shots start (Cross-promotion)

Project Open Robe Part 5 – the one where we share the first month’s results (Reviewing)

Project Open Robe Part 6 – the one where we toughen up (Soul Searching)

Project Open Robe Part 7 – the one where we find the world’s best marketers (Segmenting)

Project Open Robe Part 8 – the one where we show that design isn’t everything (Style v Substance)

Project Open Robe Part 9 – the one where lead nurturing proves its worth (Marketo)

Project Open Robe Part 10 – the one where the form fights back (Form v No Form)

Project Open Robe Part 11 – the one about autoDMs in Twitter

Project Open Robe Part 12 – the one about re-purposing and atomising your content

Project Open Robe Part 13 – the one with an early peek at the outcomes

Project Open Robe Part 14 – the one where it ends (before it starts again)