Like most B2B marketing folks, I am a big fan of Marketing Sherpa. I read many of their case studies, and nearly all of their research reports. This year I am going to attend my first Marketing Sherpa event, the B2B Demand Generation Summit in Boston on October 15-16. (There is also an event in San Francisco on October 29-30).
I had a chance to speak with Stefan Tornquist, Research Director from Marketing Sherpa (for some reason people return your calls if you tell them you write for a marketing blog). Stefan gave me a little preview of what attendees can expect from the event and what will be covered, and I thought I would share that with the Small Business Hub readers in case any of you are thinking about attending the event.
First, they will be discussing their newest report on search marketing including eyetracking specifically for a B2B audience. This report is scheduled to be released in September, so it will be very fresh and timely. Topics 1-3 below are things from that report that they will highlight at the conference. Topics 4-5 are other areas of interest that they expect to cover at the event, but are not in the research report.
1) Effect of the length of the URL on click through rate. In organic search results, Google and other search engines display the URL to the page that the result is from, so if it is a deep page on your site, the URL may be long and complicated. I know someone who has a PhD but will only click on results that have a very short and clean URL, preferably a homepage. I have not seen any research on this topic so I really look forward to hearing about it. If the effect is strong, many people will have to think about completely rebuilding their website structures and changing their content management system, and think about their PPC ads as well.
2) Effect of relevance of Ad Title on click through rate. This is one where I firmly believe that if you have the same keywords from the search in your page title that the click through rate will be higher. Google is even biased that way since they bold your search terms in the results. But, good data is always great and I am curious about the exact amount of this effect and
3) Relevance of ad vs. position. If an ad is more relevant, but further down the page, will you still get more clicks. Do people only look at the top ads and totally skip the ones at the bottom, even if they are actually the information they want? This has a lot of implications for bidding strategies, so again, I am looking forward to the results.
4) Changes in paid search because of big companies. As larger companies start doing more paid search, what happens to the majority of us who are small businesses? Typically large companies have big budgets and can also afford and justify some "branding" spend (which basically means they can talk themselves into bidding higher and accepting lower click through rates). This means the rest of us have to pay more and more for our clicks (another reason I think SEO is so important). What is the status of this trend and what is coming in the future?
5) Use of content in marketing. How can you best use content in marketing, and how does the use of content affect people's perception of your brand and their response rates to your campaigns? People are trying to avoid marketing more and more, but perhaps there are ways to use content in a smart fashion to overcome this problem?
If you have not registered for one of the events, but want to learn more, view the agenda from the B2B Demand Generation Summits. There is also a $200 early bird discount if you register before August 24.
If you will be attending the Boston event andwould like to meet up, leave a comment below and I'll buy you a cup of coffee and we can chat.
