Articles

B2B Lead Generation Part III: Personalized Landing Pages and Marketing Automation
By Steve Tsai, Managing Editor, Internet Journal
8/26/11

This is the Part 3 of the B2B Lead Generation based on an SES session by Lauren Vaccarello, Director of Search, Display and Social Advertising, Salesforce.com.

Personalized landing page is an interesting new concept. The concept is similar to "cloaking"; a black hat tactics intended to fool the search engine. Cloaking means that the Web site would direct a search engine crawler to a page specifically designed for the search engine for the purpose of getting a better page ranking. A human visitor will see a different page. Most search engine experts will not recommend cloaking because it can backfire and cause the search engine to penalize your page or site ranking.

However, personalized landing page is a legitimate and a white hat tactics which can be quite effective as a B2B lead generation tool.

The concept is that headlines, images, and copy change based on the visitor profile. For example, based on visitor's IP address, you can determine whether it is from a small business or from a large enterprise. You can then serve a landing page either for small business or for a large enterprise. This way the landing page is targeted specifically to the visitor.

Another example is to serve a landing page depending on the visitor's role, executives and CEOs will see a landing page specifically for the executives, while other visitors will see a different landing page. In this case, the visitor would have to have identified himself before so that the system knows what role he is and serve the appropriate landing page.

The advantage of this approach is that the landing page is tailored closely to the visitor profile or intent and makes it more effective to engage the visitor.

The drawback is that sometimes the visitor's profile can be wrong and it can backfire.

Also, it may have unpredicted effect on search engine page ranking.

For B2B company, marketing and sales must work closely together to make the entire marketing and sales operations productive. The goal is to generate more revenue with less cost, less people, and less time.

To do that you need to increase communication with the sales team: leave notes in your marketing campaigns, hold sessions with sales and get them excited about your leads, and show them tricks to better understand their prospects.

Marketing automation tools will also improve the overall productivities: lead management, lead scoring, lead nurturing, and increase sales effectiveness.

In summary, use marketing automation to prioritize and nurture leads and increase sales, sales and marketing can work together.

In the next and final installment, I will discuss Retargeting.

About The Author Steve Tsai is the Managing Editor of the Internet Journal http://www.intnetjournal.com. Internet Journal provides the insights and analysis on Internet marketing, eCommerce, mobile communications, eSecurity, and global e-Business. If you have any comments about Internet Journal, please send email to stt@intnetjournal.com.

eMarketing