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In the age of online marketing a business website is a make or break feature. Done well it can capture your intended audience's attention and draw them into a relationship with your brand. Done badly it can turn off a potential customer in record time. And with platforms like Drupal and Wordpress making web design and development accessible to the masses there really isn't any excuse for doing it badly.

This month we've scoured the Approved Index directory to find the very best examples of B2B websites. All of our 400+ active suppliers were in contention and over the next few weeks we'll be presenting the very finest examples of online customer interaction from the following sectors:

• Office Equipment
• Business Services
• Automotive
• Training
• Construction Equipment

and finally, the incredibly competitive categories of

• Marketing
• Internet Services

Approved Index suppliers are, in general, a pretty web savvy bunch so the standards have been high and most categories have presented a very hard decision.

The translation: you shouldn't be downhearted if you're an Approved Index supplier and didn't get an award. To double the amount of website love we can dish out though we'll also highlight an honourable mention in each category.

The Judging Criteria

We'll give full reasons for each of our decisions in the award announcement post but in the interests of transparency here's what we were looking for in our search for the best supplier websites of 2012.

At Approved Index we're all too familiar with the nexus that exists between buyer and seller and what can go wrong in that oh so delicate zone both at initial contact and in subsequent steps of the buying process. The website should present as few hurdles to the potential customer as possible while providing all the support and information they need to get them through the conversion process.

Design - A good customer facing website should make the presentation of information a priority. The layout should be clear and provide your users with everything they need while still being easy on the eye.

Navigation - Users should be able to work out easily how to get to the information they need and be able ot navigate there quickly.

Contact Options - The more ways you give your customers to connect with you the better - some people are more comfortable ringing in while others like to email. An online form can be the perfect solution in many an instance but leave users feeling cut off in others.

Content - Whether in the form of text, audio, video or pictures, content is king. No matter what your business does the visitors to your website can be described as looking for one thing and one thing only - information. A great business website provides as much information to its users as possible and always makes sure that the content is engaging, relevant and satisfies visitors' neds.

Pizazz - The least important factor to us but one which can make the difference between a really good website and a great one. If you can not only provide your visitors with a great looking, content paked, easy to use website with tons of options for following up but also do it with style and personality then you are truly a master of the B2B web.

The Announcements

Will begin tomorrow, so keep an eye out.

First up... Office Equipment.

This is exciting!

Another area in which it can be tempting to slash costs in a recession is marketing. The marketing budget tends to take up a lot of space on a business's list of outgoings and it sometimes feels that those outgoings are strangling your margins. After all, what does marketing do exactly? What revenue does it bring in? It's just there because everyone else does it, right? Do those guys in marketing actually do anything all day long?

As we've discussed in previous posts, we believe that SMEs are the key to returning to economic growth and that small business innovation can't happen without taking a chance or two. Increasing your marketing efforts could be one such chance but it could also mean doing more with less - not marketing bigger, but marketing smarter.

So, before you get out that big red pen and start slashing budgets left, right and centre take some time to consider what marketing is, how you're doing it and how stepping up your marketing efforts could actually strengthen your market position in an economic downturn.

What's it For?
Marketing encompasses a range of activities from billboard advertising through to Tweeting. We're not here to tell you what method is best for your business - that all depends on what it is you sell and who your target audience is. What we want to convince you of is that marketing is effective and that it can bring in much more than it takes out - especially in a recession.

In a stagnating or shrinking economy large companies will cut their marketing budgets. But large companies probably had bloated marketing expenses in the first place - sponsorship of sporting events and TV commercials don't come cheap. But that doesn't mean you should cut yours as well. Instead you should be ready to exploit the opportunity that this presents.

What opportunity? I hear you cry. Glad you asked.

Marketing has to happen somewhere - in a physical space like on billboards or newspapers, in a digital space like on TV or on the internet. There's only so much of this space that people pay attention to, that registers on people's internal radar as they go about their day. During boom times we're literally bombarded with marketing messages 24/7 but as large corporations spend less on marketing they start to retreat from those spaces, leaving more room for smaller companies to start inhabiting that space and making their messages more effective (due to reduced competition) when they do.

And that's not all. Lower demand actually causes the price of advertising to drop. Never will you have a cheaper opportunity for, say, getting a TV commercial made than during an economic downturn.

How do I do it?
Now that we've given you the reasons we think that marketing shouldn't be the first casualty of your cost-cutting exercises, what advice can we offer on how to spend your marketing budget effectively?

It all boils down to two words: plan and measure.

Whether you're taking on a marketing company or keeping it in-house, your marketing plan should be thorough and well researched. Delve deep into your customer data to work out how your customers behave: what forms of media are they most likely to pay attention to? What's their typical job title, age range, income or marital status? Your specific plan will depend heavily on the insights you glean from information that customers have given you in the past so if you haven't been collecting this kind of data before, start now!

Your plan should set out exactly waht it is you're trying to communicate to the customer, which channels you're going to use to get that message out and should include clearly defined objectives and goals. 'Increase number of customers' is not a clearly defined goal. 'Make and publish 5 online videos in February' is. One size fits all plans won't do - make sure you have separate plans for the short, medium and long term.

Of course, drawing up a marketing plan is just the first step. Actually implementing it well is probably the more difficult part. In order to succeed you'll need to make sure that the plan's aims and objectives are communicated company wide and that everyone understands them. This is where a small company has the advantage over the corporates - in an SME everyone can get involved in marketing efforts. For example, using real staff in promotional videos not only saves money but customers love it too. Make sure everyone's on board and understands their role.

Now we come to measuring results. Measuring return on marketing investment (ROMI) is a fairly new area of study but there are several god books on the subject like Marketing Calculator by Guy Powell. It's a fairly difficult task to accomplish as there are incidental effects of marketing that can't be directly measured - like increased brand awareness. What monetary value can you attach to such effects and how do you measure them? It's not easy.

This is where online marketing comes into it's own. Tracking tools like Google Analytics allow you to see exactly how many new visitors have been attracted to your website and how many of those visitors turn into customers or prospects. You can also see how they got to your site (e.g. via a link in an email newsletter) making the task of attributing effects to different marketing channels much easier.

There are ways to achive this kind of tracking offline as well. Discount codes which you can change across different advertising methods, specific phone numbers or barcodes can all help you pinpoint exactly how a new customer heard about you. In order for such methods to work though, you have to get your staff to ask and record the information.

All these measurements can then feed back into your marketing plan, allowing you to scrap what isn't working and focusing your efforts on what is.

SEO for Beginners, the second part of this series of SEO tips is all about aligning your business and SEO strategies. This is an all important aspect that must be considered when beginning a concerted effort to improve the visibility of your website, via SEO methods.

Reflection time
Examine your business goals and what your website is currently doing or what it will do. Are these two areas aligned, signing off the same hymn sheet, are they focused like a laser, on the prize that you've set yourself?

If not then you need to have a think about how you can get these two areas aligned, or your strategy for the website will go off kilter and quickly.

Write down the areas that have become mis-aligned and delve, discuss & debate into how you can align these areas.

Getting these goals aligned will help you to define how and where you put your efforts when you employ your SEO strategy, not only for your website, but for your overall business strategy.

Get the building blocks of your website correct & the rest doesn't become easier, but it becomes a lot clearer.

Handling Opposition to your website and SEO strategy
Obviously, business needs can alter the decisions we want to make, so at times we can't always do what we would like to. This does not make your SEO strategy obsolete, it means you have to focus on other areas until the time or resources become available to optimise the parts of your site that have been put on the back burner.

Once you have shown your strategy to the rest of your team, or consorted with your peers if you're a one person business, then it's the time to choose which areas you want to focus on at this stage.

Focus on increasing traffic overall to the website, optimise specific pages on the website, and see how these perform.

But

The most important consideration to keep in mind is that you keep your expectations in check. SEO takes time, and limited changes will produce slower results, so enter with the mentality that you will be in for the long haul. Once you and your fellow employees notice that the site is bringing in more quality traffic then it will be time to garner more money for your SEO budget.


And finally,
So what to remember! Develop a document displaying your business goals and objectives overall.
Define what you want your website to do, or what it currently does. Are these areas aligned?
If you have mis-aligned areas, are there opportunities to focus these and bring them in line?
If not, prioritise on a smaller part of the site, and manage your expectations. List some SEO goals that will be attainable whilst you are limited by resources, time or management.

Next time we will discuss your future site visitors and what you want them to do when on your website.

Beginning an SEO strategy for your business can be a very daunting task. Where on earth do you begin??? The terminology is off-putting, the complex coding that can be involving is mind boggling and there is so much information out there where on earth do you begin?

When I first got involved with SEO those thoughts were flowing around my head on a rotational basis for most of the day. Getting ready in the morning for work involved minutes of head scratching regarding the use of H tags when writing content, and what kind of anchor text was best to link my internal pages.

This blind panic has abated over time, and I now feel comfortable with the terminology (well most of it), that I think it's about time to pass on some introductory pointers to webmasters who want to aid their sites and see their all important website gain some good grace with Google.

So over the upcoming weeks I will post some short articles relating to a particular area in SEO that are simple enough for webmasters with little experience to employ and gain those all important SERP rankings. Ill post my own advice with links to videos from industry professionals at Google and other leading bodies.

The first post is something all marketers, business owners or website babysitters can manage, and that is defining the reason for having your website, and having a well planned SEO strategy. Defining your aims, goals and objectives will help you to clarify how you want your website to operate and who it should be aiming for. A good strategy should be thought out before any of the nitty gritty keyword research or on/off page optimisation begins.

1 - Define your primary, secondary & any additional business goals.

2 - What does your website do?
    If you already have a website, then examine what it's doing at the moment. Is it selling products online? Is it a brochure website, which displays your products? Are you publishing research papers, discussing new innovations, business biographies?


If you don't have a website or your looking to re-develop go through and write down what you want your website to do in the future, thus giving yourself a clearly defined list of aims and objectives for your website. This will also help give you an idea of the complexity of the website and allow you to align this with your marketing budgets for the upcoming business year, and then help you to gain a realistic perspective of the functionality the site will be capable of displaying, in line with your current budget.

Next time we will discuss how to align what you have just found out with your overall business goals and how this can affect you're online and SEO strategy...

You should never underestimate the power of email. This method of communication with existing and new clients can be powerful. This is only possible if you have a clear and well thought out approach to your email marketing campaigns. We have compiled a 10 point list of some of the best techniques to help you and your email marketing campaigns. Please feel free to add any further comments to this list below.


1 - Don't underestimate the importance of the subject line
The subject line is easily one of the most important aspects you should consider in order to get the best response from your email campaigns.  It needs to be eye catching, engaging and not look spammy. You only have a few seconds (if that) to engage a potential prospect before they click on delete, therefore having a good, nay excellent subject line is of great importance.

Testing different subject lines by splitting your data and running A/B tests of varying subject lines to see what achieves the highest open rate will help you to learn what your audience responds best to.  You can also run potential subject lines past your colleagues, but you can't get a more accurate result than testing your actual audience.

Keep a record of what works and what doesn't. What unique selling points or benefits do your audience respond to best?  Do they prefer long or short subject lines? This data can be a great reference point for future email campaigns, and makes sure they don't become repetitive.

For a real life case study, take a read of Conversion Rate Expert's Voice Case Study.

2 - Keep it accessible: use all formats and link to a webpage version
Consider the format you create your email in. Send both a text and HTML version to ensure all users can receive your message, and include a link to a webpage version to maximise the number of people who can read your message.

Keep the HTML version image light, and use text instead of images where you can.  All images must also have relevant alt text that accurately describes them.  This is of great importance due to the advancement of spam filters, and the fact that a large proportion of emails arrive in many recipients' inbox without images enabled.

A good test is to sense-check that your key message is easily identifiable without the use of images.

3 - Make sure the message is relevant to the recipient
Firstly, a well maintained email database or a targeted email list that you've purchased from a third party is crucial to the success of your campaign.  If you own the email database, cleaning it regularly by removing unsubscribers and adding new contacts will keep the audience active and relevant and really help boost your open rates. It also means your emails will not go to unsolicited recipients who have unsubscribed in the past, therefore helping you in analysing the success of the campaign by eliminating erroneous email addresses.

Secondly, is the message compelling to prospective customers?  Is it driven by their needs, or just a re-working of ideas or information the internal team want to share?  How does it compare to messages they are receiving from competitors? Asking these questions will help you keep your message relevant to your audience and help you stand out from the competition.

4 - Understand the science of timing
This can be overlooked, but it's another aspect that should be carefully considered. When you send your email can have a huge impact on whether it is opened, read, ignored or consigned to the trash.

The day you send, time of day and if you have a seasonal product, the time of year when you send specific messages can all have an effect. Do your research. When are your customers most likely to be receptive to emails from your company? If your emails are business related, are they likely to get the best response during working hours? If they are more consumer focused is a lunch time, early morning or evening email likely to get higher open rates?

Researching your market and testing different timings is really the only way to find this out for sure.

5 - Is your branding consistent?
Integrating your email marketing with your other marketing activities is important. Are you presenting a unified image?  Is your branding aligned at all times? Inconsistency can be costly, and therefore making all marketing streams aligned is a relatively simple yet highly important consideration.

Maintain colours, fonts, images, and the overall content and marketing message.  You want seamless integration when a user clicks through the email, arrives on a particular landing page and possibly requests a brochure or further contact. Maintaining this will add professionalism to your business, your product offering, and should lead to increased success.

6 - Keep the content organised and scannable
You've achieved your first goal of getting your email opened, so don't let all that hard work be for nothing by offering light, spammy, ill-conceived content.

Make sure the content is organised properly. This can include the words you use, how the email is organised & even where the text is positioned. You want to grab the recipient's attention with a useful and beneficial message as soon as they open the email; this then needs to be reaffirmed with the content that precedes that initial message.

Formatting of the content is important. Most users do not read emails, they scan.  Therefore make sure you break down your key marketing messages into scannable headings and  simple bullet points that inform customers about the key features and benefits you want to highlight.

Images can be a useful aid in quickly conveying your message, so a well chosen image can go a long way to increasing your response rates (or reducing them if it's inappropriate or low quality). Do remember though that a high majority of email clients block images by default, so don't rely on an image to do all the work for you.

7 - Make your brand recognisable and feedback easy
The From Address must work as hard as the subject line to get your emails opened, so use something relevant such as your brand name, product name or something that prospective customers will feel recognise. You don't want your message to be immediately consigned to the junk folder because of an ambiguous From Address.

It's also important to include a share option such as "send to a friend" so that people can quickly and easily forward it to friends or colleagues that would find it useful. This is an effective way to reach new customers, and also allows you an opportunity to garner new  email addresses if you link to a "sign-up" page within your email.

8 - Track & analyse your email campaigns
Don't begin an email marketing campaign without having some way to monitor its impact. This is key to measuring the success or failure of your campaigns. Being able to track, monitor and analyse your campaigns will allow you to edit future campaigns so that they have a greater impact.

Most reputable email marketing service providers will provide some form of analytics package, such as open rates and clicks, but it's good to check this first.  If you have your own analytics package you can add tracking code to the end of your URLs so that all you visits and conversions are tracked. 

Google Analytics offers this functionality and has an easy URL builder to help you set these up for any number of campaigns.

9 - Use a dedicated email provider
Spend some time and money to get a professional email marketing company to help you build, distribute and track your email marketing campaigns. You may be surprised at what good value they are, and your costs will quickly be covered once the orders come rolling in.
Check the Approved Index Email List Pricing Guide for a comprehensive overview of the prices involved, and armed with that extra knowledge you can then go out and begin getting quotes from email list providers, and email marketing companies.

10 - Test, test and test
Never underestimate this!!! I still get nervous before sending out large scale email marketing campaigns. You have one chance to impress so read over your content, check that all the links work, check images are sized properly and then check it again.  Send it to a gmail, yahoo, hotmail and Outlook email address and see how the email looks when accessed via different email clients.  Test that email until you are bored of seeing it, and the marketing message is imprinted onto your brain.

Another week, and another week of excellent posts from the blogging world. Working in digital marketing I am always looking for inspiration for future projects and initiatives to roll out for Approved Index. This week I had an epiphany as a friend has just entered the world of digital marketing and they were asking for some tips on social media.

This got me thinking about businesses and how they employ social media to communicate with new and existing customers, evangelise their brand and generally increase their own social media standing. So this week I have pulled together some great posts all relating to social media and how this can be utilised for business.

Outsourcing Your Social Media Activity

The first article I want to talk about relates to outsourcing your social media activity to an external agency and what you need to consider when doing this. I am personally not a fan of outsourcing this type of activity as I feel it goes against what social media engagement should be. That is, the company interacting with its customer base on a more personable and social level. Giving this to an external company that doesn't fully appreciate or understand your brand could be very detrimental, and from working in an agency in a previous life I have seen this happen. But, at the same time I can appreciate some businesses don't have the time or the necessary experience to implement a full social media campaign.

Thus the reason for me liking this article so much as it gives you five top tips on what you should be doing when employing an external agency to manage your social media campaign. To surmise the tips within the article, they're all about communicating regularly with the external agency, making sure they blend seamlessly with your corporate message and fully understand your brand and also making sure you get regular reports on the progress of your campaigns. To read the full article 5 Key Elements for Success when Outsourcing your Social Media Activity.

If you decide to go down the route of doing your social media activity internally then what should you be taking into consideration to ensure a successful campaign is achieved. The following two articles are both good introductions in how to monitor your brand using various forms of social media. The third article is an excellent introduction on how to use Twitter effectively for business.

Fundamentals of Social Media Monitoring

You've decided to take on the social media challenge internally. It's a big step but one that if done correctly will pay off dividends. You can expect to receive more sales leads, increased communication with your clients and increase the promotion of your products and services.

The article Putting the "Fun" into the Fundamentals of Social Media Monitoring has some great tips on how to monitor your brand and business within the social media world. It has tips on how to utilise the search functionality on all of the key social media platforms. I particularly agree with using the social media monitoring tools such as Hootsuite, one other tool that we use regularly is Followerwonk, this simple tool searches the profiles of Twitter users and enables you to do some basic searching of businesses that may be in the same market as you are.

It is key when implementing a new social media campaign to be aware of what people, companies and rivals might be saying about you. Do the initial research and it can pay dividends later on down the line by enabling to see where you are getting mentioned most regularly. So do what this article recommends and you will be on a good footing, I'm continually monitoring our brand and what people are saying about us, enabling Approved Index to build up that rapport.

10 Twitter Tips for Business

This is a really good article for people in business who want to get into using Twitter to bolster their social media standing. The 10 Tweetable Twitter Tips for B2B Marketers is a great article for novices and experts alike.

I really like the final three points, and they are tips that I still regularly employ whilst at work. The rest of the tips are also extremely beneficial so I would highly recommend getting stuck in and trying them out to see what you think to them.

In the article I felt point six was of particular note, as its one that we are regularly testing ourselves. We regularly test different formats, link to different types of content and analyse what proves successful, don't be afraid to try something different. Standing out from the crowd could give you that edge that propels you up in the social media stratosphere.

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Another busy week in the office and another busy week trawling the internet looking for interesting topics of conversation. So as tradition dictates it is now time for my Friday round-up of some of the best posts, videos and general online ephemera that has garnered my attention in the past week.

The first post that I have enjoyed this week was from Google. The post was titled Measuring and optimising Fairmont's social media efforts with Google Analytics. It's an interesting post about how the Fairmont business implemented advanced segments and tracking in order to measure the success of individual social media campaigns. I find it an interesting article as there is a lot of dispute out in the marketing world over the validity of social media, due in part to the lack of being able to track or record conversion or success rates.

                                        

The second article that has caught my attention is related to user generated content, and strictly speaking I found this article last week, but only got round to reading it early this week. The article is all about user generated content (UGC) and this is an area that we at Approved Index are focusing a lot of interest at the moment, and it is something we are going to be enabling on the Approved Index website in the future. The article is very interesting and goes into good detail about the potential benefits of maximising your UGC offering. Read the full article here How To Get Users To Promote Their Own Content.

The third and final article that I had in my RSS feed and got round to reading this week was regarding homepage re-design. This is an interesting topic and one that I take a great interest in as it can be a risky, yet very beneficial move for a website. This article sums up three good points on what you should be considering when beginning the process of implementing a new homepage. Read the full article here Redesigning Your Homepage: 3 "Must Do" Steps.

After another meeting of minds with the buyer facing team, or leads beasts as well call them at Approved Index, we have some more top quality information that all direct mailing buyers should be aware of. If you're considering using the services of a direct mailing company then you should find these common misconceptions and FAQs save you a lot of time, and potentially money!
Read the article in full Direct Mailing: FAQs and Misconceptions, or take a look at the highlights below.

Common Direct Mail Misconceptions

1 - Direct mail is spammy! The most reputable direct mailing
companies use lists of people who have opted in to receive information from pre-agreed businesses. So sending out direct mail is a great way to send targeted information to large targeted groups of prospective customers, who have indicated they have a vested interest in the general area that your business operates within, and this can apply for both B2B and B2C.



2 - Nobody reads direct mail! This can't be true or direct mailing companies wouldn't still be operating, yet alone expanding. Of course not everyone is going to read the information you send out, but a great majority will, and this is what you should bear in mind. Complement the direct mailing by employing other methods from the marketing mix such as email, or paid search and you will have a strong integrated campaign with which to market your product. As good marketers know relying on one marketing tactic does not always make for the best marketing strategy.



3 - Direct Mail and Email Marketing are the same! Whilst we at Approved Index can see where this idea may have arisen from, it's a common misconception that can leave first time direct mail customers feeling very confused. They are both different platforms for delivering information to prospective customers, the way the information being sent is organised and arranged is also hugely different. Collecting the results also varies greatly, email marketing is highly measurable, where as direct mail is much more of a carpet approach where you send the information to as many people as possible, and filter the responses from that initial send date.