Sales & Marketing Services | SALESWORKS » b2b online marketing

How To Use LinkedIn For Business To Business Advertising?

Nick Murphy — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 00:47:33 +0000

LinkedIn seems like the perfect platform for business-to-business advertising. You’ve got a captive market, you can target specific industries with specific offers, you can decide which level of executive will see your ad. It’s an ideal scenario for us search marketers. At least in theory.

Well, making LinkedIn work for your business to business marketing can be a challenging task. The design is still very much in-flux so you can expect a lot of things to change, perhaps even during a campaign (as happened with one of our own). But for now at least, if you want your LinkedIn advertising campaign to succeed you’ve got to work with it.

So what do you need to get started?

Define the geographic location of your market. You can select by continent, country, state, all the way down to particular cities. Depending on what you’re selling you’ll need to be precise to maximize your LinkedIn campaign potential.
Select the companies you want to target. You can target categories of company or specific companies and people within those companies.
Select the job title or job category of people you want to target. LinkedIn can help you target that high-level executive.
Write your ad content, make it snappy, and bring on the lead conversions!

By setting these requirements you could reach some proportion of LinkedIn’s 120 million users. That’s right 120 million users. But unless you have something 120 million people are all definitely going to like then reducing the number that you target is going to be important. Not least because there is one piece of critical information that will define how successful your business to business LinkedIn advertising campaign will be:

“Your click-through-rate is everything”

Now this seemingly innocuous phrase is loaded with every aspect of the success of your campaign. There are two critical factors you have to bear in mind when thinking about this and its application to your campaign.

How many people do you want to see your campaign (impressions)
How many people do you expect to click on your Ad (click-through-rate)

The number of people who see your ad (impressions) is defined by the audience you are trying to reach and the specifics of the first 3 items in the getting started list. By increasing the number of people in your audience you increase the number of impressions you get. Unfortunately, and here’s the rub with LinkedIn, you can’t define when that impression appears or under what circumstances.

The clearest difference between Google Adwords PPC campaigns and LinkedIn advertising is that with LinkedIn impressions are not content specific. They are end-user specific, but what good is it to you if your ideal user sees your Ad when they’re searching for a job online?

Another important factor is that once your ad has gathered a certain number of impressions (we’re not currently sure the threshold) LinkedIn begins to track it against an expected click-through-rate. Once your Ad drops below that level; then you’re in trouble. Best industry guesses put that figure at 0.025% CTR; although you can expect to see changes in this as LinkedIn becomes more of a platform for business-to-business sellers. Meaning that 2.5 people have to click your ad for every 1000 impressions.

So you’re ad is being seen by lots of people, but at a time when they might not be looking to buy. That places an incredible extra pressure on a LinkedIn campaign: exciting people out of their job-searching, social slumber and into a buying, business-to-business frame of mind. And that’s no easy task. You’ll need exciting copy, great images (50x50pixel optimized) and an offer that will blow their socks off.

4 Website Mistakes You Can’t Afford to Make

Lori Kittelberg — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 18:16:30 +0000

A large part of our job here at SALESWORKS this summer has been auditing company websites, including our very own – we launched our new site in July.

This has had me thinking plenty about not just about what we do to build effective business websites, but also about the things businesses still do that can defeat the purposes of their website, those purposes being:

Raise brand awareness;
Boost prospects and leads;
Drive sales.

As a writer and communications specialist, there are the top 4 mistakes I see on company websites:

Unclear Messaging

You know what you do – after all, you live and breathe it. However, your average website visitor does not necessarily know what you do or the depth and breadth to which you do it. It seems obvious that your target audience needs to easily identify what you do, but a lot of businesses fail to make their messaging clear.

Many website home pages seem to be written under the mistaken assumption that if the browser found your website, they automatically know what you do. In fact, your homepage is where you should make your elevator pitch, which can be expanded upon in the About page.

Lost Identity

Yes, you resell software made by another company, be it Microsoft, Sage, SAP, Epicor, etc. But don’t lose yourself in the process. You need to tell visitors why you’re the best outfit to buy it from, implement it and maintain it. After all, selecting the right solution provider is the key to software solution implementation success.

This of course also relates to creating unique copy rather than simply duplicating copy from software vendor websites – not only will doing this bury your identity, but it will also hurt your SEO (read Website Copy – What is it Saying About Your Business? for details). Make your identity clear on each and every page through your copy and page design. Drill in why you are the No. 1 choice and make your business unforgettable.

Squandered Lead Gen Opportunities

Your responsibility doesn’t end with getting warm bodies to visit your website; it’s only the beginning. Offering visitors an opportunity to give you valuable contact and/or business information in exchange for a relevant resource – a white paper, video or evaluation tool – can drive leads.

There are 2 keys here:

Offering something unique and valuable to prospects. Ditch the tired brochures that can be found on the websites of your competition. Invest in creating unique downloads that speak to the expertise your business offers clients.
Creating compelling offer copy. Rather than simply providing a link to your offer, create compelling copy to “sell” it, with a graphic treatment that makes it stand out. Placement of the offer can also drive lead generation; often, placing it in the middle of the page rather than at the bottom boosts conversions while also providing a visual break to the rest of the page copy.

Ineffective or Nonexistent Blogging

Consistently posting content to a blog on your business website means you always have fresh content, and search engines like this, meaning it drives your SEO.

However, there are a few ways you can negate these benefits. One is to have a single person identified as your company blogger, usually someone in marketing (don’t be offended, marketing/communications folks – I’m one of you!). You want your blog to reflect your business’s depth of experience, so have different people from various departments blog on their respective areas of expertise.

Make sure you share your content too. No point producing it if no one knows it’s there. Encourage visitors to subscribe to your RSS feed. Posting links via social media like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook will help drive brand recognition in addition to SEO.

Now Get Cracking

Now you know the mistakes most businesses make and you suspect you’re making a few of them. Not sure how to proceed, or lacking the time and resources to do it yourself? Contact Us to talk to one of our website design and consulting experts.

*World’s Worst Website image © http://www.angelfire.com/super/badwebs/

A Rough Schematic for Crafting Your B2B Follow Up Process

Colin Greig — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 18:31:49 +0000

When a business is engaged in Pay-Per-Click, Search Engine Optimization, etc to generate leads the general assumption is that they have a process in place to follow up with and nurture those leads. Unfortunately, this is not always the case and we see a lot of vendors who lack any form of cohesive, stringent follow up / sales process.

What Does Your Follow Up / Sales Process Look Like?

For many partners, their processes for following up with prospects looks something like this:

An email to prospect is manually written and manually sent by a salesperson at their convenience.
If a phone number is available for the prospect, a single call is made and a voicemail is sometimes left with a message of the salespersons choosing.
Sometimes notes are left in their CRM about the contact attempts
Sometimes a salesperson might follow up once at a later date.

Your current follow up process doesn’t cut it.

In the above example,

No structure or methodology = no accountability

No “multi-touch” process = 7 touches to make a sale is the classic, golden rule

No automation = opportunity for a prospect to fall through the cracks.

Sending out Newsletters is NOT nurture marketing:

They are untargeted, unspecific and usually not valuable enough to be read by prospects who aren’t already customers.

They reinforce your brand to your existing customer base – in our experience they do not win you new customers.

Mass email “blasting” notifications of events is NOT nurture marketing:

Event notifications should be delivered to prospects based on the products or verticals that they have raised their hand to – everything else is untargeted, inefficient and results in training your prospects to ignore your emails or mark you as a spammer.

What a successful follow up / sales process might look like,

This is a very general guide to how your automated nurturing program might work.

Suspect requests gated resource via landing page form, becomes a prospect.
Prospect receives branded, personalized response with link to access resource.
Partner sends prospect a simple follow up survey 48hrs later:a. Did you find the resource helpful?b. Did it meet your expectations?c. Do you have any remaining questions?d.Would you like an expert to give you a call?
7-14 days after that email the Partner sends a follow up offer that is directly related to the original offer.a. The email contains a link to a gated form which delivers the white paper and requests different information from the prospect:i. Email (pre-filled in automatically ideally)ii. Office Phone Numberiii. Number of Employeesiv. Job Titlev. Buying Timeline
vi. Etc.

b. This process qualifies the prospect further for your sales team.
Prospect received the white paper, their trust in the partner has increased; the partner has become credible and is positioned well for a phone conversation.a. Your telesales team is notified to call the prospecti. Work with a sales coach to craft an effective telephone script.ii. If they reach a voicemail, don’t hang up – refer to your voicemail script.
Repeat sets 4-5 again and again, 7-30 days between touches, ideally at least 7 times
Interspersed between these “offers” emails are automated, personalized email asking the prospect:a. If they would like to speak with a software consultant.b. If they would like a quote.c. If they would like a demo.d. If they would like information on a diagnostic.e. Etc.
Build out your next nurture campaign for the next core topic (vertical, product, etc).

How To Execute This Strategy For Your Business

This can be a manual process or automated using software ranging from $20 a month to $5000. The concept is the same regardless of the execution.

If you’re generating prospects already then steps 1-2 should just need some refinement.
Step 3 could be done via Outlook manually, in a few minutes per prospect, for a small partner getting a few prospects per month.
Steps 4-7 are more difficult to execute on a larger scale. The process that you build out at this stage is essential to your automated marketing machine and can be used to process/nurture leads from direct mail, bought lists, PPC, SEO, etc. – it’s very flexible.

Depending on your businesses size and objectives, some form of automated follow up marketing system is likely a required investment. However, beware of the labor overhead costs in setting up, maintaining and creating content (emails, resources) for your marketing automation system.

Quick Tips:

Leverage the power of VisitorTrack to pull contacts for visitors who visited but didn’t convert.
- Add these contacts into your automated nurture system.
Once a prospect reaches a specific threshold of engagement (e.g. clicking through on 2 emails), they are flagged to:
- Send out a set of high impact boxes with a specific desired action.
- Have your sales team follow up on the boxes.
- Etc.
Communication between marketing and sales teams is critical. Everyone needs to be aware of what the strategy is and what the expectations are.

Selecting The Right Marketing Automation Software

There are more than 100 solutions on the market. The process of selecting marketing automation software can be a painful experience – not unlike what ERP vendor’s clients face when choosing business management accounting software for their company.

However, this is a topic for another post.

Why B2B Companies Can’t Ignore Social Media

Lori Kittelberg — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 19:42:00 +0000

Once upon a time it was commonly believed that social media was a time-waster for B2B companies. Times have changed.

In December, Google and Bing confirmed in an interview with search engine land’s Danny Sullivan that Twitter and Facebook links indeed have an impact on how well a webpage ranks. In a nutshell, in addition to helping boost your presence and credibility, retweets and link-sharing on Facebook by the right people can help drive your organic search results.

Now ignoring social media simply will not do. Armed with the right information, tackling social media can feel a lot less daunting.

Dos and Don’ts to Maximize Your Social Media ROI

Once you have your Twitter and Facebook pages in place, here are our tips on how to get the biggest bang for your investment.

1. Do keep the lines of communication open.

The point of social media is engagement. If you want to spread news, you can’t accomplish that by disenabling comments from your Facebook wall or moderating overzealously. Responding in a timely, professional manner can turn that less-than-flattering comment into an opportunity to further build trust with your fan/follower base (unless it’s made by a troll).
Mashable has a handy guide: How to Deal With Negative Feedback in Social Media.

2. Don’t follow/like blindly.

Your ratio of followers/friends matters. You don’t have to follow everyone who follows you. The idea is to follow or like those who you are likely to engage with – clients, prospective clients, industry leaders, etc. Indeed, your SEO is impacted not only by your number of Twitter followers, but also by the quality and relevance of your followers.

3. Do focus on quality over quantity.

Build quality content and they will come. Ensure your bloggers write about what they know best (rather than having a single communications person write it all). Likewise, share content created by others based on quality.
And when you share content, whether your own or from a trusted source, don’t simply say, “Read this.” Pose a question or ask followers to share their own experience with you. Invite the engagement that social media is meant to encourage.

4. Don’t post too often.

You know that aunt who friended you on your personal Facebook account? The one who constantly posts updates on her Farmville progress? You don’t want your business to become that aunt. Inundating people is a sure way of getting unfollowed or unliked.
HubSpot’s Facebook page ebook recommends posting once every other day. Twitter is a different game and you have the flexibility to tweet more often. John Moore of The Lab suggests 1-5 times/day for newbies. Because you will be tweeting more often than you update your Facebook page, do not use an auto-updater that posts everything to both.

5. Do have a personality.

Social media gives you an opportunity to be creative. For instance, you can post on pop topics that may have some relevance to what your business does or your industry.
When Chrysler was embarrassed by a tweet that included the F-bomb, SALESWORKS posted a Facebook update posing the question, “Who is handling your social media?” Injecting some personality helps boost followers, who will be at the ready once you share more targeted information or articles with them.

Are You Romancing Your Prospects or Turning Them Off?

Erica Hakonson — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 18:00:03 +0000

With Valentine’s Day just around the corner, I thought this would be the perfect time to think about how you are romancing your suspects/prospects, or turning them off with your first encounter.

Are Traditional Marketing Tactics Extinct?

In this digital day and age, many companies have done away with many methods of traditional marketing, including direct mail. Many felt the traditional market was too saturated, others wanted to hop on the web-based bandwagon and some even threw their hands in the air and stopped marketing all together.

With the average number of corporate emails projected to be 228 sent and received by a worker a day in 2011¹, are your online marketing tactics as effective as they used to be?

The Saturated Digital Market

Talks about saturation, before the days of mainstream corporate email, were you sending and receiving over 200 letters or other correspondence a day? The barrier to entry in the online marketplace is nonexistent these days. It has become difficult for your suspects/prospects to differentiate an email from a reputable company versus an email from a spam engine. It’s time to differentiate your business.

Romance vs. Cheesy Pick-Up Lines

Marketing is somewhat of the courtship, a romance, to your prospective buyers. You wouldn’t pitch one pick-up line (“Do you have a Band-Aid? Because I skinned my knee falling for you.”), and expect to propose marriage directly after. So why do you think one email or one Google ad is going to seal the deal with your prospects?

They need to be romanced – flowers, chocolates, love letters, phone calls and dates – the whole bit. They need to know you are serious about starting this long-term relationship with them, that you are invested. Sound familiar?

Here is where traditional marketing comes back into play.

You need a mix of tactics to show your prospects that you are the right business/solution provider to take care of their needs. This means don’t just stop at the email campaigns or paying to show up as the right choice in the search engines. Show them you understand them, you want to help them and that they need you.

Expand Your Bag of Tricks

Don’t be a one-trick pony. Use all the weapons in your marketing arsenal to get their attention:

Website – The first-impression. These days this is the first thing a prospect sees; don’t make it be their last. Represent yourself well with a clean design, optimized and relevant material, while giving them a reason to keep coming back (e.g. weekly blog, valuable white paper offers, event registration).
Emails – The love letters. Nurture; send them valuable, unique information that your competitors aren’t offering.
Pay-Per-Click Campaigns – The referral from a friend. Let them know you are the right choice, showing up when they don’t even know they are looking for you.
Direct Mail – The flowers and chocolates. Remind them what you do and why you care; high-impact mailers delivered via courier get you the most attention and differentiate your offering from the competition.
Phone Calls – The late-night calls. Following up on emails and direct-mail pieces is a must. Don’t let too much time go by without them hearing from you – include a date invite in the conversation (webinar, briefing or demo).
Webinars/Executive Briefings/Product Demos – The dates. Exclusive webinars, executive briefings or scheduled product demos is where the rubber meets the road; you are arranging an event you know would interest the prospect to build your relationship (e.g. Inventory Management Webinars for Manufacturers and Distributors, Utilization Tracking and Management for Professional Service Firms).

Just remember, you’d never expected a marriage proposal after your first encounter, so don’t expect a good response from your prospects either.

Have you had success with romancing your prospects? I’d love to hear your story – erica@salesworks.com.

Until next time, don’t forget about the “flowers and chocolates” – your prospects will appreciate them just as much as your dates do.

_{¹Email’s Friendly Fire. The Wall Street Journal [Internet]. 2007 November 27. Available from: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119612732031704719.html}

Budgeting Your Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising

Adrian Stepczynski — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 16:00:54 +0000

If you’re new to PPC advertising then you may be finding it difficult to determine the size of your budget. There are no easy answers for setting up an initial budget; however, there are certain things you should consider before starting.

The most important factors your will want to think about are:

Account Size

Industry Cost Per Click (CPC)

Conversion Rate

Conversion Goal

Let’s break these down a bit further…

Account Size

The size of your account is one of the biggest determining factors when it comes to setting your budget. How many campaigns, ad groups and keywords will there be in your account? The bigger the account the more you will likely need to spend to keep your ads active throughout the day. The other factor is the geographic location(s) you’re targeting; if the areas you’re targeting have a high population then your budget will need to be higher.

To get a rough idea of the estimated traffic for a particular geographic location you can use the free Google Traffic Estimator.

Industry CPC

The average cost per click can vary depending on the industry or niche you’re targeting. Some keywords may cost as little as a few pennies but more competitive keywords can range anywhere from $5-$25. The more expensive your advertising space is, the higher your budget will need to be to stay competitive.

To get a rough idea of the average cost per click in your industry, use the free Google Keyword Tool, search for a related keyword and locate the “Estimated Avg CPC” column.

Conversion Rate

When you’re selling a physical product, the conversion rate is likely to be lower than when you’re giving away a white paper in exchange for personal information. It is also unlikely a brand new account is going to get anything above 5% without at least a few months of optimization. Of course there are exceptions but the general rule is to expect a lower conversion rate when starting out.

Conversion Goal

A conversion can be anything from a viewed page to a sale. In PPC, a conversion tracking script is typically placed on a thank you page where the visitor will end up after a desired action. This allows us to track the conversions.

What are your expectations? How many leads or sales are you looking to achieve?

This is where it helps to have an idea of the average estimated cost per click and the estimated conversion rate. By having these numbers you can apply some basic math and get an idea of what is achievable with the budget you have established.

For example, let’s say the average cost per click is $3, and the average estimated conversion rate is 2%. Using these numbers the cost per conversion will be $150. If you are looking to achieve 20 leads for the month then your estimated monthly budget would need to come in around $3,000. Go ahead and use the formula above to get an idea of what your budget will need to be to achieve the desired amount of leads.

Final Word

Because this is a guideline to determining an estimated PPC budget, it is not 100% dead on. The idea is to set the budget using the data at hand then adjust based on performance.

Keep in mind that if you set your budget to low, it may take much longer to see the results you want. PPC is a data-driven platform meaning that the more data coming in, the quicker certain aspects can be tested and improved. If the data isn’t there then the improvements and ultimately conversion will take much longer to show.

What to Do When Someone Plagiarizes Your Content

Lori Kittelberg — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 13:00:07 +0000

You’ve been diligent and invested the time and resources to create original copy promoting your products and/or services. Your team has put together a blog that speaks specifically to how they have resolved pains particular to your industry. Then wham – you find it all on someone else’s website.

Plagiarism Today offers a thorough list of steps to detecting plagiarism and how to then deal with it. Plagiarism Today Editor, Jonathan Bailey, a copyright and plagiarism consultant, notes that business content is increasingly being pilfered.

“In nearly all cases where a business is the victim, it’s another business doing the plagiarizing,” notes Bailey.

Cease & Desist

First, contact the plagiarist via a cease and desist letter. Tell them to remove the content, give them a deadline and lay out the consequences for not complying. Your level of success can vary depending on where the offending party is.

I once worked for a business that had its professionally-shot product photographs reused by a competitor both on and offline. Both companies were in the same city. My boss and I crafted a letter using our collective copyright knowledge. The company quit using the photos shortly after that.

You can gather copyright information by visiting the US Copyright Office or the Canadian Intellectual Property Office.

DMCA Notice

If they don’t act, file a notice to have the infringing material removed from the web. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) protects online service providers from being found liable for copyright infringement – in return, they must remove infringing material fast when notified.

If the same offender has repeated complaints against them, they may have their website blocked completely.

Be forewarned, filing a DMCA notice is a very detail-oriented (and some say painful) procedure, so prepare yourself accordingly.

Take Legal Action

You may also opt to go to court, though this can be tricky, not to mention costly, if the offending party is in a different country.

If you have already sent the cease and desist letter, ramp it up a notch and have it sent on a lawyer’s letterhead. If you happen to have a lawyer friend who will pass on his letterhead gratis, all the better. Often a threat that seems viable, regardless of whether following through actually is viable, will do the trick.

If you’re looking for a good starting point, Plagiarism Today provides free Cease & Desist and DCMA (to host and search engine) stock letters.

An Ounce of Prevention

If you haven’t been burned and want to avoid it, there some steps you can take to better safeguard your content, says Bailey.

Though with text, there is little you can do to prevent it from being copied, you can carefully track it. Bailey suggests using Google Alerts for static content and FairShare for a dynamic website such as a blog “or anything else in an RSS feed.” Both of these tools are free.

For images or videos, “the only sure-fire technique is to place visible watermarks on your image to ensure that, if they are taken, they will be attributed to you,” Bailey says. With images, you could register your works with an automatic monitoring service like ImageRights – Bailey has put together a step-by-step guide to doing this.

Marketing Sherpa B2B Summit – Best Practices

Erica Hakonson — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 16:01:38 +0000

I had the opportunity to attend the Marketing Sherpa B2B Marketing Summit this week in San Francisco, featuring speakers and expert panels across industries and sectors. The summit covered today’s HOT B2B Marketing topics across the gamut, with: Landing Page Optimization, Social Media for the B2B Marketer, Direct Mail Revitalization, Lead Nurturing & Lead Scoring, Successful Drip Email Nurture Campaigns, etc.

There were so many topics covered in the short 2-day summit, here is a summary of best practices discussed in my favorite sessions.

Optimizing the Entire Sales Funnel: 3 Essential Principles

Speaker: Dr. Flint McGlaughlin | Managing Director (CEO) | MECLABS

Best Practices: The 3 Principles

Increase Specificity - Use quantitative statements.
Increase Continuity – Make sure the key values are communicated at every step in the process.
Maximize Relevance – Talk to the motivations of the potential prospects.

Your Landing Page must answer these questions within the first 4 inches and 7 seconds of your audience hitting your page or face the consequences of the back arrow:

Where am I at?
What can I do here?
Why should I do it?

Content That Converts: Transforming a Marketing Department into a Publishing Empire

Speakers: Thom Schoenborn | Editorial Director | Webtrends

Marko Muellner | Director of Marketing Program | Webtrends

Best Practices: Why Publish?

To Generate Leads
To Educate Your Customers
To Get People Thinking
To Build Credibility

We have moved from a pull to push approach to expand our reach and touches. Push forums are available to all businesses – push content out to your website, blog, key influencers,Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and the press. Once you push the content out, reign in your prospects through Lead Routing and Nurturing.

Successful Drip Email Nurturing Campaigns

Speakers: Jeanne S. Jennings | Consultant | Email Marketing Strategy

Best Practices: A Drip Campaign nurtures leads through a series
of emails sent over time.

Build Your Drip Campaign Message Map before content development:

Identify Your Key Features, Benefits and Advantages.
Identify the Obstacles to Overcome.
Include Testimonials to Build Credibility.
Spell out the Incentive/Call to Action.
Create a Sense of Urgency.

The Marketing Sherpa B2B Summit was a great opportunity to find out what is working and what isn’t in the B2B arena. Find out more B2B marketing best practices by visiting http://www.marketingsherpa.com/.

3 Reasons You Should Not Plagiarize Your B2B Copy

Lori Kittelberg — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 17:16:54 +0000

Plagiarizing B2B copy, whether for marketing your products and services or for your blog, is a dangerous idea.

To be clear, plagiarism is not republishing someone else’s story with their permission and credit given to them – it is taking someone else’s work and representing it as your own original work.

Though the Internet has arguably made it easier for writers to gather information, it has also made it easier to steal someone else’s work. And yes, it is stealing.

Business Content Plagiarism on the Rise

In most cases where business copy is misappropriated, the culprit is another business, says Jonathan Bailey, editor of Plagiarism Today and a copyright and plagiarism consultant.

“The business side of plagiarism is growing more rapidly as the rise of freelancing and small Web-based business are putting more people with limited experience (or scruples) in the position to be a business plagiarist,” Bailey explained in an email interview.

So before you copy and paste, consider these 3 Reasons You Shouldn’t Plagiarize B2B Copy:

1. You’ll Hurt Your SEO

As noted in Website Copy – What Is it Saying About Your Business, recycling copy is frowned upon by search engines and penalized accordingly. Search engines filter out duplicate content based on a number of factors, including date published, effectively neutering your ability to rank with them. Makes reusing that copy pretty pointless, doesn’t it?

This is the biggest issue Partners who reuse Microsoft copy face. Microsoft obviously isn’t going to sue you for reusing their promo copy. However, if you think you’re going to rank above Microsoft using their copy, I have a bridge I’d like to sell you.

2. You Lose Credibility

Blogs seem to be increasingly targeted by the copy-paste bunch. I was recently researching a story and found a great blog post with tons of valuable information. I later found the same story, word for word, posted on a different, unassociated blog with a different writer’s byline.

Now, if I was a customer I would certainly not be inclined to do business with someone who had stolen content from another website. A blog is really supposed to be your stories told in your voice. So to me, reusing someone else’s content is an indication of a lack of honesty.

3. You Are Breaking the Law

You read that correctly. Though the act of copying and pasting may seem innocuous, it is indeed illegal.

The content’s creator has copyright on their work right from the moment it’s created. In other words, it doesn’t need to be registered for that copyright to exist (though it does provide a handy paper trail if the creator takes a plagiarist to court). Visit the US Copyright Office or the Canadian Intellectual Property Office for more information.

Though you may be concerned about the resources it will require to put together unique, compelling copy for your website, in the end, it pays off. Stay tuned for tips on what to do if your company falls victim to a plagiarist.

“Push the Envelope…Give 110 %”

Lori Kittelberg — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 13:44:07 +0000

As a copywriter and a former reporter, I’m always on the lookout for clichés in copy.

A journalism professor drove this home for me many years ago by sharing his least favourite cliché:

It’s every parent’s worst nightmare.

Because really, how does someone else know what my worst nightmare as a parent is?

I was reminded of this by a recent article in The Australian that made the social media rounds about the worst clichés in journalism. At the end of the story, one source noted, “I get more annoyed by corporate speak because it is not descriptive and often is designed to hide the real meaning.”

And clichéd corporate speak has permeated online B2B marketing.

A SALESWORKS client recently requested that we ensure none of their online copy includes the descriptors state-of-the-art or top-of-the-line because they’re overused and no longer resonate with the client’s audience.

Why avoid clichés? They are:

Lazy. And readers know it. Find a unique way to say what you want to.
Too general. They don’t differentiate your product or why you’re the best company to implement the solution they’re seeking.
Overused. People tend to glaze over or quit reading altogether when they’re faced with drab, overused text they have read over and over again. And it sounds insincere to boot.

Out of curiosity, I searched ‘state-of-the-art software’ and got 151,000,000 hits.

I started creating my own list of clichés to avoid when I found The Encyclopedia of Business Clichés by business author Seth Godin. His top-10 has been enhanced by Squidoo.com readers who, at the last point I checked, had boosted his list to 384.

Seth Godin’s Top-10 Business Clichés:

1. Win-win situation

2. Thinking outside the box

3. Giving 110%

4. Best practices

5. Synergy

6. Paradigm shift

7. At the end of the day…

8. Low-hanging fruit

9. Going forward

10. Push the envelope

What are the clichés that irk you?