JAZD Markets, Inc.

According to MediaBistro, only 22% of Fortune 500 companies have corporate blogs.  That percentage should climb considering that corporate blogs have so much upside.  PR works.  More important, a corporate blog is interactive and gives you instant connectivity to all your stakeholders.  A well done corporate blog can communicate a company’s values, pride, passion, and customer engagement, as well as delivery performance, all in one platform. 

One corporate blog that often gets showcased as a best practice by blog reviewers is General Motor’s Fastlane blog.   GM’s Fastlane blog is packed with information, is well organized, includes lots of pictures, and is updated frequently.  It implies action and innovation.

Like other marketing platforms, you decide your rules of engagement.  In addition to your company spokesperson, you can open the doors to other industry gurus as well.  You can continually replay your messaging in a variety of ways.  Keep it interesting.  Make sure it’s interactive.  Serve your customers.

 Frequently visited sites such as Bloggingtips.com can give you guidance from coming up with content ideas to production and posting.  Copyblogger.com is one of the kings on blog writing.  Technorati.com provides some useful tips including what not to do with a post on some reasons why corporate blogs fail.

JAZD is currently a B-to-B player in eight other verticals including technology, healthcare, communications, process flow, life sciences, chemicals, supply chain and hotels.JAZD Markets is also celebrating the release of a new state-of-the-art, real-time reporting system that allows marketers to measure their ROI more effectively than ever before.   In addition to a record sales month and five new employees signing on, the team is JAZD about future growth.

You can’t manage what you can’t measure.   And, what and how you measure counts most.  Hard metrics vs. soft metrics need to stand out.  The new marketing agenda requires ROI to be measured on short-term payouts and not as part of the overall marketing budget that caters to long term objectives such as product introductions, brand awareness and other umbrella activities.  Since you need  to separate it, we’ve done it for you.

The new JAZD reporting system:

• Saves you Management Time
• Gives you Metrics that Matter
• Provides Lead Nurturing Intelligence at your Fingertips

The dashboard below demonstrates your payout.

• You get details on the number of touch points to your potential customers and fine-tuned metrics.
• We’ve calculated your dollar value for you.  You don’t have to pore through reports.
• We have categorized your online leads with behavioral data and other elements to help you transition effectively from marketing through the sales cycle.

All the online leads in the world aren’t good unless lead nurturing is given the same priority as the goal of getting the leads in the first place.  Sales executives don’t really care about leads unless they know those specific leads have already put them in the running. So how do you give them leads that put them in the running?  You give them leads that may or may not be ready to buy but they are ready to establish a relationship, an introduction that guarantees connecting buyers with sellers especially in a complex sale.

In the online directory world, Category leads are real decision-makers who have been actively exploring your product and services in the past 30 days under your category heading.  They have been out fishing.  So handle the big fish with care.

When you want the attention of a busy person, your chances are greater if you introduce specific information on how to help them versus general information.  It’s the same with leads.

Category leads are specific, not general.  They are leads that live in your discipline.  They are leads that say I want to establish a relationship that will most likely lead to a sale.  Your Company has something that I am specifically seeking.  Find a way to nurture them.   Get sales to understand where Category leads sit in the sales funnel.  They are the ones that count.  And, that their first approach to these leads is to warm them up to your Company.  The close isn’t always on the first call.  But, the first step in an important relationship is always in the first round.

And by the way, an important tip and a one line commercial that’s relevant to you:  The ROI of a Category lead in the JAZD Marketplace is the best in the industry.  You get a lot of demo data about  buyers who are actively searching for your products and services (within 30 days) for less CPL, making the true value of these leads the economic win in your marketing funnel. 

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I was an early adopter of Facebook.

Actually – to date myself in Internet terms – I was an early adopter of Friendster. And then MySpace. And then, finally, once it opened up to more than just college students, Facebook.

Now, I’m not bragging about my Social Media savvy here. Rather, I’m admitting that I am an Internet Addict. And because of my addiction I’ve noticed a few things . . . a few things about how companies use Facebook to engage a wider client audience.

Here are a few practices I suggest avoiding.

Posting a Zillion Times a Day

No one is that interested in your company’s goings-on. Not even your mother.

For the most part people don’t use Facebook to find out what’s new with the corporate sites they’ve trusted enough to “Like.” In fact, they have little tolerance for too much interaction with companies.

It’s a personal tool, so when you use it for your company you’ve got to keep that in mind and respect that your fans have let your company into their inner circle.

I suggest updating once or twice a day in pre-determined and thoughtfully spaced out intervals. What does that mean? That means don’t post twice, right in row, at lunch time. It means post once around lunch and a second time as you’re leaving for the day.

Think about how you check your own personal Facebook and take your own habits into consideration. I check mine around lunch and then when I leave for the day. If your corporate Facebook follows suit then I’ll see both of your posts before they’re buried in my news stream. And I won’t be frustrated that I saw your company’s posts when I snuck on to Facebook on my iPhone around 10 a.m., and then again at 3 p.m. You get the idea.

Including a Link and Only a Link in Your Status Updates

Think about it. If you were in a business meeting and someone asked you about what your company has been up to lately, you wouldn’t write down a link to a recent Press Release and mutely pass it over to them, would you? If you would, then we’ve got more to discuss than Facebook practices.

When given a chance to show personality, passion and enthusiasm for your company, TAKE IT.

Sounds like a no-brainer, right? But you have no idea how many corporate Facebook pages I’ve seen that just throw links up, SMACK! in their status updates. No explanations, no engaging text. Just the ugly URL to whatever it is on which they want to direct their audience to click. Avoid this.

No Logo

Now I know internally everyone thinks the picture of a seedling depicts the potential growth your clients companies could see if they just sought out your services. But I can guarantee these potential clients with whom you’d like to engage – as well as a fair share of your current clients with whom you already engage – will have no idea who your company is or what it is your company does.

If you think your logo needs a bit of dressing up to attract Facebook fans, by all means (after discussing it with your marketing team) dress it up a bit. Just don’t forget it.

What are some Facebook tips you suggest?

Enter any online-online marketing help forum or discussion group and you’re guaranteed to see a myriad of posts about the subject.

“SEO Help!” “Long-Tail Terms, Worth It?” “Five SEO Tips to Drive Traffic.” You get the idea.

Well for those of you who swear by the Three-Word-Rule you can give yourself a big ol’ pat on the back for being right . . . for the most part.

Chitika, an ad network (you may know them from their iPad tracker), recently published results showing that there is a “SEO Sweet Spot.” And according to their findings, most organic search traffic was the result of three-word searches.

Chitika came to this conclusion after looking at a sample of 41,103,403 impressions of search engine traffic coming into their network between June 13th and 19th.

“Within the sample, 10,710,579 impressions – some 26% of all search traffic – came from three-word searches,” Chitika posted. “The next top word counts were two-word (19%), four-word (17%), and finally one-word (14%). “

And if your query is longer than five words you can forget about it being effective. According to Chitika “Any query beyond five words will see dramatically lower traffic, throwing into perspective just how fragmented traffic from long queries really is.”

Chitika also took a deeper look into whether there was a correlation between the word count of a query and a visitor’s intent when it comes to advertising click rates.

Turns out there is.

In the case of advertising click rates; having 5, 6, and 4 word search terms is best.

The conclusion? There is a definitive window for success in search optimization and it lives between three and five word long queries.

Will this change how you about the way you approach SEO terms?

Dhiraj Rijhwani  |  SEO Analyst | JAZD Markets, Inc.

Working with JAZD markets, Inc. a comprehensive MaaS Platform company, as a SEO analyst I have tried a lot of ways to improve the page rank (PR) for the 17 web properties owned by JAZD. But after going through many trial & error methods I can say that back linking/solicitations is one of the most effective ways to improve and bring up the page rank of a domain.

Back linking helps in direct increase of Page Rank of a site. Back Linking is more effective if a domain gets a back link from a domain with a higher page ranked domain.

Back linking is a very famous and valuable term in the SEO world. Back linking at its very basic means having incoming links to one’s domain from other domains. There are a couple ways of back linking as far as I know namely two-way back linking and three-way back linking.
A domain’s PR is calculated by a formula applied by Google that takes into account all the back links a particular domain has.
The PR is calculated by a formula that says
PR (Domain Name) = PR(Incoming link 1) + PR(Incoming link 2) + PR(Incoming link 3)+…….
•    Where the sum of all the PR’s is 1.
This formula is easy if the domain doesn’t have any outbound links. But if there are solicitations or link exchanges then the formula changes as follows.
PR (Domain Name) = PR(Incoming link 1)/X1 + PR(Incoming link 2)/X2 + PR(Incoming link 3)/X3+…….
•    Where X_ is number of outbound links for that particular domain.
Thus according to me back linking is one of the most effective page rank improvement methods.

I while working at JAZD Markets, Inc. (http://www.jazd.net) have experienced it myself that link exchange with other web masters or sites helped JAZD to improve the page rank of all their 17 domains.

Solicitations can be more useful and can be long lasting if there is useful content in your web site. Content can be in any form, be it a blog or profiles of the management team of the company, or information about stuff related to the products of the company. What Google does is it looks for pages that are unique i.e. have content that has not been mirrored form any other web page. The other thing that Google looks for is mirrored pages while crawling through the domains and if you have a lot of pages that have the same layout and have a very little content then Google most probably consider those pages as spam. Thus more unique the page more chances are that it will get recognized and valued in the eyes of Google.

Thus Page Rank is directly proportional to solicitations and solicitations are directly proportional to unique and relevant content on a page.

I recently attended the annual show for the Industrial Supply Association held this year in San Antonio. Much like all annual shows there was the typical convention center experience with aisles of 10×10 booths all lined up with sales exec’s that didn’t really look like they were having a good time or expected too much from the experience. The ISA is a very well respected member association and really does a fine job at pulling together the industry as a whole and setting up a first rate networking event, but something was amiss. Even with the tough economic times ISA members showed up in strong numbers to the event which speaks to the overall value ISA members get from the annual event.

What was missing in the whole event were B2B end customers. You had Manufacturers meeting with Distributors galore which is proxy for the supply chain in the Industrial Supply market. What you did not have was the flood of B2B buyers that would provide a clear direction and voice for the event. This is somewhat the result of ISA membership but also a misalignment with how B2B industrial buyers are not looking for the products that they require and the distributors that they will work with. Today’s industrial supply buyers are starting to leverage the web to find suppliers at a pace that the industry has not seen before. The truth is that most companies in the sector are not prepared to meet this new flood of potential customers in a meaningful way. Traditional directories and buyers guides are either still in the “Yellow Pages” paper format or at best an online list. Manufactures and Distributors in Industrial Supply today have very few online options to distinguish themselves with the very end buyers that they lust to have a meaningful conversation with.

In looking for an answer to this dilemma I found “the book” of attendees and much like the traditional directory it was a good list and a place to start, but no more than that. I started to look to compare like companies and found it impossible to accomplish this with just the book or frankly with their sparse 10x10s either. So rather than continue searching through the book I simply started to speak with those poor sales exec’s at their 10×10’s. Not too surprisingly, they were very eager to speak with me even if they were slightly groggy from the night before. It’s Fiesta time in San Antonio; if you haven’t been it is a little like Mardi Gras, southwestern style. What these sales execs were starved for even more than a coffee and an aspirin was a real conversation with a buyer. They can only talk to the folks in the other booths about the economy for so long before they simply lose their spark and start to focus on where that evening’s Fiesta will happen.

My questions were simple although somewhat self-serving as I wanted to understand how B2B buyers make their selections on products and distributors within the Industrial Supply channel. I do have a bias that the Industrial Supply sector at large is in desperate need of the type interactive directory driven marketplace that JAZD just so happens to lead the market with. So armed with all my self-serving bias I went ahead and asked these questions:

1)    How do you interact with your B2B buyers online?
2)    How do you separate your company from the rest online?
3)    How much do you leverage online advertising and lead generation to build your business and fill your pipeline?
4)    What would you like to be able to do to distinguish yourself online?

Not surprising the answers were largely that companies are not doing very much online although they now are starting to understand that they must change and leverage the internet to reach the market much more than ever before. They all were quick to mention that they knew the end buyer was getting very savvy with how to use the web in their buying decisions and that search was playing a greater role than ever. When asked about an interactive market that was built on a world-class directory platform I got strong interest and some passive resistance after they cleared away the groggy look from their faces. The ability to interact with real buyers in meaningful sales conversations and distinguish their products and services from others was as one distributor put it the “holy grail of industrial supply.”

After attending ISA 2009 I am even more confident that the marketplace is ready, and even waiting for an integrated online directory platform. I am very excited to take the feedback from the many buyers I talked to back to the team at JAZD and continue on our mission to provide the best B2B directory platforms in the world. JAZD will deliver a state of the art industrial supply directory market to the industry in 2009. More on that hot topic in future quips.

-Jamie Bedard

One of the reasons I was so excited about joining JAZD is that, as a long-time B2B marketer myself, I know that the buyers I really want to reach – the smart, well-informed ones (i.e. the ones that the smartest and richest companies hire) are so in need of what we do.

To illustrate this, I’ll use a consumer analogy – let’s say you’re looking to purchase an automobile.  While the automobile manufacturers spend many millions of dollars marketing themselves, and creating compelling, useful websites, is that where you as a buyer are really going to spend your time?

I suggest not – what most of us would do (at least what I would do) is first spend significant time at a site like AutoByTel, Cars.com or ConsumerReports.com to research the types of vehicle that is of interest, set up our parameters (2WD/4WD, body style, MPG, hybrid/traditional, etc…) and create a short list of models that most closely reflect my needs.  Then we might go to the auto company websites once we’ve made a decision.

For B2B buyers, however, in most markets those ‘Consumer Reports’-esque resources simply don’t exist today.  Yes there are numerous simplistic ‘buyers’ guides’ in most industries which provide basic taxonomies and general listings of who sells what, but there are few if any tools to do any in-depth category or product research or comparisons, or allow buyers to consume relevant content, deeply research products and categories, or exchange ideas with peers on which vendors might be most appropriate.

In a nutshell, that is the JAZD value proposition – we build highly interactive, deeply meaningful and useful resources for B2B buyers across vertical markets, leveraging the domain expertise of our content and association partners – and the buyers’ themselves.  It’s a huge, highly compelling value proposition – and I’m personally thrilled to play a role in making this mission a reality.

This is also why, if you are a B2B marketer, you need to participate in our marketplaces even if you’ve done a top-notch job of SEO/PPC/web marketing yourselves.  We complement – and can turbocharge – your efforts, and we look forward to working with you to deliver new ROI to your current marketing spend.  More on that in a later post…

Online B2B directories have a poor reputation.  They are typically littered with ads, include only the most basic information about each listed company, have limited search features, and provide no feedback on how often potential buyers have seen or used your listing.

What does all this remind you of?: A printed, paper directory of course!

Most online directories are nothing more than an electronic version of their printed predecessors.  In the rush to get existing print directories online, implementors simply carried the bath water with the baby: bringing all the limitations of print into the online world:

• Ads were the primary way to generate money from printed directories
• The pages had to limit space per listing to keep book size and shipping costs low.
• Search in a printed directories meant thumbing through or using the index.
• Feedback could only be tracked with great effort through promotional codes, coupons or other costly and error-prone methods.

Any platform that wishes to change the business-to-business market perception of online directories must optimize to the online environment by providing industry-sensitive search functionality, deep listings that include product-level information, and constant real-time feedback on tasteful advertising and lead-generation programs.

In other words, we’d all like to see a true online directory, rather than a printed directory online.