It's been almost two months since I posted links, so we've got a bunch this time!

Modern B2B Marketing Links

What do you mean I can't "Click-To-Buy" your Software!?!
According to by Mike Mankowski of Tier 1, only 13% of Software as a Service companies allow you to buy their software directly on their site. "It's not enough to offer your software on the web and charge a subscription, you need to make it simple to adopt and get started. Not having a 'click-to-buy' feature tells your users that they are going to need your help to get going and make their software work. That sounds a lot like bad old Enterprise Software."

Interview with MarketingSherpa's Anne Holland
In this podcast, Brian Carroll interviews Anne Holland about their Business Technology Marketing Benchmark Guide 2007-08, which I discussed in my recent post 80% of Your New Customers Think They Found You.

Ten Ways B2B Marketers Can Become Cutting Edge with Online Marketing
Three of the ten: Use Mobile Marketing to Compliment your Online Presence; Have Dedicated Resources for Search Engine Marketing; Live and Breath Relationship Marketing.

Marketing Accountability Links

The Most Dangerous Job in Business: The CMO
A great quote from FastCompany.com: Because marketing is such a public function, and everyone has an opinion on what works, people will come up to the CMO and say something like "your advertising blows". No one comes up to the CIO and says, "Hey, I was just thinking about your data architecture and how much better things are somewhere else."

Fixing the Marketing-CEO Disconnect
In many companies, the marketing function has wandered far from the company's overall strategy. The result: lower margins and declining productivity, says HBS Professor Gail McGovern. In this interview she discusses what executives can do to repair the split and introduces a new diagnostic tool for measuring marketing performance used in HBS executive education programs.

Pay Per Click Management Links

Seven Habits Of Highly Effective Pay-Per-Click Advertisers
From John Ellis: Separate Content from Search, Control spending by adjusting bid amounts, Create a negative keyword list, Conversion matters (not click-through rate), Bid Exact (Avoid Broad), Good Analytics.

How to Lower Your AdWords Minimum Bid
How landing pages and ad group organization can lower your minimum bid and raise your quality score.

AdWords Optimization Tips - From Google!
The Inside AdWords team has been sharing tips for assessing optimizing your AdWords account, including assessing your business and goals, and optimizing your account structure, keywords, and ad text.

Mobile Search Marketing for B2B Marketers
B2B marketers who have not looked at mobile search as a means of creating top of mind awareness should indeed consider mobile search as an addition to their marketing efforts.

9 Cost-Effective PPC Branding Strategies
Nine strategies to help you build your brand without burning through your spend, courtesy of MarketingPilgrim.

Landing Pages and Testing Links

11 Tips for Successful B2B Landing Pages
Practical tips for creating successful B2B landing pages, from Luke Newton at Skatterbox.

"Keep it Simple, Stupid" Applies to Your Landing Pages, Too!
Landing page effectiveness and conversion rates increase significantly when choices and unnecessary distractions are eliminated.

Screen Testing
DestinationCRM's Jessica Sebor writes that Marketers should use testing to facilitate performance decisions, rather than going on intuition. Marketo's CEO Phil Fernandez is quoted in the article, saying that A/B testing is more appropriate than multivariate testing for B2B companies, since most B2B companies do not get enough traffic and conversions to get statistically valid results with multivariate.

11 Ways To Improve Landing Pages
An old article (from 2005) by Michael Nguyen with great tips for improving your PPC landing pages.

Lead Nurturing Links

Lead Nurturing – The Method Matters
Telephone and in-person meetings are not what prospects want during the lead nurturing stage – online content and emails are what prospects are looking for.

Capturing That Shy Prospect
Jason Stewart from DemandBlog shares tips for increasing conversions in forms, writing "Removing the request for things that people feel protective of is going to reduce the number of people who either abandon the form or purposefully mislead you with an incorrect phone number. When [my company] Maxager stopped asking for phone numbers, landing page conversions doubled and the cost per conversion dropped 40%."