B2B Marketing, Digital Media and Marketing Strategy
Lead scoring and personas are popular topics in B2B marketing. However, the two are generally discussed separately.
Until B2B marketers begin talking about personas and lead scoring together they are missing an simple way to identify missed sales opportunities.
What if your objective is to deliver highly engaged leads to sales, but your persona indicates that sizable segments of your audience are not likely to engage with marketing content or even to register. [Read more…]
What if banner ads could become as targeted and relevant as emails?
One of the emerging trends in online advertising promises to make this possible.
Rather than targeting an audience based on various characteristics, CRM retargeting allows you to target segments of your CRM database with online ads. [Read more…]
B2B marketing is complex. Sales cycles are long, measurement can be convoluted, and segmentation, lead scoring and sales and marketing alignment take traditional marketers into uncomfortable spaces.
Amid the details and uncomfortable spaces, the bigger marketing picture is often lost.
Take a step back and consider the three bigger picture items below. How can you improve each of these things? [Read more…]
Sitting in a meeting recently and reviewing various B2B sites, someone said “they even have a promotional offer with pricing on their site.”
It wasn’t a complement of their marketing prowess or focus. It was a knock, the final proof that this B2B marketer did not know how to market.
Say what? Solution selling and never undermining your value are anthems in marketing. But has it gone too far? Not everyone will compete on price and promotion, but does that mean no one should? [Read more…]
Lead generation continues to be a top objective for B2B marketers and content syndication is primary offering from publishers.
Definitions:
As demand for B2B lead generation programs increases, new providers are springing up, sporting slick new websites, massive email databases, lower costs and brand new approaches.
As the landscape changes, here are some of the benefits and drawbacks [Read more…]
Increasingly, marketers are adding content curation to their marketing activity, often with objectives of sharing a certain amount of content each day. Ardath Albee (@ardath421) has a sample to-do list for a content marketer in Show Quantity the Door.
Three weeks ago I published Three Reasons Content Curation is Overrated, my reaction to research published on eMarketer and advice we frequently see about curating content in order to establish thought leadership.
That doesn’t mean curation is not valuable. It may be one of the primary ways you stay in touch with your audience. But the path to value from your curation is a winding one. [Read more…]
In B2B marketing, bad data represents a huge lost opportunity. According to SiriusDecisions, companies with the best quality data drive 70% more revenue through marketing programs than those with simply average data quality.
Despite the cost of bad data, the practice of the average marketer guarantees bad data, and it may be getting worse each year. With a growing body of research showing current marketing practices are consistently delivering bad data, it is time for change. [Read more…]
B2B marketing discussions on Twitter and blogs have a tendency to focus on singular topics, such as Twitter, marketing automation, or lead generation, as if they are right for everyone and we just need to do them well.
However, the people B2B marketers want to reach are ultimately trying to solve a challenge or embrace an opportunity based on their unique business.
Shouldn’t B2B marketing solutions be just as unique? [Read more…]
If you measure or benchmark B2B demand generation activity across sales and marketing, one of the best benchmark resources just received a major facelift and a number of improvements.
Yesterday SiriusDecisions unveiled their new demand waterfall at the annual SiriusDecisions Summit. The new waterfall (or funnel, to most of us) provides a framework for measuring and benchmarking demand generation from initial inquiry to close and across sales and marketing. [Read more…]
According to recent research from IDC, lead generation is a top B2B marketing priority, and in the next four years Sirius Decisions predicts 75% of all registrations will be captured online. (Sirius Decisions actually labels this as inbound marketing, however I use a more limited definition of inbound marketing.)
One of the primary ways B2B marketers capture leads online is asking prospects to register for content. Doing it effectively requires creating content prospects want in a format that is easy to engage with while capturing the information you need.
However, based on recent research from DemandGen Report, marketers are turning away prospects [Read more…]