B2B Marketing, Digital Media and Marketing Strategy
“We will start with an awareness efforts for the four weeks. This will provide air cover and soften the market for our demand generation campaign.”
Theory, benchmarks and the wisdom of the marketing crowd would indicate that you have a sound strategy. This approach is common in B2B marketing, particularly for mid-sized marketers.
Unfortunately, when you dig into it, the strategy doesn’t hold water. It fails, consistently, for two reasons. [Read more…]
You have a lead generation program. An influencer program. An advertising program. A marketing automation program.
You measure every detail about every program. And your programs are doing great.
There is just one little problem: you are reporting on a series of programs. Even though reporting shows you are becoming a better marketer, it doesn’t show how marketing, overall, is progressively improving your company’s position. [Read more…]
When the success of your business is less important than the success of your marketing, something is seriously wrong.
Yet this is exactly how most B2B marketers approach lead generation today! You don’t care about the number of leads your sales team has. Instead you care about the number of marketing sourced leads.
We all know B2B marketing measurement is imperfect, yet we momentarily suspend all reservations in order to judge our effectiveness based on results attributed to our efforts instead of the results for our business!
This is crazy folks! [Read more…]
Do you care if potential prospects see your services as high value or a complete rip-off? Of course you do.
This is about the perception each individual has about you. This is about your brand.
Perceptions are created by experience with your products, service and people, through what other people say about you (even competitors) and through your own marketing.
No one buys from a company they distrust or pays a premium for a solution they see as a low cost provider.
However, in B2B, the value of perceptions have been set aside, in favor of the new holy grail of B2B marketing: lead generation. [Read more…]
Among paid media and advertising tactics, lead generation programs are a key source of leads for B2B marketers, especially in the enterprise technology space. Tell a B2B publisher that you are interested in lead generation and the majority will point to some form of white paper syndication program they offer.
For the sake of this post, lead generation programs refer to publisher programs that promote your content and capture registration. These are contacts or inquiries, not sales leads, but in keeping with the terminology publishers use, we will refer to this as lead generation here.
In enterprise technology, publishers like IDG, Information Week and TechTarget have nearly turned these programs into a science, with guaranteed leads volume and a myriad of filtering and qualification options driven largely by email and newsletter promotions. [Read more…]
I was recently informed that every marketing blogger must publish their predictions for the year ahead. So to claim my status as a blogger and not put my right to use WordPress at risk, here are my 12 serious predictions for B2B marketing in 2012.
1. Name recognition will rule. Flooded with content, audiences will turn to recognized sources. High quality editorial, analysts and recognized thought leaders will rise above the clutter based on their names and reputations. [Read more…]
Despite numerous calls for the demise of the click rate, it lives on as a standard fixture in nearly every benchmark and performance report. It lives on, its very existence reducing the effectiveness of your brand campaign.
Click rates live on for a simple reason. No other metric is (1) common across all advertisers and publishers and (2) accessible by publishers. Until an alternative performance metric can broadly be measured by those selling advertising space, click rates will remain a fixture.
The problem is, click rates hurt brand campaigns. [Read more…]