B2B Marketing, Digital Media and Marketing Strategy
Let’s get right to the point. B2B marketers today are not optimizing programs to reach and engage their best prospects.
Sure, we talk about a buyer journey or about carefully mapping content. But at the end of the day, what are we doing? We are scoring leads high if they consume a lot of content and we are optimizing our program to increase lead scores and content consumption.
Who does that mean we are really optimizing our marketing for? Serial content consumers. [Read more…]
A colleague forwards you link with a short note: “this is awesome, we should be doing this.” Your interest is perked. Your expectations are high. You click and… your heart sinks.
Its last decade’s news and isn’t relevant for your business today. What was gold to your colleague was a waste of time for you.
Content quality is in the eye of the beholder. At the end of the day, no other perspective matters. Here is the litmus test we need to apply: [Read more…]
What is a good ROI on marketing? If you can increase net income by 50 cents for every dollar spent on marketing, that’s good, right? The more you spend, the more money you make.
But what if you learned your primary competitor was getting $1.50 in income for every dollar spent on marketing? 3x the return you are getting on marketing! All of a sudden your marketing looks pretty ineffective! [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…]
Without marketing metrics, marketers cannot manage investments or show the value of marketing. However, without careful selection of metrics, diligent analysis and a clear overarching vision, those same metrics can become the biggest barrier to successful long-term marketing programs.
Short term metrics are easily gamed, and it often happens unintentionally. Here are a few common metrics for B2B marketers and ways some businesses influence the metric without driving long-term results. [Read more…]
What are B2B marketers biggest measurement challenges? How do they effectively communicate results within the organization? What are the trends they are looking towards in 2012?
We tackled these and other questions during the weekly #B2Bchat discussion on Twitter on December 8, 2011. Highlights from the discussion along with additional commentary on each question is below. [Read more…]
I’ve have been using Triberr for about two months. Last week, Triberr was down for upgrades. All of a sudden, my posts, normally shared by 25 to 30 tribe members, didn’t have any automated support.
What’s Triberr? It’s a platform for forming tribes of bloggers that support each other by tweeting the posts of other tribe members.
Over the last month, the traffic here from Triberr has steadily increased. I was hooked on the numbers and started to see the increasing traffic numbers as success. But it wasn’t my success, it was Pam Moore’s and Michael Brenner’s success. I was simply fortunate to have been invited into their tribes.
Suddenly, despite the warnings I give others, it happened to me. I was focused on the metrics and forgot why I started blogging. I let measurement trump purpose. [Read more…]
This is my opinion about the recent IAB, ANA and 4A’s principles for online measurement. If you don’t like rants, or think the advertising associations can do no wrong, stop reading and go back to Lycos. Otherwise, read on and share your reactions in the comments below.
The IAB, ANA and 4A’s recently outlined five measurement principles as part of Making Measurement Make Sense. The objectives, outlined below, are admirable:
The problem is, as someone that has spent the last ten years (gulp) in this industry, the principles and their intended impact are mostly nonsense. [Read more…]
This should be a call to ensure you measure your social media activities, and to measure them correctly.
One of the challenges of measuring social media ROI is the return comes in many different forms. As companies develop social media plans and programs, anticipating the ways social media will deliver ROI is a challenge few have addressed. Most companies quickly implement traditional media measurements, slightly adapted for social media.
Before you continue, ask the following questions: [Read more…]
Measurement Love
I’m a bit of a nut for measurement. In fact, I spent the first eight years of my career focused on improving and applying digital marketing measurement.
I believe everything needs to be measured. But just maybe, we should stop measuring for a moment. Measurement has gone too far, expectations of measurement are too great, and measurement has clouded our judgement instead of informing it.
These days, all to often measurement has become the purpose, not a tool. One thing I learned in those first eight years [Read more…]