Social Media Spending 2012: Forrester & a VC Weigh In
How does your 2012 social media spending compare to spending levels at similar companies? Is your B2B social media strategy based on hard data, or guesswork? It’s often hard to know how to budget effectively, but two new reports may help marketers with their B2B social media strategy for the remainder of 2012 and beyond. Forrester analyst Kim Celestre just published a new research report titled “Social Media Amplifies Your B2B Buyer’s Experience“. The $499 report is filled with new data on how business to business marketers (primarily those who sell technology products) view social media, as well as how business Read More
New Research on Driving Revenue via Email
Gleanster Research recently published a new report titled Deep Dive: Email Marketing in the Distributed Enterprise. A PDF of the entire report is available for free download, but here are five email marketing best practices for marketers who work in companies with a distributed marketing model. In a study that showed that 76% of marketers use 3 or more technology solutions, top performers were twice as likely as everyone else to use a central marketing platform that manages email marketing best practices for corporate and local/partner campaigns. “Internal” communication — between corporate marketing and the “external” distributed marketing and sales Read More
Five Rules of Content Marketing
Content marketing works. That simple premise is why more and more marketers are making content marketing a core part of their lead generation strategies. One of the reasons that they work is that providing high-quality content helps build trust and rapport with prospects and customers, making it easier for them to make an eventual purchasing or renewal decision. It’s not a new idea. Early in my career, I worked at Shell Oil Company in Houston, where the “Come to Shell for Answers” booklets were a primary part of our marketing communications budget. Back then, we called it thought leadership marketing, Read More
4 Top Strategies to Drive Revenue & Cut Costs
If you’re like most marketers, chances are you have a clear mandate to drive more revenue while lowering your cost per lead. How do you do that? Sure, everyone knows that online marketing (social, email, digital, search, content) can be less expensive than traditional marketing communications channels, but online marketing costs are rising, too. In fact, if you work in some industries — like insurance, financial services, health care, the legal profession, or high technology — the costs for the most popular keywords used in search marketing are increasing so rapidly that even big brands are feeling the squeeze. Take Read More
Optimize Customer Engagement via Data & Technology
Forrester Research Analyst Ellen Carney teamed up with KBM Group’s Lindsey Resnick last week for a webinar titled, “Marketing Life Insurance in a Customer-Driven Environment: Optimize Customer Engagement via Data & Technology.” Don’t let the long title fool you: it was one of the most important webinars we’ve seen this year in terms of providing great data that marketers need right now. You can view the entire webinar online by clicking here, but here are a few of the highlights that we thought would be of special interest to marketers. Consumer Experience Emerges as a Key Revenue Driver Ellen Carney presented quite Read More
SEO Fairy Tales Without Happy Endings
We share office space with Vertical Nerve, a web analytics, search marketing, and mobile marketing company. In other words, they’re Google Analytics geeks, who understand exactly how to measure, monitor and tweak marketing campaigns to get the results you want. I’m not, even though I’ve known about Google longer than most people on the planet. Months before Sergei Brinn and Larry Page announced their new search engine, I attended a hush-hush meeting (after signing “binding mutual non-disclosure agreements and information embargoes” explained with great seriousness by two teams of lawyers), and saw one of the very first demos of the product that Read More
Facebook Timeline Steps to Take Now
It’s been about a month since Facebook implemented the new Timeline layout for business pages. When Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s new page design was first announced, the reaction was less than positive. Like it or not, there are some features in the new layout that can make a big difference in how user-friendly business pages are for both the page manager and customers or prospects who “Like” the page. Here are some basic steps every marketer needs to take now to catch up with the new Facebook Timeline. I’ll admit that when Timeline first came out, I was among the Read More
Best Practices in Multi-Channel Distributed Marketing
Distribion and The Distributed Marketing Blog today announced a free webinar for marketing professionals interested in distributed marketing best practices, trends, and useful techniques for “glocalization” – a way to empower local sales organizations to personalize and customize nulti-channel communications campaigns without compromising brand or regulatory standards. The webinar will take place at noon, on Tuesday, May 8. Attendance is free, but pre-registration is required. Registration is now available by clicking this link. Distributed marketing best practices deliver measurable results for organizations where strategy and creative resides in corporate marketing but local or field sales and marketing organizations or channel Read More
Pinning Email to Pinterest for Faster ROI
Pinterest is the fastest growing social media site, far outstripping other recent entries into the social media sweepstakes. But Pinterest isn’t for everyone. People either love it or hate it. Forbes blogger David Coursey called it “Facebook with training wheels” in a recent article in which he said that Facebook’s purchase of Instagram would kill Pinterest. The same day, CNBC aired a story titled “Why Pine for the Pinterest Customer? They’re Worth More.” Here are three of the comments that business owners or marketers made during the CNBC segment: “Customers who come to (our) website from Pinterest have a 70 percent larger ticket Read More
Five Steps to Reviving B2B Email Results
When did you last open an unsolicited e-mail and think “Hey, this is really useful?” When did you last actually download the pictures for an unsolicited e-mail? There are those who make pretty convincing arguments that B2B email marketing is a dying art. I’m not one of them, although from a personal angle, I’ve seen more than my share of email campaigns that seem to be intent on killing it. The problem is that marketers have over-killed email marketing by getting it wrong, by thinking that because it was cheap, it was the best way “in” to a new prospect. And Read More
