How to Sell Marketing Automation to the Boss
A few weeks ago, I attended a luncheon where Danesh De Silva, Vice President of Marketing at Orametrix, presented a great case study on how he had used marketing automation technology to transform his company’s marketing operations and the ROI he’s gotten. When Dan was finished with his story, one of the people at my table shook his head sadly. “He’s so right. I know that I could do great things if I just had the right tools. But how do I ‘sell’ marketing automation to my boss?” It’s a common question. A marketing director or even vice president of marketing becomes convinced Read More
Marketing Sherpa Features Our Blog
David Kirkpatrick, a reporter with industry research firm MEC Labs’ popular Marketing Sherpa blog, today featured The Distributed Marketing Blog and its parent company, Distribion, in a case study. Case Study #CS32133: Overall Content Marketing Strategy Leads to 2,000% Lift in Blog Traffic, 40% Boost in Revenue looks at the blog and its success over the past 12 months. Kirkpatrick points out some of the unique pain points associated with distributed marketing, and explains how the content marketing strategy that Distribion adopted contributed to the company’s growth. With the focus on distributed marketing best practices and industry news, the company Read More
How Is Distributed Marketing Success Measured?
One of the most common questions I am asked in my role as the head of the professional services team at a company that sells multi-channel distributed marketing automation solutions is how our clients measure distributed marketing success. I don’t want to sound like a dissembling politician trying to cover up a scandal, but it depends on the definition of “marketing success”. Last year, we embarked on a review of our clients to see how they were using our products, and what kind of results they achieved. We came up with a summary of “typical” results that looked like this: Read More
A New Way to Find Our Blog!
The Distributed Marketing Blog is a best-practices and distributed marketing industry news blog for corporate marketers, sponsored by Distribion, Inc., a leading provider of multi-channel distributed marketing automation solutions for marketers in regulated industries. With the launch of the new Distribion, Inc. corporate website today, you can now find The Distributed Marketing Blog at www.distribion.com — as well as our current URL, www.distributedmarketing.org. The content won’t change, nor will the editorial focus. The only switch will be a second way to find us, which will make it easier for blog visitors to access the resources (white papers, case studies, videos, PDF documents, Read More
What is distributed marketing automation?
I was talking to a prospective customer the other day, and he wanted to know exactly what I meant when I said that my company delivers multi-channel distributed marketing automation solutions for companies like his in regulated industries. “Just what is distributed marketing anyway?” he wanted to know. The simplest way to explain it is to say that distributed marketing is the business model where a corporation with one or more brands sells its products and services through a network of regional or local channels. The channel might be a local branch, an independent distributor or reseller, a franchisee, or an Read More
Four Signs You Need Marketing Automation
Marketing is a complex process that relies on many systems, people, and resources to function smoothly. If one part of the system breaks down, it creates a bottleneck that slows down the whole process. Add in the layers of complexity that come with a multi-channel distributed marketing environment, and the results can be a maze that is hard to navigate and costly to manage. Often, marketing automation is the cure. But how do you know if your marketing processes need a marketing automation fix? Marketing automation may be the cure for what ails your marketing operation if more than two Read More
Content Marketing Increases Despite Skeptics
Digital lead generation through content marketing was once viewed as an expensive and unproven technique. As recently as 2010, surveys showed that up to a third of executives were unsure that the strategies were worth their time according to a recent article by Nicholas Kinports. That’s not far from the results that we got when we surveyed 190 U.S. and Canadian marketers with the title CMO, Vice President, Sr. Vice President, or Director of Marketing several months ago. In our survey, 45% of the marketers surveyed said that they used content marketing as a lead generation tool, but 55% did Read More
How Closed Loop Reporting Speeds Year-End Tasks
If you’re a marketer, and you haven’t finished your 2012 marketing budget, then it’s probably number one on your to do list. And that, inevitably, means you’ve been looking at all of the marketing metrics and reporting available to you in order to make your case for spending. We’ve been doing that in my office, too. But I’m lucky: I have a closed-loop reporting system that aggregates the data that matters to my management, so it’s easy to find the information that supports the marketing department’s contribution to revenue. In fact, the closed-loop reporting system is part of the product Read More
The Distributed Marketing Circle of Life
Recently, I heard a very smart marketer say that his job wouldn’t be tenable without his “circle of life” – a web of vendors and services he relies on to manage, integrate and optimize campaigns. He’s not alone. Forrester, Gartner, and IDC all predict that marketing automation will continue to be a top investment priority for CMO’s for the next three years (through 2015), a position that Focus Research says it has held for the past five years. Multi-channel marketing automation uses an integrated set of online tools that empower users to easily search, find, select, assemble, customize, distribute and Read More
Four Landing Page Mistakes to Avoid
A simple landing page with no navigation links, a clear call to action, and just enough “sell” copy to encourage conversion, can improve campaign results dramatically. The clients I work with are in different industries, and they approach online marketing from very different perspectives. The one thing they have in common is that effective landing pages are critical to their success. In fact, the measured ROI on campaigns often governs budget approval for future campaigns, and the design and function of your landing page is critical to your measured ROI. Like many other digital media tools, landing pages weren’t part Read More
