Senate Poised to Change Rules of the Road for Marketers
Three U.S. Senators and two bills in the U.S. Senate appear poised to change the basic rules for anyone involved in using Internet, email, or social media services. Senator Jay Rockefeller’s Do Not Track Act of 2011 and the Commercial Privacy Bill of Rights Act of 2011 sponsored by former presidential hopefuls John Kerry and John McCain would limit marketer’s ability to track online behavior, and give consumers new rights to review the data collected about them, and make changes to that data. The bills expressly target the use of cookies, location tracking, and other technologies that monitor online behavior without Read More
Why Social Media Monitoring Matters
Licensed from Cartoonstock.com. It’s Friday the 13th — so we thought a little humor was in order. This cartoon, like all good satire, has a kernel of truth we all need to remember: if we as marketing and sales professionals don’t know what’s being said about our brand in social media, we’ll soon find out that others will create an image for us, perhaps an image we don’t like much.
5 Signs You Need a Distributed Marketing Platform
In nearly every corporation, marketing is one of the last business areas to be automated. According to a presentation by IDC Executive Advisory Service analyst Rich Vancil in September 2010, less than one in three companies have a complete marketing automation solution in place. This means that streamlining complex marketing processes with automation may be one of the last places where companies can squeeze more efficiency out of the resources they have. Is your company a candidate for a distributed marketing automation solution? Here are the top 5 signs that technology may deliver a great return on investment. Your prospects are getting Read More
Nine in 10 Marketers Use Facebook — Why?
A new study reported in the Social Media Examiner reported that in April, 2011, nine of every 10 corporate marketers said that they used Facebook. That’s 92%, if you like statistics as a percentage of the total. Twitter and LinkedIn rank #2 and #3 on the marketing social media usage charts. That’s not surprising. How many of those marketers have incorporated social media into their overall marketing plans? What percentage actively monitorthe return on their social media investment with something other than the “3F’s” (friends, fans, followers)? One thing that is important in looking at social media is the demographics of those friends, Read More
Rules of the Road for Digital and Social Media in Regulated Industries
Anyone who works in insurance, financial services or any other regulated industry already knows that the rules and regulations seem to get more complex every year. So just what are the rules of the road for using the power of digital (web, email, mobile) and social media (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn) to reach prospects and customers? It’s not always easy to understand the overlapping maze of regulations, leaving many sales and marketing professionals to wonder about how to speed up the process of using technology to drive sales without running into compliance nightmares along the way. A free webinar on May 19, sponsored by Read More
Distributed Marketing Platforms are a “Must Have” for Sales Success
When IBM announced its purchase of Unica last year for $480 million, the company’s press release said that the enterprise marketing management software market was worth $2.5 billion and doubling in size on an annual basis. Why is the market for distributed marketing platforms growing so rapidly as overall marketing budgets are still recovering from the recession? Because technology helps marketers win the race to provide sales with the tools they need to win business. It’s really that simple. Just one in three large companies (with revenue over $5 billion) reported in an IDC survey that they had completed their Read More
Personalized Selling 101
Selling is about people. One person offers something of value – a product, a service, an idea or promise. Others want what the first person is offering enough to trade something of value to get it – time, money, or attention. The better the two people understand each other, the more likely it is that the sale will happen. According to a 2010 Kelsey Group survey that’s why 97% of us research products and services online before buying them locally. In the insurance industry, most companies have two kinds of representatives who sell their products: employed or “captive” insurance agents, Read More
Putting the Sales Enablement Pieces Together
Sales enablement is the delivery of the right information to the right person in the right format to assist in moving sales opportunities forward. Sounds pretty simple, right? It isn’t. Assembling the right sales message is a complex process in a large distributed marketing organization — especially in regulated industries. Four or five distinct processes and roles are involved, and without clear planning and a smooth process built on a technology platform designed to streamline the process, it can seem nearly impossible. Marketing creates the information. Management (legal, compliance, HR) reviews it. Marketing publishes it (through a sales portal, Read More
Marketing is Dead
Marketing is dead. Before rejecting the idea, think again. The truth is that only a tiny fraction of a marketer’s time is actually spent on marketing – that is, on creating demand for a product or service, shaping the brand, and supporting sales. How is that possible? Just look at the number of communications channels a marketer has to manage in today’s multi-channel world – and add to each communications channel the necessity for planning and budgeting, delivering or implementing, tracking and reporting on each one. Add managing the process of distributing marketing and sales support materials in an indirect Read More
Using Distributed Marketing Technology to End the Battle Between Sales and Marketing
How many times have you heard comments like this from sales people? Marketing never gives us the right information we need to close the deal. We have to spend hours and hours creating our own customized content to sell effectively. It takes too long to find the right information and get permission to customize it for our prospects. Chances are you’ve heard those complaints just about as often as you’ve heard the opposite coming from the corporate marketing department. Sales never uses the approved materials and the brand is compromised because of inconsistent messages. We have to spend hours and Read More
