January, 2012

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3 Tips to Use QR Codes For Information, Not Destination

Convince & Convert

QR codes ask a lot of prospective users. Possess a smart phone. Download a QR reader app (or other format like Microsoft TAG). Have the phone nearby and usable when you encounter a QR code (easy in a magazine ad, perhaps less so for QR codes now appearing on highway billboards). Be motivated enough to actually perform behaviors 1-3. While nifty, QR codes are often not the easiest and most convenient method of information retrieval, and when utilized to convey data that could be more seamlessly d

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Do Standardized Sales Processes Really Work Anymore?

ViewPoint

Tony Zambito is Founder and Principal of the buyer research and strategy firm Buyerology ?. He is also the originator of the buyer persona research and creation methodology as well as Business Buyergraphics ™ that are widely used to make informed decisions from buyer insights. Tony also served in the role of Vice President in Sales and Marketing capacities for TRW, Knight-Ridder, and Compaq (HP).

Process 195
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Why Inbound Marketing is Telemarketing’s Secret Ingredient

Tomorrow People

Telemarketing is a well known method of drumming up more business. Yet it is facing increasing challenges - consumers overwhelmed and desensitised to increasing volume of cold calls plus a growing shift towards the internet and social media for making choices around what we buy. These changes mean that telemarketing requires a secret ingredient to make it truly effective in creating great results for companies: Added customer connection: Use inbound marketing effectively and it can transform tho

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Nimble Adds Social Data to CRM

Customer Experience Matrix

I had an intriguing demonstration yesterday from social CRM vendor Nimble. Since “social CRM” could mean just about anything, it’s important to explain what Nimble actually does: it combines traditional contact management with automated access to social media information about those contacts. That might not sound like much, but in practice it’s pretty darn slick.

CRM 187
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The Top 3 Tips for Writing Successful White Papers

In the B2B marketing toolkit, white papers can be a powerful option for reaching decision-makers and experts, presenting them with interesting information that improves their perception of your organization's competence and thought leadership. That said, a poorly executed whitepaper will not only be unable to influence your desired audience but will also come with significant costs that other assets won't incur.

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Measuring the service experience

Savanta

Does your business have a service element? Do you measure customer perceptions of the experience? If so, you might want to take a quick look under the bonnet. Let me share a story. It sounds far-fetched, but is true. Recently I took a holiday. Not one to ever fully turn off though, I needed my smartphone. Sadly, it too had decided to take a vacation.

Service 152

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The Power of Transparent Marketing to Rock Your Business in 2012 and Beyond

Convince & Convert

Guest post by Marcus Sheridan. Marcus passionately speaks and writes about business and marketing on his blog, The Sales Lion. Make sure to download his popular, 230-page FREE eBook—“ Inbound and Content Marketing Made Easy”. ‘Transparency’. Ahh yes, one of the most over-used words, yet under-utilized actions, in our society today. News stations, despite their incessant claims, aren’t close to being transparent.

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The 5 Top Media for Cold Prospecting

ViewPoint

Ruth Stevens is Founder of eMarketing Strategy , a consulting practice that assists companies in building their customer acquisition and retention strategies. Ruth is also author of Maximizing Lead Generation: The Complete Guide for B2B Marketers. Every business needs new customers. But what are the most effective outbound marketing channels for kicking off a business relationship?

B to B 226
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Why Make New Year’s Resolutions for your Marketing?

Tomorrow People

Why every business needs to make New Year’s resolutions for their marketing. The New Year’s resolution is not just a useful way to make a life change. It can also prove to be a valuable resource for upgrading the performance of your business marketing in 2012. It may seem easy to dismiss the New Year’s resolution as an over-popular excuse to set unrealistic ambitions at the start of every year.

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The Top-5 B2B Marketing Trends for 2012

Everything Technology Marketing

Happy New Year! It is time again for our annual B2B Marketing "predictions". As every year, I asked the 25,000 marketing professionals in the B2B Technology Marketing Community on LinkedIn about their B2B marketing priorities for 2012. And here are the results: 1 - Integration of social media Social media remains the #1 topic in 2012. Social media has clearly evolved from the experimental stage to become an established marketing tactic and lead generator in 2011.

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21 Advanced ChatGPT Prompts To Take Your Social Media to the Next Level

Upgrade your social media game with our in-depth playbook: "21 advanced ChatGPT prompts for social media managers". These powerful prompts are tailored to supercharge your content creation, strategy development, and results analysis. Say goodbye to writer's block and hello to endless creativity as you effortlessly generate engaging posts, come up with original strategies, and optimize your social media performance - all in a fraction of the time.

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5 Things I Learned from Self-Publishing

B2B Memes

If nothing else, self-publishing is a learning experience. You learn not just about the process, but yourself. It’s not for everyone, certainly, but don’t count yourself out as a self-publisher until you give it some serious thought. Thanks to e-book and print-on-demand technology, the risks are low and the potential for rewards—though not perhaps of the kind you’d expect—high.

Amazon 119
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4 Ways B2B Marketers Can Benefit from Pinterest

B2B Marketing Traction

Like many of you I’m enamored with Pinterest , but I can’t help but ask, “Can Pinterest benefit B2B Marketers?” Pinterest is a social media site that allows members to create boards for images that they like. You can name the boards whatever you like, and assign them to a category from a list of pre-determined by Pinterest. Over time as you find images that you like, you pin the images to the appropriate board.

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Comparison of 100 Top Companies on Social Business and Corporate Culture

Convince & Convert

Are social business and corporate culture inevitably linked? In a recent podcast , Mitch Joel interviewed Fred Reichheld, author of The Ultimate Question 2.0 , and creator of the Net Promoter methodology. Fred made a statement that has stuck with me in the several weeks since I tuned in: “You can’t be the best place to buy, if you’re not the best place to work.” As social business moves from the toddler stage to youth stage, it’s becoming accepted wisdom that the be

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Is It Really B2B, Or Something Different All Together?

ViewPoint

Jason Falls is an author, speaker and CEO of Social Media Explorer. He is also co-author of the book No Bullshit Social Media: The All-Business, No-Hype Guide To Social Media Marketing , available on Amazon and in bookstores everywhere. Marketing to the business consumer takes a special pedigree. The complexities of the non-commercial arena often overwhelm even seasoned marketers from the consumer-facing world.

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Are Your Impact Comms Resonating With Stakeholders?

Whether your organization is at the start of its sustainability and impact journey or years into it, many brands share a common concern: the uncertainty of whether they are sending stakeholders mixed messages. Creating content that speaks to your audience's “love language” can be a tricky dance. But, worry not! 3BL has put together tips to ensure that your content not only finds its rhythm but also resonates with your target audiences.

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Why Your New Year's Resolutions Don't Need Inbound Marketing

Tomorrow People

Two reasons your New Year’s resolutions don’t need inbound marketing. Planning your new year’s resolutions for your 2012 marketing approach? Already know what’s going to work and what’s not? Here’s why your New Year’s resolutions don’t need inbound marketing : 1. You have too many customers. Don’t need to plan for more customers or prospects in your 2012 resolutions?

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The Danger of Automatic Feeds in Social Media

The Effective Marketer

Note: This is a guest post by Brad Shorr is Director of Content & Social Media for Straight North. See Brad’s bio at the end of the article. Participating in social media is time consuming, so it’s only natural that people look for shortcuts. However, some shortcuts become disastrous detours, and this is often what happens when a company relies on automation for significant portions of its social updating.

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Is Your Business Ready for Marketing?

Digital B2B Marketing

Businesses turn to marketing to drive revenue, but are you really ready? Before investing in marketing you must ensure other key areas of your business are ready first. Your Product or Service. If your offering isn’t ready for the market, your marketing will not solve your problems. Your Sales Organization. If your sales organization is not ready to sell your new offerings, your marketing will not solve the problem.

Business 128
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Predictive Buyer Modeling Is Changing the Future of B2B

Tony Zambito

Image via Wikipedia. I would not be surprised today if a group of B2B executives said they were using fortune tellers to peer into a crystal ball to make predictions about the future. The fast pace of change makes the crystal ball of how buyers will behave in the future enveloped in a hazy fog. C-Suites are under enormous pressures to get it right the first time with regards to marketing and sales planning.

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The Resurgence of Direct Mail as a Growth Marketing Strategy

Speaker: Jeff Tarran, COO, Gunderson Direct & Margaret Pepe, Executive Director of Product Management, U.S. Postal Service

Learn the secrets to direct mail success for growth marketers! Industry veterans Jeff Tarran and Margaret Pepe are here to delve into how direct mail has completely evolved in recent years, and has rightfully earned a seat at the table alongside the email and digital marketing plans of SMBs, enterprise companies, and agencies as they look into strategy for 2024 and beyond.

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Putting the Social in Social Good

Convince & Convert

Illustration by Joelle Leung Guest post. Harrison Kratz is the Community Manager at MBA@UNC, the new online MBA degree program from the University of North Carolina. Harrison sticks to his entrepreneurial roots as the founder of the global social good campaign, Tweet Drive. Like anything in social media, the need for evolution comes pretty fast and furious.

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Turning Raw B2B Sales Leads Into Real Opportunities: Don’t Give Up Too Soon

ViewPoint

When qualifying and nurturing sales leads, the lead farmer (prospect development professional) has a challenging job. The starting point in lead management is usually an inquiry consisting of a name, title, a company, a phone number or email address. The lead farmer must have the patience, discipline and skill to engage the inquirer in a conversation.

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Why B2B Telemarketing Needs to Change

Tomorrow People

B2b telemarketing is changing. Yet many businesses still rely on the old way of finding new leads and customers - despite the cost and time involved. They’re missing out on more effective telemarketing approaches, using inbound marketing to boost leads and revenue. Here’s why b2b telemarketing needs to change: British consumers receive an average of six cold calls a month at home and three-quarters of people want cold calling to be banned, according to a recent survey (Source: Which?

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12 (of the) Best WordPress Guides and Plugin Reviews of 2011

Webbiquity

WordPress is not only the most popular blogging platform , but is increasingly becoming a leading website content management system (CMS) as well. Cost and ease of use are certainly factors, but one of the important reasons is its extensibility through plugins. These add-ons make it easy to add an incredible variety of functionality to the platform, from contact forms and photo galleries to social sharing and ecommerce capabilities.

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ABM Evolution: How Top Marketers Are Using Account-Based Strategies

In times of economic uncertainty, account-based strategies are essential. According to several business analysts and practitioners, ABM is a necessity for creating more predictable revenue. Research shows that nearly three-quarters of marketers (74%) already have the resources needed to build successful ABM programs.

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ThinkBook

Ambal's Amusings

A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on. - John F. Kennedy. Ideas are always powerful. Ideas bring change, progress and most importantly help in human development. So, are you passionate about ideas? ThinkBook is a gift that reminds people of you every time they write down a new idea. My friend Rajesh Setty says this about his cool looking book: “ ThinkBook is a notebook designed for smart people AND it’s a business book designed for creative thinkers.

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10 Reasons You Can’t Get Found Online

B2B Marketing Traction

It’s critical that qualified prospects find your business on the Internet. If you’re not getting found, you’re losing leads and potential revenues. Your website uses outdated programming code. Your website doesn’t have relevant content. You use flash in your website. You have too many big images in the wrong places. Your images are not properly tagged.

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3 Tools For Managing a Killer Multi-Author Blog

Convince & Convert

Jason Keath is CEO of Social Fresh, a social media education company. Their next social media conference is Social Fresh EAST on February 6-7 in Tampa, FL featuring speakers from RadioShack, Pepsi, Nordstrom, and Scott Monty of Ford. (and Jay Baer). I remember making a handmade magazine when I was eight years old. Crayons. Magazine cutouts pasted onto pages filled with penciled in copy.

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Lead Qualification & Lead Nurturing: Whose Job Is It?

ViewPoint

Are marketing resources or sales reps the right resources to do lead qualification and lead nurturing in the B2B complex sale? The answer is clear, and may surprise you. But first, let's take a look at some lead generation challenges. Cahners Research has shown that 45 percent of qualified leads will end up buying a solution from someone within a year.

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1st, 2nd, and 3rd Party Intent Data: Which Is Right for You?

How do 1st, 2nd, and 3rd party intent data compare? 1st, 2nd, and 3rd party data each have specific advantages and disadvantages. It comes down to four factors: accuracy, cost, control and quantity. This infographic explains the pros and cons of each and helps you understand which one is best for meeting your business objectives. Intent data can be a great way to fill your pipeline and close more deals.

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Making a Marketing New Year’s Resolution or Revolution?

Tomorrow People

Are you making a marketing New Year’s resolution – or revolution? New Year’s resolutions – they can be a one-off idea or a serious promise that helps us create lasting change. With 2012 around the corner, now is a great time to apply business marketing resolutions to make good things happen. So how do you make your resolution more of a revolution?

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Integrating Social Media Into The B2B Marketing Mix [Slides]

Marketing Insider Group

This presentation covers the change that is occurring in marketing. Marketers are no longer in control of the message. We are in a battle for customer attention and focusing just on social media is a mistake too many businesses are making. Only effective integrated marketing approaches can help us reach consumers when, where and how they want… I spoke Wednesday night to an amazing crowd at the Philadelphia Business Marketing Association (@ PhillyBMA ).

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An Infographic on the Right Track: Grad School to Google

B2B Memes

Though I was once a big fan of infographics , my ardor has cooled of late. Too many of the examples I see just look like clones of each other. But now and then I run across an infographic that is distinctly different, and worth sharing. Case in point: this interactive graphic from OnlinePhD.org, which steps you through Google’s growth year by year (thanks to Google Tutor for the lead.

Google 119