Sat.Jul 30, 2011 - Fri.Aug 05, 2011

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B2B social media: Highlights from new benchmarking research

Savanta

B2B social media; is it a case of the Emperor’s New Clothes? The latest B2B Marketing Benchmark Report – based on a survey of 274 client side B2B marketers conducted by us here at Circle Research – finally seems to provide a definitive answer. The social media Emperor is getting dressed, but is still in his underpants. The report is set to be launched late August, but here’s a sneak preview.

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Lead Management: Let’s Formalize this Relationship

ViewPoint

Today's guest blogger, Tony Jaros, is Senior Vice President of Research at SiriusDecisions. As a sales and marketing thought leader with nearly 20 years experience, Tony has led the overall research function at SiriusDecisions since the company's founding in 2001. Getting b-to-b sales and marketing to align more closely has driven even the most capable business leaders crazy for years.

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Is Sentiment Making Brands Stupid?

Buzz Marketing for Technology

I loved the article by Nick Carr a few years ago that asked the question – Is Google Making us Stupid? Nick likened the use of Google and other tools as training us how to “power browse” and not really read effectively. So I have been thinking about a parallel article that would apply in the social media space as people try to effectively read what is being said on mediums like Twitter and Facebook about their brand.

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Social Media Measurement – Would You Still Do It If There Was No ROI?

Marketing Insider Group

There has been plenty of debate about the ROI of social media. And just before my friend Eric Wittlake went on vacation this week, he stoked my creative juices once again with this thought-provoking post about social media measurement. To summarize, the CMO of Kmart stated that TV is easier to measure than Social Media. Eric agrees with him and disagrees with a Jay Baer tweet that suggests Kmart just “try harder.&#.

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Sales & Marketing Alignment: How to Synergize for Success

Speaker: Carlos Hidalgo, Co-Founder & CEO of Digital Exhaust, Author, International Keynote & TEDx Speaker

Recent research shows that only 50% of B2B organizations state that they have good alignment between their marketing and sales teams. This lack of alignment tremendously impacts the ability to meet business goals, and is a limiting factor for building and maintaining customer relationships. While many B2B organizations continue to struggle with aligning their marketing and sales teams, they can take practical steps to unify both teams and simplify their overall approach.

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Business Lessons from the Woodtick Theater

Webbiquity

A few weeks back, I had a chance to get away for a few days “up nort&# as Minnesotans say, for some fishing and relaxing with the family. While there, my mother-in-law took us to the Woodtick Theater , a bluegrass music show in the huge metropolis of Akeley (population: 432). The show itself wasn’t really my kind of thing, but then again, I wasn’t the target demographic (see below).

Business 160

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Future of Buyer Personas is Social - Part 4 ( A New Role and Framework)

Tony Zambito

Image by Arenamontanus via Flickr. This is the fourth part of a series of reflective articles on the future of buyer personas.  In part 1 through part 3 I focused primarily on misconceptions, what needed to change, and why changes must take place in buyer persona development in the social age.  In part 4, I would like to center on the role needed in organizations for buyer persona development to adapt to social business.

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My Stolen Car, A Sleazy Salesman and 5 Marketing Lessons for Business Owners

Marketing Insider Group

Two weeks ago my wife’s car was stolen. She was upset…I was not. . The car that was stolen was large, practical, paid off and ran pretty well. But folks, it was a minivan! So while she labored over “who would steal a car with child car seats and kid’s DVDs in it?&# I was scanning websites of car dealers for the hottest deals in anything BUT a minivan.

Business 161
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Two Google Adwords features worth testing for lead generation optimization: Call Metrics and Remarketing.

NuSpark Consulting

The Google Adwords pay-per-click platform has a number of fairly new features that can contribute to lead generation and increased conversions. Google continues to add features and options to its search and display advertising platform with the goal to continually help its advertisers generate leads and produce efficient conversions. It’s my job to stay abreast of these new features and recommend to clients where appropriate.

Adwords 149
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Landing Pages: Get Readers to Take Action

Writing on the Web

How do you get readers to take action? Short answer: a landing page. (Also known as a sales page, squeeze page). You can’t get results from all the content you’re creating and publishing on your blog, e-newsletter, social media sites, unless eventually you send people to a landing page and ask them to take action. Otherwise, you may be creating a great brand, great thought leadership, great content… and so what?

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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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Future of Buyer Personas is Social - Part 5 (6 Essentials To Embedding Into Your Organization)

Tony Zambito

Image by Cristiano Betta via Flickr. This is the fifth and final part of a series of reflective articles on the future of buyer personas in the social age.  Leading up to this final part, part 1 through 4, I covered some of the misconceptions, impact of the social age, what changes were needed, and the establishing of a new role and framework.  In this final reflection, I offer 6 essentials to embedding buyer personas into your organization.   In part 4, I described a new

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The Value of Qualitative Results in a Case Study

WriteSpark

There are times when you have what seems to be an ideal case study: a happy, willing, and talkative customer; a prestigious company name; a story for an application or industry that you want to target. All is well until you get into the interview and discover one significant shortcoming: The customer hasn't measured quantitative results, isn't willing to disclose them, or the results are weak.

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Two Google Adwords features worth testing for lead generation optimization: Call Metrics and Remarketing.

NuSpark Consulting

The Google Adwords pay-per-click platform has a number of fairly new features that can contribute to lead generation and increased conversions. Google continues to add features and options to its search and display advertising platform with the goal to continually help its advertisers generate leads and produce efficient conversions. It’s my job to stay abreast of these new features and recommend to clients where appropriate.

Adwords 149
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Remove the Barriers to Strategic Planning in B2B Marketing

Digital B2B Marketing

As B2B marketers enter the 2012 strategic planning season and begin shaping executional plans, it is important that we get it right. The goal is to create a strategy that survives the full year (and beyond) and gives you a framework for more tactical planning, execution and optimization. Today, many companies have replaced strategic planning with a set of goals and tactics, without a formalized marketing strategy.

Barriers 132
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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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Social Proof: Are You Using Client Recommendations?

Writing on the Web

This weekend I got a call from a person who wanted to buy a subscription to executive coach articles to use for his newsletter. What sealed the deal? The testimonials from other subscribers. Recommendations, testimonials and client stories are a powerful persuasion tactic. It’s one of the key persuasion triggers that get people to take action. It’s called social proof.

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Is Your Marketing Plan SMART?

B2B Marketing Traction

Tweet. One Page Marketing Plan. If there is one thing I’ve learned as a marketing consultant, strategic marketing plans must be SMART to be successful. I work with business owners of small to mid-size companies. Especially in tough economic times, they have limited resources to spend on marketing. So, what they do spend on marketing must produce results.

Planning 124
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The Value of Qualitative Results in a Case Study

WriteSpark

There are times when you have what seems to be an ideal case study: a happy, willing, and talkative customer; a prestigious company name; a story for an application or industry that you want to target. All is well until you get into the interview and discover one significant shortcoming: The customer hasn't measured quantitative results, isn't willing to disclose them, or the results are weak.

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Don’t Be a Content Marketing Grinch

Convince & Convert

This is the first of what I hope will be a regular series of Webinines: short Webinars of 9 minutes or fewer. Because it’s seemingly 150 degrees throughout most of the country, I went with a cool weather holiday theme on this one. Your Content Should Be Centralized and Decentralized. The default state for most content marketing initiatives is to focus on content that we OWN, that resides on web properties we control.

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How to Improve Email Deliverability and Optimize Each Send

Learn how to optimize email deliverability and drive greater email ROI. What lands your email in the customer’s inbox? Understanding those factors, otherwise known as email deliverability, is critical to getting the most return on your campaign investments. But the “rules” around which factors land you in the spam folder aren’t always easy to keep up with.

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Remove the Barriers to Strategic Planning in B2B Marketing

Digital B2B Marketing

As B2B marketers enter the 2012 strategic planning season and begin shaping executional plans, it is important that we get it right. The goal is to create a strategy that survives the full year (and beyond) and gives you a framework for more tactical planning, execution and optimization. Today, many companies have replaced strategic planning [.].

Planning 100
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The Art of the Infographic: 9 Compelling Characteristics You Need to Know

Adobe Experience Cloud Blog

by Maria Pergolino American composer Stephen Sondheim once said, “Art, in itself, is an attempt to bring order out of chaos.” That said, the true art of an infographic is in finding a way to tell the real story behind the numbers. There are a number of things that should be taken into consideration when creating an infographic. Here are nine key characteristics to keep in mind: Visual Interest.

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Facebook Can Work for B2B Marketers, But You Gotta Know the Rules

Paul Gillin

In my work with B2B organizations, the question of how to use Facebook is invariably front and center. This Is despite the fact that numerous surveys have shown that Facebook is one of the least effective social networks for B2B marketing. In a survey of marketers conducted by BtoB magazine last year , Facebook was ranked last in usefulness among the top five social networks, trailing blogs, LinkedIn, YouTube and Twitter, in that order.

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The 3 Keys to Social Influence

Convince & Convert

This is an interview I did with Klout for their Klout Stars series , where they ask “influencers&# about their background in social media. 1. How did you get started in social media? I was originally a political consultant, helping manage campaigns for Governor, U.S. Senate, and President. I moved out of that industry into digital marketing in 1994.

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The Silver Lining to Corporate DEI Challenges

In our latest edition of Navigating ESG Comms Through the Cosmos - Scorpio Edition, 3BL embraces the perspective of one of the zodiac's most misunderstood signs: Scorpio. While this sign often has a darker view of the world, they do not shy away from shining a light on controversial topics. This month we take a deep dive into corporate pullback of DEI and how companies can utilize astrological advice to reinvent its social impact communication.

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See you in September–again

Biznology

Image by Kenzoka [Insearch for a new cam] via Flickr Long-time readers might know that I do something somewhat unusual each August. For the last two years (and I am doing it again this year), I take off the month of August. Each year, I refine it a bit, and I am making some changes [.].

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The Top 5 Deal-Breakers for LinkedIn Cold Contacting

Adobe Experience Cloud Blog

by Carol Fox Any salesperson will tell you: cold calling is a fine art. It takes perseverance, confidence and insight to be successful. While this approach can be extremely effective in finding the ideal qualified sales lead, too many B2B marketers fall prey to mistakes that could easily be avoided. Now with the advent of LinkedIn, cold calling has a new spin: cold contacting.

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Don’t Take “Selling” Out of Content Marketing

Industrial Marketing Today

Notice how discussions about content marketing are full of words like engagement, helpful, sharing, nurturing and community building. These are all great at soft selling without irritating the customer. No complaints there. However, have we gone too soft with content marketing when it comes to selling industrial products and services? May be it’s time to inject a healthy dose of reality into this warm and fuzzy picture.

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Perception, Happiness, and Getting Anything You Want

Convince & Convert

I’ve read a lot of books. But I’ve perhaps never been personally impacted as much as I was reading Derek Sivers ‘ new book Anything You Want. Part of Seth Godin’s Domino Project that’s rewiring the publishing industry from the inside-out, Anything You Want is a concise (one hour read) and motivational account of Derek’s experiences founding, growing, and selling CDbaby.com , the pioneering indie music e-commerce site.

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Solving the Biggest Tech Challenges in RevOps

In this eBook, we’ll run through real-world examples that show how RevOps teams can benefit from modern solutions for the access, management, and activation of their GTM data. Whether you need to improve lead response times, boost adoption of core tools, improve lead qualification, or target and automate your GTM motions, you’ll find examples of how revenue teams are solving some of the toughest problems in modern business.

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See you in September--again

Biznology

Image by Kenzoka [Insearch for a new cam] via Flickr. Long-time readers might know that I do something somewhat unusual each August. For the last two years (and I am doing it again this year), I take off the month of August. Each year, I refine it a bit, and I am making some changes again this year in my approach. In some ways, it feels harder for me to take off in August than ever, even though I know that I need it and i know that it will turn out very well for me in the end.

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Putting the “Fun” into the Fundamentals of Social Media Monitoring

Adobe Experience Cloud Blog

by Rick Siegfried NEWS FLASH: B2B marketers must learn to leverage social media. Yeah, we know. Sometimes it seems like all you hear about is how important it is to integrate social media into your marketing processes, but do you honestly know why you should do it? It can sometimes be difficult to quantify the benefits of investing large amounts of time into social media.

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B2B Word on the Street: Selling

MLT Creative

This Week's B2B Word on the Street is: SELLING. In my opinion, the most riveting cinematic speech about the art of the sale is Alec Baldwin's fiery monologue in the movie "Glengarry Glen Ross." He takes a disgruntled group of real estate salesmen to school, and from "Put the coffee down!" to "The leads aren't weak. you're weak," he grabs their attention -and their throats - with his words.

B to B 73