Since publishing posts on Marketing Automation , the question of “how to justify the investment&# came up with some of our readers. Obviously a very valid question, so let’s zoom in on that today. Technically, Return-on-Investment (ROI) is the extra profits you make divided by the investment. So if I’ve spent $40,000 on my initiative, and I’ve generated $120,000 more revenue, the following formula gives the ROI: ($120k - $40k) / $40k * 100% = 200%. So we should look at both the additional costs and the additional revenue generated. The Investment in Marketing Automation. MORE >>

Thanks to Ardath Albee ( @ardath421 ), Brian Carroll ( @brianJcarroll ), Craig Rosenberg ( @funnelholic ) and Scott Mersy ( @smersy ), the 3 Must-Haves for Successful Lead Nurturing webinar turned out even better than expected - and I had high expectations to begin with. encourage you to check out the recorded event. With thousands of attendees, we couldn’t field all of the questions in live the Q&A. So to keep the conversation going, we’ll continue to respond via this blog and other social media sources over the next few weeks.  A: Simple.  Make it about them.  A: You bet it does.  MORE >>

Social Media is one of the hottest topics in marketing right now. But it’s not a proven tactic yet. How can you test whether your Social Media strategy is working? One approach is to track website conversions and use Lead Scoring to assess lead quality. Let’s assume that you are using Social Media to drive traffic to your website. This could be using Twitter to announce new blog posts, publishing events on LinkedIn, or status updates on Facebook. It would be great to know which links are resulting in business. Referrer. The referrer shows where people are visiting from. Page (e.g. MORE >>

At yesterday’s Marketing Sherpa B2B Marketing Summit they echoed the themes addressed in last month’s Genius.com  Content Marketing webinar where Ardath Albee made the case for creating contagious content and mapping this content to the buying stage. This makes your communication more relevant and it provides more value. However, it can be daunting to create content for each buying stage and buyer role (see my previous  introduction to lead nurturing ). There’s an easy way to start and that’s to use email marketing and create a newsletter. Publish Regularly. MORE >>

You may have read the recent article that I co-authored in the Harvard Business Review, “In a Downturn, Provoke Your Customers”. The article highlights a new approach to generating demand, by provoking your prospects to solve problems they may otherwise be unaware of or simply undervalue. Now that you’ve provoked the prospects’ interest, what‘s next? Studies indicate that while B2B Marketers spend billions of dollars generating leads, as little as 5% of new leads are sales-ready. Using Sales 2.0 Start Generating More Opportunities. Demand Generation in a Sales 2.0 World. MORE >>