Here’s the shocking reality of B2B lead generation – 79% of marketing leads never convert into sales opportunities. Source: Marketing Sherpa/ KnowledgeStorm). B2B marketing and lead generation experts point to a lack of lead nurturing as the primary cause of this poor performance. Why is lead nurturing important? It is a fact of life that the bulk of your site visitors and/or conversions from landing pages are not ready to buy now. According to Kelly Gay, KnowledgeStorm CEO, “79% of all leads generated by marketing are not followed up by sales in a typical technology company. MORE >>

Results: About 2,000 daily visitors; 15 to 20 email messages per day, including an invitation to bid on a large, new plant that could total hundreds of millions of dollars; top rankings for Emerson in Google for terms such as “process controls,” “process management” and “compressor surge control” and the winner of Best Corporate Blog by BtoB magazine in 2010. times increase in registration of community members; double-digit growth in paid subscriptions for their SaaS product RapidResponse and a BtoB Social Media Awards 2010 winner. Exhibit #1: Emerson Process Management Experts. MORE >>

Most marketers agree that content marketing and social media have become mainstream B2B marketing strategies. Nine out of ten B2B marketers are now using content marketing to grow their businesses, according to the recent study released by MarketingProfs and Junta42|Content Marketing Institute. The reason for not using content marketing that I hear most often from my industrial clients is “we don’t have and/or can’t produce enough content that our customers (engineering, technical and manufacturing professionals) will find valuable.”. B2B marketing tactics to use right now. Build brand loyalty. MORE >>

While working on an email campaign for a client who markets to manufacturers in the Process Controls and Automation industry, I was asked if there was an easy way to combine web analytics with email marketing. He was already using Google Analytics (GA) to monitor his Web site. However, there really wasn’t a good way for him to track site activity after each email campaign went out. My client wanted to gain a better understanding of Web site interactions that could be tied to a specific email and help him refine his landing pages to improve his lead generation efforts. Click on Traffic Sources. MORE >>

I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving weekend (here in the U.S.) with your family. Now, back to work. Attempting do-it-yourself (DiY) search engine optimization (SEO) is common among industrial companies since they tend to have dedicated IT departments. Can DiY SEO be just as effective as hiring an outside expert? Should IT be handling this task? Those are two very debatable questions but that is a topic for another post. Here I want to focus on the three most common SEO mistakes that I see when industrial clients contact me for Website optimization. So far so good. Bad idea! Tread carefully! MORE >>