by Michael Martin | Tweet this You’ll feel it when it happens: When you’re spending all your time managing lists and unsubscribes; when the sales team won’t return your calls; when all the good leads seem to land with your competitor. These are common signs that you need to go beyond batch and blast marketing, need to get sales on the same page, need a stronger lead management process – these are the signs and symptoms that your business needs marketing automation. You suffer from a “one size fits all” approach to marketing. The Remedy. The Remedy. MORE >>

Marketers have long been used to drawing up plans. But as social media has gone from the beta test to a part of everyday life , sticking to a detailed marketing plan has become virtually impossible. Even so, creating a social media strategy allows marketing to focus on organizational goals rather than new gimmicks and stay on message. The problem for demand marketers is that few, if any, resources that explain how to use social to build strong, lasting demand generation strategy. It serves as an on-ramp to social media for demand marketers. MORE >>

Marketing says “tomato”, and sales says, “Give me more leads.” ” When it comes to lead generation , these two organizations often view the same topic from entirely different perspectives. Like some sort of twisted Pavlovian experiment with leads, we’ve conditioned them to sit at different ends of the demand generation funnel, looking at it through different lenses and taking action in different ways to achieve the same goal. when you say the words, “lead generation.” Metrics. MORE >>

Obtaining sponsorship and resources to implement (or replace) a marketing automation solution is no easy task. Skepticism about the value of marketing automation. Lack of understanding about marketing automation. If you are NOT currently running demand generation processes manually (or using an existing marketing automation solution you want to replace), you may have a difficult time convincing your management that you have the knowledge and skills to implement a new platform successfully. What makes them tick? Happy selling! MORE >>

Most manufacturers and industrial companies use email marketing as a way to keep in touch with new leads and existing customers. It has been my experience within the industrial sector that these companies rarely use email marketing proactively for lead generation. To me, those contacts are prospects and not leads. For more on that, refer to my post, “Subscribers to Free Content are NOT Leads.”. How to generate quality leads using email marketing. What I’ve described here may sound a lot like Marketing Automation (MA). MORE >>