There's no doubt that we're moving toward a more visual marketing world. As users, we often prefer consuming visual content to reading blocks of text. In fact, Facebook users are uploading approximately 300 million photos to Facebook per day, up 20% from earlier this year. Even u sage of the photo-sharing tool Instagram, purchased by Facebook in April of 2012, has increased 1,179% in six months. But as a business, will catering to this new trend in visual content have a positive impact on crucial engagement metrics, including Facebook Likes, comments, and potentially even link clicks? MORE >>

by Jon Miller A common question I hear from marketers is “I already have a CRM system (e.g. salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics CRM), so why do I need marketing automation ”? On the face of it, this is not a surprising question. Many CRM systems have a module for marketing. Salesforce recently rebranded their social marketing application as the Marketing Cloud, and their website says you can use their solutions to “optimize campaigns from lead to close, on every channel”. Similarly, Architecture of Marketing Automation versus CRM. Marketing Automation. Business Goal. Departmental Focus. Pricing. MORE >>

You have no doubt heard of the many benefits of pull marketing, also called inbound marketing. But perhaps you face a common challenge – how to implement pull marketing without disrupting what you are doing with your push marketing model. In other words, how do your reap the inbound marketing goodies, without sacrificing what is already working. First, let’s briefly recap the benefits of pull marketing. Here are five of the most important: Improves sales close rates by 50% or more. Generates leads at 1/3 the cost of push marketing. Shortens the sales cycle by 20-40 percent. MORE >>

If you’re like most companies, you have heard about the importance of getting sales and marketing on the same page. You have heard that organizations with good alignment between sales and marketing teams achieved 20% annual revenue growth in 2010. By contrast, companies with poor alignment saw revenues decline by 4%. However, some things are easier said than done. Developing a unified sales and marketing process takes many steps and can be hard to navigate. In order to help we have outlined the 7 key steps to becoming a business development powerhouse. Step 1: Define funnel. The Bottom Line. MORE >>

Let’s discuss the idea of lead scoring within marketing automation and why inbound marketing embedded with a scoring system doesn’t a sales qualified lead make. Content is where it’s at nowadays, or should I say, Quality content is where it’s at. However, I’ve been reading content about the process of lead scoring, (guiding the prospect through the sales process, down the funnel so that you can then pass sales qualified leads directly to the sales people). Now, understanding the scoring model of marketing automation systems, it can be a very useful tool. So, what to do? MORE >>