At the earliest stages of the funnel, where buyers first begin to become aware of your company and its solutions is perhaps the most challenging. Efforts to build great content and share it with influencers lead to a more measurable metric of inbound links. Creating interesting, useful, and valuable content leads to more links, and each link increases the chances that your content will be discovered by those reading about the market space. This thinking needs to be applied to all areas of the revenue engine, and each has its own unique challenges. MORE >>

Especially in B2B marketing, the length of the buying process leads to challenges in defining metrics that make sense for a marketing dashboard. Here are a few key areas to think about as you build critical management metrics for your marketing organization: Funnel Management: As we adapt to today’s buying processes where the buyers are in control, we need to adapt our thinking on how we look at a marketing funnel. From there, we can measure the marketing funnel using a balance sheet and income statement metaphor. Response, is also critical to measure. MORE >>

This audit leads to a content matrix that forms a very useful basis for defining both your nurture marketing approaches and your content development strategy. As you plan your lead nurturing strategies, understanding where in the marketing funnel you need to focus on and where in the buying process your content exists is key. Tags: lead nurturing Buying Process Buyer Roles Content Shifting your thinking from a selling process to a buying process means understanding how buyers buy and what stages each type of buyer goes through. MORE >>

The conceptual model of a funnel is a great one for understanding buyer stages. At the top of the funnel is the broadest universe of suspects who may at some point have an interest in your product or services, but currently do not show significant interest. There are usually the largest number of these potential buyers, hence it being the widest part of the funnel. Further down the funnel, closer to being an actual buyer, interest levels increase while, in most cases, the number of individuals decreases. The map that a funnel represents is often taken to be linear. MORE >>

This leads to a need in B2B marketing for a significant amount of content. This may be an inside sales team, a field sales team, or a channel partner’s sales team, but the direct involvement leads to another unique aspect of B2B marketing. One of marketing’s main roles in a B2B organization is to provide sales with a steady flow of qualified leads. With this insight, B2B marketers can then establish a lead scoring system that identifies and ranks prospective buyers. Tags: lead nurturing Lead scoring sales and marketing alignment B2B Marketing MORE >>