An increasing number of marketers fortunately has understood how “users”, “prospects”, “leads”, “recipients”, “suspects”, “relations” or simply people and their emotional and individual needs, digital signals, social information-gathering processes and buying journeys define what works and what doesn’t. Content leads to stories when the networks and ecosystems it touches decide so. When talking about content marketing and content in context, we are, however, mostly talking about “inbound marketing” and lead nurturing and, indeed, often in a B2B marketing framework. MORE >>

Someone in your marketing team can make an error, leading to a situation in which the expectations are not met and promises are broken. Obviously, developing a relationship in marketing is also about lead nurturing, which is about content, offers, scenarios etc. Organizations have been facing a challenge for several years now: a lack of trust among people regarding what they say, the messages they spread and how they act. Relationships are based upon trust. Although the levels and types of trust are different, this goes for business relationships as well. Your product can be DOA. MORE >>

Word of mouth leads to new customers, shortened sales cycles, improved branding and much more. People have always talked about their experiences, emotions, needs and also products, services and brands. Word of mouth is an old and human phenomenon. With the arrival of interactive and social media the patterns, role and impact of word of mouth have changed. These changes affected the ways businesses can leverage the power of word of mouth for marketing purposes and, vice versa, the impact of word of mouth on businesses. Period. But when do we talk about word of mouth marketing (WOM)? MORE >>

That’s why it’s pretty revolting that some ‘thought leaders’ (and I won’t mention names anymore or even link to them), especially in the social media space, keep repeating marketing ROI leads to failure (!). Yesterday, I had a long and interesting conversation with the president of STIMA , Belgium’s largest association of marketing professionals. He told me the main issue that surfaces in his daily contacts with marketers is ROMI (Return On Marketing Investment), a.k.a. Marketing ROI. The crisis is hitting hard, and accountability is priority number one today. And it’s about time. MORE >>

All these people-to-people interactions lead to a perception of your company and brand by your clients and prospects. In some companies, the role of sales has been reduced by strict lead management processes, whereby the role of sales reps has been reduced to order intake. In many other businesses, sales reps continue to play a very important role from the early buying process stage onward and are involved, as consultants, in lead generation and even setting cross-divisional marketing and communication priorities. Of course, it’s not the only division in most cases. MORE >>