“Is Marketing Talking to IT?”. The real question companies should be asking themselves isn’t, “Is marketing talking to sales?” but rather, “Is marketing talking to IT?” Or for that matter, “Is IT talking to marketing?”. Marketing – IT:  Dysfunctional Behavior? IT didn’t understand marketing concepts either. 

While mobile-marketing tools and strategies will differ amongst different companies; like any strategy worth its salt, there's no one-size-fits-all solution. Because in a world where our competitors are just a click away and marketing clutter abounds, we are fortunate to have audiences accessing our content. B2B Mobile Marketing

Viral marketing campaigns can be effective for B2B marketers—but they aren't easy to pull off. The next three posts here will offer some ideas about programs, promotion, and pitfalls to avoid that may help in developing successful B2B viral marketing campaigns, based both on my own experience and research by MarketingSherpa.

'[Posted by Kristin Hambelton, Vice President Marketing, Neolane, Inc.] There is no universal checklist for creating a successful direct marketing campaign; every campaign is different and requires an approach specific to the brand’s (and customers’) needs. Direct Marketing Kristin Hambelton Posts

by contributor | Tweet this Today’s guest post comes courtesy of Laura Patterson , president and co-founder of VisionEdge Marketing, Inc., At two recent conferences we asked attendees whether they had a marketing dashboard. Provide a direct link between your marketing programs and investments and business results?  

And content marketing is the slingshot that gives us a fair advantage.”. They spend two months bouncing these ideas off professionals inside and outside Tellabs – from Sales and Marketing to industry analysts and journalists to customers. Related Resources: Content Marketing: Slow, steady pay off for manufacturer.

The rise of the online research and the ease of getting peer feedback means marketers have to be smarter, finding ways to educate and advise rather than pushy. ClickZ has published it’s own 10 Commandments of Modern Marketing , which offers some sage advice. Modern marketing is about behaviours, not just tactics. Storytelling.

In many B2B marketing organizations, marketing is expected to deliver leads and sales is expected to close. But is this really perfect sales and marketing alignment? He also points out that sales and marketing both contribute through the entire funnel. Marketing is focused on MQLs, sales is focused on revenue.

'“Marketing Plans are an incredibly useful, but frequently overlooking tool for marketers” wrote Bill Blaney, author of B2B AtoZ. As the Creator and Host of the extremely popular show Marketing Made Simple TV , I get many books sent to me by prospective show guests. How much is your marketing budget? Location.

Thriving in today’s content-driven online marketing world, demands that you think like a publisher. That’s the battle cry among content marketers. Just as publishers start by learning everything about their target audience and what information they want, content marketers must realize it is not about them but about their customers.

The raw number of searches being performed gives a good indication of the upper limit of your success with active awareness efforts such as search engine marketing or search engine optimization. Tags: Discovery marketing dashboards search B2B Marketing Awareness Are you Being Discovered?

Sazbean is proud to bring you the final part in the Future of Publishing series on affiliate marketing (next week’s episode will be on a different topic). In this episode, Oliver Roup focuses on an advanced topic that challenges the advertising side of affiliate marketing: Affiliate fraud. Marketing

Modern online marketing has talented writers establishing authentic relationships with audiences, effectively turning the idea of 30-second commercials and mass media messages upside down. The Content is the Marketing. This article was originally produced as part of the Real World Marketing Syllabus. Brian Clark. Write to Win.

Summary: So you want some hard numbers to prove the value of marketing automation? client asked yesterday if I had some benchmark information to justify the cost of her marketing automation project. Neolane “ Making the Business Case for Enterprise Marketing Software ”. Here's a bunch. Statistics include: • 16.5%

Holger Schulze, Marketing Director at SafeNet, recently posted a great question to the 9,040 members of LinkedIn’s B2B Marketing group. Can you use ONE WORD to describe the biggest challenge facing B2B Marketing today?”. It appears one of the biggest challenges then is not related to the market, but to internal politics. .

If you have a marketing database you probably have something in there that is like a cancerous tumor. The cleaner your database, the better response you will receive and the more your confidence your marketing and sales teams will have with it. Tags: email marketing It's what I call the "database deadbeats". Chad H.

So if your marketing plan doesn’t account for tablets, you might want to revisit it. We’ve written before about why tablets need to be a part of your marketing plan. But we wanted to share some recent stats that tell you everything about the state of the tablet market. First off, the tablet market continues to grow.

Inbound marketing is all about your content, right? If you use the components of inbound marketing I have shared or the common definition centered on content, social and search, content is at the core. During Marketo’s Social Rockstar Tour presentation, they presented two alternatives to content in inbound marketing.

Oracle announced today that it has agreed to purchase B2B marketing automation leader Eloqua for $23.50 The deal makes obvious sense, in that it gives Oracle a much stronger position in the fast-growing B2B marketing automation industry*. What if you're an enterprise marketer? per share, which comes to $871 million.

For anyone in marketing or PR being asked to make “data-driven&# decisions “based on the numbers&# (and doesn’t that include pretty much everyone in marketing and PR these days?), How do social media marketing strategies in small businesses differ from those in larger enterprises? Social Media Facts and Stats.

As the former Managing Editor of DemandGen Report, Amanda covered the latest technology, trends and development in the marketing automation technology space, as well as the sales and marketing strategies central to demand generation. Let’s face it: we’re tethered individuals, marketers perhaps even more so. Evernote Business.

If you sell a web app or a software product that has web elements, it’s time to consider how your product can help market itself. More and more we’re seeing marketing  built into products, allowing the code to do some of the advertising work for you. It’s a wired world, so let’s allow our products to help them market themselves!

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. First, let’s briefly recap the benefits of pull marketing.

The newest buzz-phrase to hit the marketing scene is Unified Marketing. If you’re like me, my first thought is that this is just some new spin on something old, like integrated marketing , relationship marketing or customer relationship management. to it, then you have unified marketing (in simple terms). 

“We don’t have the time or the skills to write copy for digital content” is the most common reaction I get from clients when discussing their industrial marketing programs. Myth: Content for digital marketing is the text on your Website or blog. have to quickly shift into my explaining mode right after that. Easy, right? Not exactly.

Industrial distributors face a unique set of challenges when it comes to content marketing. Visit my website for more content on industrial marketing.]. Content Marketing Inbound Marketing Industrial Blogs Blogging Blogs Industrial Marketing Lead generation SEO WordPressThis is only a content summary.

by Jon Miller I recently wrote about how to build a data-driven marketing team. There are literally hundreds if not thousands of possible marketing management metrics to choose from, and almost all of them measure something of some kind of value.  Too often, marketers rely on “feel good” measurements to justify their marketing spend. 

When it comes to ROI, email remains a relatively inexpensive, high-return marketing method. by the end of 2011, according to the Direct Marketing Association. The year started out with a lot of predictions talking about the end of email,” said Bill McCloskey, Founder of OnlyInfluencers.com and an expert on email marketing.

'Unless you’ve been living under a rock somewhere for the past couple of years, you’ve surely heard or read about the power and the popularity of content marketing by now. Visit my website for more content on industrial marketing.]. 91% [.]. This is only a content summary. Please click on the headline to read the full article.

…fall back on tried-and-true marketing tactics that they have relied on for years. In the current tough economy, cutting edge and innovative marketing is taking a back seat to proven strategies for lead generation. Those three marketing channels received the largest allocation of the budget. See chart for details.

Is blogging worth it for B2B marketers? Here are 12 benefits business to business marketers can gain from blogging. Increase “shareability” of your marketing messages. This facilitates word of mouth marketing and expands your marketing reach. Crowdsource market research. Please comment below.

Why should any marketer consider a search-driven marketing plan? Unfortunately, many marketing plans are built with a few minor modifications to the previous year’s plans and some new buzz words added in. search-driven marketing plan is the only way to ensure that your marketing activities are aligned to your audience.

The team at Savvy B2B Marketing has a great blog with consistently valuable information and insight. When and why B2B marketing fails. B2B Content B2B Marketing Research Outbound B2B Marketing B2B Direct Marketing B2B Marketing Best Practices Lead Generation Best Practices Marketing Best Practices

Tweet I just got back from this year’s round of MarketingSherpa B2B Summits in Boston and San Francisco, where I provided one-on-one coaching to attendees, marketers from Fortune 500 organizations, leading private companies, and emerging businesses. Frankly, I don’t know who walks away more enlightened – the marketers I was coaching or me.

I recently received a comment chastising me for suggesting that your web site should be a trap from Peter Johnston , who said, “This attitude has no place in modern marketing. This sort of general point-of-view is actually dangerous for anyone who actually wants to be successful using social media as a marketing platform.

'I’ve been practicing the B2B marketing thing since the late 1980s, when the term “database marketing” first started being mentioned. While the buzz around database marketing has waned, its importance to the B2B marketing community has not. Put real effort into your database marketing efforts.

[Posted by Ed Hadley Senior Marketing Manager, Neolane, Inc.] With the digital marketing landscape undergoing rapid change, marketers need to stay on top of the current trends to achieve the greatest results. Digital Marketing Ed Hadley Posts

You can thank Brendan Cournoyer , Brainshark’s content marketing manager, for the post below. It’s no secret that online video has become one of the hottest trends in content marketing. As a result, online video usage rose 12% amongst B2B content marketers, according to a recent Content Marketing Institute (CMI) survey.

Following are a few of my favorites quotes, including their origins and how they apply to today’s marketer. This pretty much describes every new marketing campaign I’ve worked on in the past 25 years. If we consider the competitive world of B2B marketing as a war, you bet this still applies. Marketing Marketing Cliches

Are you paying attention to your mobile marketing yet? joint study by the ANA (Association of National Advertisers) and MediaVest shows marketers are excited about opportunities for mobile marketing but frustrated about the ability to prove return on investment (ROI). Here are 16 case studies that prove ROI of mobile marketing.

Fortunately, three of our great guests on Mad Marketing TV  interviewed by me, Jeff Ogden of Find New Customers , are content marketing experts. Using Story-Telling in Content Marketing, with Joe Pulizzi, founder of the Content Marketing Institute. The top performance metric for content marketers is leads.

Tweet The week before Labor Day, hundreds of marketers descended upon Orlando, Fla., Last week, they gave me a behind-the-scenes look at the most common challenges marketers discussed with them, and both concluded that these discussions validated research from the 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report (free excerpt at that link): .

Despite all the viral marketing success stories, there is still an embarrassing number of amateur mistakes made in the average viral marketing campaign. In this post you will find five anti-tips that will help you in better planning and executing a successful viral marketing campaign.

Nobody wins when marketing automation system implementations don’t yield expected results. While suppliers, consultants, and marketers have amply documented what needs to be done and often how to do it, the extent of the changes that may be needed makes if hard to focus on what to do first.  Unfortunately,

B2B marketing B2B Marketing Online Content Marketing Lead Generation Lead Nurturing Marketing ROI b2b blog blog traffic funnel holidays inbound marketing leadsReview the Year Gone By Put. [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]].

In recent years we’ve noticed a sea change in the skills, knowledge and roles required to be successful in marketing. CRM Administrator:  Even though a CRM system is a sales platform, the administrator should sit in marketing and be responsible for configuration, maintenance, customizations and vendor management.

poll taken by MarketingProfs unveiled the biggest challenges marketers have with  content marketing. In his latest vlog, Jeff Ogden (the Fearless Competitor) expands on the top two challenges in content marketing. poll taken by MarketingProfs unveiled the biggest challenges marketers have with content marketing.

I released the 2012 edition of our B2B Marketing Automation Vendor Selection Tool (VEST) report today, an event that deserves more hoopla that I’ve given it. Although the VEST is primarily intended to help people who are buying a marketing automation system, its database also provides a statistical portrait of the industry.

Content marketing is a central topic in most of my recent conversations with industrial companies. The not so good news is that they have a mistaken belief that content marketing is for search engine optimization (SEO). However, your industrial marketing content must do a lot more than just SEO. That is the good news.

This is part 3 of a series on the challenge of targeting SMB markets and how the use of buyer-based modeling and buyer-based marketing help organizations to grow their SMB customer base. . The sheer size of the SMB makes for a daunting task for any organization intent on marketing to the SMB segment.  The U.S. Related articles.

This is my first post in 2012 and I want to start the New Year by answering a perennial question about content marketing for manufacturers and industrial companies. There are many advantages to this content marketing strategy. There is also a big hidden benefit of this content marketing strategy. Happy New Year!

by Sylvia Jensen | Tweet this Similar to “social CRM” or “lifecycle marketing,” “Marketing Automation” is a key phrase among marketers today. billion by 2010, the marketing automation industry is expected to grow to $4.8 What is marketing automation software? ways you should be using marketing automation.

by Jesse Noyes | Tweet this Jeffrey Hayzlett knows his marketing. Hayzlett knows marketers face challenges, but his edgy argument: What’s new about that? He took some time to answer my questions about the key challenges, opportunities and mandates modern marketers face. But marketing is increasingly driven by data.

I just finished reading an excellent research report from the good folks at Content Marketing Institute (CMI). This report is chock full of statistics and graphs about B2B content marketing. In this post, I want to focus on some of their findings that I feel apply to content marketing for manufacturers and industrial companies.

Pinterest is the marketing flavor du jour. Many B2B marketers do not have any presence on Pinterest. In my search for major B2B marketers on Pinterest, I only found a handful using it actively. Here are three of the better B2B marketing examples I found. Constant Contact : Looking for marketing and social media tips?

You are ready to take your content marketing to the next level. Now, you are ready to use content marketing to raise the profile of your company overall. Identifying where to focus your Stage Zero content efforts can be an unnatural process for marketers accustomed to focusing on the buying process. Where do the line up exactly?

Google Authorship is making big waves in the SEO and digital marketing worlds. In the summer of 2011, Google announced the Google Authorship  program and it has shaken the SEO and digital marketing worlds for a number of reasons. Image via CrunchBase. An SEO Boost. Compare the two SERP links above, which one would you click on?

by Brian Kardon | Tweet this I was with a group of CMOs last week, all of whom were knee-deep in developing their marketing budgets for 2012. But now I look forward to the marketing budget process. And I know precisely what my Marketing team has to do to hit those targets. To explain, I created a sample marketing budget below.

Over the course of my day I speak to quite a few people about Internet / digital marketing in one capacity or another. To say the least the online marketing landscape is vast and it can be one that creates problems for those trying to optimize their business opportunity using it. I Photo credit: Wikipedia. I’m not either.”

This is a guest post from Tom Callway, Marketing Manager at IT monitoring platform company Opsview. joined a UK technology start-up as Marketing Manager in 2009 and was immediately tasked with increasing the number of high quality leads to our sales team by 500%. Enter marketing automation…. What is marketing automation?

Lately I have been having some very passionate discussions about the best place to start in Content Marketing. You have heard me rant before about the biggest marketing mistake when we use our website and too much outbound promotion to just talk about ourselves. What is Audience Marketing? Content MarketingPhoto Source.

by Jesse Noyes | Tweet this Ernest Hemingway is one of the best writers of all time, but a great content marketer? Still, Hemingway’s writing process reveals great tips for content marketing. Below we suggest some words of wisdom from Hemingway you can apply to your content marketing process. Well, maybe books.) Ezra Pound.

With the clamor in the marketing world about multichannel marketing, it recently dawned on me that most so-called multichannel marketing is more like “dual-channel” marketing.  There are three critical components in any multichannel marketing campaign: Coordinating and managing multiple marketing channels.

Business Blog Writing and Content Marketing: Come on, light my fire! About Blogs Content Marketing On Writing Better Online Marketing Attracting Clients blog content blog marketing blog writing business blogging content marketing with blogs online content SEOWriting for the web can be like walking on a tightrope.

The other day I was a witness to content marketing murder. local marketing “expert” was describing how he propelled a new dentist’s office to the top of the Google rankings through his content marketing genius. ” Here is the sneaky little secret of content marketing. Image courtesy BigStock.com.

Needless to say, Marketing Automation software is very popular today. It can be used for email campaigns, drip marketing, lead nurturing, lead scoring, landing page management and for brewing coffee. It is often positioned as something that will solve all your marketing problems for a couple of thousand dollars per month.

Today’s marketer has the challenge (or opportunity) of reaching their customers through what can seem like an infinite number of marketing channels. Marketers need to put the customer in the driver’s seat, allowing them to choose how and when they wish to receive relevant information and/or [.]. Digital Marketing

Internet marketing as we once knew it is dead. This is where the death of traditional Internet Marketing comes into play. The Fall Of Internet Marketing. SEO social media Internet marketing social seoBy Robert Dempsey, Contributing {grow} Columnist. Now is the time of social SEO. And this time has already begun.

Every good marketing strategy needs a good set of performance indicators to back it up. Let’s start with the big picture – marketing budgets. So So are you an impoverished marketer or blessed with a bountiful budget? In B2B, 33% of this budget tends to go on advertising and direct marketing channels. and 5.6%

Blogging Internet Marketing Social Sharing Facebook flipboard Foursquare Google iPad pinterest StumbleUpon twitterI am in the midst of setting up my New Year’s resolutions for 2013. know not everyone does the resolution thing, but almost half of all Americans do. Take what you want and leave the rest. Good luck and Godspeed!

When I interviewed three top content marketing experts for Marketing Made Simple TV  (Joe Pulizzi, Content Marketing Institute; Jim Burns, Avitage, and Doug Kessler, Velocity Partners UK), one of them, Joe, told me about a big problem he sees, even in large firms. Joe Pulizzi. There’s no common agreement on content.

'Looking into a heavy topic today: Big Data for Marketing. think Big Data for Marketing is more about the questions than the answers. Big Data for Marketing is easy to say but hard to do. So Big Data Marketing Is Like Gold Mining. Prioritization of the marketing goals Big Data can help you accomplish.

Marketers recognize the potential reach of social media, but are rightly frightened that they can’t control the message. Most social marketing applications sidestep the issue by focusing on creating communities ( Jive , Lithium ), monitoring conversations (Radian6 , Trackur ) and running promotions ( CrowdFactory , Nextbee ).

B2B marketing is complex. Sales cycles are long, measurement can be convoluted, and segmentation, lead scoring and sales and marketing alignment take traditional marketers into uncomfortable spaces. Amid the details and uncomfortable spaces, the bigger marketing picture is often lost. Buyers need information.

In early October, the B2B Lead Roundtable Group , this blog’s LinkedIn group, was recognized as one of the top LinkedIn groups for content marketing. Check it out for yourself here: “ 4 Hottest LinkedIn Groups for B2B content marketing.” Social Media Pays Off Big for Over 1,000 Marketers Reporting 150% ROI or More.

Frankly, you could rightfully draw the same conclusion if you extended that analogy to marketers. 64% of marketers still send all leads that respond to marketing campaigns directly to Sales. It’s no wonder 80% of Marketing-generated leads end up lost, ignored or discarded. You wouldn’t think much of the chef, yes?

All successful businesses have one thing in common, they have great marketing and they care about their customers and coffee shops are no exemption. am talking about the opportunity which inbound marketing offer to a coffee shop. Coffee Shop Facebook Marketing: 4 “Hot” Examples. Here is a list of coffeehouse chains.

I had a long discussion this week with an analyst trying to figure out how companies should be budgeting for their social media marketing efforts. A marketing strategy — and the appropriate budget — is going to be determined by your organization’s goals and the competitive structure of your industry. Tweet.

'Tweet This week, I’ve joined marketers from around the world in Athens Americana – Boston, Mass. Our goal is to give marketers a framework they can use to identify and express a value proposition using the MECLABS value proposition worksheet. Exclusivity – “ Is this offer available anywhere else in the market? ”.

As we wind down 2011, this is a good time to review all the industrial marketing posts that I have published here and been viewed by you, my readers, during the year. That’s the power of inbound marketing with content. Thought Leadership: Marketing Engineering Services with Technical Articles. And now for the drum roll please….

by Rob Bois | Tweet this In a prior job, I was responsible for both product marketing and content marketing. How do product marketers stay relevant? Be the Expert on the Market. Sometimes content marketing feels like it’s about everything but the problem your product solves. Partner with Content Marketing.

Content marketing is defined as a marketing technique. However, it’s also  a process that it is very connected – and thus should be aligned – with several marketing purposes and business processes. Note that the definition of content marketing as a technique should not make you focus too much on the content itself.

This is a major change and for marketers, it is a far more interesting change. New brand pages give marketers a new home, but the changes to everyone’s stream is where the real opportunities are. The integration of the Discover tab is a huge change for marketers. Discover. Discover. Discover.

Over the past few weeks I have seen a strange series of blog posts expressing that the marketing profession is slimy or one step above a snake oil salesperson. Let me tell you why I am so lucky to be in marketing. Marketing Inspiration. Marketing did THIS? wanted to be a marketer. Marketing has been trivialized.

by Jason Miller Are you measuring your marketing efforts? As marketers in this day and age we should all be aware of the importance and growing pressure to measure and demonstrate marketing’s ROI. But how can marketing efforts be measured, and which are the best metrics to use?

by Jon Miller Marketing automation is a technology that streamlines and automates marketing tasks so companies can increase operational efficiency and grow revenue faster. In other words, companies don’t buy marketing automation to automate their marketing. Measure and prove marketing ROI. Marketing Automation

An industrial marketer [.]. Visit my website for more content on industrial marketing.]. Content Marketing Sales Strategies Engineering Inbound Marketing Industrial distributors Industrial Marketing Manuafcturing ManufacturersI am not referring to the age-old question, “What will we write about?”

Hitting on a single topic in marketing, social media and business communications. Facebook Marketing, An Hour A Day is a book by Chris Treadaway and Mari [.]. Tags: market research marketing social media Facebook Facebook advertising Facebook Targeting Quick and to the point.

Danny lined up a great set of provocative questions for the group on aligning B2B sales and marketing. As always, the #B2Bchat participants shared a range of perspectives from both sales and marketing experiences. Business #B2Bchat Alignment danny hanssel Marketing SalesFollow @B2B_chat for announcements of the topic each week.

In this post, we’ll try to answer that question, especially in the context of fixing a broken marketing organization. Some questions to keep in mind: Are marketing’s objectives aligned with those of other organizations, especially sales? How strong is the existing marketing team? When Should You Really Think About Marketing?

In the area of online marketing, there are many different tools that you can use. Pay-per-click campaigns, banner ads, article marketing and email marketing are just a few of the options that you have available. Why exactly is email marketing such a powerful way to market to your customers? Email Marketing

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.

You’ve always been marketing. First it was search marketing, then social media marketing, and now you’re looking at the latest thing–the combination of search and social called content marketing. But, as with anything, there are the right ways and the wrong ways to do content marketing. Forget it.

Social media is arguably overhyped as a marketing trend: it gets well under 10% of marketing budgets (different surveys have figures from 3% to 8%) and results are questionable (it was rated the least effective content marketing tactic in a recent MarketingProfs study ). Results are summarized in the table below.

2009 was the year in which Marketing Automation really took off. Several new vendors appeared on the market, many existing vendors experienced rapid growth, and Marketing Automation as a term gained popularity among B2B marketers. In this post I want to focus on the trends in Marketing Automation for 2010.

by Sylvia Jensen | Tweet this What does  sales and marketing alignment  really mean within an organization?  We discovered that the level of sales and marketing alignment we assume in the marketing automation world doesn’t always translate to all marketers. Are Your Sales and Marketing Teams Really Aligned?

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. Marketers are uncertain and even scared.

However, CRM technology potentially includes multiple pieces including email software and marketing automation (MA) solutions. Marketing, Sales (and IT) alignment. The role of marketing automation. She mentioned a few areas where MA software can help Marketing: Automatically sending  large quantities of emails.

There are times when you need a marketing or sales accelerator – something that takes you to an entire new level.  One of the best ways to reinvigorate a flagging B2B marketing program is to find an entirely new audience for you existing products or services.  In other words – stop with the “new message of the month” marketing.

The most shocking statistic is that 44% of companies don’t even know what marketing automation is. Almost 9 out of 10 don’t use marketing automation. MarketingBuyerZone shared this great infographic with bloggers who won one of their Best B2B Blogs of 2012 award.  Ironically, Fearless Competitor was picked #1 !)