Another in MarketingSherpa’s Chart of the Week series – perhaps familiar if you happen to have sprung for Sherpa’s B2B Marketing Benchmark Survey 2009 – this one focused on the often yawning Marketing-Sales chasm. Although in this case there is good news, such as: 51% using a CRM to manage lead process (13% say no, [...]
Continue Reading Add comment July 23rd, 2009
We get the questions a lot from our B2B clients… “Should we start a blog?” and “What do we need to know to do it ‘right’?” We answer “yes” to the first one in most cases, because if nothing else, a reasonably well-done blog will improve their website’s search-engine ranking and their market’s perception of [...]
Continue Reading Add comment July 22nd, 2009
Hopefully, we’re all well aware by now of the critical importance of landing pages, due to their tremendous leverage; 50-80% swings in conversion rate from seemingly minor changes to headlines, copy or design elements are commonplace. And there’s certainly a lot of info “out there” on how to do landing pages right. Well folks, Google [...]
Continue Reading Add comment July 22nd, 2009
For those who thought that social media were mostly good for brand- and relationship-building, and maybe SEO… along comes a study from DemandGen Report showing that – at least for the 218 B2B sales and marketing professionals sampled – lead generation is becoming the main goal of social media use. In fact, some early adopters [...]
Continue Reading Add comment July 21st, 2009
So much ink is spilled over driving traffic, generating leads and conversion… one might conclude that that’s all that matters. But equally important… what’s happening to all those leads? More specifically, how long does it take you to respond to them? For B2Bs, lead response is kind of like baggage claim for an airline: it’s [...]
Continue Reading Add comment July 20th, 2009
We all know about the usefulness of social media in brand-building, customer relationship enhancement, and the like. But according to John Gaffney in his recent piece for ClickZ, the real value of social networking will eventually lie in improved customer service. John cites a number of examples, including the Mountain View police using Twitter to [...]
Continue Reading Add comment July 17th, 2009
It’s bedeviled webmasters and SEM practitioners since the dawn of the Bing age a month or so ago. But in our analysis, and now with some good work by Julie Batten writing for ClickZ, it seems like “everything old is new again” (or maybe vice-versa). Bing’s critical SERP-influencing elements appear to be… Content – it’s [...]
Continue Reading Add comment July 16th, 2009