B2B buyers are great at kicking the tire well before they are ready to talk to your sales team. We’re all familiar with the new fact that B2B buyers are often 60% of the way into their buying process before bringing your sales team into the process. But all along the way of getting half way to a buying decision, they are online checking you out. It’s their way of kicking the tire to see who they want to ... Read More
Customer profitability is a fragile thing. If not maintained, it can go the same way as a car breakdown.
Have you seen a decrease in customer retention or new customer sales? Or conversely, maybe you’re seeing an increase in customers, but not a proportionate increase in profit? Not knowing your customer needs will not only influence customer retention and new sales, it can cause ... Read More
By Juliana Davies, Contributing Author
Laying the foundation for a recognizable brand is often overlooked by inexperienced entrepreneurs. This despite the fact that branding is crucial to building a successful company as it has a significant impact on customer experience. Making this mistake early in the branding process can create problems that are difficult to fix, at times even leading to a businesses’ untimely demise. However, ... Read More
Here’s the problem with B2B selling today. Eighty percent of buyers journey through their buying process without contacting a salesperson. They know more about you than you know about them. They only need you to do a final trust check and negotiate the price alongside your competitors. There was no selling cycle. The buyer also cut herself short. By not taking the time to get to know you she has ... Read More
The power of unique, quality content used to support B2B marketing strategies has been self-evident as a way of capturing audiences for over a century. But since the Internet put the customer in charge, it is now mandatory that corporate marketing departments and their agencies think more like publishers than traditional marketers. (Scene from P&G’s Guiding Lightsoap opera at ... Read More
Most online advertising (Google Adwords or similar relevance-based ads on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc.) are what many marketers think of when they hear contextual marketing. That is too-limited a definition for such an important concept as contextual or relevance-based ... Read More
By Dale Wolf
Context is the connector to the customer. It establishes relevance to what the customer needs or is interested in. If we deliver a marvelous experience at every touchpoint, our chances of being listened to go up rapidly. The customer experience is often both emotional and realistic. It takes research about customer needs to make sure you are capable of delivering a better experience than ... Read More
By Dale Wolf
What brings a prospect into a buying cycle? The choices a prospect makes to satisfy aspirations or challenges. To understand the effect of a campaign, we need first to understand the cause. Usually, there is a combination of offline and online interactions across various touchpoints, many of which go unrecognized or recorded. Downloading an eBook is best understood by observing the prospect’s next action. The next action might be to contact the company or to answer the phone when the supplier calls. Or the next touch might be to continue a process of research about the supplier by visiting more deeply into the supplier’s website and that of similar suppliers. It is a series of actions and reactions.
In all cases, when a prospect takes an action, there are ... Read More
ADVERTISING SKULLDUGGERY
This Sunday, more than 111 million people will tune in to the big game – The Super Bowl – to watch the 2011 football season come to an end. Many of them will be watching JUST for the commercials. However, over on YouTube, some of the ads have been leaked accidentally on purpose.
A REAL BARGAIN: 30 SECONDS FOR 4 $MILLION
While some ... Read More
Content marketing is about one thing: providing a great customer experience that helps grow your
business. If the content is about anything else, it is fine art, like a diary or a painting that satisfies the artist but has no retail value.
B2B content producers are sales people who sell with concepts, words, illustrations; crafted together by a graphic designer. It is preparing the way for the salesperson to make his onsite visit with a prepared ... Read More
Joe Chernov, VP of Content Marketing for Eloqua, a revenue performance management company, expresses his dismay with the ‘boy’s club’ culture of content marketing, namely, excluding women thought ... Read More
