Tactics

How to leak your sales funnel gracefully

Deals can drift, delay or simply disappear. For many buyers, ‘do nothing’ is a legitimate option – and a popular one. Sure, you can also make mistakes, or do well and still lose to a competitor. Whichever the case, how you exit that ‘thanks but no thanks’ conversation is just as important as your opening call. Think about the most common conversations at the point of exit, and what’s really going on: “This is not a priority for us right now” At some point it will be. You need to be the one they call (or receive READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Tactics, Velocity|

Write web content that gets read: 7 tips for B2B Marketer

Do you LOL and ROFL; perhaps you often exclaim OMG, or on particularly bad day are you driven to declare...WTF? Well here is a new acronym to add to your dictionary...TLDR. which according to Copyblogger stands for "Too Long Didn't Read." Its excellent post lays out a prescription for writing content that's designed for the web. Web usability research has shown that almost 80% of web users scan what they are reading. B2B Marketers need to take a scalpel to their content and adapt their style of writing and layout to convert those scanners into readers! READ MORE ›

By Chris Fell|Tactics|

How to build mobile-friendly websites and emails

Your target market is increasingly reading your website on small devices, which means much of your designer's hard work is wasted. If your pages are not formatted with mobile viewing in mind, chances are your users will click away quickly. Some will argue that this is a consumer phenomenon, but that's a cop-out. The reality is that your audience is becoming less patient by the day, and if your content can't be digested easily, it won't be. Even for sites that enjoy a good proportion of patient, desk-bound visitors, the emails that promote your web copy and READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Tactics, Velocity|

Social Media: A Team Effort Between Marketing & Sales

Surveys of B2B marketing budgets consistently show that a higher percentage of marketing resources are being invested in content development and social media than ever before. But business social media is too important to be left to the marketing department alone—it needs to be a team effort between marketing, sales and other customer-facing employees. In addition to the obvious advice to make all of your invaluable content social-media friendly and easily shareable, I’d like to suggest 7 simple steps that could help the whole organization to come together to fully realize the potential of business social media. READ MORE ›

By Bob Apollo|Sales, Tactics|

B2B Sales: Is your funnel fighting fit or fundamentally flabby?

The “funnel” is one of the most powerful metaphors in B2B sales and marketing. It describes the passage of prospects through a buying decision process that hopefully will (but often does not) result in your successfully selling something to them. A flawed metaphor For sure, the metaphor is flawed. Real-world funnels don’t leak, and everything that flows into the top tends to flow out from the bottom. And - unlike sales opportunities - the liquid they contain doesn’t normally flow back uphill again or evaporate completely. But despite all its manifest flaws, the idea of a funnel READ MORE ›

By Bob Apollo|Tactics, Velocity|

5 Reasons Why Events are a Must-Do B2B Marketing Tactic

At align.me, we run a lot of B2B marketing events – for ourselves and for our Marketing Services clients These range from small, boardroom discussions with just a handful of prospects in a room; to larger, forum-style events with various decision makers and companies in attendance. Regardless of the size or format, the objective is always the same: to get a bunch of targeted individuals together, and have them acknowledge the problems they face in their business – problems that we, surprise surprise, happen to be well-equipped to solve. Although events require a lot of preparation READ MORE ›

By Inka Wibowo|Tactics|

Five factors for B2B email marketing campaign success

With 81% of marketers using email marketing as a lead generation tactic (MarketingSherpa), it's easy to see how important it is to make sure you're doing it right. But what does "success" look like for an email campaign? And how can B2B marketers prove it in the Boardroom to combat the dim view CEOs already have of marketers? Here are 5 key elements that we think define a successful B2B email marketing campaign: 1. Focusing on the Right Buyers Identifying and targeting your buyer personas directly affects the quality of your leads. Buyer personas for your business READ MORE ›

By Chris Fell|Tactics|

Explore 5 types of content marketing that generate leads

We have all heard the phrase "content is king". In fact I would argue it has reached cliche status...and as with all cliches there is usually a kernel of truth in the saying. Content has been used in B2B marketing for decades, its certainly not a new phenomenon, but with the pervasive use of the internet to research buying options and the rise of social media to connect with peers, the focus on content to educate buyers through the stages of their buying journey is seeing a strong resurgence. It can sometimes be difficult for business owners READ MORE ›

By Chris Fell|Tactics|

B2B marketing: Unleash true powers of Google AdWords

By Inka Wibowo. Although it’s easy to understand the advantages of using Google AdWords in B2C marketing, the benefits for B2B marketing are less clear. While campaign success can be easily quantified in B2C, effectiveness is much harder to measure in B2B. This is because the journey for consumer buyers is very different to that of business buyers. In B2C, a typical journey will see a B2C buyer recognise a need for a product (informed by their awareness of the solutions that are available), then go on Google to search for it. They see a compelling READ MORE ›

By Inka Wibowo|Tactics|

Is marketing automation a powerful tool in B2B arenas?

The Pedowitz Group and The Lenskold Group recently set out to test how much marketing automation contributes to the effectiveness of marketing operations in the B2B arena. After surveying nearly 350 B2B marketing organizations, the study found that marketing automation, combined with ROI metrics such as lead acceptance rate and revenue per sale, made top-performing organizations more efficient and effective. According to the survey, the top segment of companies – 11% of all marketers surveyed – demonstrated distinct advantages in outgrowing competitors by adopting integrated marketing automation and using ROI metrics. Beyond that, the report found that, after deploying a marketing automation READ MORE ›

By Derek Singleton|Strategy, Tactics|