blog

Most IT sales professionals know what it takes to close a deal. Put one in front of a well-qualified prospect, and the rest takes care of itself. The problem, of course, is getting those meetings. Without effective marketing support, sales teams are stuck cold-calling, hovering at networking events filled mostly with job-hunters instead of decision-makers and otherwise trying to find very small needles in incredibly large haystacks. The odds against success are high.

The situation is made worse by a tendency – in both sales and marketing departments – to focus only on the present. Even if you can rack up enough appointments for this month, what happens next month? Next quarter? Next year?

Read the rest of this entry »

Most companies could be much more aggressive with their e-mail marketing initiatives. A new report from MarketingSherpa shows that customer retention is by far the top priority, with objectives around new opportunities not gaining nearly as much attention. Listen to this message from the market, and you’ll hear the whisper: “It’s time to make your move.”

When I saw the latest chart published by MarketingSherpa, I was shocked. Eighty-eight percent of respondents called “retain[ing] existing customers” a very important objective for e-mail marketing. Only 78 percent ascribed this level of importance to “generat[ing] new sales leads,” and “increase web traffic,” “build brand and educate market” and “drive offline sales” each was considered “very important” by only 56 percent of respondents.

Read the rest of this entry »

For internet marketers, nothing compares in value to the house list. It’s gold. You know that you can blast an e-mail and count on a certain conversion rate, yielding a comfortable predictability to your revenue stream. Yet, there are limits to e-mail marketing. After a while, you have to limit your campaigns, for fear of winding up in a spam folder or seeing the unsubscribes tick up. You’re ability to interact with your most likely buyers, therefore, is inherently constrained. Social media platforms can cut the ties that bind, however, and bring new flexibility to your internet marketing efforts.

Doubtless, direct pitches to your fan base will eventually meet with the same malaise triggered by e-mail saturation. So, keep your blasts to a minimum. Instead, use other methods to attract the attention of your fans or followers — which is effectively your social media “house list” — and you can stimulate buying activity much more often.

Read the rest of this entry »

Five Signs You Are Leaving Marketing ROI on the Table: Are you getting the most out of your marketing budget? The only way to know for sure is to take a close look at how your marketing and sales teams are performing. Dig into the data in your CRM system, and you’ll find a wealth of information. Even if you’re satisfied with the fruits of your labor, you may learn that you’re actually leaving ROI on the table. Here are five ways to find out if your organization has more ROI just waiting to happen.

Read the article >>

Four Ways to Sell Skittish Execs on Corporate Blogging: Blogging isn’t for the faint of heart. You have to expect readers to engage on some sort of level if you’re doing it right. With that said, some blogs can be the Wild Wild West, which is what gives blogging a bad reputation in the board room and with executives that are stuck in the 80s. So, despite impassioned pleas to get a corporate blog off the ground, sometimes those pleas are destined to fall on deaf ears.

Read the article >>

Five Twitter Tips for IT Social Media Marketers: The dialogue on Twitter is fast-paced and has close to 60 million participants. So, it’s at once high-value and highly frustrating. How can you make your voice heard above so many others? Rather than delve into the “focused community” spiel that you’ve probably read hundreds of times on Mashable, here are five tips to help you with the basic blocking and tackling of marketing your IT product or service on Twitter.

Read the article >>

Do You Really Want More Leads?: Generating high-quality leads is the top challenge for B2B marketers … by a mile. The latest research from MarketingSherpa shows that 69 percent of respondents see this as a significant challenge. The next one — marketing to a lengthening sales cycle – came in at a distant 39 percent. Even generating a high volume of leads only attracted the attention of 35 percent of the survey’s respondents. Competing for leads across multiple media environments ranked last at 27 percent.

Read the article >>

Learn the Thinking Behind LinkedIn’s Faceted Search: If you’re using LinkedIn as part of your social media marketing program – or just have an interest in this stuff – you’ll want to take a peek behind the curtain. The latest post on LinkedIn’s blog shows you how the new “faceted search” feature (launched at the end of last year) was designed. In the increasingly crowded and complex social media space, it’s important to get a sense of why some of the new features being introduced were developed at all. This will help you decide which to adopt and which to skip.

Read the article >>

Most Popular Keyword: Strategy

And, you may have missed …

Twitter Mastery Makes Money: Let’s not mess around with the thinking, here’s the data: companies with between 100 and 500 followers on Twitter generated 146 percent more median monthly leads than those with 21 to 100 followers. So, whip out your Blackberry and pump out those 140-character insights!

Read the article >>

Click here to receive enter:marketing blog updates by e-mail >>

Follow @entermarketing on Twitter >>

Generating high-quality leads is the top challenge for B2B marketers … by a mile. The latest research from MarketingSherpa shows that 69 percent of respondents see this as a significant challenge. The next one — marketing to a lengthening sales cycle – came in at a distant 39 percent. Even generating a high volume of leads only attracted the attention of 35 percent of the survey’s respondents. Competing for leads across multiple media environments ranked last at 27 percent.

What does this mean for you?

Quality matters. Period. The top priority for solution providers needs to be lead quality — there’s no substitute for delivering a qualified, interested prospect on which you have plenty of intelligence to your sales team.

[Source: MarketingSherpa]

If you’re using LinkedIn as part of your social media marketing program – or just have an interest in this stuff – you’ll want to take a peek behind the curtain. The latest post on LinkedIn’s blog shows you how the new “faceted search” feature (launched at the end of last year) was designed. In the increasingly crowded and complex social media space, it’s important to get a sense of why some of the new features being introduced were developed at all. This will help you decide which to adopt and which to skip.

While I won’t rehash the entire post here (you can read the whole thing on LinkedIn’s blog), it was pretty interesting to learn some of the findings that influenced the development of faceted search:

• Read the rest of this entry »

Blogging isn’t for the faint of heart. You have to expect readers to engage on some sort of level if you’re doing it right. With that said, some blogs can be the Wild Wild West, which is what gives blogging a bad reputation in the board room and with executives that are stuck in the 80s. So, despite impassioned pleas to get a corporate blog off the ground, sometimes those pleas are destined to fall on deaf ears.

However, no mountain is too high to climb. To reach the corporate summit and gain approval (and maybe even budget), you need to know how to sell the corporate blogging concept to a guy in a tie who thinks the internet is dangerous.

Fortunately, it isn’t as difficult as it may seem.

Read the rest of this entry »