Six Most Significant Challenges to Email Marketing
January 3rd, 2011 - Posted in Solution Provider Services by Tim Freestone
What makes success difficult for email marketing campaigns? For B2B marketing professionals, several factors can impede progress, but targeting recipients is at the top of the list. Let’s take a look at the top six challenges B2B email marketers face:
How Do You Perceive Email Marketing ROI When Budgeting?
December 29th, 2010 - Posted in Solution Provider Services by Tim Freestone
Email marketing has been around for a while, and many marketers have clear thoughts on the value it provides. Respondents to a recent MarketingSherpa survey indicated a variety of perspectives on email marketing, ROI and investment, though almost all surveyed indicated seeing the value of this approach.
How You Budget for Email Marketing Matters
December 22nd, 2010 - Posted in Solution Provider Services by Tim Freestone
Is email marketing a priority for your company? Nothing answers that question quite like your budget. After all, how you allocate your marketing capital is the truest indicator of what’s important to your business. According to the latest survey by MarketingSherpa, it looks like email marketing means different things to different companies.
December 15th, 2010 - Posted in Solution Provider Services by Tom Johansmeyer
The truth of what your clients need lies somewhere between “trends are trends for a reason” and “every company is unique.” New technology and its ability to address business needs, the effects of economic conditions on financial performance and emerging industry issues usually do have consistent effects on related companies. Yet, differences in operations and products, varying business objectives and employee personalities lead to the specific circumstances that can’t be addressed with cookie-cutter solutions.
So, what’s my point? You need to balance these two competing forces in order to serve your clients effectively. This may sound obvious, but it’s usually relegated to sentiment when you’re knee-deep in working with a prospect or existing client to address pain points and preparing to implement a solution.
November 29th, 2010 - Posted in Solution Provider Services by Tom Johansmeyer
Tradeshow and conference leads are expensive – there’s no way around it. Compared to direct response, social media your own events and even PR, you’re going to drop a hefty portion of your budget for what amounts to a small number of business opportunities. For some IT solution providers, the notion of skipping these conferences entirely is not an option, so if you’re going to attend, you should at least tip the odds in your favor as much as possible. The biggest – and costliest – mistake you can make is completely preventable, and it happens on the convention floor.
Here are five ways you can reduce your tradeshow cost per lead, drive higher quality and increase your marketing ROI:
1. Choose your tradeshows carefully: do you really need to invest in every tradeshow on your list? Take a hard look at the results you gained from each, and think about how you could use your marketing budget more effectively. Be prepared to make some tough choices.
2. Have a game plan: market to key people you want to see in advance of the tradeshow. Make sure you can get them to your booth for a meaningful conversation. This increases the odds of a deeper, more productive appointment later.
November 24th, 2010 - Posted in Solution Provider Services by Tom Johansmeyer
Email marketing hasn’t gone out of style. Even though there’s plenty of buzz around social media, its predecessor remains a powerful tool for reaching a powerful audience with a specific message. This is evident in the latest research from MarketingSherpa, which shows a clear priority for this approach among email marketers.
November 17th, 2010 - Posted in Solution Provider Services by Tom Johansmeyer
As you’re planning your marketing budget for next year, stop to think about what worked in 2010 – and what really didn’t. This can be a tough process, since you need to take critical look at the decisions you made and how they performed. Needless to say, it took me a couple of years to get used to this, but the end result has been far better for enter:marketing’s clients. You’ll probably find the same to be true for yours.
When you step through your list of marketing initiatives and decide what to keep for 2011, make sure you spend some extra time exploring your tradeshow investment. This is often your most expensive source of leads, and it can result in lots of time spent chasing dead ends. Instead of assuming that you’ll have the same tradeshow obligations in 2011 that you did in 2010, consider your ROI on each, and how you could redeploy your marketing dollars for greater returns.
To maintain the face-to-face interaction of tradeshows but avoid the substantial hard-dollar costs, consider hosting your own marketing events. With this approach, you’ll:
The Best Leads May Need to Age
November 15th, 2010 - Posted in Solution Provider Services by Tim Freestone
Nothing is more exciting than getting a hot lead – a prospect who wants to make a fast decision. Your sales costs stay low, and you turn an opportunity into revenue as quickly as possible with little effort. If only they were all that easy, right?
Of course, it rarely works that way. Most sales opportunities take some time and planning on your part in order to become revenue. For larger sales, the cycle can take quite a while to come to a conclusion, and you may have to wait a few months before you can even get started in earnest. Since some of the best opportunities you have may not be ready right away, you need to develop a lead cultivation strategy in order to keep the opportunity warm until you can engage the decision-maker in the sales process.
It’s what you do before you get started that can turn a long-term lead into your next big opportunity. Invest your time in cultivating a lead, and you’ll be the first call when it’s time to start discussing a purchase. Also, you’ll make it harder for your competitors to swoop in and steal the opportunity from you.
Four Ways to Get Better Sales Intelligence
November 10th, 2010 - Posted in Solution Provider Services by Tim Freestone
Sales intelligence is vital to winning new business. Without a sense of what a prospect needs and how your company can help, you’re left with nothing more than a cold call. Gain some information on your prospect, however, and you’ll have a much easier time identifying and proposing solutions.
Here are four ways you can get better sales intelligence:
1. Start with a survey: during your lead generation efforts, be sure to include a survey that aligns with the types of clients you are looking to attract. A survey is a great way to get your prospect to self-disclose the information you need to bring the sales process to a successful conclusion.
How Continuous Marketing Widens Your Margins
November 3rd, 2010 - Posted in Solution Provider Services by Tim Freestone
Increasing your company’s revenue isn’t enough. Strong growth on the top line sometimes comes with heavy sales expenses, which erodes your profits, ultimately delivering little value for your efforts. Profitable growth on the other hand, is crucial to your ongoing success, and it can be quite difficult to attain. You can protect your margins (and even widen them) by streamlining your approach to marketing and generating revenue at a lower cost. By turning marketing into an ongoing activity, you can generate higher revenue and profits simultaneously.
Think about your last big client pursuit. Your sales team invested heavily in it. In addition to hard costs around travel, entertainment and demonstrations, the team spent a considerable amount of time on appointments, understanding pain points and developing a proposal. Your technology professionals, no doubt, contributed heavily to the effort, increasing your sales costs further. And, you had all those marketing costs up front just to get the lead. If you started from scratch, you probably invested a substantial amount in bringing that lead in the door.
