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.
Marketing Maturity: You’re Off to a Good Start
December 13th, 2010 - Posted in Strategy by Tim Freestone
B2B marketing operations may be more mature than you think.
It’s easy to look in the mirror and get frustrated. After all, you have to balance your commitment to marketing against your core business operations (such as sales and services fulfillment), and it always feels like you’re leaving a marketing opportunity on the table. I’ve spoken with many IT solution provider marketers over the past few years, and I’m rarely surprised to hear sentences that start with, “I’d like to …” and have “but” somewhere in there.
B2B Marketing Investment Shift: Social Media and Websites
November 8th, 2010 - Posted in Strategy by Tim Freestone
B2B marketers are spending more money on being found, according to the latest survey by MarketingSherpa. Some inbound tactics are attracting greater investment than others, though, and the bias is definitely toward web-based channels.
October 27th, 2010 - Posted in Social Media Marketing by Tom Johansmeyer
The use of social media to market a company is usually linked to brand initiatives first, despite obvious application for lead generation and cultivation. It makes sense, though. The brand propagation uses of social media are straightforward and can be incredibly powerful.
The latest research from MarketingSherpa shows that the three most effective uses of social media are: influence brand reputation, increase brand awareness and improve search engine rankings, with respondents saying they’re “very effective” coming in at 39 percent, 37 percent and 38 percent, respectively. Respondents indicating that social media is “somewhat effective” for achieving these branding goals are 53 percent, 54 percent and 49 percent, respectively.
Marketing-to-Sales Handoff: What Are You Missing?
October 20th, 2010 - Posted in Strategy by Tim Freestone
How the handoff from marketing to sales occurs can make a difference in deal size … not to mention whether the sales force can close at all. Yet, the process doesn’t always work as seamlessly as it should. There are sales team needs that aren’t always communicated to the marketing department, and the marketing department often has access to information that it can’t effectively provide to the sales team. The result, of course, is a missed opportunity for revenue growth.
October 18th, 2010 - Posted in Social Media Marketing by Tom Johansmeyer
What are the IT marketing challenges that keep you up at night? Well, if you’re anything like other marketers in the broader B2B space, it’s generating high-quality leads – which has become more important year-over-year.
The latest survey results from MarketingSherpa reveal that 78 percent of respondents saw this as a challenge in 2010, up from 69 percent last year. A distant second was “generating a high volume of leads,” up from 35 percent last year to 44 percent this year. Concerns about marketing to a lengthening sales cycle increased slightly, from 39 percent of respondents to 41 percent of respondents.
How Are You Using Social Media for Marketing?
September 22nd, 2010 - Posted in Social Media Marketing by Tim Freestone
Most marketers are still using social media tools for in-platform branding, which translates to lost opportunity. According to the latest survey by MarketingSherpa, 78 percent of respondents are participating on company branded or managed social networks, such as Facebook or LinkedIn, with another 63 percent using microblogging tools (e.g., Twitter). Content sharing, blogging and social media news releases also receive a considerable amount of attention, at 63 percent, 59 percent and 48 percent of respondents, respectively.
Marketing Outsourcing on the Rise
September 8th, 2010 - Posted in Manufacturer Services, Solution Provider Services, Strategy by Tim Freestone
What marketing functions are you outsourcing?
The latest data from MarketingSherpa suggests that many companies are planning to outsource more of their marketing functions. Even with much of marketing’s capabilities remaining in-house, the advantages of outsourcing — for scale or capabilities — are starting to be noticed.
