Category: B2B

Lead nurturing is SO important to B2B success. This is a great article == > Lead lifecycle in B2B marketing refers to how we manage the life of a lead from the moment it shows up in your CRM system to when the deal closes. The lead lifecycle defines where a lead can live, how a lead moves along, and what we do with a lead at each stage. Companies typically use a lead lifecycle model for two primary reasons: 1) Preventing sales leads (and potential sales leads) from falling through the cracks  2) Reporting on conversion rates through each stage so ...

I love Ben Affleck's first scene in the movie "Boiler Room." I always felt that the quote above perfectly relates to companies and press coverage. The ones who don’t get coverage will quickly dismiss it as useless and a waste of time and money to pursue, while the ones who regularly get coverage just smile and hope that you keep thinking that way. Over the last 12 years, I have been featured in hundreds of major newspapers, magazines, websites and blogs (everything ranging from the NY Times, USA Today and CNN to TechCrunch, Entrepreneur and so on), and ...

Ten recent infographics on B2B marketing and related issues, including B2B leading nurturing, LinkedIn for B2b marketrs, B2B Social Media marketing, QR Mobile Codes, funnel optimisation, marketing automation, and B2B social media landscape.

Techvibes has been tracking Kryos Velocity for a couple of years, and it's always great to see a company that is continuously inventing itself as it's success grows. Here's the Techvibes post from last July on the launch of their Android version.

The Velocity 2 release adds HTML5 to the Android and Blackberry versions; it also runs on tablets such as the new PlayBook 2.0 and iPad. There's a lot more to the Velocity 2 launch. A full version of the press release can be found on the Seattle Post Intelligencer.

Let’s talk about Outlook. Microsoft’s venerable email client has a pretty steady grip on the email inboxes of Americans, probably due in no small part to Microsoft’s prevalence in the enterprise sector (and, being bundled with MS Office). If your subscribers sit in an office cubicle in the U.S., they’re very likely to use it. Considering it’s been around at least since 1997, Microsoft has had plenty of time to improve its product, and by most measures has done so. However, HTML rendering in Outlook stinks.

Welcome to Part 2 of our 12 Steps to Becoming a Natural at SEO. In Part 1, I covered the basics of SEO such as the difference between SEO and PPC, writing title and meta tags, structuring your URLs and...

The trend for the last 3 or 4 years has been for businesses to try to tap into social media as a broadcasting tool. It's not universal, but many (most) see social media as a place to post their messages to prospective clients in hopes of switching on the social media faucet that touches a billion people worldwide. The promise of social media for businesses, particularly local ones, has only been seen by a small percantage.

This is a story about using Customer Loyalty research to create lasting and believable marketing benefit messages. I recently had the pleasure of refreshing the brand and marketing statements of one of my clients, Jazzit (http://www.jazzit.pro), a software company that creates financial statement and reporting templates for accountants. Their software is amazing with extremely happy customers, but their messaging was lagging behind in terms of telling their great story. In particular, and something that is typical in many B2B SME technology firms -- they had the problem of empty and unfocused marketing benefit statements.  What are "empty and ...

by Brooke Howell on February 7, 2012 in Social Media, Understanding Your Audience This guest post is by Brooke Howell, SmartBrief’s small business editor. Follow her on Twitter at @SBStartup, and sign up for SmartBrief on Small Business for more great news and advice to help build your small business. You put a lot of effort into writing each of your blog posts. Then you Tweet it and put it up on Facebook, LinkedIn and your other social networks, only to find no once clicks through.

Email Summit 2012 has centered around two themes: understanding the customer mindset, and creating content that speaks to customers’ mindset. Rebekah Henson, AWeber, breaks down the Summit’s key takeaways surround these two themes from the SMB perspective. “The customer is king.” That’s been the overarching theme of Email Summit 2012. From the first words of Dr. Flint McGlaughlin’s keynote on day one, promising not to teach us new things but instead to teach us to see things differently, the focus of this year’s Summit has been all about valuing your customers.

More than three-quarters (77%) of social media users say websites should offer social login--i.e., using a social media identity to log in at a website--as an alternative to traditional account creation or logging in as a guest, up from the 66% who said so a year earlier, according to a ... Read the full article at MarketingProfs

At my first job out of business school, I was tasked with implementing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for the website of the company where I worked. First, as green as I was, I knew this was a big deal and was shocked at the fact that it hadn't been undertaken yet. I mean, in a day and age where people don't even bother typing in URLs anymore and just go straight to Google or Bing, what's the point of having the best product/service in the world if no one will be able to find it?

Tips for hiring an inbound marketing manager or social media manager. Including sample job description. As you may have noticed, some new faces have joined the marketing team here at Marketo to help improve our online engagement and grow demand from inbound marketing sources. Why? Because we believe that to continue our fast growth we need to scale both paid programs as well as inbound programs including SEO, Social Media, and Content Marketing.

Your success with the social web greatly depends on having a solid understanding of social media fundamentals. Here's your social media cheat sheet infographic explaining Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Google+, Tumblr, and Digg

I recently attended the webinar How to Master B2B Social Media Marketing with @KippBodnar and @JeffreyLCohen from Hubspot. Lots of great thought provoking information shared, including their “10-4-1” rule for social media posts in a B2B environment. This rule describes the number of times a business should promote their own content on social media platforms, in relationship to the number used from other sources.  »10 Links to third-party articles  »4 Links to company blog posts   »1 Link to a landing page This 10-4-1 rule was only a tiny portion of the webinar -- Kipp and Jeffrey covered lots of other valuable ...