Category: Inbound Marketing

In a previous post, I described the SaaS Sales Funnel where marketers can help customers emerge from the murky ooze of the world wide web and drive towards paying for products and services. Now, let's apply customer loyalty measurements to creating accelerated and sustained revenue growth. There are three ways a company can make money: 1) Getting existing customers to buy from you again -- in SaaS pricing models, this is typically on a recurring monthly basis. 2) Getting new customers. 3) Getting existing customers to buy more things from you -- in SaaS, this means enticing customers into the next ...

A new report from Michael Stelzner and his team at Social Media Examiner reveals that social media adoption by marketers is growing steadily, but that we still have room to do more and have plenty of questions when it comes to measuring effectiveness. The 2012 Social Media Marketing Report found that and much more after surveying over 3,800 marketers from both the B2B and B2C worlds and from companies of all sizes. You can find the full report here, but I'll share my key takeaways.

Visual communication is one of the least frequently explored areas within the content world, possibly because it’s so easy to lump in with UI design, aka Not Our Problem. But many forms of visual communication clearly are content, part of the muscle of a website or other project. In the hands of a skillful communicator, visual content conveys information and ideas with extraordinary efficiency. In the content world, we pay lip service to non-textual content—and we do work with photographs, screenshots, and video—but how often do most of us get to employ custom illustration, diagrams, illustrative animation ...

Here's ten quick ideas on how to sprice up your blogging and other such content. People love images! Due to the popularity of visually appealing platforms, businesses need to heed the growing demand for visual content. Let this infodoodle inspire you to think visually.

With customer service and experience industries undergoing rapid change, here are 20 interesting customer service and customer experience statistics to keep in mind as we head into a new era of Big Data and understanding customers.

Everything we do in a company is about selling. We all know that, right? ABC. "Always Be Closing," is the infamous sales motivation line from Alec Baldwin's character in the movie "Glengarry Glenross." I’ve been spending a lot of time with Go-To-Market strategies, campaigns and launches with my Stephdokin clients and other companies I pal around with -- I’ve been thinking about the journey of building awareness for your product and brand all the way to a happy customer giving you money on a frequent basis. I present to you … The “Stephdokin SaaS Sales Funnel-On-A-Page.” 

Do you have a full understanding of what social media marketing does for your business? MarketingProfs blogger Jason Falls says companies today don't---despite all the analytics. We blog, we tweet, we post. Our measurement systems tell us how many people read, click, and retweet. If we’re smart, we can tell how many people are seeing our messages and how many people are responding to them in some relevant way. We know how many people clicked through and downloaded whitepapers. We know how many people may have clicked through and purchased something we sell online. But for all the ...

We've seen too many high-profile calamities of websites going down in a major way—whether Target's, Ann Taylor's, Twitter's, or Facebook's. It's painful to watch, and certainly it must be far more painful to experience from the inside. And, of course, such intermittent events aren't limited to retailers or big names, which are merely the ones that get the most press. Lost revenues and tarnished corporate and personal images don't discriminate by industry sector or company size. Online disasters can happen to anyone. And the last thing any of us wants or ...

In the dark and ancient days of digital yellow highlighters and outrageous claims, a cry rang out over the mountains -- a cry for sanity, integrity, and beauty in the building of landing pages. There came forth from the mountain 10 commandments to guide a certain tribe of Internet publishers in all their conversion endeavors. The landing page would no longer be a desert of confusion and bad taste.

CEOs of today’s B2B organizations are becoming laser-focused on profit, execution of strategy, and top-line revenue growth, and they expect every department in the organization to be aligned with these key goals. For many, the area that gives them the most heartburn–based on budget and non-goal alignment–is marketing. For CMOs, this could mean...

Google Spreadsheets is an excellent tool for campaign tracking, reporting, automating, and aggregating complex SEO and social media tasks. Learn invaluable tips for using Google Spreadsheets more effectively. I've been using Google Spreadsheets for ages... for campaign tracking, reporting, automating, and aggregating some of the most complex search engine optimization (SEO) and social media tasks. In this article, I'll share the three most useful, yet easy-to-implement, Google spreadsheet tips any online marketer would find useful.

Predictive modeling is a process by which a statistical model is chosen to best predict the probability of an outcome. The use of predictive modeling was illustrated in the excellent movie, Moneyball, in which Billy Beane, the manager of the Oakland Athletics used predictive modeling to select the players for his team. When executives make decisions about how to improve customer loyalty, they rely on many sources of information, including personal knowledge, past experiences of similar situations and even predictive models of expected performance.

2012 State of Inbound Marketing. Businesses that use primarily inbound marketing strategies for lead acquisition consistently report lower cost-per-lead (CPL) rates than those using outbound-centric strategies. Among companies with outbound marketing-dominated strategies—those that spend more than 50% of their lead-generation budgets on outbound marketing channels—the average CPL was $346 as of January 2012. By contrast, among inbound-centric companies (those spending over 50% of their lead-generation budget on inbound marketing) the average CPL was $135—61% less than the CPL of outbound-dominated businesses.

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.

MarketingProfs guest blogger Ted Nelson of Mechanica shares insights from his company and Fast Company's in-depth survey of nearly 700 marketers for its Branding Forward Project. It has been said that marketing is one of the few corporate disciplines that regularly confronts unsolicited opinions from every other department. This can make working on the marketing frontlines, actively bobbing and weaving through regular cycles of technology and consumer disruption, either an incredibly exciting endeavor or a very dangerous one. To help marketers enjoy more of the excitement and less of the danger, Mechanica recently partnered with Fast Company to create ...