Category: Outbound 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 ...

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 ...

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.” 

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.

I had the special treat of going with my niece and her 9 lady entourage to a local Wedding trade show. Needless to say, between the tiny tastes of chocolate and the runway models, I had some time on my hands -- so I got to thinking about the trade show industry, and how mobile technology is surely, and slowly, creeping into the sales process. It can be a missed opportunity. My guess was that 99% of the brides and grooms had smartphones, yet less than 10% of the booths sported a mobile QR code! For those that didn't have ...

As compared to Facebook and Google PPC, LinkedIn provides much better ad targeting for B2B companies. LinkedIn has proven to be a fruitful lead source for thousands of companies. So fruitful in fact, its paid advertising program has helped grow the company’s revenue in 2011 at a faster rate than Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Google and Microsoft. Why are marketers flocking to LinkedIn paid advertising? They are using LinkedIn pay per click (PPC) because it simply works.

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 ...

Learn the 17 R's of Mobile Marketing from this infographic so you can deploy stellar mobile marketing campaigns. Do you know what the top three Google searches are for mobile marketing? The first is “mobile marketing,” and the second is “mobile media.” But the third most popular Google search about mobile marketing is “What is mobile marketing?” Data like that suggests that businesspeople are still trying to wrap their heads around this growing and evolving industry. If people are still asking what mobile marketing is, then they’re probably also struggling with how to use it to drive leads ...

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.

An detailed timeline infographic featuring the history of marketing from 1450 to 2012. Ever since people have had something to sell, we’ve been marketing. But the effectiveness of those marketing methods have waxed and waned over thousands of years, and as consumers and their technologies advanced at a more and more rapid pace, marketers have had to change their game.

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.

How small business should use email marketing for sales success, not failure. If you are, a small business that sells to other businesses, forget about using email for mass-market marketing. The first thing that small business needs to know about email marketing is not to blast thousands of emails to people who do not know you or your company. Online email marketing blasts are the equivalent of mass-market direct marketing offline. Direct mail or mass-market emailing works for businesses that sell to consumer, not small business B2B companies. The most effective way for any small business that sells consultative products ...

Only have a few employees and sell B2B, then lead nurturing could be vital to your success. Maximizing the returns on your lead nurturing marketing boosts profits and helps you grow. Small business lead nurturing is one way to generate B2B sales leads that do not cost a lot or require a marketing department to deploy. Simply follow these best practices for lead nurturing and see your profits grow. 1. Add Value Gleanster Research found that 25-50% of sales go to the vendor that responds first The goal of successful lead nurturing is to help potential sales prospects gain increased ...