November 29th, 2010 by Marcus Tewksbury
Interview with Scott Olson (President, Mindlink Marketing)
For many marketing organizations, the implementation of a marketing automation tool and methodology is going to represent a major departure from the status quo. With marketing automation there is a major focus shift to collecting and analyzing data. Segregating prospects, understanding where they fall in the buying process, or through which channels they prefer to interact all require the ability to apply data to marketing problems. Having the right mix of internal skill sets is critical to success with marketing automation.
In this episode we are joined by Scott Olson, the President of Mindlink marketing. Scott and team focus on helping organizations better leverage data and understanding of the customer’s buying process to craft content and stories that drive conversion.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: lead nurturing, Marketing Automation
Posted in Marketing Automation, Thought Leadership | 1 Comment »
November 23rd, 2010 by Don Dalrymple
The opportunity to hone in on your prospective buyer in a one-to-one approach versus a one-to-many traditional marketing campaign requires attention to Lead Scoring and tracking. Setting up your system to follow the Loopfuse buyer from initial landing site contact to engagement with your sales and value propositions requires attention to each of the predetermined steps which qualify a buyer for the sales funnel. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Lead Scoring, Thought Leadership | No Comments »
November 22nd, 2010 by Sean Dwyer
And finally, it’s very important to measure the performance of your website. Below is an excerpt from the article on “Analyzing Web Performance” from Taking Your Website to the Next Level, ……
Lastly, you’ll want to be sure you measure how well your website investment is paying off. It’s actually very easy to learn how many people are visiting your website, where they’re from, whether they registered, how they found your website, etc. This information is very helpful—it shows you how well your awareness generation programs are working (e.g. advertising, PR, etc.) so you can figure out which ones to keep investing in, or drop.
Setting web analytics is easy. Sign up for Google Analytics or LoopFuse FreeView (or both!) and follow the instructions they provide for adding their analytics to your site; it’s very easy to do, and here are some samples of what Google and LoopFuse can tell you about your website visitors:
Download a copy of Taking Your Website to the Next Level
Tags: Building a Great Website
Posted in Thought Leadership, Web Analytics | No Comments »
November 18th, 2010 by Marcus Tewksbury
On the surface, implementing a marketing automation tool appears fairly simple. The problem though, is in not knowing what you don’t know. Implementing a tool isn’t that hard, but getting it setup in a way, with the processes to match, to produce business value is another matter. This is not an effort you want to go alone. Like a tile floor, if it’s done wrong you have to rip and replace.
Someone that knows a thing or two about marketing automation, having installed and trained some of the earliest implementation of said tools is Don Dalrymple, President of AscendWorks. Beyond his deep knowledge of the inner workings of many marketing automation tools, Don is also extremely well versed in training marketing organizations to focus on the customer rather than the process.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: AscendWorks, Marketing Automation
Posted in Marketing, Marketing Automation, Thought Leadership | No Comments »
November 17th, 2010 by Don Dalrymple
Disparate systems can be a problem. The continuity of data which helps you understand your return on investment for marketing initiatives is easily broken. What is hard to manage becomes less motivating to use. Thus, the problem of piecemeal marketing presents itself in a world where it is completely possible to measure the lifecycle of a prospective customer from interest to doing business.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Loopfuse Success
Posted in Thought Leadership | No Comments »
November 17th, 2010 by Roy Russo
Web analytics data provides B2B Marketing executives a wealth of information regarding their outbound and inbound marketing initiatives. A critical and passively-collected component in a website visitor’s profile, is the distinct company or ISP used by a prospect while browsing your website. Visiting company information collected from site visitors provides marketers with indicators on just how broadly and deeply marketing efforts have penetrated a company. However, making that information actionable by marketing and sales alike is made easier with a consolidated marketing toolset, as found with most marketing automation software.
Visiting Company Analytics
Although much of the information collected by web analytics software is collected passively (by resolving IP addresses to a Company’s name), the enriching of that data with third-party business directories such as Hoovers, Jigsaw, and LinkedIn is where the value lies for marketing and sales.
The value of business directory data is lost if it is kept in a silo, because the data is only valuable when it is joined with other behavior data from a prospect which may be composed of web analytics, email marketing, and CRM information.
Now armed with a complete view of a prospect along with business directory information, an organization can:
- Target a visiting company with focused campaigns.
- Identify and contact key personnel and decision makers.
- Effectively segment a lead database, ie. company size, revenue amount, industry, etc…
Although much of the value contained within business directories is nothing new to marketers and sales reps, as you can see, the real value is in making it actionable. Making information actionable is only possible when you have a clear picture of a particular prospect or company within one database (or marketing dashboard), such as those found in marketing automation solutions. Subscribing to business directory services without a plan on how that information will be used in your marketing campaigns will rarely if ever show fruit. Likewise, services such as Leadlander, that simply track users and display company information remain an island of unactionable information and don’t solve the problem faced by marketers today: How do I leverage all of my different databases of information for my marketing strategies? The answer is in selecting a marketing automation vendor that focuses on aggregating of all the random bits of information for you, in one place, so you can leverage it in your marketing initiatives.
Tags: Demand Generation, Inbound Marketing, lead lander, leadlander, Marketing Automation, Website Analytics
Posted in Inbound Marketing, Lead Management, Marketing Automation, Web Analytics | No Comments »
November 16th, 2010 by Richard Murdock
Recently I was on a call with a customer who had signed up for FreeView but was looking to upgrade to one of our paid packages. They had used our marketing automation system but had a few questions just before making the switch. As we discussed some of the setup to get a clean database after the testing phase, the subject of using lead capture to retain prospects was brought up.
One of the team members said “Oh we’ll just use Web2Lead and then import the data back in to OneView”. That is when I reminded them that OneView offered the ability to create lead capture forms and that would enable the use of many other features such as list segmentation, scoring, lead nurturing, and email campaigns without the extra steps of having to import CSV lists back from Salesforce.
They had temporarily lost sight of the purpose of marketing automation software. The idea is that OneView sits between your website and Salesforce, gathering data and helping you automate the process of capturing, nurturing, and qualifying leads before they are fed into your CRM where your sales team can take further action.
Once our conversation was over, the customers had realized exactly how they could leverage OneView to help with their marketing automation efforts and streamline their processes.
Tags: Freemium, instrumentation, lead capture forms, Marketing Automation, Salesforce.com Integration
Posted in Lead Generation, Marketing Automation | 1 Comment »
November 12th, 2010 by Sean Dwyer
Continuing with tips on Taking Your Website to the Next Level, below is an excerpt from the article on “Getting your Website Built”……
It’s common for medium to large-sized companies to spend anywhere from $20,000 to $500,000 on a website design and development effort. These projects often involve specialized web and creative marketing consulting firms that perform the analysis described above and then design and build a site to fit the need.
Here is a high-level outline of the website development process that the big firms follow, with tips on how to do it for less. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Building a Great Website
Posted in Thought Leadership | No Comments »
November 11th, 2010 by Marcus Tewksbury
To get big you’ve got to start small. In business, as in many places in life the old adage rings true. When you are first getting started you need to figure out how to successfully solve problems. Take on too much, or problems too large and you may not have a runway long enough to discover the right formula.
This becomes a central key to messaging. Within your target market you want to start identifying niches where you can isolate common needs. The smaller the audience, the more likely you are to find a relevant point of view. Geography? Company size? You don’t need to get too cute, or overly complicated here just look for some obvious ways to segment your audience. Begin with the understanding you will need to iterate your groupings to come up with the right formula.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Customer Acquisition
Posted in Marketing, Thought Leadership | No Comments »
November 10th, 2010 by Tom Elrod
In the past few months there has been a great deal of industry discussions related to whether Free Marketing Automation is a good thing. Many of the enterprise vendors in the space claim that Marketing Automation is too complicated to leave novices on their own to figure it out. I couldn’t agree more, but not for the reasons they spread.
LoopFuse simplifies Marketing Automation
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Freemium, FreeView, Marketing Automation
Posted in Freemium, Marketing Automation | No Comments »
