Archive for November, 2010

Get big by starting small (Identify Niches)

Thursday, November 11th, 2010

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.

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Marketing Automation is too complicated for Free

Wednesday, November 10th, 2010

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

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Real-Time Reaction

Tuesday, November 9th, 2010

Think about how much you forget while surfing the internet. When you are learning about something new or searching for something you are not quite sure exists yet, you may navigate a multitude of pages until you hone in on your desired content.

If all the while you are entering and leaving storefronts, valuable content and building blocks of knowledge, you will likely forget more than you remember.  The sheer amount of information becomes irrelevant.  Very few sites are designed to engage and follow up with you.  They stop at creating awareness rather than create a process for you to engage or be nurtured with. (more…)

WEBINAR: LoopFuse 101 for your Sales Team

Tuesday, November 9th, 2010

Thursday, November 11th, 2010 2:00PM EST

Join us for the next installment of our webinar series “Light the Fuse.” This series is intended to provide you, the LoopFuse user, valuable tips and tricks on how to use LoopFuse OneView to grow your business.

This webinar will focus on how sales team members can benefit from using LoopFuse. Tom Elrod, co-founder of LoopFuse, will walk you through the different features available as a sales user and how you can use them when following up on leads. He will give you tips along the way on how to use LoopFuse more effectively.

How will this help grow my business?

By getting both your sales and marketing teams involved with LoopFuse you can save time and resources sending information back and forth between the two departments. Visibility into your website traffic and visitors can be accessed by your sales team real-time with marketing dashboards. Individual sales representatives can set up alerts so they receive valuable information about their top prospects daily.

You will learn how to:

* Set up sales alerts so you can get real-time activity on your top prospects
* Utilize the marketing dashboards to view your target companies activity
* Implement the salesforce.com plug-in to view all your lead’s activity right in your CRM
* Use lead scores to manage which leads are the most qualified prospects

CLICK HERE to register.

Get Fused!

Taking Your Website to the Next Level: Setting a Website Strategy

Monday, November 8th, 2010

Building off of last week’s post, below is an excerpt from the Taking Your Website to the Next Level article on “Setting a Website Strategy”……

Start by carefully considering the goals for your website. Answer these two questions to help you set a strategy:

  • Who do I want to attract to the site?
  • What do I want them to do/learn when they get here?

Create a list of different visitor “types.” Be as exhaustive and specific as you can.

Consider a maker of vehicle fleet tracking technology. The company enables companies with mobile delivery, sales, or service people to know where the vehicles are, if they’re on schedule, if they’re safe, if they’re speeding, or if they’re following the most efficient routes, etc. Here’s how they might answer the questions above. (more…)

B2B Marketing: Where does the Funnel begin?

Thursday, November 4th, 2010

In a previous post I described how B2B Marketing professionals today view online marketing, employing the 4Cs: Campaign, Customer, Channel, and Customer. For this new content-driven strategy to function properly, a Marketing Automation system is essential, as it automates many of the labor-intensive tasks associated with deploying multi-channel campaigns and other outbound marketing tasks.

Since customers are able to find your content via different channels (twitter, google search, PPC ads, linkedin, youtube, etc…), it is paramount to include inbound marketing whenever we discuss the marketing and sales funnel:

inboundmarketingfunnel

Inbound Marketing and Marketing Automation Funnel

It should be made clear to everyone reading, that online B2B Marketing absolutely requires the marrying of inbound marketing and marketing automation data. A complete view of marketing campaigns is impossible without the ability to analyze customer-content interaction data. Making matters worse is the fact that disjointed systems lack the capability to inform marketers on what campaigns are producing the highest-value leads via different channels.

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Unto Death Do Us Part (Go, No-Go)

Wednesday, November 3rd, 2010

Or… at least until some critical thresholds have been exceeded (like leaving the seat up one too many times)!  Seriously though, opening a new market requires considerable time and energy and if you aren’t committed to getting yourself across the Dip, as Seth Godin defines, then your first steps are better laid in another direction.

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First and Only Marketing Automation Solution with Inbound Marketing

Wednesday, November 3rd, 2010

LoopFuse, the leader in sales and marketing automation for small and medium-sized businesses (SMB), announced today the release of OneView v3.28, featuring inbound, content and search engine marketing.  OneView, the best-of-breed marketing automation platform, is the first and only marketing automation solution to offer inbound marketing.  The addition of these latest features, also available in FreeView, greatly reduces the “swivel chair effect” by integrating all of the most cutting-edge marketing tools in a single, user-friendly application.

Read the Entire Press Release »

Taking Your Website to the Next Level: Branding Do’s and Don’ts

Tuesday, November 2nd, 2010

Last week, we added Taking Your Website to the Next Level to the Sales & Marketing Best Practices exchange.  Since there is a lot of very useful information in this article, I thought I would share some highlights.  Below is an excerpt from the article on “Branding Do’s and Don’ts”……

Your website will communicate information about you and the products or services you offer. Your “brand” is your company’s identity (company name, logo, slogan, etc.) and more importantly, the qualities people associate with it. Your website says a lot about your brand, and not just via the messaging on your site. The way your website looks and how people experience it say a lot about your brand and your company too. (more…)

One-To-One Connection

Tuesday, November 2nd, 2010

If your marketing is trying to “sell” me, I will pick it up easily and quickly.  We have all been trained to recognize marketing.  We have also been trained to put our guard up with suspicion.  After all, talking about how great you are only causes disconnection.  The new economy differentiates between mass marketing and authenticity.  Buyers choose authenticity.

If you want to do it the old way, then build a message for everyone and play the numbers game.  However, such a strategy loses before you even commit the time and costs to implement it. (more…)