Topseoscom Declares Boostability as the Second Top Search Engine Marketing … | Barry's 54 News.
How to Torpedo a Competitor. When you're selling to businesses, it's very common to find customers who are already talking with your competitors. That's bad news for you, because your competitor probably has the "inside track" just because they got there first. If you're going to compete for that customer, you'll need to adapt your message and sales approach so that it gradually "locks out" the competitor.
To do this, you'll first need to diagnose exactly where your competition stands, according to Linda Richardson author of the New York Times best seller Perfect Selling and founder of the sales training firm Richardson. As part of your conversations with the customer, obtain answers to the following questions: Who have you already met with? Have they sold anything to you so far? What value did they provide? Once you've gotten the answers, you can begin building an action plan. By the way, if your customer contact isn't willing to answer these questions, you've probably already lost the sale. 11 Words You Should Never Use in Sales or Marketing. Strategic Marketing of Managing Expectations. “Happiness is in expectations management.” Let’s try to apply this wisdom to Product Marketing and Marketing Strategy.
For example, your company expects a product to generate specific and positive cash flow over a period of its life, and your customers expect the product to reliably perform functions you have promised them in your marketing communications. I would like to pose that pro-active management of your customers expectations will dramatically improve the probability of your product’s success.
It is important to take a look at the entire cycle of creation and management of expectations process: Pre-Announcement Speculation Stage- Think about rumors and speculations about the “next” version or release that start to appear out of nowhere soon after a new product is launched. We have seen the most powerful results achieved and the most attractive ROI, when marketing used the feedback analysis results to: This is a guest post by Gregory Yankelovich Guest Post.
Four Steps for Starting the Lead Management Process | Marketing Action Blog - Act-On. In a recent webinar titled “The Blueprint for Turning Prospects into Customers” Carlos Hidalgo, CEO of Annuitas Group and Craig Rosenberg, author of the blog, Funnelholic discussed lead management and how it relates to demand generation. Carlos began by defining “lead management” as the answer to the question, “I generated a lead or inquiry…now what?” He also noted that “lead generation” usually means: Someone leaves their name or gives contact info to marketing, and marketing passes that to sales to follow-up. That really isn’t a lead at all; it’s an inquiry, and it makes up 70–80 % of the results of lead generation. All organizations, and particularly small or mid-market businesses, have to be efficient. Your salespeople have to be working on prospects that are ready to buy; they don’t have time to qualify inquiries.
The way to ensure that the right people pay the right kind of attention to the right contacts is to use lead management. Starting the Lead Management Process. The Steps You Need to Define the Stages of Your Sales & Marketing Funnel. By now, most marketers understand the importance of mending the traditional rift between sales and marketing. The mistrust and miscommunication that’s so often found between the two teams can act like an anchor on your company’s growth rate.
In fact, organizations with good alignment between sales and marketing teams achieved 20% annual revenue growth in 2010, according to a study by the Aberdeen Group. By contrast, companies with poor alignment saw revenues decline by 4%. Often, one of the biggest blockers for sales and marketing alignment is the very different views each team has of the funnel. For example, they might disagree about the number of stages a lead passes through before becoming a customer. Furthermore, they often use different terminology to describe those stages. But in order to adopt an effective SMarketing (get it?) But that's just our funnel ... what does yours look like? Step 1: Understand Lead Quality Focus on the definition of a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL). Marketing. How to Build Third-Party Credibility for Your Content. The Ultimate Guide to Marketing with Infographics (with PDF) Guess what folks, today is going to be all about showing you how to market using infographics, by using infographics to show you how.
Fun! Infographics are awesome. Why? A couple of reasons. The thing is, many marketers don’t know how to get the best out of infographics and reap the benefits available. Over the next 5 days we’ll be doing an infographic deep dive. Day One: Today we’ll learn 12 ways to market an infographic including; Building your own Create content that people actually wantInfographic researchIf you find data, add it – otherwise just make something epicInfographic Design & Data VisualizationAdd an embed code to let others re-post itMaking your Infographic go ViralUsing your networkBorrowing one from someone else Finding InfographicsAdding valueWhat’s the proper etiquette for re-using others work?
Download the 12-step guide as a PDF If you like it, please share on Twitter of Facebook as a thank you – hope you enjoy.The Ultimate Guide to Marketing with Infographics (pdf) 1. - StumbleUpon. In our “Ultimate Guide to Marketing With Infographics” we covered all the ways you can leverage them to extend their reach (rather than letting them simply appear once in a blog post and fade away). It covered: Creation vs. curationResearching data sourcesEmbed codes for easy sharingVirality using social recycling via a landing pageMaking them Pinnable with PinterestA PDF and much more… Today we’ll dig into the stats behind why infographics are so effective as a marketing tool.
As you’ll notice from the graphic above, people are searching for infographics like crazy! An 800% increase in searches on Google in just the last two years. And if you read on, you’ll see a lot of crazy stats about how the human brain and our eyes perceive imagery and the affect it has on how we interact with content. Oh, and there are some nice tweetable stats taken from the infographic at the end of the post, ready and waiting for you (you’ll be able to change what they say before tweeting them too). – Oli Gardner.
This isn’t Your Dad’s Marketing… Value is Becoming the New Black – Chapter 2. [Over the coming weeks I'll be sharing excerpts as we work towards completing the manuscript for 'What's Your Purple Goldfish? '. Yesterday was Chapter 1 and today is a glimpse at Chapter 2] DEAL is no longer a bad four letter word. It’s a badge. Value is now the new black. Consumers are expecting more value. Brand Keys analyzed the likely consumer values, needs and expectations and offered the following trends: Value is the new black: Consumer spending, even on sale items, will continue to be replaced by a reason-to-buy at all. Price is relative to the value received.
“Today’s consumer expectations are clear. Here are three truisms for the future of marketing: 1. 2. 3. Using Pareto’s Law to Flip Traditional Marketing Vilfredo Federico Damaso Pareto was an Italian economist that made a famous observation in 1906. . “20% of the population in Italy owns 80% of the property” Stew Leonard’s is a retailer that always understood the Pareto Principle. Enter the Phelps 80/20 Corollary 1. 5 Tips for Managing Your Company's Brand on the Web. This series is supported by IGLOO, a leader in helping organizations improve business processes, increase employee productivity and enhance stakeholder engagement inside and outside the organization using social technologies.
Brand management in the current era means not just keeping an ever-present eye on the social web, but also engaging in meaningful ways with brand advocates and detractors. Professionals in the field have come to accept social media as crucial to their jobs, but most know that managing a company's brand on the web is so much more than setting up shop on social sites like Twitter and Facebook. Here we'll give you an inside look at the strategies of avant garde industry leaders who've spent years figuring out how to move beyond social media hype and implement practical management practices into their daily work routines.
Brad Nelson, Jeremy Thum, Joel Price, Joel Frey and Bowen Payson are all marketers behind big brand names. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Series supported by IGLOO. 6 Challenges to Managing a Brand on the Social Web. This series is supported by IGLOO, a leader in helping organizations improve business processes, increase employee productivity and enhance stakeholder engagement inside and outside the organization using social technologies. As more companies and PR firms attempt to manage their brands using social media, there are just as many opportunities for greatness as there are pitfalls. To broaden our collective understanding of these challenges, we consulted six social media pros with extensive experience in PR, branding and marketing. Each one has gained respect in their respective spheres of work; and each one of them told us about a unique challenge and how to address it. From being transparent to being profitable, from the tools you use today to the ones you'll need tomorrow, here are six specific challenges to managing your brand on the social web.
If you've got your own insights to share, please let us know about them in the comments. 1. 2. 3. We love Laura "@Pistachio" Fitton. 4. 5. 6. How Groupon Funders Find Their Next Investment: "Office Hours" Every week, the guys who funded the daily-deals powerhouse Groupon toss out a lottery ticket of sorts and let six completely unvetted entrepreneurs come in and pitch them. They’re calling it “Office Hours,” and while they’re hoping it will help them find the next big thing, they also believe it will simply play a role in juicing up the entrepreneurial community in their home base of Chicago, which, they say, will produce long-term benefits of its own. Lightbank is the $100 million fund created last year by Groupon investors (and now paper billionaires) Eric Lefkovsky and Brad Keywell.
It started holding Office Hours back in May--the brainchild of their third partner, Paul Lee, who recently joined the firm after having spearheaded digital ventures at Playboy Enterprises and the NBC Universal/GE Capital Peacock Equity Fund. “When I did startups, I remember thinking that unless you knew the right people, it’s really hard to get an audience,” Lee tells Fast Company.
Twitter for Brands: 6 Winning Strategies to Learn From. Megan Berry is marketing manager for Klout, the standard for online influence. She also blogs at The Huffington Post and Brazen Careerist. You can follow her on Twitter at @meganberry. Twitter can sometimes create a dilemma for brands. It’s a medium that focuses on people, so how should brand accounts work? Should you let your users know who is the voice behind your brand? 1. Scott Monty is head of social media for Ford Motor Company and, for many, the face and personality of Ford on Twitter. Monty points out that one of the biggest challenges to this approach is finding a representative that will be the right fit. Best for: Companies that have a strong social media lead who is committed to the company and who fits well with the brand image 2. “We want Twitter to be more personalized," says Corina Craig, one of Zappos's tweeters. Best for: Companies that need to provide service 24/7. 3. “The 'Virgin Voice' is casual, cheeky and irreverent, and so are we," she says. 4. 5. 6.
Conclusion. 10 Tips for Aspiring Digital Marketers. Digital marketing budgets are expected to increase steadily during the next few years, according to Datran Media's Annual Marketing & Media Survey, which reaches out to more than 5,000 marketing executives from Fortune 500 brands, top publishers, and leading advertising and media agencies. This is good news for those of you hoping to break into the digital marketing industry. Whether you're passionate about search, affiliate, social media, or another area of marketing, there are a few things you can do to prove your worthiness to prospective employers. We asked five industry insiders about their top tips for aspiring digital marketers. Find their suggestions below and add your own in the comments. 1. Get Hands-On Marketing Experience A degree in marketing or communications can take you a distance, but most employers are looking for candidates with marketing experience, whether that's from a previous job, internship or side project. 2. 3. 4.
There isn't just one career path in marketing. 5 Tips for Aspiring Social Media Marketers. Within the past few years, it seems that social media positions are popping up everywhere, in all types of organizations, from The New York Times, to Pizza Hut, and even in the White House. Businesses of all types are identifying the need to stay connected with their communities because they recognize the benefits. Social media marketing is just a slice of the social media industry, but it's a very important piece of the story.
Businesses see social media as a platform for engaging with consumers and informing them of the latest company news and products. Marketers are blazing trails in the social media marketing sector, creating campaigns that are interactive, shareable and inclusive of the online community. For the most innovative of marketers, the focus isn't on campaigns, but on letting consumers take the reigns in guiding a brand's social presence. For aspiring social media marketers, there are no strict rules for becoming successful. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Social Media Job Listings. 7 Twitter Marketing Campaigns to Learn From. While marketing activities on Twitter are often described by silly, Twitterized words — like tweetathon, twontest and tweetchat — these types of campaigns have proven successful for marketers and brands of all sizes.
There are a number of winning Twitter strategies used by top brands, but those same companies tend to mix up the types of individual marketing campaigns they run on Twitter, whether paid or organic. Here are seven successful Twitter marketing campaigns from American Airlines, Network Solutions, UNICEF India, IBM, USA for UNHCR, McDonald's Canada and appbackr.
Read about their successes below and share your brand's Twitter campaign victories in the comments. 1. American Airlines: Celebrate Successes with a Hashtag In celebration of the 30th anniversary of its AAdvantage loyalty program, American Airlines ran a Twitter contest called "Tweet to Win 30K Miles. " "Given a valuable enough incentive, users will complete several registration steps for entry. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. Modern Day Marketing on Twitter. In the modern economy, marketing makes or breaks a business. Luckily for the modern business, social networking has so developed that a business can easily take advantage of widespread marketing opportunities without any cost at all. What in previous eras would have been a significant piece of the budgeting puzzle is now an easy source of visibility for savvy businesses. Twitter is the massive online social networking tool invented in 2006 and now drawing over two hundred million users and growing.
It allows the user to communicate a brief idea or concept in 140 characters or less. For individual users, it's a good way to keep in touch with friends and associates. But for businesses, it's a sleek and efficient way of staying in touch with a customer base. Here are five ways to maximize your use of Twitter and best advance your business. 1. 2. 4. 5. Using Twitter as an integrated part of a marketing strategy is pragmatic, cost-effective, makes sense, and fun! [INFOGRAPHIC] 7 Types of Content Marketing Customers Actively Seek. Marketing. Personal Branding. Social Media Marketing. Copyright free images, sounds & music. 5 Easy Ways to Close a Deal. Great Customer Service is Not Grumpy, Grouchy or Gross – Greg Smith « mick's leadership blog.
12 Most Stupendous Ways to ROCK Customer Service | All the facts about product placement. Are You The Best in The World? Personal Branding Resources. What’s your definition of marketing? How to Market Your Business through Social Media | 3 Ways To Beat SEO Competition That Doesn’t Use Keywords. Create a Recipe for Success With Your Sales and Marketing |