5 Ways to Improve B2B SEO Conversion Rates & Benchmarking Data. In late October MarketingSherpa published a chart from their 2012 Website Optimization Benchmark Report, highlighting average conversion rates broken down by industry.
B2B search marketers certainly obsess about conversion metrics and this chart does well to provide broad expectation for success, from an industry perspective. That said, the associated article does a good job identifying important considerations in addition to just benchmark information. What's the Most Powerful Use of Big Data for Lead Generation Marketing in 2013? Thad Kahlow | January 2, 2013 | 0 Comments inShare99 As digital marketing techniques and technologies have evolved, front-end metrics from web analytics tools often fall short in delivering enough high-value insight to drive business decisions.
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. Sales - Who Is Your Ideal Customer? Three Simple Ways to Find Your Target Market. Determining your target market and acquiring accurate data on your sales prospects may be the most important first steps in developing and managing your long-term sales and marketing strategy, but they are also steps worth repeating to ensure your success.
Salespeople must continually evaluate and determine whether those initial assessments were, well, on target. Unfortunately, the old adage that "a product sells itself" is nothing more than a sales and marketing myth. Products sell in large part because of the due diligence that is completed before the first sales call is made. That means taking the necessary time to create your "ideal customer" profile and then securing a high-end database of prospects and companies that match that profile. My company, AG Salesworks, took such a course of action two years ago as part of its long-term sales strategy.
Lead Generation: Trends in 2012 marketing budgets. According to the MarketingSherpa 2012 Lead Generation Benchmark Report (free excerpt at that link), 71% of survey respondents indicated that generating high-quality leads was a top challenge.
So, in today’s blog post, let’s look at lead generation budget trends (hint: money is moving to online tactics) and provide some resources to help you make wise use of that budget. To help you get the most effective use of your budget, here are several case studies and how-to articles for some of the tactics mentioned in the above chart. Website optimization Lead Generation Optimization: Finding the right amount of friction. Five 'no regrets' moves for superior customer engagement - McKinsey Quarterly - Marketing & Sales - Strategy. No organization can avoid coming to grips with the rapidly evolving behavior of consumers and business customers.
They check prices at a keystroke and are increasingly selective about which brands share their lives. They form impressions from every encounter and post withering online reviews. As we noted in a McKinsey Quarterly article last year, these changes present significant organizational challenges, as well as opportunities. The biggest is that all of us have become marketers: the critical moments of interaction, or touch points, between companies and customers are increasingly spread across different parts of the organization, so customer engagement is now everyone’s responsibility. 8 Steps to Designing a Reactivation Campaign. Jack Aaronson | July 6, 2012 | 2 Comments inShare6 With reactivation marketing, you need to understand how long people have been gone, why they left, what's different in your offerings now, and what incentive they might need to come back.
While there are many ways to run a reactivation campaign, the following steps will set you on a pretty good path should you decide to launch one. 30 Thought-Provoking Lead Nurturing Stats You Can't Ignore. We've got some news for you, inbound marketers, and it might come as quite a shock: your job doesn't necessarily stop at lead generation (GASP!).
5 Integrations That Will Amplify the Power of Your Lead Nurturing. To increase the effectiveness and power of your lead nurturing campaigns, there's no question about it: you need to integrate them with other aspects of your marketing.
In fact, it’s actually impossible to run effective lead nurturing campaigns in isolation. They are so closely tied to landing pages, analytics, social media, etc., that you really need to view all these elements as part of an interdependent ecosystem. So how can you ensure your lead nurturing is fully integrated with the rest of your marketing efforts? In this blog post, we'll explore some ways in which lead nurturing relies on and impacts other marketing elements, and exactly how you can take advantage of these optimization opportunities. 1. Lead nurturing is all about pushing existing prospects through the sales funnel. Next Steps. Developing personas for marketing strategy. Personas are an extremely valuable tool for marketers in any field.
If you're not familiar with the term, personas are representations of your target audience based on research and interviews. From PR to digital to advertising, any marketing team or agency can benefit from developing client- and/or brand-specific personas. As an example, let's say one of your target audience types is a 18-21 year old male who likes emo music, skateboarding and high-end electronics. 7 Clever Email Campaigns That Get Customers Buying Again. If you have a great product, customers will probably want to buy from you again. But that doesn't mean they'll always remember to. People are busy; no matter how much they love you, sometimes it's just hard to keep in touch, you know? Which is why email remarketing campaigns are great ideas for those who have purchased (or almost purchased) from you in the past! Marketing Research in Action: 65% of B2B marketers are not nurturing. So I’ve got this old friend from college.
At first, we had fun. Now I only hear from when he needs something. Then after I help him out … he disappears again. General Management - Marketing Automation: Five Must-Do's for Achieving Maximum Efficiency. As marketers continue to face loftier goals while still down a player or two, many of them have turned to marketing automation (MA) as a way to accomplish more with less. MA software, which streamlines and automates marketing activities, has been a focus of many marketers for some time. Using a single system, marketers are able to manage prospect and customer databases, track individual activity, and personalize their messaging. In most cases, a series of impressions precede a prospect's taking action.
Thus, marketers are building more and more complex programs with a variety of activities to generate and convert new leads. Implementing MA software has allowed marketers to run—despite their limited resources—a variety of segmented, multichannel campaigns. 5 Actionable Insights to Extract From Your Landing Page Analytics. Your landing pages are critical to your effectiveness as an inbound marketer. After all, what better way to collect inbound leads than landing pages? So if you're not putting the effort into creating landing pages -- and the offers to house on those landing pages -- your inbound marketing efforts might not be faring as well as they could be. And where there are landing pages, there is data. Or at least, there should be. Social Media Landing Pages - 5 Tips for Moving Social Media Leads Into the Sales Funnel. Top B2B Firms Gaining 230% More Leads via Social Media Than Peers. Best-in-Class B2B companies generate on average 17% of their leads from social media channels, roughly 230% more marketing-generated leads than other companies (5%), according to a new report by Aberdeen Group, which examines the social marketing strategies of top-performing B2B companies.
In the new report, titled "B2B Social Meeting Marketing: Are We There Yet," Aberdeen uses four key performance criteria to distinguish the Best-in-Class (top 20% of aggregate performers) from the Industry Average (middle 50%) and Laggard (bottom 30%) organizations. The top 20% of companies (i.e., Best-in-Class) have achieved the following performance metrics: The Time-Crunched Marketer's Guide to Creating Lead-Gen Offers. MarketingSherpa reports that 60% of marketers have fewer than 10 landing pages on their website. How to Tailor Lead Nurturing Content to Suit Individual Personas. Conversion Assists: How to Leverage Your Site's Most Influential Pages. If you've ever played a sport that regarded the 'assist' as an important statistic, you know how valuable it can be. I grew up playing soccer for most of my adolescence, and although I was never the highest scoring player, I was always one of the most regular contributors to making assists. And to be honest, setting my teammates up for success somehow felt even more rewarding than scoring goals myself.
In marketing, assists can be extremely valuable, too. How to Start a Lead Management Program in 9 Easy Steps. No two ways about it, starting a lead management program from scratch can be daunting. How to Excel With the Most Underused Marketing Automation Features. From the results of its Marketing Automation Survey last year, Loopfuse released some interesting data about the adoption of advanced marketing automation features.
Based on 361 respondents, Loopfuse showed that, while many users have adopted the basic features of its marketing automation tools , most haven't started using many of the more advanced features. This raises the question: Why are the more advanced marketing automation features tripping marketers up, and how can you prevent yourself from getting snagged? How social business will transform B2B Sales & Marketing. BigStockPhoto image by kentoh. Combining SEO and CRO for Higher Conversion Rates. Tim Ash | March 6, 2012 | 3 Comments inShare41 SEO and CRO must work together in harmony to maximize visitors, improve conversion rates, and increase revenues.
Many Internet marketers get caught up in arguments over the most important strategy to improve conversion rates: search engine optimization (SEO) or conversion rate optimization (CRO). They talk about them as if one must be chosen over the other when, in practice, they are anything but mutually exclusive. SEO and CRO go hand in hand and must work together for a website to be successful. Sales - Three Ways to Improve Your Lead-Scoring Process.
How to Master the Design of Compelling Calls-to-Action. Calls-to-action (CTAs) are one of the most important elements of lead generation, and they should be used in each and every one of your marketing tactics: emails, social media updates, press releases, trade shows ... the list goes on. 6 Tips for Using Propensity Models to Improve Response and Revenue. Stephanie Miller | February 6, 2012 | 0 Comments. Five Tips for Implementing a Successful QR Code Campaign. How to Use Lead Intel to Accelerate Sales. What You Need to Do Right Now [SPONSORED] What a Top-Notch Lead Management Program Looks Like. 10 Creative Ways to Use QR Codes for Marketing. What Makes People Buy? 20 Reasons Why. Selling to Big Companies - Accessing C-Level Decision Makers.