Sales and marketing
Get flash to fully experience Pearltrees
Marketing automation gains momentum, but are companies making the most of it?
One of the B2B roundtables at this year’s Digital Cream London event focused on marketing automation, the findings of which have just been released in our free-to-access Marketing Automation Trends Briefing , sponsored by Oracle Eloqua . According to Econsultancy calculations, major marketing automation vendors have secured more than $150 million in additional venture capital funding in the last few months. Coupled with the consolidation spree we’ve witnessed lately, the market shows strong growth and potential, with some analysts predicting 50% industry revenue increase in 2013. A recent Econsultancy survey revealed that marketing automation is a top-three priority in 2013 for only 11% of responding organisations, down from 15% in 2012.5 Mindset Shifts Marketing Leaders Must Make
We all know that real change starts with a shift in thinking. And so we are winding down the Future of Marketing series (for now) with this post on the 5 mindset shifts marketing leaders need to make. Previous interviews covered Social Business , Creativity , Big Data , Customer Experience , Thought Leadership , Content Culture , the Future of Search , the Science of Marketing , Content Brands and much more. Today’s post comes from Velocidi CMO Margaret Molloy (@ MargaretMolloy ) and includes her coverage of the discussions at the recent CMO Club Summit .
What exactly is inbound marketing? Part one: the big idea
Inbound marketing: is it just another buzzword? In this two-part article, I'll explain what it really means and why its lead generation potential is causing a stir. In a nutshell, inbound marketing uses a ‘pull’ approach to attract potential customers, when they are actively searching for products and services. It rejects the traditional ‘push’ marketing approach of selling to people when they aren't ready to buy, or may not even want what is being sold.
Shift From CMO to CDO Is In Progress Today’s marketing strategies increasingly depend more on digital and on data than in the past. With more data, marketers can measure against a new set of metrics that matter including:
Trends: Seven Priorities In The Shift From CMO to Chief Digital Officer
The Marketer's Guide to Developing a Strong Brand Identity
If you're a photographer and someone mentions GoPro, you think of a super-sturdy camera for the adventurous. Why is that? Because GoPro has done a good job defining their brand .
Brand Storytelling In The Digital Age
We are all living in the digital age. Put another way we are now living in the age of community. It’s a brave new world confounding marketing people in every business category. Within this digital age of community, consumers now opt in or opt out. For marketers, no longer is the conversation about persuasion to buy, rather it’s about to join. So in the digital age is brand storytelling still relevant?
1. Observe how customers are using your product. Medical device company Medtronic has salespeople and market researchers regularly observe spine surgeons who use their products and competitive products to learn how to improve their own. 2. Ask customers about their problems with your products.
7 Ways To Generate Ideas From Your Customers
What works today is the exact opposite of what worked a decade ago. wackelijmrooster/Flickr 715 in Share Connect with Evernote:
The New Rules for Marketing
Near the end of 2012, a group of us at Ziba got together to review what we’d learned over the course of the year. Working with dozens of clients who serve customers around the world, we designers spend a lot of time observing people as they interact with technology, services, and experiences, noticing how they seek solutions to everyday problems and make decisions. In the process, certain patterns emerge so forcefully that they’re practically unavoidable. Meeting over three sessions spread out over a week, 23 Zibites (designers, researchers, and creative directors) discussed the patterns we’d seen, and distilled them down to the 12 insights we thought were most current and useful, to us and to our clients. Each one is presented here, as a brief essay that suggests how it will affect business practices in 2013, and as an illustration created by one of Ziba’s designers.
The 12 Trends That Will Rule Products In 2013
In Marketing, People Are Not Numbers - Sam Ford
by Sam Ford | 12:00 PM February 13, 2013 For marketers, there was much to like about the broadcast era. It was easy to pretend things were simple, even when they weren't: general aggregate numbers and basic demographic data served were "close enough" for understanding audiences. Now, though, media content is controlled as much by the audience as by traditional distributors. We find ourselves in the age of what my coauthors and I call spreadable media .
Content And Technology Will Define The Future of Marketing
In the previous posts from the Future of Marketing series, we published insights, guidance and advice from some of the best minds in our industry. To review, Mark Schaefer discussed culture and the future of search . Marcus Starke predicted the rise of the science of marketing . Ann Handley called for more brands to become Content Brands . And Alan See reiterated that the customer and the content is king .There are thousands of companies marketing themselves to consumers (both prospective and returning) several times per day, all of them with their own unique logo. Even the simplest company logos have a high amount of thought and time put into them, from logos representing small businesses all the way to logos for colossal corporations. One of the most important aspects in choosing the symbol that will define your company, and thus the self-image that your are presenting to your prospective consumer, is not necessarily the design itself but rather its color. Today’s infographic comes to us from The Logo Company and gives us a look into the choice of colors worn by the logos that we see every day. Do you want your company to give off a sense of excitement or boldness?
Infographic detailing the significance in a logo's color.
Can You Measure The Value Of A Single Touchpoint?
Customer experience is the result of a series of interactions between your company and those you serve. These interactions–the places where your brand interacts with or touches your customers–are your touchpoints. Article Highlights: The fastest path to improvement is managing how well individual touchpoints perform. Not all touchpoints are created–or should be delivered–equal. Delivering better customer experiences requires an understanding of which touchpoints are most valuable.If You Love Your Brand, Set It Free
The practice of branding is undergoing a deep transformation — a change brought about by our kaleidoscopic postmodern culture, the development of communication technology and rapid globalization. In prior decades, brand managers aimed to establish their products and services primarily by way of consistency and repetition. A brand’s voice and message were to be the same, independent of marketing channel.The notion that questions may at times be more valuable to a business than answers is counterintuitive. But in my research into the value of inquiry , I’m finding a growing number of today’s leading business consultants share Drucker’s view on the critical importance of getting company leaders to focus on asking the right questions. “It’s the number one thing I spend my time thinking about these days,” says Dev Patnaik of design firm Jump Associates .