11 Reasons Why Outbound Telemarketing Programs Fail
My colleague Robert Krekstein is the Telemarketing Program Director for SAP North America. Rob and I support and have adopted what we call the “Tele-Web” concept of driving the most efficient leads for sales through pull-based inbound programs. The leads with the highest conversion rate and the lowest costs typically come from inbound activities like search and are then followed up and qualified by our telemarketing professionals.
Need to Drive Leads? Try These Traditional Tactics Now
In a recent article from eMarketer, “Is Social a Source for B2B Leads?”, a survey from Leadforce1 is highlighted showing that social media is not producing the kind of engagement that drives leads. So what’s a marketer to do?
While we all see the storm clouds on the horizon, the end is not quite here for traditional techniques.
Why Social Media Will Help Us All Get Along (Better)
It is one of the biggest questions you will hear in any open forum on Social Media: Which department owns social media? I wanted to outline my thoughts here and summarize some of the key sides of the debate.
6 Content Marketing Tips That Drive Leads
In yesterday’s post we reviewed the The 4 Most Common Mistakes in B2B Content Marketing. Too often we grab the latest product brochure, sales presentation or case study and post it online. But customers are looking for you to demonstrate an understanding of their needs before they are ready to engage in the sales process. If we pay close attention to avoid the common mistakes, content marketing can drive leads that are more relevant, targeted and qualified than a traditional outbound push.
So here are my 6 tips for creating content that drives the leads that sales wants…
The 4 Most Common Mistakes in B2B Content Marketing
One of the largest challenges facing online marketers is how to create and utilize content that resonates and then delivers the targeted leads that sales is looking for. The days of sending a list of contacts to sales is over. Some creative marketers call these lists suspects. To sales, they are a waste of time. Inbound marketeering requires 2 simple things: First you need to be found and that requires the basic techniques of understanding how prospects search and the keywords they use. Second, you need to have compelling content that meets the prospects needs. Do these 2 things and you will find valuable leads.
In this post I will explain the 4 most common mistakes marketers make. And I will describe the “halo effect” and how to make it work for you. In the next post, I will list the actions you can take today to deliver targeted leads to sales.
5 Steps to Achieve Lead Generation ROI
While social media is the hottest topic in B2B marketing these days, we should not lose sight of why we are all here: to help our companies sell stuff. In this article I will argue for the importance of and the 5 steps to create marketing ROI through demand generation. Social media is hot mainly because it is new news to lots of folks in marketing and across our organizations that “the customer is indeed in charge”. Customers decide when and how to engage with us in the buying journey. Online lead generation is one of the best ways to identify customers early in the journey and produce a solid and predictable return on investment. Read more
The Objectives for the B2B Marketing Insider blog
Since I think it is important to set objectives, I am going to lay them out here. I realize my first blog posts are a bit self-indulgent but since I am only talking to myself and a few friends, I hope you will allow me these few introspections until I grow my followers and hopefully start to dispense pearls of wisdom that become widely shared across the web.
I also hope to lay these down publicly and will re-visit these objectives and report out to you how well I am doing.
Why am I in Marketing?
As I traveled the course of my career, often times in unexpected directions, I have found myself asking the question of why I do what I do. Since most of us have found ourselves in a position or a company that is not exactly on the path we imagined when we were younger, it makes sense to ponder what exactly has delivered us to the place we stand.
