Marketing Funnel

B2B marketers face challenges in bringing more leads into the funnel and turning them into buyers. Doing so calls for changing how marketers tend to think about branding and engagement through all stages of the funnel. That’s what Bizo CEO Russell Glass and Eloqua CTO Steve Woods addressed in “Staying on the Bleeding Edge of B2B Marketing: A C-Level Fireside Chat with Bizo and Eloqua,” a discussion moderated by Digital Marketing Remix editor Sean Callahan. Here are some of the highlights of the...

As we continue to break down and illuminate each of the points we made in our recent summary of the biggest misconceptions of effective B2B marketing, we come now to our second chapter of this series. This time, we’ll be talking about the hazards of assuming that you can attribute credit to the last click in a buyer’s path and get an accurate idea of the impact of your marketing dollars.

Back when the web was still relatively young and marketers started demanding some measurement of digital ROI,...

A recent BtoB Magazine survey found that a lengthening B2B sales cycles and struggles with audience segmentation and program attribution are among the top challenges facing B2B marketers today. It’s worth taking a deeper dive into these challenges, and how marketers can react to continue to scale their marketing engines to support the needs of the business.

Challenge: 90% of the B2B purchase process happens before sales people get involved.

At the end of the day, sales needs marketing to help...

Like any program, your display campaign is largely destined for success or failure based on the decisions that you make, steps taken, and the quality of work done before you ever launch.   As mentioned in a previous post where I gave an inside look at where display advertising fits in our mix at Bizo, my team has been aggressively testing, learning and getting a handle on how to design, flight, measure and optimize display campaigns since our earliest days.  So, I thought I’d share the 5-step...

In my last post, “B2B Ad Creative: What Works for Top-Funnel Branding,” I explored how display advertising strategies differ depending on where you’re looking to make an impact within the marketing funnel. For example, if you’re looking to increase brand awareness, you’ll want to fill the top of your marketing funnel with as many prospects within your target business audience as possible. To accomplish this with our own internal Bizo display ad campaign, we sought to use ad creative that was...

If you’re one of the 70% of B2B marketers that creates online videos, you’re likely distributing them via Youtube, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn…the usual suspects. Yet unless your video goes viral, the reach available to you within your own audience is limited. Paid video advertising online gives marketers access to 75 million daily viewers in the U.S. that are streaming 40 billion videos per month, and marketers have taken notice. U.S. online video RTB spending accounted for $402 million in 2012...

You may have recently read about the greatest misconceptions of great B2B marketing. We’ll be undertaking a series of posts to dive deeper and get a better handle on each misconception, helping us all collectively steer our marketing efforts down the most productive path.

To kick-off, let’s consider the notion that “branding is less important in B2B.” Ever catch yourself thinking that investing dollars in branding is for the B2C marketer endeavor? Think again. We’ve explained recently why...

The goal of B2B marketers is to communicate with all prospects that could possibly influence or be part of the decision making to buy their products or services. However, finding the right people is only half the battle, and putting an offer in front of them through one channel simply isn’t enough. The answer? Marketers using a full-funnel marketing approach are able to start the dialogue with their target audiences before they’re even thinking about purchasing a new product, continuously...

When it comes to our own B2B display advertising at Bizo, we have a three-pronged approach: use display ads to fill the top of our marketing funnel with as many prospects within our target business audience as possible (i.e. online marketers), incorporate mid-funnel display ads aimed to educate and nurture prospects, especially through social paid advertising, and use retargeting to nurture them anywhere on the Web and ultimately drive conversions at the bottom of the funnel. These may sound...

All action results from thought, so it is thoughts that matter. - Sai Baba

Do you want your prospects to take action when they encounter your offers? Want to be the “go-to brand” in your industry? Get them thinking about your brand first. Tell a story. What can you do to make your prospects better understand what value you provide, and make them feel more compelled to take action?

In your own experience, what is the likelihood that you’ll fill out a form for content from RandomCompany, Inc. if...

Marketing automation systems are the technology backbone for today’s B2B marketing. Forward-thinking companies rely on marketing automation to power their lead generation and nurturing efforts, and use these platforms to keep marketing and sales better aligned.  However, from my experiences working with a variety of marketers, 97% of the prospects visiting a marketer's web site never identify themselves to the Marketing Automation system – so they cannot be nurtured. Further, those who do...

Given the nature of our business and Bizo’s own digital marketing platform, clients often ask us where display advertising fits in our own marketing effort. In my last post, I explored how the beauty of display is that it is uniquely positioned to make an impact from top to bottom of my funnel.  As a channel, the nearest comparable might be industry events which gives us a chance to build our brand with large numbers of target prospects, while also providing a vehicle that can turn an unaware...

Is paid search one of the key drivers of conversions through your website? For B2B marketers, search is typically one of the most effective ways to reach prospects while they are in a search and buying mode. Yet only a small portion of your total target audience is actively searching at any one time. How can you ensure that you're keeping your brand in front of the largest target audience possible, and that your brand will be the one they recognize when they are ready to search?

By deploying...

Does display advertising need defenders? If you saw some of the headlines out there on stories discussing online display, you might think it needs a whole army of defenders.

Here’s one of the headlines I’m talking about: “Banners, the Turd in Digital Media’s Punchbowl.” I’m not making that up. You can find it here.

Online display is the Rodney Dangerfield of digital marketing. It gets no respect.

But it seems that many of online display’s detractors are attacking a form of the banner that doesn’t...

I know a lot of marketers who are interested in plugging display advertising into their marketing mix, but are unsure of exactly how it fits alongside their other channels and what its distinct role would be. These are typically the marketers who own the bottom of the funnel—are killing it in search, seeing a ton of conversions through email—but feel like something is missing that will take their marketing game to the next level. This is what I tell them: Think of display not only as a massively...

The conversations we have with marketers always circle back to the marketing funnel—creating brand awareness at the top, educating and building trust in the middle, and driving engagement and conversions at the bottom. Some of your most qualified prospects are the ones who have visited your website or engaged with you via social channels. As a marketer you must do your part to encourage them to come back and take action. Here are four reasons why retargeting is the way to do it:

1. Get a second...

In my last post, I explored the challenge of scaling the marketing engine at Bizo. A huge part of accomplishing this is to first understand what my mix of marketing programs looks like today:

Here, I’ve attempted to map the channels we’re leveraging and various programs we have in play to the expected impact on our marketing funnel. You’ll note that higher up in the funnel I’m counting on programs and channels such as PR, social media, our recently launched online publication, The Digital...

Online display advertising remains a critical part of the marketing mix, and it continues to grow at a rapid pace. By 2017, Forrester Research anticipates that the online advertising market will reach $28 billion, with 17% annual average growth over the next five years. Online display advertising is growing for one simple reason: It’s working. Here are eight steps to creating banner ads that deliver ROI.  

1. Determine your objective -- branding, nurturing or driving sales -- and target your...

As head of marketing at a 90-person, $30 million revenue run-rate company that grew near triple digits in 2012 (and is setting sights on comparable growth in 2013), my team has our work cut out for us to support a growing business. 

From a standing start in 2010, marketing leads contributed almost $1 million in directly attributable new business in 2011, and in 2012 we directly contributed 4x that amount on the back of an almost 300% increase in Marketing-sourced wins. And, based on 2013 direct...

As we collectively launch into 2013, two massive trends are reshaping how successful B2B-focused companies go to market: 1) Rapidly changing buyer behavior and 2) the maturation of data-driven marketing. More than ever before, these two factors are putting the marketing organization in a position to steer this year’s outcome.  B2B marketers that build a firm appreciation of these trends deeply, and equally, into the DNA of their marketing efforts will see their companies beat their sales...