There’s
a lot of content out there about the “typical” marketing/sales
funnel when it comes to business purchases. Marketers put a lot of
weight on this funnel, as it can be a good indicator of what type
of content we should provide, how often and in what ways we should
nurture leads, and what sort of marketing investments we should
make in various online marketing channels.
But it’s always good to have a reality check. Bizo recently
migrated to a new blogging platform, and I thought this...
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If you
market to business professionals, you’re no stranger to the
complexities of the buying cycle. In most cases, prospective buyers
don’t sign on the dotted line immediately—it’s a gradual process,
beginning with awareness and education, fueled along by solid
nurturing, and then stages of evaluation, proposals, and
negotiation, before the final purchase is made (if we’re
lucky).
When
the deals are signed and we’re patting ourselves on the back, it’s
tempting to say that a specific marketing...
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For online marketers who target business
professionals, the “click” is always just the beginning. Most B2B
sales cycles are long and require solid relationship building with
prospects. Email is a great tool to help with this sort of lead
nurturing, but it also relies on having accurate contact
information for a lead, and influencing the prospect or customer
takes place within the confines of the inbox. What’s more, if your
potential customers are on email only 8.3% of the time that...
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I don’t know how many B2B marketers I’ve spoken
to who have succumbed to “banner ad complacency.” This is the
attitude that display advertising is a necessary part of the
marketing mix, but somehow does not warrant the type of hard-nosed
scrutiny that other marketing channels receive, such as search and
email, when it comes to measuring the impact on the B2B sales
process. For some, the area of display advertising in B2B may seem
like a bit of a black box. Are clicks and click-through...
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I
don’t know how many B2B marketers I’ve spoken to who have succumbed
to “banner ad complacency.” This is the attitude that display
advertising is a necessary part of the marketing mix, but somehow
does not warrant the type of hard-nosed scrutiny that other
marketing channels receive, such as search and email, when it comes
to measuring the impact on the B2B sales process. For some, the
area of display advertising in B2B may seem like a bit of a black
box. Are clicks and click-through rates...
Continue Reading »
Mass marketing has historically
been the purview of the “big guys”— large agencies and huge brands
with the budgets to afford glitzy Madison Avenue campaigns across
TV, radio, and print.Their
goal was simple: create a known brand so that potential customers
chose their products over the competition.
Fast forward to
today. Thanks to the Internet, smaller companies now have access to
the same mass marketing opportunities, reaching and exposing their
brands to broad audiences. In addition, the...
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Today, B2B
marketing is largely a process of driving visitors to a website,
and often to specific landing pages within that
website. Whether a marketer is
using email, search, webinars, display ads, or a combination of all
of the above, the ultimate goal is to bring a visitor to their
website to purchase a product or fill out a form for more
information. A ton of work and
budget goes into creating the campaigns that convince users to come
to a landing page, not to mention the fact that roughly...
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One of the keys to fixing
display advertising is finding an alternative to
the click-through as a metric for measuring the success of online
advertising campaigns.
The most promising – and
most practical – form of next-gen measurement is multi-channel
media attribution. Multi-channel
attribution is measurement of how all marketing channels affect the
actions of a prospect or customer. For example, a
multi-channel attribution model would measure how adding a display
ad campaign to search and email...
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