Only 13 percent of firms believe they have the in-house talent to implement effective digital marketing, according to a recent
Heidrick & Struggles International report.
Labels: digital marketing, Internet marketing
Business development and sales teams at small-to-midsized technology companies are stretched thinner than ever, if they even exist at all. Marketing automation systems (also known as demand generation systems) can keep prospects warm by reaching out to them in all phases of the sales cycle. Web-hosted systems automate email campaigns and lead followup; some even allow creation of direct postal mail campaigns to support the email campaign. Systems also provide the ability to add landing pages to your website and include analytics data on clickthroughs, web site visits, repeat visits and more. Systems include a contact management feature or integrate with popular
CRM applications such as Salesforce.
Higher end systems such as Eloqua or eTrigue start around $2,500 per month. Simpler systems, such as Infusionsoft
are $199-$299 per month. Higher end systems work most effectively if you company has an in-house marketing department or can afford an outsource marketing services or a tech-savvy copywriter. Lower-end systems work well for small businesses with limited time, although, it will take up to 1 week to familiarize yourself with the application and upload your content. For small to midsized companies, I'm actually quite impressed with Infusionsoft's capabilities and features for the price. David Raab, an expert in direct marketing tools, wrote a detailed review of Infusionsoft if you want all the details.
Before jumping in with one of these systems, make sure you have content for at least 3 email campaigns and the related web landing pages. Otherwise, you will be paying the monthly fee before you have the content necessary to use the system effectively. You should also think through the process of buying through the eyes of your prospects. For example, if a prospect downloads a whitepaper on electronic medical records, should you send information on your upcoming EMR webinar or your latest case study?. It helps to sequentially map out how your customers go through the decision process and test your theories by actually asking them.
Your campaigns should contain valuable content such as technical whitepapers, case studies, new product announcements, webinar invitations and breaking news in your industry.
Labels: demand generation, eloqua, etrigue, infusionsoft, marketing automation
Gartner added micro-blogging to its list of technologies that will transform business over the next two to five years, predicting that by 2011, business micro-blogging will be a standard feature of 80% of social software platforms. However, standard micro-blogging platforms, such as Twitter, don't make sense for technology and healthcare companies selling into niche markets.
Media Brains has launched "
Business Chatter" which targets their niche directories such as electronic engineering, plastics, and manufacturing. You get one free post a month. However, for unlimited posts you have to pay $995 for a 12-month profile listing. So far, I don't see conversations happening on this platform, just blatant self-promotion. I think these platforms will have a tough time competing with niche discussion forms.
What do you think? Please post a comment if you know if any micro-blogging platforms that are effective for niche B2B marketing.
Labels: b2bmarketing, business chatter, gartner, microblogging, twitter
Internet marketing firm Lotame found
that 300 x 250 "medium rectangle" online ads averaged 13 seconds of "viewing" exposure per user served vs. only 5.4 seconds for leaderboards and 1.9 seconds for skyscrapers. This result is liable to shake up advertising rates since leaderboards and skyscrapers command premium prices over rectangle ads. The study, however, did not look at clickthroughs and conversions which are the most important metrics.
Read the full article.
Labels: banner ads, Internet marketing, media buy, online advertising
In our popular
Press Release Wire Service whitepaper, we recommended a PRWeb.com package with BusinessWire. PRWeb recently discontinued this package.
Over the past few weeks, I've gone back to using
Marketwire with great success. Media pickup, online news service and search engine rankings were much better than PRWeb. I also noticed many small to midsized high-tech companies were using this wire service.
Media coverage is far superior to PRWeb and pickup from MSNBC and Marketwatch also show up on Google page 1 for key phrases in your release title. Their editors are also very good at catching even subtle typos.
The only drawback to Marketwire is you have to call their customer support if you need to make a change after posting. With PRWeb, it's a simple matter of making the change online and then resubmitting. However, that's the difference between a wire service and a distribution service. I've found Marketwire's customer support staff to be fast, efficient and helpful.
Cost savings hint: If your business only serves a local market, try Marketwire's state distribution service. Rates start at $145 and for less than $250 you can get a release with anchor text links of your key phrases. The excellent part from a search ranking perspective is sites such as MSNBC and Marketwatch usually picks up the cheaper one state releases.
Labels: marketwire, msnbc, press releases., public relations, wire services
Chris Garrett wrote a
fantastic post that outlines all the ways you can increase the Google authority (and thus the ranking) of your website. I especially like the visual Mindmap at the bottom of the post.
Labels: chris garrett, chrisg.com, google authority, Google ranking
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