Kudos to Adobe for this ad series for their Marketing Cloud solution. Attention grabbing, insightful and humorous…that’s a hard combo to achieve in B2B marketing.
Good infographic in AdWeek that shows the continued digitization of media in the local marketing space. Key stats to note include that local digital is forecast to grow 42% this year [after 40% last year] and that 75% of the local digital ads sold are by independent/pure play digital companies like mine. After over a decade the traditional media publishers are slowly getting on board with digital but are they too late?
Lots of really sharp people on this list…not sure how I made the cut.
And boom goes the dynamite — just a few minutes ago we launched our brand new website, the culmination of months of hard work. I’m incredibly proud of the entire team for creating this gem of a B2B lead generation website. From architecture, to design, to content, to dev, to QA we built it 100% in house. I am truly humbled by the creativity, dedication and drive by this special group of people. After a glass of champagne to celebrate they’ll finally get to go home and get some very well deserved rest.
P.S. Note to self: never, ever, ever launch a new brand and website during the holidays
As a longtime B2B marketer and software user I’ve developed a big pet peeve about bad UX/UI.
Every single B2B software user is also a consumer who uses leading consumer sites and apps on an hourly basis. So I find it perplexing that many B2B product managers don’t understand that their users have been “Amazonified” in terms of expectations for ease of use and experience.
B2B product managers need to up their UX game to B2C levels. The starting point is user centered design with detailed personas and user requirements. I’m no UX expert so I like this graphic by Pascal Raab which does a great job of explaining all the basics. Now we just need more product managers to see the light.
Remember the School House Rock videos that played during Saturday morning cartoons? Yes, I know that question dates me, but honestly those videos still stand up today. Some of my favorites were:
Taking the same approach as “I’m Just a Bill”, our latest infographic shows the long journey of how a consumer turns into a customer of a local business. It includes the steps that businesses should be taking to prevent lead leaks and squeeze more ROI from their sales and marketing budgets.
Back to school season means brushing up on the three Rs – writing, reading and arithmetic so I’m sharing this marketing math infographic by Aberdeen Group. It shows the typical conversion rates at each stage of the marketing and sales funnel.
It’s been a while since I took arithmetics but if my calculations are correct it takes over 3,000 website visitors to get just 1 closed deal. Breaking it down, that’s 3,000 visitors to get: 150 contacts, 33 MQLs, 12 SALs, 4 opportunities and 1 closed deal.
This goes to show 3 things:
- How narrow and steep the funnel really is for B2B marketers
- How you need to measure your lead gen funnel against benchmarks or you’ll have no idea what to focus on
- How critical it is to optimize every conversion point and fix lead leaks in your funnel
Speaking of leaky funnels, go check out www.dontleakleads.com and use our marketing math calculator to see how small changes in conversion can make a big impact on your bottom line.
I really enjoyed giving this presentation at the CeBit show in Sydney, Australia where I provided my POV on the 7 pillars of modern marketing.
1. Change Your Mindset – always be helping
2. Be Useful – make marketing so useful people would pay for it
3. Use the Trio of Owned, Earned, Paid Media – need integration of all 3 to drive the best results
4. Leverage Marketing Automation – great content is the essential element
5. Integrate the Sales & Marketing Teams — create one dedicated “Smarketing” team with one mission, one dashboard and one reward
6. Continuously Measure, Test and Optimize – optimization is everything and everything is optimized
7. Build Product that markets itself – the UX must recommend other products automatically based on data
Well, it's that time of year again when we do annual plans. This time around I'd like to clearly lay out the mission statement for my team so our role and contribution is super clear to all stakeholders [including my team].
Toward that end, I'd like your thoughts and suggestions on my first draft.
To create marketing programs, content and tools so engaging/educational/useful that “Premium SMBs” want to do business with us [leads], our Sales teams have an easier time turning prospects into clients, and we keep clients for a longer time.
What do you think? Is it clear? What is missing?