Marketing Automation: 5 Things You Need To Know

Marketing Technology is a vast landscape, full of platforms, processes, and the vendors who want to sell them to you. This article sheds a little light on Marketing Automation Platforms (MAPs) and equips you with the questions you’ll want to ask potential partners/vendors before making any buying or upgrading decisions. 

The Digital Marketing Evolution

Even the top performers in today's business world have some looming questions about Marketing Automation Platforms. How can you best approach technology as a marketer to stay focused on lead and revenue generation without getting bogged down? Read on for a primer in digital marketing. 

What’s Missing in Microsoft Social Engagement?

 

Despite the many great features and functionalities of Social Engagement, there are still several areas where this up-and-coming tool falls short.  So, instead of talking about the great things Social Engagement has to offer, like we typically discuss, today we are going to spend time on the less popular topic of what Microsoft Social Engagement doesn’t have. 

What’s Missing in Microsoft Social Engagement?

 

Despite the many great features and functionalities of Social Engagement, there are still several areas where this up-and-coming tool falls short.  So, instead of talking about the great things Social Engagement has to offer, like we typically discuss, today we are going to spend time on the less popular topic of what Microsoft Social Engagement doesn’t have. 

Marketing Automation: Questions To Consider When Selecting A Solution

I recently ran across a staggering statistic: less than 10% of businesses are using a marketing automation solution.

How can this be? What are businesses using to not only create and send email templates to their marketing lists, but also tie in nurture marketing, web forms, landing pages, web tracking, social sharing, campaign management, and more? It’s time to address what to look for during solution selection.

Defining Failure? Stop Blaming Technology

There is a big issue in business these days – blaming technology for people problems.Though it’s true that technology can be fickle and frustrating and even I have often restrained myself from sending my laptop sailing out the window, well…it’s a computer. Can we all just agree, collectively, to assert our human brain’s superiority and stop blaming technology? Here are a few ways to start bringing people back into the mix.

Are you worth the effort?

Companies continue to spend countless hours focusing on how to better articulate their value proposition, in order to increase both the volume and velocity of sales. There is potential for greater impact by focusing some of that time on an often neglected piece of the sales puzzle. Have you considered how hard you are to work with?

2014 C5 Insight Best Of Blog Round Up

Everywhere you look on the internet these days, you see Best of 2014 lists. And rightfully so – as we prepare to embark on 2015, it’s natural to gaze back across our most recent journey around the sun. In the spirit of helping you navigate through the more than 80 blogs we published in 2014, we’ve compiled a quick round-up of some of our most helpful and popular entries.

Building a Targeted Marketing Strategy: 8 Components of a Successful Campaign

For this blog entry, let’s take a look at ways to build a Targeted Marketing Strategy, and exactly what that means. The end goal here is to penetrate a specific sector of the marketplace, establishing dominance in a particular offering, making your brand synonymous with fixing a customer’s pain. Now, let’s get going on building a strategy around your new favorite marketing concept.

Miss Manners for Marketing: 5 Basic Marketing Etiquette Tips

Marketing is a conversation, a relationship, not a one-sided battle to see who can yell the loudest.  I’d rather have 100 readers devour every morsel of content over 1,000,000 recipients who ignore - or worse - delete it.  This blog entry discusses five basic marketing etiquette tips. 

Five Ways NOT to Prioritize Initiatives for your Organization and Yourself!

Even with the expansive good information out there, companies do the darnedest things when choosing from initiatives that are vying for constrained resources. Surely your organization has never done any of the things outlined here...

Lead Scoring – Other Ways to Use Scoring – Part 4 of 4

Used properly, scoring is a way not only to optimize your organization’s budget, but also to serve your customers, prospects and employees by trying to respond to them in the most relevant manner possible.  Think of scoring as a way to simulate an individual prioritization process across thousands – or even hundreds of millions – of people, all at once.

Lead Scoring – Collaborate with Sales for More Impact – Part 3 of 4

Scoring leads is a great way to make sure that your sales team is working the leads that show the highest propensity of becoming a customer.    This is an ideal area where your marketing, sales and analytical people can collaborate to create something that helps everyone to be more successful.

Lead Scoring – The Scoring Options – Part 2 of 4

Marketing: Why won’t the salespeople work our leads?

Sales: Why won’t the marketing people give us good leads?

Sound familiar?  Part of the answer to this age-old dilemma is lead scoring.  In this post, let’s dive into the different options for lead scoring.

Lead Scoring – Convert Hot Leads to Customers – Part 1 of 4

You may already know that about 80% of the leads that your organization invests thousands of dollars to generate are never worked by your sales team.  But do you know why?  It’s because 98% of the leads you generate … stink.

And your sales team has no way of knowing which 2% of the leads are worth following up.  So it’s easier for them to work on the deals that are already in the pipeline and work with their networking contacts to generate referrals that are almost always more qualified than those danged marketing leads.

So how do you help your sales team find the gold nuggets buried in that mountain of leads?

Five Tips For A More Memorable Marketing Strategy

Your work is too important to be just a daydream. Map it out. Be accountable. Refer back, make edits, and keep climbing. This isn’t a race, but a really fun ride and you’d best be prepared.