Marketing spend is on the upswing as the economic outlook and other key metrics trend up. One interesting statistic in the latest CMO survey, which indicates that marketers expect to spend more on marketing analytics. Current analytic spend is 7.1% of total marketing budgets and is projected to be above 12% over the next three […]
Content Marketing was the biggest buzz-term in Marketing in 2013 and by the looks of it 2014 is no different. However, whereas as in 2013 organizations were primarily focused on creating an array of content, in 2014 they need to focus their efforts on creating engaging content. After all the infographics, whitepapers, e-books, newsletters, webinars, […]
I was recently at a lunch forum with over 20 sales and marketing executives from a variety of industries and the topic of connecting marketing and sales came up. So did the interest level. The lunch event was over-capacity and included a great cross section of Fortune 1000 and emerging high growth companies across a […]
The Ultimate Guide to the New Buyer’s Journey – Part 3: Prevent Customer Detours Through Digital Engagement We established in Part 1 that digital and online channels are playing a significant role in the new buyer’s journey. Organizations need to create digital strategies for multiple digital channels, including but not limited to, SEO, Social Media, […]
B2B Customers have clearly changed how they conduct their buying process. Their expectations have changed as it relates to their process of evaluating product or service options, self-educating, participating in decision making groups, and ultimately deciding on and making a purchase. Customers now spend significantly more time doing on-line research, they expect to be served […]
The Ultimate Guide to the New Buyer’s Journey – Part 2: Does Your Segmentation Lead the Way? Part of the power of the new buying behavior is the opportunity associated with the millions of touchpoints which customers make with your online platforms. This data (when integrated and married with social, CRM, and transaction history) can […]
In a recent article, Forrester Research notes that the goal of social-to-sales efforts should be “to see how well social is driving customers toward the actions that create value for your company,” as opposed to just collecting Likes, Followers or +1s. Whereas the early days of social marketing were little more than eyeball-grabbing techniques, today’s […]
Does your current business intelligence (BI) solution really support your business processes by enabling you and your team to draw intelligence and actionable insights from marketing and sales activity? For most organizations the answer is “No”, making the “BI” moniker a bit ironic. Most organizations struggle with reporting typically because, the reporting solution is hard […]
The Ultimate Guide to the New Buyer’s Journey – Part 1: What is the New Buyer’s Journey? We’ve all seen the stats from Gartner and Forrester by 2020, more than 80% of the buying process will occur without any direct human-to-human interaction. As a result, organizations need to rethink their customer engagement strategy. This means […]
Type “cold calling is dead” into a basic Google search and you receive over 50,000,000 search results. Many of which are provocative thought pieces around the shift in buying behavior and how technology has made the cold call obsolete. I agree that cold calling has forever changed, but it certainly is NOT dead. Even in […]
