b2b marketing tactics Archives - Page 5 of 6

How to get buyers interested in your business brand

Quite frankly, it doesn't matter what buyers think about you or your brand, if they don't think about you or your brand. It doesn't matter how much better you think you are than your competitors, and it certainly doesn't matter how enthusiastic you are about your own business and products. So the question remains, how DO you get buyers interested in your brand? The answer - you don't. In this blog, Hugh explains why you need to get buyers interested in a conversation, rather than in your brand. Earning the right to help your buyers with their READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|B2B marketing blog, Tactics|

How to position your brand in the category

We get this wrong all the time. Businesses seek "brand awareness" in order to position their brand prominently in a given category. Unfortunately, while this is all fine and dandy in theory, it is inevitably followed by salespeople complaining about the marketing departments feeble attempt at positioning the qualities of their products and services relative to competitors. Getting your image right sounds like the over-riding priority, but the issue for many businesses is having their brand considered by buyers at all.. In this blog, Hugh helps us think about positioning a little differently, and suggest two approaches and eight tactics we READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|B2B marketing blog, Strategy, Tactics|

How to find contact details for your ideal target market

I want leads, I want their names, and I want it now. There's a strategic piece to this and a tactical piece to this. I'm going to show you today some of our favourite tactics for finding the right names and the right buyers. But along the way I am going to argue very strongly that you need to get the strategy right first and then I'll show you how we get the names. Well there's a strategic piece to this; of course, I need to have the right buyers - people who are likely to have READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Alignment, B2B marketing blog, Tactics, Velocity|

The #1 Sales issue: inability to communicate value

For three years in a row, the highly influential benchmark and advisory firm Sirius Decisions has reported that the number one revenue inhibitor in complex B2B sales environments remains the average sales person’s inability to communicate value. You’d hope that we would have made more progress in solving this. I believe one of the reasons that we haven’t is that most of the effort has been spent focusing on the value of our solutions and not on the cost to the prospect of not dealing with the problem. Personalising our value Of course, we need to find READ MORE ›

By Bob Apollo|B2B marketing blog, Sales, Tactics, Velocity|

How to choose content to move buyers through your funnel

Do you lead or do you demand? I read a great article from the Content Marketing Institute asking whether we should focus on lead generation or demand generation. I'm going to show you how to answer that question for yourself. In the article, the Content Marketing Institute - a very highly regarded organisation by the way - argue that your content strategy can't deal with both Lead Gen and Demand Gen. Lead Gen is all about names and Demand Gen is all about shaping behaviour. Well, I'd argue content strategy must deal with both. What about positioning, READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|B2B marketing blog, Tactics|

How to close more deals by closing less often

The harder you work on closing, the less successful you are at it. That has always been true for sales and I am going to show you why it's true for marketing, as well. In a recent blog I showed you why trying to make your funnel flow faster is folly. Apologies for the alliteration, but basically, we can't go faster or slower than the buyer wants us to go and I showed you why that was the case in a recent blog. In this blog, I am going to show you why our focus shouldn't READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|B2B marketing blog, Tactics, Velocity|

Why you should align your CRM stage names to the Buyers’ Journey

If the probability of closing a marketing lead is 28% higher for companies that let their marketers change their CRM stages, and 88% higher if those new stages are buyer stages not seller stages, why do only 24% of marketers make this change? In this blog, Hugh explains the Buyer's Journey - a phrase he coined in 2003 when he wrote The Leaky Funnel - and makes concrete suggestions about how to name the lead and opportunity stages in your CRM and Marketing Automation Platform.

By Hugh Macfarlane|Alignment, Evergreen|

How to build the case for an inbound (digital) marketing budget

Even though inbound marketing is now an essential part of most company’s marketing strategy, one question still persists in the minds of many business owners and executives: How much does it cost? It’s a valid question because inbound marketing is as much a change in process as it is an investment in digital marketing. What's the right level of spending? A recent Gartner survey showed that, on average, US companies spend 2.5 percent of their revenue purely on digital marketing activities and its expected to grow by 9% in 2013. So if your company generates, say, $5 million READ MORE ›

By Chris Fell|B2B marketing blog, Strategy, Tactics|

Using PURLs in Direct Mail

What is a PURL and why would I use one? By Charlotte Mackenzie Well, the answer is pretty simple. PURL stands for ‘personalised URL’, which is exactly what it is; a fully-trackable online address that is exclusive to the individual buyer. When a person visits their PURL, it redirects to whatever URL you want it to. This could be any page on your site, a promotional offer, or a landing page generated for a specific campaign, such as a personal event invite and registration form. PURLs can be incorporated into your personalised direct mail and eDM communications READ MORE ›

By Charlotte Mackenzie|B2B marketing blog, Tactics|

The 5 key ingredients for Twitter success

By Inka Wibowo As B2B marketers, everything we do comes down to one goal: creating buyers. To do this, we often need to start at the very beginning – even before buyers know who we are, what we do, and that they have a problem we can solve. We get buyers started on this journey by reaching out to them, and initiating a conversation – a conversation that we hope will one day create a troubled and qualified buyer. Social media is one way to start this conversation, but with so many different networks at our disposal, READ MORE ›

By Inka Wibowo|B2B marketing blog, Tactics|