If you want your content to Engage your visitors, you had better ensure that some of it is Video. This chart shows why.
Much has been written on the subject of Landing Page design, but this post is the most concise, informative and valuable one we’ve seen.
Inbound Marketing and Marketing Automation work best when treated as a Process and not just a collection of software tools and techniques. Using the Continuous Process Improvement approach of Think, Plan, Do, Measure and Repeat will ensure that your Inbound Marketing Automation system runs efficiently and that, over time, your system performs more and more effectively. Done right, it really is a path to continuously improving marketing and sales performance.
The spectacular success of the iPad had produced a slew of new marketing apps already. Is yours far behind?
Google recently clarified its estimates for organic search traffic, and in doing so, it may just have pulled the rug from under many search-engine-optimization (SEO) programs. Apparently, the Search Volumes presented by Google’s Adwords Keyword Tool, used by many SEO “specialists” to estimate the size of the organic search market and justify their SEO programs, [...]
A couple of days ago SEO guru Rand Fishkin made a presentation at the 2010 Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. Here are the highlights of his presentation with specific focus on what it means to Gossamar’s core audience: mid-sized B2B companies engaged in Inbound Marketing Automation.
This is the third and final post in our series of how to effectively use Twitter in your B2B campaigns. The first introduced you to Twitter and its buzzwords. The second post began our Formal Process description of How to Run a B2B Twitter Campaign, and focused on the Think and Plan portions of the process, and this post completes it by covering the Do, Measure and Repeat phases..
For more than 25 years I have been expounding the virtues of a highly trained and motivated sales force for companies of all sizes. Back in the 80’s and even into the 90’s, the cold call ruled as a source of qualified lead generation. Whether companies employed call centres, hunters or had the salesforce making [...]
This is the second post in our series of how to effectively use Twitter in your B2B campaigns. The first introduced you to Twitter and its buzzwords. This post is Part 1 of another of our famous Process Description series. These Formal Process Descriptions are designed around the Continuous Process Improvements mantra of Think, Plan, Do, Measure and Repeat. Part 1 deals with the Thinking and Planing phases of the process, Part 2, to be published on May 10, 2010, concludes the series with the Do, Measure and Repeat stages.
I spoke with a veteran marketing strategist this morning, and when I asked him the expected “What’s new?”, he gave me a very unexpected “Everything!” In his opinion, Marketing is undergoing one of those once-every-few-decades fundamental shifts, and it’s all because of the deluge of digital data spewing from the Internet, that Marketing Managers now [...]
Until now, Usability Testing has been expensive, difficult to do regularly because it needs many people to do the testing, and has thus traditionally been restricted to large companies with deep pockets. But now your Inbound Marketing Automation system can do it for you, with huge sample sizes (dependent only on your traffic volumes), and literally for free (i.e. no additional costs). This post provides some ideas about how to improve your site by making it as usable as it can be.
This week one of my favorite “hands-on” columnists in the Report on Business, Gwyn Moran – the founding CEO of Encana Corp – talked about the Canadian economy. Specifically, about our persistent lag in productivity growth relative to our US neighbour, and why the productivity gap is so important to our Canadian economy and our [...]
In case you missed it, this week print advertising in the US was hit with a punishing blow. For the first time ever, US advertisers will spend more on digital marketing than on print this year.
What is B2B print publishing doing about this threat to their existence? What are these venerable marketers doing to recast their value-added and their vision?
I recently had the opportunity to meet with one of Canada’s leading B2B print publishing houses …
According to Wiki, Outsourcing often refers to the process of subcontracting to a third-party. Outsourcing can yield significant cost savings, dramatically improve performance all round, or… There’s no shortage of horror stories describing how Outsourcing produced disappointing results and in some severe cases, the loss of a company’s core competencies which in turn caused the company to fail.
So just how do you decide if you should Outsource, and if you do decide to do this, how do you pick the right partner? This post attempts to answer these questions.
All too often we come across a website which just doesn’t work well. We either bounce immediately, or we try and use it because we want/need something it’s offering, but it’s just too difficult and we leave in frustration. From a company’s perspective, when that happens they have literally wasted every dime they spent on designing and building the site. This post is aimed at helping you to avoid that problem.
Welcome to our Twitter Primer for B2B Users. You may have heard of the expression a Micro-Blogging-Service used to describe Twitter and that’s because each Tweet, each message you send out, is limited to 140 characters. But most newcomers to Twitter are baffled by what it is and why people are using it at all.
So lets start with this great introduction to what Twitter is.
If you still need convincing that you should be using Twitter for B2B Marketing, I could be glib and ask what the ROI of your phone is,but this post will give you better reasons as to why you should use it, and how.
When humans set out to build something complex, they almost always spend some time thinking about the project before they begin building it. Makes sense, doesn’t it? How can you build the right thing if you don’t know precisely what it is you are about to build? Most of us understand this and hire an architect before we hire a builder. But did you do the same thing for your website? I don’t mean hire a designer and then build it – I mean hire a Technical Architect to ensure that you design your website to do all it will need to do, before you begin building it? If you don’t think this is where most websites set themselves up to fail, you should read this post…
Leaving your SEO campaign until after the website is built or reworked leads to costly problems down the road. It’s like hiring the contractor to build your dream-house before you hire the architect. Progress appears rapid. At first.
In this post, we’ll give you a sampling of the key structural issues and implications that you must consider as you design your new website. These issues, if ignored, will limit the SEO potential of your website for the rest of its life!
This series of posts will give Marketing Managers – specifically those in mid-sized B2B firms – the know-how they need to successfully manage their SEO campaigns and avoid the biggest potholes, without having to become SEO experts themselves.
I came across an interesting post yesterday over at Marcom Inc, called, “How Registration Forms are Killing B2B Software Marketing”.
The author cited a statistic from an interview with Jay Halberg, VP Marketing for network monitoring software provider, Spiceworks, on the Savvy B2B Marketing blog. According to the post, 75% of visitors to the Spiceworks site [...]
In the past 2 posts we’ve shown you how to calculate your website ROMI (Return-on-Marketing-Investment), and how to access free ROMI calculators for a variety of marketing initiatives, including Social Media Marketing. Should none of these ROMI calculators meet your specific needs, in this post we’ll cover how you can easily build your own marketing ROI calculator.
My last post focused specifically on website ROI, and how relatively easy it can be to calculate your marketing ROI for your website and internet marketing campaigns. In this post, we’ll go beyond website ROI, and look into ROMI for all your marketing campaigns, both online and offline. And to help you determine your ROMI, we’ll offer you our list of the Top 10 free ROMI calculators found on the web.
With tight budgets and an increased focus on cost accountability, the subject of ROMI (Return-On-Marketing-Investment) is getting more and more attention in the b2b marketing world. In this post, we’ll cover how Inbound Marketing and Marketing Automation makes it easy for you to calculate the ROI of your internet marketing, given that your website is [...]
Marketing 2.0 is well underway in the business-to-business world, and many B2B companies are actively seeking to build that “Inbound Pipeline” of high-quality sales leads.
How close is your company to taking advantage of this accelerating shift to Inbound Marketing? And what is required to turn your existing website into an effective Inbound Marketing Website?
Before we [...]
We do business today with people we never meet in person: never evaluate their handshake, never see their tense or relaxed body, never hear the sincerity or falseness in their voice, or smell the excitement or fear on their skin. Our senses have evolved over millions of years to enable us to make rapid and usually accurate assessments of people and situations. And now social media’s digital connections between people have rendered useless at least 3 and often 4 of our senses. How are we going to adapt quickly enough to deal with the change which is already upon us?
In this fourth and final installment of Inbound Marketing Fundamentals, we’ll take a closer look at the irreversible shift from “the art of marketing” to “the science of marketing”, including the some incredible marketing insights that Marketing 2.0 can deliver.
If you’re company has gotten by for so long without computer assisted marketing and sales functions, why suddenly does it need it now? I guess the short answer is to refer you to my blog on the Internet Size Problem. But here are a few specific thoughts which may help to put this into perspective.
Did you know that 70-75% of all search queries on Google and other search engines are in “The Long Tail”?
Take a look inside the Long Tail and you’ll find out why traditional mass-marketing is dying, and why 1:1 online marketing is the new norm.
I have been reading a fair amount on industry blogs lately, about how one should implement an Inbound Marketing Automation System in one’s b2b organization. Usually the advice given suggests that you start with one small piece of the puzzle and then take a step-by-step approach to implementing a complete inbound marketing automation system.
It sounds [...]
A “bookend” to Eric’s post on SEO 101.
What if SEO 101 is not enough to get you on that first Search Engine Results Page? What if you are in a highly competitive market, with lots of established, rich-content sites (aka “the big dogs”), lots of links, and sound SEO practices? Well, then you have two options: Go for The Long Tail, or invest in Advanced SEO strategies.
An interesting post over at B2B Read. Kathryn Roy, marketing consultant, wrote:
Mark Twain said it best: “It ain’t what you don’t know that will hurt you. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
Sales trainers use a research study conducted years ago by Xerox to remind salespeople that their effectiveness declines after roughly [...]
Guess who knows best what customers dream of, need, and value? You guessed right; customers themselves. So why not integrate them into the product development process? What is the use in first secretively developing what we think should be the newest gadget or, what is often called these days, “disruptive technology”; and then failing to [...]
I came across this, on the surface, “cute” story in Slashdot:
An anonymous reader writes “Motherboard.TV reports, ‘In Monrovia, Liberia, there’s a guy taking the matter of a lopsided, state-run media and reshaping it into a free-of-charge, [0]independent news-aggregator—all accomplished with dry-erase board and couple markers. (Sorry, internet!) Each morning, at 10:45 AM, Alfred Sirleaf wakes [...]
My iPhone runs our CRM software (Salesforce.com) and our Inbound Marketing Automation software (Pardot’s Prospect Insight). When a sales lead in our system goes “hot” my iPhone tells me about it. In true Mae West style, its happiness at delivering the news makes it vibrate in my pocket.
As a tech marketer I’ve always believed that lead generation should be my number one priority. To feed business success, it’s essential to deliver a steady stream of actionable sales leads to the sales force. But it’s not an easy task – especially in recessionary (or even post -recessionary) times.
Luckily, we’re living smack dab in [...]
It’s often said that experts simply forget how much they learned to become an expert. For beginners, talking to experts (or reading them) can be daunting: they have a tendency to fire off meaningless new words and phrases at a blistering pace. This post should help you catch up a little…
Heard the phrase “content is king”? Creating great online content is critical in any Inbound Marketing strategy. This post covers how you can easily generate pages and pages of valuable content for your B2B company’s website by blogging.
Want to know why Gossamar chose Pardot’s Demand Generation system to integrate into our Inbound Marketing Solution for our B2B clients? Let Forrester Research tell the story…
Want a concrete example of how Inbound Marketing Automation delivers high-quality sales leads through a website?
Well, let’s take a closer look at visits to our website last Tuesday. And let’s compare what we would know about these visitors without Inbound Marketing Automation, to the wealth of actionable information that is revealed with Inbound Marketing Automation.
I came across an article on Slashdot today, which spoke of the problems facing Scientists dealing with large datasets.
The author was hit by a barrage of criticism for suggesting that Science is the only field which deals with what he called Internet-Sized datasets. In the context of teaching students to think big numbers, he talked [...]
A short blog to welcome a new player to the world of Inbound Marketing and Sales Automation.
Gossamar has launched a Squidoo Lens! It’s a way for us to promote the concept of Inbound Marketing in a cool social media platform, (one of Seth Godin’s creations). A neutral way in keeping with the traditions of free [...]
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) vs Paid Search (PPC). Which is Better?
I think most B2B marketers would agree that achieving top organic rankings on Google on a consistent basis is an objective worthy of the journey that’s needed to get there. The challenge is knowing the best way to go about it – SEO or PPC [...]
In B2B markets, the Internet has changed the way we do business significantly. Not only is the amount of information about products and services offered almost infinite but also it is slowly and steadily changing the way we all make our purchasing decisions. Who does not first quickly look up a company, product or service [...]
Okay, I know – funeral plans have not been announced yet, and yes, this is an Inbound Marketing and decidedly Demand Generation Systems oriented blog. Mea culpa! But bear with me for a moment…
There are some great blogs out there on B2B Marketing and Marketing Automation. Frequent Posts. Great insight. Lots of followers.
And so it becomes easy to mistake frequency for thought leadership.
For example, every now and then you come across a real gem from where you least expect it. A really smart, insightful post from an “occasional” [...]
In this third instalment of Inbound Marketing Fundamentals, let’s take a closer look at the keystone of what makes Inbound Marketing feasible: Marketing Automation.
“Whoa”, you say. “Automation in Marketing?*%!”
I know the term automation doesn’t exactly warm most marketer’s hearts. Some envision losing control to an oppressive system (can you say Orwell’s 1984?), while others see [...]
Troubled by the idea of changing your company’s existing way of marketing and selling to one using the new Sales and Marketing Automation tools? Or all fired up and ready to boldly leapfrog the competition, but worried about convincing the rest of the company?
Let’s face it: changing people’s behaviour is never easy. Years spent automating [...]
Tools allow humans to overcome our limitations: we routinely bend steel, travel faster than Olympic speed, see in the dark, fly… The list goes on. We make astonishing tools enabling us to achieve great feats. Sometimes… when we get it right. And we need to remember this when it comes to Sales and Marketing Automation [...]
In this second installment of Inbound Marketing Fundamentals, we’ll take a closer look at the irreversible shift from Outbound Marketing to Inbound Marketing, including the top 3 benefits of Inbound Marketing for B2B companies.
In this post we’ll cover the fundamental shift in power from seller to buyer, and two “big-picture” suggestions on how you can take advantage of it.
Welcome to my introductory post at our Inbound Marketing Automation blog. Some rants, some raves, and hopefully a lot of big-picture insights on the new phenomenon of Inbound Marketing Automation.
The rate of change in the world of SEM – the science and art of SEO and PPC, is blistering indeed. A great deal changes in a year. When we tried to name our company, we knew that the name must match its web address. And for us business folks, .com is the only Top [...]
If you’re reading this you’re interested in implementing a Sales and Marketing Automation solution, or parts of it like tools for SEO/PPC, Demand Generation, Reputation Management Analytics or CRM. Complex, isn’t it? Powerful too, but all these pieces make it difficult to understand and evaluate your options. You may be wondering how you choose from among the many alternatives.
For some time now, I’ve been haunted by a question: Why is so much of what we use everyday so poorly designed? All those software packages with user-hostile interfaces, the door handles you push instead of pull, the stove tops where you give up on the map and turn a dial to see what heats up…
“Their slogan says it all: ‘More Leads of Higher Quality at Lower Cost’. Gossamar delivers the Holy Grail for B2B marketers.”
Jay Goldman – Author of The Facebook Cookbook
“End-to-end sales & marketing automation for B2B companies. Finally!”
Ian Barker – Founder and CEO, Symtext.com
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