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.
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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.
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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 [...]
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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 …
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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.
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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You’re probably either running a b2b social media marketing campaign already, or are wondering how to do so. I thought I’d share with you how I do social media on behalf of Gossamar. Being a Process bigot, I run my campaigns according to the mantra: Think, Plan, Do, Measure, and Repeat.
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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.
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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.
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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.
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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…
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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.
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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” [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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.
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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.
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Our short video introduces Gossamar and explains our approach and philosophy. The movie reveals how we use Inbound Marketing and Marketing Automation to deliver on the promise of our slogan: More Sales Leads of Higher Quality at Lower Cost.
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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…
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See B2B Marketing Automation.
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