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The CMO's Top 3 Objectives |
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Unlike most other C-level executives, CMOs are without commonly accepted strategies and routine measures. This may be in part why CMO’s so often don’t have a seat at the executive table and incur such high churn. So what’s a CMO to do? Here’s the three most important stakeholders and strategies for CMOs to deliver the greatest contribution to the company, and get that seat at the executive table. |
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The Complete Guide to Marketing and Sales Alignment |
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Sales and marketing misalignment is a pervasive and costly problem. IDC research shows that B2B companies' inability to align sales and marketing costs 10 percent or more of annual revenue. What's needed to bridge this divide is a proven Sales and Marketing Alignment framework with business case, implementation steps and payback measures. |
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Why You Need Marketing Automation Software |
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Marketers increased investments in online marketing methods are incurring tactical challenges which impede ROI and strategic challenges which impact their ability to deliver the volume and quality of leads needed to achieve revenue objectives. Here we identify exactly how marketing automation software is stepping up to help resolve these challenges. |
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Why Marketing Automation Software Fails to Deliver |
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Despite claims of more qualified leads for the sales team, accelerated pipeline velocity and supporting analytics which tie marketing investments to top line revenues, marketing automation software has yet to cross the chasm to mainstream adoption. And while the benefits are espoused by the vendors, the risks are harder to come by. Here are the top 7 reasons why marketing software fails to deliver. |
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How To Use Nurture Campaigns to Double Qualified Leads |
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According to Forrester research, businesses that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales ready leads at 33% lower cost. Here is a nurture marketing strategy to apply nurture campaigns in a way that doubles your qualified leads as well as some of the best nurture marketing campaign best practices which will further increase your lead conversions and total lead acquisitions. |
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Lead Scoring Best Practices |
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Successful lead scoring helps prioritize leads, send sales-ready leads to the sales team, nurture the not-yet-sales-ready leads until they become qualified and reduce the perennial problem of lead leakage. But deciphering a leads digital footprints in order to determine exactly when that lead is ready to buy is a challenging undertaking. Here's a 10 step framework to calculating accurate lead scores. |
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Lead Distribution Best Practices to Decrease Lead Leakage and Increase Top Line Revenues |
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The mechanics of assigning leads based on a lead score to sales people are simple. However, lead assignment in the absence of accompanying processes does little to ensure that leads are followed through or combat the perennial problem of lead leakage. Here are 12 lead distribution best practices, along with supported analyst research, to optimize your lead distribution process. |
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How Demand Elasticity and Price Elasticity Uncover Revenue Opportunities |
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Small changes to product prices can create big changes to company profits. Strategic pricing uses price and demand elasticity models to create powerful levers to confidently change prices and increase revenues and margins. This article shares how to calculate your price and demand elasticity, how to shift elasticity to your advantage and how to maximize revenues. |
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How to Grow Revenues Using Social Marketing |
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Social marketing is one tenant of a social CRM strategy and an innovative opportunity to acquire more qualified leads for the sales team and grow top line revenues for the company. Here I share six social marketing methods to help marketers and Chief Marketing Officers fill the top of the sales funnel with targeted leads. |
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How to Grow Revenues with Marketing Automation Software |
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Marketing automation software can help accelerate sales-ready leads through the revenue funnel. And while extremely valuable, that doesn’t increase the volume of leads going into the top of the funnel in order to grow top line revenues. Here I share how to use marketing automation software beyond its core constructs to increase the volume of new lead acquisitions, and grow revenues. |
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Blueshift Marketing Software Review |
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Most marketing software vendors offer simple rules-based segmentation constructs but are without predictive analytics. Blueshift is a B2C marketing software application that brings innovation in the forms of micro customer segmentation, cross channel customer journey mapping and artificial intelligence tools to put much needed predictive analytics in the hands of marketers. |
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Dueling Marketing Software Growth Tracts—Social Marketing vs. Marketing Automation |
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So far this year, Oracle, Marketo and Salesforce.com have acquired Vitrue, Crowd Factory and Buddy Media, respectively. In each case, the acquisition is designed to accelerate social marketing. But don't confuse social marketing automation with marketing automation software. While the two overlap to be sure, the objectives and capabilities remain separate—at least for now. |
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Marketo Ups the Ante in Marketing Automation Software |
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The Marketo customer engagement release demonstrates new innovation, in the forms of Smart Streams and content scoring, to address the perennial challenges of buyer engagement and delivering remarkable content. This is helpful technology for the modern marketer who seeks to deliver relevant, contextual and personalized content to recipients exactly when it’s needed. |
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CallidusCloud Marketing Automation |
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CallidusCloud shows the potential to bring some much needed differentiation to the marketing software industry by using its LeadRocket solution to extend marketing automation to sales people and create a more holistic revenue cycle framework with its Lead to Money Cloud. The vision is good but the verdict is still uncertain. Nonetheless, this may be some innovation a crowded industry is in need of. |
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Salesforce.com Shakes Up Marketing Automation—Acquires ExactTarget |
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Salesforce.com shook up both the CRM software industry and the closely affiliated marketing automation software industry today. While many including myself have been predicting for some time that Salesforce would acquire a marketing automation vendor, I’m not aware of anybody that thought it would be ExactTarget. Instead, most pundits expected it would be Marketo. |
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Oracle Acquires Eloqua—And What This Means to the CRM Industry |
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Oracle has acquired marketing automation pioneer Eloqua, and with this acquisition accelerates its growth into a red hot marketing software industry. But this acquisition is interesting not because Oracle gains an impressive product, but because this product is symbiotic with Oracle’s CRM and CX software solutions, and will further fuel a movement where competing CRM software publishers follow suit. |
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Infor & Orbis Merge Marketing Automation with MRM |
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Infor has upped its product strategy and end-run in the red hot marketing software industry. With the acquisition of Orbis Global, Infor is integrating Marketing Resource Management (MRM) software with its flagship Epiphany solution as well as its Inforce marketing automation software. If successful, the company will combine two high growth market sectors for big results. |
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Eloqua IPO and its Impact to the Marketing Software Industry |
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What would an Eloqua IPO mean for the marketing automation software industry, or for Eloqua itself, for that matter? In addition to the media buzz, Eloqua has made its intentions known to potential buyers, customers, and competitors. The announcement also promotes its product, staves off competition from chief competitor Marketo, and indirectly advertises its availability to be acquired. |
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HubSpot Excels By Packaging Marketing Simplicity in a Suite |
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HubSpot helps bridge the gap between a smaller company's marketing skills and its ability to gain market visibility. When both skills and visibility exist, the company gains market share. However, if one or the other is absent, the company falters. HubSpot focuses on building online market visibility for SMBs, particularly those that lack technical or digital marketing savvy. |
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Tips & Tricks to Improve Test Marketing and Increase Campaign Results |
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The most successful marketers are the ones constantly testing the responses to their marketing campaigns. Testing results in incremental improvements over sustained periods of time which then drive better campaigns with tighter focus and improved response rates. Yet most companies don't test their marketing campaigns. |
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What Exactly is Marketing Automation Software? |
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In a world of increased competition, shrinking customer bases and eroding financial margins, savvy marketers are leveraging new marketing automation software to automate lead development processes such as lead acquisition, nurture campaign management, lead scoring, customer segmentation, customer data integration (CDI) and marketing analysis. |
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Integrating Marketing Strategies with CRM Software |
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CRM solutions have found a new strength for forward thinking marketers. Instead of just recording and making sense of transactional data, CRM solutions can be used to create, synthesize, correlate and display the data in visual presentations that identify patterns, relationships and new sale opportunities. The effect is a more direct integration between marketing strategy and system automation. |
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What Exactly is a Chief Customer Officer, and Do I Need One? |
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The idea of a Chief Customer Officer (CCO) has been growing slowly but steadily over the past decade. Only a handful had the role and title of CCO five years ago, including forward-thinking Monster.com, Sun Microsystems and Cisco Systems. Although they don’t all have the same responsibilities, they tend to focus on customer acquisitions, retention, service and relationships.. |
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3 Principals For Successful Drip Marketing Campaigns |
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By applying messages over a prescribed period of time in calculated intervals and in a progressive sequence, drip marketing campaigns help build customer awareness for your company and products and systemically move the customer into an active sales cycle when they are ready to buy. Drip campaigns also provide the benefits of increased response rates and less executional effort. |
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A Primer To Marketing Automation Software |
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Marketing automation software that is integrated with CRM software eliminates many time-consuming yet vital tasks, automates both atypical and commonly recurring business processes, advances sales prospects to become sales ready leads, provides analytics to measure benefits and results, and ensures closed-loop visibility around acquiring new customers. |
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Marketing as a Service (MaaS) |
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Just when marketing automation software is becoming an accepted add-on to CRM systems, technology vendors are upping the ante, providing growing capabilities as a service. This newest cloud-based category of Marketing as a Service (MaaS) is an extension of the marketing automation software provided by technology vendors like Eloqua, Aprimo, Marketo, Silverpop and Unica. |
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Just What is a Marketing Automation System Anyway? |
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According to Forrester Research, marketing capabilities have been largely under served from CRM software providers, thereby giving a new breed of marketing automation vendors a sizable market void to satisfy. These new marketing systems automate everything from lead acquisition to landing page creation to sophisticated nurture campaigns with automated scoring and lead distribution. |
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6 Step Approach to Increased Customer Loyalty |
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Using your CRM software 360 degree view of the customer relationship you can aim targeted offers at highly specific segments of your customer base to build loyalty, deliver relevant messaging, grow customer share and retain more of your customers. Consider the following six step approach to use targeted offers to increase customer loyalty. |
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Control Group Marketing | The Benefits of Doing Nothing with CRM |
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Even without CRM software or marketing analytics, there's a simple way to track the impact of your campaigns. Using a marketing control group, you can select and exclude a random sample from your campaign's marketing list, measure the targeted population activity and identify the difference, as well as the halo effect. |
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Automating Campaign Management with CRM Software |
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A well-run Customer Relationship Management system can help you avoid traditional marketing campaign challenges while improving campaign response rates, conversion rates and marketing budget ROI. For example, when marketers deliver targeted messages to segmented buyers, email reads increase by 200% or more. |
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6 Steps To Improved Data Quality For More Effective Marketing |
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As marketing becomes more focused, pervasive and customer centric, and as campaigns become more sophisticated in using more data points, leveraging clean, complete and accurate data becomes more critical to achieving results. To maximize campaign effectiveness and marketing budget ROI, consider the following six best practices to data management. |
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Perfecting Event Marketing – Can CRM Software Help? |
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Event marketing can effectively contribute to new customer acquisitions, up-sell, cross-sell and increased customer engagement, if you are able to create a memorable experience for delegates and execute methodical event management that delivers an ROI. While CRM software systems are largely void of marketing event management functionality, that's starting to change. |
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5 Ways To Approach the 'Demographic of One' |
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In marketing pursuits the demographic of one is the ideal destination. That is, each marketing message is precisely targeted to the needs, buy criteria or maximum receptivity of a single customer. The theory behind the demographic of one is that the more closely you tailor your campaign to your target, the more likely it is to produce the desired response. |
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Better Campaign Results From Better Marketing List Management |
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Marketing lists are the lifeblood of conventional marketing. We use lists to outreach new prospects, keep track of customers, follow prospects through the nurture process and manage campaigns that contact our customers or prospects. However lists can also be tedious and time-consuming to manage. That's where CRM software can add value. |
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Mining The Marketing Database For Lost Opportunities |
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We all know its less costly and time consuming to sell existing customers over new customers, but many marketers fail to recognize its also less costly to sell to former prospects and customers than new accounts. Consider this 11 step process to mine your marketing database and add new life to old prospects. |
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Direct Mail Marketing is Dead. Long Live Direct Mail Marketing |
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I'm surprised by the number of marketing pros who suggest direct mail no longer has role in the marketing mix. It should not go unnoticed that retailers continue to show impressive returns with their paper based catalogues or marketers continue to show innovation - and impressive response rates - with odd sized and abnormal form factor mail distributions. |
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