Do you have a holistic testing strategy?

Testing is the best way to find out what makes your customers tick, but if you market across multiple digital channels, you must come up with a testing protocol for each channel: email, web, social media, retargeting, SMS etc. Or do you? And even though you already know that email is the hub of your digital marketing programme because you can use email addresses to identify and communicate with your customers across all your marketing channels, most email marketers are not performing the basics and testing their emails as stated in latest report from GetResponse “Email Marketing & Beyond: Global Industry Benchmarks 2017”.

What if I could show you that…

Testing via email can drive your multichannel testing programme and deliver insights across your entire customer database, thereby not only saving you time and money in driving traffic but…

Offline information sources remain important, supplemented by new online sources

High-value B2B purchase decisions are typically complex, involving multiple decision makers. They often involve interactions with sales staff to check the fit between product and service and what the client is looking for. Higher in the funnel, when purchasers are comparing the features of suppliers they will use multiple sources. This research from Global Web Index across a large sample of B2B buyers show the range of information sources that are used. These include both traditional sources such as sales presentations and direct mailing which remain important and newer techniques. For example, communities created by the business or independent communities are surprisingly important. Company pages are on social media are also used are slightly more important that trade ads today. The chart doesn't clarify 'relevant industry website', we can assume this includes both supplier sites and specialist industry news sites. 'News story' is…

Predictive analytics and consultative selling among the most important trends for B2B sales strategy in 2017

As a marketer, you’re more than familiar with the importance of closing the gap between marketing and sales. It’s been proven over and over that the more these teams talk, the better the results. Yet according to Aberdeen group, salespeople still spend an average of 440 hours a year searching for the right content to use. Furthermore, 65% of marketing content isn’t used by sales at all! When looking at the most popular sales trends for 2017, three are crucial when bridging this gap. These trends are most likely to inform your sales enablement content over the next year and beyond In this article, we’re going to analyse each trend to see not only how they will contribute to your sales enablement efforts, but your marketing strategy as a whole.

1. Subject Matter Experts will Play Salesperson & Marketer

The…

How to avoid the common pitfalls of B2B marketing campaigns

As a marketer with practical experience within the B2B space as well as working as a trainer, teaching a number of digital marketing subjects, means I have direct access to marketers and business owners. I've noticed a number of issues and themes have appeared quite frequently over the last 12 to 18 months. When coming up with the 10 mistakes for this guide I brainstormed with Dave and his team and it was a much wider list! We boiled down to 10 themes that I have explored in detail, giving you some background into what they are and examples which you may sympathize with or are currently experiencing. The advice to tackle these issues includes a mini do to list to help shape your actions plans, and it goes without saying that there are more practical and detailed resources within the Smart Insights…

Chart of the Day: Delivering quality leads is the #1 objective for B2B marketers in 2017

Todays, Chart of the Day is actually compilation of charts from DemandWave's State of B2B digital marketing report 2017. They asked nearly 200 B2B marketers what they saw as the pressing issues and trends for this year. When asked what the #1 objective of their digital marketing was the top answer was "deliver quality leads". This is unsurprising, but also an important issue for B2B marketers who need to provide enough leads to keep the sales team busy, while also not having them chasing prospects that will never convert. The respondents were also asked which channels were a part of their marketing mix and Social media came out top with 95% saying they used Social to deliver their objectives with Email and Organic Search making up the top 3. …

How digital innovation is engaging audiences and improving customer experience in the airline / aviation sector

This is the first in a new series looking at digital innovation and transformation in different B2B sectors aimed to inspire business-to-business marketers, this post from regular B2B marketing commentator René Power looks at how digital technologies are being deployed within the blossoming air travel and aviation sector to enhance customer experiences at every stage of the process. As you read, think about what ideas you might take forward into your own sector?

Air travel is a growing sector

There continues to be an explosion in air travel, which makes it a very lucrative industry to be in. Air travel numbers themselves are mind-boggling. Published forecasts predict the total number of people flying on U.S. airlines will increase by 0.8 percent from 2013 levels to 745.5 million in 2014 and grow to 1.15 billion in 2034. But it's not just the U.S. The International Air Transport…

What are senior B2B marketers using currently? According to the research by Regalix B2B marketers are still mostly using basic analytics tools including web analysis (91%) and spreadsheets (80%), but more advanced tools this year have found to be of more interest. [caption id="attachment_77084" align="alignnone" width="550"] These are the Marketing Analytics Tools Senior B2B Marketers Want to Pay More Attention to This Year[/caption] Which technologies are expected to get the most attention in 2016?  Whilst web analysis which is a pretty basic method will get a lot of attention (50%), Predictive Analytics are expected to be most looked into by B2B marketers this year. Predictive analytics can help predict behaviour and in turn, reduce financial risk. Business intelligence, mobile analytics and attribution tools are also expected to be popular. According to the study by Regalix, B2B marketers expect to have extra cash for…

Join Dave Chaffey of Smart Insights in a new webinar highlighting the key success factors for marketing online in the business-to-business sector

Although digital marketing is not now a new discipline, it is evolving fast as the mega platforms like Facebook, Google and LinkedIn used by consumers and businesses offer new ways to engage their users and improve their monetisation . But are you and your business keeping up? For a large number of businesses of different size, the challenges presented by online marketing are holding them back since they don't have a strategy. Falling behind with your digital strategy or not having a strategy at all means losing competitive advantage—something that no company can afford to do in today's fast-moving markets. So what can you do to improve the situation? How can you ensure that your online…

What is it? Does it matter? Do I already have one?

Marketing technology is exploding. Scott Brinker’s Marketing Technology Landscape showed 947 companies in 43 categories in 2014 – which seemed overwhelming. Then in 2015 it jumped to 1,876 companies. And we’ve learnt that 2016 has seen it double again, to a massive 3,500 companies. So what does this mean for marketers? What does it mean for IT managers? And how can we plan to make the most of the new technologies without getting lost in a sea of data? The aim of this post is to introduce the core components and purpose of a Marketing Technology Stack. Most of the current literature is aimed clearly at large organisations whose CIO’s, CMO’s and CTO’s are very busy dealing with mega integrations of multi-user software solutions. It’s fascinating…

Optimise your customer journey to turn leads into sales

If your online B2B marketing is well tuned, a potential B2B customer that has conducted a Google search for a product, clicked on an ad, or read your newsletter and/or social media page, arrives at your B2B e-commerce site. As we all know however, simply reaching a landing page doesn’t mean the individual will stay there for long. In fact, according a recent Hubspot article, 55% of browsers will leave a site within just 15 seconds. Obviously, those numbers aren’t great. To improve them, you need to focus on what drew users to your B2B e-commerce site initially and where your site went wrong in meeting their expectations. After you take the time to analyze this, you can optimize the user journey to convert a visitor from a prospect to…