Tag Archive for: marketing

You are here: Home / marketing

Posts

BlogMailImage

Traits of Modern-Day Marketers

Jan 2014/in /by

Now that we’ve just crossed the threshold into 2014, it’s a good time to reassess marketing and sales strategies to keep up with changing times. Here’s a hint – it’s not bourbon-swilling ad men in expensive suits. Is your marketing team up to scratch now that we are roughly a decade and a half into the 21st century? Here are a few traits that characterize the modern-day marketer:

Data Artisan Marketing professionals need to be able to stay on track with customer data, but they also need to understand how to implement this knowledge into a successful campaign, and that still requires a great deal of creativity. As Matt Wesson noted on Salesforce blog, marketing no longer lionizes creativity above all else, although it’s still a large part of what makes a successful marketer. These days, marketers who aren’t taking advantage of customer intelligence analytics and other data points may be seriously missing the mark.

Customer-oriented When it comes to information consumption, clients are increasingly omnivorous, switching quickly between multiple channels. From social media to email to online video, if you’re not keeping up with consumers, you’re not doing it right. The customer is king. In this media-saturated world, knowing your customers is essential. Use customer intelligence to keep an eye on trends in your customer’s industry. It’s no longer adequate to have just a preliminary understanding of your clients. They’ll expect you to know more. Predict their needs in advance and your marketing campaigns will be far more successful.

Social Media Maven The contemporary marketer understands that it’s crucial not to overplay the role of “me” in social media. There are no Don Drapers here. Social platforms are all about connection and communication, not about self-serving status updates and calls to action. Marketers can help themselves by helping others on Facebook and Twitter. Serve as a resource and listen for potential clients that need help. In the same spirit, it’s important to remember that the marketing department doesn’t exist in a vacuum; it’s part of a team. Collaboration is essential in ensuring that campaigns provide return on investment. A survey from CRM Essentials cited in Destination CRM found that small and medium-sized business executives were more successful in social media campaigns when they took a holistic approach. Rather than having separate departments firing out social posts, they worked together to roll out a strategic plan.

Mobile-driven If emails and websites are not optimized for mobile viewing, they won’t be successful. A lot of people view email on mobile devices on the go. According to an infographic from Position2, almost half of all emails are opened on mobile devices. Decision makers are busy people, and if they can’t check their inbox at a time that’s convenient for them, you may have lost out on a sale. The infographic also shows that 80 percent of recipients will delete an email that doesn’t look good on their mobile device. Just think of how users are deterred by a website that transitions poorly to a tablet or smartphone! In 2014, there’s no excuse for this.

Good Communicators This point is somewhat built into some of the earlier ones. After all, in order to have a collaborative spirit, you need to be able to communicate. According to Maria Pergolino for Marketo, any marketing position will require you to wear multiple hats - when you’re not generating leads, you may be writing a blog, speaking at an event or networking. Communication skills are, therefore, vital to success. You will need to converse effectively with prospects, colleagues and managers about your company and products.

lifecycle

Understanding the life cycle of a sales lead

Dec 2013/in /by

A big pet peeve of salespeople is that they are given terrible leads by their marketing team. However, it may not be that the leads aren’t great, it may be how the salesperson is choosing to follow up on them. Think of it this way: Leads have a life cycle, like plants do. Just because a lead has peeked its head out of the ground doesn’t mean you can harvest it. Give your leads some TLC to see a maximum return on investment.

The buying cycle is changing
Buyers have already done their research before approaching a business. They could find a company through social media, search engines or other online channels. With the advent of content marketing, potential buyers could learn a lot about your company without ever having talked to you. You no longer need to seek out prospects. They’ll come to you. For this reason, prospective buyers are often at an early stage of the buying process during their first conversation with a sales rep.

A study from Marketing Sherpa Business-To-Business Demand Generation Summit found two different conclusions. Sales people need to:
1. Respond more quickly
2. Be more persistent.

Pounce quickly
Your leads are using the Internet to their advantage, and you should too. If you have data on when they were browsing, use it to make a call. The Marketing Sherpa study demonstrated that effective response times could be far shorter than most sales reps think. The likelihood of reaching a new sales lead drops 10 times if you wait longer than an hour after they first show interest. After an hour, the odds decrease another 6 times.

Be persistent
According to Michael Boyette for Marketo, about 45 percent of B2B leads end up buying. Out of 100 leads handed down by the marketing department, roughly 45 of them will be sales opportunities and about 15 of those will actually close.

The mistake is in thinking that the remaining 30 leads are dead. According to Boyette, they might just not be ripe enough. Depending on where they are in the buying cycle, they might just not be ready to commit. It doesn’t meant you should stop trying. Keep in touch with green leads. If you were gardening, you wouldn’t water plants once and then stop. If the apples were too green when you went out to pick them, it doesn’t mean they’re worthless – they just need some more time.

Nurture your leads
If potential customers aren’t quite ready to buy, they may not be ready to talk to a sales rep just yet. Keep building brand awareness for your products by sending them messages and content. Doing this can actually speed up the buyer’s timeline, making them likely to purchase more quickly. According to MarketingSherpa data cited by Marketo, lead nurturing can lead to a 45 percent increase in return on investment. Knowing your customers can help you determine when and how to approach leads when they are reaching fruition. Use customer research to determine what their buying cycle might look like before trying to close the deal.

new years

Make content your New Year’s marketing resolution

Dec 2013/in /by

Content marketing is the probably the biggest marketing trend of 2013. It seems likely that content will remain the biggest marketing industry buzzword going into 2014. Do you have a resolution for the New Year? Maybe it’s time for your marketing department to come up with a collective resolution: successfully implementing a content marketing strategy in 2014.

You may be thinking content marketing doesn’t work for B2B, and you’re not exactly wrong. A lot of companies haven’t figured out how to get content marketing to work efficiently for them. The truth is, B2B content marketing brings a unique set of challenges. However, provided you know what you’re in for, the return on investment can be just as high as it is for B2C.

The challenges of B2B content marketing:

  • Not all traffic is good - While a lot of B2C companies can benefit from easy content that simply drives traffic, B2B content needs to be engaging, thoughtful and demonstrate expertise. When done right, B2B content will be aimed at aimed at industry experts. Bad content can attract a whole lot of the wrong audience. You may be getting more traffic, but if it’s not improving your sales prospects, there’s really no point.
  • Getting your voice heard - In the past, things were much simpler. You knew exactly where your content would go, and who would get it. Basically, marketers would write articles for glossy industry magazines that would go out to a list of subscribers. These days, content sources are free and marketers often struggle to be heard over the din of voices.

How to implement a successful content strategy

Because of these challenges, it’s not surprising that about half of companies surveyed by Content Marketing Institute reported they had no content marketing strategy. Given the lag in adoption of this marketing channel, those firms that do find a way to implement a successful content marketing strategy will be ahead of the game.

Here are some tips to get started:

  1. Get to know your consumers - Use customer intelligence to learn as much as you can about your consumer base. You can’t generate great content without knowing who should be reading it and why your services matter to them.
  2. Generate awesome content – Be a resource for your consumers. Write informative content targeted directly to prospective buyers. As Leigh Hoops writes for Forbes, consumers are constantly bombarded with information, and they’re getting sick of it. She also says if a piece of information feels too valuable to be giving away, then you’re doing it right. On the other hand, make your content as readable as possible. Your prospective buyers are busy people too.
  3. Find your consumers - Having trouble finding your audience? You’re probably not looking in the right place. Social media may be great for B2C, but if your company is using Facebook and Twitter, you could be throwing hashtags into the void. Of the companies that do use content marketing, 91 percent are on LinkedIn, according to Content Marketing Institute.
  4. Don’t give up - Continuous content is a must. Don’t disappoint your newly enticed prospects by neglecting your blog. According to Holly Chessman for Social Media B2B, the biggest reason corporate blogs die is because people stop writing them. To make sure you aren’t putting your content strategy on the back burner, it’s a good idea to create an editorial calendar. Make writing part of your daily duties. If you have trouble figuring out what to write, it’s okay to delve back into old content and put together a “greatest hits” collection.

When done right, these strategies will help you generate better leads for your sales team. Don’t let your fears hold you back from the jumping on the content marketing bandwagon.

relationships

Improve relationships between sales and marketing departments

Dec 2013/in , /by

By Ryan Warren

Sales and marketing departments often butt heads. Despite them working toward the same goal, the lack of communication between employees in these divisions can often lead to decreased efficiency.

3 things salespeople wish marketers knew
Sales can be a difficult job. If salespeople could put one thing on their holiday wish lists, it would probably be that marketers try to empathize with their position more. Instead of buying your sales colleagues ornaments or chocolates this year, try giving them something they really need: a little more understanding.

1. Selling is difficult
Salespeople love to sell, but it’s a hard job. Selling is personal, says best-selling author Seth Godin. When a salesperson makes a promise, he or she has to keep it. In a similar vein, selling is highly interpersonal. Sales is like a long conversation. The salesperson can’t always tell you when a prospect is ready to buy. Often, no one knows.

2. There’s a huge difference between inbound and cold calls
No one wants to be in a situation where they have to make a cold call. As Godin puts it, the marketer’s job is to prevent a cold call scenario from ever taking place. Given how rude people in the U.S. can be over the phone, it’s no surprise that salespeople would want to avoid cold calling. A recent poll from The Atlantic Monthly demonstrated just how foul-mouthed Americans tend to be on the phone, particularly Ohioans.

3. Salespeople enjoy a good conversation-
- especially with you, the marketer! Salespeople tend to learn from conversations with each other. In turn, marketers stand to learn a lot from the salespeople who are down in the trenches.

What’s on the wish list in your sales department?
It all boils down to one big wish, and that’s known as lead qualification, according to Jeff Kalter for Business 2 Community.

The job of marketers is to generate leads, which salespeople then follow up on. However, the marketer’s job shouldn’t be over as soon as he or she has generated some interest in a product or service. As Kalter notes, this situation is lose-lose. When marketers hand over too many leads, salespeople are only able to call a few of them. Panicked about wasting time, the salesperson then throws out the rest of the leads, confident he or she can save more time by just starting over.

Instead, marketers can work to alleviate the burden by talking to leads themselves.

  • Think ahead – Determine whether prospects actually have the budget, need or timeframe to buy.
  • Score leads – Rate sales prospects based on the above criteria and assign a rating based on a system you decide.
  • Create a short list - Only send along the ones that qualify based on their ratings. Ideally, this shouldn’t be that many. As Kalter puts it, 10 dependable leads is better than 100 of questionable value.

Building the sales-marketing relationship
First of all, realize the two departments can learn together. Both sales and marketing can benefit from B2B market research. Market insights are invaluable to understanding the customer base. Both marketers and salespeople need this knowledge to maximize performance.

Schedule regular meetings to make sure sales and marketing are both in the loop. If you already have meetings, organize break-out sessions with small portions of each team, Brad Miller suggests in an article for Search Engine Watch. In these meetings, focus on the positives. Use the time to talk about which leads the marketing department provided actually led to a sale. It’s fun to talk about success, but it’s also beneficial. Figure out how both teams can reproduce these results.

The hyper-connected digital buyer has a greater knowledge base than ever before. Sales and marketing teams need to keep up. Consumers will probably have researched your product long before you ever speak with them. This is an area where marketers can really help out their sales teams.

agenda

Want to add an interesting session to your agenda?

Nov 2013/in /by

As Dreamforce approaches (it’s November, and that means there are only 17 days left!), we’ve finalized our booth design, have finally all agreed on what we’re going to wear, and have our giveaways ready to go. We’re preparing for a GREAT show.

 

What we’re most excited about, though, are our breakout sessions. This year, we have two—one with Cisco’s Charlie Treadwell and Evan Escobedo, and the other with QTS’s Chris Oberkfell. They’ll discuss how big data insights are helping their sales and marketing teams drive growth.

 

Charlie and Evan will be talking about how Cisco is using FirstRain’s Market Insights to develop and implement their go-to-market strategy. They’ll discuss some of the challenges their organization faced, the goal it’s trying to achieve, as well as the characteristics that were important to them when they were trying to find a solution.

 

Chris, on the other hand, will be speaking to Customer Insights, and how it’s helped his entire sales organization replicate the behaviors of the top salespeople—and why having deep insight into your customer’s business is essential to compete in a fast-moving, constantly changing market.

 

We hope to see you there! To get more information on our sessions, click here. You can also enter to win a Fitbit Flex!

 

So, what are you waiting for?

 

app exchange

Customer Insights Expands on Salesforce.com’s AppExchange

Oct 2013/in /by

For more than three years, FirstRain has been delivering big data insights to our Fortune 500 customers through the power of the Salesforce’s Sales Cloud. Today, we are excited to announce an expanded partnership with Salesforce and an upgraded version of FirstRain Customer Insights on their AppExchange.

 

The more than ten thousand FirstRain enterprise sales and marketing customers that access our service through Sales Cloud will now enjoy an even richer and more deeply embedded customer intelligence experience within salesforce.com. And the deepened relationship between our two companies means enterprise sales and marketing professionals can more effectively tap into the power of social and mobile cloud technologies to accelerate their businesses.

 

Our expansion into the AppExchange will not force our users to learn a new way of working; FirstRain’s Customer Insights are streamed and embedded directly into the salesforce client to help drive revenue by making every salesperson as informed as your top 10% achievers.

 

We’ll be showcasing the newly expanded Customer Insights solution at Dreamforce 2013, November 18-21, in San Francisco, California. See you there!

 

social media

Develop a Social Media Strategy Specific to Your Customers

Aug 2013/in , , /by

By Daniela Barbosa, Director of Business Development

Simply just being on networking sites isn’t enough anymore—to stay competitive you have to be creative with the content you are putting out there, showcasing your expertise and even creating a new social community. With all of its challenges, social media continues to be one of the most effective ways you can market your company and connect with clients. When your customers are able to interact with your company online, you’ll understand what is currently driving them to purchase a certain product or favor a specific brand. But think beyond just sharing content with your clients—develop an engagement strategy that’s specific to your target consumer and you will begin to see stronger sales.

Be Purpose-Driven
Forbes says that digital marketing campaigns are starting to move toward more purpose-driven content and branding, according to this infographic from We First, a B2B training company. The infographic highlighted that 54% of consumers don’t trust that brands are being genuine. Let that sink in for a minute. Your social media initiative is under customer scrutiny most of the time, and you need to figure out a way to bridge that disconnect and really interact with your customers. A main challenge to achieving this end is that the majority of employees, about 54%, said they didn’t clearly understand their company’s mission and so were unable to effectively communicate with customers online. After you make sure your employees really know what your company is trying to achieve, then you can turn to your customers. One of the key ways the infographic suggested for building customer loyalty online is by showcasing the humanizing aspects of your company, such as charity involvement, or highlighting a strong volunteer culture.

By developing a comprehensive social media strategy around your customers’ needs that all of your employees can follow, you will not only improve worker knowledge, but also ensure everyone is on the same page.

Learn From Entrepreneurs
But how do you make this a reality? Well, understanding your customers is key, but you should also gather some insider secrets from a few innovative professionals who have conducted successful social initiatives.

Entrepreneurs are often better able to think strategically about what they want to accomplish. According to a case study by Entrepreneur magazine, three startups gained strong sales early on by adopting a customer-centric—and, unsurprisingly, innovative—social media strategy.

One of these young professionals, Warby Parker, decided to increase awareness about his New York city-based online eyeglass company’s brand by encouraging clients to share their own stories and content on social media. Warby was able to promote his company by providing customers with the opportunity to try on the eyeglasses before buying, and then asking them to speak about their experience online, like whether they decided to purchase the frames. The strategy was focused on generating positive buzz about the company.

David Gilboa, co-founder and co-CEO of Warby’s company, told Entrepreneur that the marketing idea was a grassroots-type strategy for the brand.

“Don’t view social media as just another way to push your marketing messaging,” Gilboa said. “Think of Facebook, Instagram and Twitter as critical customer service gateways and take the time to respond to each and every customer who reaches out to you there. Each comment, photo and tweet gives you an opening to directly communicate with them on a meaningful, personalized basis that encourages brand loyalty.”

While you don’t have to implement a try-on initiative like Warby, especially if you are selling B2B enterprise solutions, you should make sure you develop a social media plan that focuses on the customer—not just on your company. Doing so can get the rest of your team involved and centered on what should be the primary reason for the campaign—connecting with your clients.
Rocket Ship Launch Rise

FirstRain Launches Market Insights

Jul 2013/in , /by

On this day in 1984, the space shuttle Discovery took off on its maiden voyage.

And just as the Discovery launch was another important step forward for NASA, FirstRain made another big advancement today with the launch of our newest product, Market Insights!

Our sales-focused solution, Customer Insights, is revolutionizing the big data analytics market and has become a valuable part of the daily workflow at many Fortune 500 companies. But some of these companies are already finding that sometimes customer intelligence alone isn’t enough—in order to truly put their go-to-market strategy into action, their marketing teams need market-focused intelligence as well.

And that’s why we created FirstRain Market Insights. Developed over the last year in collaboration with two of our leading enterprise customers (both major, Fortune 100 technology companies), Market Insights leverages our powerful semantic analytics technology in order to provide relevant, real-time market insights that CMOs, strategic leaders and entire marketing teams need about their specific lines of business.

The combination of our new Market Insights solution with our already popular Customer Insights product (not to mention our recently launched FirstRain for Touch) now makes a powerful suite of enterprise solutions providing unmatched business insights into your target markets and your top customers, helping you grow revenue and (finally!) putting your go-to-market strategy into action.

As with the rest of FirstRain’s products, it doesn’t matter if you’re on the road, at a customer site, on your iPads, iPhones or Android phones, via email, or integrated directly into company CRMs or social enterprise portals such as salesforce.com—we can deliver insight wherever and whenever you need it.

FirstRain Market Insights is available now. For more information, you can visit its product page or drop us a line at sales@ignite.firstrain.com.

We’re over the moon about our new product. In fact, it’s left us starry-eyed with wonder—and our early adopters are, too—we hope you’ll let us know what you think of it!

ladder

Big Data Boosts Customer Intelligence

Jul 2013/in , /by

By Ryan Warren, Vice President of Marketing

From cloud computing to collecting market insights, employing data is already important. But big data analytics is set to become essential to business strategies other than simply knowing where you should market or where there may be a sale. According to the Business 2 Community, a marketing resource, organizations often forget that customer intelligence relies on big data, and it’s essential that professionals consider big data as an integral part of any sales or marketing strategy.

According to CIO, customer analytics allows companies to focus on the how they can help their clients instead of just becoming informed on the products. For example, CIO reported that IT companies are using big data as a way to examine how their solution will help the customer in real life. By examining what types of products customers need to tackle every day challenges, IT businesses are able to design a custom solution that can produce stronger results.

Big Data in Sales and Marketing 
It’s so much easier to glean market insights when you have the right tools, and big data is the foundation of many types of customer intelligence software—including FirstRain. According to eWeek, an IT news resource, big data helps improve client and partner relations by providing a measurable connection between you and them. Accruing customer intelligence through traceable analytics ensures companies are able to raise their customer service and optimize their strategies for selling products or solutions.

Understanding that big data is an important aspect of your customer intelligence solution can help you optimize sales and marketing strategies. Being able to stay up-to-date on where your clients’ markets are headed and what types of solutions they’ll require can allow you to anticipate your sales or marketing growth. When you know that your customer is going to need a new information storage solution, or that the latest product innovation is gaining traction in the industry, you can create a realistic timeline and sales goals. Big data offers you a way to actually solve your customer’s problem, instead of simply selling them a solution that may not necessarily produce the desired results.

back to top
MENU