Posts related to B2B marketing and sales

Marketing Automation Selection Criteria

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Marketing Team Working on Vendor Selection

Choosing a marketing automation vendor can be challenging. Whether you are jumping into marketing automation for the first time, or are re-evaluating your current system, it can be a difficult and daunting task – especially with how many options are out there these days. Marketing Automation Selection Criteria can help.

The vendor you choose will have an enormous impact on not only your Marketing Department and marketing efforts, but could easily touch other areas as well such as Sales, Customer Service and IT. It is important to consider these other groups when evaluating various vendors, as they may have requirements, obstacles and questions that should be taken into consideration.

To help make the evaluation process a little easier and more effective, here is a recommended process to follow: Read more

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7 Attributes of a Lead Scoring Model

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Every company will have different ways of measuring a qualified lead, yet there is a set of factors that you can use to map into a lead-scoring model. Many marketing automation solutions, such as Eloqua, Marketo, Hubspot, Pardot, ShaprSpring, and others, have built-in lead scoring algorithms and pass this information into a CRM system like Salesforce and SugarCRM.

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These scores can be set up to deliver marketing-qualified leads based on certain criteria and scores, helping sales teams accept the leads (Sales Accepted Leads) and focus their energies on the top prospects.

Marketing Automation and CRM are both important. We use Sharpspring technology for our small business retainer services to deliver inbound marketing programs and integrated marketing. Sharpspring includes an integrated CRM as well as API hooks into leading CRMs so it is great for small businesses. The life of the lead is a great way to see the flow of the lead through time and the lead scoring approach helps sales focus immediately on the top inbound leads.

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What’s Makes a Good User Experience?

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John Stone from Revenue Architects asked me this question over lunch. The answer I gave him got me thinking about a conversation I had at a conference a few years back.

I was approached by a business executive who asked me what is the difference between usability and user experience. My answer: Here’s the big difference, user experience is all about ROI (Return on Investment).

Integrated Digital Strategy

Source: RevenuePerform.com

The start of any good user experience begins with a clear business goal. Whether it is a mobile app, website, or even a physical product a good user experience fulfills that need. Start by asking yourselves the hard questions – What do I want my users to do? What do I want them to accomplish? What is the call to action? Given that end goal, a good user experience optimizes the path and flow that they will need to take.

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Sales Imperatives for the Mutual Fund Wholesaler

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Across industries, there are a lot of articles that suggest sales is dead. The argument is that web provides a content rich platform for buyers to “self-sell” and there is no longer a need for a salesperson to drive awareness, shape and develop needs and craft tailored solutions. Some studies found that 70-80+% of a decision is made on the web and through trusted networks before a person ever engages a sales person. The sales rep’s role is reduced to order taking at the end of a self-sell cycle.

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Attributes of Consultative Solution Sales

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As we are onboarding some interns with a sales-focused role in a few weeks, we kicked off discussions about what sales and marketing are all about.  For people new to sales, it can be a bit confusing and there remains a range of perceptions about sales and the value of sales – from  “used car salesman” analogies, to the highly professional sales leader.

There are many personal attributes of effective solution sales that are rooted in the DNA of the individual – like empathy, patience, intelligence, listening, questioning, sense of humor, ability to articulate ideas, being likable. This post is focused more on consultative solution sales  – selling a complex, often intangible, product or service to discerning buyers and often, complex organizations. Solution sales requires an approach centered on the client or customer. This sounds obvious, but is often forgotten.

Trends are changing the role of sales.

  • Buyers are using the web, mobile and social to self educate and they are often far more knowledgeable by the time they engage with sales
  • There is a bigger role for marketing now because the web plays a much bigger role in the sales value chain including inbound lead generation
  • Leading companies are aligning the processes of marketing and sales end-to-end recognizing the importance of a collaborative effort

While inbound is increasingly important, there is still a critical role for outbound prospecting and sales. More leads are generated from inbound marketing with valued content and lead gen tools, but sales must qualify and manage these leads while also developing prospects using more traditional outbound strategies.

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Use Pricing Strategies for Maximizing Revenue and Profit

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Best Price

Companies take a number of different approaches to establishing their pricing , but many wrongly assume that they have limited control on revenue and margin by using more effective pricing strategies. Businesses can implement different pricing strategies and tactics to maximize revenue and margin. Depending on the pricing models and business-specific circumstances, it may take some time to find the right balance. The key strategy is to enable your front-line sales team with the tools and insights needed to maintain optimal pricing.

Here are some tactics you might consider.

 

1. Segment Around Buyer Values to Drive Value Pricing

If you’re struggling to get a grip on your customers’ buyer values, you aren’t alone. Buyer values can fluctuate based on the market competition, market sensitivity to pricing, and other challenges. For companies that serve diversified markets, a one-size-fits-all approach can leave revenue opportunities untapped. Segmentation around buyer business impact and value offers the flexibility to manage pricing differently across different segments, adjusting for those markets where the underlying business value justifies premium pricing. When managed effectively, segmentation strategies can produce margin increases of 10 points, and sometimes more.

2. Pricing Decision Support

Sales representatives have a significant influence on revenue margin. In many cases, sales professionals might be pursuing volume over margin, and with poor pricing tools at their disposal, they likely give away revenue margin needlessly when adjustments to their discounting and other pricing actions might give them better guidance. Getting this right leads to improved margins for the sales reps as well as the business. Companies should be on the lookout for tools and resources that can help sales reps handle these pricing considerations.

3. Allocate Resources Towards Higher Margin Opportunities

Profit is always welcome of course, but some sales efforts will prove to be much more profitable to a company than others. Those marginally profitable segments may be turning over a net gain, but their consumption of resources could be taking away from other opportunities that offer greater pricing power and are even more profitable. Businesses should stratify their various segments by profitability and allocate resources to the most attractive segments.

4. Assess and Adapt

With these strategies in place, use observation and analysis to evaluate the success of new pricing strategies. By closely observing the effects, you will gain insights into what’s impacting revenue and margin performance and you can fine tune your strategies.

Ultimately, the market will be the main driver in determining pricing, yet leaders are recognizing the importance of using value-based segmentation, market research and decision support to inform and enable their pricing strategies.  Contact us if you need help in maximizing pricing impact.

 

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3 Ways to Increase Website Conversion

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Getting a web visitor to take action is the main objective of any web page. Unfortunately, many businesses see still a website as a brochure and do not take into account the way that web usage has changed and what the real purpose is. They spend all their time on design and not enough on usability and website conversion optimization. Pretty is good but conversion grows a business.

1. Use of Strong Visuals

Images need to have a purpose not just be decoration. Derek Halpen at Social Triggers put together a great article on the effective use of images.

He pointed out the following potential reasons for using images.

-To show a key product or service feature

Derek points out how genius the image of Apple Air in the envelope is. Apple is selling the “thinness” feature and nail it with the image. If you are selling a service, a good graphic can explain your offer.

MacBook Air image example for web conversion

-To direct attention

Images can be used to direct the web visitor’s attention. Images of people looking at or pointing can emphasize a key headline or call-to-action like a sign up form.

-To build trust

Using pictures of real people involved in the business whether they are customers or team members builds trust. Derek points out that people want to deal with real people. Stock images just don’t cut it. Customer testimonials have a lot more credibility if they have an image of the customer with them.

Revenue Architects testimonial example

2. Get the Headline Right

Another key page element is the headline. Copyblogger found 8 out of 10 people read only the headline. The promise of the headline must be compelling enough to turn a browser into a reader and then a sign up. Copyblogger offer a 11 part course to help with this. You won’t get the headline right first time. Optimizely lets you to test different headlines (and images) with no coding required. Testing should be an ongoing process.

3. Be Mobile Friendly

The big movement right now is towards responsive design. This means that a web site will reconfigure to be usable for any device from laptop ti smart phone. Website builders from Virb to Wix and Squarespace now offer responsive solutions. Excellent responsive themes are available for WordPress.

Revenizer mobile responsive web exampleDespite this, only 6% of small business websites are mobile ready according to a recent survey. The same study calculated that the lack of mobile readiness is costing US small businesses $1T each year. Mobile is now 28% of all web traffic. 4 out of 5 of these visitors will leave a site if it is not mobile optimized.

Make sure your emails are mobile optimized also. 70% of users will delete an email if it does display well on their smartphone. 75% of users open emails on smart phones.

 

Looking for help with improving conversion. Contact us at Revenue Architects.

For more ideas, go to Revenizer for 400+ more tips on optimizing digital + real time stats on your marketing performance.

The article summary is below.

Revenizer web conversion tips

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Marketing Performance Measurement and Attribution

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Leading marketers are pursuing multi-channel engagement with their customer and prospect audience as part of an overall Revenue Architecture. When measuring general performance from different on and offline channels, the digital channels are much easier to measure, so a game plan for tracking non-digital media is critical. With an organized plan of attack, firms can measure the results of campaigns across marketing channels and allocate dollars in the most efficient way possible.

A Focus on Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)

Marketing ROI analytics involve a range of variables that ultimately lead to capturing customer value. There are three ways to capture customer value:

  1. Acquire new customers
  2. Retain relationships with existing customers
  3. Expand relationships by increasing ‘wallet share’

All three of these dimensions help drive Customer Lifetime Value (LTV).

Clearly, a business can use their marketing and advertising dollars more efficiently by reaching customers who will engage in more business over time and be more likely to drive customer referrals from their personal networks. Through a lifetime, the customer will experience a wide range of events, offering a business the opportunity to engage at critical moments. Tracking this can be tied to LTV metrics and leading indicators from digital interactions between the customer and the various web, email and social media presence of the business.

However, many businesses attribute too much credit to the ‘last click’ – a single cost-per-acquisition (CPA) metric – and do not adequately consider how much should be invested in acquisition across different marketing channels. LTV helps highlight the value created over a long-term relationship with the customer by fostering an increase in wallet share through targeted marketing. Too often businesses have a single CPA number in mind, yet acquisition budgets could be allocated more effectively by increasing CPA budgets to acquire customers with attractive LTV metrics and reducing CPA investments in less attractive segments.

Campaign Insights

Paid, owned and earned media is a helpful top level framework for developing marketing strategies that capture customer value and drive Customer Lifetime Value. Paid media campaigns drive customers to owned media online properties that provide information, products or services that create earned media buzz that can build among customers through social media, PR and referrals.

Bringing Together Offline and Online Marketing

Digital marketing strategies, such as display and pay-per-click advertising, bring about clear opportunities to measure marketing investment return. Tools like Google Analytics and Adwords provide a rich array of funnel and conversion tracking. Offline programs are typically more difficult to measure beyond tracking broad business impacts (like web visits) that can be attributed to offline campaigns.

By bringing offline conversions online, it’s easier to track and measure the impact of marketing. As each visit is tracked, analytics provide the ability to view customers over their full sales lifecycle rather than through the limited lens of a one-time conversion-based transaction.

Through the implementation of different vanity URLs for offline campaigns, prospective customers can be driven to specific landing pages that redirect to the main business domain in order to measure incremental campaign performance. Other ways of tracking offline advertising related to paid, owned and earned advertising include:

  • QR codes attached to print media and outdoor advertising
  • Phone numbers specific to each campaign and marketing channel
  • Customized discount or offer codes unique to the marketing channel
  • Social media hashtags that connect the offline campaign to how customers interact with it online
  • Annotated analysis of direct traffic surrounding mentions of the business through other offline print media or television coverage

Ultimately, a lead can be tracked from cradle to grave using these techniques, allowing businesses to prioritize LTV while allocating marketing dollars more effectively.

Marketing Performance Measurement and Metrics

For the complex sale typical of B2B and service companies, a range of metrics can help to monitor the health of the marketing-to-sales funnel, enabling businesses to focus their best efforts and identify opportunities and challenges. The following outlines a sample of the metrics our clients are focused on day-to-day.

  • Multi-Channel Funnel (conversion rates across digital channels)
  • Lead Velocity (time for leads to move through the funnel)
  • Path Length (sequence of events and stops in the customer journey)
  • Cost Per Acquisition and Campaign ROI (measuring marketing performance)
  • Marketing Qualified Leads (# and quality of leads generated by marketing)
  • Sales Accepted Leads (# of leads qualified for pursuit by sales)
  • Customer Acquisition and Sales Conversions (sales completion)

Data produced by these interactions can be tracked through a range of tools including marketing automation, Google Analytics and dashboards such as Cyfe, which offers customizable analytics and detailed reports on the conversion process of marketing efforts.

LifeofLead

The ultimate goal is to have a single end-to-end view of the ‘life of the lead’ while tracking the impact of a variety of activities within marketing and sales to drive revenue performance.

To learn more about Marketing Performance Measurement and Attribution, please feel free to contact us.

 

 

 

 

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What Does SEO look like in 2014?

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Of all the digital marketing disciplines, nothing keeps a marketer on their toes quite like Google. Google’s recent algorithm updates gave us the cutely titled Panda and Penguin updates, but don’t let the names fool you – they meant business. Those two penalized poor content and spammy links; cleaning house if you will. I’ll take a look at Google’s new algorithm update called Hummingbird and also look at two other significant SEO trends to carefully consider in your search engine marketing plan for 2014.

Humming to Google’s New Tune?

The truth is, this update appears less overtly dangerous than the previous algorithm updates, as if you have been doing well in search engines with honest content marketing, then you are probably no worse off right now. The challenge though, is keeping up with websites and marketers that are paying attention to Hummingbird’s perceived impact.

Here are 3 key points to consider:

  1. The usefulness of your content;

  2. The speed if your site;

  3. The user experience for mobile devices;

Around this point of providing ‘useful’ content, you blog is a key tool in providing ‘answers’ to searcher’s questions. The old tactic of optimizing your meta data around primary keyword phrases still holds true, but try to avoid keyword obsessing; the search engines are smart enough to understand context in the rest of your content much better these days.

Remember: long tail keyword searches make up 70% of all search engine queries.

For maximum impact, focus on adding new content that explicitly answers user questions, including “how to” blog posts, FAQs, and process tutorials. Your blog can help provide answers to some of these ‘how to’ questions and attract natural links and get picked up by press outlets – who often have a high domain authority – and can direct a high volume of traffic back to your website.

Mobile Device SEO

For mobile optimization these items are critical to ensure a quality mobile user experience, which keeps your bounce rate down – in turn – helping your search rankings on mobile devices.

  • Use Finger Touch Friendly Navigation

  • Disable Pop-up On Mobile

  • Don’t Use Flash Content

  • Scroll-to-Sections Speed up Navigation

  • Keep the number of videos to a page to a minimum

  • Compress images and combine CSS files

  • Use responsive design unless a traditional mobile site suits your content

What Is Structured Data and Schema Markup?

As with the importance of mobile SEO – its best friend is local SEO.

For many small online businesses and social media novices this has proved tricky to navigate while Google+ (which merged with Google Places) has evolved itself. Common mistakes are creating multiple profiles, confusing a personal account with a business one and generally not filling out all the information.

Structured Data and Schema Markup may not sound much fun either, but its function is to create a common vocabulary for describing the data on the web. Using the right expertise to implement, it allows search engines to display important information, such as hours, testimonials, reviews, menus and blog authorship.

You can find the Structured Data Markup Helper here.

You may be more familiar with Google Authorship by sight if not by name. It displays the blog authors Google+ profile picture potentially leading to greater exposure, traffic; especially if the person is an expert.

A combination of your Google+ business page and Schema, means that Google will pull in reviews and other schema information from your business and display it with your business’ Google+ page in search results.ert in the local community or industry.

A one-two punch for improving your local search results and satisfying your mobile device users, both of which will provide the proverbial nectar to Hummingbirds buzzing around your content.

Learn more about how Revenue Architects can take your SEO goals to the next level for 2014.

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Digital Experience Index – Annual Check Up Assessment

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Expanding Your Digital Review

Website assessments are nothing new, yet today, we need to take a comprehensive view that includes a look at your websites, apps, media, and social media presence. So, when you do your next check-up, instead of thinking “website assessment,” you should be thinking “digital assessment.” Given how rapidly things are changing in digital strategy and systems, you should be conducting a self-assessment at least each year. When we do this for clients, we call it a “DXI” –  Digital Experience Index. The benefits are clear.

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