Slideshare’s Content Marketing, Social Media and Marketing Predictions for 2009 cites research commentary from Q2 Marketing. Find the presentation, full of great resources, here:
http://www.slideshare.net/ambal/clickdocuments-content-marketing-cheat-sheet
This series grew out of my heartfelt conclusion that B2B and B2G blogging isn’t for everyone. Sometimes I get the sense that non-bloggers feel guilty about not yet joining the fray. Conversely, a hearty helping of business-to-business bloggers that, it turns out, have very little to say, have jumped in. The series began by highting the four attributes a would-be blogger absolutely must have:
Business-to-business blogs are everywhere these days. But that doesn’t mean that blogging is really for everyone. Maybe it’s a fit for your and your business. Maybe it’s not. This article highlights the four most essential attributes needed before blogging. We’ll review even more in part two. If you’re missing any one of the four below, regroup and consider if blogging makes sense for you.
Now is the time to leverage marketing to generate leads. In an economy where it takes considerably more leads and more times to make sales, moving quickly to keep the pipeline full is of the essence. Marketing should be helping you in the endeavor.
This article examines the five fastest ways to leverage marketing to generate and nurture leads. These tactics are designed to work in unison with more long-range marketing activities, and can be executed on an ongoing basis. They’re also meant to fit tightly with and enhance your selling process.
This is the latest in an occasional series on webinar marketing. Why so much focus on webinars? Because they’re relatively inexpensive to produce, particularly when compared to road shows and other live events. Webinars are an increasingly important tool in the lead generation activities of marketing departments of tech companies. But, if they aren’t done right, the Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI) will be adversely impacted.
Read on for five common pitfalls to avoid in your next webinar or series.
Your customers and prospects receive lots of offers to attend webinars. How many emails and other invitations have you received this week urging you to a product or solution webinar? How many have you received today? The important question: how many have you paid attention to and why? For more on how to put together a great webinar, read Maximize the value of your webinars.
Without further ado, here are the pitfalls:
1. Poor branding.
Read more about how to brand your webinars here. This is a big deal, and often a shortcoming for too many companies. How do you measure up?
2. Lack of content
If your webinar is a thinly-veiled sales pitch or you don’t have important information to communicate to the marketplace, a webinar strategy may not be your best option. Read more about why content comes first.
3. Failing at the follow up
We all know that follow up is where a lot of our best laid marketing plans too often fall apart. Make sure the follow up strategy is in place before you launch the webinar. How many days after the webinar will sales follow up? What will be their approach? How will they further quality leads? And, importantly, what role do you expect the webinar to have in your sales process?
4. Missing the mark
It is critical, of course, to deliver great content in a webinar. Secondly, it’s just as critical to use your webinars to build and reinforce your corporate and/or product brand. But make sure the two are not mutually exclusive. It is possible to distance your topic too far from what your company does. Just because you think prospects will opt into a webinar on a hot topic doesn’t mean hosting it will further the objectives of your organization.
5. Not getting the word out
This is Marketing 101. The marketing database and/or list to attract visitors to your webinars has to be a good one. Consider a distribution strategy that includes ads and sponsorship in influential industry media, through partners and other vehicles. Some media groups saturate their readership with emails for webinars, and a small business can get lost in the shuffle. Others are more targeted to industries, verticals, etc. It usually makes sense to opt for the latter.
For more on how to hold webinars that drive revenue, contact sales@q2marketing.com.
DMNews reported recently that 99.5% of press releases don’t feature search engine optimization (SEO) for the web. This DMNews story was written by Brian Halligan:
Conventional wisdom in search, across industries, is that buyers are using two to three keywords to find information on solutions like yours. But this report sheds new light on this critical topic. In the early stages of research, technology buyers tend to type in two or three keywords. No surprise to search pros. But later in the buying cycle, they will use brief four- or five-word phrases. Why is this?
