Friday Wrap-Up: This Week in B2B Marketing Tips

Filed under Marketing Tips, Weekly Wrap-up

By ReachForce

on January 20th, 2012

Each week we present a collection of some of the best marketing tips, guides, and best practices from thought leaders around the blogosphere to help you stay informed, hone your craft, and improve your marketing efforts. Enjoy!

1. Is a Google+ Brand page or Facebook Brand Page Best for Your Business?

True story: about half an hour ago I got out of a meeting with our CEO going over our marketing strategy for Q1 and beyond. I went into the meeting with a ream of notes and ideas, IOs from dozens of vendors, and a 50-page deck that covered everything from events to lead gen, content creation to retention efforts. While we were discussing social, he posed, essentially, this very question. And while I think I sold him on my perspective, if you’re still deciding between the two, or using both, this post by Heather Rast (via Insights & Ingenuity) might help you out: Is a google+ brand page or facebook brand page best for your business?

2. Measuring Marketing’s Effectiveness

I wonder – really wonder – if this issue is ever going to be solved. This post from the Marketing Leadership Council’s blog, Wide Angle, examines a handful of strategies MLC members have found to be really effective when it comes to that ridiculously persistent problem of marketing and measurement. Equally beneficial are the three case studies and examples they provide to illustrate the ideas. Good stuff: Measuring Marketing’s Effectiveness

3. 4 Reasons For B2B Marketers To Explore Pinterest

This post caught my eye right away. As a Pinterest newbie I’m on the lookout for ideas about how to have fun with the service, but what I found really interesting was the B2B marketers bit. Seriously? B2B? You had me at “hello,” Social Media B2B, tell me more. From positioning to outbound links, Karlie Justus offers a few ideas you might not have considered with this increasing popular virtual pinboard. 4 Reasons For B2B Marketers To Explore Pinterest

4. Mobile Apps, Social Integration, Content are Key Trends.

You’ve probably seen quite a few predictions for 2012, or even 2015, regarding the evolution of marketing and what happens next, but this post from Kate Maddox, via B2B, delivers some intriguing stats gleaned from interviews with marketers, analysts, and agency executives. Want to know what your peers believe are trends to keep an eye on in the coming months? Read on: Mobile apps, social integration, content are key trends

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Friday Wrap-Up: This Week in B2B Marketing Tips

Filed under Marketing Tips, Weekly Wrap-up

By ReachForce

on January 13th, 2012

Each week we present a collection of some of the best marketing tips, guides, and best practices from thought leaders around the blogosphere to help you stay informed, hone your craft, and improve your marketing efforts. Enjoy!

1. The 2015 Digital Marketing Rule Book. Change or Perish.

If you’re going to read one post this week, dear marketers, this one absolutely needs to be it. Occam’s Razor author, Avinash Kaushik, provides one of the most comprehensive and thoughtful analyses regarding the future of marketing and the success of your business I’ve seen in quite some time. From the evolution of the customer’s expectations to why we need to embrace potential embarrassment, here are (8) rules to help you improve your marketing efforts in the coming years. The 2015 Digital Marketing Rule Book. Change or Perish.

2. The Ultimate List of Email SPAM Trigger Words

Plenty has been written about avoiding SPAM filters (we’ve done so here and here, in fact) but a gentle reminder, as well as an updated list, never hurts. HubSpot’s Karen Rubin delivers a comprehensive (upward of 300 examples, no less) list of words you should avoid when crafting your message. The Ultimate List of Email SPAM Trigger Words

3. Is LinkedIn Still a Valuable Marketing Tool?

This post from The Straight North Blog attempts to get to the bottom of this question by examining the opinions of a host of social media thought leaders. Given the topic it’s curious they didn’t interview more primary marketers for insight, but some of the responses here are sure to get you thinking. By the bye, if you’ve found an interesting and/or effective way to use LinkedIn for your marketing, I’d love to hear about it – be sure to leave a comment. Is LinkedIn Still a Valuable Marketing Tool?

4. Answer These Five Questions before Launching a Marketing Campaign

I’ve talked about the Wilson & Ellis Consulting Blog, Multichannel Magic, before, but if you missed it I’ll happily repeat the highlights: you should totally read this blog. Great writing, insightful information, and always ready to ask the tough questions (and help you answer them); I can’t recommend Debra Ellis’ writing enough. This post examines the fundamentals we marketers, especially last year, sometimes forget when it comes to strategy and campaigns. Answer These Five Questions before Launching a Marketing Campaign

5. A little extra…

Warning – you can lose hours in the following posts if you’re not careful. That said, if you’re looking for a fairly comprehensive Wrap-Up of the best posts of 2011, be sure to check out this one from Marketo: Marketo’s Greatest Blog Hits of 2011. Next, Canalside View’s Martin Weigel presents a few fairly intriguing observations and suggestions regarding the problems found within current analytics used by advertisers and marketers. Find out why “…counting and analysis are very different things.” Data Without Context, Results Without Consequence, Counting Without Analysis…An Industry Without Conscience?

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Friday Wrap-Up: This Week in B2B Marketing Tips

Filed under Marketing Tips, Weekly Wrap-up

By ReachForce

on January 6th, 2012

Each week we present a collection of some of the best marketing tips, guides, and best practices from thought leaders around the blogosphere to help you stay informed, hone your craft, and improve your marketing efforts. Enjoy!

1. The Anatomy of a Perfect Marketing Dashboard

Volumes have been written in the last couple of years about the increasing need for marketers to directly map to and support revenue goals. No doubt, justly, 2012 will see much more of the same. But because far more is needed than simply identifying the need to do so, my hope is that this year we’ll see better tools, strategies, and algorithms to help bridge that gap. This infographic from Jason Miller, via Marketo, is a great tool to get you started. The Anatomy of a Perfect Marketing Dashboard

2. More Proof Of The Major Disconnect Between Brands And Consumers When It Comes To Social Media

If, as stated above, a mountain of information about marketing and revenue has been produced in recent years, there is a different topic altogether that could easily be considered Mount Everest: Content. You’d be hard-pressed to find a blog that didn’t break down rationale, methods to produce it, and strategies to ensure it was relevant to your audience last year, and “Content is king” is now accepted as absolute. This post, however, raises a question mark. And while it certainly would have benefitted from a shorter title, the central idea here is pretty remarkable: we marketers, by and large, just don’t get it. Read on to find out why content just might not be the most important element of your social media strategy. Even More Proof Of The Major Disconnect Between Brands And Consumers When It Comes To Social Media

3. 7 Things Marketers Should Stop Doing Today

And yet, this post recommends we do the exact opposite – “So start by giving them what they want: educational content.” Sigh. Disconnect aside, the B2B Marketing Insider’s Michael Brenner offers an interesting approach to your standard New Year’s Resolution type of strategy and suggests we instead focus on things to stop rather than to start. Enjoy. 7 Things Marketers Should Stop Doing Today

4. 8 Great Marketing Infographics To Inspire Your 2012 Objectives

Okay, I’m sucker for a nice infographic. I know we started this week’s Wrap-up with one, but this post, another from the B2B Insider, serves up eight of them. Awesome. Particularly interesting are “The Noob Guide to Online Marketing” and (really, really dig this one) “Inbound Marketing vs. Outbound Marketing.” Check ‘em out. 8 Great Marketing Infographics To Inspire Your 2012 Objectives

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Friday Wrap-Up: This Week in B2B Marketing Tips

Filed under Marketing Tips, Weekly Wrap-up

By ReachForce

on December 30th, 2011

Each week we present a collection of some of the best marketing tips, guides, and best practices from thought leaders around the blogosphere to help you stay informed, hone your craft, and improve your marketing efforts. Enjoy!

1. 7 Marketing Resolutions For the New Year

Well, we couldn’t very well let one of these lists slip by this week’s wrap-up, could we? This post from Elaine Fogel (at Totally Uncorked on Marketing) serves up a handful of solid tips and ideas you might want to consider moving into Q1. 7 Marketing Resolutions for the New Year

2. 4 Ways Google+ Hangouts Can Increase B2B Productivity

We’ve talked about Google+ a number of times here at The B2B Lead and, so far, it’s still a bit of a mystery as to whether or not it’s going to be the “game changer” folks (John Jantsch and Chris Brogan, to name but a few) are predicting. That aside, any tool that can help you do business better and faster deserves at least a little consideration. Marketo’s Jason Miller breaks down a bit of Google+ functionality you might not be aware of: 4 Ways Google+ Hangouts Can Increase B2B Productivity

3. Top Online Marketing Books for 2012

This Christmas both my wife and I received a Kindle Fire from her parents and to say we were absolutely giddy as we unwrapped them is a bit of an understatement. She looked quite a bit cuter being giddy than I did, I might add, but I’m pretty sure her parents knew they’d scored a big win either way. And as I played around with the e-reader that night I kept wondering what books I should load-up on first. This list from the Top Rank Online Marketing Blog may have just helped. You’ll find a summary of 8 new books with topics ranging from B2B Marketing to Search and Social Media. FYI, Brogan’s Google+ for Business: How Google’s Social Network Changes Everything mentioned above is included. Top Online Marketing Books for 2012

4. 2012 Marketing Predictions from 8 Industry Leaders

An interesting piece from Marketing Trenches that might get you thinking. Some predictions aren’t overly surprising (“Facebook indeed surpasses $100 billion in market cap after going public”), but others like “Bring on the Onslaught of Voice Automation” might surprise you. 2012 Marketing Predictions from 8 Industry Leaders

5. A little extra…

In the event you’re looking for a bit of additional reading I have just the thing. The first is an honest and pragmatic post from The Future Buzz that is absolutely refreshing. Think your business needs to develop an app this year? Think again. Check out The App Fallacy to read more. The second post comes from Drew’s Marketing Minute and poses a simple question that is actually, perhaps, the single most important question we marketers should ask (and answer). Read Marketing insights question: What’s your legacy sentence? to continue.

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Friday Wrap-Up: This Week in B2B Marketing Tips

Filed under Sales and Marketing Tips, Weekly Wrap-up

By ReachForce

on December 23rd, 2011

Each week we present a collection of some of the best marketing tips, guides, and best practices from thought leaders around the blogosphere to help you stay informed, hone your craft, and improve your marketing efforts. Enjoy!

1. 3 Ways to Use YouTube to Drive Traffic to Your Website

While researching today’s Wrap-up I ran across more than a few posts offering tips about productivity during that odd, dreamy time between Christmas and the New Year. Some were better than others, but after reading this post by James Wedmore, via Social Media Examiner, I know what I’ll be spending at least some of my time on next week. Want a few strategies (and one awesome tool you might not be familiar with) to boost traffic from your YouTube channel? Read on: 3 Ways to use YouTube to Drive Traffic to Your Website

2. Opportunity Knocks! – Three Tips for Talking About More Than Just Leads

For ReachForce, 2011 was a fairly active tradeshow and events year with a lot of great opportunities to connect with our customers and meet new marketers. One of the best was Marketo’s Revenue Rockstar Roadshow. Not only did we have the opportunity to talk with professionals from coast to coast, we also got to soak-up some of the great content that was presented at the events. In this post, Marketo’s Kelly Waffle touches on some of that content and provides a nice reminder of why marketers need to re-frame the conversation when reporting to the C-Suite. Opportunity Knocks! – Three Tips for Talking About More Than Just Leads

3. How To Generate ROI (Return on Interesting) With Content Marketing

If you’re not following Michael Brenner on Twitter, I suggest you stop what you’re doing and correct that now. And while his Twitter feed is a consistent source of humor and insight, you’ll find his great stuff is at the B2B Marketing Insider. This post discusses the challenges of creating content that avoids falling into “marketing mush” and what you need to consider when creating interesting (read actionable) content. How To Generate ROI (Return on Interesting) With Content Marketing

4. How to Find the Marketing Rules that Work for Your Business

Wow. Absolutely love this. Love it. I haven’t been to the Wilson & Ellis Consulting Blog before, but I’ll definitely be going back. You might want to, too. Debra Ellis takes a critical (and wholly justified) look at social media, how it’s changed the game, and – far more importantly – how it hasn’t. “Being able to talk a good game doesn’t make you a player.” How to Find the Marketing Rules that Work for Your Business

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Friday Wrap-Up: This Week in B2B Marketing Tips

Filed under Weekly Wrap-up

By ReachForce

on December 16th, 2011

Each week we present a collection of some of the best marketing tips, guides, and best practices from thought leaders around the blogosphere to help you stay informed, hone your craft, and improve your marketing efforts. Enjoy!

1. 6 Core Benefits of Well-Defined Marketing Personas

While this post from HubSpot provides a nice list of the insights and characteristics you can glean from your customer personas, equally noteworthy are the suggestions for how to apply them to your strategy. From building a better marketing plan to executing specific campaigns, this list shows you how customer personas can be a powerful asset to help you get it done. 6 Core Benefits of Well-Defined Marketing Personas

2. How to Choose Which Marketing Events Are Worth Your Time (& Money)

It was a nice surprise stumbling on this particular post from MarketingProfs. Not only is Tobias a friend, he’s also spent the last few years helping me make the most out of our relationship with MarketingProfs. Here you’ll find a few bits of wisdom he’s picked up over the years to help you decide what events make the most sense when thinking about sending your team or your executives. How to Choose Which Marketing Events Are Worth Your Time (& Money)

3. 10 Sales Trends for 2012

This is a long post, but definitely worth the read. The Wide Angle Blog from the Marketing Leadership Council has put together a fairly intriguing list of the sales trends they’ve identified for next year, but more interesting is how marketing will need to adjust to address them. For a snapshot of what marketing might look like next year, check out this post from the B2B Marketing Insider. 10 Sales Trends for 2012

4. 8 Tips to Improve Your Marketing ROI in the New Year

New sales trends or established practices, your marketing strategy and campaigns still need to generate revenue, right? This post from the 60 Second Marketer provides a nice primer on a few of the fundamentals you’ll need to think about when building out your 2012 plan. Enjoy. 8 Tips to Improve Your Marketing ROI in the New Year

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Friday Wrap-Up: This Week in B2B Marketing Tips

Filed under Weekly Wrap-up

By ReachForce

on December 9th, 2011

Each week we present a collection of some of the best marketing tips, guides, and best practices from thought leaders around the blogosphere to help you stay informed, hone your craft, and improve your marketing efforts. Enjoy!

1. 6 Tips to Prepare for B2B Marketing Victory in 2012

Christopher Ryan at Great B2B Marketing provides a nice list of tips to help you get ready for Q1. Interestingly, while most of Ryan’s suggestions rely heavily on analysis of your current assets, campaign performance, and 2012 plan, there isn’t really a mention of how to get that done. Here’s the part where I add a shameless ReachForce plug (sorry about that), but this promotion really dovetails extraordinarily well with the rest of Ryan’s points. From now until the end of the year, ReachForce is offering a host of tools to help you assess, clean, and replenish your marketing lead database. Click here to find out more about them and how you can ensure your data is ready for upcoming campaigns. For more ideas on how to prepare for next year, read: 6 Tips to Prepare for B2B Marketing Victory in 2012

2. Twitter Makes Two Major Announcements

Wow. Has it really been five years? You could (rightfully) argue that these changes are long, long overdue, but the updates Twitter is rolling out for brands include some really cool features. This post from Jeff Bullas examines the underlying problem (“Twitter had Forgotten the Enterprise”) and the new tools and options organizations will have to make a bigger impact with their message. Enjoy. Twitter Makes Two Major Announcements

3. Top 20 Marketing Automation Solutions

Because when choosing a marketing automation vendor you should “pay far more attention to how your internal processes and other applications might work with a marketing automation platform rather than trying to implement one and try to change your entire company to fit it,” options are a good thing, right? And while we’re a big proponent of Eloqua and Marketo, this infographic from the Marketing Tech Blog provides interesting data about the top 20 providers to help you get started. Top 20 Marketing Automation Solutions

4. Understanding Viral Content Marketing

Feel free to skip the lead here, but the infographic is spot-on and worth taping to your wall if viral marketing is something you’ve been thinking about. Which, at a guess, pretty much means all of us, right? Particularly interesting are the “Reasons we Share.” Do you create content with these ideas in mind? Understanding Viral Marketing Content

5. The End of the Campaign

File this one under, “Food for thought.” Google’s Ben Wise, via the Canadian Marketing Blog, explains why he thinks the shift to digital marketing is a game-changer for how businesses connect and interact with prospects and customers – and what’s coming next. The End of the Campaign

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Friday Wrap-Up: This Week in B2B Marketing Tips

Filed under Weekly Wrap-up

By ReachForce

on December 2nd, 2011

Each week we present a collection of some of the best marketing tips, guides, and best practices from thought leaders around the blogosphere to help you stay informed, hone your craft, and improve your marketing efforts. Enjoy!

1. IT’S (IM)POSSIBLE

I’m cheating here a bit. You see, Friday wrap-ups are supposed to be insights from around the Web from the previous five days. This piece was actually written about a month ago, on November 3^rd. So, clearly, not current. That said, I just found it today and it’s good enough I don’t mind bending the rules a bit this week to share it with you. The post begins with the following: “The problem isn’t that we set our goals too high and miss them. The problem is we set our goals too low and hit them.” When you’re done reading, come back and let me know a time when you’ve set a goal that’s “unachievable” and how it turned out. I’d love to hear your story. IT’S (IM)POSSIBLE

2. How to Write Weapons-Grade Copy

I found the reference to this post on one of my favorite blogs, Neuromarketing, but you’ll find the full post on Copyblogger. Written by Roger Dooley, How to Write Weapons-Grade Copy examines why an industry as cutting-edge as DARPA (the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) considers storytelling critical in regard to engagement, provides some pretty striking clinical data that shows just about everyone else does too, and the best way to apply this technique in your marketing efforts. How to Write Weapons-Grade Copy

3. Top Five Things Your B2B Mobile Website Needs (Besides Beer)

Seriously, they had me with the parenthetical aside. And although the actual post does a “meh” job of connecting the content to that notation, the bulk of the advice is solid and delivers the top five pieces of information that are most important for mobile visitors. Top Five Things Your B2B Mobile Website Needs (Besides Beer)

4. A few extra posts you might enjoy…

This was a really good week for posts. Perhaps I’m finding new places to look, or perhaps there are more than a few bloggers that are shaking it up a bit as the year winds down. Whatever the reason, here are a few additional pieces worth checking out. While Don’t Let What You Know Limit What You Imagine examines how executives can improve problem-solving skills, the underlying message certainly applies to all marketers. This week I also stumbled upon The Responsible Marketing Blog (where commerce and conscience come together). Not sure I agree with the posts I’ve read, but great food for thought.

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Friday Wrap-Up: This Week in B2B Marketing Tips

Filed under Weekly Wrap-up

By ReachForce

on November 25th, 2011

Each week we present a collection of some of the best marketing tips, guides, and best practices from thought leaders around the blogosphere to help you stay informed, hone your craft, and improve your marketing efforts. Enjoy!

1. 8 Technologies Marketers Should be Thankful For

Couldn’t very well let this one go unmentioned, could we? This post from Eloqua outlines a few tools we marketers rely on to get the job done and why we need to thank our lucky stars we have them in our kits. Particularly funny is a quote from the “Analytics” section where it’s suggested that marketing is just “liquor and guessing.” For a few more personal messages of thanks, check out this post from MarketingProfs Daily Fix Blog. 8 Technologies Marketers Should be Thankful For

2. 11 Safeguards to Prevent Business Blogging Embarrassment

There isn’t a blogger out there who doesn’t benefit from a second set of eyes on a post before it’s released. As many sets as you can pin down to read it, actually. In fact, not that long ago we found a lovely little typo in one of our pieces of collateral that had been proofed by no fewer than six different people. Six. Ghosts in the machine, says I. HubSpot’s Corey Eridon delivers a great checklist of must-dos, from baseline editing to meta descriptions, to help you avoid the more common issues as well as a few you might not be thinking about. 11 Safeguards to Prevent Business Blogging Embarrassment

3. How To Monitor Your Three Essential Internet Marketing Strategies

Andy Havard, via Techipedia, delivers a nice primer with a host of tools (old and new), as well as the challenges you should be aware of, to ensure you’re effectively using and measuring social, video, and traffic-generating campaigns. How To Monitor Your Three Essential Internet Marketing Strategies

4. Key to digital marketing success? Be less digital.

Really interesting read here that, while short on specific answers, absolutely asks some of the right questions. “Behind the Twitter avatars and Facebook updates, the text messages and the Skype conferences, people are the same. They still want to be acknowledged. They want to be heard. They want to cut through that digital distance and get to know you as a person.” How do your marketing efforts bridge that gap? Key to digital marketing success? Be less digital.

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Friday Wrap-Up: This Week in B2B Marketing Tips

Filed under Sales and Marketing Tips, Weekly Wrap-up

By ReachForce

on November 18th, 2011

Each week we present a collection of some of the best marketing tips, guides, and best practices from thought leaders around the blogosphere to help you stay informed, hone your craft, and improve your marketing efforts. Enjoy!

Top findings from the Marketo Email Marketing Benchmark

Earlier this week, we partnered with DemandGen and Televerde for a webinar around the importance of a solid 2012 contact data strategy. And while we discussed a ton of reasons and best practices why data strategy is so important to your bottom line, here’s another: according to a new Marketo benchmark report, “Segmentation is also the highest ROI tactic.” It’s all about the data. Chock full of great information, this report covers “what’s working and what’s not for today’s email marketers and top performers.” FYI, if you missed our webinar earlier this week you can view the archived version here. Top Findings from the Marketo Email Marketing Benchmark

Why Your Business Should Maybe Stop Ignoring LinkedIn

While the product or service reviews and recommendations functionality totally “had me at hello,” LinkedIn is providing more and more company-based tools to help you recruit the right people, generate new business, promote your organization, and quite a bit more. Lisa Barone, from Outspoken Media, does a great job of providing a snapshot of many of these features and how your team can make the most of them. Enjoy. Why Your Business Should Maybe Stop Ignoring LinkedIn

Newsjacking: A New Approach to PR

Remember when thousands of birds fell from the sky over Arkansas in early January? Not long after, an online game developer our company worked with released the following:

“UTV True Games, an international publisher and developer of multi-player online games, has accepted responsibility for the mass bird and fish deaths in Arkansas and Louisiana, citing their internal game development team for testing their latest project, Faxion, that went awry on New Year’s Eve.”

“Our development team was working overtime in preparation for Closed Beta at the end of January, and one of our designers left for lunch without closing out the contagion spell in Hell,” said Creative Director of Faxion, Mike Madden. “We are very sorry and that designer has since been confined to a windowless conference room and forced to update documentation.”

There you have it – Newsjacking, in a nutshell. Love it. You can find the original release here. Or, if you’d rather read a bit about David Meerman Scott’s new book on the subject, Newsjacking: How to Inject Your Ideas into a Breaking News Story and Generate Tons of Media Coverage, check out the following interview with Scott and MarketingProfs’ Ann Handley. Newsjacking: A New Approach to PR.

How to Squash Expensive Lead Gen Tactics [Captain Inbound Video 3]

“What marketing shenanigans will the Sultan of Spam pull together next time?” No idea. However, I’ll be sure to tune-in and find out because this short video from HubSpot made laugh into an empty office twice in four minutes. A little Friday diversion is never a bad thing… How to Squash Expensive Lead Gen Tactics [Captain Inbound Video 3]

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