Couch & Associates is a proud gold sponsor of this year’s Online Marketing Summit (OMS), taking place February 6-10 in San Diego, CA. OMS will be a conference dedicated to sharing ideas, hearing expert practitioners and learning best practices in the areas of: Social Media, Demand Generation, Search, Analytics, Mobile Integrated Marketing and more. The event includes hands-on training workshops, one-on-one personalized labs, thought-leadership presentations and peer-to-peer collaborations. Read about the 6 reasons why marketers around the world attend OMS.
All posts tagged B2B Marketing
5 Criteria for Developing an Effective Content Roadmap
1. Execution
Content marketing champions often get stuck at the planning stages: What type of content are we going to disseminate? What should we do with the content after it has been created? How is the content going to be defined in terms of the solutions it will provide for our prospects? What channels should be used for distribution; and finally, do we offer publications for free or charge prospects for access?
For a properly executed content roadmap, strategic content marketers have to evaluate each step of the sales cycle as well as the buying behavior of prospects in order to ensure that publications are delivered and contain authoritative information. The worst thing that can be done is when content champions leave things to chance or “understanding” hoping that consumers will “get” what actions they need to take.
The “Contact Washing Machine”: The Effort to Combat Bad Data
Food for thought:
- It takes $1 to verify a record when it is in your database
- It takes $10 to cleanse that record for accuracy, and;
- It can cost you up to $100 if you neglect to take the necessary steps to ensure that your contact information is accurate.
5 Ways to Effectively Manage Leads
1. Respond to Leads According to where they are in the Sales Process
Lead scoring is essential to the lead management process. The better understanding we have of the nature of a lead in terms of how sales-ready it is or how ‘hot’ it may be, the better does our decision-making process become. When we know that a lead hasn’t met a particular set of criteria, we know that it is still ‘warm’ and needs more marketing-related activities in order to be ready to be passed off to sales. Leads are very delicate when it comes to engagement, and sophisticated marketers know and value this most. Brash or out of turn action can cause negative effects in the short- and long-term. It is important to respect each lead in the buying cycle and respond accordingly.
Data Normalization: Improving Sales Funnel Performance by Maintaining Accurate Contact Profiles
In the effort to maintain a healthy sales funnel and a lead scoring process that further strengthens and aligns sales and marketing, what often gets neglected is the need to maintain a clean database. When marketing neglects to focus on maintaining accurate contact information, it’s actually working against its very own effort.
Consider this: the amount of data in a B2B organization typically doubles every 12-18 months, and the number of critical errors associated with contact profiles is estimated to be at 10%-25%. Without a viable data strategy, companies can expect to lose up to 25% of leads as they pass from the inquiry stage to the marketing-qualified stage in the funnel. The problem here is that marketers often spend a significant amount of time and effort on generating demand. Yet without an accurate database, marketing efforts to increase lead scores actually lead to a drop-off at each subsequent stage.
Chad: Got you - thx!...
Mike MacFarlane: Hey Chad,
In the past I have not used this method, but you could easi...
Mr.H: Love it!...
