I recently read a couple of articles about marketing during a downturn. Both urged businesses to resist the natural temptation to cut marketing during this, or any, crisis. They got me thinking about what marketing should be doing to prepare the business for the eventuality that things recover.
The number one challenge in demand generation is persuading prospective buyers to give you their contact information. Without it, they remain anonymous visitors to your website, leaving sales without the ability to follow up and convert them to an opportunity.
They say hindsight is 20/20 and while it may be helpful to look back at 2019, it’s more productive to plan ahead. Now is a great time to create a marketing program for 2020 that will improve the quality of your leads, increase conversions and grow sales revenue.
Why is it so difficult to accurately identify the average B2B lead conversion rate? One significant reason is that what constitutes a “lead” is subjective and variable. For example, is a lead the contact details from someone who downloaded a white paper? Or is it those contact details plus criteria like company size or job title that provide access to a higher value asset?
The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus is credited with saying, “There is nothing permanent except change.” This adage is certainly true centuries later, especially with regard to technology and its impact on today’s sales and marketing organizations.
B2B marketing advice can be found everywhere, but some of it is outdated and misguided when it comes to achieving its most important goal -- closing the sale. Today’s B2B marketing approach requires attention to three critical certainties in order to improve sales revenue.
Fundamentals, in most competitive endeavors, are what we must first learn and master in order to perform well. They provide us with confidence in setting basic direction and a stable foundation when the going gets rough. In marketing, sound fundamentals help set strategic direction, guide tactical plans and provide benchmarks for determining execution and performance.
The other day I caught a reference on an episode of Mad Men to the Four P’s. The episode was set in the early 1970’s, which means Phil Kotler’s game-changing concept of the Four P’s (product, price, placement, and promotion) had just recently been published in his book, Marketing Management: Analysis, Planning, and Control.
Recently I asked my blog readers to share opinions about the great "quality vs. volume" debate. That is, if you had your choice between a high volume of leads and high-quality leads, which would you prefer? Here's the feedback I received from readers -- 71% chose quality, while 29% chose volume.
