What’s the not-so-secret but often neglected success factor in B2B direct marketing? Simply this: your in-house prospect list (house file) can be your most important asset in a successful direct marketing operation. And this is equally true whether you are communicating with prospects at their email addresses, physical addresses or telephone numbers. A house file can vastly decrease your cost of lead and new …
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Use Pull Marketing to Communicate with the SMB Market
Posted: May 15 2012 by Christopher Ryan on our GreatB2BMarketing.com blog in Pull Marketing
In his April 17, 2012 blog post at tellallmarketing.com, Ray Schultz addressed the issue of How Brands Are Failing Small Businesses. Schultz makes a number of important points in the post but one of the most interesting is the high cost of the disconnect that exists between how business owners learn and how marketers attempt to reach them. According to a major survey by Inc. magazine and Cargo, a B2B agency, here are the channels that business owners deem important ...
D-Day Marketing: The Land and Expand Strategy
Posted: May 4 2012 by Christopher Ryan on our GreatB2BMarketing.com blog in B2B Sales
Let’s start today’s post by acknowledging one important fact. It is usually much, much (did I say “much”) easier to up-sell an existing customer than it is to find a new customer. Yet, our marketing efforts are often focused on selling the whole enchilada to the customer on their first experience with us. This is often counterproductive, and why you may need to adopt the “land and expand” marketing strategy. This is where the “D-Day” analogy comes in. ...
Marketing Statements that Show Your Company is Out of Touch
Posted: Apr 23 2012 by Christopher Ryan on our GreatB2BMarketing.com blog in Business to Business Marketing
As B2B marketing outsource providers, we get to hear some interesting statements about marketing. Some of these statements indicate a philosophy that can be detrimental to achieving your marketing and sales objectives. If you hear any of your internal personnel saying any of the following, consider it a red flag and address the issue right away.Why should we spend any more time working on the website? That’s what our sales team is for. This is a very scary ...
When in Doubt – Start Marketing
Posted: Apr 13 2012 by Christopher Ryan on our GreatB2BMarketing.com blog in B2B Marketing
Many B2B marketers suffer from factors that prevent them from taking marketing action. This article discusses these factors and talks about the best strategies to take to build awareness and generate leads. ...
B2B Lead Management – 6 Best Practices
Posted: Apr 3 2012 by Christopher Ryan on our GreatB2BMarketing.com blog in B2B Leads
Companies that succeed in marketing not only generate a large quantity of sales leads but they also do a good job of qualifying and nurturing these leads to make sure they become customers. This article discusses six specific B2B lead management best practices. ...
Pull Marketing – a Valuable Strategy to Stay in Touch with Prospects
Posted: Mar 23 2012 by Christopher Ryan on our GreatB2BMarketing.com blog in B2B Marketing
Timing is an important consideration in B2B marketing. B2B companies can use proven lead nuturing, pull marketing and social media techniques to stay in touch with prospects until they are ready to engage in the sales process. ...
B2B Marketing Game Changing Ideas
Posted: Mar 15 2012 by Christopher Ryan on our GreatB2BMarketing.com blog in B2B Marketing
This article discusses seven B2B marketing strategies that can lead to major improvements in marketing or sales performance. ...
Measuring B2B Marketing Success
Posted: Mar 8 2012 by Christopher Ryan on our GreatB2BMarketing.com blog in B2B Marketing
It is not enough to execute good marketing programs - you also need to know the measurement criteria that define marketing success. This article discusses six marketing measurement categories. ...
A Formula for B2B Marketing Success
Posted: Mar 1 2012 by Christopher Ryan on our GreatB2BMarketing.com blog in Marketing Formula
This article discusses a specific formula for B2B marketing success. Frequency and impact are covered as imporant elements of marketing strategy as well as talking to your prospects when they are in a receptive mindset. ...
Content Marketing – Quality vs. Quantity
Posted: Feb 23 2012 by Christopher Ryan on our GreatB2BMarketing.com blog in Content
Marketing content is an important component of effective B2B marketing. Quality and quantity are both important attributes of good online marketing content. This article discusses the miminum quality and quantity standards for content marketing. ...
Should You Use a Marketing Consulting Firm? by Christopher Ryan
I was doing a talk about branding and positioning to the Peak Venture Group last week and was asked an intriguing question from a technology start-up CEO: Should I hire an in-house chief marketing officer (CMO) or outsource this role? Here is a rough synopsis of the answer I gave this gentleman. Note that my …
Salespeople: Are they Dinosaurs or Something Else? – by Christopher Ryan
I read an interesting discussion on LinkedIn titled: How soon will the internet turn your salespeople into dinosaurs? Not surprisingly, this discussion generated a lot of comments – 132 to date. Some agreed that sales reps are an endangered species while others took the opposite approach, maintaining that sales professionals are essential to the success …
Do You Need a Coach to Be Successful in B2B Marketing? – by Christopher Ryan
I read a posting by Patrick McClure at the Sales Lead Management website titled The First Fundamental of Success: Get a Coach. McClure points out that every Olympic athlete has a coach and this is one of the reasons why they are able to obtain such high levels of performance. So how does coaching apply …
Push Marketing vs. Pull Marketing by Christopher Ryan
I am a marketer by trade but as a consumer, I get as annoyed as anyone by the persistent and unrelenting intrusiveness of push marketing techniques. As hard as we try to get away from unwanted promotions (TiVo, Sirius Radio, cable, etc.), marketers find new ways to track us down and share their messages with us, …
Is the B2B Marketing Services Industry Broken? – by Christopher Ryan
I just read an interesting article at Hubspot.com titled Is the Marketing Services Industry Broken? The article makes a rational case that services firms are failing to provide good value to their clients in many important ways. And while I believe many of these types of generalizations are tough to justify, there is indeed some truth in the …
Pricing Strategies in B2B Marketing
There is no magic bullet in pricing. However, we can all agree that maximizing our value to customers is a very good thing for both the top line and bottom line. I happened to attend a very good presentation on this subject at the Inverness Group meeting in Denver. The speaker was Jonathan Bein, Managing …
Nine Questions to Develop Your B2B Branding Strategy
The first step in developing a branding and positioning strategy is to determine your starting point through a series of nine questions. The first question is: What is the scope of your branding problem—is it to position an entire organization or simply to position a product or series of products?
Bridging the Gap Between B2B Marketing and Sales by Christopher Ryan
If you are a marketing manager at a company that uses direct sales representatives, these people can be either your best friends or worst nightmare. Chances are they are somewhere in between, but the point is they can make your life easier, or they can be a constant source of irritation. In fact, careers can …
