INSIGHTS

Today, mar­ket­ing is more than sim­ply about doing some com­mu­ni­ca­tions and throw­ing leads over the wall to sales. It is a dis­ci­pline that touches every part of the sales cycle – attract­ing new cus­tomers, mak­ing them sales-ready, help­ing close the deal, con­vert­ing new cus­tomers into advo­cates, deliv­er­ing long-term repeat sales.

Fun­da­men­tally, this means the mar­ket­ing sales cycle is now both longer and more com­plex than ever before. It requires a more holis­tic view of how to take some­one from cold prospect to active evan­ge­list. And it demands that mar­keters must deploy a wider range of strate­gies and tac­tics – under­stand­ing what to use and when to use it to deliver the best results.

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The screen on the aver­age Black­Berry mea­sures just 60mm across. Yet for many of today’s B2B buy­ers, this is the main source they have for infor­ma­tion about the prod­ucts and ser­vices they will buy in the com­ing year. More than this, it is also the main way that they will engage in the var­i­ous com­mu­ni­ties that influ­ence their buy­ing deci­sions. It’s not sur­pris­ing then that B2B mar­keters should be wrestling with how to make the most of mobile social media.

The phe­nom­e­nal suc­cess of social net­works can be trans­ferred directly to mobile, enabling cus­tomers and prospects around the clock access to an array of social net­work­ing ser­vices.

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Pri­vacy is a big issue right across the inter­net. As we’ve all seen, com­pa­nies that fail to take users’ pri­vacy seri­ously do so at their peril.

While many of us are well versed in the cur­rent rules around opt-in for emails and the man­age­ment of PII data, there is now a new set of Euro­pean reg­u­la­tions every­one in mar­ket­ing needs to be aware of. These con­cern the use of cook­ies to iden­tify, track and retar­get cus­tomers. And they will change the way you run your campaigns.

In this new insight paper, we take a look at what the reg­u­la­tions require and what you will need to do to com­ply.

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Social media is the topic of the moment for many mar­keters. It seems you can’t move for blog posts telling you why you MUST get engaged right now. Half of this year’s con­fer­ences have a social media focus (the other half include ses­sions on get­ting more from Twit­ter or cre­at­ing Face­book com­mu­ni­ties). And social media experts are mul­ti­ply­ing faster than rab­bits in Spring.

No one is deny­ing that social media is a pow­er­ful new chan­nel for com­mu­ni­cat­ing with cus­tomers and prospects. But just how powerful?

This white paper takes a look at a wide range of cur­rent research into B2B social media, it exam­ines:

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Demand gen­er­a­tion is the num­ber one focus of an ever-increasing num­ber of mar­keters. Faced by ever higher quar­terly tar­gets, they need to deliver pre­dictable results from their activ­ity. But, all too often, the tra­di­tional six week B2B cam­paign is sim­ply fail­ing to deliver.

In this white paper we explode the myth of the tra­di­tional sales fun­nel. We show how it is now time to move to a per­pet­ual trigger-based approach. One recog­nis­ing that dif­fer­ent cus­tomers will need dif­fer­ent infor­ma­tion at dif­fer­ent stages.

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The web plays a cen­tral role in every­thing we do in mar­ket­ing today. But are you really get­ting the most you can out of it? In this video, we’ll take you through how you can deliver bet­ter results and greater ROI. We focus on where you should invest and where you should pro­ceed with cau­tion. And we high­light how impor­tant it is to think beyond the ini­tial click.

There are many, many cus­tomer seg­men­ta­tions in the world of mar­ket­ing. Typ­i­cally, these involve a chunk of research to deter­mine a set of buyer arche­types. These are often then given names such as ‘big man on cam­pus’, ‘harassed MD’ and ‘dig­i­tal refusenik’.

As an approach, they can be pretty help­ful. They pro­vide a short­hand way of look­ing at an audi­ence – one which enables us to form more tar­geted strate­gies that speak to the real needs of our key targets.

The prob­lem, how­ever, is that typ­i­cally they are sim­ply made up.

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