Marketing M.O.

Accessing Marketing Tools from Pre-built Projects

jsagar — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 15:28:24 +0000

When you’re starting out with Marketing M.O., you can preview the tools in the Browse Tools view. To interact with them, you must access them from a project. One option is to create a pre-built project. Step 1: Create your pre-built project Click on the New Project button on the homepage or in the main [...]

Evaluating Marketing M.O. During Your Free Trial

jsagar — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 17:19:15 +0000

Marketing M.O. is a marketing strategy and planning app. Use it to define marketing strategies, create campaign plans, measure marketing investments and design and manage marketing projects. To get feel for how it works during your free trial, try: Browsing the marketing tools: 30 subjects; 247 deliverables; 667 marketing tools Opening a pre-built marketing project to access [...]

Marketing M.O. Strategy and Planning App is Live

jsagar — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 14:40:59 +0000

Our new marketing strategy and planning app is now live. From the app, you can: Access pre-built marketing projects (with all the tasks and guidance already in the project) Browse through 665 guided marketing tools – over 1,000 pages of how-to content Download 144 programmed spreadsheets for all the complex marketing calculations Create detailed brand [...]

Beta Program Update

jsagar — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 15:57:09 +0000

Our beta program for our new marketing strategy and planning app is coming to a close. Thanks to everyone who has requested an invite! We capped our invite list at 1,000, so if you didn’t receive an invite, you’ll have an opportunity to preview the app with a free trial once we go live. We’ll [...]

Sales Development Reps

jsagar — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 22:51:09 +0000

Marketing automation requires more than just software; it requires people to interact with leads as they’re nurtured through the revenue generation process. But who should interact with them? Marketers? Expensive sales reps? In this final segment of Software Advice’s 3-part educational whiteboard session, Jon Miller, VP of Marketing at Marketo, talks about their Sales Development [...]

Distribution channels for services: Big ideas, big payoffs

Nancy Sagar — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 17:28:00 +0000

Last week James talked about the unglamorous but important topic of distribution channels. It’s one of the “4 Ps” (“placement”), but many marketers and smaller companies don’t think about it as often as they should. And it’s potentially the most important strategy in your arsenal. When you sell a physical product, it’s easy to keep [...]

Marketo as a marketing automation case study

jsagar — Wed, 04 May 2011 02:57:59 +0000

What’s a good way to understand how marketing automation works? Have a company explain how it successfully uses marketing automation software in its revenue generation process. Better yet, how about hearing it directly from a leading marketing automation vendor? Marketo does exactly that – explaining in the embedded video below how they use their own [...]

Revenue Performance Management

jsagar — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 23:58:38 +0000

The Internet has fundamentally changed sales and marketing, transferring power from sellers to buyers. We’ve all felt this obvious change, and our jobs are quite different than they were in 1994. Since buyers nowadays almost always research solutions prior to purchase, it’s imperative for marketers to make sure that they’re easily found on the web. [...]

Win mindshare to influence your market

jsagar — Sun, 20 Feb 2011 21:58:18 +0000

Years ago Peter Drucker, the father of business consulting, made a very profound observation: “Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two—and only two—basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs. Marketing is the distinguishing, unique function of the business.” Yet [...]

Marketing plan tips: How to get your marketing budget approved

Nancy Sagar — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 13:00:00 +0000

If you’re a marketing manager, you’re probably swamped with this year’s planning and budgeting process. Hopefully you find it exciting to create a marketing plan filled with new programs and campaigns to build your business in the year ahead. (If not, it may be time for a new job!) And as you know, it can [...]

How to calculate Cost of Goods

Jennifer Lueck — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 21:56:00 +0000

Marketing campaigns are investments. And like any smart investment, they need to be measured, monitored and compared to other investments to ensure you’re spending your money wisely. Return on investment (ROI) is a measure of the profit earned from each investment. Like the return you earn on your portfolio or bank account, it’s calculated as [...]

Positioning strategy for startups

jsagar — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 22:44:17 +0000

Over the weekend I read Steven Gary Blank’s The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products that Win. It’s a fabulous business book packed with a ton of valuable insights from the author’s 30 plus years of experience as an entrepreneur and a venture capitalist. I highly recommend that every entrepreneur running a [...]

Generating B2B sales leads

jsagar — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 14:41:18 +0000

If you’re a B2B marketer, the main focus of your job is probably generating leads for your sales team. Often B2B marketers of small to mid-size companies struggle to produce qualified sales leads because they don’t have a strong understanding of the nuances of selling B2B products and services. The more complex the sale, the [...]

How to improve your sales literature

John Austin — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 15:00:00 +0000

Do you know what your prospects do with your sales literature? Do they 1) read every last word, 2) skim and file it away, or 3) glance at it and file it away? If you answered #1, you have very special prospects! However, most people don’t actually read sales literature. A quick glance, a general [...]

Improve your SEO and SEM with a quality keyword list

jsagar — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 17:14:01 +0000

If you’re revamping your website or launching a SEM campaign, the quality of your keyword list will play a significant role in your overall success. It’s only logical, right? When you optimize and advertise using popular keywords and phrases that are a good fit for your site, you increase your chances of obtaining traffic and [...]

How to get the most from a print ad

Jennifer Lueck — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 14:00:00 +0000

Even though all the hype has been around social media and digital marketing for the last few years, print advertising is still effective and an important part of most B2B and B2C marketing campaigns. If you’re planning a campaign in a trade publication this summer or fall, here are a few tips to increase your [...]

The problem with marketing departments

Nancy Sagar — Wed, 19 May 2010 11:00:00 +0000

Fifty years ago, Peter Drucker said that “any business enterprise has two – and only these two – basic functions: innovation and marketing.” Yet even today, industry leaders are still lamenting that the marketing function is broken. Issue #1: Companies have vastly different definitions of “marketing.” To some it’s a creative function that develops slick [...]

Valuable marketing data

jsagar — Wed, 05 May 2010 18:51:21 +0000

Recently HubSpot reported their results from analyzing the marketing activity of over 2,500 businesses over the last two years. HubSpot offers a nice internet marketing application that allows companies to easily improve their search engine visibility through organic search, paid search and social media. I’ve embedded their presentation below. Things that stood out: Costs per [...]

How to develop your brand architecture

jsagar — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 15:58:45 +0000

Branding is a bit of a mystery for many small to mid-market (SMB) companies. There are many opinions and methods as to how best approach it. Top creative agencies have their own “proprietary” methods for crafting brand strategies. They have to, in order to position themselves against competing agencies. They use cool-looking graphics: circles, triangles, [...]

How to help your prospects buy

Jennifer Lueck — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 14:00:00 +0000

In my previous article, How to get the most from a print ad, I pointed out the importance of not inundating your sales force with unqualified leads. When you run a campaign, focus on driving profitable revenue, not just a long list of names for your database. It’s ROI, not just the response rate that [...]

How to develop content for your website

Jennifer Lueck — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 21:56:00 +0000

Revamping your company’s website can be challenging, especially if you’ve never tackled this type of project before. OK, honestly, if you’ve never done it before it can be a nightmare. But I’m trying to be helpful here …. These days, most business buyers and potential partners will review your site before they do business with [...]

The lost art of telemarketing

jsagar — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 20:14:28 +0000

The Internet has made B2B telemarketing nearly obsolete. Most marketers in this digital age don’t even consider using it in a campaign. Often that’s a mistake; phone calls can still be a very useful component in most B2B marketing campaigns. In the telemarketing hey days of the eighties and nineties (i.e., before email), many companies [...]

Marketing is strategy, not an afterthought

jsagar — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 16:12:52 +0000

The marketing function gets no respect. In B2B companies with less than $100 million in revenue, it’s the lowest rung of all the business functions on the ladder. Why? Because everyone thinks they understand marketing, yet few do it well. Actually, not quite everyone, but ask 10 non-marketer business people to define marketing and you’ll [...]

How to design an integrated marketing campaign

jsagar — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 20:24:44 +0000

The New Year brings a fresh start for many marketing departments. It’s a great time to review which campaigns worked well in 2009 and generate new ideas for 2010. For those small to midsize B2B companies that typically use only a single medium for marketing campaigns (or, worse yet, use only their sales team), here’s [...]

Create HD screencasts for sales tools

jsagar — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 19:33:10 +0000

Technology moves quickly. It’s time-consuming to stay on the front edge of the wave, and tricky to figure out creative ways to use it to improve corporate marketing results. I Tweet, but do I generate leads? How come the fans on my Facebook page never buy? It can be frustrating, and it can feel like [...]