With this blog, we want to provide our view on innovations shaping the main areas of our business focus – Advancement; B2B Marketing; and Technology Support. The aim is to not simply rehash what is being echoed ad nauseam on the web. Instead, we want to provide original, occasionally contrarian, but always thought provoking view - that we hope will be of value.
In recent years, businesses of all sizes have made concerted efforts to build communities on Social Media. Most have succeeded in creating vibrant online communities on Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social media platforms. Amazon Web Services Community on LinkedIn, for example, has close to 50,000 members. Microsoft, has 20,000 followers of Microsoft Azure & Microsoft Cloud community. These communities can be quite effective in building brand or product awareness, but do very little to drive top-line sales growth. Why is that? And what can be done to help drive revenues from this presence?
See More Posted by Lesterusa.comThat there is a major problem with quality of marketing databases is now a cliché. Marketing bloggers have quoted ad nauseam the Sirius Decision study claiming that “25 % of the average B2B marketer’s database is inaccurate”. It is not hard to conclude that poor quality data are a huge drain on customer acquisition and retention campaigns in terms of dollars and missed opportunities. What gets glossed over though, and swept under the rug, is the inadequacy of the remedies to this data quality problem. The current solutions to fixing B2B marketing data quality are incomplete and for the most part ineffective. Here is why and what you can do about it.
See More Posted by Lesterusa.comHere are some startling facts regarding the relentless flux and churn in US employment. On average, according to a 2015 U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Survey, people born during the latter years of baby-boom generation, held on average 11.7 jobs from age 18 to 48. Employment continuity, in new jobs taken, as one grows older, is alarmingly low. Of the total new jobs started by 40 to 48 year olds, 32 percent ended in less than a year.
See More Posted by Lesterusa.comThe idea behind Account Based Marketing (ABM), though not revolutionary, is a simple and powerful one. You focus marketing on a selected set of Accounts (businesses). These are the ones you want to penetrate to grow sales. And ABM will target these businesses to generate leads within those Accounts. This way marketing can give sales leads they want within Accounts they are responsible for.
See More Posted by Lesterusa.comThe ABM process can be broken down into two phases. The first phase is about goal setting, account selection, prospect (influencers, decision makers) discovery, and holistic contact profile compilation. The second phase is about activating ABM by developing a content strategy, creating compelling content, using multiple channels to seed content, and generating interactions. We covered the first phase of the ABM process in a prior blog. Here we will cover the second phase of the ABM process.
See More Posted by Lesterusa.comThe ABM process can be broken down into two phases. The first phase is about goal setting, account selection, prospect (influencers, decision makers) discovery, and holistic contact profile compilation. The second phase is about activating ABM by developing a content strategy, creating compelling content, using multiple channels to seed content, and generating interactions. We covered the first phase of the ABM process in a prior blog. Here we will cover the second phase of the ABM process.
See More Posted by Lesterusa.comThere is a cataclysmic shift underway in the way B2B solutions are being purchased today. Buyers are doing most of the pre-purchase homework by themselves, with very little involvement of suppliers. According to a CEB survey, sponsored by Google, more than 57 percent of the purchase process is completed without any discussion with supplier. Using the internet, buyers are finding solution providers, researching solutions, setting requirements, short-listing vendors – and are then contacting suppliers.
See More Posted by Lesterusa.comJust when marketers were getting the hang of multi-channel marketing, here comes omni-channel marketing - the industry's newest Holy Grail."Retailers Share their Omni-Channel Experiments", blogs Wall Street Journal. "7 Inspiring Examples of Omni-Channel" thunders HubSpot. But what exactly is omni-channel marketing? And is it something that marketers need to adopt?
See More Posted by Lesterusa.comGuy Kawasaki, marketing guru and chief evangelist at Apple, once famously said "if you have more money than brains, you should focus on outbound marketing. If you have more brains than money, you should focus on inbound marketing". But is Inbound Marketing being over hyped? And how easy it is to execute? Outbound marketing, for sure, has flaws. Direct mail, email, telemarketing, and other outbound techniques are intrusive and interruptive. Prospects feel violated by unsolicited messages from advertisers. This lowers the response rates which increases costs. Marketers have been dulled into accepting this state of affairs. A direct marketing campaign – even one with just a few percent response rate – is often considered a success.
See More Posted by Lesterusa.comFocus marketing, improve response rates, optimize marketing expenses, and generate highly targeted leads with Account Based Marketing.
Enrich CRM with Social Media Intelligence and reverse data quality decay
Unleash the power of Social Media channels for effective B2B marketing for event marketing, subscription management, lead generation, and other such campaigns.
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