The task of recruiting millennials is a whole new game, and the days of flashy advertisements and smooth sales pitches are dead. Let’s be real – a college education is expensive. Prospective students need more than nice fliers and a holiday card in the mail to commit to your institution. Prospects want hard evidence that they will get their money’s worth if they choose to attend your university, and what better proof can you offer than your thriving current students?
As a business development lead, my job is to ask prospective clients questions and evaluate if we, as an agency, can help with their marketing efforts. I speak with small businesses and Fortune 100 companies and see my share of business strategies (or lack thereof). It still amazes me, however, how many times I learn that companies, regardless of size, are still not using a Client Relationship Management (CRM) tool.
Do you think you have SEO figured out? You probably do because you are a marketing genius, and already know everything there is to know about it. But guess what? Search has changed again.
According to Smart Insights, more than 20% of more than 2,300 marketers said that content marketing would give their business the biggest incremental uplift in leads and sales in 2017. But content marketing isn’t easily mastered, nor is it always easily implemented. What is this beast that marketers everywhere wring their hands over? And how can smart marketers tame that beast and get leads rolling in once and for all?
Traveling with work is both exciting and stressful. Your first business conference can be a true first glance into adulthood. Last year, I attended my first one. It was HubSpot’s INBOUND conference in Boston, and lucky for you, I took notes on how to survive the week. Check out my tips below to conquer your first INBOUND experience.
As traditional marketing methods seem to fall more and more by the wayside, it seems everyone these days is looking for the next hot trend in marketing. The digital world is moving so quickly that by the time most B2B marketers get with the current trends, the Next Big Thing has already come along. B2B marketers are tired of feeling left behind, but, at the same time, they wonder if the same trends driving the B2C market can really be effective in the B2B marketing world.
Even within traditional markets and traditional companies, a new idea can knock it out of the park. We began partnering with our client, Dow AgroSciences, two years ago. Dow AgroSciences is a subsidiary of the Dow Chemical Company and specializes in agricultural chemicals, seeds and biotechnology solutions.
Before you call me crazy or bring out sales and marketing professionals worldwide to blow up my twitter feed, let me explain! Lead scoring does not work unless you have a full marketing and technology stack to score lead activities correctly and a tightly aligned sales and marketing team to take action, providing timely feedback on lead interactions and lead quality. Now see, that statement was certainly too long for a blog title, and search engines only allow so many characters to show in titles anyway.
The relationship between sales and marketing is a critical one. Both teams (should) have one ultimate goal in mind: increase the bottom line of the organization. The two teams must work as a cohesive unit to fulfill that final, juicy goal of realizing the many benefits of a healthy, sustainable company.
If you’ve done the hard work to research and create several buyer personas, then you’ve laid a fantastic foundation for your content marketing. Many marketers think that having the personas is enough. They think that the content they create will naturally flow for each persona. And maybe it does. But putting on that persona hat and really thinking like your personas will help you create fabulousness that will draw prospects to your content like flies to honey.
Congratulations! You’re getting traffic to your content. Your numbers are up everywhere. Prospects are reading your emails and blog subscribers are happily lapping up your “free” material. You’re already winning a big chunk of the battle. But how do you get those eager beaver readers to start converting to actual leads? How do you get them to share their information with you so that you can nurture them through your well-crafted lead conversion funnel?
Often sales and marketing departments within companies operate completely separately with little communication or visibility into each others worlds. These silos ultimately cause an inefficient and ineffective process of generating qualified leads that sales teams can close fluidly. So instead of working against each other, here are three important ways inbound marketing drives sales and why sales and marketing should be working hand-in-hand!
