4 Initial Steps Toward Effective B2B Mobile Marketing

Technology companies and marketing gurus have been touting mobile as the next big marketing thing for a while now. In fact, hum and hype around mobile marketing have reached a point where corporate marketers can hardly go a day without a new study or webinar invitation suggesting you’re woefully behind the curve if you’re not already well down the road with a “mobile strategy.”

Then again, for every statistic that says mobile devices are today’s happening marketing medium, you needn’t search far to find another which suggests mobile marketing’s momentum might be overstated.

Online Marketing News: Content Marketing for B2B, Engage Your Audience, Twitter Bot Seems Human, Facebook Knows What’s Best, Watch The Sarcasm

Content Marketing in B2B

exploreB2B recently partnered with Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs to creat this infographic which covers elements of why, what, where, and how of B2B Content Marketing that are necessary to execute on a successful campaign.

Featured TopRank Team Story

Shawna Kenyon – How to Build – and Keep – an Engaged Audience
For those of us creating content on a regular basis it is important to understand how best to build and keep and audience.  Many companies find themselves asking: with so much content online how do we fit in, and how do we differentiate ourselves from the competition? Gripping headlines, to the point copy, and promotion are just a few of the tips included in this article.  Via Mashable.

Knowledge is Power: 5 Reasons You Have to Know More to Grow More

The reasons for knowing customers well in a B2B sales sense should be self-explanatory, but sometimes these reasons become lost among numerous other sales concerns. However, neglecting efforts to get to know customers better can hamper all other marketing strategies. There are five key reasons businesses need to be more intelligible about their customers:

4 Ways B2B Marketers Can Grow Their Retargeting List Size

Retargeting (also called remarketing) is the act of serving display advertisements to users who have viewed specific pages on your web site as they browse other sites across display networks on the web.  It is an extremely effective and valuable method for interacting with your customer base.

So why aren’t more B2B advertisers utilizing it?

Problem: You are a specialized consulting firm and your site only averages about 10,000 unique visitors every month.

Improving B2B sales productivity requires designed interventions

Saavy sales managers constantly hunt for places where a little coaching can have a big impact on sales performance. The right metrics can function like coaching radar. Saavy sales coaches are just like saavy sports coaches. They use radar-like data to affect the outcome of games by how they teach and the learning they enable.

From what we’re seeing, neither metrics nor coaching, by themselves, are any guarantee sales performance will improve. It takes more. It takes the kind of designed interventions that it takes to improve habits of any form. Interventions that promote the courage and curiosity to try new approaches.

How to Align Sales and Marketing

Getting B2B Sales and Marketing Departments To Work Together to Increase Leads

Most business-to-business or B2B companies don’t want to admit this, but their sales and marketing departments are at odds. In the worse case scenarios, the company isn’t even aware of the problem. With the B2B sales and marketing teams each sending out conflicting messages, this lack of cohesion makes it difficult to generate B2B leads and sales. Getting both departments to see themselves as allies instead of rivals improves the company’s bottom line.

Selling to a Buyer's Market

Local, national and global economies all have their ups and downs. When the economies that affect you are doing well, it usually results in a seller's market – in other words, demand is high, so it's relatively easy to sell your product. When your economy is low, though, look out – you're now in a buyer's market, with low demand and many competitors trying to sell to your prospects.

B2B Social Media Assessment: How Do Your Efforts Stack Up?

More and more B2B companies are recognizing the power of social media in terms of building community, increasing thought leadership, and generating leads. With over 800 million active users on Facebook, more than 300 million tweets sent daily, and one hour of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, it’s easy to get carried away and let everything just pass you by. The truth is, B2B companies can’t afford to overlook a solid social media strategy (which is why we have assembled a group of biggest and brightest minds in social media including Jay Baer, Tim Washer, Ekaterina Walter, Mike Sansone, and Nate Riggs for a series on the Labs site).  In case you have missed it, here are the articles to date:

Amazon Launches B2B Business

As the web has grown and more B2B companies have expanded their online presences, they have had to deal with the notion of Amazon as a competitor. Not in the normal sense of competition for business, but competition for attention. B2B companies have also had to contend with the Amazon experience. No matter what your business, as soon as you migrate it to the web, your customers expect an experience like they get at Amazon. This means easy navigation, filtered browsing, robust search, recommended products, customer reviews, simple checkout and reliable shipping.