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Digest... #1: Implement a “Top of the Funnel” Paid Search Strategy #2: Align Content and Offerings with Progressions within the Sales Cycle #3: Drive Action by Making the Experience Personalized & Relating with Each Prospect #4: Study Common Behaviors and Make Changes Accordingly #5: Invest in a Marketing Automation Platform or Team to Nurture Leads #6: Maintain a Close and Transparent Relationship with Your Sales Team
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![[FREE] The Guide to Creating Content for Every Stage of the Funnel - BizReport | The MarTech Digest | Scoop.it](https://img.scoop.it/tfnpfDaiFtPldzw74NWsfnCypPtktPfVAn033ftACFA=)
"Eventually, you’ll want to move your content strategy past awareness-driven content creation and start converting leads. To show meaningful content ROI, you must have a framework in place to create a diverse array of custom content, and this free eBook will give you the tools and strategy to get started." ► Receive a FREE daily summary of The Marketing Technology Alert ◄
Marteq's insight:
More content-by-funnel. Behind an email address reg form.
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![New Data Exposes the Best and Worst Customer Conversion Channels [Infographic] - HubSpot | The MarTech Digest | Scoop.it](https://img.scoop.it/y0ctjvxSaoq001P926bM5fL6dadsvGA8m9WNoVsbzkY=)
Check out the newest data on the most and least effective channels for customer conversion. ► Receive a FREE daily summary of The Marketing Technology Alert ◄
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Marteq's insight:
It's one way to look at it. Note the arrows where the buyer goes in and out of the funnel. My take: forget the funnel, and focus on defining the buyer's journey x persona.
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Digest... Four ways to ramp up your mid-funnel content offerings for maximum impact: 1. Leverage E-Books Create a unique e-book for each of your audience segments: it should provide sufficient value for what your downloader paid for it (typically the right for you to contact him/her again).
2. Reprocess Your Wide-Funnel Content A blog post created a year ago to get buzz, search visibility, and generate awareness might be attracting no hits right now, but that doesn't mean that it's worthless. Such an article - when combined with other old articles written on the same theme - might provide enough heft for a credible mid-funnel content item such as an e-book.
3. Use SlideShare This platform (with 60 million monthly users) is an ideal platform for showcasing your mid-funnel content.
4. Consider Video Video is an excellent medium for in-depth explanations of complex subjects. Because it’s a sequential medium, it’s uniquely suited for "step-by-step" instruction.
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Marteq's insight:
MOFU content has to be more substantive than TOFU, and these formats make sense. Slideshare: most underused tactic!
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From
moz
Marketing efforts at the top of the funnel, like PR and content marketing, are notoriously hard to measure in terms of their value. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand offers three ways you can perform that measurement, as well as some perspective about "serendipitous marketing." ► Receive a FREE daily summary of The Marketing Technology Alert ◄
Marteq's insight:
Click through for the 9+ minutes of video. Straightforward stuff, but TOFU, as an individually measured stage, can only rely on the softer metrics, e.g., traffic, without knowing the impact on true business metrics. Without that linkage, it's a waste of time.
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![B2B Sales Benchmark Research Finds Some Pipeline Surprises [INFOGRAPHIC] - Salesforce | The MarTech Digest | Scoop.it](https://img.scoop.it/xB6NjErydyWGuXpQM2TS0fL6dadsvGA8m9WNoVsbzkY=)
Marteq's insight:
Missing: the quantity of opportunities, or the relative percentage to each other. I don't doubt the percentages, but the number of email campaign leads usually far exceed the number of social leads.
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Based on the latest round of 436 interviews in seven countries, here are the facts: ► Receive a FREE daily summary of The Marketing Technology Alert ◄
Marteq's insight:
And more evidence that points to the unpredictable buyer's journey.
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Digest... The San Mateo, Calif.-based company, founded in 2010 by Salesforce veterans, offers a Marketing Performance Management solution that runs on the Salesforce1 Platform. The key idea, the company said, is to use a company’s data in Salesforce to better determine which marketing campaigns have the greatest impact on revenue, connecting marketing spend with sales results to assess return-on-investment (ROI).
“A lot of marketing folks like [the idea of a sales funnel],” Full Circle CEO and cofounder Bonnie Crater pointed out, and Full Circle is built to track “what goes in [the funnel], what goes out, and everything in between.” This includes sales volume, sales cycle velocity, and conversion rate, she said, “stage by stage.”
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Marteq's insight:
Now this is something exciting to review!
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Rather than thinking in circles, maybe you should start thinking in a straight line. Sure, we want our buyers to come right back for more, but when they do, will they start back at the beginning? No, and that’s why they don’t need to be funneled through the awareness stage again. If you’re not providing what they need, they may find it on your competitor’s website. It’s crucial to kick this cycle to the curb. ► Receive a FREE daily summary of The Marketing Technology Alert ◄
Marteq's insight:
The best way to tackle this effort is with a simple grid that allows you to map content to stage. Search the tags "buyer's journey" and "funnel" for more information on mapping and what content goes where.
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Becky Carr, CMO at CenturyLink Technology Solutions, discusses the rebranding of Savvis into CTS and how she is driving demand for the technology company.
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Marteq's insight:
Summary: (1) A customer journey is mapped, and based on behavior, the visitor is slotted in the appropriate place in the journey and delivered the right content at the right time; (2) the analytics are sharp. So the moral of the story: know your personas, know your potential journeys, map and deliver content accordingly.
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Raising brand awareness, building trust, establishing credibility, and ultimately driving revenue, that’s what the top of the funnel is all about. It can be a marketer’s “Paradise City”, but without focus, it can quickly become overwhelming. The one-two punch of social media and content marketing is a vital part of any successful integrated marketing approach. If you are not pairing these two powerhouses together then you are simply missing opportunities for your business.
Marteq's insight:
FYI.
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Digest... What Are Marketers’ Goals at the Top of the Funnel? There are two main goals at this stage: >> Drive brand awareness >> Generate leads
What Are the Key Elements of Top-of-Funnel Content? Because it’s meant to attract a larger audience interested in high-level topics associated with your brand, top-of-funnel content is both attention-grabbing, easily consumable, and useful to your buyers. Top-of-funnel content tends to be: >> Engaging >> Buyer-centric >> Snackable >> Visual
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Marteq's insight:
And it is additionally parsed by persona. Now that those individual components and multiply it by 3 (TOFU, MOFU, BOFU), and you've got a ton of work to get done.
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Digest... Here are five new ways to impact the evolving B2B buyer’s journey:
Step 1: New Audience Targeting. Spending efficiently to reach your target prospects early in the buy process is now within reach of any B2B marketer. Fast-evolving channels like display and social advertising enable precision targeting. In B2B, that means being able to narrow your spend against the business profiles that matter.
Step 2: Anonymous Audience Nurturing. Now that you’re investing wisely to reach the right audiences early in the buy process, and hopefully starting to drive them to your website and landing pages, the key is to give them a great reason to provide their email address by providing helpful content. Since 95% of your website visitors will leave before converting, nurturing them through display and social advertising is the way to bring them back.
Step 3: Known Prospect Nurturing. Once you have people filling out your web forms, your marketing automation system can take the hand-off and kick off email nurturing. But, the key is to break out of the inbox. Since 80 percent of your known leads are not opening your email (on a GREAT day), you need to apply a multi-channel nurturing approach including email, social, and display. This is how you “wake up” your leads database wherever they go online, and accelerate more of them to MQL status and into pipeline.
Step 4: Customer Education & Upsell. You’re now closing more business with the leads you’ve captured. Yet, a huge opportunity still remains as you look to master your full demand cycle. Specifically, applying the same nurturing rigor that you’re using to educate prospects to your existing customers to grow the business.
Step 5: Optimized Targeting, Message & Content. Closing the demand cycle loop requires getting a handle on all of your valuable marketing data. Our teams are inundated with program performance data, web analytics data, pipeline data, and all forms of transactional prospects and customer data that we can use to optimize how we target our programs, creative and content. But the sheer volume and range of data can be paralyzing. The key is to always be making forward progress.
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Marteq's insight:
The beauty of this post: it acts as a roadmap for the B2B marketer to create his/her own 5 steps. Another nice find.
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![How Content Is Changing And What Marketers Need To Know [Survey Data] - Marketing Land | The MarTech Digest | Scoop.it](https://img.scoop.it/HjQn_5HQVkF82khWDTy2lPL6dadsvGA8m9WNoVsbzkY=)
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Marteq's insight:
Nice to see how marketers are responding to the buyer's changing search process.
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![What influences purchase of your product or service? [Infographic] - Smart Insights Digital Marketing Advice | The MarTech Digest | Scoop.it](https://img.scoop.it/qoPKya2bDY8DJfQVPUR9f_L6dadsvGA8m9WNoVsbzkY=)
Understanding your customer buying decision journey Getting cut through is a key challenge for marketers today since there are so many online influences on. Marketing topic(s):Consumer buying behaviour. Advice by Danyl Bosomworth. __________________ ► Receive a FREE daily summary of The Marketing Technology Alert directly to your inbox. To subscribe, please go to http://ineomarketing.com/About_The_MAR_Sub.html (your privacy is protected).
massimo scalzo's curator insight,
August 16, 2014 12:24 PM
That's true, that's the influencing circle in my view!
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Digest... Their assumption is that the customer in a position to buy a six- or seven-figure (or larger) piece of equipment or service is going to be deeply experienced and already know who the main providers are, and that’s who they're going to request bids from. The evidence suggests otherwise.
According to IDG Connect, 58% of B2B IT buyers use search during the buying process. What are those people searching for?
They typically consume seven or eight pieces of content while researching. Early in the buying process they’re often doing broad industry searches and then they focus in more on solutions and ultimately research on particular, short-list vendors.
The most advanced companies aren’t just using PPC ads but they’re also creating content that addresses the concerns of each member of the buying team during each stage of the process.
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Marteq's insight:
We know that buyers come into the sales funnel already armed with information. And we know that buyers find this information from search. So what is needed? Using PPC to deliver a wide range of information to assist the buyer.
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From
visual
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Digest... It’s time we treat our our customers and prospects as the financial assets/instruments they really represent. Each has a probable outcome and risks that need to be accounted and managed for in the context of our target for a return on investment. And the right way to manage financial assets is through portfolio management frameworks.
Sales, finance, and marketing leaders are more ready than ever before to accept that a simplistic funnel doesn’t work. They need more comprehensive representation of their potential and existing revenue assets. Imagine a world where you get early warning signals about the risks in your pipeline (portfolio) so you reallocate and re-balance your resources (capital) to focus on the right deals (investments) to improve your chances of hitting your goals (your desired rate of return).
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Marteq's insight:
Funnels are our futile attempts to be proactive, i.e., be prepared to do X if at Stage A. I think this article points out the value of reactive, i.e., react to the moment using the tools at your disposal (right content at the right time). If true, then you have to have the tools ready to go at a moment's notice.
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Excerpt... Learn the rules of this new game. Study your prospect’s every move and understand what their learning preferences are. Get comfortable with uncertainty and assume you have near zero control of his journey. Instead, make sure you are ready when THEY are ready. Use all the intelligence you have at your fingertips and be on constant alert, having your valuable commercial insights within reach and full view of your prospect as they chart their own path at their own speed. And make sure you honor their time by giving them a soft surround of genuinely valuable content and knowledge that they can consume as they need it and when they need it. When it’s time for them to bring their journey to a close they may just give you an opportunity to meet the needs that you’ve managed to help shape over time.
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Marteq's insight:
I love the phrase "a soft surround of genuinely valuable content." And as I often say: be at the right place at the right time with the right content.
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65% of executives responding to a new survey from gyro and The Fortune Group say that subjective factors that can’t be quantified make a difference when evaluating competing proposals. __________________ ► Receive a FREE daily summary of The Marketing Technology Alert directly to your inbox. To subscribe, please go to http://ineomarketing.com/About_The_MAR_Sub.html (your privacy is protected).
Marteq's insight:
To download the executive summary, visit gyro.com/onlyhuman.
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Digest... 1. Program Focus (Top graphic) With the program focus funnel, especially if you are leveraging marketing automation, you are trying to map back specific programs and content to specific personas in the specific stages of this funnel.
2. Operations Focus (Middle graphic) As you can see with the operations focus funnel, the considerations change. The focus is on processes, not programs. Some key processes to note with this funnel are fast tracking, lead scoring, qualification stages, and lead recycling. No matter how you set up your operational funnel, you want to have a fast track path to sales. The sales team does not want to feel that qualified leads are being held up in Marketing. Lead scoring is simple to set up in marketing automation but hard to master. The same white paper could be downloaded by someone just collecting information or someone ready to close. How do you score it? Keep revisiting and adjusting your lead scoring on at least a quarterly basis.
3. Buyer’s Focus (Bottom graphic) Some look at the above graphic and call it a buyer’s journey. It is—but it is a buyer’s journey through the funnel. Too many marketers overlook these distinct buyer’s actions as they plan campaigns and programs through the funnel. You must map specific content to these specific actions if you want to see specific results. The content that you would send out at the “Committing to change” stage should be different than that content going out at the “Justifying the decision” stage. Always take a moment and consider the buyer’s journey through the funnel as you plan and create your marketing initiatives.
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Marteq's insight:
At the end of the day, it's about having the right content to the right people at the right time.
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Digest... 1. Content matters throughout the entire B2B buyer's journey Sales needs to focus on closing, not explaining. Potential customers are self-educated about products and services, and they contact salespeople only after defining their requirements on their own, having already made most of their decisions.
Tweets lead to paragraphs, paragraphs lead to posts, and then posts lead to longer articles and whitepapers. As the funnel narrows, articles, case studies, and brochures integrate with direct responses and conversations. Thought-leadership content, such as whitepapers, supports serious consideration and purchase decisions. Ideally, all this content is premeditated, coordinated, and reinforces an effective messaging theme.
Effective B2B social content starts and ends with thought leadership. All those tweets, posts, and articles must have a foundation to be meaningful. To produce it, you must have genuine subject-matter experts in tune with the challenges that real customers face, and equipped with thoughtful opinions about how to best address those very real customer challenges.
4. Remember, the goal is to sell Ultimately, Marketing has one mission: make sales easy. Sure, awareness campaigns are critical for getting prospects to notice and to become curious about your product or service; but, unless your content informs prospects and leads them toward the point of purchase, some part of your strategy is likely broken, missing, or muted.
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Marteq's insight:
Got it wrong. If there's anything we've learned, its that people meander in and out, up and down through the sales pipeline, and that you have to have the right content available for them to review. Think of it this way: all sales funnels are personalized.
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![The Best Content Types for Each Stage of the B2B Sales Cycle [Infographic] - Profs | The MarTech Digest | Scoop.it](https://img.scoop.it/kQ3GE_qD5hJMNSvyWIbAiPL6dadsvGA8m9WNoVsbzkY=)
![The Real Truth about Your Sales Funnel [Infographic] - B2B Infographics | The MarTech Digest | Scoop.it](https://img.scoop.it/n6hxVoEzPxDGRaYbs0Xz8vL6dadsvGA8m9WNoVsbzkY=)
The point: create a strategy to move prospects through the funnel, i.e., don't leave the job solely to Sales. And with that strategy, be sure to have your measurements in place.