One of the questions frequently asked about attribution is how much cookie deletion by Internet users affects its accuracy. This is an extremely valid question, because proper attribution of digital channels such as search and online display is very much dependent on these little pieces of code placed on users’ computers to collect the data associated with the touchpoints created by your campaigns.  So without cookies, the attribution process that’s dependent on that touchpoint data seems as if it would break.

Read more…

List growth is a perennial top priority for email marketers. Today, it’s even more important to grow your list with quality sales leads to keep your messages in your readers’ priority inboxes and to lessen the risk that an ISP will block your messages because of outdated, nonfunctioning, or bogus email addresses.

Read more… 

Our friends at Inside View created this awesome infographic that gathers together many statistics, ideas and examples about using social media to help drive leads and sales for B2B companies. You can look through the stats yourself, but here are some to consider:

• 61% of US Marketers Use Social Media to Increase Lead Gen
• IBM saw an Increase of 400% in Sales in a Social Selling Pilot Program
• 55% of Buyers Search for Information on Social Media
• 75% of Buyers Likely to Use Social Media in the Purchase Process

Continue reading… 

We wrote a book about B2B social media to share our ideas with others and to help them learn how to adopt social media in their B2B companies. One sign of success is when people take the ideas and make them their own. This is something that the web has always been good for. People gather ideas, remix them and create their own content from them. We were pretty excited to see the book review from Aarne Töllinen, Project Manager at University of Jyväskylä. And thankfully it is written in English, because we don’t speak Finnish.

Read more…

B2B salespeople spend roughly two-thirds of their time selling in virtual environments—via the Web and telephone—yet most companies haven’t adapted their sales skills or content marketing tools to deal with this new reality, according to a new report by Corporate Visions.

Sales and marketing teams are not prepared to sell in virtual environments: 58% of surveyed B2B sales and marketing professionals say they have insufficient (27%), little (10%), or no training (21%) in how to deliver compelling messages in virtual environments.

Read more… 

My father used to say, “If you live long enough, you see history repeat itself.” After 30-plus years as a B2B marketer, I can attest to the wisdom of his adage as it applies to lead-generation success. It has become clear that regardless of the vertical industry, product or service being marketed, decade, price point, or  length of the sales cycle, the basic formula is the same. It’s what I call “the formula of the four multiples.”

Learn more… 

While b2b marketing can entail lots of things, a new clarity of responsibilities is emerging: Demand generation is its fundamental mission, and lead development is its primary metric.

To do this, you need to exercise your “CORE”: content, outreach, response and engagement.

Learn more… 

Social media works best for B2B companies when people connect directly around topics they are passionate about. Connections work even better when no one in the group is pushing a particular agenda. This allows the focus of the communications to be around joint learning, which draws crowds, versus thinly disguised sales pitches, which drives everyone toward the metaphorical door.

Read more… 

What if I told you the last three digital paid media campaigns that my company, lonelybrand, executed earned an average 31.92 percent conversion rate? (To be clear — we’re talking about the number of successful conversions divided by the total number of paid clicks.)

Read more… 

My father used to say, “If you live long enough, you see history repeat itself.” After 30-plus years as a B2B marketer, I can attest to the wisdom of his adage as it applies to lead-generation success. It has become clear that regardless of the vertical industry, product or service being marketed, decade, price point, or  length of the sales cycle, the basic formula is the same. It’s what I call “the formula of the four multiples.”

Find out more…