Under marketing hardware I file the static, robust marketing framework long established in theory and practice: brand architecture, trademarks, direct mailing, loyalty programs, trade show booths, traditional print collateral, print ads, billboards, sales brochures, feature lists, etc.
In contrast, marketing software encompasses knowledge, point of views, conversations, social networks, partnerships, entertainment, etc. Like the PC, marketing hardware is meaningless without software. As with the iPod or any other mobile device, the primary value of marketing lies in the software and not in the hardware.
The flow of information outweighs the channel. The water is more powerful than the rock. While marketing hardware relies on programs, marketing software is all about the programming.
Pricing — determining the sweet spot between customer value and company profits. A company may choose cost-based pricing, with the main consideration being the cost of production. While others prefer market demand-based pricing or competition-based pricing. Budget — responsible for managing the allocated marketing budget. Marketing managers must secure space in the budget to fully support the marketing strategy. A sufficient budget is important to generate more revenue, expand into new markets, and reach more potential customers.
Distribution — developing the right distribution channels to reach customers. A company might sell products directly to customers by establishing a retail outlet or creating an e-commerce channel. Alternatively, they rely on various intermediaries such as distributors and retailers to sell products. Customer relationship management — this responsibility includes studying their target customers, determining how best to reach and meet their needs, maintaining good relationships with them, and encouraging them to continue purchasing the product.
Since recruiting new customers is expensive, this responsibility is crucial to keep the money flowing to the company. Branding — responsible for managing the brand and ensuring the brand is marketed appropriately. There are various branding strategies, including individual branding, family branding, or corporate branding. Each has advantages and disadvantages. Online channel management — manage and maintain online channel pages such as corporate websites and social media. This is becoming increasingly vital as consumers get more and more online.
Companies should have a wide range of content to reach people of different personalities, consumption preferences, and stages of the sales cycle. The following graphic shows the type of content from left to right based on where they are in their buying stage while the top to bottom displays the engagement experience type.
Content Usage Matrix. Depending on where your solution, and organization, stand in the marketplace you'll likely have a different focus when attending live events. Here are four reasons to integrate live events with your digital marketing efforts, depending on your core marketing needs at any given time:. Especially for early-stage startups and tech companies, your main challenge may just be getting noticed in the marketplace.
The goal is to simply get the word out there, so when prospects do finally evaluate solutions like yours, you'll be in the running. For businesses in a more mature stage, it may be more imperative to generate sales leads face-to-face. Planning is critical, so make sure to reach out to key prospects well in advance to drive attendance to the event and your booth. Have systems in place for collecting contacts, qualifying leads, and setting up follow-up sales appointments either during or after the event.
Live events are a great way to meet and greet current customers in a more fun, low-pressure format. Since they're already customers, you'll be able to get to know them on a more personal level, casually discuss their success with your solution, and discover if there are any potential up-sell opportunities.
Some of the most effective live event marketing that enterprise tech companies do comes in the form of educational content and workshops. This is great for drawing in both current customers and new prospects, especially decision-makers on the technical side.
Again, you'll want to collect contact info upfront prior to any training session and follow up to see what they got out of it and if they're potentially a sales-qualified lead. Make sure to stay active and engaged on social media both prior to and after the event. Encourage employees especially your sales team to spread the word on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to maximize the chances of active prospects attending, meeting and moving further along the sales cycle.
Live events can provide you quick exposure to a volume of prospects, but because you may not get much 1-on-1 time, it is imperative that you create a smart strategy to nurture and convert those leads.
First, let's start with collecting leads:. Collecting leads is important, but too many companies don't utilize them correctly after the event. It is a waste of time and money if you don't see the process through. During your event if possible or soon after,, leads should be entered into your marketing automation the next chapter in this e-book or CRM software.
You should have a distinction set for leads that want direct follow ups versus those who are collected. Following up too hard on attendees who submitted a card or came to a workshop will just turn them away. This process is called nurturing and should provide the lead with value while conveying your key brand messages.
The key here is not to jump into selling, but instead show your prospects you are knowledgeable, engaged, and care about providing them value. Doing this first and then building up to a demo or call will open the gate rather than quick rejection from a hard sales approach.
Marketing automation helps B2B enterprise companies nurture, qualify, and pass leads over to sales when they're finally ready. This is essential in the technology space, as both pre-sales and sales cycles can last weeks, months, and even years.
What tool you use will depend on the size of your company, as well as the nature of your solution and target buyer. Here are three of the most popular and effective marketing automation tools that you should consider implementing within your organization if you haven't already :. One of the most powerful and popular marketing automation systems on the market.
If you're currently using SalesForce. Marketo is great for managing and segmenting lists, as well as delivering rapid-fire email content. However, Marketo hits it's limit and begins to slow down if your web page experiences high amounts of web traffic, or leads in the database exceed k.
Recently acquired by Oracle and now under their Marketing Cloud umbrella, Eloqua is a robust B2B marketing automation platform that outperforms Marketo with large databases. Eloqua also has what is considered the best customer and prospect insights engine, giving marketers detailed and granular analysis of how users are reacting to marketing emails they receive. The major downside to Eloqua is that it has so many capabilities that the user interface is often non-intuitive and difficult to execute.
Now part of IBM's marketing cloud, SilverPop is a competitive enterprise marketing automation solution that differentiates itself with more mobile, text and SMS marketing capabilities than the competition. It has an intuitive UI user interface , a user-friendly database structure, and allows for relative ease of email creation. On the downside, Silverpop doesn't have as many native integrations as Marketo and Eloqua, and tends to slow down when processing large data sets.
There are many other Marketing Automation Systems available and now many are part of a platform that also includes CRM, Customer Service, and a wide range of other features. If you are an organization looking to generate leads for sales teams, then Marketing Automation combined with lead scoring can significantly improve your entire approach to marketing.
A process of automating follow-ups to potential customers. Open an email, they get 5; click a link, they get 10; visit a page, they get Combined with automation, we can consistently reach many people and create a ranking of the most engaged prospects.
The organization of prospects into like groups or leveraging data to target prospects with information most relevant to them. Segmentation is one of the most important topics in marketing and is central to marketing automation. These three aspects are only scratching the surface of marketing automation but they should be enough to peak your interest to learn a lot more about what platforms like these can do for your marketing — especially for technology and software companies.
Efforts and investments here can pay off many times over. Not only can you increase the spending of existing customers, but by staying top-of-mind with them, you create an army of advocates building referrals.
Most companies miss the opportunity by not putting a serious and thorough plan specifically for customer remarketing. Here are three of the main ways that you can remarket to increase the lifetime value of current customers:. If your customers are having great success with your solution, they're probably logging in daily, if not more.
How you design and maintain your customer portal can contribute to ongoing marketing efforts to your current customers. The last thing you want to do after you onboard a new customer is to remove them from your marketing automation program. However, it's a common mistake that many B2B enterprise tech organizations make. What you want is to design separate nurturing programs for existing customers.
The number of touches might be more infrequent, and the messaging will be much more consultative. Your existing customer nurturing program should include things like webinars, customer success workshops, and live events in their area. By seeing the topics of webinars customers attend, for example, you'll gain some insight into what their ongoing needs are and if there are any additional features or services they might be interested in purchasing.
Building out customer forums and communities is another great way to keep current customers engaged with your brand on a consistent basis. While customers will work with each other and your employees to maximize the value they receive from your solution, you should use communities to continually establish thought leadership through high-value content. If you have a new whitepaper or eBook coming out, customer communities are a great place to announce it to get the conversation going and to see which customers are interested in that specific topic.
Any customer marketing program should utilize multiple channels and tactics and should be measured and adjusted over time to work best for your specific customer base. Below are two graphs that show what existing marketers focused on customer retention and marketing do and what channels are found to be most effective. If you do not already have a customer marketing program, this data might help you decide where to start:.
Source: Demand Influence Survey. Source: Gigaom. Whether enterprise technology, enterprise software or SaaS — customer marketing works. For SaaS companies, specifically where MMR Monthly Recurring Revenue occurs at higher volumes of users, there can be even more at stake with high churn rates. Media Production. Medical Devices. Medical Practice. Mental Health Care. Motion Pictures and Film. Museums and Institutions.
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