MarketingSherpa Blog

In the MarketingSherpa 2012 Mobile Marketing Benchmark Report (free excerpt at that link), we asked …

Q: How much do you expect your organization’s mobile marketing budget to change from 2012 to 2013?             

Click to enlarge

A combined 71% of respondents said they would see budget increases, with over half of those reporting increases seeing more than 10%.

While this is great news for many marketing teams, it’s also a tough challenge: Mobile is still a new channel with several unknowns. So today’s MarketingSherpa blog post will share our discoveries in the hopes that our findings can aid your strategy planning efforts for the upcoming year.

I sat down with Benjamin Filip, Research Manager, Data Sciences, MECLABS, and a lead data analyst for the report, for a look at what we can learn from the data to help you get the best use of your (hopefully bigger) mobile budget.

“It really depends on what an organization’s goals are,” Benjamin said. “Some factors to consider in planning how to spend a bigger budget are usage, effectiveness and difficulty.”

According to the data below, from the 2012 Mobile Marketing Benchmark Report, when comparing the factors of usage, effectiveness and difficulty, we can find some good opportunities. For example, our respondents reported “Includes video content” as a highly effective tactic that is not very difficult to implement, yet it is not highly utilized.

Read more…

The Internet has a wealth of free, public information that could help you uncover sales leads, get closer access to industry influencers, monitor your competition, and curate news for content marketing.

One way to tap into this wealth of data is with a listening dashboard. At one of the roundtables recently held during the B2B Summit 2012 in Orlando, Nancy Chou, Senior Director of Customer Success, LeadFormix, shared a presentation on how B2B marketers could use social media to generate leads by creating a “listening dashboard.”

What is a “listening dashboard”?

A listening dashboard is ultimately a customer intelligence gathering strategy that consists of collecting and combining together smaller pieces of information to produce a larger and more insightful picture of a given topic, brand or prospect.

Here are some of the benefits Nancy listed that a listening dashboard can offer:

• Hear what people are saying, and uncover sales leads whenever people discuss relevant keywords
• Gain closer access to the industry influencers through the article and blog posts they write
• Monitor your competition, gather sales intelligence and beat your competition by following discussions in real time
• Share fresh news and content from industry thought leaders with prospects and customers

How to set up a listening dashboard

If you’re interested in building your own listening dashboard, Nancy provided four steps for building a listening dashboard for free:

1. Create a list of the RSS feeds you typically read
2. Gather additional newsfeeds on specific keywords using sites like alltop for newsfeeds and technorati or Google blog search to gather blogs written by industry thought leaders or topics of interest
3. Start following influential people on Twitter using search engines like listorious and wefollow that categorize Twitter users by keyword
4. Set up a Google Alerts account to be notified whenever a keyword, industry topic, competitor or thought leader releases new content

The steps above will get you started; however, if you need more sophisticated social media monitoring and tracking services, fee-based tracking tools are available.

Related Resources:

How IntraLinks Used Social Media to Generate Twice as Many Sales-ready Leads as Any Other Channel

B2B Lead Generation: 6 social media tactics from 7 experts

Social Media Marketing: 9 tactics for B2B social channel advertising

B2B Social Marketing: 4 ways to build one-to-one relationships with social influencers

I have small confession to make. Content marketing is fast becoming an industry topic near and dear to my heart. My responsibilities as a content creator for marketers has given me a soft spot for this segment of our audience that I was recently able to indulge during the “Confessions of a Content Marketer” session at the MarketingSherpa B2B Summit 2012 in Orlando, Fla.

The session presenter was Edwin Jensen, Director of Business Development, The Ian Martin Group and he offered a series of short insights dubbed “tips from the marketing trenches.”

So, today’s MarketingSherpa post will present some of the tips Edwin shared in just the way he intended — as “a great blog post for some of you out there.”

Read more…