MarketingSherpa Blog

These are the ABCs of online marketing these days. Did you leave off Webinars because companies are not finding them effective in the B2B space, only in B2C?

As a Community Manager who works exclusively within the B2B space, I both agree with and relate to these statistics. Our blog has been a key source of traffic to our website and has done wonders for boosting our online presence. Creating unique, intriguing and engaging content that is keyword rich has optimized our search engine ranking. Community building through social media engagement, as an extension of our blogging efforts, has also proven extremely valuable. In my research and advisory role for the startup community, I have found that these tactics are also extremely valuable for them, despite low domain trust of new websites. If you’re interested in reading more, I wrote a post on it just yesterday: http://bit.ly/e7mrUs

Hi Roman — Webinars are definitely effective for some B2B companies. They just aren’t the *most* effective tactic in these categories. As you can see in the chart, 60% of B2B marketers are increasing investment in webinars.

I love your blog and would love to guest post an educational article I have written pertaining to social media and the conflict in Egypt. If you are interested please email me for more information.

Thomas Morrison
twmorrison75@gmail.com
http://twitter.com/twmorrison75

Thanks for the positive comments Thomas.

We don’t have guest writers, per se, like other blogs do. We’ve found those “guest writers” tend to just be shopping the same story around everywhere.

But what we do occasionally ask a question to our audience and then publish the most helpful tips on our blog. Here’s a past example of such a post. Join our LinkedIn Group and be on the lookout for the next question.

Thanks Roman for a great post on inbound marketing and the value it brings! As the numbers of inbound leads continue to rise for companies though it is important that follow up processes are in place to qualify these leads promptly, pass to sales those that are sales ready, nurture those that are qualified but not sales ready and disgard those that aren’t a fit. I know for us that is a big focus so we can invest our marketing efforts and our sales professional’s time on those areas that will have the highest return.

I’m glad to see this increase, particularly in the field of SEO. Its a good reflection of the increase in awareness of in-bound marketing.

Christa,

Great mention on Lead Management. Marketing’s role has always primarily been Lead/Demand Generation, but Lead Management (capture, qualify, prioritize, route) is a rapidly growing function more often falling to Marketing to implement.

Adam, since it’s such a new field I would love to learn more about best practices around Lead Qualification (weight, rank, score including defining Segmentation Profiles), Prioritization (funnel position – who is sales ready), and Routing (optimum channel selection). It is almost impossible to find research.

I found this to be extremely helpful. It is a good gauge on where we are as a company and how much further we need to go!

Now a day’s Social Media is almost everything in terms of personal and professional aspects. May be you can call it a system or process through which we can get our marketing surveys right on place.

That chart is still relevant today. B2B inbound marketing is growing now, but businesses are realizing that it needs to be in context of their overall strategy: http://nali.org/what-is-b2b-inbound-marketing/

A good explanation about focussing on the right tactics… thanks Adam 🙂