MarketingSherpa Blog

Content marketing is a lot of work. Any company doing content marketing has to also run a media business on the side of their regular business.

But what if you could do less writing and still increase your leads by 300%?

That’s exactly what Alan O’Rourke did at HR performance management software company, WorkCompass, with a small marketing team.

According to his blog post on Audience Stack, O’Rourke was having trouble getting his content marketing efforts to pay off.

I tried it for a few months but found I was just sending more content to the same people. More was not better. It was just more. Using basic inbound marketing our audience and reach was not growing.

So what he did instead was create an inbound marketing strategy that focused 70% of his team’s effort on promoting his content, and 30% of his team’s effort in actually creating the content.

The results were fantastic. In fact lead capture (my primary measurement of success) jumped by over 300%!

Fortunately, he mapped out his entire strategy in a nice infographic. He calls it the One Month Micro B2B Marketing Plan — although I’m sure most savvy ecommerce marketers out there will be able to apply the same principles to their own content marketing strategies.

So what does this mean for your team?

It means you can at least test slowing down your editorial calendar to produce higher quality long form content to promote over and over again.

P.S. I found O’Rourke’s blog post and infographic from a post on Reddit, where he had promoted it. Now I’m writing about it here, giving him links and hopefully sending a significant amount of traffic his way. So he’s doing something right.

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For today’s MarketingSherpa blog post, we have an infographic from Kentico, “Customer Experience in the Digital Age.”

The research behind the infographic was an eight-question survey of 200 Internet users via SurveyMonkey in February 2013, and the survey was open to both consumer and B2B brand interactions.

Here are few data points on the surveyed Internet users:

The gender breakdown was 54% male and 46% female, and the age breakdown included …

• 18-24 – 10%
• 25-34 – 20%
• 35-44 – 24%
• 45-54 – 19%
• 55-64 – 15%
• 65-74 – 10%
• Over 74 – 2%

To help put this infographic – and the research that went into the content – into context, I had the chance to interview Thom Robbins, Chief Evangelist, Kentico Software.

MarketingSherpa: What were some of the key findings?

Thom Robbins: Company websites were second (25%) behind word of mouth (28%) in weighing most heavily on impacting brand affinity. In-store experiences factored [at] 18%.

Perhaps most surprising was the discovery that only 7% of respondents felt their brand experience was affected by social networks such as Facebook or Twitter, but I think this may be misleading. People may be influenced by social media a lot more than they think they are, through both direct and indirect interactions.

MS: Did any results come as a surprise?

TR: Other than the small role social media seemed to have, which I think merely shows us it’s a channel still on the rise, I was most surprised to see that 69% of those surveyed said they were willing to give up personal data in exchange for more customized service.

MS: Were there any results that might inform future research, or uncovered data points that deserve/require a deeper dive into customer insights?

TR: Well, I thought it was very telling that 97% were ready to forgive poor service as long as the company offers up a quick response or correction.

It’s important for businesses to know that while mistakes will be made, in the age of social media, every single customer experience counts. You can’t afford [to have] anyone to walk away unhappy, and there’s really no excuse given how forgiving customers are as long as you respond quickly to complaints.

Read more…

MarketingSherpa has been covering email marketing for a long time. And, while we’re always interested in the latest tactics, marketers still must never overlook the basics.

For example, email timing. Searching through the MarketingSherpa Article Archive, I found this blog post from 2003, which refers to a case study where time of day helped a marketer garner open rates higher than 70%.

When is the best time to send an email?

This topic is definitely the “Email Marketing 101” question about which any marketer breaking into major email campaigns still wants information.

To take a more quantitative dive into the question of timing email, GetResponse Email Marketing decided to go into its substantial dataset for some research.

This involved analyzing 21 million messages sent from U.S. email accounts during the first quarter of 2012 to determine the top result for the following metrics:

• Open time
• Click-through time
• Recipients’ top engagement time  Read more…

My first experience with a lead funnel was the IBM Signature Selling Methodology. I was struck with what a simple illustration this was to such a complex challenge – how do you get companies to buy expensive stuff and people to bet their careers on it?

While IBM’s SSM is essentially a sales tool, B2B marketers face the same challenges, and, because of the maddening complexity inherent in that simple question, a well thought-out funnel can be a useful planning tool to making sure you align all the many facets of sales and marketing you have to get right to close business.

Of course, once you map out your funnel, you’re not done. Like a good diet and exercise plan, you have to continue to optimize your funnel. To help you do just that, the MarketingSherpa team has put together the below infographic and has taken a funnel optimization approach to the content at B2B Summit 2011 in Boston and San Francisco.

“The infographic was developed from the results of our upcoming 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Study,” according to Jen Doyle, Senior Research Manager, MECLABS. “This study focused on identifying the most effective strategies and tactics for attracting and converting the modern B2B buyer, and benchmarking B2B marketing performance. It represents the scope of our study, which dissected all stages of the funnel, from lead generation to sales conversion.” Read more…