Category: Inbound Channel Marketing

From CRM to Socail: The future of advertising

From CRM to Social: The Future of Measuring Customer Value

A few years ago my friend and colleague Maria Sipka introduced me to a couple of professors at Wharton working on a collaborative project about the future of advertising. They invited me to submit an essay on CRM to social, one of what grew to more than 200 essays from colleagues eventually published in the online Advertising 2020 project. They promoted dialog, researched and analyzed the topics of discussion and ultimately wrote a book on their findings, recently published by Wiley.

I got a chance to see a manuscript of the book when it was being written, so I was excited to see they used a quote from my essay—one that I thought was provocative. It was a quote about the degree to which, I believe, advertising has missed the point of social media by focusing on metrics that emphasize quantity more than quality. It’s the kind of criticism that doesn’t always win friends among colleagues, so when I finally got a copy of the published book, I was surprised to find they’d doubled down and selected a second quote, one for the opening page of the book.

Enabling Channel Partners: Data Sheets Don’t Cut it Anymore

The fourth? interview in our webcast series on The Channel’s Biggest Marketing Challenges? is with? ? Carol Meyers,? CMO at Rapid7.? Carol has? a wealth of experience and insights? on channel management, including branding, lead generation, sales support and partner management. We discuss channel partners challenges from the Supplier perspective, including best practices for partner enablement, channel account management, and developing? effective partnerships.

What Partners Want from Channel Marketing Enablement

In this Webcast, we discuss channel challenges from the VAR and Integrator perspective, including best practices for channel marketing enablement and for partners adjusting to cloud disruption.

Nine Disruptive Channel Marketing Trends

Over the past several weeks, I’ve been interviewing channel marketing executives and managers about the challenges they face growing partner revenue. The interviews are the first step in an industry benchmarking survey we’re working on at SocialRep, in an effort to understand challenges and best practices in partner enablement, sales acceleration and performance management.

When Should You Stop Shooting at Customers?

Have you ever stopped to consider the terminology of marketing, and how it both reflects and affects the way we think about our relationship with customers? Marketing activities are organized as campaigns (often launched with advertising air cover) which focus on targets for the sales force to acquire. These terms are not only militaristic, they betray an attitude of control over customer and channel relationships that is an artifact of a bygone era. Businesses no longer control relationships the way they once did, and channel managers and marketers needs to adapt.

The new world of channel marketing is inbound over outbound—instead of putting a target on the backs of? customers for partner sales team to hunt, you help partners attract customers with relevant content that addresses their interests and needs. You do that by enabling partners to engage with the market, cultivating peer connections, collaborating with influencers and driving dialog with customers.

Introducing Inbound Channel Marketing

Over the past several years, inbound channel marketing has grown to be one of the most influential approaches to modern marketing. Inbound marketing addresses a number of key challenges in marketing today, most notably the need to engage with customers in a more productive and sustainable way. ? Although inbound marketing has been growing by leaps ands bounds among both B2B and B2C businesses, it hasn’t yet taken hold in the channel, largely due to the challenges of scaling quality content for a distributed network of partners. Bits and pieces of inbound marketing have been adapted for the channel, such as social media syndication and content curation, but it’s high time for a true? Inbound Channel Marketing solution.

The One Thing More Important than Content

Twenty years ago when I was a couple of years out of college and dreaming up my first startup, the commercial Internet was just getting off the ground. I worked as a news editor and journalist at a mid-size daily newspaper and had access to the Internet through a Mosaic browser, where I could read the first online newspaper called The Nando Times. All of the market analysis at the time focused on content business models for the web, which is when I first heard the old saw “Content is King”. Twenty years of mind-bending evolution later, we’re still saying the same thing as if learning it for the first time. It’s time to move on.

Activate Your Partners as a Unified Vocal Network

For seven years now, we’ve been delivering social media intelligence to some of the world’s largest brands, and we’ve watched marketers struggle with the concept of segmentation in social media. Segmentation is one of the fundamental principals of good marketing–the idea of dividing customers with similar needs and attributes into groups for more targeted marketing. Demographics, psychographics and behavioral economics are all time-tested techniques for segmenting markets in meaningful ways, and marketers have done backflips trying to apply them to social media.

Are Your Lead Generation Tactics Toxic?

Lead gen consumes billions of dollars in marketing budgets, including technology and human capital. And yet, a typical campaign can ring up a 99% failure rate and still be called a success. Many companies don’t even act on 95% of the leads they do generate.

Spotting Market Trends First With Social Media

I’m in Boston tomorrow hosting an event at the Microsoft NERD center on social media intelligence with Carol Meyers, our invaluable advisory board member and a true marketing maven.