Marketing Advisor Blog

Kickstart your online marketing testing

Online marketing testing, if done properly, can be a great step towards reducing the guesswork in online marketing. Online marketing testing and tracking can give you accurate and reliable answers to almost any marketing question you can image.

The tracking and testing approach should pave the path towards an online marketing decision making process based on facts, not convictions. 

Though this approach might seem pretty straightforward, online marketeers often ask me the question how to get started with online marketing testing, because this approach can be quite overwhelming.

The following simple guidelines should help you out.

The three crucial elements of a successful CRM or SFA system

In yesterday’s post we explained you why B2B CRM systems are not the best friend of sales teams, according to Leadfab’ric’s Koen De Witte. In this post we tell you how, according to him, B2B CRM systems…can become the best friend of the sales team.

Remember how we said that the main problem in today’s CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and SFA (Sales Force Automation) tools is that they seldom or never add value to the customer interactions (if not, read the post here)?

How can that change? According to De Witte success can only be achieved by having another approach.

There are three main stakeholders that should be considered in this exercise: the customers, the sales people and management.

Why B2B CRM systems are not the best friends of sales teams

We recently sat down with Koen de Witte, Chief Weaving Officer of Leadfab’ric, a one stop shop for international B2B sales and marketing professionals that offers solutions to help their clients ‘weave’ eye-opening marketing acts with optimized sales execution.

In this post we tell you why B2B CRM systems (Customer Relationship Management) are not the best friends of sales teams, in a coming post we explain what should be done to change this in the view of Leadfab’ric.

When making an audit of your current sales management IT tools, you will probably notice that they are focussed on issues such as estimating future sales conversions or the performance of individuals.

It’s called sales force accounting and it is a very important part of sales management. Predictability and being able to see what’s coming next is what many managers wish to optimize. The only question is where the customer fits in all this? Right, nowhere.

Why you should care about the return of your marketing investments

The life of a modern marketer is tough. New communication channels, an explosion of media, new tools to master, changing media consumption and buying patterns etc. To make it all worse now marketers have to be accountable. They have to prove that their marketing efforts generate revenue. Why would they care? Their job is to increase customer satisfaction, improve brand awareness and create killer campaigns, isn’t it?

Well it’s much more than that. Marketing, as well as any other activity in the company, in the end is about revenue and profit. Seems obvious, after all we’re not in business for the fun alone. But in reality it’s less obvious than you might expect.

The finance in marketing

The increasing attention for the return of marketing investment, translated in financial parameters, makes many marketers feel uncomfortable. First of all because it’s new to them: after all return on investment or ROI is something the finance department talks about.

How does my customer behave online: the Eloqua point of view

How do you call the customer that finds you and decides when he wants to talk to you or get information from you? We called him the 'pull' customer before ourselves and when we talk about his relative invisibility on online media like your website we talk about his 'digital footprints'.

Another nice way of looking at the digital behaviour and footprints of the online customer comes from US-based (but increasingly present in Europe) marketing automation and lead nurturing vendor Eloqua.

The company coined a new concept, which is called the Digital Body Language™ (yes, it is indeed trademarked). Eloqua came with it in a report, called “Digital Body Language, reading and responding to your prospects’ buying behaviour in the Web 2.0 world”.

How do you call the customer that finds you and decides when he wants to talk to you or get information from you? We called him the 'pull' customer before ourselves and when we talk about his relative invisibility on online media like your website we talk about his 'digital footprints'.

Another nice way of looking at the digital behaviour and footprints of the online customer comes from US-based (but increasingly present in Europe) marketing automation and lead nurturing vendor Eloqua.

The company coined a new concept, which is called the Digital Body Language™ (yes, it is indeed trademarked). Eloqua came with it in a report, called “Digital Body Language, reading and responding to your prospects’ buying behaviour in the Web 2.0 world”.

How do you call the customer that finds you and decides when he wants to talk to you or get information from you? We called him the 'pull' customer before ourselves and when we talk about his relative invisibility on online media like your website we talk about his 'digital footprints'.

Another nice way of looking at the digital behaviour and footprints of the online customer comes from US-based (but increasingly present in Europe) marketing automation and lead nurturing vendor Eloqua.

The company coined a new concept, which is called the Digital Body Language™ (yes, it is indeed trademarked). Eloqua came with it in a report, called “Digital Body Language, reading and responding to your prospects’ buying behaviour in the Web 2.0 world”.

Is your company ready for the pull customer?

We don’t have to explain you that the marketing and communication reality has changed dramatically since the arrival of new digital media. Whether we call it Web 2.0 or any other buzzword, we tend to summarize these changes as the end of mass communication as we knew it, an explosion of new communication channels, the fragmentation of media, the participation of the customer in the marketing and communication process and so on.

One of these changes, that is going on since many years now, is the fact that communication and marketing have become a ‘pull’ instead of a ‘push’ process (and it’s becoming so more and more). Instead of pushing marketing messages and information, as is the case in traditional mass communication, the customer wants to ‘pull’ information. He decides when, how and where he gets the information he needs.

We don’t have to explain you that the marketing and communication reality has changed dramatically since the arrival of new digital media. Whether we call it Web 2.0 or any other buzzword, we tend to summarize these changes as the end of mass communication as we knew it, an explosion of new communication channels, the fragmentation of media, the participation of the customer in the marketing and communication process and so on.

One of these changes, that is going on since many years now, is the fact that communication and marketing have become a ‘pull’ instead of a ‘push’ process (and it’s becoming so more and more). Instead of pushing marketing messages and information, as is the case in traditional mass communication, the customer wants to ‘pull’ information. He decides when, how and where he gets the information he needs.

We don’t have to explain you that the marketing and communication reality has changed dramatically since the arrival of new digital media. Whether we call it Web 2.0 or any other buzzword, we tend to summarize these changes as the end of mass communication as we knew it, an explosion of new communication channels, the fragmentation of media, the participation of the customer in the marketing and communication process and so on.

One of these changes, that is going on since many years now, is the fact that communication and marketing have become a ‘pull’ instead of a ‘push’ process (and it’s becoming so more and more). Instead of pushing marketing messages and information, as is the case in traditional mass communication, the customer wants to ‘pull’ information. He decides when, how and where he gets the information he needs.