Posts Tagged ‘direct marketing’

Inbound Marketing Budgets Increase for 2010

Tuesday, May 4th, 2010

According to the ‘State of Inbound Marketing Report’ reported by HubSpot, inbound marketing is increasing at the expense of outbound marketing for 2010. Social Media, PPC, Organic SEO, and blogs, all part of the online media mix, seem to be increasing in value for lead generation for marketers more so, due to the increased success of the inbound marketing programs.  Unfortunately, offline outbound marketing programs, which constitute trade shows, telemarketing, and direct mail are decreasing in budgets, due to the successes of online marketing generating quantifiable leads.

For 2010, outbound marketing budget expectations will be decreasing from 29% to 24%, but inbound marketing will be increasing from 38% to 34%.  This is an important shift for lead generation channels, since the change marks a strong shift to online from offline.  To see what works best for your marketing strategies, make sure that before you run out and spend a lot of money on social media and the other outbound marketing programs, make sure that your target audience is there and test each channel, before making a large investment.

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Posted in online marketing, SEO | No Comments »

Is there a difference between B2B and B2C Online Marketing?

Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008

Is there a difference between Business-to-Business (B2B) and Business-to-Consumer (B2C) online marketing?  Absolutely.  Don’t let an inexperienced marketer tell you otherwise.  B2B marketing tends to focus on providing targeted content, such as white papers, case studies and webinars to their target market, in exchange for the target markets’ contact information.  Also, B2B marketers tend to focus more on customer acquisition, rather than customer retention, since attrition is much lower in the business market than in the consumer market. Online marketing channels tend to concentrate on SEM, SEO and related business information websites.

B2C marketing tends to focus equally on customer acquisition and retention marketing programs.  Consumers are more price & service sensitive than businesses. Consumers visit more alternative online services, if they believe there is a better value for them testing out varied sites.  Many good B2C online marketers will focus on creating customer retention programs that keep consumers coming back to their sites to extend their Life Time Value (LTV) of their online members…i.e. if the average of an online user is 2 months at a casual gaming site, then the marketer seeks to extend the LTV to 3-4 months.  By extending the LTV of an online member, potentially increases online usage at the site and will increase overall ROI for revenues.

Online marketing channels for B2C online services tend to concentrate on SEM, SEO, direct marketing, email campaigns, blogs, viral and affiliate marketing.

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Posted in internet marketing, Media Buying, online marketing, Search, SEO | 1 Comment »

Tracking your customers efficiently through CRM software

Friday, October 17th, 2008

You’ve launched your website, leads are contacting you through your online registration form successfully, but you can’t efficiently see how well your leads have sale closings.  What should you do?  Track them with CRM software. What is CRM software?

CRM is ‘Customer Relationship Management’ software that enables you to track customers thoroughly and see the cycle of prospect to lead to sale closings efficiently between your marketing and sales teams.  Many entrepreneurs and small companies believe that since they are small, that they are efficient in communicating between their departments, but they are wrong.  Small companies, sometime are worse that larger organizations in communicating, it’s just not as noticeable, until they start tracking for ROI growth and reviewing what direct marketing programs are working for lead generation programs.

To review clear sales user paths and improve customer satisfaction, check out a few CRM products.

Salesforce.com is one of the top CRM products on the market.  Salesforce.com has a 30-day free trial and has a pricing plan for any size company. If you are interested in having the CRM work with your current Outlook contacts, check out Prophet 5.0 (www.Avidian.com) , which has a 30 day money back guarantee and can be up and running in only a few minutes. Another good option is Microsoft’s Dynamics CRM 4.0, which you can register for free to try the product.

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Posted in entrepreneurs, online marketing | No Comments »