How Micro Targeting And Micro Messaging Drives Your PPC Forward

My father was in the retail automotive industry for most of his working life. He always preached to me ‘location, location, location.’ Last week during Google’s live summit, a major focus of the presentation was the rise of local searches. My key takeaway from the rise of local based searches is that granularity is key to a successful paid search account. Providing a personalized experience that’s unique to the geographical location a customer is in and device they are using is critical to what Google calls ‘winning the moment’...

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DiscoverOrg

DiscoverOrg is the leading global sales and marketing intelligence tool used by over 2,000 of the world's fastest growing companies to accelerate growth. The company itself has been named an Inc. 500 fastest ­growing company three times over the past 5 years. DiscoverOrg's award­ winning solutions provide a constant stream of accurate and actionable company, contact, and buying intelligence that can be used to find, connect with, and sell to target buyers more effectively ­ all integrated into the leading CRM and Marketing Automation Tools in the market. DiscoverOrg's team of almost 200 in­house researchers refreshes every data point at minimum every 90 days ­ ensuring customers reach the right buyers with the right message at the right time.

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Buyer Intent Data

How Does Influencer Marketing Enhance ABM?

Article | August 23, 2022

ABM influences key accounts that show buyer intent. This influence is internal (B2B through personalized content) and aims to sway decision-makers who green-light a purchase. In an interview with Media 7, Mark Emond, Founder & President of Demand Spring, talked about the importance of content in marketing. “Content is at the heart of great marketing today. It needs to educate, inspire, and convert. It must be tied to the unique rational and emotional needs of each target persona.” ABM’s focused approach leads to faster lead conversions and a higher ROI. However, B2B marketers still face the following challenges in their marketing strategy: Maximizing Marketing Efficiency B2B marketers must consistently drive higher ROI on their efforts while working within a limited budget. Improving Customer Experience Cutting through the noise of thousands of competitors and delivering an enhanced customer experience is challenging. Generating Trust in Customers Marketers need to humanize their approach and reach a level of undeniable authenticity to generate trust in the minds of customers. Why Should You Use Influencer Marketing in ABM? According to a CSO Insights report from Marketing Charts, brands fail to incite enough trust in their target audience. Interestingly, it is what the subject matter experts and third-party influencers from the industry say that counts. So, external influence is driving purchase decisions. Internal influence, though crucial, cannot sideline external influence and how it impacts sales and key decisions. When you integrate ABM with influencer marketing, you co-create relatable, impactful content with relevant influencers to encourage your target accounts to move ahead in the sales funnel. An influencer becomes a credible touch point, powerful enough to convert a lead. The influencer’s performance-oriented content resonates with the target audience, engages, educates, and informs them of the strong points of your business, creating a strong foundation for lead conversion. Here is how it can help strengthen ABM strategy: Increases Content Authenticity The words of a trusted subject matter expert or third-party niche content creator hold more weight than static website content or brand ads. Their followers trust them and consider their views authentic. If such relevant influencers create content with you, your target audience is bound to be positively influenced. This leads to higher conversions and ROI, qualitative reach, and better engagement. Attracts New Audiences Influencers attract new audiences that are similar to your ideal customer profile (ICP). Interactions, content promotions, and publicity can create brand awareness generate more interest in your brand. Encourages Brand Advocacy Positive reviews, customer success stories (voice of customer), testimonials, and word-of-mouth publicity that comes from influencers and their followers promote brand advocacy. Influencers also create incentives for referrals, thus bringing in better engagement. Humanizes the Buyer Experiences B2B storytelling is the key to conversions. It has more impact than any other form of advertising. Influencers humanize the buyer experience by sharing their opinions, reviews from other businesses, and highlighting success stories through their content. This content is impressive as compared to any other content the brand hosts and promotes. B2B Influencer Content is Priceless B2B influencer content has high value because it has third-party credibility that attracts trust across all brand channels. Another advantage is that you can easily access the creativity of the influencer without having to hire someone. All the content that influencers publish on their platforms is brand content, highlighted with the voice of the customer. Influencer marketing generates traction and engagement for businesses. Integrated Influence Influence can be integrated through social media marketing, content marketing, PR, SEO, branding, and ABM. How to Create a Powerful, Influencer-based ABM Marketing Strategy? Brainstorm a Strategy To make the most of influencer-based ABM marketing, you need to streamline a process and strategy. Find the answers to these two crucial questions: 1. Who influences your target audience? 2. Which topics interest your target audience? Once you find the answers to these questions, you can zero in on a relevant influencer and approach them to participate in creating/co-creating high-quality marketing content (text, podcast, video, interactive). Integrate the content and publish it on brand channels, and influencer channels. Promote the content via blogs, ads, other influencers, and brand sites to target your key accounts. Monitor the promotions (URLs, engagement) and adjust the campaign for maximum output. Most importantly, create and nurture relationships with industry influencers for future campaigns. Understand the Demand Understanding the demand of the target audience through keyword research and data analysis can boost the results of an influencer marketing campaign. Offering audiences solutions to their problems or information that will help them scale their business assist in lead nurturing and conversions. Identify Ideal Influencers Choosing a suitable influencer can help kick start your influencer campaign powerfully. An ideal influencer should be proficient in their domain, passionate about content creation, capable of publishing content across platforms, popular in the industry with keen followers, and knowledgeable and eager to promote content across different channels in different formats. You can employ software to identify and qualify relevant influencers who create credible, high-quality content on the topic you want to promote. Filter influencers based on how much they charge and how well they align with your company values and brand voice. Focus on creating a long term association. Shuffle the Content Formats By shuffling between marketing content formats like blog articles, live video, third party analyst reports, videos, case studies, webinars, podcasts, industry presentations, infographics, and interactive content, the target audience can be engaged on multiple channels, and data can be collected to analyze which formats work best. Remain Connected with Influencers As a B2B marketer, you should connect one-on-one through email, phone, or in-person meetings with influencers frequently. You should monitor and engage with influencers on social media when they mention your brand. By interacting with and sharing relevant influencer content on social channels, you can build a community and promote advocacy through continued partnership and engagement. Additionally, you can recycle content made by influencers to show you value the association. Sixty-three percent of marketers believe they would have better marketing results with an influencer marketing program, while seventy-four percent of marketers agree that it improves customer and prospect experience with the brand. How Cherwell Software Witnessed a 437% Year-over-year Increase in Content Shares? Colorado-based Cherwell Software is an IT Service Management (ITSM) company. It engaged TopRankMarketing to create an influencer marketing campaign with the aim of increasing brand awareness, targeting CIOs, CTOs, and IT Directors of companies for business, and increasing sales and revenue. With the help of the content 15 ITSM thought leaders created and amplified across five channels, Cherwell Software saw a 170% growth in their audience views and a 437% year-over-year increase in their content shares. Key Takeaways In B2B marketing and ABM, influencer marketing can help reach customers you would have otherwise missed. Engaging in an influencer marketing platform to maximize ABM strategy outputs is crucial to remaining ahead in the race. FAQ What characteristics should a good B2B influencer have? A good B2B influencer should be proficient, passionate, popular, a dedicated content promoter and creator. How does influencer marketing help B2B marketers? Influencer marketing can help B2B marketers target key accounts by leveraging content created by industry experts.

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Programmatic ABM

How Sales and Marketing Can Work Together to Form an Effective B2B Sales Funnel.

Article | June 9, 2022

In any company, there is a sales function and a marketing function. They are supposed to work together to help the organization secure business, earn revenue, and facilitate growth. Oftentimes, because of the nature of their business, sales and marketing work at cross purposes and they lose focus on their ultimate objective of identifying, creating, and retaining customers. In this article, we will discuss how sales and marketing can work together to form an effective B2B sales funnel. But first, let’s explore the roles of sales and marketing within an organization. Sales are the function of driving revenue with salespeople who follow a defined sales process. A typical sales process involves a research phase to ensure that the intended customer is a good fit to the company’s Ideal Customer Profile, a discovery phase where the salesperson gets to know the customer, understand their needs, and see where their solution can help solve the customer’s problem, a demonstration phase where the seller lets the buyer envision how their solution for a product or service can satisfy the buyer’s need. A proposal phase is proactive and where the seller provides the customer with an outline of the work they will undertake and at what price. Sometimes a seller will instead be responding to a buyer’s request for a proposal (RFP). Up until this point in the sales process, prospective customers are referred to as “suspects,” meaning that they may be a good fit, but they have not expressed any interest in the company’s solutions and the company has not proposed any ways in which it could be of service. However, once a salesperson provides the prospective customer with a proposal, that prospective customer becomes known as a “prospect.” In sales, the measurement of potential revenue and its progress towards realization is called a sales “funnel.” In a sales funnel, the probability of the salesperson closing the sale is now weighted with percentages demonstrating the likelihood of success. In the sales process, opportunities are weighted based on their probability of closing. This is called opportunity management and it looks something like this: 0% of the prospect is identified by researching the intended sales target company. 10% of the prospect is prequalified as a potential good fit in alignment with the company’s Ideal Customer Profile (I.D.C.). 25% of the prospect is qualified via a discovery call, and the opportunity is loaded into the sales funnel. 40% is when the buyer agrees to a demonstration, shows genuine buying interest, and is open to receiving a proposal. 50% is the assessment phase where the seller determines if the buyer has Budget, Authority, Need, and the Timeframe for implementation, (B.A.N.T.). Another component of the sale to be addressed at this phase is “why,” as in, “Why is the buyer making this purchase decision, why is my company being considered, and why is this timeframe for implementation important?” 60% is when a proposal is submitted to the buyer for consideration. (Pro tip: A good salesperson will have the boilerplate components of the contract pre-vetted by legal and IT when the proposal is initially submitted to the buyer so that the contract does not get held up at the bottom of the funnel by any issues not within the buyer’s control when it is ready to close). 75% is the negotiation phase where the buyer/decision-maker(s) asks clarifying questions that show an intent to purchase or express some objections that the seller will need to overcome to move the sale forward. 90% is when both parties agree to all the conditions of the purchase and the final contract is submitted for signature. 100% is when the sale is closed and the revenue can be recognized. If the funnel can be trusted, and oftentimes that’s a big “if” because salespeople are not always disciplined in opportunity management, then revenue recognized can be forecasted beginning at 75% of probability. At every phase of the sales funnel, sales are conducted by calling, emailing, texting, or other outreach to prospective and existing customers to guide them towards making a purchase. The process might be consultative, taking place over a long period and involving multiple decision-makers in which the salesperson learns about the customer and their pain points, and then helps them understand how their product or service offering can provide a solution. Sales could also be tactical and a very short process involving just a single conversation with a salesperson before an agreement is finalized. Although technology and social media have certainly influenced how sales are conducted, the essential steps of the sales process have pretty much remained the same. Whereas sales are hands-on, marketing is a much more comprehensive process that does not generally interact with an individual customer but is designed to increase awareness of a brand or product to target customers as a group. Unlike sales, the methods, tactics, and channels used by marketers have evolved tremendously over the last fifteen years. Marketing today is primarily digital and includes content marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, organic website traffic, search engine optimization, pay-per-click advertising, and the use of influencers and brand ambassadors. The objective of the marketing department is to generate leads for the sales department. These leads start as “marketing qualified leads” (MQLs) and although these prospective buyers are not yet ready to purchase, they have expressed interest in a company’s product. When properly nurtured by the marketing department, these prospects become “sales qualified leads” (SQL’s) and are handed off by the marketing team to the sales team when they are likely to make a purchase. This nurturing can occur via social media, email distribution, or other communication from the marketing team to keep the prospective client interested and engaged. It would seem so easy for marketing to cultivate leads and hand them off to the sales team. However, this is often not the case. Too frequently marketing and sales are simply misaligned. Just consider these statistics: According to Upland, 55% of marketers don’t know which collateral their sales colleagues are most likely to use. LinkedIn reports that only 46% of marketers describe sales and marketing as “highly aligned” at their company. The Precision Marketing Group states that 25% of businesses describe their sales and marketing as either “misaligned” or “rarely aligned”. This lack of synchronization between marketing and sales causes poor execution and lost opportunities. According to LinkedIn’s Art of Winning Report, an estimated $1 trillion a year is lost due to a lack of sales and marketing coordination in the US alone. An industry survey by InsideView found that the six biggest obstacles to sales and marketing working together were: Lack of accurate/shared data on target accounts and prospects (43%) Communication (43%) Use of different metrics (41%) Broken/flawed processes (37%) Lack of accountability on both sides (25%) Reporting challenges (21%) Simply put, marketing and sales need to collaborate more effectively to better manage today’s sales funnel. But how? According to digital marketing strategist, Sujan Patel, there are three levels of marketing alignment: The Emotional Level: Your Sales and Marketing teams should be working cohesively together and supporting each other. They should not be working at cross-purposes. The Process Level: There need to be clear, measurable, sustainable, and repeatable processes in place to ensure that everyone within both the marketing and sales teams is pulling in the same direction and working in the same way. The Feedback Loop Level: Marketing doesn’t always produce awesome leads. Sometimes they might suck. Nobody’s perfect. That’s why sales need to communicate back to marketing so there is a feedback loop between the two teams to either encourage good leads or stop wasting company resources on bad ones. An effective partnership between sales and marketing is the #1 success factor attributed to achieving revenue goals. (Source: Heinz Marketing - Performance Management Report) So, how can we get sales and marketing to work better together? It starts with having a project plan in place. The first step is for sales and marketing to agree on what the ideal customer profile (I.D.C.) of a target customer should be. They need to agree on the characteristics that define the type of company (not the individual buyer or end-user) that will find the most value in their product or service offering. If done correctly, prospects that are aligned to the company’s IDC are most likely to become long-term customers who will give significant value back to the business in the form of possible subscription fees, upsells, and referrals. An easy way to identify the IDC of a company is to look at a list of their current best-performing customers and determine what attributes they have in common. The next step is for sales to explain to marketing the steps of the sales funnel, how it works and what marketing resources are needed to migrate the prospective customer through it. Too often, marketing is concerned with branding and outreach, and they do not allocate sufficient resources to the sales team to give them the resources and collateral they need to expedite their sales. Once sales and marketing are aligned regarding who the IDC of a company is and what marketing resources should be allocated to support the sales team, an organization can take its game up a level and begin to pursue account-based marketing (A.B.M.) opportunities. Account-based marketing is when marketing and sales teams work together in a focused approach to target best-fit accounts and turn them into customers. When done correctly, marketing and sales teams meld their expertise to locate, engage with, and close deals with high-value accounts that offer a high ROI to their company. The primary components of account-based marketing include: Reaching the right accounts Engaging across marketing channels Determining effective metrics and measurements According to LinkedIn research, businesses with strong sales and marketing alignment are 67% more effective at closing deals, 58% more effective at retaining customers, and drive 208% more revenue as a result of their marketing efforts. So, whether an organization is pursuing a traditional marketing approach or a more targeted account-based marketing strategy, it is essential for marketing to work more closely with sales in vigorous and meaningful ways. Today’s buyer is more knowledgeable and has access to more information about a prospective seller, their competition, and the marketplace than ever before. As a result, sales leaders need to demonstrate subject matter expertise in their area of commerce and leverage the content, tools, and resources that the marketing department can provide them to enhance their sales efforts. Although good salespeople will find a way to close business, having the support of a well-synchronized marketing team behind them will help accelerate the sales process, increase revenue, boost profitability and facilitate greater customer satisfaction.

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Buyer Intent Data

5 Reasons Why Account-Based Marketing Gives Better ROI

Article | September 11, 2023

ROI matters in B2B business. Account-based marketing has reached a significant tipping point and has become an investment that could pay off for the years to come. It is because B2B marketers are achieving substantial results with the help of ABM, and those who haven't started using it yet are planning to implement it. And why not? This type of marketing harnesses the best marketing tactics for creating highly relevant campaigns that positively impact a B2B businesses’ bottom line. Forrester describes ABM as "a strategy by which marketing and sales cooperatively work to pursue, establish, and grow in long-term and engage in revenue-generating relationships with specific accounts." As a result, its study says that 71 percent of companies that invest in ABM report that their return on investment is fairly or significantly higher than traditional marketing programs it used before. Now that the importance of account-based marketing has come into the picture while detailing the reasons why ABM gives a better ROI. It is decisive to know why you should get interested in ABM. Importance of Account-Based Marketing ABM is vital to your marketing strategy because it helps you create a more targeted and effective campaign. In other words, it has the potential to fuel growth for years into your B2B business future and develop stronger relationships with customers who matter most in support of your business objectives. Understand that ABM is more than social media advertising that incorporates traditional marketing methods such as direct mail and email marketing. Similarly, marketing automation is yet another crucial part of ABM. When you automate your ABM, you get qualified leads and prospecting activities. This gives you a competitive advantage over other companies in your industry so that you can get an insight into what your competitors are up to. But, most importantly, you get a higher chance of getting the right prospect to what you offer. In connection to this, here comes an important step to include—creating relevant content. It is because when it comes to ABM, relevance is all that matters. Your offers need to be tailored for qualified prospects, and not all noise will cut through the clutter anymore. A recent Forrester Consulting study by LiveRamp surveyed 312 B2B marketers across six industries found that nearly all marketers said their businesses are committed to using ABM as a revenue-driving strategy in the present time. Similarly, most marketers also reported a high level of confidence by using a wide range of ABM capabilities. Let’s deep dive into five reasons why ABM offers a better return on investment than more traditional methods. Efficient Operations for Sales and Marketing ABM users highlight its role in bringing sales and marketing closer to collaborate on developing and executing sales and marketing strategies. As per Bizible’s research, marketers are now 40 percent more likely to align their strategy with sales because of ABM's strategy. By putting the teams together, sales and marketing can coordinate their outreach and ensure client engagement is conducted high-value and meaningful. Meanwhile, marketers benefit from a streamlined approach that lets them discard a far-and-wide marketing strategy favoring carefully chosen prospects. With having a focus on selected targets rather than scattershot marketing campaigns, marketers can now focus on harmonizing and automating their digital marketing efforts, which makes them ready to work on next-generation demand-gen platforms with the help of AI and machine learning. In this way, they can orchestrate their campaigns and exponentially grow the ROI of your business. This ensures the right account prospects and results in the most significant ROI potential. This automated marketing approach reduces the marketing team workload and saves staff precious time while preserving huge marketing dollars. Thus, more efficient spending and a higher threshold for returns will bring a significant ROI to your business. Master in Multichannel Amid the rush to digital marketing, which is gaining prominence in the current time, the most effective ABM strategy and programs create a balance of online and offline approaches, fully integrated across sales and marketing. In addition, account-based marketing automation saves marketers from making unnecessary costs, so they spend less on marketing while still getting results. Forrester's survey says that the key strengths of dedicated measurement solutions by ABM are the improved ability to track engagement and optimize across online and offline channels. This is so marketers can manage the frequency of engagement as well as precisely determine attribution. A Personalized Approach Personalization makes ABM so appealing to clients. ABM has a way of turning attention to detail, so it immediately gets a client’s interest. To be true, the marketing and sales teams have to be competent in conducting in-depth research of potential leads. When it’s done accurately, they will target clients based on their likelihood of converting, then develop personalized offers to get good results. For this, you have to keep a separate ROI of account-based marketing at the same level. When you have such a narrow focus, you get a chance to communicate with the specific prospect and craft a better offer for them. By providing a personalized approach, you have a high chance to see increased ROI of your business. Manage, Monitor Data Governance and Privacy Maintaining the privacy of prospect data is crucial for B2B organizations. In today’s time, where the lines between B2B and B2C marketing are increasingly blurred, applying strict governance policies over the use of prospect data is a must. In addition, people expect brands to respect privacy preferences and actively work to build trust. Every dollar counts in a crisis. But almost one-third of marketing professionals are still planning to increase their investments towards ABM in the next calendar year. Moreover, decision-makers expect those investments in digital to yield substantial business benefits; the pressure to deliver is higher than ever. So, to have an actual ROI of account-based marketing is equally crucial to enjoying a significant revenue of your business. ABM Encourages to Measure Performance By integrating ABM strategy and account-based marketing automation, marketers can identify and reinforce the most effective strategies to measure the performance of marketing efforts that exclusively depends on ROI generation. It’s easy to measure acumens when you have highly focused accounts and well-sorted campaigns. You need to perceive what content approach gains traction and what attempts fail to succeed. In a nutshell, when the businesses are identified, an account-based approach will offer precisely what a business needs; this will help your business gain maximum ROI. So, plan now for an account-centric marketing future. Your team can accelerate deliver strong business ROI out of account-based marketing automation programs by considering a cross-channel B2B business solution that can help fill capability gaps and evidently prove the worth of your ABM marketing efforts. Frequently Asked Questions How effective is ABM for generating ROI? When it comes to increasing the ROI of business, ABM helps drastically. It aligns sales and marketing teams to work together, which generates a positive ROI and increases revenue. In this, 60% of companies that use ABM experienced a revenue increase of at least 10% within a year, while one out of five companies experienced a 30% and more rise in revenue. What is a good ROI percentage for ABM? A good ROI percentage for ABM stands at 5:1, which is considered the middle of the curve. A ratio over 5:1 is considered robust for most businesses, whereas a 10:1 ratio is exceptional. What are the top 3 reasons to choose ABM marketing? The top three reasons are: To reach the right prospect that matters according to business To gain a competitive advantage ABM shortens long sales cycles { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "FAQPage", "mainEntity": [{ "@type": "Question", "name": "How effective is ABM for generating ROI?", "acceptedAnswer": { "@type": "Answer", "text": "When it comes to increasing the ROI of business, ABM helps drastically. It aligns sales and marketing teams to work together, which generates a positive ROI and increases revenue. In this, 60% of companies that use ABM experienced a revenue increase of at least 10% within a year, while one out of five companies experienced a 30% and more rise in revenue." } },{ "@type": "Question", "name": "What is a good ROI percentage for ABM?", "acceptedAnswer": { "@type": "Answer", "text": "A good ROI percentage for ABM stands at 5:1, which is considered the middle of the curve. A ratio over 5:1 is considered robust for most businesses, whereas a 10:1 ratio is exceptional." } },{ "@type": "Question", "name": "What are the top 3 reasons to choose ABM marketing?", "acceptedAnswer": { "@type": "Answer", "text": "The top three reasons are: To reach the right prospect that matters according to business To gain a competitive advantage ABM shortens long sales cycles" } }] }

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Account Based Analytics

Why Is an Inbound Marketing Audit Important?

Article | December 28, 2021

Inbound Marketing Businesses put effort into designing their inbound marketing strategies to seek growth opportunities. In inbound marketing strategies, target audiences are attracted, engaged, and delighted by businesses by using valuable content. They also communicate with the customers regularly through inbound sales calls and keep the customers happy through timely and prompt assistance. Businesses use an inbound marketing strategy that they have trusted for years, while some still struggle to grasp the power of inbound marketing. In both cases, if the strategy doesn’t show the expected results, it becomes a matter of immediate concern. Why Should You Conduct an Inbound Marketing Audit? In an interview with Media 7, Daniel Englebretson, Founder of Khronos, talked about rise of AI in ABM and the success of marketing programs. “The best programs, and the best marketers, have built their success on the back of rapid iteration and a long history of testing, learning, and continuously improving.” Continuous improvement in marketing can happen only when you carry out regular assessments or audits of your marketing strategy, inbound, and outbound. A marketing audit looks at the business environment, strategy implementation, systems, organization, productivity, and function of the strategy. It is undertaken when there is a change in leadership, the business is lagging compared to competitors, has rapid growth or is terribly stuck, or when a design overhaul is planned. Here is why you should conduct an inbound marketing audit: Identifying Weaknesses If an inbound marketing strategy suddenly stops working, you need to find its weaknesses and remedy them in time to get the best results. This is called “strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats” (SWOT) analysis. An audit will help you analyze the effectiveness of the channels and the tactics you use as compared to industry standards and find out the reasons behind ineffective lead generation. An effective audit also rigorously checks the marketing tools your team uses. You can make adjustments and improvements to the strategy based on the audit. You can look into channels like websites, paid search, email marketing, social media, and organic search to assess the performance of your strategy. Spotting Growth Opportunities When expanding the business, introducing a new product or service, conducting an audit can add great value to your plan. You can evaluate your business position, rate your customer satisfaction and engagement, know how well you are exploiting your existing opportunities, and if you are using the right channels and messaging to get in touch with your target audience. If you find anything amiss, you can promptly deploy resources to course-correct your team and work towards a better ROI through the inbound marketing strategy. Reaffirming Goals Reaffirm your marketing and business goals by assessing important data-driven perspective metrics like keyword ranking, post engagement, customer acquisition cost (CAC), email click-through rate, and lead quality. For example, if your website is not optimized for SERP and doesn’t grab the attention of your users, it could be the reason behind ineffective lead generation. In such a case, you can re-evaluate your content strategy. Things like text-to-image ratio on web pages, irrelevant images, and weirdly placed call-to-action (CTA) buttons can affect the user’s journey. If some pages are unresponsive on mobiles or tablets, then the audit will help you find those and implement appropriate solutions. Knowing what is working and what isn’t helps you know what you need to do next to get optimum results from your inbound marketing strategy. Keeping Your Team Motivated Every team is a defined stakeholder in the company's success. Right from the sales team, customer experience, IT architects, c-suite, product developers, to your marketing team, everyone will know their strengths and weaknesses through the audit. A regularly conducted marketing audit will keep your teams motivated to perform their duties well. Boosts ROI Boost your ROI by ditching things that do not work. Allocating resources to your business strengths instead of your marketing weaknesses will help you get the ROI you expect. You can also focus on introducing new plans to revive the part of the strategy that is no longer working. It can be anything from redesigning a few website pages to hiring a new SEO expert. What Does a Strong Inbound Marketing Audit Look Like? A strong marketing audit yields results that enhance your strategy, improve your ROI, and help you step up your game so you don’t fall behind in the race with your competitors. These are the characteristics a strong inbound marketing audit will have: Autonomy An effective audit should be autonomously conducted by a third-party auditor so you do not skip the hard parts and the management completely cooperates in the process. The more stringent the audit, the better the understanding of potential growth opportunities, managerial snags, and resource allotments. Perfect Structure The audit has to be systematically structured to cover all bases, like contact channels, business environment, customer experience, design, engagement, SEO, SMM, and sales management, so no crucial elements are missed. Conducted Regularly Conduct the audit at regular intervals of time, at least once a year. It should be a part of your marketing calendar or your strategic marketing plan. Business-specific The audit should factor in the technology, expertise, and experience of your business. It should consider factors like political, legal, and socio-cultural issues that arise from the location of your business. Competitors, best practices, and conditions should also be considered. How Eclipse Software Saw a 370% Increase in Organic Traffic in a Year Manchester-based software company Eclipse Software hit a snag when their online presence wasn’t translating into revenue, leads, or ROI. They hired Noisy Little Monkey, a service-based digital marketing agency in the UK, to help them boost their online presence. Noisy Little Monkey ran a marketing audit for them and found issues like page speeds and content offerings, and they ran campaigns using gated content. As a result of such campaigns and website improvements, Eclipse Software saw a 370% rise in their organic traffic in a year, with a conversion rate of 3.7%. Key Takeaways An inbound marketing audit is crucial for identifying the strengths and weaknesses of your marketing strategy. It can tell you which areas need improvement, how to allocate your resources better, and how to increase your growth opportunities and ROI through data-driven perspectives and more to achieve better results. FAQ At what time interval should you conduct an inbound marketing audit? Every business should conduct an audit once every six to twelve months. What are the characteristics of an inbound marketing audit? An inbound marketing audit should be autonomous, periodically carried out, systematic and business-specific.

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Spotlight

DiscoverOrg

DiscoverOrg is the leading global sales and marketing intelligence tool used by over 2,000 of the world's fastest growing companies to accelerate growth. The company itself has been named an Inc. 500 fastest ­growing company three times over the past 5 years. DiscoverOrg's award­ winning solutions provide a constant stream of accurate and actionable company, contact, and buying intelligence that can be used to find, connect with, and sell to target buyers more effectively ­ all integrated into the leading CRM and Marketing Automation Tools in the market. DiscoverOrg's team of almost 200 in­house researchers refreshes every data point at minimum every 90 days ­ ensuring customers reach the right buyers with the right message at the right time.

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How Social Media, Microtargeting and Big Data Revolutionized Political Marketing

American Marketing Association | September 26, 2016

Marketing has revolutionized politics. An expert discusses how it’s affecting November’s election. The paradigm has shifted in U.S. politics. Out-of-nowhere candidates—such as Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and Democratic-socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders—have grown less from the political canon and more from the will of the people. Marketing has been at the heart of this shift, according to Bruce Newman, professor of marketing and a Wicklander Fellow in business ethics at the Kellstadt Graduate School of Business at DePaul University in Chicago. In Newman’s latest book, The Marketing Revolution in Politics, he writes that President Barack Obama’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns changed how politicians use marketing.

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Europe Microscopy Market Segmentation, Parameters and Prospects 2016 to 2022 Market Research Report

June 20, 2016

Microscopy is a field of science in which objects are not visible to bare eye can be viewed under microscope. It is used to observe macromolecules and macromolecular complexes at sub-nanometer resolution. Microscopy enables scientists, physicians, and doctors to view live, transparent, and unstained cells. The visualization of patterns, location, and intercellular details of cells and tissues is possible due to microscopy…

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Research details developments in Eastern Europe's compound optical microscope market segmentation, parameters and prospects

June 15, 2016

The research includes historic data from 2009 to 2015 and forecasts until 2020 which makes the reports an invaluable resource for industry executives, marketing, sales and product managers, consultants, analysts, and other people looking for key industry data in readily accessible documents with clearly presented tables and graphs...

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