How to measure your Trade Show Marketing return on investment
Do you know the return on investment of your last radio marketing campaign? How about print media? While it’s easy to track the profitability of your marketing efforts online, accurately tracking your offline marketing ROI is tough.
With the right tools and techniques, measuring your trade show ROI is simple
Nowhere is this truer than at trade shows. Although many businesses are fully aware that their trade show marketing is profitable, we recently surveyed businesses and marketing managers and found that almost 50% don’t measure the ROI of their trade show activity.
Although it’s more difficult to track trade show ROI than it is to measure the ROI of a display advertising or social media marketing campaign, it’s still very possible with the right tools, techniques and metrics.
4 steps to measure your ROI for your Trade Show
In this guide,…
How to identify and manage the most efficient methods of generating leads
The most successful small businesses know how to identify and manage the most efficient methods of generating leads. Generally speaking, there are two main categories of lead generation tactics: outbound lead generation (where you reach out to the prospective customers via phone solicitation, direct mail, paid advertising, and email marketing) and inbound lead generation (where the customer finds you via Search Engine Optimization, social media, and PPC).
Deciding on the right lead generation strategy
Different methods (or combination of methods) might provide the best opportunity for new business leads, depending on your circumstances. Deciding on the right lead generation strategy depends on what you’re selling and how your customers get information that leads to a sale.
Here are a few key concepts to keep in mind when deciding your lead generation strategy:
Tip 1 - Not all customers are on social media, and…
Inbound marketing success requires digital channel integration
As referenced in the book, Inbound Marketing and SEO, Inbound Marketing is defined as an organisation gaining the privilege to deliver anticipated, personal and timely content to people who actually want to receive the content. It’s a concept the polar opposite of customers being blasted email shots, their email addresses being sold off to 3rd parties without permission, money off coupons and direct mail shots where an organisation hopes enough customers would interact with the promotion to make it stick.
A number of digital communications channels are being utilised to adapt an Inbound approach with the aim to customise the delivery of content to a well-defined, targeted customer group such as Search Engine Optimisation and Social Media, working together as one joined up digital strategy, delivering the same message adapted for the chosen digital channel optimised to attract the…
A definition of Marketing Automation in 2014
Have you noticed that there’s a lot more discussion of how marketing automation can be used by businesses in 2014? Many email marketing service providers (ESPs) are repositioning their services as marketing automation platforms and at the same time, customer relationship management (CRM) systems are including marketing automation and Big Data features as part of their cloud platform services.
As I speak with marketers at different businesses I find that there is varying understanding of what marketing automation means and I'm often asked to define it’s scope. So, in this post I have outlined some of the main features as I see it.
Automated, personalised email sequences are a key feature of Marketing Automation
In reality, the automation concept is not new, for example, automated email sequences are a key feature of marketing automation that have been available for at least 10 years in many capable…
Is Marketing Automation right for your business - find out the reasons why other businesses are using it
Are you at the stage of choosing your marketing automation system or building the business case? If so, then this infographic may give you some advice on how to either sell the idea to your boss or ensure it meets your business needs.
Marketo and Software Advice, a company that researches and reviews marketing automation tools, spoke with hundreds of companies to find out the key drivers to purchasing a marketing automation system. For 91% it was a new initiative, and companies with less than 500 employees were the main buyers to purchase a Marketing Automation System.
The main drivers were for lead acquisition and to automate their processes, as shown in the infographic.
More resources on Marketing Automation on Smart Insights
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June 16, 2014
5 techniques to integrate social media into your event marketing
Over the last decade, social media has emerged as one of the most useful platforms for finding new customers, developing your brand and expanding your business.
While there’s a massive amount of social media marketing information out there, almost all of it is aimed at business-to-consumer (B2C) businesses. With the right strategy, however, social media can be an equally powerful marketing platform for B2B businesses.
In this guide, we’ll show you five tactics that you can use to learn more about your upcoming trade shows, monitor your competitors, own your search engine results and connect with prospects with ease.
1. Incorporate social media into your company branding
In order for prospects to connect with you on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, they need to know how to find you. Make social media an integral part of your branding by adding your usernames and URLs to banners,…
How to build your email list using viral promotions
When building your email list, or indeed any lists for direct marketing, it is best practice to grow them organically, but of course that’s easier said than done and additional incentives will help grow a list more rapidly and can encourage sale as part of sales promotion. Social media will help amplify your promotions further.
Running viral promotions via social media, such as contests and sweepstakes and the other examples I will show in this post, are the perfect example of how social media can both increase engagement with prospects and clients as well as building your email list organically.
Before I explore the various viral promotions that you could utilise, we need to acknowledge the common pitfalls with viral promotions strategy and how to avoid them.
Prize hunters not paying customers
Viral promotions can attract the wrong type of prospects. There are always going to be those who will…
Which LinkedIn features are best for lead generation?
In B2B marketing, we know that lead generation is key and it's about generating good quality, targeted leads, which can be qualified as much as possible rather than focussing on the volume of leads. To assess which social networks is best at B2B lead generation across B2B sectors. Oktopost has analysed over 100,000 posts across LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Google+, and LinkedIn ranked the highest for lead generation for B2B companies.
The findings covered in the Infographic below included highlights that:
96% of posts, in discussion groups, generated leads which resulted in up to 86% conversion rates.
1 out of 3 converted posts, included a ? in the subject line of the post.
To learn more about LinkedIn, access our Smartinsights LinkedIn Guide which we have recently updated.…
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February 19, 2014
An introduction to the benefits of exhibiting if you haven't taken the plunge yet
From visibility to credibility, exhibiting at a trade show has hundreds of benefits for your business. Establishing a presence, whether big or small, for your company at a trade show gives you a powerful platform for meeting new customers, reaching out to your existing clientèle, and building a more established and reliable brand.
[caption id="attachment_34551" align="aligncenter" width="600"] One of the largest exhibitions - CES Las Vegas. Image credit - AskDaveTaylor.[/caption]
A lot of businesses are put off exhibiting at a trade show because of the cost. It’s true – developing a great trade show exhibit, training your staff members, and travelling to the event itself isn’t a very cheap process. However, like most forms of marketing, with the right strategy, a trade show can be a very profitable…
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January 20, 2014
How to effectively manage your data for marketing automation success
As a data-driven initiative, marketing automation is heavily dependent upon the accuracy, completeness and validity of the data that the technology will run on.
Inaccurate and out-of-date data, gaps in information and poorly integrated data will all serve to compromise the core objectives of marketing automation, hindering the ability to create relevant, timely and engaging communications, and ultimately undermining efforts to increase loyalty and sales.
Worse still, marketing processes driven by bad data can actually damage customer relationships, as demonstrated by numerous studies.
'According to one survey, 55% of respondents had been sent information about an irrelevant product by a business in the previous 12 months,' says Nigel Turner, VP of information management strategy at Trillium Software. 'A large minority (47%) said they are ‘annoyed’ when a business gets their personal information wrong, and 35% said such errors reduce their faith in…
