“Fail fast and fail forward!”
This is advice I recently heard from a veteran sales & marketing professional when asked what advice would he give to the fledgling demand generation marketer. While this is not something you expect to hear, it makes perfect sense given the unknown territory the demand generation marketer is responsible for. The statement sums up an approach which uses an hypothesis for all elements of an untested demand generation strategy, test it, analyze it, if it fails, move on to the next option.
However, what I [...]
As marketers, we’ve all been there. We’ve planned for our webinar, spent countless hours making sure our content was beneficial to the participants, worked on our campaigns to invite people and then 30 minute before hand, tested everything. Then the curtain goes up and what was just tested 30 minutes ago…freezes up! What do you do? How do you handle this?The answer is with honesty and transparency. This happened to me yesterday and as the speaker AND a veteran of many, many webinars, I can [...]
As I sit here today and witness history in the making with the swearing in of Barack Obama as the President of the United States of America, I have to reflect on the topic of change. We live in a new day and a new time and while this may sound like the same refrain, this current tide of change is different and significant. It does not represent just a generational change. It is a historical change which takes us all into unchartered territory with no going back! What we [...]
You may have heard this term before. Ellen Reid first coined the term to describe her approach to publishing and used the moniker to name her company. Omniture uses it to describe a world-class Search Engine Marketer. Perhaps the way I heard it used best was by my good friend, Debbie Qaqish, VP of Strategy at Knowlagent. She was describing the ideal marketer for today’s demanding B2B environments. Someone who has experience in both sales AND marketing. A marketer who realizes that their job [...]
Direct Mail. An oldie but a goodie, many marketers have moved away from direct mail since email has become so cost effective. To make direct mail work for you in a Web 2.0 world, make sure that you add a personalized URL to each DM piece that takes the respondent to their own personalized microsite. Once there, you can tailor content based on title, industry, behavior and other characteristics to create a more compelling experience. Most marketers I have worked with see a 3-5X lift over [...]
