http://blog.themarketingpractice.com 10 years, 10,000 campaigns: B2B marketing strategies that really drive sales Thu, 11 Mar 2010 23:26:24 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en We've been reviewing recently our most successful lead management and lead nurturing programmes, looking at what it took to make them successful and the key steps in setting them up. (For a view on the benefits these programmes have to offer, see this previous post on lead nurturing strategies/target benefits.) Alongside ... http://blog.themarketingpractice.com/how-to/lead-nurturing-essentials-4-key-ingredients-and-4-key-actions Forrester's B2B profile tool gives an interesting perspective on how different categories of buyer currently use social media (based on over 1,200 business technology decision-makers in the US and Europe; filter by organisation size or type of purchase to see how behaviour varies). There may not be any particularly pronounced ... http://blog.themarketingpractice.com/marketing-mit/how-b2b-buyers-are-using-social-media-forresters-profile-tool Admittedly, the last few days may well have been a bit out of the norm at the BBC, but CIO UK has a couple of interesting articles about the priorities of Tiffany Hall, BBC CIO. The first article is a brief 'day in the life' - the kind of piece that's ... http://blog.themarketingpractice.com/itboomhunter/a-day-in-the-life-of-the-bbcs-cio We're just finalising the details for the next Sales & Marketing Forum (pencil 11 May into your diaries, and see details here of the previous session), focusing on what it will take to be a successful supplier to the public sector over the next few years. So it was interesting to ... http://blog.themarketingpractice.com/uncategorized/topical-thoughts-on-selling-to-the-public-sector CIO UK has released an updated list of the 100 top spenders on IT in the UK - available here. The DWP, MOD, Shell, Tesco and the Department of Health top the list, while RBS has slipped out of the top 5 and Lloyds out of the top 10. It's hard ... http://blog.themarketingpractice.com/itboomhunter/the-uks-top-100-users-of-it-from-cio-uk So having made the case in the previous post for clarity in content and simplicity in presentation, it's time to show that complex means of presentation can also be impactful and - yes - even fun... Augmented reality (AR) is probably as complex as presentation can get - in case you ... http://blog.themarketingpractice.com/how-to/how-augmented-is-your-reality There's nothing like keeping it simple when it comes to raising awareness at the early stages of the sales cycle. Every time we talk to buyers, we hear their need for the information that will clarify a proposition's relevance to them (they have personal positions as experts to defend in ... http://blog.themarketingpractice.com/how-to/sometimes-the-simplest-answer-is-the-best Forrester's recent research ('How Managing Leads Pays Off In A Stronger, More Qualified Pipeline' - registration required) makes for interesting reading. Sponsored by marketing technology vendor Silverpop, the research is based on interviews with 15 senior B2B marketers in the US. The interviewees paint a consistent and compelling picture of what ... http://blog.themarketingpractice.com/leadgenengine/insights-from-the-field-in-forrester-paper-on-lead-management A January article in McKinsey Quarterly raised the old question of how much emotion really comes into major purchase decisions - particularly after hearing recently from one decision-maker who said that the first projects to get budget approval are when the mandate comes straight from the Board for an urgent ... http://blog.themarketingpractice.com/marketing-mit/when-the-heart-and-head-combine-personal-drivers-for-major-it-purchases Few people would argue about the power of 'content marketing' (or whatever you choose to call it): the importance of sharing the right insight, with the right people, in the right way, at the right time, for the right purpose. A couple of recent blog posts shed some interesting light on ... http://blog.themarketingpractice.com/marketing-mit/conversations-about-content-marketing