Hear from author Ardath Albee on how contagious content drives conversations –the ultimate outcome marketers need to produce for sales.
Live Date: February 4, 2010 12:00 PM
3. Panelists Andrew Gaffney Content Director Demand Creation Specialists Ardath Albee CEO Marketing Interactions Author of: eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale
8. Our Featured Speaker… Ardath Albee, CEO Marketing Interactions, Inc. www.marketinginteractions.com [email_address]
9. Differentiation is a BIG Opportunity “ Only 14% of the ‘ unique benefits ’ promoted by companies drive enough preference to have a commercial impact.” Corporate Executive Board
10. What’s the Difference? Achieve Dramatic Cost Savings, Increase Operational Efficiency and Business Agility Reduce Costs, Improve Service Delivery, Enable Business Innovation Reduce IT Costs, Improve Performance, Do More with Less
11. What You Sell is NOT What They Buy Buyers say they only find relevant content 42% of the time. - IDG
16. The Role of B2B Content is to… provide pieces of the puzzle for solving a business problem in a way that promotes active response.
17. Online Dialogue – One-off is Over Hmm. Should I click? Okay – I clicked… now what? Dialogue: an exchange of information and ideas on a particular subject of interest.
Content marketing is the art of understanding what your customers need to know and delivering it to them in a compelling way. Instead of focusing on your product or service and selling them, you devote resources to creating information that your customers and prospects need. Discuss Terms for a minute
Like it or not, we are all publishers. Just look at the ways we are going to market. Looks a lot like publishing, right?
Like it or not, we are all publishers. Just look at the ways we are going to market. Looks a lot like publishing, right?
IDG found that this lack of relevancy perceived by buyers is responsible for reducing the vendor's chance of closing the sale by 45%.
Reactions, comments and questions
In 2007, Pam Casale, the CMO of Intellitactics was challenged to provide her sales team with fully qualified, well informed sales opportunities – instead of raw leads. She worked with her sales team to define just what that meant and then implemented Manticore’s solution to manage the process to get the results she needed. Because she’d done the groundwork, she was able to see ROI from the system within 2 months. But take a look at these statistics after their first year. Prior to using marketing automation, marketing had been able to qualify only 30% of their leads. They’re now at 60% and that’s pretty dramatic. Because they’re working more closely with sales, their accuracy in this qualification has resulted in a huge increase in the amount of leads sales is accepting. And look at how much better they’ve become at connecting. Considering that a majority of salespeople are only successful at setting initial meetings half the time, this change puts Intellitactics in the running far more often. When you consider that their competition is the big guns like EMC, with much larger budgets, this is even more impressive. It truly shows that size doesn’t have to slow your company down. And, finally, who wouldn’t want shorter sales cycles?
Content drove nurturing touch points and conversational guides. The more we talked about the content ideas and tied the two together, the more engagement we were able to produce. Even if you haven’t used your content as a competitive differentiator, it’s not too late to get started.