About Leads

In The Graduation Edition of the Best of BuyerZone series, I was happy to read that the majority of the entrepreneurs featured said that their parents were their biggest role models; the ones who inspired, motivated and supported their decision to branch out and start their own business.

Well, with Father's Day coming up this Sunday, there's no better time than now to sit back and reflect on all the great advice your father ever gave you - particularly the business advice you take with you to every meeting, sales call or business presentation.

To help get the juices flowing for you to write your heart-felt Father's Day card, BuyerZone employees shared the best business advice their fathers shared with them:

"Never give up. Always follow through with all aspects of your business and personal life." - Troy Esposito.

"Respect everyone, regardless of title." - Fintan Fahy.

I can't believe it's already June. With half the year almost over, it's time to analyze how your content projects are going.

If they are going great, Mazel Tov! If they are slowing down - never fear, good reads are here. Stop yourself from falling into the summer slump with these following AWESOME content resources:

Reorganize with these 17 Essential Content Templates & Checklists

Michel Linn and her team at the Content Marketing Institute released an updated version to a popular post on content marketing templates. Having never seen the original post to begin with, my mind was blown. In fact, I found myself inspired to start a new project right away - just so I could try a checklist.

I hope that's how you feel after reading through it. My top three favorite checklists:

1. Content Technology Questionnaire
2. 15 Questions to Ask Before Starting a Content Marketing Project
3. 7 NEW Things to Do After You've Written a New Blog Post

With today's news that Salesforce.com is acquiring ExactTarget, a marketing services and email company, there's more evidence than ever that marketing and sales are intricately linked. It's long been rumored that Salesforce.com would be moving into more marketing technology and its seemingly come to fruition. ExactTarget is not only an email platform, but they too recently acquired Pardot, a marketing automation company.

This post, though, isn't meant to be a recap of company transactions. Rather, I want to highlight the direction we're headed: into a true marriage of marketing and sales. The advent of the modern CRM system has allowed sales organizations to diligently track their leads, opportunities and closed business while also ensuring great account servicing. From there, a need for marketers to interact with leads and, yes, automate some of the sales functions arose - and in the past few years, the installations of marketing automation platforms have exploded.

And so today, we have more and more companies taking the plunge and investing in these technologies (and stay tuned for our upcoming report where we survey our thousands of B2B lead buyers to get a true sense for CRM and marketing automation adoption; the 2012 report can be found here). Companies have gotten used to sourcing these functions from different vendors, but increasingly, it looks like the consolidation within this space will allow for companies like Salesforce (and Oracle, which recently acquired another marketing automation vendor, Eloqua, as another) to offer one-stop-shopping to satisfy the growing appetite for marketing and sales alignment.

Stay tuned.

A guest post by Dylan Mazeika from BuyerZone's Content Team

Monday and Tuesday of this week I attended SearchLove Boston, and experienced two days of great speakers, topics, and attendees. There were 19 presentations over 2 days and when I wasn't typing notes I was live-tweeting the event (#BZatSearchLove).

The SlideShares for the presentations can be found on Distilled's Slideshare account, but I'm going to cover a few of the talks that provided a lot of insight for B2B professionals.

The Future of Search - Bill Slawski

This is one that I wrote about in my last post and was looking forward to. Bill started off by referencing a Matt Cutts post on why we shouldn't look into patents when it comes to predicting changes in search when it comes to Google.

He disregarded this and looked at how new patents and technology will affect...

• New ways to crawl and new indexing approaches
• New ways to search
• New ways to rank

Bill made it clear that we should be focusing on the following things to prepare for what's coming down the road in search:

1. Understanding how data is being collected and indexed
2. Making pages about "things not strings" and understanding the relationships between them
3. Rankings will increasingly be about authority and quality

The patents discussed were really interesting and worth a read into but as a consumer of the internet, I'm excited to see search go in a direction that generates results people are actually looking for.

BuyerZone just got a bit more social. Today, we launched our brand new social media page: BuyerZone on Social Media. As you look around, you'll probably note that it's a pretty simple page.

Well, look again!

There are, in fact, two key aspects that I made sure went into this page as I designed it. Here's what they are and more importantly, why you should have a social media page for your business' networks:

1) Social Media Team Introduction

As I'm reading tweets from a few of my favorite business brands, I can't help but ask, "Who is the person behind the tweets?" Is it the social media intern? The marketing manager? Or just some random person they hired who works remotely?

It always boggles my mind.

Well, I didn't want you to get a headache, so I made sure to include a little blurb about me and my social media teammate, Dylan Mazeika. The number one reason I did this is because I don't want you to just read BuyerZone's tweets or our Facebook updates. I want you to ENGAGE with us too.

And you're more likely to do this if you feel like you know the people behind them. Well, now you do!

A guest post by Dylan Mazeika from BuyerZone's Content Team

Next week I'll be attending Distilled's SearchLove conference in Boston. I'm looking forward to bringing a lot of actionable marketing and B2B tips back to BuyerZone. While I'm looking forward to all of the speakers, I think the following presentation topics will offer the most takeaways for B2B marketers:

Improving content

Dr. Pete's talk is about DIY data-driven content. Lead generation companies gather a lot of data; so I'm looking forward to moving past typical infographics, and learning how to present this data in a more compelling way for users and readers.

Conversion rate optimization

Rand Fishkin will be speaking on behavioral psychology and inbound marketing, and how this relates to traffic, conversions, and how users behave on your site. This will be an especially interesting presentation from a lead generation perspective where conversions and UX are the bottom line.

As we close in on the end of another work week, here are some good reads that caught our eye:

• Email open rates averaged nearly 20% last year. Are you seeing that in your email activities? If not, here are some tips that could help.

• Are you considering buying leads from a lead generation company? Even if you don't work with BuyerZone, here's a comprehensive whitepaper on everything you need to consider when buying leads from our friends at LeadsCouncil.

• A flower delivery company analyzed their sales funnel and decided to invest in a dedicated lead generation team to supercharge their results. Read their story. 

Stumble upon anything that caught your eye this week? Share in the comments section below.

A guest post by Joy Gendusa

As new marketing technologies are created, businesses are given opportunities to make their marketing systems better. These technologies can help you build a complete marketing system that comprehensively covers all your marketing bases, such as lead generation and follow-up.

The following is just one of the ways you won't lose any of the leads you generate from your marketing campaigns. You'll generate more leads and convert more of those leads into customers, and the best part is forming this complete system takes only four easy steps.

Let's take a look at them...

Acquire New Leads with Postcard Marketing

Postcard marketing is a lead generation tool that is proven to get the job done. It can consistently produce new leads for your company's growth. It works on fundamental marketing principles, using benefits to build prospect interest, and using repetition to build trust and brand awareness.

The key to postcard marketing is the targeted mailing lists. You can create a list of prospects who are already looking for what your company offers - they just don't know you exist yet. When you mail them an intentionally designed marketing postcard, you give them a reason to choose your company over your competition.