Innovations Insights
How B2B Content Marketing Agencies Fail Their Clients
The Top 5 B2B Marketing Mistakes
Content marketing is the foundation of inbound lead generation. When part of a strategic marketing plan leveraged with search engine optimization (SEO), content marketing can dramatically increase thought leadership, inbound lead generation, revenue and profits.
Effective content marketing can generate ROI of at least 300% within 9-18 months, sometimes sooner. Unfortunately, ineffective content marketing is more common, can cost several thousand per month and may only result in a handful of leads. How can you tell the good from the bad so you don’t waste a lot of time and money?
Here are five common mistakes made by content marketing agencies, and how to avoid them.
Mistake #1: Content in a VacuumAny content marketing agency who guarantees they can boost your online ranking with content alone is telling you a tired story.
… Continue Reading >>A Better Way to Market Your Brand & Accelerate B2B Sales Growth
So many companies make the same mistake: they lead with what they sell and why they’re good at it. While this may sound counterintuitive, leading with who you serve and what problems you solve resonates with prospects and customers in a far more powerful way – especially when you craft a compelling story around the needs of your clients.
Messaging that Doesn’t Put the Solution Before the Problem
The problem with the traditional approach to messaging is that it only works if the products, services and solutions you sell align exactly with what your prospects think they need. What if they don’t know what they want? What if they’re wrong? What if they’re not even aware your solutions exist?
Unless they are experts in your field, which is unlikely, your prospects are self-prescribing and are likely to be wrong,
… Continue Reading >>Farewell, Adobe Business Catalyst – What’s Next?
At this time two years ago, we encouraged B2B companies to use Adobe Business Catalyst – our website content management system (WCMS) of choice.
Sadly and unexpectedly, Business Catalyst announced that they will end-of-life the platform by March 26, 2020. Adobe originally wanted to pull the plug in 2018, but pushed the date back as torches were lit and pitchforks were being sharpened. This leaves more than 700,000 websites currently hosted on Adobe with the daunting task of migrating to another platform.
Choosing a WCMS for your B2B website can be a struggle. There are so many – trendy platforms entice you with promises of do-it-yourself website designs and minimal prices. Others wow you with functionality until you realize that the monthly subscription is more than your entire marketing budget.
So, how do you choose the right WCMS without sacrificing something key?
… Continue Reading >>How to Unlock the Power of Your B2B Website with Structured Data
The first objective of any marketing effort is to get your message where it needs to go. In digital marketing, your first audience is often a search engine: the powerful, frequently misunderstood gatekeepers of the internet.
Search engines are designed to deliver the best possible results based on what you’re searching for. To do so, automatically, they have to decipher and reconcile thousands of formats, languages and vocabularies associated with website coding.
The addition of “structured data” – highly organized blocks of code added to web pages to provide search engines with additional page details – can streamline this process by “speaking” to search engines directly, in a vocabulary they can easily interpret.
Until recently, these multiple languages and vocabularies used on the web for structured data made this process difficult for search engines and web developers alike.
But in 2011,
… Continue Reading >>Chicago Innovation Awards 2018: Call for Nominations
For the 17th consecutive year, the Chicago Innovation Awards will celebrate the most innovative new products and services introduced in the Chicago. Nominees and winners cut across all industries, from large corporations to start-ups, for-profit and non-profit, public and private sector, high tech and low tech. The key is innovation.
I encourage all who have developed a new product or service within the last 3 years to self-nominate for this year’s awards. Nominations are free, and can be submitted via an online form at www.chicagoinnovation.com. The deadline is July 31, 2018.
This year’s winners will be celebrated with 1,500 business and civic leaders at the Chicago Innovation Awards on October 29, 2018, at the Harris Theater. Winners will be covered in local and national media, invited to ring the NASDAQ Bell, invited to meet with the Mayor, Governor, Cook County President and more.
… Continue Reading >>Leveraging B2B Sales and Marketing Efforts to Go Farther in 2018
The B2B sales and marketing landscape can be a murky place.
Visitors may flock to your website but create few qualified leads. A flurry of sales activity doesn’t necessarily lead to sustainable gains. You can flaunt your services at all the right trade shows and still go home with little to show for it. And every five minutes some new “must do” marketing platform or technology pops up on the scene.
It’s never been easier to sink time and money into marketing your business. What’s harder is creating a focused and disciplined strategy that’s tied to genuine and measurable ROI.
At Innovaxis, we specialize in helping B2B businesses develop and implement effective sales and marketing strategies specifically tailored for B2B success. Our strategies don’t just drive leads – they drive sustainable B2B success. But we don’t do it alone.
Marketing Strategies that Leverage Your Team &
… Continue Reading >>The Stock Market Is Booming, So Why Isn’t Your Business?
The stock market is at all-time highs. The economy is in the seventh year of expansion since the Great Recession. Big business has never been more
profitable, even before proposed cuts to lower the corporate tax rate.
So why aren’t small and mid-sized businesses growing at the same rate? Why is it so difficult to generate new business? How can SMBs compete against
big business?
If the answers were clear, SMBs would be growing along with the rest of the economy. Instead, they suffer from many hidden barriers to growth. One
of the most common, and most damaging, is a misalignment between sales and marketing.
Buyerlytics Plus is the product of 30 years of combined sales and marketing best practice experience between Innovaxis and Infinity, and provides SMBs
what no other company can: alignment between sales and marketing and the first step to 10X sales growth.
Buyerlytics® Plus Creates a New Opportunity for Businesses to Achieve 10X Growth
Innovaxis & Infinity Partner to Help Businesses Achieve B2B Sales & Marketing Alignment for Midwest Companies with Digital Sales Models
Chicago & Cedar Rapids – October 30, 2017 – Infinity, Inc., a Cedar Rapids-based sales and service agency, today announces the launch of Buyerlytics Plus: a new way for business-to-business (B2B) technology and service companies to achieve 10X sales growth by aligning sales and marketing.
Buyerlytics Plus provides integrated sales and marketing through Infinity’s strategic partnership with Innovaxis, a Chicago-based marketing consultancy
and managed services firm.
The Case for Sales & Marketing Alignment Best Practices
While markets have rebounded since the Great Recession, many organizations between $25 and $100 million in annual revenues are still experiencing a
lack of growth.
These companies implement sales and marketing strategies that should be effective, but still fall short of their B2B revenue and profitability goals.
… Continue Reading >>Sales & Marketing Alignment: Strategy vs. Tactics
If there is anyone who hasn’t weighed in by now on the concept of sales and marketing alignment, it’s hard to imagine who it could be.
Getting everyone on the same page, in the same boat, on the same planet, holding hands and having a beer together, is, apparently, a goal upon which we all agree and a topic that generates no end of strategies for how to reach it.
Can there possibly be anything left to say? If not, then why isn’t your sales & marketing aligned?
The idea of sales and marketing professionals locked in endless disagreement over how to grow a business seems a little dated at this point. We can’t really talk anymore about how one pursues results that are easily measured while the other operates in a cloud of theory. The cloud is our second office now and the metrics of modern B2B marketing are as nailed down as any sales quota.
… Continue Reading >>New Product Development: Do You Feel Lucky?
It happened again. We’ve observed another software vendor that released a new product that has generated almost no sales
in the first year and which faces an increasingly grim outlook.
How
does a vendor with an otherwise successful track
record in their bread-and-butter market fail so miserably?
The answer is a lack of insight into both
channel and end-user requirements—insight that could be
obtained through primary market research.
We’ve seen this scenario play out time and time again, with millions wasted and many people fired. Two
instances come to mind where products were launched with no evidence of market or channel demand, only to see them fail.
Does This Sound Familiar?
The first example comes from a software vendor
whose engineers came up with an interesting
concept that was a spin-off of a successful,
