Tag: marketing strategy
#fail: How to Create Google Pay-Per-Click Campaigns that Pay Off … for Google
A whopping 90% of internet search traffic takes place through the magic of Google, a company so ambitious that it named itself for a mathematical concept that means a number so big we don’t have time to explain it to you.
But that’s no reason not to trust them to help you play the world’s most popular pay-per-click competition, The Game of Google Ads.
This wild bidding war is perfect for the marketer looking to spend as much time and money as possible for results that are as predictable as ripening avocados.
Will your ad strike the right note at the right time with the ripe prospects?
… Continue Reading >>#fail: 5 Ways to Fail Hard at Product Management
A dream is a really fragile thing and market research is a death sentence when it comes to really stupid dreams…
Product managers – sometimes referred to as product marketers – are responsible for incorporating the voice of the customer into the development process to produce something – sometimes referred to as a product – that somebody will want to buy, possibly.
What is the big deal exactly? 15-year-olds can do it. We live in a world where it is possible to whip up six-figure profits selling slime out of your parents’ kitchen.
So when you hear the so-called “experts” droning on about things like “product roadmaps” and “market research,” just remember that a dream is a fragile thing and market research is a death sentence when it comes to really stupid dreams like becoming a millionaire by selling rocks or blankets with arms.
… Continue Reading >>#fail: How to Suck at B2B Marketing Strategy
They say 80% of businesses fail, so it’s actually pretty easy to suck at B2B marketing strategy.
Still, a broken clock is right twice a day and you could get lucky, so here are some tips for covering all the bases in your next strategic marketing debacle.
Don’t Listen to Your Customers
The quickest way to fail is to ignore the people who might actually buy from you.
You know what’s best for your channel partners and customers, so why bother with getting their input? After all, it would be better if we didn’t have to deal with them at all, right? So why would we want to [gulp] actually talk to them?
… Continue Reading >>Why SEO?
Before you jump into the bottomless pool of opinion on how to do B2B search engine optimization (SEO), it’s important to consider an often-overlooked question in the overheated debate around SEO strategy: Why do it? What is the underlying goal?
SEO is perhaps the single most misunderstood factor around the process of creating a B2B website in the hope of converting visitors into customers: if you don’t have high-quality content aligned to a sales and marketing strategy, an SEO strategy is worthless.
The Whole Point
Strange but true – SEO efforts often overlook the fundamental purpose behind the whole exercise: delivering information to a target audience in a way that will prompt them to buy what you’re selling.
… Continue Reading >>#fail: How to Write B2B Blogs that Suck
There are a lot of ways to fail at B2B blogging and sometimes we feel as if we have seen them all, but then from out of the blue – and yes, the internet is in fact, mostly blue; we looked it up – will come a daring and original new form of just plain terrible blogging.
But you don’t have to be super creative to fail at B2B blogging. There are plenty of ordinary ways to create B2B blog content that is limp, unreadable, ineffective or that actively repels or offends your prospects.
We’re going to walk you through some of the best ways to accomplish all of those things,
… Continue Reading >>B2B Messaging Under Duress: 3 Recommendations for Managing COVID-19 Communications
Your clients have a lot of things to worry about right now. First of course, is protecting the health and safety of their employees and others around them.
But while that’s the priority, the economic risks are hard to separate from our other worries right now. Your clients, like all of us, are navigating the health threat while also scrambling to keep it from spilling over into a threat to their businesses.
How do you communicate with them without simply adding to the noise, or worse – creating the impression that you put profits ahead of public health?
Here are three recommendations on how to communicate with your customers or prospective customers during this crisis:
Share the State of Your Operations
Your customers need to know if there are changes to your capacity or availability.
… Continue Reading >>Innovaxis Named to List of Chicago’s Top Marketing Consultants
As a B2B-focused digital marketing firm with a track record of creating lead-generating marketing content and strategy for a wide variety of businesses, we are proud to have been named to a list of the top marketing and consulting firms serving Chicago.
The ranking, created by Seattle-based research firm Expertise, used 25 variables across five categories that include reputation, credibility, experience, availability and professionalism to establish its list. The agencies on the list were culled from a starting point of more than 600 marketing consultants serving Chicago.
B2B Expertise that Drives Lead Generation
Our president Sean Parnell said the ranking reflects the hard work and specialized expertise that the Innovaxis Marketing team brings to its B2B clients both in Chicago and across the United States.
… Continue Reading >>3 Steps for Applying the Merlyn Principle in Business Planning
In T.H. White’s The Once & Future King, Merlyn explains how he predicts the future: “Now ordinary people are born forwards in Time… But I unfortunately was born at the wrong end of Time, and I have to live backwards from in front, while surrounded by a lot of people living forwards from behind. Some people call it having second sight.”
If you want to predict the future of your business, then start by developing your exit strategy and work backwards. Here are three steps for doing so.
Step 1: Create Your Exit Strategy
It can be uncomfortable to explore the answers to questions like, “How long will I live?
… 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.
… Continue Reading >>Website Strategy: Performance vs. Design
Are You Satisfied with How Your Website Performs?
B2B buyers today spend a great deal of time educating themselves about a business issue and possible solutions. When a visitor lands on your site (if they can find it), you’ve only a few seconds to convey that your product or service is relevant and your company is an authority. If you do, you will generate quality sales leads. If you don’t, you’ll never make it to the shortlist.
It All Starts with Strategy
A website that delivers quality leads, a healthy conversion rate and increased sales, begins with strategic planning.
To perform, your website needs to go beyond looking good and being easy to navigate to making it possible to accomplish your business goals,
… Continue Reading >>