Smash The Funnel - The Secrets To Massive Revenue Growth

The More You Know, The Better The Experience; The Better The Experience, The More You Close

“The customer experience is the new marketing battlefront.” — Chris Pemberton, Gartner

“You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work back to the technology, not the other way around.” — Steve Jobs

“We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job to make every aspect of that experience a little better every day.” — Jeff Bezos, Amazon

Marketing automation is never going to replace the work you do to create a remarkable experience for your customers.

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Everything You Need To Craft An SLA For Sales And Marketing This Afternoon

A service-level agreement (SLA) is a contract that establishes a set of deliverables that one party has agreed to provide another.

This agreement can exist between a business and its customers, or between a department that delivers a recurring service to another department within that business, like the sales and marketing departments.

According to a study by CEB, “87% of the terms sales and marketing teams use to describe each other are negative.”

So it makes sense that progressive sales and marketing teams are putting SLAs in place. 

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Don’t Be Intimidated; Video Is Easier Than Ever To Create

Earlier this week, we did an article on where to apply video in your buyer journey. We looked at video for everything from email marketing to using it in your sales process.

Today, we’re digging into what scares people about video the most — the production side of video.

Not to worry. Tools and techniques are available to make producing video for your business easier than ever.

While we’ll talk about some of the professional options for video production later, for most of this article, we’ll assume you’re tackling it on your own. Hold on to your boom mic, here we go.

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About 65% of people are visual learners. They’re often called spatial learners and, unsurprisingly, they learn and remember best through visual communication.

So it’s not surprising that video has become critical to creating a remarkable buyer journey that aligns with the way your prospects and customers want to interact with your brand.

But questions remain: Where and how do you weave video into your marketing, sales and customer service experiences? Where should you use video? How many videos are too many videos? What results should you expect from video? How do you track the performance of those videos?

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Content Marketing Strategy: When Is A Blog Article Much More Than A Blog Article?

You’ve been blogging three or four times a week and you just don’t see major improvement in your KPIs. Visitors are not up, leads are not up and you certainly don’t see more sales opportunities, new customers or revenue from your content marketing efforts.

What’s up?

Blogging for blogging’s sake is never the right approach. If you haven’t spent the time to build your content marketing strategy as an underpinning for your blogging efforts, then you shouldn’t be surprised to see limited results from your blog writing effort.

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Words Matter And The Story Matters, But You Don’t Need To Be Google To Tell A Great Story

Most of the Super Bowl commercials were unremarkable. While some were memorable, they were not memorable enough for you to connect the brand, the action they asked you to take and the creative.

But as always, a few commercials stand out. One of this year’s crop getting a ton of attention is the Google “Loretta” ad.

Some very interesting aspects of the ad helped it stand out, tell Google’s story, make a memory with the audience and hopefully drive revenue for Google.

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A Deep Dive On Why HubSpot Might Actually Be Better For Enterprise Marketers

HubSpot is ready for the pros — professional marketers, that is. For years, the marketing automation platform has excelled in small to medium-sized businesses.

It’s been perfect for CEOs, business owners, single-person or small marketing teams and anyone who needed to ramp up a marketing automation platform quickly.

Out of the box, it’s ready to go and so easy to use that almost anyone can start sending emails, building landing pages, blogging, posting socially and proactively managing their website.

But for bigger companies with more sophisticated marketing requirements, Marketo has always been the go-to platform. Until now!

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Outbound Marketing Tactics Like Trade Shows Require Automation To Optimize Your Event ROI

Today there are more conferences, trade shows and live events than ever before. People are flocking to events, and more marketers are using events in their orchestrated demand generation and lead generation programs.

If your live events are designed to generate leads (not all are), you’re going to be working on a host of marketing tactics designed to drive people to your booth or session, to have attendees aware of your presence and to optimize any sponsorship or exhibit expenses.

But did you know that you can leverage your marketing automation software to improve the ROI on any event or conference you’re participating in this year?

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Regardless Of Size, Companies Have To Stay In Touch With Their Prospects And Customers — Email Is Still The Best Way

Like it or not, we’re all addicted to our email. We check it constantly. We have it in our pockets, in our cars and now on our TVs at home.

Most people make checking, sorting and dealing with email the first thing they do upon waking up or arriving at the office. This makes email marketing one of the most important campaign tactics in the marketer’s toolbox.

On the flip side, reaching people via email has never been more challenging due to the sheer number of emails, the crazy amount of bad emails and the workarounds we’ve created to deal with the massive amount of unwanted email in our inboxes.

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It’s Been Six Months Since You Started With Your Agency And You’ve Seen Few Or No Results – Should You Be Worried?

The short answer is maybe. That’s because generally results are in the eye of the beholder, and in this case, it’s you, the client.

Whether you should be worried or not is 100% dependent on what you expected, what you discussed with your agency and what they told you to expect.

Today, there is a lot wrong with the way agencies work with clients.

The retainers are wrong, the team models are wrong, the investments are wrong, the communication is wrong and what’s wrong most of the time are the expectations around when results will start impacting the business.

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