Achieving marketing and sales alignment is tough. Sales reps are on the hunt for better leads, while marketers seek more effective ways for evaluating their impact. Instead, imagine a unified approach, where marketing and sales teams work hand-in-hand to pinpoint the most qualified prospects, and market to them accordingly.
According to MarketingProfs, by aligning sales and marketing teams, companies experience a 36% higher customer retention rates and 38% higher sales win rates. End the sales and marketing tug of war, send your ROI soaring, and reach your revenue goals with Account-Based Marketing (ABM).
We’re diving into the ABCs of ABM: what it’s all about, benefits you can’t ignore, and a crash course on creating a winning campaign.
While social
media marketing has come a long way over the last decade, its goal remains the
same: to foster interactive platforms for individuals to share, discuss, and
co-create content.
When done the right way, social media has big-time potential to build your community, grow your customer reach, boost engagement, and drive traffic to your website (and conversions too!). In fact, according to Sprout Social, when consumers follow a brand on social, 87% say they’re likely to visit that brand’s site or app.
Social media is no longer just a “nice-to-have” for enhancing your online presence. After all, it’s where your existing and potential customers and buyers hang out the most. But sometimes, your social media efforts can do more harm than good if you’re not sending the right message, participating on the channels in a meaningful way, or are failing to collect and track data effectively.
Do any of these not-so-rare social media cardinal sins sound like you?
Are you:
… guilty of throwing content out into the universe without a clue of who you’re talking to? You might be a Community Crapshooter.
…employing a “more is more” strategy (or lack thereof), by posting as much as possible in an attempt to stay relevant? You might be an Over Sharer.
…using social channels as a soapbox for your brand and failing to truly engage your followers? You might be an Anti-Social Ghost.
If so, you
may have fallen into an impersonal social media vortex that many brands find
themselves in. Fortunately, we have some tips for how to break the cycle and
put the “social” back in your social media.
Whereoware is excited to introduce Acoustic, the newest iteration of the IBM Watson Marketing suite of tools, released on July 15. The release follows Centerbridge Partners’ acquisition of IBM Watson Marketing software (the marketing automation suite Whereoware specializes in and has used daily for the last decade.)
Born from the desire to focus solely on marketers, Acoustic is dedicated to building products that “bring humanity back to marketing.”
Marketing is Acoustic’s number one priority, rather than an add-on feature to a larger technology suite.
Why
Acoustic?
What’s in a name? In the words of Mark Simpson, Acoustic’s CEO, “our new name is a symbol of our ability to create environments that draw people in, inviting closer and more personal connections. By providing purpose-built solutions, we can empower marketers to make these true human connections. Only by listening carefully to consumers can marketers make themselves heard.”
It’s no secret that personalizing your customers’ experience boosts satisfaction, loyalty, and sales.
Successful personalization delivers a consistent and seamless customer journey across channels (email, website, social, etc.). In fact, according to Salesforce, 75% of consumers expect consistent experiences across multiple channels, with 73% likely to switch brands if they don’t.
To help you get started, we’re sharing three tips for connecting your website and email personalization strategy so you can deliver relevant, memorable experiences that build brand loyalty, motivate action, and increase sales.
Imagine: you’re on a webpage with an enticing offer. You’re excited and ready to go when suddenly, a long, bulky webform form with several required fields appears.
If we’re being honest, most of us are unlikely to stick it out and finish the form, and you wouldn’t be alone. In fact, according to The Manifest, a whopping 67% of users will permanently abandon a form if they encounter complications.
Webforms are, however, vital to engaging your customers and
communities online. Not only do they increase both B2B and B2C account
registration (which is, by the way, an important KPI for new websites) and
email capture for marketing, but forms also offer the convenience for users to
sign in from anywhere and proceed through checkout more easily.
There are many factors that contribute to user frustration, so follow the tips below to start addressing the usability issues on your forms.
Amazon Prime Day (the summer’s “Black Friday” holiday boasting tons of discounts on popular items for Amazon Prime members) started as a 20th Anniversary promotion in 2015 but has since become a shopping phenomenon across Amazon and competitive online shopping sites.
Amazon will hold its longest Prime Day yet—48 hours of deals—from July 15 to July 16. This year, major retailers Target, Walmart, and eBay are joining in on the fun.
This year’s Internet Retailer Conference and Exhibition (IRCE 2019) in Chicago was a blast! We enjoyed awesome speakers, fun networking opportunities, and more during our visit to the Windy City.
Our session with client Yamaha, Selling a Lifestyle: How Storytelling Motivates Different Customer Types to Buy, covered proven techniques for segmenting different customer types—from first-time visitors to your highest-value clientele—and online personalization approaches to drive brand loyalty and sales. Download the Persona Worksheet and get the presentation slides to get started on building personalized customer journeys.
Did you miss our session or need a refresher? We’re recapping how Yamaha develops user personas and combines email and website personalization to deliver every prospect and customer a relevant and compelling brand experience.
Don’t just sell your products. Follow our 4-step guide to brand storytelling, selling a lifestyle, and gaining lifetime customers.
One-size-fits-all marketing is a thing of the past; your customers expect a personalized experience everywhere they interact with your brand.
Your messages and incentives should be tailored to each individual: relevant to their needs, addressing their concerns, demonstrating your value, and persuading them to convert—all at an appropriate time in their individual purchase cycle.
It may seem impossible to cater to each customer’s individual needs, but one way to simplify this process is to develop user personas.
User personas are fictional characters representing different segments of your core audience, so you can engage individuals with the right approach, timing, and messaging to move them down the conversion path.
Getting your personas right and successfully personalizing the customer experience is a huge opportunity.
This week, we welcome a guest post from our Marketing Account Manager, Lea Howland.
Lea works with our clients to maximize their website and email strategy, guiding them on how to leverage digital technology to achieve their goals. She specializes in creating and implementing strategic roadmaps for client success – translating best-in-class digital tactics into actionable plans.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) is a popular marketing automation software enabling marketers to target and track interactions using the powerful data capabilities of Salesforce.com (SFDC) CRM, right out of the box. Combining SFMC and SFDC ensures all leads receive the attention they need through targeted, automated marketing and your sales team—leading to a more efficient, effective, and aligned sales process.
Any tool that helps get sales and marketing alignment is a win in our book! In fact, Salesforce found that “62% of marketing leaders say individuals and teams in their departments are more aligned with each other than ever…and the more aligned they become, the better they perform.”
Today, we’re covering a few tips to help Salesforce Marketing Cloud users maximize tools within the platform to better support their sales team and marketing efforts, while growing ROI.
Shopping on social media just got a whole lot easier.
Last year, Instagram released shopping tags, enabling brands to create hybrid marketing and advertising content with tags that display product and price details directly on posts. But the much-loved social media platform has taken it to the next level.
Instagram announced that it began rolling out a new in-app checkout feature that makes it easy-breezy for ‘grammers to shop their feed and favorite brands.
This is a big move for Facebook, the parent company of the popular photo-sharing app, into becoming a full-fledged commerce business. Although direct checkout is currently in limited testing with 20-something top brands, Instagram plans to extend the feature to more businesses in the coming months.
Want to know how you can get in front of your brand’s biggest fans? Learn how the checkout feature works, how to get started, and what it means for your devoted followers.
