MarketStar Blog

Drip marketing involves sending out of a set of messages periodically throughout an online marketing campaign with the key objective of increasing the effectiveness of a campaign and improving ROI. The term has been inspired by the “drip irrigation” technology used by farmers to water a huge plot of farmland growing crops in the most efficient manner…continued impact leading to prolonged effects with benefits that can be reaped over longer periods of time. 

by Hobart Swan , originally printed in CCI's Channel Management Insights Blog located here: http://outreach.channelmanagement.com/NL-2015-07-July-CMI_Main.html

The maxim leading many technology manufacturers’ channel strategy has long been the 80/20 rule: the top 20 percent of partners deliver 80 percent of sales so only focus on the top 20 percent. But what if the increasing sophistication of marketing technology can help alter that rule a little bit. Vaughn Aust, Executive Vice President for Digital and BI Solutions at MarketStar, says that advances in analytical and automation technology make it possible to get more business out of that often overlooked bottom 80 percent of partners. He’s been in the business a long time and just might be on to something.

One of the greatest challenges channel marketing groups face is how to generate measurable demand and sales results through and with their channel partners.

For channel marketing, enabling partners to gain access to vendor marketing tools and resources is generally a first step. However, today’s channel partners need more than access to standardized marketing resources to get results. So the question is if you build it, will they come?  

In the fast-paced world of digital marketing, various tools and strategies emerge and evolve, yet content marketing remains a steadfast favorite among B2B marketers. Despite its popularity, the sheer volume of content being produced has led to concerns about its effectiveness. Marketers worry that with so much information flooding the digital space, their carefully crafted content might get lost, leading to diminishing returns on investment.  

It’s no longer a fight over product features or pricing. Great service is what defines competitive advantage. Sadly, all organizations forget that they are not selling products and product features alone. They are selling dreams, desires and must cater to basic human needs. Product specs don’t cater to emotional needs…good service does.

In today’s world, a customer is the nucleus around which the whole business revolves. A product or solution, no matter how ground-breaking, will be unable to survive if it doesn’t meet consumers’ expectations. In this consumer-centric economy, marketers are relentlessly trying to capture customers’ attention and improve their experiences with the brand so as to keep them coming back for more. 

The customer revolution is powered by the influx of mobile devices which allows them to seek information, make purchases, and make recommendations all with the click of a button. The implication is that this is all shaping up to be a shopper driven revolution, with customers shopping online, in the store, on their mobile phones, and switching in between them without any concept of borders. 

Companies now acknowledge the importance of providing a consistent experience at each of these touch-points for consumers; else they run the risk of losing them altogether at any of these interaction points. But it is important that while doing so marketers keep their customers in the center and develop a framework for enhancing their experience with the brand accordingly. 

Using video for marketing is a growing trend that is especially important in ABM because it leads to a quantum jump in successfully connecting, engaging and converting prospects. And personalized video takes marketing effectiveness even further. This article shows how the numbers stand and some proven ways to interpret your video marketing strategy for ABM. 

Email is an indispensable channel for marketers seeking to attract, engage and retain prospects and customers. However, sometimes in an attempt to talk to customers, they end up having a monologue instead of a meaningful two-sided conversation, which leaves a bad taste in their inboxes. It is important for marketers to keep some basic best practices in mind to ensure that their communication is such that it prompts their target audience to open, respond and even share their message onwards with their networks. 

Over the past few years, the retail industry has been negotiating with the challenge of adopting an omni-channel strategy for providing a unified experience to its customers across all channels. The reason for this is not hard to find. According to research1 conducted by the Aberdeen Group, companies with the strongest omni-channel customer engagement strategies retain an average of 89% of their customers, increase their annual revenue by an average of 9.5% year-on-year and decrease their cost per customer contact by an average of 7.5% each year. 

Here are four steps to achieving a seamless omni-channel retail experience: 

Start with a Clear Strategy 

Any strategy that you develop for creating an omni-channel experience should begin with the customer. All stakeholders within the company, be it marketing, customer success or product need to buy into this new approach of making the customer the center of all that you do. 

In order to develop a clear strategy you need to identify the key touch points that your customers frequent and see how you can enhance their journey at each one of them, based on the stage at which they are in the customer journey. 

New Age selling requires that your engagement with customers be contextually relevant to what they are looking for and where they are in the customer journey at any given point in time. You are thus able to offer timely solutions to problems for which they are seeking answers. That’s context-driven marketing, also called contextual marketing.