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Demand Generation, Reputation Development, or Both?

16. July 2012 · Write a comment · Categories: Digital Marketing, Marketing, Marketing Communications, Marketing Strategy

Demand Generation and Reputation Development in B2B Marketing

This post discusses a diagram that I first created a few years ago to visually illustrate the relationships between reputation development and demand generation activities in B2B marketing. It's a classic 'quadrant-style' graphic, with Demand Generation value (e.g., return on investment / ROI) increasing to the right along the horizontal axis, and Reputation Development value increasing vertically.

B2B Lead Generation, CRM, and Marketing Automation

29. June 2012 · 1 comment · Categories: Digital Marketing, Market Research, Marketing, Marketing Communications, Marketing Strategy, Marketing Trends, Sales

How do CRM and Marketing Automation impact B2B lead generation?

I recently saw the infographic below (via BuyerZone) about B2B lead generation, and thought it was worth highlighting here, along with a little commentary. The results in the graphic come from a survey of '200+ BuyerZone clients and other B2B companies.'

The key takeaways for me were:

CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platforms have become much more mainstream, and their use seems to also indicate a more sophisticated and well-rounded approach to marketing, and a small improvement (from 6.99 to 7.31) in overall sales/marketing alignment.

Marketing Automation, however, is still relatively unused (and not well understood) by this group of respondents. But for those using it, Marketing Automation is driving significantly increased satisfaction with overall lead volumes and lead quality.

Defining Inbound Marketing in 2012

07. June 2012 · 2 comments · Categories: Customers, Digital Marketing, Marketing, Marketing Communications, Marketing Strategy, Marketing Trends

So just what is Inbound Marketing, anyway?

I recently became curious about the origins and evolution of the term 'inbound marketing', so I did a little Googling on it to learn more.

Here are some highlights, based on the Google search: define "inbound marketing" 2012. I wanted to get only fresh results, so I added 2012 to the search phrase.

The term 'inbound marketing' has in fact been around since 2005 (Brian Halligan of HubSpot gets credit for coining it). The Wikipedia entry for it is very helpful, with references to marketing industry heavyweights Brian Halligan, David Meerman Scott, and Seth Godin.

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