Last week I saw Magic Johnson deliver a keynote on marketing at the Sirius Decisions Summit in Nashville. If you’re not a marketing or sales geek, Sirius Decisions is an analyst-driven consulting firm that focuses on helping businesses improve sales and marketing operations with better processes and technologies. Exciting stuff for us marketing geeks, but Magic Johnson?
The fourth? interview in our webcast series on The Channel’s Biggest Marketing Challenges? is with? ? Carol Meyers,? CMO at Rapid7.? Carol has? a wealth of experience and insights? on channel management, including branding, lead generation, sales support and partner management. We discuss channel partners challenges from the Supplier perspective, including best practices for partner enablement, channel account management, and developing? effective partnerships.
Read moreEnabling Channel Partners: Data Sheets Don’t Cut it Anymore
If you’ve ever managed a big project you know many little things can go wrong on the way to that moment of truth when you hope, ultimately, everything goes right. If you’ve managed a lot of big projects, you know how painful it can be when that ultimate moment of truth blows up in your face.? In business, big projects are a part of daily life. We make products, we launch campaigns, we engineer production processes. Big money is at stake, as well as careers and companies. So how do you avoid falling flat on your face?
Over the seven years we’ve been working with companies to incorporate social media into their marketing mix, we’ve seen a lot of changes in the way companies approach social marketing. Mostly for the better. But one area where we still see companies struggling is in deciding who should speak for the company in social media.
There’s a d
angerous? undercurrent we see developing among channel? marketing organizations? trying to deal with the? confusing landscape of social media options? that can? best be called “Checking Off the Social Media Box.” Everyone knows social media is important, but it’s hard to pin down exactly where it adds the most value, so business objectives get over-simplified to reduce the confusion.
For seven years now, we’ve been delivering social media intelligence to some of the world’s largest brands, and we’ve watched marketers struggle with the concept of segmentation in social media. Segmentation is one of the fundamental principals of good marketing–the idea of dividing customers with similar needs and attributes into groups for more targeted marketing. Demographics, psychographics and behavioral economics are all time-tested techniques for segmenting markets in meaningful ways, and marketers have done backflips trying to apply them to social media.
My post? blasting LinkedIn? last week was a long time in coming. I’ve been working with clients for several years, strongly advocating LinkedIn as a powerful tool for engaging customers and prospects. But time after time, I’ve watched marketers get burned by poor planning, poor communication, and poor decision-making at LinkedIn. Last week I focused on? LinkedIn’s seemingly arbitrary decision to wipe out Product Pages, after thousands of companies invested in creating them, only to replace them with “Showcase” pages, which seem like a really cheap imitation of GooglePlus. I now have customers for whom we built Product Pages and championed LinkedIn asking what they should do, and whether or not LinkedIn should still be a part of their content strategy.
Read moreOne Content Error That Will Get You Banned On LinkedIn
Good partners—especially growing partners—don’t just want to be fed leads, they want to learn how to drive leads themselves.
Visibility into partner performance means seeing how partners are marketing, what kinds of reaction they’re getting, what kind of market influence they can generate, and what quality of leads they can produce.
Lead gen consumes billions of dollars in marketing budgets, including technology and human capital. And yet, a typical campaign can ring up a 99% failure rate and still be called a success. Many companies don’t even act on 95% of the leads they do generate.