Get in Shape for the New B2B Season

It’s never too early to start planning for the turn of the year. Organisations need to consider all their options in order to optimise the time and effort spent on generating new business.

Many companies are aware that their website is the best source for new leads. However there are key areas where improvements through integrated marketing solutions can create major success for the new business process.

The latest white paper from Profunnel offers practical advice on preparing for the new selling season, which includes:

• Website Content – ensuring your website contains the right keywords to increase SEO and drive traffic to your site
• CRM Database – an up-to-date CRM is essential for the start of the sales process and a large amount of data is required to maximise the results of emails and e-shots sent out
• Awareness of Digital Conversation – digital conversations will already be taking place between prospects and your services. By implementing social media tools you can tag and track online conversations, allowing you to view and understand positive and negative conversions
• Targeted Email Marketing– segmented email campaigns for different sectors and audiences are more beneficial for gaining interest and achieving positive responses than generic ‘email blasting’
• Marketing Automation System – the engine can provide email templates to assist with the design of your targeted campaigns while the system will check and test emails to assure you that they won’t be received as spam

Download the full version of the white paper here

Visit Profunnel for more information on the products and services available.

Email Marketing is Evolving

The results from the annual Marketing Week ‘Email Attitudes Research’ survey indicate that email marketing remains a favoured method of communication for businesses. 70% of respondents said they sent more emails over the last 12 months than the previous year and 45% have seen greater click-through rates.

Consumers surveyed in 2010 found one of the biggest issues with email to be ‘information overload’, whereas this year consumers are more willing to receive email messages due to better targeting. Although for many marketers ‘targeting’ is still considered a big challenge, finding difficulties in obtaining data.

Email appears to be retaining its status as a preferred form of marketing as businesses begin to see the potential of integrating email with other marketing channels. 45% indicate they have seen traffic from other channels increase when integrated with email campaigns. However there is still concern from marketers over data capture, which would allow them to create more tailored emails.

As the results highlight, targeted email marketing is the underlying success factor for marketers and consumers. Profunnel provides integrated email marketing solutions to strengthen tailored campaigns for better results. Through web forensics, website visitor behaviour is captured and warm leads are selected and sent through to marketers, developing B2B lead generation. With this information, email messages can be composed with relevant content for individual prospects. Recipients are more likely to open these messages which will consequently create greater opportunity to generate new business.

Please visit Profunnel for more information on email marketing

Social Media Week – Is Your Business on Board?

Social media is never out of the spotlight and next week sees Social Media Week taking place around the world from 19^th-23^rd September. Social Media Week was established back in 2009 in New York. Now the event will be marked by 12 cities around the world, including Glasgow for the UK, with thousands of attendees – highlighting the surge in importance, popularity and usability of social media across all industries.

Clearly social media is now an integral factor in most businesses, particularly in terms of marketing. Although it’s easy to adopt this tool, it’s essential to use social media correctly and to ensure the applications are relevant to business identity in order to produce effective results.

Profunnel can provide social media marketing solutions to enhance your company’s productivity when using the applications. By integrating our demand generation platform, you can track your social media activities giving you a better understanding of your ROI. The solution also allows you to monitor inbound traffic from various social media sites, increasing your lead generation. These leads will be tracked through the sales cycle to illustrate the financial impact social media integration is achieving for your company.

Please visit Profunnel for more information on social media tracking

Solutions Required for Better Knowledge of Information

A recent Q&A conducted by Marketing Week with national and global brands, including Telefonica/o2, AXA Insurance and Toyota, shows how organisations are getting closer to their customers but marketers are still facing issues when obtaining information.

The heads of research and marketing discuss innovative research techniques which have impressed them, the majority of which are often related to online and digital methods.

These specialists are also concerned with hold-ups in the information retrieval process and how this is frustrating in terms of being able to deliver results. Issues for a number of the brands include targeting the right people and problems with measuring research and the data obtained. The problems highlighted here are apparent for both the B2C and B2B industries.

Profunnel’s marketing software can be integrated to assist marketers with numerous processes, overall contributing to better results. From the demand generation platform, marketers are able to track and monitor website visitors and their activity via web forensics. B2B lead generation is improved as automated personalised emails, created from valuable information, are sent relating to visitor interest. Such targeted email marketing will allow the sales team to build their engagement with prospects and increase interest in the company. Both these factors are crucial for turning prospects into customers.

Visit Profunnel for more information on demand generation

CRM at the Forefront of Business Recovery

As reported on Computing, a recent survey conducted by analyst group Gartner has revealed customer relationship management (CRM) is anticipated to see the largest investment of all the application software markets worldwide in 2011.

31% of respondents say they expect a rise in spending on CRM software. This result reflects Gartner’s prediction that as buyer confidence returns and businesses begin to refocus their attention on increasing revenue rather than reducing costs, the CRM market will start to recover.

For marketers CRM software is a vital component for successful customer retention and is necessary to enhance customer experience. Another key benefit is that marketing activity can be more accurately targeted.

Profunnel offers the only marketing automation solution which is built on a CRM database. This allows marketers to simply and affordably integrate their demand generation activity with the CRM. From the integrated platform, businesses can view client movements on the website incorporated with CRM and into the individual client profile. As a result, sales people can respond to visitor activity which will improve conversion rates and generated sales. Sales representatives are able to build stronger relationships with clients as they are aware of their interests – where and when they visit the website. Overall a streamlined marketing strategy can be implemented – facilitating lead management and ROI tracking.

Visit Profunnel for more information on CRM Integration