It’s easy to think that sales leads are subjective. More specifically, plenty of organizations have marketers and salespeople constantly go back and forth on defining leads that actually produce sales.
What about social media, though? It’s not news that critics love to decry the medium for actually destroying social skills. But from that debate, you can only ask: What defines as social?
Ours is the age high tech information. However, this has plenty people fearing for the future of humanity. As of 2013, today’s average attention span has shrunk down to eight seconds. You can already hear it now. “Nobody reads anymore.” “Kids don’t appreciate fine attention to detail.” “Technology makes us dumb.”
This may sound sagely at first but you shouldn’t adopt this sort of thinking for your email marketing campaign. Why? It’s because it’s an excuse. This makes it easy to shift the blame of bad marketing to something you think is beyond your control.
Yet, by thinking this way you are making prospects and customers the real victim.
If you thought that linking brain damage and football was just a jive at jocks, you wouldn’t be the first. (Bonus if you were the kind they’d stuff in a locker.)
But what you may not know is that this little gag could actually be true. If this shocks you, you have now just learned what it feels like when the gags and tropes of fiction become all too real.
Like many social media trends, the Ice Bucket Challenge has received its customary scorn from the crowd that scorns them best. The whole thing seems to reek with the cheesy, millennial stupidity that seems to belie a lack of creativity than an abundance of it.
At least, that’s what you’ll hear from people who typically sling eggs at anything to do with social media. Yet in spite of their argumentation, enlightenment, and sympathetic disillusionment, one thing hasn’t changed.
This stupid stunt still worked.
So is this a sign that your B2B marketing campaign could use a bit of stupid or is it just stooping to its undesirable level?
Not all marketing experiments are corporate invasions of privacy. On the other hand, sometimes experiments themselves need to be utilized within the private confines of your own organization. This extends to the ones you do on the internet.
Ask yourself, how do you expect to improve your B2B marketing strategy if you’re not testing out your ideas? Everything can sound all too good in theory. You’ll have to put it into practice and it may not be worth wasting more of your marketing dollars in case something goes wrong.
Separation never seems to be a good thing for most people. It’s like the Grim Reaper to personal relationships and the recipe for war to those in political office.
But for your lead generation campaign, it might actually be an all-new selling point and the birth of better value proposition to your prospects. To demonstrate, here’s a look on how a complete break-up worked to benefit the conflict between Samsung and Apple.
Whether you watched the first debut of the Dinobots in the original series or the whole of Transformers 4, both tell a story of creations going out of control. And likewise, the same can happen if you put too much faith in marketing automation. Like any part of your lead generation campaign, your marketing tools are still your responsibility and should remain completely under your control.
Now past its second week, the 2014 FIFA World Cup has all the world’s attention. But along with it, you have its biggest sponsors: McDonald’s.
Labeling itself the World Cup’s “official restaurant,” it’s certainly a prime example of all out marketing. From its entire menu theme to inspiring ads and youth programs, it’s a wonder how a single brand can tie itself to something that seems actually quite unrelated to its tie-in event.
How do they pull it off? Is it through the food? Player endorsements? Sheer branding power?
It may not actually be all these things. Maybe, it’s because McDonald’s really just has a way of identifying itself with most people. McDonald’s has been famous for a huge share of ads that just really get people connecting not just with the brand but also with each other. Connecting though isn’t just something you can accomplish with consumer advertising. Even B2B marketers can (and should) score for the same goal.
Apple’s 3 billion-dollar deal with Beats has been its biggest yet but many are saying the move has more to do with branding power than technology. You may neither have the branding power or the money to buy it but are things really as simple as that? Can your B2B marketing campaign really kick it in to high gear just by having a certain brand in your campaign?
Father’s Day is a tradition. And like the day itself, many Dads aspire to pass something on to their children. That includes their own business.
Speaking of which though, how can the idea of passing something down impact your B2B lead generation strategy? This usually implies an image of longevity, meaning yours is a company that’s been around since the time of its founder. How did other old brands maintain themselves as their figurative torch passed down generation after generation?