Tag: B2B Marketing

B2B marketing automation can quietly become so complex that nobody knows what messages a customer actually receives, a major insurance client of ours had to create a dummy customer just to find out. Here's how to choose a B2B marketing automation platform you can actually manage long-term, with the five top contenders (HubSpot, Marketo, Pardot, ActiveCampaign, Eloqua) compared honestly.

Marketing automation is one of the great efficiency multipliers, and one of the great time-wasters when set up badly. After 20 years and six different platforms, here are nine best practices that survive a platform change: start with the journey map, automate processes not campaigns, build over time, test relentlessly, and keep the system count down even if it means compromising on features.

Customer testimonials are one of the highest-ROI marketing assets on your website, and most teams use them wrong. Sam Johnson, founder of Feedback Loop, shares six fixes you can make today: testimonial placement near CTAs, social-channel tracking, going beyond email asks, photos and video, no faking, and remembering to ask in the first place.

Right offer or right time — which one matters more? A retail client asked, and the answer surprised both of us. Khan, Lewis and Singh's Marketing Science paper runs the numbers properly and the result is gold for one-to-one marketers. Here's what they found, and what it implies about how much effort to put into timing versus content.

Trigger marketing isn't a clever overlay on the existing campaign calendar, it's a fundamentally different way of interacting with customers. With trigger programs typically 2 to 12 times more effective than traditional direct marketing, the value's worth the rebuild. Here's the contrast between the old quarterly-campaign approach and the trigger-marketing approach.

A major financial services firm spent six months and several hundred thousand dollars on a segmentation exercise that produced statistically perfect customer groups, and was then unusable because nobody could act on them. That's the segmentation trap: technically correct, practically useless. Here's why segmentation is not customer strategy, and what to build instead.