Customer Development Articles

Unwrap Your Ideal Customer

Via The Customer Collective on No Responses

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Did you know your ideal customer is out there, just waiting for you? When it comes to lead generation—and, ultimately, lead management—you need to have a firm finger on the pulse of your ideal customer. The best way to reach this place: build an ideal customer profile. Bob Apollo writes: “The idea of creating ‘ideal customer profiles’ is gaining momentum, and with good reason: it enables marketing to be better targeted, and it equips sales people to qualify more effectively.” Apollo sketches out the 4 Dimensions of an Ideal B2B Customer, which…

Put a Leash on those Sales Leads!

Via B2B Lead Generation Blog on No Responses

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Withholding leads from sales seems … a little backwards. But if your 2011 marketing budget is tight, it may be the best solution. Brian Carroll provides some stats that takes the awkwardness out of the situation: 80 percent of [survey] respondents said they pass unqualified leads along to sales. That’s costly! Carroll continues: For every 100 raw leads, only 4 to 7 are ready to buy. So what your marketing team needs to do is delve deep into lead nurturing and qualification. This will then free up the budget—and a lot of…

Your Business Needs Customer Feedback to Succeed—and Learn

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Customer feedback: the key to business promotion—and learning. Marketing strategies need commentary. Otherwise, how do you know you’re succeeding in customer engagement? Amongst Mike Volpe’s A Small Business Owner’s Guide To Building Credibility, there’s an underlying thread that steals the show: feedback. It comes in two forms: Encourage Customer Reviews and Post Testimonials and Endorsements Think about how business branding has succeeded—and struggled—based on Yelp customer reviews. This applies mostly to restaurants and customer service-oriented establishments, but the lesson thrives: if you provide your customers with a place to speak their…

Be a Glutton … for Blog Content!

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What’s the key ingredient in a content marketing strategy? Content, of course. So how gluttonous for content have you been lately? BNet has a PDF presentation about blogging called Content is Queen that’s worth taking a look at if you don’t have the basics of a blog-based marketing strategy. (If you do have the basics, however, you might want to seek out something a little more advanced.) Here’s the breakdown between The Challenge and The Solution: Customers shut off messages—so give them useful content they’ll seek out Customers are…

Execute the Creation of Your Case Study

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This is a part of a series that was created to help you create case studies for your company. This series will walk through the process, necessary roles, in addition to guides for each role to help your company get started quickly. From start to finish, case study creation can take anywhere from a couple weeks to several months – it is up to you to establish expectations with your freelancers. As a reference, it takes OpenView four weeks to create a case study. Be prepared that often times, the external case study participants (your customers) may take awhile to…

What is the Role of the Outbound Prospecting Manager?

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This is a part of a series that was cre­at­ed to help you get the prac­tice of out­bound prospect­ing built into your com­pany.  This series will walk through the process, nec­es­sary roles, in addi­tion to guides for each role to help your com­pany get started quickly. As the manager of a team of outbound prospectors, it is imperative that many processes and tasks are completed/in motion before your reps start dialing. Launching an outbound prospecting initiative is not as simple as hiring a cold-caller, giving them a list/computer/phone, and saying, “Start calling!” Use this checklist as a guide to stay…

Email Addicts: Your Company's Lifeblood

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In the face of social media, email marketing may seem a little outdated and ineffective. But subscribers to your email lists are, in fact, immeasurably valuable. “It’s your subscribers who have the strongest foundation of trust with your content. It’s your subscribers who let you carry on when you run into snags (like getting de-indexed from Google). And it’s your subscribers who will become the bulk of your buyers.” In his/her post on Copyblogger, The Blog Tyrant lists 3 Ways to Get More Email Subscribers. The most worthwhile takeaway is Harnessing the…

Email Addicts: Your Company’s Lifeblood

Via Copyblogger on No Responses

Image provided by: kwolski

In the face of social media, email marketing may seem a little outdated and ineffective. But subscribers to your email lists are, in fact, immeasurably valuable. “It’s your subscribers who have the strongest foundation of trust with your content. It’s your subscribers who let you carry on when you run into snags (like getting de-indexed from Google). And it’s your subscribers who will become the bulk of your buyers.” In his/her post on Copyblogger, The Blog Tyrant lists 3 Ways to Get More Email Subscribers. The most worthwhile takeaway is Harnessing the…

Social Media is a Conversation—So Start Talking

Via Content Marketing Institute on No Responses

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Here’s the problem with social media: all too often there is no conversation—just a lot of one-sided chatter. That shouldn’t be the truth with your online marketing strategy. There’s one simple question you need to ask yourself whenever engaging with a customer: “At the end of of the dialog, did the conversation work to strengthen the relationship between the brand and the customer?” If you keep that elementary phrase in mind, you’ll give your content marketing efforts a double-take and reconsider the effectiveness of your tweets, Facebook status updates, LinkedIn group postings,…