Martech Zone
Martech Zone provides daily articles for business, sales, and marketing professionals to research technology, discover new sales and marketing tools, and learn how to leverage platforms to drive greater business results.
- Sales Enablement, Automation, and Performance
The Utopian Future of Channel Selling
Channel partners and Value-Added Resellers (VARs) are the redheaded stepchildren (treated without the favor of birthright) when it comes to obtaining the attention and resources from manufacturers of the countless products they sell. They’re the last to get training and the first to be held accountable for meeting their quotas. With limited marketing budgets and outdated sales tools, they struggle…
- Marketing Infographics
Navigating the Wacky Rules of Facebook Contests and Sweepstakes
Did you know that you can require entrants in your Facebook contest or sweepstake promotions to like your page, but you can’t require or even ask them to share your page? Hey, it’s their platform and their users, so they can make the rules however they’d like. If you want to get at their users, you have to navigate some…
- Analytics & Testing
The B2B Sales Pipeline: Turning Clicks into Customers
What is a sales pipeline? In both the business to business (B2B) and the business to consumer (B2C) world, sales organizations work to quantify the number of leads they are currently trying to convert into customers. This provides them with a prediction as to whether they are going to meet the goals of the organization as it pertains to acquisition…
- Advertising Technology
9 Steps for Planning Your Next Social Advertising Campaign
On this last week’s podcast, we shared some great information, tips and tricks on social advertising. Recently, Facebook released some incredible statistics on its social advertising revenue. Overall revenue is up and ads themselves are 122% more costly. Facebook is absolutely embraced as an advertising platform and we’ve seen both incredible results and others that left us scratching our head.…
- Marketing Infographics
Nurturing Conversions through the Social Media Sales Funnel
This amazing infographic sponsored by TollFreeForwarding walks the average business or marketer through the 6 keys to achieve to drive sales via social media: Awareness, Interest, Conversion, Sale, Loyalty and Advocacy. Sales funnels have been used through the marketing world because they provide a way to simplify and visualize the path of a customer from first to final action. Traditionally…
- Content Marketing
Here’s How to Optimize Your Blog for Content Marketing
No matter what kind of content you’re creating, your blog should be the central hub for all things content marketing. But how do you make sure that central nervous system is set up for success? Luckily, there are some simple tweaks that will amplify distribution and ensure that your followers know exactly what they’re supposed to do next. It’s safe to…
- Content Marketing
Ambience: Relevant Product Recommendations in Content
There’s a world of content out there that’s growing every day. Much of the product marketing strategy is to get some product reviews distributed throughout the web, attract those readers back to a product page and then push the reader to convert. Sophia’s e-commerce platform Ambience™ inserts the product image and recommendation within the content – optimized for viewing and…
- Marketing & Sales Videos
Pagemodo Posts: Increase Engagement with Your Social Audience
By now all marketing professionals know that the key to engaging any social community is sharing content of value to them. Of course, it’s also important to optimize that content with great imagery and to share it at the ideal time to reach the optimal audience. Pagemodo has not only given us best practices and strategies for sharing content on…
- Sales Enablement, Automation, and Performance
Recruit’em: Find Business Connections on Google
If you’re looking for a business connection across social networks, Google is a great tool. I often do a search of Twitter + name, or LinkedIn + name to find a profile. LinkedIn, of course, has a great internal search engine (especially the paid version) and there are also sites like Data.com to find connections. More often than not, I…
- Content Marketing
16 Steps to Compelling Content Creation
Sometimes a checklist makes life easy and this one is pretty good on ideas for developing compelling content creation courtesy of WebSearch SEO. I like the advice here because it goes beyond the actual media and points to other elements that make consuming the content easier as well. The 16 Steps to Compelling Content Creation: Think like a journalist. Get…
