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.
- Content Marketing
Improving Sales Proposal Effectiveness
In a world where there are so many different options and all the information available to us with a quick search and click, the sales cycle has gotten longer over the past decade. In fact, the average sales cycle is 22% longer than it was five years ago. What gives? Our sales proposal automation sponsor, TinderBox, actually did a study…
- Social Media & Influencer Marketing
The Blurry Lines of Marketing Return on Investment
Yesterday, I did a session at Social Media Marketing World called How to Shift From Growing Followers to Producing Results With Social Media. I’m often a contrarian to the advice that’s continually pushed in this industry… even leaning a bit on the controversial. The genuine premise is that businesses continue to look for fan and follower growth in social media…
- Paid and Organic Search Marketing
What, Exactly, Is Good SEO?
Last week, I had the opportunity to meet Anthony Duignan-Cabrera, a seasoned journalist, digital marketer, and content strategist who helped drive explosive growth at Patch. When I was introduced to him as an SEO consultant, I couldn’t help but cringe a little. Even though this particular engagement focuses on search strategy, that label carries some baggage. It often implies that…
- Analytics & Testing
How to Generate Value from Digital Marketing
Just this week I was interviewed about the optimization work we do and one of the problems we find central to many of our prospect and clients’ marketing efforts is that they want they don’t build the sites for their prospects and clients – they build it for themselves. Don’t bet me wrong, of course your company wants to love…
- Content Marketing
The Top Marketing Tactics for Lead Generation
We touched base with an old client today who hasn’t worked with us in the last year. A year ago, many companies were utilizing our resources because we were ahead of the curve on search optimization strategies. Now, I believe we’re pushing our clients further down the road to rich content strategies and marketing automation. It winds up, we’re on…
- Content Marketing
Selling IN Content is not Selling WITH Content
In speaking with a company that produces great content, they discussed that some of the content ideas that they ran up the flagpole had been denied because the content didn’t directly influence the sale of their products nor services. Ugh. What an absolutely disastrous content strategy. If the goal of every piece of your content is to sell something, you…
- Social Media & Influencer Marketing
Brook Daily: Find the Best Tweets of Interest
While I follow a lot of accounts on Twitter, I don’t actually follow the accounts. Twitter is a stream that I’d have to stare at all day if I wanted to capture all of the information I wanted from it. While I love Twitter and it’s an incredible resource, finding tools that allow you to curate the content is really…
- Analytics & Testing
Gainsight: A Customer Insight and Retention Platform
Gainsight launched the Spring Release of its Customer Success Management platform, which makes it even easier for marketers to get a 360° customer view and collaborate with other customer success stakeholders across the organization using the power of data analytics. At larger companies where many different departments – from sales to product development and marketing – marketers are challenged with…
- E-commerce and Retail
Which Social Media Platforms Drive the Most Sales?
Wow… to better understand how social media is impacting the e-commerce industry, Shopify analyzed data from 37 million social media visits that led to 529,000 orders. Here are some highlights from the infographic they shared: Nearly two thirds of all social media visits to Shopify stores come from Facebook. An average of 85% of all orders from social media come…
- Analytics & Testing
The State of Mobile in the US
Mobile usage among consumers continues to skyrocket. 74% of growth was in smartphones with 79% of US Shoppers browsing and shopping on sites and apps. By 2016 mobile app revenues will hit $46 billion. To quantify what this dramatic shift means for brands the folks at Usablenet put together an infographic that demonstrates just how much mobile Internet usage is…
