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Feature ArticlesThink of Marketing-as-a-System to Fuel GrowthBy Dan Freeman, Editor, SMB Marketing ReportWhy does marketing always seem to get the short shrift among small & mid-sized businesses? This was the question we posed to John Jantsch, author of Duct Tape Marketing, and creator of the Duct Tape Marketing small business marketing system and Duct Tape Marketing Authorized Coach Network. “It’s pretty simple really, they didn't get into business because they were great marketers, they got into business because they wanted to or knew how to do what the business does. It doesn't take long though for them to realize they are actually in the marketing business”. Yet even those executives that understand the value of marketing have a hard time committing the time or resources to it. “Even though most business owners are also their firm's CMO, they rarely spend any time in that box. If they do, it's primarily reacting to the ‘idea of the week’ “, say Jantsch. Why Marketing Automation is the Next Big ThingBy Dan Freeman, Editor, SMB Marketing ReportWhile Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software that attempts to improve the productivity of sales teams is fairly ubiquitous, most small and mid-sized firms are still in their infancy when it comes to using CRM to drive sales results. Yet even as SMB’s grapple with CRM selection and implementation, we are already well into the rise of another sphere of productivity improvements. This time it’s marketing that is getting streamlined, measured, and hopefully, better managed with a multitude of new marketing productivity tools on the market. The first wave of marketing automation on the market has been centered on email marketing systems. Today there are dozens of vendors that specialize in providing ‘hosted’ email marketing platforms where users. One of the leaders is Constant Contact, which went public last summer and now has more than 250,000 customers. According to CEO Gail Goodwill, the company succeeded by focusing on one important aspect of marketing. “At Constant Contact, the goal was to make it easy for companies to communicate with customers via e-mail - and that was it.” >> Learn more about the next generation of Marketing Automation solutions… SMBs Stepping Up Inbound Lead Generation and Social Media StrategiesBy John Gaffney of Demand GenerationAs lead generation continues its momentum even in a tough economy, some differences between large companies and their small-to-medium sized counterparts are starting to take shape. Case in point: A new survey from Cambridge, MA-based marketing services agency HubSpot shows that SMBs spend three times more money on social media for lead generation than larger companies do. SMBs, according to the survey, spend 14% of their lead gen budget on the newest blogs and social media as compared to 5% for larger companies. |
