If you have a business, you have undoubtedly been told to jump on the social media bandwagon -- to sign up for a Twitter or Facebook account and start tweeting, inviting friends, and posting to walls. But should you? In many cases, the answer is no -- or at least, not right now (or certainly not while marketing dollars are scarce).
In marketing, there are often short periods of time when a new or popular concept emerges that can help differentiate your products or services, promote them to a wider audience, and expand your business. At this moment, innerbridge believes that although there has been a significant amount of activity around going "green" - creating eco-friendly operations, developing green products and services, and marketing them as such - it still represents a tremendous opportunity to businesses of all sizes.
While we think this green trend is here to stay, like most other marketing concepts, it will become less relevant as a primary pitch as being green becomes an expectation - not the exception - for organizations. But that reality is still a few years out. For the time being, we think that the business return for going green has not yet been maximized.
But to maximize the return of going green, we need to learn more about what businesses are doing in terms of becoming eco-friendly and what business executives think and plan to do in the near- and long-term around this opportunity. So, last year innerbridge developed a survey to understand the state of green operations, products, and marketing.
Being "green" is all the rage in marketing these days. Print, TV, radio, and online advertisements pitch eco-friendly products and offerings. Riding on the back of intense media coverage of the climate change issue and the dramatic increases in energy costs, especially...
For small or startup organizations, finding a cost-effective contact management system is not an easy task. It's critical to track interactions with prospects,clients, vendors, partners, and sometimes the media, but the most well known offerings don't offer enough value for the cost. Highrise by 37signals is a welcome exception, providing great value at a low price point. It success also provides lessons for those marketing online services.
It's amazing that some companies still insist on serving PDF-based press releases from their Web sites. While the file format has great advantages in many document use cases, it makes no sense for online press releases. It hinders SEO optimization, delivers an inconsistent browsing experience, and can cause issues for increasingly popular mobile devices, such as the iPhone.
One of the keys in any marketing effort, such as naming a product or choosing a Web site URL, is to make a decision that will at the very least be neutral and at best be positive. Pragmatism, particularly in business-to-business technology marketing, should be a core philosophy. It is better for companies to cap discussions and get on with the dirty but necessary work of lead generation, scheduling prospect meetings, influencing the press, and improving the product to meet current and expected client demands.
Almost everyone in high-tech marketing at some point in his or her career has grimaced trying to sell an under-powered, feature-starved, or buggy solution. For many, helping sell weak products defines a technology marketing career. But by getting a marketing liaison -- armed with customer data -- into the product development trenches early, marketing can work with developers to deliver a product that can both be built and that will appeal to prospects.
This post will walk you through a process that can be used to measure your core search terms effectiveness. It's a relatively simple, repeatable process that can be very effective for making quick, tactical changes to Web sites and marketing campaigns. As a bonus, this approach also shows who else is using your terms -- a valuable bit of competitive intelligence.
Vendor blogging initiatives offer great reward, but a project can stumble when facing the inevitable challenges of creating and approving content and reacting to negative feedback. In this post, we will examine some of the issues of vendor blogging, look at ways to easily spot and try and mitigate these issues, and, finally, talk about the role of third parties in providing a blog management service.
Many organizations are tempted to outsource telesales, but without processes in place and without understanding the best model for the company, contracting with a third-party can do more harm than good. In this post, we discuss how to get your telesales processes in order and debate the various models for telesales.
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