Delivering on a Data Strategy

Posted on September 24, 2012 by Srikant Sharma

Part 2

Data in Action: Getting Started

While defining and deploying a data strategy may be perceived as a challenge to the status quo, staying outcome-focused by emphasizing its benefits – going forward will garner support and help reinforce the initial groundwork already laid to recast data’s role in your organization.

- Define objectives

What exactly is the desired outcome? Expansion into new markets? Pick-up the sales cycle pace? Do sales and marketing have the same goals? Establish objectives that will allow your data collection efforts to meet the needs of all stakeholders.

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The Most Pinteresting Brands

Posted on May 22, 2012 by Christina Dal Porto

Part 3 of 3: Five Brands Doing Pinterest Right

Conversation, Community...

WHOLE FOODS
Whole Foods is using Pinterest to do what it does best in the social media universe, publishing compelling content intended to highlight and promote its brand, with pinboards centered on topics like food, living green, recycling, entertainment and kitchen design, among others. The brand is as engaged as it is engaging, too – it consistently pins, repins and follows other members.

BETTER HOMES AND GARDENS
Nowhere has traditional lifestyle brand Better Homes and Gardens demonstrated very modern social networking strategy than on Pinterest. In addition to pinboards devoted to standard fare like recipes, decorating, entertaining and household projects, the brand also maintains pinboards focused on the content of other online publishers such as pinboard “Blogger Twists on BHG Recipes”, which showcases content published by bloggers. Outside of demonstrating its broadened perspective, these pinboards masterfully serve as a means of indirect brand marketing via shared content originating with brand advocates and other thought leaders in their niche.

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The B2B Sales Tango

Posted on January 17, 2012 by Christina Dal Porto

Building Successful Nurture Campaigns

It’s a timeless scenario we all know: they meet, sense the instant mutual interest and suspect they may have met their ideal match. They could be perfect partners, but one of them just isn’t ready to commit yet.

Indeed, this particular tango is all too familiar to marketers. No matter how great a fit your product or service may be, more than 90 percent of B2B customers aren’t ready to buy right away. According to the 2011 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report, the biggest challenge faced by almost half of all marketers is a sales cycle that continues to grow – a challenge exacerbated by shrinking budgets and a troubled global economy.

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Making 2012 A Success

Posted on November 30, 2011 by Srikant Sharma

Ten Rules (with a Prayer) for the B2B Marketer

Unless you’re among the lucky few, another difficult year is drawing to a close. While 2011 has seen more than its fair share of economic and business turmoil, there is significant worry that 2012 will not necessarily see the strong revival everyone so badly needs (sorry to be a downer, folks!). Political and macroeconomic uncertainty will likely persist, and critical economic benchmarks such as employment, inflation and business spending will remain under pressure. Business abhors volatility – and we will probably continue to see reticent markets and customers at least though the earlier part of 2012. On the positive side, global negative macroeconomic factors seem to be improving, and the economic screw has been tightened far too much. This gives us good reason to believe that business spending, corporate employment, and pricing are ready to “pop” on the upside as confidence grows.

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Integrated Marketing: What and Why?

Posted on December 6, 2010 by Srikant Sharma

Marketing professionals, particularly those in the B2B space, talk about integrated marketing but it is surprising how many marketing activities are still not “integrated” with the whole of marketing.

I recently had a discussion with a non-marketing professional who reminded me that many of his colleagues do not understand what integrated marketing is.

For these 2 reasons, I thought this topic worthy of a blog posting. To succeed in a Demand Generation 2.0 world, integrated marketing is an absolute must.

Without looking up (or linking to) any other definition of integrated marketing, let me define integrated marketing based on my own experience.

What is it?

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Seven Tips for Developing a Successful Demand Generation 2.0 Strategy

Posted on November 5, 2010 by Srikant Sharma

While Marketing 2.0 is about closer connectivity with Sales, it is also about the end point of our existence – connectivity with the marketplace and more specifically, with our prospects and customers. At the end of the day, it is our customers that make our payroll and while internal collaboration and listening to both internal and external partners is important, the CUSTOMER IS STILL KING. As you develop your DG 2.0 charter going forward, it is the KING that you should consider FIRST.

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Social Media in the Enterprise Context > Key Solution Areas and Use Cases

Posted on October 15, 2010 by Srikant Sharma

Spheres of Influence As enterprises are racing to adopt social media, it is becoming increasingly apparent that there are some areas where Web 2.0 technologies are having a more dramatic impact than others. Over the recent weeks, I have been actively engaging with friends, customers, partners and industry experts to understand and discuss where businesses appear to be seeing the greatest traction with regards to their social media initiatives – and I thought I’d share my findings.

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What is Demand Gen 2.0?

Posted on October 5, 2010 by Srikant Sharma

We are in a new business climate – call it World 2.0. You’ve undoubtedly heard about Business 2.0, Web 2.0 etc. – the idea behind this “2.0-fication” is that the critical paradigms governing business have changed radically – almost creating a new dimension of complexity around critical areas such as technology development, sales and marketing, brand and competitive positioning.

No area is more critical to a business enterprise than demand for its products and services in the marketplace and thereby enabling revenue growth. Indeed, enabling market demand has always been the holy grail of business – but enterprises today are faced with a completely new realm of challenges and possibilities – all brought about as a result of the evolution of these new paradigms. Continuing to drive sustainable and accelerating demand in this new world requires newer skills and capabilities – and many of the practices from even a few years ago are no longer effective. This is DEMAND GEN 2.0

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Enterprise 2.0 = Profit x 2.0

Posted on September 21, 2010 by Srikant Sharma

Collaboration There is a lot of talk about Enterprise 2.0 a term originally coined by Andrew McAfee in 2007 was then somewhat ahead of its time. That time is now and enterprises are rapidly embracing this paradigm. The central idea behind Enterprise 2.0 was the adoption of the social web, and all its attendant capabilities based on the Web 2.0 revolution.

For one to truly understand and harness the potential of Enterprise 2.0, it is key to understand the underlying paradigm of Web 2.0. Web 2.0 is simply the natural next step in the evolution of the web. But I would like to think of this evolution as almost a big leap forward (almost a mutation!). Whereas Web 1.0 was essentially a universally-accessible static-content publishing platform, and the next step forward (think of it as a Web 1.1 to 1.3) was adding core transactional capabilities (such as shopping carts, payments processing, etc., – primarily driven by the growth of e-commerce), Web 2.0 is a major leap forward. Web 2.0 enables individuals to become contributors thereby allowing for the web to tap into the expertise, knowledge, tastes, opinions, and talents of a large community while preserving individual identity and role. Web 2.0 is about enabling the aggregate-individual.

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