B2B Marketing Blog - TopRank®

B2B Marketing views, news and interviews.

Why Relationship Marketing Is Essential To B2B Lead Generation

Why relationship marketing is essential to B2B lead generation two business professionals preparing to shake hands image

One of the oldest, and creepiest, adages about the value of content marketing is that you can’t ask someone to marry you on the first date.

Weird as it might feel, there’s a good reason this metaphor has held sway. A marriage is a serious and high-stakes commitment, and nobody wants to enter one without truly feeling like they know and trust their future partner.

In the business realm, purchase influencers and decision makers are under huge pressure to get it right. It’s not enough to understand the product, its price, or its features. Buyers want to believe in the brand and the people behind it.

Increasingly, significant business purchases need to be buoyed by a strong relationship. (The non-romantic type, to be clear.) Smart and strategic content marketing is how those relationships are built.


Why Relationship Marketing Is Essential To B2B Lead Generation

Reduce Friction, Increase Loyalty: Key Insights from Roger Dooley at #Pubcon Pro

Did you know, only 5% of our brain’s decision making is conscious? Leaving 95% for decisions made on a nonconscious level. As marketers, charged with increasing the quality and quantity of conversions (i.e. decisions), how do we address the 95%?

Roger Dooley, speaker and author of Brainfluence: 100 Ways to Persuade and Convince Consumers with Neuromarketing, the popular blog Neuromarketing, and Brainy Marketing at Forbes, addressed this in his session at Pubcon pro.

Here are the top three takeaways to help you increase your conversions without much more than common sense — and a little user data.

1. Friction changes behavior
Momentum is what causes us to keep moving, like sliding down a slide. Friction is what stops us from completing that motion. When it comes to your digital properties, like your website, you likely have specific actions you want prospects and visitors to take.


Reduce Friction, Increase Loyalty: Key Insights from Roger Dooley at #Pubcon Pro

21 Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) Tools to Increase Your ROI

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) Tools

Today’s savvy marketers have moved beyond just collecting website analytics, and are instead focusing on how to inspire customers to take action based on their digital marketing. Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is essential for any marketer and proper CRO is how you will make your marketing as actionable as possible for your customers. No matter what your role is within your marketing department, it is important to understand the key Conversion Rate Optimization tactics to improve your ROI and to grow your business. If fact, only 22% of companies are satisfied with their conversion rates according to Econsultancy.

Improving your conversion rate is a never ending battle that requires testing and optimization. To make your conversion rate optimization efforts easier, we have selected 21 tools to get a better ROI on your website. 14 of the tools are either free or have a free version to get you started on optimizing for conversion rate.


21 Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) Tools to Increase Your ROI

Want Better Leads? 7 Tips to Achieve Sales & Marketing Alignment

marketing-and-sales-growth

There is often a struggle between sales teams and marketing teams to prove who is most valuable. However, when marketing and sales combine their efforts, that is when they can be the most effective and powerful.

Recent research has found that nearly 60% of the sales cycle completed before prospects even speaking to a salesperson. That means, now more than ever, marketing has become an even more integral part of the sales process.

Below are some tips to help sales and marketing teams collaborate in a meaningful way that meets both business objectives and marketing KPIs.

#1 – Communicate Well & Often

One of the biggest causes of misalignment between departments is infrequent communication. Some simple ways to begin collaborating more frequently include:


Want Better Leads? 7 Tips to Achieve Sales & Marketing Alignment

Conversion Rate Optimization Software: Choose the Right Tools for Your Business

Miranda Miller
Miranda Miller
Conversion Optimization

Conversion rate optimization is the marketing art of maximizing your investment in existing site traffic, through improvements and problem-solving rather than additional ad spend. At some point in any business site’s lifetime, CRO is a must; for smart marketers, it’s an ongoing process that pays dividends over and over again.

Once you’ve invested in attracting traffic to your site, whether to complete a purchase or take some other action, CRO helps ensure your visitors are engaged and converting at the greatest rate possible.

Some believe CRO happens only on-site, though attracting targeted prospects likely to convert through paid search ads, email marketing and landing pages, for example, is a critical step. Another misconception is that CRO is all about increasing the number of conversions. You like to make money, right? Optimizing for higher revenue conversions and increasing the value of each site visitor is another element of CRO that can’t be overlooked.


Conversion Rate Optimization Software: Choose the Right Tools for Your Business

Are Bad Directions Leaving Web Visitors Stranded? Optimize For Outcomes to Improve Experience & Conversions

At some point, most of us have been lost. We know our ultimate destination, but either through a wrong turn or poor directions we find ourselves in the wrong place and likely very frustrated.

Without landing page optimization, your visitors may have this same lost feeling when they arrive on your website. Whether the content was written 10 days or 10 months ago, it’s easy to make assumptions about your website visitors and assume the directions (read: content and calls to action) you are providing make sense.

If anyone has ever given you directions based on landmarks (turn right at the gas station) you can understand this feeling. And ultimately you are unsure and have questions such as: what gas station, what if there is more than 1 and good grief why didn’t you just give me the street name?


Are Bad Directions Leaving Web Visitors Stranded? Optimize For Outcomes to Improve Experience & Conversions

B2B Conversion Optimization: How Buyer Personas Inspire Content That Converts

Conversion OptimizationThe mantra for digital marketers interested in conversion optimization is ABT “always be testing.”  That mantra fits well with the perspectives TopRank has been advocating for years: optimization is a continuous process.

Although consumer needs remain fairly simple when it comes to achieving an outcome after they arrive at your website, the opportunities to test different elements to improve conversion performance has grown in both sophistication and complexity. From eye tracking studies to monthly A/B tests, converting more visitors into buyers is both an art and a science.

The Internet is not a static environment; change is constant and consumers’ expectations have evolved along with web technology. The challenge for marketers is to make sense of the customer journey and provide the right information at the right time to inspire a desired outcome.


B2B Conversion Optimization: How Buyer Personas Inspire Content That Converts