On Tuesday more than 500 B2B and B2C marketers attended FUNNEL, our first event to consider where marketing meets sales – and leads become revenue.
With a definite sense of new confidence in the air, the packed speaker programme looked at key challenges and opportunities facing ‘considered purchase’ marketers today – how to best attract, engage, nurture and convert leads.
I’ve collated some of the key takeaways and soundbites below…
As a frequent attendee of marketing conferences I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard speakers tell their audience that SEO is incredibly simple, it’s just about having great content.
Not while this may be true in theory, many businesses are understandably sceptical about whether they have the necessary manpower or expertise in-house to regularly produce high quality content.
So at our Funnel event yesterday, which is part of the Festival of Marketing, it was refreshing to see Search Laboratory’s John Readman back up his words with a relevant B2B SEO case study.
SEO is very important for B2B businesses as 21% of all traffic to B2B sites comes from search engines, with around 90% of that portion coming from organic search.
How can marketers get consumers to love their brand? It’s a long and difficult process that requires a complex system of tools and tactics.
Yet at Econsultancy’s Funnel event this morning Silverpop’s John Watton managed to summarise the process in just 20 minutes, succinctly laying out the basic premise of behavioural marketing and how it can benefit businesses.
Watton began by describing the relationship he has with a wine merchant in the Chiswick area of West London, which is a neat metaphor for the principles behind behavioural marketing.
Though there are a huge number of shops that Watton could go to for his weekly wine fix, he chooses to return to the same shop due to the relationship he has with ‘Bob’ the shopkeeper.
It’s never too early to get your house in order for next year.
This morning at FUNNEL and the Festival of Marketing, I listened to Adam Sharp from clevertouch, marketing automation specialists.
Adam outlined how the marketing department is changing, and what you need to be thinking about to prove that the marketing team is the place where fundamental change can be driven within the organisation.
With less than two weeks to go until the Festival of Marketing, Econsultancy towers is now working at full speed.
Not only do we now have over 100 speakers and 5,000 marketers in attendance, but our beloved mayor Boris Johnson has given us his support.
A lot has been said about the purchase funnel.
In fact so much has been said about it that many feel it has been exhausted to death. In its wake, a smorgasbord of geometric configurations have been posited: cylinder, concentric circles, orbits, spindles, dodecahedrons (ok, I added that one).
Type ‘purchase process’ into Google Images and scroll away: everything from crazy path diagrams, the old funnel, cartoons and one that suggests it’s now a pretzel! Personally, I prefer the poetic variety such as the ‘consumer journey’.
It suggests a Tolkien-esque epic requiring consumers to circumvent mythical creatures and fiery environs. Which is a typical experience for any of you that have hazarded Bluewater on a Saturday!
But whether it’s a funnel, a journey or a cycle the one thing that is generally the same is that it has a recognized objective beginning and end. That is to say, one of the chief goals of any marketer is to create awareness of their product or service and ultimately keep people interested enough to drive them to purchase.
Econsultancy last month held Europe’s largest conference devoted to B2B marketing and sales.
Our London FUNNEL event at the Emirates stadium saw some of the world’s leading B2B business experts present to an audience across four streams: Plan, Align, Attract and Engage.
The thoughts and insights shared that day, along with case studies illustrating best practice, have been used to create our B2B Digital Marketing Briefing, which is free to download.
Attribution modelling, multi-channel funnels, customer journey mapping… it’s all very hot at the moment.
As part of my preparation for a talk I’m giving this Wednesday I had a look at Econsultancy.com’s own data for how different digital marketing channels contributed to conversions.
I was interested by what I found so wanted to share it here to see what others are learning.
Minter Dial is co-author of a new report published by Econsultancy entitled The Sales Organization of the Future.
The report, which is free to registered Econsultancy users, explores how product-oriented companies need to evolve into value-added services organizations to meet the changing expectations of customers in a business environment which is fundamentally changing.
I asked Minter some questions about the report and the imperative for business change.