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.
Going green is now a compelling proposition for organizations that want to potentially reduce energy costs as well as promote themselves as environmentally friendly. But green, like many terms, has taken on many meanings. The "greeness" of vendors is hard to verify as companies tout very different energy strategies. For Web hosting, organizations have plenty of options to go green, and innerbridge has taken the plunge with its service provider.
Whether trying to download software or a whitepaper, we've all had issue with onerous, lengthy, intrusive site registration forms. Being in the marketing and PR profession, we know what those registration forms are trying to do. But most online registration forms suffer from a fatal flaw -- they don't work. Few site visitors want to take the time to fill out tens of fields or have the inclination to enter real information when they are just kicking the digital tires. In this post, we discuss online registration and forms best practices.
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