Five must-have tips for emails that get opened

Despite the growth of social, video, and other digital marketing channels, more than 59 percent of businesses still identify email as the most effective marketing channel for their brand.1 The necessity of email marketing is only expected to increase as distrust in social media grows and buyers demand more personal, authentic, 1:1 connections. While it may seem simple to craft and send a basic email pitching your product or service, ensuring your email actually gets opened and read is a whole different ballgame. The typical B2B buyer is bombarded with hundreds of emails in their inbox every day, making it difficult to actually stand out against the noise and capture their attention enough to get them clicking. There are, however, some proven tactics that can help boost your open rates and improve the success of your campaigns.

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When And Why To Blog: 5 Steps To Getting Started

If your job involves sales, marketing, or attracting customer leads in any way, knowing how and when to blog is a critical skill. Blogging is a key lead generation mechanism, and a great way to set you apart from your competition. In fact, marketers that prioritize blogging see 13-times the ROI of businesses that don’t.1

But why blog if you already have a website that outlines your company, products, core competencies, and values? Websites are usually about selling, whereas blogs are about educating and engaging with your customers on topics of interest or relevance to them. Blogging can also improve your SEO and drive increased traffic to your website, create word of mouth referrals, and helps you set your business apart as an authority in your particular subject area.

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The Targeting Advantage: How Identifying Your Ideal Prospects Will Help You Close More Deals

While it may be tempting to cast the widest net possible when trying to attract new customers, this may not actually deliver the most—or the best—prospects. Today, growing your business doesn’t mean throwing a bunch of marketing dollars at generic campaigns and seeing what sticks; it’s about targeting the most ideal prospects in order to bring in well qualified, high-propensity leads from the start. A well crafted targeting strategy not only helps you cut down on the effort (and cost) required to find qualified leads while starting them farther up your sales funnel, but does double-duty by helping you hone in on the characteristics, needs, and buying processes of your ideal customers. With well-defined personas and segments, you can approach the right prospects with most relevant offers at the right time and increase the likelihood of closed deals.

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How to propel your lead gen activities with original content

Developing original content—like eBooks, guides, case studies, blogs, and whitepapers—can have a multitude of benefits to your business. Not only does it help you establish your brand as a subject matter authority in your area of expertise, but it can provide valuable material for driving and strengthening your lead generation campaigns. In this over saturated market, it’s essential to find ways to cut through the noise in order to reach customers. A well-crafted, informative piece of content can generate up to three times as many prospects as traditional outbound marketing and advertising tactics.1

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6 Landing Page Mistakes to Avoid

It’s safe to say that all businesses today leverage a website as part of their overall marketing strategy and a destination for lead gen campaigns and communications. Yet despite your best efforts, like many B2Bs, you might be finding that your campaigns are not generating the conversion levels you were hoping for—and it might be due to your landing pages (or lack thereof). Over 44% of B2Bs still direct prospects to their general homepage instead of tailored landing pages, despite research showing that targeted landing pages can increase conversion rates by up to 300%.1 In a competitive economy so driven by digital engagement, having an optimal landing page experience is essential. To help, we’ve compiled some of the most common landing page mistakes, along with the best practices to help you improve them:

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5 Best Practices For a Successful Paid Search Campaign

Google reports that it processes an astonishing 70,000 search queries every single second, equating to over 2-trillion global searches each year.1 With volumes that enormous, who would want to pass up the opportunity to capitalize on all that traffic to get noticed and drive new business?

With a successfully executed Google pay-per-click (PPC) campaign, businesses generate an average of $2 in income for every $1 they spend,2 which makes it seems like a no-brainer – yet it takes a little extra effort to create a campaign that will generate a return. Here we’ve compiled some paid search best practices learned from developing more than 100 Microsoft Partner digital campaigns.

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The “3-30-3” Rule: Does your marketing content measure up?

So you’ve decided to incorporate a content strategy into your marketing plans—great! While numbers show that conversion rates trend at six times higher for companies leveraging content marketing than those that don’t,1 simply putting content out there doesn’t guarantee it’s going to resonate with your customers. In a previous blog, we discussed some of the key best practices for a content marketing strategy, including the value of quality over quantity and talking to your audience’s specific needs and concerns. But even if your content is highly relevant and well executed, in today’s fast-paced world it can be particularly challenging to catch – much less keep – a prospective buyer’s attention. Well, that’s where the “3-30-3” rule can help guide you in crafting content that draws readers in and makes an impact.

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