MarketStar Blog

Freelancing has been on an up-trend for some years now. It’s rapidly changing not only the way we work but the way we think about work, view clients, and negotiate with those who deliver services to us. Businesses can benefit from this trend. Here’s how. 

While most businesses believe that the risks of investing in emerging markets have increased over the past decade, just as many believe that the rewards have also increased, especially in markets that seem to have become saturated with existing customers and competition. In other words, businesses by and large believe that the risk and return ratio of investing in global markets is becoming increasingly favorable.

Sales organizations have an unprecedented amount of data available at their fingertips. While it’s easier than ever to access big data, the data itself can be overwhelming. In fact, 53 percent of sales managers say they feel overwhelmed by the volume of data, and 38 percent admit that they don’t know what to do with data once they get it.

You and your team of salespeople likely excel at closing sales. You likely have a firm grasp of managing your top enterprise accounts. However, managing a funnel of leads and prospecting and qualifying them for growth are also likely consistent challenges.

You aren’t alone. As data shows, 25 percent of leads are legitimate and should advance to sales, but 79 percent of marketing leads never convert. What’s more, 73 percent of leads are not sales-ready, and 50 percent are qualified but not yet ready to buy.

The industry has become both increasingly accessible and competitive thanks in part to improved tools and software. On one hand, technology has simplified and automated an array of processes. On the other, it has created a demand for sales teams and their managers to stay up to date.

These days, deploying the right technology and tools is essential to success. According to a recent report, the tools that a sales rep uses are highly correlated to the rep’s performance. In fact, 82 percent of top salespeople cite sales tools as “critical” to their ability to close deals.

You already know that inside sales drives more revenue at a lower cost. However, in order to manage teams and ensure a steady flow of leads, this requires appropriate tools and technology.

As big data becomes a reality for businesses looking to manage large volumes of information, data analytics tools have emerged as a reliable way to identify trends and patterns and monitor buyer activity. These tools create a better understanding of your prospects. And while this may be a no-brainer, information-based decisions are better than arbitrary or judgmental ones. 

Channel partners have become more diverse than ever, making it hard to rely on one or two profiles to build an effective support and coverage model. This diversity only grows as you move further down the list of channel partners until you reach the bottom tier, where most vendors see the mix of high diversity and low revenue potential as a reason to write off any support beyond a portal or website. If you want to capture significant long tail revenue, you need to avoid generic messaging and give partners effective communication that fits their specific needs.

Programmatic advertising is still a relatively new discipline, and brands remain unsure about the best approach to follow. The eventual goal for programmatic advertising is to serve ads to targeted consumers in a more efficient and timely manner. However, the complexity lies in the fact that there is considerable variation in the automated platforms aiding the campaign execution, as well as in the way in which the results are measured and quantified. Companies should therefore first decide on the metrics they will be using for tracking their ROI of the programmatic spend. 

Various companies have approached their digital marketing needs with programmatic marketing. We will be discussing five instances where these brands have disrupted their respective industries with a programmatic advertising approach. 

Did you know that B2B marketers who use Twitter generate twice as many leads as those that do not? (Source: InsideView) Or that 55% of B2B survey respondents search for information on social media (Source: Mediabistro)? Your customers are tweeting their frustrations, liking pages of brands they would like to be associated with on Facebook, viewing videos of similar solutions on YouTube, posting queries on forums to make decisions. Not monitoring and indulging in these discussions means losing out on crucial information about valuable prospects and alienating your potential customers.

Content is an essential tool for marketers. Digital marketing, especially, revolves around the creation of tons of content. But most of the content that you put out there has a particular shelf life and could begin to look a little stale or outdated in a year or two. So how exactly is a content marketer meant to overcome this challenge?