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How to Market a Startup, Part 2: Planning, Staffing, and Measuring

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Effective marketing for a startup company is all about focus. You’ve got limited time (you’re likely already working 80+ hours per week!) and little budget, so it’s essential to judiciously optimize the use of both.

Part one of this two-part series dealt with laying the groundwork for startup marketing: branding, messaging, and honing in on your target customer persona or ideal customer profile (ICP).

How to market a startup company - planning, staffing, metricsWith that essential groundwork in place, here’s how to start telling the story of your innovative new product or service.

Based on previous research here, pretty much all entrepreneurs launch their ventures for the same reason: a passion for solving a specific problem.

When people are passionate about an idea, they typically want to tell everyone about it, in great detail. That’s human nature. But it it’s not effective marketing. The best marketing practice is tell the right people the most compelling essence of the story—and then provide more details to those who show interest. Here are three key steps.
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How to Create an Effective Email Newsletter for Your Business

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Guest post by Prasad Reddy.

Newsletter marketing is the most effective way for business to stay “top-of-mind” with customers and sales prospects. Companies can send useful, informative content (with some product promotion mixed in) through an email newsletter to their list of opt-in subscribers, or better yet, send slightly different content to different segments of that list.

In today’s highly competitive business landscape, a well-crafted newsletter can enable companies to stay in constant touch with customers, establish authority, grab attention, and provide calls to action.

How to create an effective email newsletterThere are many metrics by which to gauge the effectiveness of your newsletter, including:

  • Increased rate of subscribers – measures your reach
  • Open rate of the newsletter – measures the performance of the newsletter content
  • Click-through rate – measures the activity of readers (whether they performed the desired action)
  • Revenue – If the readers make a purchase clicking through email newsletter

How do you improve on each of these metrics or make your newsletter more effective? [Read more…]

The Eight Best Online Tools for Sales Professionals

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Revised June 14, 2023
Revised December 21, 2022
Revised December 15, 2021
Revised July 20, 2020
Revised July 26, 2019

It’s hardly news that B2B sales and marketing teams aren’t always on the same page. And it’s not just arguments over lead quality. According to research from IDC, over 40% of all marketing materials aren’t used by sales teams. The primary reason is that sales reps are unable to locate or access the materials when needed.

The best online sales tools to extend CRMBut in top-performing organizations, sales and marketing are closely aligned. A CRM system is usually the starting point, but the technology available to support sales+marketing alignment go well beyond a common platform for customer and prospect contact information.

The eight tools here deliver a range of functionality such as email automation, automatic email and call logging, workflow scheduling, lead qualification, sales enablement, and personalized direct mail.

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The 10 Best Customer Service and Customer Engagement Platforms

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Revised February 16, 2023
Revised September 29, 2021
Revised August 3, 2020
Revised March 6, 2019

The emergence and spread of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has dramatically changed the game for both B2B vendors and customers. Producers of a wide array of products—from vehicles to machine tools to jet engines to officer copiers—now have access to the kind of user and usage data that, not long ago, only SaaS software developers could capture.

Best customer service toolsFor suppliers, that means a vast new stream of data that can be used for marketing, warranty, maintenance, and other purposes. But it also means a dramatic leap in customer expectations.

Professional customers (i.e., those in business/industrial firms, government agencies, non-profits, educational institutions, financial services, and healthcare) are well aware of the data they are providing to vendors, just through normal product usage. They don’t mind giving up their data—as long as that leads to better support and product development.

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The Eight Best Social CRM Tools

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Revised January 13, 2022
Revised September 9, 2021
Revised January 23, 2020

Social customer relationship management (CRM) was being written about as a distinct product category as far back as 2008, but market interest really began to take off the following year. According to Google Trends, the average number of monthly web searches for the phrase “social CRM” quadrupled from June 2009 to June 2011. Market interest has remained fairly strong since then.

Best social CRM toolsHow does social CRM differ from traditional CRM? Both capture prospect and customer contact data, organizational structure, and interaction history. Both help sales, marketing, and customer service personnel plan and schedule follow-up activities.

But social CRM extends traditional CRM features by adding social media accounts to each contact record, and capturing social interactions as well as more traditional communication like phone calls and email messages.

[Read more…]

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