eMarketer: How are they investing in marketing technology specifically?

Fauscette: Most of them have an email marketing tool, but 21% of said they were looking to replace their email marketing provider this year, which suggests there’s some discontent with that technology. One-fifth of the businesses we surveyed even used marketing automation solutions, which are typically heavy-duty solutions for bigger companies.

eMarketer: How would you characterize must-have vs. nice-to-have marketing technology for small businesses?

Fauscette: Contact management and sales force automation are critical pieces of the puzzle for businesses of any size. And any technology that helps effectively keep track of customer interactions, track leads and figure out how to take advantage of those leads is a must-have as well. Everything else is secondary.

Source: www.emarketer.com

With SMBs, it's all about selling.

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"Sales enablement is both a business discipline and a collection of technology. It encompasses the process, content, training and tools to help salespeople (and others involved in the buying journey) be more efficient and effective.  Capabilities include sales content management, coaching, training, onboarding, and account management.

But in the past year, Gartner has been tracking the development of sales enablement platforms. Some of the sales enablement vendors have converted their applications into API-based open platforms, offering their own library of open APIs. With native APIs, sales enablement vendors can:

• Provide native connectors to other API-enabled sales enablement applications
• Create user-interface mashups with other sales and marketing solutions that are based on open APIs.
• Offer basic tools for building custom user interfaces or data capture forms
• Deliver granular functions for capturing and measuring how business contacts engage with the content sent to them by sales representatives."

Source: blogs.gartner.com

Eventually, marketing automation will be usurped by sales stack technology.

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Enterprise SEO managers are overworked but really good at making do with what they’ve got, while demonstrating ROI continues to be an issue for agencies and in-house SEOs. Check out these findings and more from the State of Enterprise SEO survey.

Source: moz.com

You definitely want to click through to get all the detail.

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Drift plans to bring its sales and marketing automation services to emails soon to expand upon existing services provided through live chat with a human or an automated bot.

“We started with web and app messaging, and in September we’ll announce we’re getting heavily into the email side of things — both inbound and outbound. We’ll get into voice at some point, we’ll get into video in a very specific way,” CEO David Cancel told VentureBeat in a phone interview. “We’re going to get into every way a company communicates with customers, every single one of these channels that exist over time.”

Ultimately, Cancel said, Drift wants its bots to capture all communication between sales and marketing teams and customers with the goal of providing customers insights or analysis of sentiment like Mattersight, IBM Watson, or Salesforce’s Einstein do.

Source: venturebeat.com

This will be interesting, as it is a natural cross sell for Drift. Still waiting for messaging-based marketing automation.

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What would be a legitimate reason to have more than one email platform?

• Cost: prices increased with the number of email contacts in your database. So to keep costs down, many would split their lists and join another ESP.
• Multiple mail streams: having different ESPs will give you different IP addresses. Now, this is important because if you send transaction emails on one IP address, and those emails are opened and interacted with, your reputation will remain high (not stuck in spam filters etc). However, if you bulk send your newsletter, and the engagement rate is much lower, the reputation would be low on that IP address (more likely to be stuck in spam filters).

Source: www.smartinsights.com

For each additional ESP, database coordination increases exponentially.

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"What is a problem-based navigation structure? We define it as a navigation that is built and framed based upon your user’s problems and challenges and the solutions you provide. It is inherently more conversational, with the goal of aligning with the mindset and challenges your users face.

How To Build A Problem-Based Website Navigation

Step 1: Understand Your Target User’s Problems
Step 2: Find The Emotional Trigger
An emotional trigger is the response to an external stimuli that causes you to take an action. In the digital world it is what your users encounter causing them to need and then search for a solution to their their problem.
Step 3: Do The Keyword Research
Step 4: Create Each Navigation Label In Conversational Language
Step 5: Be Precise And Focused With Navigation Labels"

Source: linchpinseo.com

A smarter approach to wireframing your website.

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A pillar page is the basis on which a topic cluster is built. A pillar page covers all aspects of the topic on a single page, with room for more in-depth reporting in more detailed cluster blog posts that hyperlink back to the pillar page.

Pillar pages broadly cover a particular topic, and cluster content should address a specific keyword related to that topic in-depth. For example, you might write a pillar page about content marketing -- a broad topic -- and a piece of cluster content about blogging -- a more specific keyword within the topic.

Pillar pages are longer than typical blog posts -- because they cover all aspects of the topic you're trying to rank for -- but they aren't as in-depth. That's what cluster content is for. You want to create a pillar page that answers questions about a particular topic, but leaves room for more detail in subsequent, related cluster content.

Source: blog.hubspot.com

An excellent, and unexpected, SEO article from HubSpot. Details when you click through.

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Actually, your email account is probably the worst online account that can be hacked. Once someone gains access to your email account.

Source: www.digitalinformationworld.com

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User experience design 

Front-end development

Backend development

Data analysis

Digital marketer

Hosting

Technology architect

Project manager

Tester

Source: www.practicalecommerce.com

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Managing your content-marketing planning, creation, dissemination, and measurement means having the right processes, structures, and tools. See this study for how you stack up vs. other marketers.

Source: www.marketingprofs.com

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1. Is there an internal team set up to manage the evaluation and eventual implementation?

2. What internal and third-party tools does your company use? Which ones must remain? Which ones can you live without? Which ones would be nice to add?

3. How large is your contact database across all internal systems?

4. How clean and accurate is your internal database?

5. Do you have a standard set of fields and values for which you collect data?

6. Have you created an inventory of all your internal offer assets, forms, landing pages, email templates, etc.?

7. What is your budget for this project and does the platform build in flexibility for potential year-over-year price increases?

8. Do you know what vendor questions to ask?

9. What browser(s) does your internal IT team support?

10. Did you create a wish list?

Source: contentmarketinginstitute.com

A great list, and spot-on. Many other questions, but start with these.

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"If TAM can be directionally misleading in the early years, how should founders and investors think about weighing the importance of market size? Of course, the eventual size of the market opportunity is paramount. There are several other factors to consider — in addition to the strict measurement of TAM — when trying to assess size of market opportunity:

-TAM expansion
-Credible adjacencies: A startup’s initial product or service is merely an entry wedge into a larger opportunity. 
-Nascent market potential: Successful startups often ride the wave of a new market that is small today, but will be big in the future, with or without that startup. 
-Frequency of use: As a general rule in consumer technology, the frequency with which users interact with a given product or service tends to correlate with the size of the opportunity. "

Source: techcrunch.com

TAM: total addressable market.

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Chart of the day: Research reports are king! Research reports are the content type that generates the highest conversion rate when used for lead generation. Marketing topic(s):Digital marketing strategy. Advice by Robert Jones.

Source: www.smartinsights.com

HINT: deliver new research via  webinar. BOOM!

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• "Advertising plan
• Customer acquisition plan
• Email marketing plan
• A retention plan
• A social media marketing plan
• Conversion optimisation plan
• Business plan
  
  • New product development
  • Revenue sources
  • Means of cost management
• Marketing plan
  
  • Geographically based
  • Product based
  • Business unit based
  • Focused on segmentation
• Campaign plan
• Digital marketing plan / Digital transformation plan
• Multichannel marketing plan"

Source: www.smartinsights.com

And of course, there are planning templates, which are plans for the plans.

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Edison Partners today announced leading a $11 million Series B growth investment in Toronto-based content marketing platform company LookBookHQ. The company will use the funds to further scale sales and marketing, and accelerate product innovation.

LookBookHQ's Intelligent Content Platform provides B2B marketers with the most effective way to accelerate their prospects' path to purchase. Since Edison's initial investment 12 months ago, the company has realized 2.5X recurring revenue growth. The marketing teams of more than 100 enterprise-level organizations now rely on LookBookHQ's platform to provide sales-ready prospects and attributable and meaningful ROI.

Source: www.benzinga.com

File this under vendor viability.

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