In “a recent survey”:http://www.mindbranch.com/products/R203-221.html sponsored by the CMO Council, BtoB Magazine, and USA Today, the vast majority of B2B marketers said digital marketing was most valuable as a lead-generation tool. Other goals defined in the survey were traffic generation, customer education, content distribution and partner/channel education.
While these goals are important, they are not the primary goals of these marketing objectives. The ultimate objective for all marketing is to increase revenue – to sell. To be successful in business-to-business marketing, we all must remember a simple thought: B2B marketing is not the same as marketing to consumers.
So, why do we continue to see these same marketing practices aimed at large business customers?
Category: Internet Marketing
I’m quite fond of the Ask Jeeves butler, but apparently CEO of parent company IAC, Larry Diller, has no such soft spot for him and says the guy’s gotta go. It wasn’t enough they sent him on a diet and to a tanning salon, apparently Jeeves is about to be retired.
The SearchViews article reporting this decision quotes branding expert Rob Frankel reasoning, “the butler is a vestige of the “playful, early days of the Internet””. Unh.. wha? You mean the net isn’t still wacky? Say it isn’t so… What are Google and Yahoo! if they do not appeal to the exploratory, who-knows-what-may-happen, original wacky nature of the net?
I took the opportunity to ask Rob’s opinion on this question.
Think a web site is a necessity when running an online advertising campaign? Think again. Pay Per Call, a take on pay-per-click search engine advertising (or “paid search”) in which marketers pay for calls to a toll-free number instead of clicks, is quickly changing the Internet marketing rules.
When San-Francisco-based “Ingenio”:http://paypercall.ingenio.com/default.aspx pioneered this ad model in September of 2004, it couldn’t have known how fast its brainchild would grow. Just a year later, “a report from the Kelsey Group”:http://www.kelseygroup.com/sum/tkradv0513.htm has found that Pay Per Call advertising could generate as much as $4 billion in revenue by 2009.