8 Reasons Startups Need Marketing Automation

Tech startups are generally innovators.  But whether bootstrapped or venture funded, they are burning cash and have significant milestones to meet in order to get to the next level – namely, increasing sales.  The irony of many startups, even ones that are selling disruptive technologies, is that many rely on the same old ways of marketing and sales that existed before the Internet came along, or the ones that are Internet-based yet don’t go far enough.

The Marketing Consigliere would like to give you some reasons why those engaged in entrepreneurship need to start from the ground up, before they even have a website, with marketing automation for their company: [Read more...]

2 Biggies That Make Snailmail Intelligent with Intelisent

Last week at the DMA‘s Digital Marketing Days, The Marketing Consigliere was curious about what technologies there were to improve traditional “non-technical” direct marketing.   Sadly enough, many of the exhibitors involved in printing looked sort of embarrassed when they were asked if they were involved with “variable data printing.”  Another SWAG vendor offering custom logo printing on just about anything with a surface had not ever used Twitter, confusing it with Facebook as a “toy for teenagers.”   But one of the refreshing stops he made was at a booth where there’s a Connecticut based company that is intelligently helping maintain the value of direct mail…

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Tracking Phone Conversion Like a Mongoose

Mongoose Metrics

Creative Commons by mape s

As a bambino, The Marketing Consigliere was enrapt with the stories of Rudyard Kipling, and he recalls the serious excitement of his endeared work, Rikki-Tikki-Tavi.  But as a young man, he found other things to hold his attention, and mongooses soon joined badgers, wolverines, and dingoes as vicious little varmints not to worry about in a digital world.  Lo and behold, the mongoose has reared its pesky, furry head and once again has earned the respect of The Marketing Consigliere as he relishes in his middle-aged wisdom.

This is because Mongoose Metrics, an Ohio-based enterprise call tracking application provider, last Friday announced a partnership with SalesForce.  This is significant because now organizations using SalesForce’s CRM will have another layer for precision marketing automation to better allocate marketing dollars and drive revenue for offline marketing efforts.  Too bad they weren’t at last week’s Cloudforce 2 Tour that was so educational. [Read more...]

Get Ready for the B2B Twitterer of the Year

Continuing the initiative and tradition started last year, the Marketing Consigliere invites you to nominate the business to business entity that should be recognized for its use of Twitter in 2009.  The panel of judges and nomination rules will be posted shortly.  So if you are interested, start paying attention to tweets from B2B companies to get ideas on who you would like to nominate for showing leadershp with Twitter.

The hashtag for the 2009 B2B Twitterer of the Year Contest is #b2btoty.

Adobe – Omnipotent with Omniture?

+= Awesome!

Web Analytics 800-pound gorilla Omniture was picked up this week by 1,600-pound solutions provider Adobe for a mere $1.8 billion.  This was a fantastic development for network-centric marketers and hopefully will set the stage for things to come regarding behavioral marketing and campaign management.

Here’s why:

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Digital Body Language – Read It and Read It!

While attending the Online Marketing Summit in Washington, DC, the audience had the privilege to listen to the lunchtime keynote by Steve Woods, CTO of Eloqua, a leading marketing automation platform provider.  He was handing out copies of his recently published book, Digital Body Language, to people who asked questions at the end of his speech.

Fortunately, the Marketing Consigliere asked one of the questions and was pleased to obtain a copy of this book, which should be read by any Marketer who is interested in demand generation, behavioral marketing, business intelligence, campaign management, email marketing, or enterprise marketing management (EMM). [Read more...]