This Halloween, more than $2 billion worth of candy will be given out across the United States.
What can be more frightening than the thought of millions of kids hopped up on $2 billion worth of sugar? These soberingly scary stats about marketing.
Experienced trick-or-treaters set out with a plan — they have a clear vision of the candy they want to collect, and they know just where they need to knock in order to make it happen (while avoiding those houses giving out pennies).
Unfortunately, the same can’t be said about marketers. According to Altimer, just 30% of marketing professionals have a consistent, integrated content marketing strategy. Without a game plan, it can be incredibly difficult to execute, generate leads, measure results, and continuously improve. Thus, it’s important to give your content marketing efforts a solid foundation for success.
Could you imagine telling a customer that you are only 60 percent sure that your products or services will meet their needs? Well, that’s pretty much what marketers told HubSpot in their annual survey of marketing professionals.
This underscores the need to do your homework when selecting a manufacturing marketing agency or hiring internal staff. You want to work with people who are confident that they can generate results. Don’t settle for an impostor.
With apologies to your favorite sugary treat, no sugar rush can match the feeling of consistently generating leads. Unfortunately, that rush comes to a crashing halt when you don't convert those leads to customers.
This is a problem that many companies face. They work hard to market their capabilities and nurture prospects, but 40-50 percent of the leads they generate are ignored, left to rot like some random candy corn at the bottom of your bag.
Timing is of the essence when it comes to turning leads into customers, so be thorough, consistent, and proactive.
The lines between B2B and B2C marketing are becoming increasingly blurry. That’s because buyers expect the same experience when shopping for industrial products as they do when shopping for personal use. They want to learn about your products, services, capabilities, and experience before they will pick up the phone or issue a purchase order.
If they can’t find the information they need — either on your site or on Thomasnet.com — then they are likely to take their business elsewhere. Scary, isn’t it?
A recent report from the security firm, Imperva, confirmed what many marketers already feared – that most activity taking place on the internet is driven by bots, not humans. While some of these bots are innocuous – responsible for things like gathering data and crawling websites – a lot of bots are far more nefarious.
These “bad bots” fraudulently click on ads and download content, ruining reporting and causing millions of dollars in wasted pay-per-click campaigns. In fact, the issue has gotten so bad – and so costly — that Google recently started issuing refunds to advertisers.
Want to avoid falling victim to this trick? At Thomas, all of our traffic is from real, verified and qualified B2B buyers — not bots, and a listing starts at just $49 a month.
Marketing can be a scary proposition for industrial companies, and these stats are downright frightening.
However, with the right agency — and the right experts — you can leverage marketing to grow your revenues and your business. Contact us to find out how we can put our solutions to work for you.