Raven Chapman
Don’t Mistake Random Acts of Marketing for a B2B Marketing Strategy
Without a strategy, B2B marketing can be like trying to find a needle in a haystack while wearing oven mitts. Many small and midsize businesses jump from idea to idea, hoping to stumble upon a winning effort.
They often end up hiring B2B marketing agencies that design eye-popping graphics but go lightly around the whole “strategy” part.
Spoiler alert: it’s not great for your business.
The High Cost of Random Acts of Marketing
Many businesses have been let down by marketing efforts that lack a guiding strategy. We’ve seen it all — a hodge-podge of sporadic, opportunistic, and often expensive tactics that produce little return. These “random acts of marketing” are disjointed,
... Continue Reading >>Marketing ROI Calculator: Your Pathway to Smarter Investments (& Returns)
Strategy-minded business owners recognize that marketing is an investment in the growth of their business but few business owners know how to calculate the return on their marketing investment.
Marketing has to do more than create a tangible picture of the value and services you provide. No matter how eloquent your messaging or how beautiful your website, if it’s not generating results you can quantify, at a cost that makes sense, it’s not much of an investment.
Our new Lead Generation & Marketing ROI Calculator helps to demystify the process of understanding your bang for the buck. Embracing this data-driven approach enables you and your team to make better decisions about where you spend your marketing time and money,
... Continue Reading >>Harnessing Speed & Effectiveness: Agile Marketing with Innovaxis
Effective marketing strategy, website development, and content creation do not have to take months. Many erroneously believe that’s what it takes because that’s what they’re used to, but there is a better, faster way.
Marketing agility isn’t just about working fast, it’s about creating and capturing demand generation to drive sales and increase business valuation – efficiently. This requires a team that works collaboratively, breaking down silos, and providing quick turnaround on strategy, content and digital marketing deliverables without sacrificing quality.
At Innovaxis, we pride ourselves on helping clients achieve amazing results, quickly, with a marketing approach that is collaborative, detail-oriented, disciplined, and accountable – allowing us to deliver faster than our clients ever thought possible without compromising quality.
... Continue Reading >>The Pros & Cons of AI-Generated Content in B2B Marketing: When & When Not to Use It
As technology continues to advance, companies are turning to AI-powered chatbots and language models like ChatGPT to handle marketing initiatives and content creation.
While these intelligent bots can be useful, they also have several major drawbacks that companies should consider before fully relying on this technology.
The Cofounder and CEO of OpenAI – the company that created ChatGPT – has acknowledged the bot’s shortcomings, calling it a “horrible product” on an episode of the New York Times tech podcast. The criticism stems from the glitchy instability of the site, but there are also concerns of misinformation and malicious intent (note: the bot reportedly passed the Turing test, a gauge of human intelligence equivalency developed by mathematician Alan Turing,
... Continue Reading >>Is It Time to Audit Your Nonprofit Website?
Grant audits, financial audits, program audits – the nonprofit world is full of these often arduous reviews – but when it comes to auditing your digital marketing, we can make it easy for you to undertake this critical step to ensure your website is pulling its weight. Learn why website audits are a critical step for nonprofits.
Many nonprofits have a website that was developed years ago and haven’t touched it since. As a result, digital marketing has fallen to the wayside for many 501(c)(3) organizations who are rightly focused on the reach, mission and impact of their organizations. We get it: with so much going on, it can sometimes feel as if you don’t have the time to make your website and digital communication a priority.
... Continue Reading >>#fail: How to Create a Pandemic Marketing Strategy as Tactless as a Maskless Shopper Coughing in the Checkout Line
A global pandemic, civil unrest, out-of-control wildfires, economic disaster, locusts, hurricanes and marathon Zoom meetings: it’s been an apocalyptic year no matter how you spin it.
But marketing rests for no crisis – as they used to say in the marketing department at Pepsi – so let’s wade into some strategies that boldly go where angels fear to tread.
There’s always a “silver lining” if you ignore a substantial percentage of what used to be called “reality” before there was Facebook and the Kardashians.
Here are some tips designed to ensure that your marketing campaign lives up to the standards set by the hot mess inside a dumpster fire wrapped in a train wreck known as 2020.
... Continue Reading >>#fail: How to Create Google Pay-Per-Click Campaigns that Pay Off … for Google
A whopping 90% of internet search traffic takes place through the magic of Google, a company so ambitious that it named itself for a mathematical concept that means a number so big we don’t have time to explain it to you.
But that’s no reason not to trust them to help you play the world’s most popular pay-per-click competition, The Game of Google Ads.
This wild bidding war is perfect for the marketer looking to spend as much time and money as possible for results that are as predictable as ripening avocados.
Will your ad strike the right note at the right time with the ripe prospects?
... Continue Reading >>#fail: 5 Ways to Fail Hard at Product Management
A dream is a really fragile thing and market research is a death sentence when it comes to really stupid dreams…
Product managers – sometimes referred to as product marketers – are responsible for incorporating the voice of the customer into the development process to produce something – sometimes referred to as a product – that somebody will want to buy, possibly.
What is the big deal exactly? 15-year-olds can do it. We live in a world where it is possible to whip up six-figure profits selling slime out of your parents’ kitchen.
So when you hear the so-called “experts” droning on about things like “product roadmaps” and “market research,” just remember that a dream is a fragile thing and market research is a death sentence when it comes to really stupid dreams like becoming a millionaire by selling rocks or blankets with arms.
... Continue Reading >>#fail: How to Lose Friends & Influence Nobody with B2B Social Media
“Everyone” knows that social media is the key to #success. “Studies” have shown that harnessing the power of so-called social “influencers” can yield ROI that is like, literally, millions of times higher than other methods of outbound marketing.
We’re not sure what other forms of marketing these studies measure but the point is, when you consider the fact that the top nine or 10 influencers count 500 million people as followers, the open rate on your latest email campaign is not even worth talking about. So how do you get there?
Experts say it helps if you’re already famous:
“It helps to already be famous or to become famous to become a social media influencer…”
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... Continue Reading >>#fail: How to Repel Prospects with B2B Email Campaigns that Go Nowhere
To: Email List [email protected]
From: Our New Marketing Intern
Subject: Re: Hi! Are you looking to COMPLETELY CRUSH your email marketing strategy?!! Read me! 😊
Dude:
Ever wondered why some email campaigns get results and others go so completely ignored that you find yourself googling the outage map? How is it possible for an email campaign to fail to connect to so many people?
It’s more than possible. With the right techniques, you can craft B2B email pitches so repellent they won’t even be opened by mistake. Here’s how:
- Start with subject lines that are wordy,
