A marketing funnel is the set of steps that a potential lead takes to become a client. Your marketing strategy should ultimately guide this process, whether you work in a B2B or B2C marketing field. A proper marketing funnel can increase revenue, production, and your overall loyal customer base. Manufacturers that institute marketing funnels will… Read more »

According to the Content Marketing Institute, around 58% of B2B marketers use content marketing to generate leads and convert them into paying customers — i.e., they have confidence in the idea of a content marketing sales funnel. However, the Content Marketing Institute also reports that only 43% of successful B2B marketers document their content strategy… Read more »

Many marketers are great at generating leads, but they also excel at losing them. Let’s face it: Lost leads are a huge blind spot in many marketing programs. So what exactly is a “lost lead” or a “dead lead?” Basically, a lost lead is a lead that did not convert into a sale and that… Read more »

In the brave new world of B2B digital marketing, the idea of focusing on inbound calls may seem antiquated. Not only do phone calls seem to make use of outdated technology (the phone sounds so twentieth century), but the idea of maintaining a call center to receive inbound calls seems like a relic of the… Read more »

If you came here looking for a rule-of-thumb recommendation for setting a B2B marketing budget based on revenue, that’s easy — you should budget between two to seven percent of your previous years’ sales. Feels a little arbitrary, right? That’s because it is. Alternatively, you could base your figure on what others are allocating for their B2B marketing budgets…. Read more »

Last year, we wrote about the importance of lead nurturing for industrials. As a premise, it makes perfect sense. The industrial buying cycle takes time — often months — and it can be extremely effective to touch base with customers at key moments in the lengthy buying cycle, helping them complete their customer journey by… Read more »

About ten years ago, we (Industrial Strength Marketing) launched a website for a company that manufactures tube sheets used in balance-of-plant heat exchangers. At the time, we didn’t realize that the company’s URL was just one keystroke away from that of a popular adult-entertainment website. (No, we’re not going to say which one.) Within days,… Read more »

If you are a B2B company or work in B2B marketing, you know how important a focus on lead generation is to any marketing plan. Other industries have the luxury of emphasizing “vanity metrics” such as how many fans they have or if their website traffic went up, but all B2Bs know that if those… Read more »