It’s easy to understand the logic behind content marketing—that establishing yourself as a thought leader will build your brand and generate leads. But it’s one thing to appreciate the idea; it’s another to actually create a content marketing culture in a company to enable successful execution of the strategy.

The Content Challenge

Content marketing can take many forms—blogs, white papers, email newsletters, social media postings, You Tube videos, personal appearances, self-published print magazines, and so on. But where does all this content come from? According to a recent survey, this is clearly the biggest problem with implementation—with respondents saying that their greatest content marketing challenges are producing engaging content (36%), producing enough content (21%), and budget to produce content (20%). Continue Reading…

Triggered Emails, often called Drip Campaigns or Autoresponders, are a more personalized type of email marketing. Triggered Email Campaigns are messages that are much more personalized than email tactics because they are started by a specific event initiated by the web visitor.While a usual email marketing campaign includes a single message that is sent to a group at the same time. With triggered emailing, prospects receive a different message at a different time based on the actions they took on your website. This makes the emails more personal, relevant and more timely.With a little more planning and research, Triggered Email Campaigns help you to stay in touch with your website prospects and lead them down the sales funnel. Continue Reading…

In a recent survey by the market research firm, Blue Research, nearly half of those surveyed (41 percent) said they would prefer using a social login such as Facebook Connect rather than registering at each individual website.

The survey also found that 77 percent believe it’s a good idea to offer social logins as a registration alternative, even if they might not use social logins themselves.

This data suggests that Facebook Connect usage is likely to continue growing. But is it the right CRM strategy? How does it compare to traditional website logins? Continue Reading…

I recently wrote about the amount of information that one can gather about users who register for or become members of your website using Facebook Connect. In continuing to read and contemplate writing on the subject I came across a nice article by Augie Ray in CRM magazine. Augie’s article points out that the majority of companies who are using Facebook Connect to allow consumers to connect to their website are doing so without telling the customer what information they are sharing or how the company will use it.

Customers are becoming wary and savvy about the fact that while connecting to a site using their Facebook ID may be high on the convenience side, they may also be unwittingly sharing more personal information and access to their data with that particular company than they would have if they would have signed up in a traditional manner. In a time where Social CRM is about as hot as any area of social software and where companies are beginning to want to capture and utilize the information available about customers and prospects on social networks it is amazing to me that so many companies would rely on Facebook to communicate what information is being shared through Facebook Connect. Let me explain… Continue Reading…