A new prospect hits your website. Their company is a perfect fit for your services, and you quickly reach out to make contact, but alas! The prospect is not yet ready to buy. This is the scenario facing companies and sales teams of all sizes, who find themselves with a pile of qualified leads who aren’t quite ready to make a purchase. Lead nurturing is the perfect tactic to engage this group of prospective customers until they’re ready to make a purchasing decision. 

A lead nurturing campaign typically consists of a series of automated emails specifically designed to keep leads engaged with your company, nurturing them along their buying journey to becoming a customer. Orchestrated properly, lead nurturing establishes trust with your leads, positions your organization as a bona fide expert in your space, leads to warmer sales conversations, and, most importantly, closes more deals. 

Marketing automation adoption continues to grow among marketers in 2020, with most marketing teams now using at least one automation tool as part of their tech stack.

Building a smart marketing automation strategy is a great way to generate remarkable marketing results and revenue growth in 2020. Like most things in digital marketing, being strategic and thoughtful in your approach to marketing automation is the best way to proceed. A sloppy or on-the-fly approach without a thoughtful, buttoned-up strategy is almost certain to create headaches and hurdles down the road. And it certainly won’t be scalable.

One key trait that identifies all high achievers is that they take action. They don't just talk about ideas; they do. Winning teams practice the art of implementation relentlessly. 

It's not particularly surprising, then, that successful implementation of a strategic marketing plan is one of the biggest challenges consistently facing marketing teams. 

Failed implementation is a stressful situation for any member of your marketing team, but it's marketing leaders that end up taking the brunt of the blame when a marketing plan fails to launch. Organizations regularly cite failure to execute a strategic plan as their primary reason for firing a CMO. 

Smart marketers know that basic marketing metrics (traffic and engagement) on their own provide a narrow view, and only small piece of the puzzle. While useful for optimizing campaigns, they are not necessarily tied to larger business goals and objectives.

Analytics that matter to organization leaders and boards go beyond the basic number of leads generated per quarter or increases in lead conversions. Leads, opportunities, and customers are easy and obvious numbers to focus on, but more important are the metrics that allow companies to track, project and predict growth. This is particularly true when it comes to SaaS (and IaaS, PaaS, FaaS) companies and others with a subscription-based pricing model.

Chances are, you're already familiar with Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR). This is a number that investors care about, which means it is a number that companies care about, which means it is a number that marketers care about. MRR, however, is just scratching the surface of revenue metrics that matter and must be measured.

Inbound marketing is a tremendously effective, modern way of generating leads and customers for many companies across the world.

Unlike outbound marketing, with inbound marketing, you don’t need to fight for your potential customers’ attention. By creating content designed to address the problems and needs of your ideal customers, you attract qualified prospects and build trust and credibility for your business.

One of the most fundamentally important elements of an inbound marketing campaign is the content offer. A content offer is a foundational piece of an inbound program that works to attract interest, convert interested users into leads, and nurture leads into sales opportunities.

Many companies understand the enormous potential of an inbound approach for their company, but they're not sure what elements are necessary to create successful, lead-generating inbound marketing content.

Here are all of the key pieces you need to include in an inbound marketing content offer, why they're important, and how to create them in order to generate successful lead generation results.

Tell me if this sounds familiar. Your team has recently implemented a marketing automation solution, but six months in or even a year later, you're still not experiencing substantial gains in efficiency, lead generation, and revenue growth. You're probably feeling a little shortchanged, and with good reason.

If you're in this situation, don't panic. You don't have to settle for mediocre results. Game-changing technology like marketing automation should deliver game-changing results. 

Start by identifying the root cause of your lackluster results. Once you know what you're dealing with, there are steps you can take to quickly turn things around and start capitalizing on your marketing automation investment. 

Customer acquisition is the strategic process of bringing on new clients or customers to your business. A good customer acquisition strategy is necessary for business growth and keeps employees, leaders, and investors happy. Customer acquisition, along with demand generation, sales enablement, and client retention, is a major component of a revenue generation plan.

The goal of building a customer acquisition strategy is to create a repeatable, sustainable process that will generate new revenue predictably over time.

There's a lot that goes into an effective customer acquisition plan, but for most growth-minded B2B companies, the essential elements of a good strategy are the same. Allow plenty of time (3-6 months) to work on your strategy internally, involve the right partners, and select the right technology tools. 

Here are the key steps to follow to create a customer acquisition strategy that will set you up for success in 2019 and beyond.

Many sales teams sheepishly admit they’re not the greatest when it comes to following up with trade show leads.

I get it, believe me. When you attend an industry trade show, your time there is a whirlwind of introductions, conversations, and contact info exchanges. You come back with an overwhelming stack of business cards, set of notes, and host of new LinkedIn connection requests. Not to mention the stack of unopened emails in your inbox and other work that has piled up while you've been out of the office.

To be clear, highly-qualified leads that are ready to make a purchase right away are not usually a problem. Where many sales teams fall short, though, is in the follow-up, management, and nurturing of qualified trade show leads who are not ready to buy just yet.

Luckily, this is an area where marketing automation tools like HubSpot can really shine. Here’s how sales, marketing and technology can work together to master the art of trade show lead follow-up and turn trade show leads into customers.

A poorly put together marketing plan will generate poor results, even if it's perfectly executed by a top-notch team.  

Marketing teams often don't realize they are stuck with a badly designed marketing plan until they are months into execution, when results have ground to a halt or even tanked. As a result, a tremendous amount of time, energy and resources are wasted.

Whether you’ve created your marketing plan in-house or you’ve hired an agency to help you, you can quickly identify whether you’re working off of a sub-par marketing plan that is destined to disappoint if you know how to spot key red flags.

Here are five of the most common signs that a marketing plan is destined for failure.