If your company hasn’t yet established its presence on Facebook, take a look at these statistics from Deluxe Rev:

• Users average 15.5 hours on Facebook each month.
• On average, users visit Facebook 40 times per month.
• 50% of users log on to Facebook on any given day.

With Facebook popularity on the rise, it is time to get started! If you aren’t quite sure what to do first, you’ll find plenty of advice out there for the taking. We just found an excellent resource we recommend you download first, Deluxe Rev’s new ebook, “REV Up Your Facebook Marketing: A Guide for Small Businesses.”

Filled with statistics and how-to advice, this is THE Facebook marketing guide to get you going quickly. It includes practical tips like:

• Don’t worry about your Facebook page being perfect -- it is more important to get started. Remember Facebook changes often and so will your page.

• If you have more than one administrator for your company’s Facebook page, create a list of guidelines for posting to ensure that your brand standards are being followed.

• Use “mentions” to help build your fan base. Post some recognition to other companies (think: congratulations and thank-you’s) that also share your target market. When you tag them correctly, these mentions will display in their fans’ news feeds, which will point new users to your company’s page.

Besides real-world tips, Deluxe Rev also has fascinating statistics to share (these are from a 2011 Buddy Media Study):

• The best length for a post is 80 characters or less.
• The best times to post are early in the morning or late at night.
• Thursday and Friday seem to be the best days of the week to post, although there are specific days that are better for specific industries (those are included in the ebook).
• Simple call-to-actions in your posts are most effective at encouraging participation (Like this…, Post this…, Comment here, and Tell Us).

However the biggest revelation is the importance of Facebook’s feature the News Feed. Social Media Strategist Ekaterina Walter of Intel says, “News Feed Optimization (NFO) is the new Search Engine Optimization (SEO).”

Those are powerful words, and they could not be truer. Facebook’s algorithm for determining what posts end up on News Feeds takes into account page popularity. Simply stated: If you have more fans interacting with you (Likes and Comments on posts) the higher your chances are to be included on your fans’ News Feeds. This is all the more powerful when coupled with this statistic: 70% of fans will not see Status Updates due to this algorithm. Yes, landing on the News Feed should be the number one goal of your Facebook strategy.

But to get on the News Feed, you first need a Facebook page. And to get started, we recommend Deluxe Rev’s “REV Up Your Facebook Marketing: A Guide for Small Businesses.” This ebook will give you the tips and techniques necessary to optimize your Facebook presence (and get on that News Feed), plus it includes some great case studies, too.

We recently took another look at Marketo's Definitive Guide to Sales Lead Qualification and Sales Development. In this guide, Marketo is advocating the creation of a Sales Development Group: a collection of reps whose singular focus is on lead qualific...

We recently took another look at Marketo’s Definitive Guide to Sales Lead Qualification and Sales Development. In this guide, Marketo is advocating the creation of a Sales Development Group: a collection of reps whose singular focus is on lead qual...

We took a closer look at two recent reports highlighting how sales and marketing priorities and budgets are allocated in 2011. The good news is, according to CSO’s 2011 Lead Management Study, marketing budgets are on the rise. CMO Council’s The 2011 State of Marketing Report also confirms this, with 57% percent of respondents indicating that they are adding to their 2011 marketing spend. (Note that this represents a budget between 2 and 4 percent of revenue.)

So how are we spending all this money?

In CSO’s Lead Management Study, respondents reported their top three strategic marketing objectives this year as:

• Increasing new customer acquisition – 82.6%
• Optimizing cross-selling and up-selling – 41.7%
• Increasing brand awareness – 41.5%

• Increasing customer renewals – 17.6%
• Enhancing customer experience – 16.3%
• Becoming customer-centric – 14.5%

• A lengthening sales cycle. Marketers now own more of the customer as sales cycles slow down and prospects spend more time on the web, learning and comparing on their own, before engaging with sales.
• Overwhelming amounts of customer data. Many more of us jumped on the social media bandwagon this year, afraid of being left behind and without having an integrated solution in place. Now, we have lots of customer data all over the place, and we aren’t sure what to do with it (or how to get at it.)
• Lack of talent. CMO Council reports that 37% of marketers plan to bring on new digital and interactive marketing talent this year. We’re not surprised. In 2011, marketers found themselves with Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, even going mobile, and did not have a well-thought out strategy for any of it.

We reviewed Marketo’s Definitive Guide to Marketing Metrics and Analytics and found it lived up to its title with 70 pages of detailed advice on how to most effectively gather and measure key marketing metrics.

Within the Guide, a new profile emerged: the Revenue Marketer™. Marketo describes them as marketers who, “begin to operate and sound more like sales.” Trademarked by The Pedowitz Group, The Revenue Marketer™ “…knows how their key metrics stack up against their targets, and what they plan to do to improve their results.”

If you don’t classify yourself as a one of these new breed marketers, you’re not alone. 44% of marketers have no idea what profits a 10% increase in their marketing budget would generate (Lenskold Group’s 2010 B2B Lead Generation Marketing ROI Study)

However, we should.

As the Definitive Guide tells us (and as most of us suspected already), to gain more credibility and respect (translation: budget and resources) within our organizations, marketing needs to measure the things that will guide decisions that improve profitability. We need to start speaking the CEO and CFO’s language.

To do so, we first need to understand and develop goals around:

• How many sales we anticipate our marketing program(s) will generate
• How much revenue each sale produces
• What the gross margin percentage is
  

Next we need to design our programs so that we can effectively measure results. With clearly understood goals and well-defined ROI estimates at the outset, we can then track and connect measurements to our pipelines, revenue, and profits. We also can make adjustments to programs with actionable data to improve results, and therefore improve credibility.

To get started, we recommend you download our Marketing Audit Pack. This group of templates includes our Marketing Plan Audit Template, Marketing ROI Template, Sales & Marketing Scorecard and S.W.O.T. Analysis Template, and will help you:

Make well-informed adjustments to your marketing strategy

Understand the true performance of your marketing plan vs. the estimate

Report your status on a weekly basis to raise awareness about your sales and marketing results

Calculate the ROI on your marketing plan

Think about it. Prospects are taking more time to gather information from the wealth of content online, content that marketers produce. This means we are presiding over a much larger share of the revenue cycle than ever before. If you aren’t yet measuring your ROI, it’s time to start. The Revenue Marketer™ is here to stay.

As we audit marketing plans for our SMB clients, we are excited to see interactive marketing taking a more prominent position in the marketing mix. For companies that are on a limited budget, there are many effective ways of putting email, social a...

Pew Internet reports, “The number using social networking sites has nearly doubled since 2008 and the population of SNS users has gotten older.”

The breakdown looks like this:

• The average age of SNS users has shifted from 33 in 2008 to 38 in 2010.
• Over half of all SNS users are over the age of 35.
• 56% of SNS users are female.

The report is filled with interesting nuggets, such as:

• Facebook users are more likely to trust in others and are more politically engaged,
• MySpace users are more open to opposing viewpoints, and
• LinkedIn users have more diverse social networks than users of other sites.

While fascinating to read and identify with the above findings, marketers should truly pay attention to these stats:

• Nearly twice as many men (63%) as women (37%) use LinkedIn.
• The average adult MySpace user is younger (32 y.o.), and the average adult LinkedIn user older (40 y.o.), than the average Facebook user (38 y.o.), and Twitter user (33 y.o.).
• MySpace and Twitter users are the most racially diverse mainstream social network platforms. However, a large proportion of users of “other” social network services are racial minorities.
• MySpace users tend to have fewer years of formal education than users of other social network services, whereas most LinkedIn users have at least one university degree.

These demographics may surprise you, or they may validate your own assumptions about which social media sites are best to engage in a dialogue with your customers. In either case, the differences between the social media options are becoming clearer as the popularity of social media increases.

Make sure to gut-check your social media strategy with the tidbits in this new report. You can download your copy at Pew Internet.

Key insights into 2011’s interactive marketing budgets include:

• The average allocation to interactive marketing is 25.2% of total budget
• B2B marketers plan to devote more money to interactive than B2C (26.2% vs. 24%)
• 30% of the overall marketing spend will go toward digital campaigns this year
• B2B marketers are more likely to increase both their interactive budgets and their overall marketing spend than B2C

Strategically, the number one goal from interactive campaigns is to build brand awareness according to 79.2% of respondents. This is followed by driving consumers to website (61.5%), generating sales (61.0%), and generating leads (60.4.%).

What surprised us is that even though building brand awareness is the leading goal for their interactive campaigns, only 24.6% of respondents are measuring brand “lift.” This speaks to the power of brand and the renewed energy around brand building with the power of social media.

Other data points to note:

• Email marketing has held steady from 2010.
• Other mainstream tools such as social media (Facebook, LinkedIn), SEO, Twitter, Online Ads, Paid Search Ads, Social Media Ads, and Viral or Word-Of-Mouth campaigns are all seeing more use now than last year.
• Top 3 leading niche-marketing tools are webinars, blogs, and online contests.

The challenge for us marketers has always been measuring how well our interactive marketing campaigns are doing. What are the metrics that we use to determine whether or not we are successful? Responses indicate the top 5 metrics being watched currently are:

• Click-throughs (58.7%)
• Traffic to website (53.3%)
• Lead generation/user opt-in (43.3%)
• Page views (38.3%)
• Incremental sales (34.1%)

Yet marketers aren’t quite sure how cost-effective interactive marketing actually is. Those who think online campaigns are more profitable than offline declined nine percentage points this year (25.7% of respondents), whereas those who think online is less profitable than offline went up (9.3%). That being said, 29% of marketers simply don’t know if interactive is more or less profitable than offline methods.

What is clear is that any uncertainty about the ROI of interactive marketing is not making an impact on the pursuit of these key initiatives. Marketers across all industries agree that is far worse to be left behind than worrying about its cost-effectiveness right now.

Download your own copy of Chief Marketer’s 2011 Interactive Marketing Survey for more information.

The results are in from Chief Marketer’s annual Interactive Marketing Survey, conducted between February and March of this year with 647 marketing professionals from both B2B and B2C. Key insights into 2011’s interactive marketing budgets includ...

With the challenge of delivering quality leads confronting marketers every day, once again the focus returns to lead scoring. More than just numbers, lead scoring is the true intersection of sales and marketing as it defines what makes a quality lead...