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Do you have a sinking feeling when it comes time to justifying your marketing decisions and expenditures?
In today’s business environment, marketers are under tremendous pressure quantify their return on marketing. That holds especially true for startups and SMBs. We know that any innovative marketer measures the impact of every marketing campaign on the sales pipeline. But why aren’t most small companies doing it?
For example, I think we all agree that your website should be at the center of your marketing and sales process. With correct Search Engine Marketing, clear and concise messaging and compelling demand generating offers, your corporate website could be the #1 source of high-quality leads to your sales force. However, it never ceases to amaze me that so many companies will flush tens of thousands of dollars down the toilet on a website design but not take this into consideration!
Case in point: A small—but growing—software company. Despite its growth, the company was not using electronic marketing channels, and the marketing department was generating few leads for the sales force. The company’s largest lead generation method at the time was direct-mail campaigns and trade shows. The company had spent close to $15,000 for a new website which served as little more than an “online brochure”. An additional $8,000 had been spent on a custom research white-paper which was given out at trade shows and was a download item on the website….a straight download that required no contact information whatsoever! The company’s CEO said they just “threw the white paper up on the website” because they didn’t have a CRM system or even a webmaster to build a download form or landing page. The CEO was quick to point out, however, that they did use Google Analytics to track the number of downloads and the whitepaper had been a huge success with over 500 people downloading it! I asked him, who were those people? Were they prospects, existing customers or competitors? How many downloads converted to a demo—or a sale? He was silent. It’s a story I hear time and time again.
Having heard this company’s sad tale, I set out on compiling a list of free, low-cost and easy-to-deploy tools that you can implement today—so you can start marketing effectively within budget constraints. I’ve included everything from hosted online forms, cheap email marketing software, low-cost presentation software, free video hosting tools, website analytics programs and even FREE (open source) CRM systems that will allow any small business to build its prospect database, drive traffic to its websites, open and manage a sophisticated e-mail channel, and generate more responses from marketing campaigns and website visitors!
In the spirit of this post, however, I am not going to just give away the list. 
I simply ask that you subscribe to the email version of my blog (just click the link on the right column to subscribe to the e-newsletter) and then send a note to me at michael@SensibleMarketing.biz and I’ll gladly send you this valuable resource so you can start generating more leads and have some degree of marketing accountability in your business!
