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If you're a business owner or in charge of your company's marketing, you're probably solicited non-stop by digital marketing agencies. Each company claims to offer something others can not. Each claims it can solve your online marketing challenges.

Whether in life or business, experiencing failure often provides invaluable lessons. Today, I intend to help you bypass that hardship and failure by sharing four important online marketing lessons we’ve seen businesses learn the hard way.

This is an update to a post written previously about marketing budgets, and includes an update about what companies are spending on marketing activities; including digital marketing, search marketing and social media. The two sources of data are Forester Research and the CMO Survey, an organization dedicated to marketing insights and supported by Duke University and McKinsey.

Today I opened the Richmond Times Dispatch (RTD) Monday Metro Business section and read an article titled “Website mistakes to avoid for small businesses”. It appears to have been picked up from an article in the Charlotte Observer.

Industry experts report that marketers this year will spend $171 billion on paid advertising. Those advertisers, and their bosses, will experience much anxiety because in many cases they won’t know what worked and/or how well it worked. Here’s a quote from a famous man that underscores this -

Cold calling isn’t dead but it’s challenging. Most salespeople don’t like it. Personal networking is effective but can be very time consuming. This all leads to a question, “in today’s environment, how do you generate high quality B2B sales leads?” This article presents a way more firms these days are answering this question.

What makes a website an effective selling tool? Why do some websites perform well at generating leads while others don’t? There are many answers to these questions, and this article focuses on how the content in your website makes a difference.

In the B2B selling world, the higher the price the longer the sales cycle. Higher priced solutions typically require more research and more people involved in the decision. Elite B2B salespeople are adept at nurturing leads through the long sales cycle. This article describes 3 ways to nurture a qualified lead from initial contact through closing the deal.

I've dedicated several posts on WorkIt Richmond to the changing winds of the search industry. From Panda, to Penguin, to Hummingbird. Despite their cute, harmless names, these updates have changed our corner of the marketing world more than anything else in the last decade.