Marketing and Sales Education Center

We here at Evenstar often get asked by companies about how they can improve the performance of their business blogging. Although they do have blogs, they find the results underwhelming: the volume of website traffic is lower than desired, and they generate little to no buzz through blog subscriptions, RSS feeds, or on social media.  

The recent changes to the Google search algorithms have now made it essential to publish content on the web.  It is no longer acceptable from a search engine standpoint to develop static web pages about your company's products or services, stuff them with a bunch of keywords, and stand back and wait for an avalanche of traffic and leads to come to your website.

For new Hubspot users the Prospect Tracking Tool may not seem to have a lot of value as the tool only gets down to the Internet Service Provider level.  For example, when a prospect logs in at a location other than the office, it is probably going to log their visit as Verizon, Sympatico HSE or Starbucks.  You may not be sure what you can do with that information or even if it has any value at all.  It can be pretty vague.

Recently, Google completely transformed the world of SEO tactics. Many B2B marketers are still under the impression that if they optimize all of the pages on their website with as many keywords as possible, that will drive traffic to their website and improve their search engine ranking.  While this was true at one time, trying to get Google's attention at the expense of focusing on what your audience wants is no longer a viable internet marketing strategy.  Google has made it this way.  Today, successful marketers will need to create remarkable content targeted to their audience and their marketing personas. In fact, some are now starting to refer to SEO (Search Engine Optimization) with the new term CEO (Customer Experience Optimization).

The scientific community, it seems, is beginning to embrace social media as a way of improving dialogue and communication.  To the general public, the scientific community has seemed like an impenetrable fortress of scientific terminology, jargon and very complex concepts.  We wanted to understand the research more, but we were hopelessly lost when we tried to find out more about the great scientific breakthroughs we hear about. 

Sometimes, desperate times call for desperate measures.  That was the dilemma Zeller's, a Canadian discount retailer, found itself in last year.  Zeller's had just announced that it was going out of business and had sold many of its store leases to U.S. giant Target.  Zeller's found itself trying to sell much of its inventory with very little marketing budget.  Faced with a very restricted budget - $400,000 vs. the $20 million marketing budget of other big retailers - Zeller's could not do the traditional TV, radio and print advertising campaigns for its final pitch.  It still had to continue to sell product for months to come and do so profitably.

It seems some of our staff have become enamoured with haiku poems, to the point that almost everything they write (texts, emails, notes) is in the form of a haiku.  Since we are all about going with mother nature and that with this staff member in particular, resistance is futile, we will be assimilated, we have decided to start a new feature "From the Haiku Corner" to allow our staff to pursue this creative outlet.

Strategic account management, sometimes called key account management is defined as a process-driven approach to managing your company's most important assets - your customers.  To succeed, Strategic Account Management must be more than your key account manager's or any single department's responsibility.  It's a total business mindset where every functional area or line of business must actively participate.  It is a process to acquire a deep understanding of not only its purchasing practices, but more importantly each key customer's business philosophies and strategies.  This requires you to understand your customer "high, wide and deep", forcing you to go beyond just understanding the Purchasing department's needs, but also Marketing, Operations, Finance, Logistics and Executive Management's needs and desires.

Online marketing is very different today than what it was even five years ago.  Today, the cutting edge of online marketing is now called inbound marketing.  In the beginning, if you set up a website with nice graphics and a few simple pages, that was online marketing.  In a traditional sense, it was a virtual store front.  Some innovative websites took it a step further and even let you buy things right on their website - through a shopping cart!  Back then, you hoped people walked by ('surfed'), looked in your store window (landed on your site), saw something that interested them in the window (home page) and walked in (viewed ALL of your pages).  Does anybody remember at the very beginning of browser technology with Netscape?  Netscape changed everything about how we gather and share information.  IBM came out with OS/2 Warp and promoted it with this funny video.  Okay, it was funny at the time but it was SO hot!

E-commerce was born.  That was so awesome and it was fun while it lasted until the tech boom went bust!  Does anybody remember the tech crash of 2000?  My wallet still has nightmares about it.

Welcome to the launch of Evenstar Marketing’s Blog and to our first ever blog post!