thefunnel » Marketing

B2B Marketing 2.0

Tomas Berghall — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 21:48:41 +0000

I thought the following table by Holger Schulze provides a good high level summary representation of how B2B marketing has changed and what skill set marketers need today. In speaking with several different companies and looking at their marketing operations it’s also a good reference and comparison point to evaluate the level of marketing maturity.

Marketing opportunities?

Tomas Berghall — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 20:14:13 +0000

Where are the exciting marketing opportunities in the future? Let’s look at some trends.

Social Media is here to stay and no longer just an experiment. For many B-2-C companies’ Social Media is already driving more traffic than search! What is the next Face Book? The short history of social media has already shown that no matter what, applications have a limited life, so what’s next?
Wireless and Mobile Applications. Wireless everywhere and embedded computing are driving the “always connected” concept, and mobile handsets (phones) are just scratching the surface. The applications for convergence or voice, data and video through the mobile internet are endless. What is the next killer app? In the past content has always been the king, but will the trend continue?
Semantic web and geo targeting. You’re already part of this, whether you like it or not, and it’s going to get a lot more advanced.
Privacy related concerns are a real issue, particularly in the world of “collaborative” social media sites, where it’s sometimes unclear who really has access to your data.
Open source, interoperability, both on the system and the application side. Just like we mash up content, we will now start to mash up whole systems and applications. Time to market is the key.
Cloud computing and SaaS (software as a service). Why invest in your own infrastructure when global systems are already available? But, what about security?
Emotional branding. A concept that was written about already many years ago, but not well understood. Well, it’s happening today in social media – is your company part of it?

About marketing metrics

Tomas Berghall — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 01:04:38 +0000

Most B-2-B marketing is all about the marketing contribution to achieve a business objective. Often there’s a high emphasis on easy to measure direct contributions such as collateral (brochures, catalogs, etc.) leads, visits, responses or new names, and not much weight is given to marketing “influencers” such as brand equity, awareness, loyalty, etc. (although these can be more valuable for the success of a business in the long run). The reason for this is simply because some things are easier to measure than others, and the short term focus of many companies leads to a very tactical approach. For many marketers, digital marketing has been great, with more measurable things, but the marketing contribution problem still remains, because yes there are more things to measure, but yes they are still very tactical or activity based rather than based on a real outcome. Why am I writing this? Here’s why. The bigger problem as I see it is that the business environment is changing and most of the “generic and measurable” marketing contributions are showing a diminishing return. For example: email marketing response rates are going down, trade show participation is down, most companies are catching on to search and web marketing, so the way in which marketing used to show its (tactical) business contribution is soon no longer being there, and yet, not much emphasis is being put onto measuring the indirect contribution of marketing. What can a marketer do, to avoid going back to be just a servant of sales and a production house for brochures and flyers?