Online Marketing Blog

B2B Marketing Best Practices 2011

We’ve been fans of MarketingSherpa reports, guides and handbooks for many years, recently reviewing their SEO Benchmark Report for 2011. As passionate B2B Marketers, we’re always on the lookout for qualitative information to improve our B2B client marketing as well as our own. That’s why I’m pretty motivated by the new 2011 B2B Marketing Advanced Practices Handbook from MarketingSherpa.

Led by Senior Research Analyst, Jen Doyle, this Handbook is nearly 200 pages of research based best practices, graphs, worksheets and of course, their FUEL Methodology for elevating B2B Marketing effectiveness. Here’s a rundown of the report:

Ron Belanger from Yahoo does a decent job explaining, “Engagement, Search and Social Media” in a video over at iMedia Connection. I like the context in which he presents social search – as a third channel to organic and PPC. Now if iMedia just offered some social bookmark links for the video!

WSJ posits a good question: “Google Tests New Ad Offerings — But Will Advertisers Follow?” In order to accomplish the transfer of ad dollars to other ad formats, Google will need to change existing mindsets about advertising in print, on radio and TV as being too expensive or complicated.

B2B Online’s recent survey gives us BtoB marketers a nice gift: “62.7% of marketers plan to boost budgets in 2007”

Pandia posts it’s Google Santa wish list and Google is listening.

There’s lots of buzz about how to use RSS for business marketing of late, particularly for business to business RSS marketing, so here are some tried and true resources as well as a few recent articles:

KnowledgeStorm Research Report: “How Blogs and RSS Affect B2B Technology Purchase Decisions” also covered by DMNews.

If you work in the B2B marketing space, then you will also be interested in this upcoming webcast: “How to Use New Media to Market to IT Professionals” which is happening Nov 2nd.

Rok Hrastnik “wrote the book” on RSS Marketing who also published “The Business Case for RSS”

Charlene Li from Forrester, “Using RSS as a Marketing Tool”

White paper on RSS by Yahoo and Ipsos Insight,”RSS‚ÄîCrossing into the Mainstream” (pdf)