You might agree with his findings or not - but for b2b marketers - it is important to remember that your business customers think like consumers too!

Text heavy websites with 20 page technical whitepapers won’t get your customers excited about an offering.

Even if you have a real niche solution - say a personnel manager for car repair shops - your customers will prefer an engaging, conversational marketing campaign.

This is not to say that every b2b product should be sold like Old Spice soap, hardly. You need to match the tone and positioning of your product. But the ‘guts’ of that Old Spice campaign (integrated landing pages, YouTube informational videos, Twitter/Facebook customer engagement) are all applicable best practices.

Even if you have channel parters or a sales team doing the heavy lifting, these strategies help them sell your offerings better.

Kudos to @AdamSinger for this tongue-in-cheek view into how savvy a marketer is. A lot of these points are important for companies to realize and measure their performance against:

Are you running web analytics, is that data being reported on and viewed by management? What changes to your go-to-market effort has this data driven?

Are you educating your potential customer pool? Is your business a thought-leader? Is your leadership engaged in your marketplace showing leadership?

Mural has developed the Web Centric Customer Life-cycle Audit process. This is a free (zero strings attached) consultation session that walks you through these and other key steps - to help your business get to market more successfully.

A great whitepaper is an important asset to your demand generation strategy. It shouldn’t be a shameless plug for your business or an incomplete analysis or abstract that requires further engagement.

Rather a whitepaper should show the world that you’re a thought leader.

Creating landing pages and other web-based campaigns around a whitepaper is great - but some human elbow grease doesn’t hurt. Why not email it to your customers and friends and ask them to pass it on? Also, use a more visual approach like PowerPoint as opposed to the text heavy look of Word.

Bottom line: A whitepaper needs to show that you’re an expert, that you have something compelling to say, and that you’re so convinced in your business that you’re giving this asset away.

This graphic shows the value of sending PPC traffic to a campaign specific landing page vs a product page, or worse yet an ordering page.

These insights aren’t just valid for PPC. You should be running campaign specific pages for each campaign and traffic source that you have - so you can tailor the message to the specific attributes of each customer persona coming to your site.

Someone interested in your CRM solution since he follows you on Twitter could be very different than a small business CEO you gave a business card to at a local seminar, who are both different than a SharePoint guru you helped out in an Azure development forum. Sending these folks to the same page - means the page must either speak to all those people (and the message is cluttered and lost in a maze) or you’re not reaching your intended audience.

Different landing pages for your audience also makes conversion tracking and ROI calculating much easier.

If you’re looking to take your demand generation strategy to the next level, give us a call and we’ll give you a complementary go-to-market analysis tailored to your business.

The SlideShare - which you can see at this link hits the nail on the head with a lot of points:

• Bad expectations
• Institutional hurdles (management/legal limiting employees, etc) Click here for stunning example of management idocy here
• Poor tactics

One of the more controversial points of evidence the authors feel point to the failure of corporate Social Media engagement is that almost 75% of companies demand positive ROI in one year.

Mural believes strongly that corporate Social Media campaigns should be ROI positive - proven, measured ROI - well before a year is up. Whether you are using Social Media for your company to find new customers, up-sell existing ones, improve support to convert customers into fans - who bring you new customers - Corporate Social Media is a big "quid pro quo".

Of course you have to be human, avoid being calculating, be light, be interesting, be real, etc. Of course you want candid discussions from employees and customers in the mix - but you have to manage, nurture, and motivate that conversation.

(TechCrunch sourced this from German Think Tank ‘Brand Science Institute’)

One final item: Getting the right analytics in place helps you make the decisions that will make your campaign a success. If you want help developing that platform give us a call.

If your agency says it is impossible to track ROI, dollar for dollar, for your Social Media campaigns - you need a new agency.

"Business agility, not cost savings, is the leading reason U.S. companies are interested in cloud computing, according to a survey of 500 senior-level IT and business-unit managers Sand Hill released in March. Forty nine percent of respondents listed business agility as their most important goal; 46 percent listed cost efficiency. The No. 3 response — freeing IT resources to focus on innovation — got less than half that support, with 22 percent."

I found this article most interesting as a marketer. Real businesses are moving to the cloud for various reasons. I think that, given the news on the economy, the cost efficiency gets a lot more air time than ‘business agility’.

Freeing IT resources to focus on key tasks - has always been a secondary reason to move to the cloud. It will always figure prominently in advertising, however, since you need to win over the IT team in any deployment.

You certainly see ‘business agility’ pitches out there - but not the type of crystal clear anecdotes that non-technical people can grasp.

From CIO.com - via Reuters - click here for the full article

If you’re an ISV and thinking about moving to the cloud, why not check out free ISV tools from Microsoft at: http://cloudservicesready.com/

I’ve bought ads on search engines for clients almost as long as AdWords has existed. Yahoo, Microsoft and the rest have advertised, bribed, and just about everything else to change Google’s "veto-proof" majority on the market. But one thing has always remained the same; it isn’t worth your while (unless you’re a big company) to advertise anywhere else than Google AdWords for search engine text ads.

Banner ads are a different story…

What comScore didn’t point out in their article is that, today, real competition is coming from social media. People are starting to engage with Facebook ads (though Facebook’s obliviousness to scammers might kill that medium off if they don’t make changes). Sites like Groupon, Foursquare and the like are connecting buyers and sellers locally.

The real issue facing SMBs when trying to market online: Success comes to the savvy. Paying a college-kid is not likely to drive sustained results; but it costs a fraction of an agency that can drive similarly useless results.

Bottom line: SMBs need to partner with a creative agency that understands that money doesn’t grow on trees, that is creative, that has the experience and the know-how to target real customers (not just the most forward early adopters). And they need to be ROI-obsessed. If your agency isn’t - talk to us!

Many of you have likely read this article already. I’d be interested to know whether you’ve ‘checked-in’ to Foursquare.

Ultimately, Social Media is about ROI. The platforms are free, but many companies don’t have time to focus on every platform. Twitter and Facebook cover a wide percentage of users - but niche platforms are great for targeting specific personas.

Groupon, Foursquare, Ning - to name a few - can all be used successfully to target some niche users.

One powerful way to keep users on your website, to keep them thinking about your offering is to show a good video. Dropbox has completely done away with brochureware and directs all traffic to watch a video introduction.

Text and stock photos aren’t going to move your sales numbers vis-a-vis your competition. Recently, we helped Canadian telco TELUS promote their Virtual Server product with this page:

http://promo.telus.com/virtualserver/domorewithless/

If you’re looking for a video-enhanced update to your online presence, reach out to us here at Mural.

Mom and Pop shops - some with no web presence at all are poised to make big leaps into the digital age. Small stores "get it" they know they need to move away from the yellow pages, and they know that competing with large chains and other stores works for them if they can personalize through the web.

This is a big opportunity for providing social media services, real expertise, and products like CRM. Larger integrators like ReachLocal will help those willing to self-service - but many will want guidance.