And here are the results:
1 - Integration of social media
Social media remains the #1 topic in 2012. Social media has clearly evolved from the experimental stage to become an established marketing tactic and lead generator in 2011. Social media will continue to be more tightly integrated into traditional tactics such as email, webcasts, and content assets as an additional channel to broaden the reach of marketing messages and drive conversations with prospects.
2 – Content marketing
Content marketing went mainstream in 2011. If you are not thinking about (and implementing) a strategy that puts your buyers (with their persona and industry driven pain points, preferences, and buying stages) in the center of your marketing efforts - and create compelling content as the currency of your engagement with buyers that influences decisions along the buying process - now is the time. Marketers often struggle to create magnetic content in the right formats and quantities. Sophisticated marketers will apply systematic ways to re-purpose existing content (for example produce webinars and derive white papers, articles and blog posts from the webinar transcript), create bite-sized content for the short-attention span executive, and design an efficient "content waterfall" approach that accelerates production times, quality, and consistency.
3 - Focus on lead quality
In the past, it was difficult to gauge lead quality and lead gen's impact on sales pipeline, so in the absence of real quality indicators, more leads were considered better. This flood of leads overwhelmed sales and distracted from the selling part of the job. And marketing received the blame for creating poor leads and wasting valuable selling time. Now with marketing automation platforms maturing it is becoming easier to filter out the sales-ready leads and keep low-scoring leads in nurturing program until they rise to the level of sales readiness.
4 - Targeted segmentation & messaging
With much "distraction" by social media, marketing automation and new marketing tactics, marketers are re-discovering fundamentals such as market segmentation. The benefits of segmentation are substantial. Segmentation is critical as vendors evolve from technology-focused business models to customer-needs driven product development, sales, marketing, and operations. Because prospects in defined, targeted segments are a better fit with the vendor’s offering, these prospects are more likely to buy, they close faster, produce bigger deals, and remain more loyal. In short, they are more profitable. For marketing, well-defined segments means more targeted messages and programs that resonate with buyers. This approach results in higher response rates, better engagements, shorter conversion cycles, and overall better return on marketing investment.
5 – Focus on marketing automation
The fastest rising category since last year's survey is marketing automation. As predicted last year, marketing automation has gone mainstream in 2011 as companies are taking their online campaigns, lead scoring, and email automation to the next level.
What marketing areas are becoming relatively less important in 2012?
As telling as the areas of increased focus are the areas B2B marketers consider less important in 2012:
- Tradeshows
- Marketing cost reduction & outsourcing
- Lead quantity (see increased focus on lead quality in the top 10 list)
- Push marketing tactics (see focus on pull marketing in the top 10 list)
- Marketing asset management (while still important, many marketers seem to have a better handle on this problem with asset and content management tools)
What are your thoughts? Does this reflect the reality in your organization going into 2011? Which of these focus areas match your priorities, which don’t?
Thank you for following and contributing to this blog. I hope the New Year will treat you well and that you have much success in your 2012 B2B marketing efforts!