New technologies. Media fragmentation. The changing marketing landscape. B-to-B marketing professionals are dealing with them – in many cases struggling with them – as day-to-day realities of the way we “do” marketing today.

One of the consequences of the new marketing landscape is that, as you necessarily devote ourselves to learning new technologies and media channels, you can lose focus on the big picture. It takes time and attention to learn how to properly execute a search engine optimization program, and keep it going continuously. It takes time and attention to implement and constantly tweak a search engine marketing program for continuous improvement. And to know, understand and leverage the continuing stream of new media opportunities and techniques available to B-to-B marketers.

There are endless details and procedures involved in optimizing press materials
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The economy is creeping towards a recession. The DOE’s 13 SEER mandate has helped level the playing field, household buying habits have changed dramatically since the popularity of the internet, and media options have drastically fragmented. With all of this going on, how can a low to mid level HVAC contractor compete against the big guys? While there is no perfect answer to this question, there are some suggestions to help you spend your precious marketing dollars wisely.

Start by looking to your manufacturer and distributor advertising programs. There are literally thousands of dollars available to dealers who agree to use branded and sometimes pre-packaged advertising programs. In fact some manufacturers offer up to 4 times a dealer’s advertising investment!

Next, think about timing and placement of your advertising. What are you really getting out of your investment? Case in point: if you put all of your dollars into yellow pages advertising then you
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Everyone has their individual reasons as to why they measure their marketing efforts. The way I see it, we all fall into four categories: Justification of Budgets, Evaluation of Tools and Tactics, Insight into Customer Behavior, and Predicting and Projecting Results. Similar to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, we need to satisfy the most basic reason before we can move up to the more complex reason, and no matter how high you have progressed, the levels below are still extremely important. I like to call it the Hierarchy of Analytical Needs.

Here is a quick look at each of the levels.

Justification of Budgets
The lowest level of Hierarchy of Analytical Needs can best be explained with the following scenario: The CFO of your company walks into your office to discuss the need for budget cuts.
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In the lead article in the December 10 issue of B2B magazine, Kate Maddox outlined “the top 10 marketing trends for 2008, based on interviews with marketers, ad agencies, media executives, analysts and other industry experts.” Read article.

The top 10 are green marketing, globalization, the shift to online, customer in control, embracing web 2.0, improving operations, targeted and personal events, integrating media platforms, going mobile and blended search.

The marketers interviewed include top tier marketers such as Boeing, Caterpillar, FedEx, GE, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, Siemens and UPS. But what about the rest of us? (Okay, we’re an agency but we came from and still serve primarily non-top-tier B-to-B marketers. You know – the real world.)

We think the top 10 list is on target.
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With all the talk of an impending recession, marketers will have to be better than ever at proving the return on investment they can provide. As sales start to decline, marketing budgets are always among the first to be cut.

With the increase of digital marketing, tracking ROI is becoming increasingly easier. Yet a study completed recently by the Sales Lead Management Association (SLMA) and reported by a recent article on BtoB Online found a vast majority of small businesses do not track ROI on lead generation programs. That brings me to the question—How do these marketers know if their programs are working? Without solid metrics to help justify the worth of your programs, your programs and future ones like them may be hard to validate. As budgets contract, these metrics may be your saving grace.

As marketers continue planning for 2008, marketing analytics should be a solid part of their program.
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Marketers and consumers are pretty familiar with the term “Buyer’s Remorse.”  You know how it goes…You’re in the store and see the perfect kitchen utensil. It promises to cut prep time in half! You must have it. After making the purchase, you rush home to give it a try. It ends up not doing exactly what you thought it would and a feeling of disappointment overwhelms you. This experience happens to all of us more times than we would like to admit and in some situations it causes a negative feeling towards the company or person who convinced you to make the purchase.

Very similar situations happen online all the time. I like to call it Clicker’s Remorse. Just imagine spending hours on Google, publication sites, and online directories looking for a solution to a problem. Finally, you find it! An attention grabbing banner ad promises to give the answer you are looking for.
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Excuse me; I need you to put down the analytics report. 
Yes, please put it down. 
Why?
Because it is time to stop reading the reports and take action.

I see a common trend in analytics. Everyone is jumping on the analytics bandwagon (which is a great!), but some are slow to take action based on the data being collected and reported. 

The purpose of analytics isn’t to create more reports for everyone to read.  We do it so we can learn and continuously improve. Jason Burby’s comment in his Clickz column really resonated with me. He said, “If you aren't taking action on the data, you're wasting money on the analytics tools and resources -- your ROI is zero!” He is right.

So, why aren’t more people taking action? I believe people hesitate because they don’t have complete faith in the numbers.
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Twice last week I heard about B-to-B marketing directors who were "ordered" to achieve the #1 ranking in Google search results for one or more keywords that were important to their company. That was the goal. Period. In one case, the company shelled out $75,000 over three months before they realized that they weren't getting significant results in terms of leads.

“Gotta be #1” might be a perfectly good move under the right circumstances, but absent strategy the mentality is reminiscent of the rush into e-commerce in the 1990s and that's a cautionary tale. If this approach catches on we’ll find ourselves in an auction situation and prices will soar. Hopefully that won’t happen, but until the search phenomenon matures a little, you might find yourself facing a similar dictate. You have to be responsive but, other than throwing money at it, what can you do?

First, if your management is stuck on buying their way into first place, you can ask if
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A recent article in the b-to-b space bemoaned the dizzying pace of change in the Web 2.0 world. Just as marketers try (let alone get comfortable with) a new technology, technique or tool, another one comes out and catches fire. Among the mind-boggling technologies are micro-blogging tools, personal aggregation sites, do-it-yourself social network site builders, niche video distribution vehicles, vote-for-content sites and virtual 3D worlds. It is an unsettling time for mapping strategy or making long-term decisions. A fad mentality seems to be taking over, and nobody can say which tool, toy or technique is going to win…or survive. The key, the article says, is putting the customer first. What a novel idea! But seriously, thanks to the revolution in digital marketing, media and Web 2.0, market and customer research are making a comeback. Some would say it has always been important, and it has.
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In the popular imagination, “creative” and “analytics” are the yin and yang of the advertising world: right-brained creatives avoiding left-brain analytics like the plague. Strictly speaking, it’s not an accurate stereotype. Creatives have never really been able to ignore the effectiveness of their work. However, there’s no question that many tried.

But it is a new world we live in. Because the new digital media bring with them a variety of measurement options, continuous measurement is possible. And because metrics – and, consequently, continuous improvement – are possible, they will soon be required. That’s also the world we live in.

And then there’s the constantly changing nature of our online interactions. What worked six months ago doesn’t work any longer. Remember when animated banners were hot. Then not. And now maybe . .
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