Multichannel Marketing for B2B Marketers

Question: Which medium still gets the biggest slice of the average marketing budget? You’re wrong if you said television or the Web.

The answer is direct mail.

Yes, despite their growing activity online, firms still allocate 17% to postal mail. And that’s “larger than the share held by any other media,” according to a new digital marketing survey by the Direct Marketing Association.

This proves, as we’ve long maintained, that direct mail remains a key part of the media mix, especially when used with email and other channels. Don’t drop any of them. continue reading…

Better act now if you plan to increase your online marketing budget. You’re soon going to have company.

A recent report from AMR International predicts that B2B spending will grow by a compound annual rate of 14% by 2012. Growth is forecast at 8% for this year.

To put this in context, online is now getting 7% of the B2B marketing dollar, but that will rise to 12% by 2013, the report says. continue reading…

Sigh. Has it really been that long? Today is the tenth anniversary of the dot-com collapse, “a rout that pushed scores of businesses to the wall,” author Richard Wray notes in the Guardian.

We remember it well. On March 15, 2000, most of us were waiting for someone to offer us stock options in a start-up. By April 1, we were wondering where to find jobs as waiters. continue reading…

Here’s more proof, as if it was needed, that marketers are challenged when it comes to Web analytics, the science defined by the Web Analytics Association as the “measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of Internet data for the purposes of understanding and optimizing Web usage.”

Unica found in a survey that the biggest single obstacle to success is inability to integrate Web analytics with other systems. This was cited by 46% of those polled. continue reading…

Hundreds of books and articles have been written about social media. But most fail to show that Twitter and other networks are of the slightest use to B2B marketers.

Usage patterns suggest that there is more talk than action on the b2b front.

A recent survey showed that only 38% of all business-to-business companies use social media, compared with 71% of the consumer marketers polled.

Their main obstacles? Lack of knowledge and inability to measure results. (For more results, see earlier blog post.

There are other reasons for this lack of belief. One is that many business people lack the time to go on social networks. Then there’s the resource issue.

Still, 38% is hardly a small number. It suggests that these tools do have their uses, and that it’s time to get active on them if you haven’t already.

What can the social networks do for you? First, they can help you reach customers who are attracted to what pundits call the real-time Web. continue reading…