Attended the first half of the Marketing Sherpa B2B Demand Generation Summit this morning in San Francisco. Stefan Tornquist, the Research Director for Marketing Sherpa shared some findings from recent research…lots of good information here, but what really struck me was that according to Sherpa Research, the only two areas where B2B marketers plan to expand budget in this economic climate are:
1) Email Marketing to their house list
2) Social Network Marketing
Social Network Marketing looks like a big topic this year. It’s the new Viral.
Stefan went on to point out the top 5 things that need to be "all the rage" in B2B marketing.
1) Optimize existing traffic (yay! check out Demandbase Stream)
2) Focus on customer retention (keep those subscribers happy!)
3) Focus on house lists (they already know your brand, now close them!)
4) Spend on SEO (if you build it *properly* they will come)
5) Spend on Email (especially to your house lists!)
He also stated that smaller companies (less than 1000 employees) are actually more likely to increase marketing spend in this economic crisis, but more importantly executives at larger companies are saying that marketing budgets are not the easy target for cuts that they used to be…I wonder if it is because of all the advances in B2B marketing and the ability to track ROI at the campaign level?
