B2B Marketers’ Priorities and Pain Points for 2009

According to Marketing Sherpa new research, the previous one was conducted in Feb 2008, B2B marketers will focus on:

1. Dealing with lengthening sales cycles
2. Doing more with less
3. Web 2.0 and social media marketing
4. Focusing on lower-cost, high-impact lead gen tactics

I will obviously only highlight the point 2. which wouldn't have been on the list a few month ago. I remember being looked at as a strange animal when pitching about Marketing 2.0 back in 2007. I heard many things as "this is just a fad", "you're always trying to bring up something new", "Our customers are not 15 years old", etc.

In the marketing area, social media and Web 2.0 importance is raising under this economic downturn period we're in, more rapidly I anticipate than if the business was going to grow. I'm expecting Cloud Computing and new software subscription business models to come up more rapidly in the IT space for the exact same reason. The economic downturn is an incredible opportunity to reconsider what we've been doing so far, to challenge deeply our fundamentals, to stress decisions that were not that urgent otherwise. A good thing in my views though of course I suffer just as everyone out there of this downturn (mood downturn as well by the way).

The research points out that many marketers still find Web 2.0 usage within their marketing campaigns arsenal a challenge. First and foremost because Web 2.0 is still new for a lot of them. They're not digital natives and tend to relate to the activities they're comfortable with (Webinars, White papers, etc.). Their top challenges, according to the research are:

1. Social media development/integration
2. Developing emerging Web 2.0 content, such as videos, blogs and podcasts

My take would be for you, already a blog reader ;-), to start your day in the office tomorrow by deciding to integrate in one of your planned campaigns a Marketing 2.0 technique. Try to pick the one that is intuitively the most relevant to your audience (start a blog or a podcast, foster a community or integrate an existing one, turn a major topic of interest into a wiki for and by your customers, start a twitter micro-blog for one of your offer) and do not forget about including video material as we discussed earlier this month.

I would also support this recommendation from Marketing Sherpa:

“Mapping content to the sales funnel “ is an immensely important aspect of success in lead nurturing for the complex sale. It deserves to be among the top priorities because some of the others – Web 2.0, social media and traditional content – are at their most effective when mapped to the sales cycle.

Marketing 2.0 will make it big in 2009.