At the beginning of the year, we conducted a survey with Babcock & Jenkins that highlighted the major challenges and priorities that B2B marketers anticipated for 2009.

Top goals and concerns included:
o A greater need for lead nurturing in the face of a longer sales cycle
o Uncertainty about adding social media to the marketing mix
o Using analytics to optimize established tactics, like SEO and email
o Making the most of limited budgets and marketing resources

With the bulk of the year now behind us, we’ve seen how B2B marketers have adapted to those challenges and achieved their goals.

Here are five highlights from our 2009 B2B newsletters:

Article #1. Lead Gen Overhaul: 4 Strategies to Boost Response Rates, Reduce Cost-per-Lead

When economic conditions make it harder to generate new leads and close deals, nurturing the leads already in your pipeline becomes paramount. See how the team at Cognos used testing and analysis to revamp their lead nurturing strategy and create new, automated marketing funnels. The changes boosted campaign response rates from 0.05% to 17.5%, and reduced cost-per-lead more than 30%.

http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=31187

Article #2. Using LinkedIn for Lead Generation: 6 Lessons

Here’s a how-to article for marketers looking for concrete examples of the role that social media can play in a lead generation strategy. We spoke with a marketer who shared his experience using LinkedIn as a key channel in his team’s outreach efforts, and collected six lessons for what works -- and what doesn’t -- when participating in the business-focused social network.

http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=31315

Article #3. Reformat, Reuse, Recycle: 5 Strategies to Stretch your Marketing Content

One of the best ways to do more with a limited marketing budget is making sure the marketing content you create plays important roles in multiple channels. This how-to article offers five clever content repurposing strategies, such as creating video from text, turning speeches into podcasts, and finding new content for nurturing emails.

http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=31399

Article #4. Create and Manage a Team-Authored Blog: 8 Steps to Reap SEO Gains

Low-cost tactics such as SEO were supremely valuable in a year of limited resources. In this article, we outline the strategy a B2B marketing team used to create a team-authored corporate blog that delivered huge SEO benefits -- blog posts now account for more than 50% of their site’s natural search visits. Includes tips on finding authors, creating an editorial calendar, and incorporating keywords in every post.

http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=31444

Article #5. Combine PR, Branding, and Lead-Gen to Market Through the Recession: 6 Steps

Marketers with limited budgets faced a dilemma in 2009: Cutting back on marketing activity to save money now could put them behind the curve when the economy bounces back and prospects are ready to spend again. See how Matt Barker, Director Marketing, TeleHealth Services, stayed on course and used PR, branding campaigns and targeted email to generate warm leads for his sales team.

With the project still ongoing, we’ve asked Barker to update the results of his email outreach at MarketingSherpa’s 2010 Email Summit in January.

http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=31301


Useful links related to this article

Matt Barker of TeleHealth Services will speak on the first day of MarketingSherpa’s 2010 Email Summit. See the agenda here:
http://www.sherpastore.com/EmailSummit2010.html