Proving ROI, using new technologies and leveraging partner marketing were key topics at Red Herring's CMO 2008 conference in San Diego last week.

The conference drew more than 300 senior marketing executives, mostly from b-to-b companies, who shared strategies for competing in today's challenging business environment.

One of the hot topics was partner marketing, with presentations by several executives whose companies use channel marketing models.

Stephen DiFranco, corporate VP-corporate and channels marketing at chip maker AMD, discussed how the company has leveraged its partner channel to confront rival Intel Corp. Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.

E-mail marketing managers love to include quick surveys in their e-newsletters—so much so that they risk overdoing it.

Melissa Read, VP-research and innovation at Spunlogic, an Atlanta-based full-service digital marketing agency, believes managers send surveys too often, causing respondents to burn out on the novelty of providing feedback. Eventually, she said, they’ll stop responding.

“Surveys should only go out when you want to understand something about the business respondents,” Read said. Otherwise, “it will become the survey who cried wolf and the next time you really want to know something, respondents won’t be as interested in telling you.”

Paring down the number of surveys is a good start, she said. Read offers these other helpful tips... Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.

On the eve of the start of a two-day “Town Hall” hosted by the Federal Trade Commission titled “Behavioral Advertising: Tracking, Targeting and Technology,” privacy groups are calling for an online “do not track” list, an Internet version of the popular Do Not Call Registry, according to reports.

While marketing metrics has become a hot topic in the last several years, the most recent ANA survey indicated a number of worrisome declines. For example, in the 2006 survey, 28% of respondents said they could forecast the impact of a 10% reduction in marketing budget on sales, only 18% said this in this year's survey. Likewise, the percentage saying they used cross-functional teams from such departments as sales and finance declined from 45.3% in 2006 to 20.1% in 2007. And only 22% said they had "full cooperation and an open dialogue with finance" to establish metrics and methodologies for marketing ROI.

While there may be many causes, Nardone and See suggested the lack of a financial commitment to measurement was one factor. The most recent survey found that 57% of marketers invested less than 1% of their working marketing budget into accountability and that only about half (49%) even had a dedicated budget for accountability. Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.

Understanding the effectiveness of a particular marketing campaign in the b-to-b space isn't easy. The sales cycle can be lengthy, and tying revenue and incremental sales to any particular program is difficult.

At best, measuring overall promotion effectiveness may come down to the sophistication of internal screening processes that produce quality leads.

"Any of the current measurements of marketing ROI are actually a measure of organizational effectiveness, not promotional efficiency," said Erik Madsen, director of marketing and strategic planning at Adtrack. Pricing, follow-up, competition, sales training, new channel partners and many other factors determine the effectiveness of any campaign. Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.