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.

Kerry Smith is president of the Event Marketing Institute, a think tank that follows trends in event marketing through research, analysis and education. BtoB asked Smith to talk about expected developments in the events industry.

BtoB: What do you see as the biggest trends this year?

Smith: There's going to be a focus on a couple of things: First, experience mapping—recognition that when you're doing an event [you] understand who you are trying to engage. Often times, it's multiple people. How are you creating an experience around your event that will allow those people to find the appropriate channels to engage with you? You're going to talk differently to a CTO than to a CFO.

Another area is portfolio analysis. At company after company, they are looking across their entire spectrum of events, and cleaning out the closet [and asking] `Which ones are working for us, which ones are not, which ones are we not sure of?' They're going to start adjusting the dials accordingly.

And then there's this whole area of measuring everything—improving performance. There are no standards for measuring events, [and there are] different objectives for every company. As one marketer told us... Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.

Chief Marketing Officer Council Encourages Adding Customer Affinity Index To The Mix

Customer centric metrics are taking center stage this year as b-to-b marketers pursue new ways to measure customer engagement, satisfaction and, ultimately, loyalty to a brand.

Measuring customer satisfaction is not a new idea, but as technology puts more control in the hands of users, marketers are seeking out the optimal ways to measure how successful they are with their marketing messages, products and services.

Marketers are divided on how best to achieve this. Some are using an array of metrics and other processes to come up with a view of how they're doing with customers, while others are trying to simplify the process by using a single metric, such as the Net Promoter Score.

The NPS, developed by loyalty expert Fred Reichheld, is a score of customer loyalty based on a single question: "How likely are you to recommend our company to colleagues?"

Marketing organizations are also coming up with new metrics to gauge the customer experience.

Last month [December 2007], the Chief Marketing Officer Council released a study on customer measurement... Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.

Register to download the free Executive Summary or purchase the full report from the CMO Council's Customer Affinity Website.

[Note: CMP was an underwriter for this CMO Council study.]

B-to-b marketing budgets appear to be in good shape this year, with more than half of marketers expecting the purse strings to loosen up. While interactive tactics will gain from that increase and see the most growth, traditional media will still command the bulk of the budget. Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.

Budget forecasters are predicting that spending on large events will be down this year. But that's not an umbrella forecast for all types of events. Instead, marketers intend to increase financing for smaller, more targeted meetings such as executive breakfasts and roundtables.

According to a recent study, "B2B Marketers' 2008 Budget Trends," by Forrester Research, which surveyed 369 marketing professionals online during September and October 2007, almost 50% of those surveyed said they would increase spending on executive seminars and events. That represents the largest projected increase among all marketing and advertising budget categories, including public relations, print advertising, direct mail and sponsorships.

Assessing intangibles

"These marketers understand that business decision-makers rely on peer testimonial, face-to-face gatherings and outside authorities to help them assess intangibles like legitimacy, credibility and trustworthiness—factors difficult to convey in both online and traditional activities," according to the report.

Although 27% said they would increase spending on trade shows while 22% said they would decrease trade show spending, survey respondents did admit to spending more on large, trade-sponsored events then any other budget category.

However, according to the study, "Client conversations and other anecdotal stories show that b-to-b marketers waste money when they scurry around last minute to staff the booth and expect show-related traffic, or a favorable booth placement, to produce leads. B-to-b marketers who fail to build interactive campaigns that preview show-specific offers, invite attendees to on-site executive briefings and continue booth conversations via e-mail should look to spend their money elsewhere."

Analyst Laura Ramos, a VP at Forrester and the principal author of the report, explained that marketers are moving away from large events, but added, "they told us that one-to-one contact is still very important in the negotiated sales process that [is going on] in b-to-b marketing and selling." Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.

A new study by the Sales Lead Management Association (SLMA) found that 82.8% of small businesses do not track ROI on lead generation programs. Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.

Search marketing continues to grow and morph, and by all accounts 2008 will bring more of the same.
A major player in the search world is Jeffrey Pruitt, exec VP-search at search agency iCrossing and president of the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO). BtoB recently asked Pruitt to talk about current and future trends in search marketing and the biggest challenges marketers will face in 2008. Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.

The customer is very much on the minds of leading marketing executives these days. Across numerous research initiatives undertaken by the CMO Council, marketers collectively indicate they are spending more time and resources than ever before on understanding and engaging with their customers, including increased investments in customer communities, CRM systems and processes, and customer intelligence and analytics. The CMO Council has been a champion of these efforts, advocating a more disciplined, measurable and integrated approach to marketing, anchored by greater knowledge and more meaningful interaction with customers and customer markets. Now we believe it is time for a new measure of marketing performance – called customer affinity – that looks beyond old brand metrics to support marketing in its critical role of building customer-centric businesses. Register to download the free Executive Summary or purchase the full report from the CMO Council's Customer Affinity Website.

[Note: CMP was an underwriter for this CMO Council study.]

Despite online’s reputation as the most measurable of all media, marketers continue to grapple with how much to invest in the medium because of the sheer abundance of data generated and the myriad ways to measure them. Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.

How do companies innovate successfully?

They can spend the most money, hire the best engineers, develop the best technology, and conduct the best market research. But unless their research and development efforts are driven by a thorough understanding of what their customers want, their performance may well fall short — at least compared to that of their more customer- driven competitors. John Schiech, president of the DeWalt division of Black & Decker (the division that makes power tools used by professional contractors), put it simply. When asked what made his com - pany so successful, he responded, “It’s engineers and marketing product managers spending hours and hours on job sites talking to the guys who are trying to make their living with these tools.”

This insight represents a further amplification of our ongoing research into the costs and value of corporate innovation. In 2006, as in the two previous years of our annual study of the Booz Allen Hamilton Global Innovation 1000 — the 1,000 publicly held companies around the world that spent the most on research and development — overall corporate revenues among these companies increased 10 percent. Once again, their overall spending on research and development also rose, to US$447 billion this year. And as in years past, we found no statistically significant connection between the amount of money a company spent on innovation and its financial performance. This document presents only a summary of the available research. Download this Booz Allan Hamilton report...

The attached document contains the questions, and their answers, that were posed to John Jainschigg from CMP and Kathy Mandelstein from IBM during the September 26 Webcast "How BtoB Marketers Can Achieve ROI in the Virtual World of Second Life." Download the complete Question and Answer document. Contact John Jainschigg, Executive Director, CMP Metaverse for more information about creating a virtual presence for your company.

Here is a summary of the questions contained in the document:

* Does SecondLife provide aggregated audience/user data or demo cuts
somewhere on the site? If so where?

* Would recommendations/best practices be applied to Playstation
'Home' coming up in April?

* How many attendees can attend an event on Second Life at one time?

Event marketers are increasingly turning to the virtual world for staging large- and small-scale events. A recent white paper released by FactPoint Group, a market research firm, studied events created by Unisfair, a virtual event provider, and found that moving events to the virtual world can reduce spending and boost attendance, lead generation and attendee interest.

The study examined more than 200 Unisfair virtual events that totaled nearly 3,000 sponsors and 500,000 attendees. The results found that the average virtual event has a registration of 3,102 people with an attendance of 1,587. Leads generated for each sponsor totaled 348 per event, and attendees spent an average of two-and-a-half hours at each event while visiting an average 16 locations and completing at least five downloads.

Aside from convenience, event marketers have found that the reason virtual events have proven so successful is because they can mimic nearly every aspect of live events. "We do events on a real-world scale," said John Jainschigg, executive director of CMP Metaverse at CMP Media, a media and marketing solutions company that holds its virtual events inside Second Life. "[Our events are] six days long, [with] 50 presenters, a weekend of tutorials, a full convention center show floor, social events, networking events—it's a comprehensive thing." Read the complete article on BtoBOnline. Contact John Jainschigg, Executive Director, CMP Metaverse for more information about creating a virtual event for your company.

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.

it with the slowing economy and pressure to cut costs, technology companies are decreasing their rate of marketing spending this year, according to IDC's annual tech marketing benchmark study.

According to the report, which was based on an online survey and telephone interviews with 99 senior IT marketing executives, tech marketing spending will be up 6.1% this year over last, a drop from the growth rate projected by IDC in March of 8.0%.

Last year, tech marketing spending grew by 7.5% over 2005.

Also, for the first time since 2004, tech marketing spending will lag global IT spending, which is projected to increase 6.7% this year. Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.

While broad-based ad networks have taken center stage as the darlings of the media industry, vertical b-to-b networks are slowly gaining traction with marketers that want to reach more targeted audiences.

In the last six months, there has been a frenzy of deals in the consumer ad network space, including Google's acquisition of DoubleClick in April for $3.1 billion, WPP Group's purchase of 24/7 Real Media in May for $649 million and AOL's acquisition of Tacoda in July for a reported $275 million.

But behind the scenes, smaller advances have been made by targeted b-to-b networks looking to reach industry-specific segments. 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.