Watch this video of our client, Virtual Premise, after winning a TAMY Award!

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Debora Tucker, Director of Marketing for Virtual Premise, discusses earning a Technology Marketing Excellence Award (TAMY) from TAG Marketing, a society of the Technology Association of Georgia. Virtual Premise, an industry-leading provider of web-based real estate information management solutions, earned this award for The Search for Real Estate Savings campaign created by Arketi. Enticing prospects to enter a sweepstakes for a new high-end GPS system, the multi-touch campaign used dimensional and online tactics to engage prospects, which contributed to outperforming traditional standard direct mail/email response rates by 250 to 500 percent throughout the promotion. Most importantly, the campaign generated a substantial volume of new prospects.

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Micky Long, vice president of Arketi Group ( http://www.arketi.com ) , a high-tech B2B PR and marketing firm, expounds on his experience as an Aberdeen Group analyst and provides a handful of best practices to employ when conducting an analyst briefing.

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Rory Carlton, principal of Arketi Group ( www.arketi.com ), a high tech business-to-business public relations and marketing firm, discusses why marketers need to reduce the amount of information you communicate to increase its impact on technology buyers.

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Arketi’s ( http://www.arketi.com ) annual BtoB Tech CMO Roundtable serves as a valuable forum for top technology marketers to assess current industry trends and evaluate potential growth opportunities. The conversations that sprang from this diverse, well-rounded group of high-tech executives this year were fascinating, and the resulting whitepaper is something every BtoB technology marketer needs to digest. The free white paper can be downloaded at http://www.arketi.com/cmowhitepaper

Speaking from personal experience, I can tell you that corporate blogging is finally going mainstream. When attempting to schedule appointments with the press at a recent tradeshow for one of my business-to-business clients, we walked away with twice – yes twice! – the number of meetings with bloggers versus traditional media outlets. Wow, things have changed.

In the “old days,” we never would have devoted time or dollars toward securing appointments with bloggers. But that was then, and this is now. This shift in industry influencers – away from traditional reporters toward bloggers – definitely speaks volumes to the impact emerging media sources are having on consumers.

What’s interesting is that my personal experience isn’t isolated. A recent study by eMarketer says that 34 percent of U.S. companies will use a blog for marketing purposes this year, a proportion that will continue to grow to 43 percent by 2012.

And not surprisingly, as consumer trust in blogs has grown, so has journalist trust. According to PRWeek and PR Newswire, about a third of journalists used corporate blogs as research sources in 2010, up from a quarter last year.

So what does this all mean? Keep blogging, of course! It’s another great tool for companies of any size to use to generate leads and position themselves as industry thought leaders, while keeping control of their brand.

We often are asked by clients, how often is “too often” when it comes to e-mailing prospects and clients. Can I e-mail them once a week? Twice a month? Just once a month?

One client just relayed a story regarding one of their sales reps who wanted to run his own campaigns… seems that the marketing department was not running them frequently enough for his taste, so he concocted his own campaign using SalesForce and away he went. There were many issues with this including the format of the e-mail and the timing, not to mention, exactly why is sales doing marketing’s job rather than spending time with customers selling (or helping them to buy).

Most importantly, it got me thinking… when does a drip campaign become a water-boarding campaign, where you are now torturing your prospects with too many e-mails?Here are some simple parameters or thoughts to help you answer the question:

1 – Ask yourself the Golden Rule question.. would I like to receive as many e-mails if I were in the buyer’s shoes, as I am now sending out. Would I be annoyed? What do I do when I receive this many e-mails from someone trying to sell me something? Chances are if you thought to yourself, “I’d be annoyed” or “I’d opt out,” then chances are your prospect is likely to do the same thing.

2 – Ask yourself whether you truly have something relevant, unique and interesting to say every week. If not, then just hold onto the e-mail and wait until you do. There is no harm in combining a few topics or other call-to-actions (e.g. links to blogs) into one e-mail newsletter.

3 – Look at the relevant metrics (opt-outs, opens, etc.) and see how or whether the additional frequency is hurting these metrics. If you have moved from dripping to water-boarding, you will see it in the data.

There is no one single answer for everyone, but there are good marketing tenets to follow to ensure that you are building a strong lead nurturing program that will last and work – that is, after all, what good marketing does.

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Mike Neumeier, APR, principal of Arketi Group (www.arketi.com), a high tech business-to-business public relations and marketing firm, discusses the importance of content marketing within an organization’s PR efforts.

According to a recent survey from OneSource that eMarketer published, the most effective social network for prospecting new clients was LinkedIn, which rated 3.1 out of 5 for effectiveness, compared with the ratings of 2 for blogs, 1.9 for Facebook and 1.8 for Twitter.

As a result of LinkedIn’s effectiveness, more companies are beginning to use this business-oriented site to help research and bring in customers as qualified leads. Specifically, the survey found that “nearly one-half of respondents said they were using the site more for prospecting and research than a year before.” At the same time, the survey cited data from HubSpot, which showed that “45% of North American B2B companies using LinkedIn for marketing had acquired a customer through the site.”

Source: eMarketer.com

As more BtoB sales representatives and marketers turn to LinkedIn, companies need to do more than simply create a LinkedIn account for it to be an effective prospecting tool. They need to use the growing number of features LinkedIn offers to help reach out to, and monitor, prospective customers.

Chad Horenfeldt’s article provides a simple, yet insightful list of top 10 tips for sales professionals and marketers to get the most out of LinkedIn “so you can stay on top of your customers and prospects and make it easier to be found.” These tips, listed in Horenfeldt’s recent post entitled “Top 10 LinkedIn Tips for Lead Generation,” include:

1)      Add the Twitter LinkedIn application

2)      Create LinkedIn answer feeds

3)      Add the Tripit application

4)      Make LinkedIn data easily accessible in your CRM

5)      Customize your LinkedIn company page

6)      Set up an industry LinkedIn group

7)      Share content on LinkedIn

8)      Have sales tailor their LinkedIn profiles

9)      Follow companies of interest

10)   Add the Google Presentation LinkedIn application to your profile

To learn more about the OneSource survey findings from eMarketer, visit http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1007636. For more tips on using LinkedIn as a lead generation tool, read Horenfeldt’s post, “Top 10 LinkedIn Tips for Lead Generation.”

Most companies have a presence in social media, but is this presence having an impact on the company’s target audience(s)? According to a new report by Forrester Research, entitled “Defeating Social Clutter,” it often does not. Most social media users are inundated with messages from their Facebook friends, Twitter feeds and LinkedIn networks, and it’s challenging for BtoB marketers to cut through the clutter.

As Forrester reports, overall adoption of social technologies has reached saturation. More than 80 percent of U.S. online users engage with social media. With an average of hundreds of friend connections on various social networks per user, there is a massive amount of social content flowing toward audiences today.

So how can you cut through the social clutter? It’s all about the content. As Forrester Analyst Nate Elliott explains, there are two broad strategies for defeating social clutter:

1. Go through the clutter. As a marketer, there’s only one way to cut through this tidal wave of social content: Make sure your messages are coming from a trusted source. And sadly, that source probably isn’t you. As social clutter continues to grow, so will the importance of peer influence.
2. Go around the clutter. Easier than cutting straight through clutter is finding a way around it—by tapping into what I call “open spaces” in social media. That could mean focusing on audiences for whom clutter is less of a problem, even if they’re a secondary audience for your brand; it could mean looking harder for genuinely new content and experiences to offer, rather than spinning off of existing ideas; it could mean focusing on less-popular social networks where you’ll find fewer users but have more of their attention—or even starting your own private niche social network to guarantee unfettered access to your audience. Put simply, make sure you’re not just following the pack in terms of audiences, ideas or execution—because the pack is exactly the type of social clutter you’re trying to avoid.

Read Forrester’s “Defeating Social Clutter” report.

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Arketi Group Principal Mike Neumeier, APR discusses recent findings from the 2009 Web Watch Survey on how business-to-business media are using the Internet and social media. Full results can be found at www.arketi.com/surveys.