New Year’s has come and gone, and it’s time to dive into 2012 – as well as get caught up with the great MLC resources you may have missed in the last few months. Here are some of our best new cases, research, and tools from the last few months:

2011 Marketing Investment Benchmarks. Review select marketing, marcomm and digital spend and budget allocation benchmarks from our 2011 benchmarking initiative, including previews by business model, revenue size and marketing priority.

Marketing Automation: Lessons from the Front. In recent years, Marketing Automation has grown in prominence but as with any new technology, many marketers are struggling to separate fact from fiction when it comes to what these software-based tools can really help them accomplish.

Help Your Consumers Become Better Advocates. As many marketers know, word of mouth is one of the most trusted forms of marketing. However, even when consumers do advocate for a product or service, their recommendations often provide too little context and detail to convince shoppers to buy. Learn How to improve the quality of your advocates’ recommendations.

Managing the Transition to Head of Marketing. As marketing organizations take on a greater role in the functioning of the enterprise, and as enterprises themselves become more global in scope, the role of the CMO has become much more complex. Heads of marketing must now assume responsibility for a bigger basket of activities, from customer understanding to analytics to creative development, and are under even more pressure to show returns on those activities.

Improve NPD Opportunities: Know Your Customers’ Goals. Too often, customer understanding efforts end up yielding only incremental improvements in product and service. Here’s how one member company sought to understand what really drove their customers, super-charging their innovation efforts in the process.

Know What Your End-To-End Customer Experience Looks Like. Product and media proliferation make it harder than ever to maintain a consistent customer experience. Well-intentioned efforts to improve individual touchpoints based on customer feedback often sum to a disjointed experience for the customer. Moreover, even when acting on the same insights, independent functions’ approaches can clash with one another.

Citrix’s “Anti-Newsletter” Nurture Program. Citrix’s automated quarterly newsletter—a content catch-all including multiple calls to action—was not generating the quality or quantity of leads that Marketing or Sales needed. The solution was an “anti-newsletter”—a system of targeted, timely e-mails with discrete calls to action.

Teach Customers with Your Sales Pitch. Are your customers paying attention to your differentiators, or are they focusing on price and forcing you into the commodity bucket? Here’s how Volvo brings the conversation back to unique supplier benefits.

Make Your Touchpoints Resonate: Reverse Your Marketing Plan. In an age of media oversaturation, brands without principled touchpoint selection strategies risk irrelevance – or worse.

(this is a guest post by Aqualyn Laury of the Marketing Leadership Roundtable, our sister program for CMOs of mid-sized companies)

Disclaimer: The title makes no warrantees or guarantees about the types of awards to be shared. That said, we advise you to do everything in your power not to receive a wooden spoon – the shame! Read on for a best practice strategy of avoiding the wooden spoon.

Perhaps we will not bestow platinum or wood at this year’s B2B MarComm Awards, but we will deliver a degree of edutainment unmatched by years past. Combining the spirited insights of a select group of judges with the enlightening elevator pitches of our finalists, this year’s event is certain to be among the best opportunities to learn, laugh and retool to lead your organizations with new, actionable insights.

So are you a Player or a Watcher? Players have already submitted their campaigns to the Awards competition for consideration. Watchers have not.

Players will be eligible to take an active role in the Awards experience. They will compete to be the last company standing in one of four categories:

1. Digital Innovation – Creatively Pushing the Boundaries
2. Sales Enablement – Integration for Impact
3. The Cool Factor – A Brilliant Blend of Art & Science with a Touch of Mojo
4. Viewer’s Choice – The Power of Public Opinion

All Players will be recognized on our website, but only the few Players left standing will enjoy all but one of the following:

• Recognition on stage during our winners presentation
• Premier positioning in our online B2B MarComm Campaign Database
• Recognition in our PR campaign targeting business media and marketing trade media
• An invitation to the next royal wedding or a trip to the Andromeda Galaxy – whichever comes first!

As for the Watchers, they haven’t suited up yet and we can’t imagine the reason.  They are certainly capable of playing with the best of them. So, rather than increase my workload by having to source wooden spoons, would the Watchers please decide to get in the game?

How to Avoid the Wooden Spoon:

1. Quickly review your strongest marketing communications campaigns from 2010-2011.
2. Choose a campaign to enter into the Awards Competition.
3. Do this before July 15^th – The earlier, the better!

To all of the Players – we applaud you for stepping up and getting those submissions in by July 1^st. It’s now redemption time for the Watchers. It’s in you – you can do it! Suit up and join the illustrious Players on the field and get ready to rumble. We’ll see you in Vegas!

At the end of this month, the MLC B2B team will present our findings from a nearly six-month research dive into the customer purchase process.  We’ve been highlighting the findings from our customer survey in posts for the past few months (check them out here, here, and here), but that survey is actually only one of the many ways we collected data.  In addition to that survey, which took the pulse of over 2,000 customers of some of our member companies, we also conducted a second survey of B2B buyers that focused on needs-targeted marketing.  We’ve had over 80 conversations with Chief Marketing Officers, Global Marketing Directors, Social Media Chiefs, and other marketing professionals doing the hard work at our member companies.  And lastly, we’ve picked the brains of numerous B2B marketing experts, consultants, and vendors specializing in everything from lead gen to social media to value calculators.

So, you may ask, what did we find?  As I mentioned, we’ll lay it all out in our first Executive Retreat on June 30 in Chicago (followed by meetings in San Francisco, Atlanta, London, Sydney, and Johannesburg).  But at a high level, the story is this: Read More »

MLC will be at the DMA11 Conference—insights and discounts herein!

We know from recent research that the top reason consumers follow brands in social media is for discounts.  So, MLC members, here’s your bone—you can save 25% off the regular price to attend the Direct Marketing Association’s 2011 conference in Boston this October.  Interested?  You can find details here.

And, if you’ll permit us to be so self-promoting, there’s extra reason to attend the DMA conference this year.  We’re facilitating two different sessions at the conference—and we think you’ll be excited about both of them! (we certainly are)

First, I’ll facilitate a stellar panel of New Media Ringmasters on Monday, October 3^rd during the general DMA conference. The stars of the show will be: Read More »

By Whitney Satin

Marketers don’t always have it easy when it comes to recognition within B2B organizations.  Often the spotlight lands on the engineer who designs the sleekest new model or the sales rep who lands the biggest contract of the decade.  Horror tales abound of small marketing teams huddled in the dusty and cobweb-ridden bowels of corporate facilities, struggling to convince the organization of the benefits of segmentation and value props.

Okay, maybe that last part is a bit of a stretch, but the reality is that many of us work in sales- or technology-driven companies where marketing is the afterthought, not a leading player.  Well, now’s your chance to show that Marketing is a force to be reckoned with, to gain bragging rights among your peers, to prove once and for all that marketers are the rock stars of the company.  It’s time … for the 3^rd annual B2B MarComm Awards! Read More »

In April of this year, the 5th annual Iconosphere – Iconoculture’s consumer insights extravaganza – will burst into life at the Eden Roc Renaissance in Miami Beach. Just like in years past, the not-your-mama’s conference focuses solely on consumers, highlighting the shifts that are shaping our culture and most keenly affecting marketers.

Don’t expect the chart-induced eyestrain and soggy pasta that’s de rigueur at typical industry events, though. At Iconosphere, the pool shimmers. The cocktails are sloshier. Best of all, curious people – members, Iconoculture strategists, colleagues – connect over inspiring ideas and shared challenges.

Stripped bare, what the event offers – what’s core to its value for those who attend – is the chance for marketers and researchers to unselfconsciously immerse themselves in the brainier parts of their jobs for a few days. It’s the opportunity to eject from the office, shove off day-to-day bureaucracies, and carefully consider and discuss where the culture is going, what consumers are really thinking, and what to do about it

We can even sneakily peek at the content debuting in April. A sampling of this year’s sessions include: Media maven-led monitoring of consumers’ relationship with mobile marketing; a close examination of Americans’ post-recession pragmatism; and a tour by our Team India through the twists and turns of the Indian consumer’s retail experience.

The ex-’sphere-ience is not at all conference-as-usual (attendees have been known to crowdsurf). In fact, it actually feels a little more like hot yoga for your consumer insights brain. Except air conditioned. And with cocktail shakers. And no physical exertion. Don’t bring a mat.

Drum roll please… many of you noticed our recent poll asking where we should focus our research efforts in 2011.  Thanks to you (and particular thanks to those who offered up time to talk to us about your areas of interest) we have our major themes of our research for next year: Read More »

By Erin Lynch-Klarup

Do B2B marketers influence buying criteria these days?

What’s the goal of most thought leadership strategies?  Are they successful?

And our customers – when do we make first contact?  Are they about to buy or still deciding?

Piqued your curiosity, right?  We are passionately interested in the answers to these questions – so interested, in fact, that we’ve launched a short survey in order to collect your opinions.  We’ll post findings as soon as we have enough responses – help us by completing the survey!  As an additional incentive, if you are a B2B marketer and answer by Tuesday August 17^th you will be entered in a drawing for a $50 Amazon gift card (or a donation to the charity of your choice).

Just a quick reminder that the deadline for nominations for MLC’s 2010 B2B Marcomm Campaign Awards is fast approaching. July 30 is the deadline to recognize the work of your peers (or maybe even your own!). If you know of a standout B2B marcomm campaign from the last year, please consider nominating it. Details, including entry guidelines and other fine print, are below the fold: Read More »