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Email marketing has been around for a while, and many marketers have clear thoughts on the value it provides. Respondents to a recent MarketingSherpa survey indicated a variety of perspectives on email marketing, ROI and investment, though almost all surveyed indicated seeing the value of this approach.

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Is email marketing a priority for your company? Nothing answers that question quite like your budget. After all, how you allocate your marketing capital is the truest indicator of what’s important to your business. According to the latest survey by MarketingSherpa, it looks like email marketing means different things to different companies.

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In some industries, the corporate blogging and social media marketing opportunity is obvious. Especially in the consumer space, you use a corporate blog to attract, retain and engage your target market, ultimately with the goal of leading them into your sales funnel and converting on your website. For business-to-business companies, especially in the professional services sector, the case isn’t quite as clear.

Does a corporate blog become relegated to PR tool, or is it primarily a brand play?

With only soft metrics apparently available, it can be incredibly difficult to get even the slightest investment. Startup costs may be low, but content creation and traffic analysis tend to be time-consuming if done properly, making a soft-dollar employee commitment crucial … which is where the reluctance of senior management usually comes into play. To free up resources to tend to your corporate blog and manage your social media marketing environment, you need to deliver a compelling business case, showing explicitly the tangible benefits to your company.

Though B2B professional services companies are extremely likely to generate direct sales online, there is a salient ROI opportunity from this form of marketing, and it stretches well past branding and publicity. Let’s take a look at five ways you can use your B2B corporate blog to gain a competitive advantage:

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B2B marketing operations may be more mature than you think.

It’s easy to look in the mirror and get frustrated. After all, you have to balance your commitment to marketing against your core business operations (such as sales and services fulfillment), and it always feels like you’re leaving a marketing opportunity on the table. I’ve spoken with many IT solution provider marketers over the past few years, and I’m rarely surprised to hear sentences that start with, “I’d like to …” and have “but” somewhere in there.

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There’s a reason why companies are more likely to turn to Twitter and Facebook than corporate blogging: corporate blogging isn’t easy. Twitter and Facebook let you churn out bite-sized pieces of content without forcing you to think fully or comprehensively, let alone communicate a message clearly and distinctly. Well, that’s a limitation of Twitter and Facebook, frankly, not to mention most social media marketing strategies.

When you turn to social media marketing, especially in the B2B space, there’s no substitute for having a blog. Period. Without a blog as the cornerstone of your social media marketing efforts, the rest won’t get far. The effort associated with corporate blogging comes with clear benefits, particularly that you’ll be able to say everything your target market will need to know to make an informed investment decision.

When I ran into an article on Web 2.0 Journal, I basically saw enter:marketing’s approach to social media marketing staring right back at me: it has to be blog-centric, and here are six reasons why:

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Nothing is more exciting than getting a hot lead – a prospect who wants to make a fast decision. Your sales costs stay low, and you turn an opportunity into revenue as quickly as possible with little effort. If only they were all that easy, right?

Of course, it rarely works that way. Most sales opportunities take some time and planning on your part in order to become revenue. For larger sales, the cycle can take quite a while to come to a conclusion, and you may have to wait a few months before you can even get started in earnest. Since some of the best opportunities you have may not be ready right away, you need to develop a lead cultivation strategy in order to keep the opportunity warm until you can engage the decision-maker in the sales process.

It’s what you do before you get started that can turn a long-term lead into your next big opportunity. Invest your time in cultivating a lead, and you’ll be the first call when it’s time to start discussing a purchase. Also, you’ll make it harder for your competitors to swoop in and steal the opportunity from you.

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Sales intelligence is vital to winning new business. Without a sense of what a prospect needs and how your company can help, you’re left with nothing more than a cold call. Gain some information on your prospect, however, and you’ll have a much easier time identifying and proposing solutions.

Here are four ways you can get better sales intelligence:

1. Start with a survey: during your lead generation efforts, be sure to include a survey that aligns with the types of clients you are looking to attract. A survey is a great way to get your prospect to self-disclose the information you need to bring the sales process to a successful conclusion.

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B2B marketers are spending more money on being found, according to the latest survey by MarketingSherpa. Some inbound tactics are attracting greater investment than others, though, and the bias is definitely toward web-based channels.

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Increasing your company’s revenue isn’t enough. Strong growth on the top line sometimes comes with heavy sales expenses, which erodes your profits, ultimately delivering little value for your efforts. Profitable growth on the other hand, is crucial to your ongoing success, and it can be quite difficult to attain. You can protect your margins (and even widen them) by streamlining your approach to marketing and generating revenue at a lower cost. By turning marketing into an ongoing activity, you can generate higher revenue and profits simultaneously.

Think about your last big client pursuit. Your sales team invested heavily in it. In addition to hard costs around travel, entertainment and demonstrations, the team spent a considerable amount of time on appointments, understanding pain points and developing a proposal. Your technology professionals, no doubt, contributed heavily to the effort, increasing your sales costs further. And, you had all those marketing costs up front just to get the lead. If you started from scratch, you probably invested a substantial amount in bringing that lead in the door.

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Small and mid-sized IT solution providers understand the value of leads. Without a full and steady pipeline, it’s easy to get nervous about the future. And with relatively tight marketing budgets, tough decisions are often necessary, and the focus naturally turns to demand generation over other important marketing initiatives, such as solidifying your brand.

What you may not realize, however, is that an investment in your brand is also an investment in shorter sales cycles, deeper client relationships and repeat business that comes at a lower cost than new client acquisition. Frankly, it pays to invest some of your marketing budget in branding, even if it comes at the expense of some lead generation.

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