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The truth of what your clients need lies somewhere between “trends are trends for a reason” and “every company is unique.” New technology and its ability to address business needs, the effects of economic conditions on financial performance and emerging industry issues usually do have consistent effects on related companies. Yet, differences in operations and products, varying business objectives and employee personalities lead to the specific circumstances that can’t be addressed with cookie-cutter solutions.

So, what’s my point? You need to balance these two competing forces in order to serve your clients effectively. This may sound obvious, but it’s usually relegated to sentiment when you’re knee-deep in working with a prospect or existing client to address pain points and preparing to implement a solution.

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Do you actively manage how your company communicates to the market? Every interaction with your clients and prospects should be framed by what your company is and believes, and this includes every piece of paper and every conversation. Managing this may seem difficult, but with a rigorous approach, you can create a culture of message discipline in your company that will bolster your band, shorten the sales cycle and reduce selling costs. This leads to more revenue, higher margins and increased market share.

Ready to get started? Here’s how you can implement message discipline in five simple steps:

1. Define your message: without a clear message from the start, nothing else matters. Your brand is a random collection of public statements and project results that may or may not be related to each other. Take the time to decide what your company is and means, based on your core business objectives and competencies. Document it, and be prepared to live by it.

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Tradeshow and conference leads are expensive – there’s no way around it. Compared to direct response, social media your own events and even PR, you’re going to drop a hefty portion of your budget for what amounts to a small number of business opportunities. For some IT solution providers, the notion of skipping these conferences entirely is not an option, so if you’re going to attend, you should at least tip the odds in your favor as much as possible. The biggest – and costliest – mistake you can make is completely preventable, and it happens on the convention floor.

Here are five ways you can reduce your tradeshow cost per lead, drive higher quality and increase your marketing ROI:

1. Choose your tradeshows carefully: do you really need to invest in every tradeshow on your list? Take a hard look at the results you gained from each, and think about how you could use your marketing budget more effectively. Be prepared to make some tough choices.

2. Have a game plan: market to key people you want to see in advance of the tradeshow. Make sure you can get them to your booth for a meaningful conversation. This increases the odds of a deeper, more productive appointment later.

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Email marketing hasn’t gone out of style. Even though there’s plenty of buzz around social media, its predecessor remains a powerful tool for reaching a powerful audience with a specific message. This is evident in the latest research from MarketingSherpa, which shows a clear priority for this approach among email marketers.

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As you increase your visibility, it becomes more important to manage what you say in public. The people who watch your company most carefully – namely, existing and potential clients – will be more likely to pick up on discrepancies, invariably leading to the uncomfortable conversations you want to avoid. It’s a necessary evil as you grow your brand and your company, so instead of trying to avoid it, start implementing message discipline now. For small and mid-sized B2B service providers, this is crucial.

The purpose of brand marketing is to define your company and communicate this to the marketplace, creating a platform for future growth at a lower cost per sale. You want your company to be visible, to be on the minds of prospective buyers all the time. There are many ways to accomplish this, ranging from person-to-person interaction through broad PR and social media initiatives. Even your demand generation campaigns are part of this process: over time, direct response marketing can accumulate to brand recognition (as long as you are positioning your marketing materials correctly).

So, what happens when it works?

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As you’re planning your marketing budget for next year, stop to think about what worked in 2010 – and what really didn’t. This can be a tough process, since you need to take critical look at the decisions you made and how they performed. Needless to say, it took me a couple of years to get used to this, but the end result has been far better for enter:marketing’s clients. You’ll probably find the same to be true for yours.

When you step through your list of marketing initiatives and decide what to keep for 2011, make sure you spend some extra time exploring your tradeshow investment. This is often your most expensive source of leads, and it can result in lots of time spent chasing dead ends. Instead of assuming that you’ll have the same tradeshow obligations in 2011 that you did in 2010, consider your ROI on each, and how you could redeploy your marketing dollars for greater returns.

To maintain the face-to-face interaction of tradeshows but avoid the substantial hard-dollar costs, consider hosting your own marketing events. With this approach, you’ll:

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There’s plenty of buzz around the new approach to integrated messaging announced by Facebook yesterday. Social media industry analysts, followers and professionals are all weighing in, and opinions are flying. SocialTimes, one of the leading social media blogs on the web, reached out to enter:marketing for our thoughts on what this new messaging development means for social media marketing professionals in the B2B space.

Tim Freestone, Vice President of enter:marketing, contributed the following perspective:

For social media marketers the B2B space, the new Facebook integrated messaging solution could facilitate client relationship management. Because the messages will remain in the end-users account, the use of this tool is likely to favor sales and fulfillment teams over the company in terms of “owning” the relationship. Since the integrated capabilities are outside the company’s control, monitoring is impeded, and the client-facing professional becomes the brand. This risk has always existed, but if Facebook captures a amount of “communication share” from email, the problem could become acute. At a minimum, B2B companies should develop and implement clear policies around social media-based client communication in order to gain some degree of protection.

Click here to read the full roundup at SocialTimes >>

The use of social media to market a company is usually linked to brand initiatives first, despite obvious application for lead generation and cultivation. It makes sense, though. The brand propagation uses of social media are straightforward and can be incredibly powerful.

The latest research from MarketingSherpa shows that the three most effective uses of social media are: influence brand reputation, increase brand awareness and improve search engine rankings, with respondents saying they’re “very effective” coming in at 39 percent, 37 percent and 38 percent, respectively. Respondents indicating that social media is “somewhat effective” for achieving these branding goals are 53 percent, 54 percent and 49 percent, respectively.

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What are the IT marketing challenges that keep you up at night? Well, if you’re anything like other marketers in the broader B2B space, it’s generating high-quality leads – which has become more important year-over-year.

The latest survey results from MarketingSherpa reveal that 78 percent of respondents saw this as a challenge in 2010, up from 69 percent last year. A distant second was “generating a high volume of leads,” up from 35 percent last year to 44 percent this year. Concerns about marketing to a lengthening sales cycle increased slightly, from 39 percent of respondents to 41 percent of respondents.

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This is going to shock you: the purpose of this blog is to promote enter:marketing. We’re happy to provide plenty of information and insights to you, free of charge. Anyone wanting to learn something about IT marketing is welcome here. Hey, so are the people who just stumbled into this blog while looking for someone else. But, we don’t invest so much time and effort into our content strictly as a goodwill gesture. We want you to become a client!

Of course, you’re fully aware of this.

What I find surprising, though, is that many companies don’t apply this thinking to their own blogs. They remain focused on “sounding authentic” and “not wanting to look like we’re selling anything.” Yet, when these folks go to over corporate or marketing blogs, they know the drill.

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