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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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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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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IT solution provider sales teams are often frustrated by their pipelines. They may scramble for a month or two, trying to keep up with high demand … and then it all goes quiet. For months, there seems like little to do except work through old leads and make a few seemingly futile cold calls. Even if the numbers look good at the end of the year, the process that gets you there can be pretty frustrating.

It’s possible to smooth out the pipeline a bit – and generate more sales at the same time. All it takes is a bit of marketing planning.

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How the handoff from marketing to sales occurs can make a difference in deal size … not to mention whether the sales force can close at all. Yet, the process doesn’t always work as seamlessly as it should. There are sales team needs that aren’t always communicated to the marketing department, and the marketing department often has access to information that it can’t effectively provide to the sales team. The result, of course, is a missed opportunity for revenue growth.

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What marketing functions are you outsourcing?

The latest data from MarketingSherpa suggests that many companies are planning to outsource more of their marketing functions. Even with much of marketing’s capabilities remaining in-house, the advantages of outsourcing — for scale or capabilities — are starting to be noticed.

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B2B social media marketers are in the early and middle stages of their efforts, according to a study by MarketingSherpa. The survey finds that, almost independent of social media marketing category, trial programs and transitions (to strategic roles) are most common, with relatively few companies using these tools strategically.

Overall, 33 percent of companies are in the Trial Phase, with 40 percent in the Transition Phase. While this constitutes an overwhelming majority, the fact that 23 percent of social media marketers have moved into the Strategic Phase is actually promising. Businesses are moving into this advanced state – and they are using social media to drive returns.

[Source: MarketingSherpa]

Marketing campaigns don’t add up to a strategy. Sometimes it may look that way, but that’s just a bit of luck at work. It’s far more effective to go the other way — start with a strategy and use that to drive your campaigns.

IT solution provider marketers tend to focus on the campaign, a perspective resulting largely from demand generation considerations. The best way to bring in leads, however, is to use a coordinated approach that maximizes the value and potency of your marketing efforts. One-off campaigns just don’t have the same effect.

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Technology adoption entails the temptation to expect over-simplification. We want to streamline to the bone, taking anything that even seems excessive out of the equation. Slicing manual intervention completely, sometimes, appears to be the goal. And, this kind of thinking finds its way to the marketing department. Push-button marketing would be great, right? Just let the marketing happen on its own …

The only problem is that push-button marketing doesn’t always work.

Don’t get me wrong: there is a place for the inflexible, the templated, the boilerplate, the procedural. Not every marketing effort has to be people-intensive and high-touch. For every carefully crafted blog post, you may send an e-mail blast to tens of thousands of people. Rather than try to automate everything — or guide everything manually — the best approach is to find the right mix.

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As you begin to enter the social media marketing space, you’ll start to hear about “fans,” “friends” and “followers” — variations on the connections that people make in these environments. These relationships provide a first layer of measurement for social media marketing success, as they define your primary high-value audience.

While you don’t want to evaluate success strictly in terms of the number of followers or fans you amass — their activity, particularly relative to blog pageviews or, even better, purchases is far more important — this is the foundation from which you will drive the interactions that yield returns.

So, why do customers and clients become company and brand fans? Well, the answer varies with the type of social media user involved.

According to MarketingSherpa, there are three basic categories: Daily Users, Max Connectors and everyone else (i.e., “All Respondents”). Max Connectors are users with more than 500 social connections (e.g., on Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter). Daily Users are exactly what you think they are, though they lack the number of relationships as Max Connectors. Finally, All Respondents consists of Max Connectors, Daily Users and everyone else who participated in the study.

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