The competition was intense this year with submissions from all sizes of companies, all industries, and all regions of the world. It was a great night last night in San Francisco with the Markies awards gala being the show highlight at Eloqua Experience. Congratulations to the winners, to the finalists, and to all the marketers who created great campaigns, deepened their alignment with sales, or achieved new heights in their analytics. MORE >>

Depending upon your industry and the keywords you are trying to rank for, those efforts may be enough to get you a top spot on Google and the other major search engines. Create your own external links to your site by writing helpful industry-related articles and linking these back to your site. Post comments on industry-related blogs. Since bloggers who know you are more likely to link to you, try to establish relationships with some key bloggers in your industry space. Here are a half-dozen+1 more tactics to generate high-quality external links to your site. MORE >>

I'm really more of a B2E kind of girl - believing that people are people and you're never really marketing to an industry or a building, but to individual human beings who - despite working in B2B - are still flesh and blood. Life is not meant to be that hard, and neither is marketing. Every once in a while, a swift kick in the pants is just what the doctor ordered to remind us not to take ourselves quite so goddamn seriously. As Brandan Gill wisely observed, "Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious." Some are old, some are new. Catchy. MORE >>

Home Marketing Matters About Contact B2B Marketing Store Company Website Deconstructing the Four Stages of the Industrial Buy Cycle by Achinta Mitra on May 26, 2010 in B2B Lead Generation , B2B Marketing Collateral , Content Marketing , Integrated Industrial Marketing B2B marketers agree that lead generation and nurturing campaigns must deliver relevant content to their target audience to be successful. The problem becomes more acute for the industrial sector because the industrial buy cycle can be a long and complex process that often involves multiple decision makers. MORE >>

The papers posted for the week of June 22 are quite diverse: they come from various industries (including the government), are different lengths, and range from recent to a couple of years old. One tenant of marketing is that all content should have a call to action. Seems basic enough, but is this really common practice with white papers? did some very unscientific research, and the results may surprise you. Jonathan Kantor provides a list of white papers each Friday in his blog, The White Paper Pundit. They are not B2B white papers, but it's still an interesting exercise. MORE >>