Segmentation is critical as vendors evolve from technology-focused business models to customer-needs driven product development, sales, marketing, and operations. Happy New Year! It is time again for our annual B2B Marketing "predictions". As every year, I asked the 25,000 marketing professionals in the B2B Technology Marketing Community on LinkedIn about their B2B marketing priorities for 2012. And here are the results: 1 - Integration of social media Social media remains the #1 topic in 2012. 2 – Content marketing Content marketing went mainstream in 2011. MORE >>

3) Create buyer personas For many software vendors who have been selling traditional on-premise solutions to customers, this focus on the business buyer and their unique requirements should not be new. They offer new and exciting ways to deliver value to your customers. The cloud is all the rage these days. Saugatuck Technology's Bruce Guptill released some interesting market research predicting that by 2014 the majority of new corporate B2B software purchases will be in the form of cloud software solutions (SaaS) rather than traditional on-premise software. Here is why. MORE >>

Power Shift Knowledge is power, and the balance of power is clearly shifting from vendors to the customer. Now imagine the information customers are finding is yours. This intersection of content marketing, social media, and automation is where innovative marketing teams can help their companies gain traction and develop ongoing relationships and customer engagements. By the way, mapping your entire marketing approach to the customer lifecycle is one way to become a truly customer-centric organization and impact prospects behavior and decisions. MORE >>

Email marketing is slightly up - likely a reflection of the increasing adoption of marketing automation platforms that heavily rely on email to communicate targeted, customized, and behavior driven messages. Last week, we talked about the changing B2B marketing mix (" Is Traditional B2B Marketing Dead? which caused a heated debate about whether these changes are real and consequential). Let's take a look at some data. Here are the preliminary results for this question (click chart to enlarge | n = 176). Same with print advertising, which is used less by 62% of respondents. MORE >>

The top response was product line (25.1%), followed by customer segment (19.6%), solution (16.4%), campaign or theme (16.0%), industry (15.8%), job role (5.8%) and other (1.3%). MarketingSherpa asked more than 900 B2B marketers how they expect their marketing budgets to change for 2011. The results are in: The majority of B2B organizations are increasing marketing budgets for inbound marketing tactics, including social media, virtual events and webinars, SEO and PPC. this year over 2009. This year, IDC says, tech companies will allocate 19.3% last year. last year. last year. last year. MORE >>