If you are not thinking about (and implementing) a strategy that puts your buyers (with their persona and industry driven pain points, preferences, and buying stages) in the center of your marketing efforts - and create compelling content as the currency of your engagement with buyers that influences decisions along the buying process - now is the time. 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. MORE >>

2) Re-focus messaging from product to buyer While more direct access to the decision maker and buying authority may simplify the decision process to some extent, it requires marketing to better understand the underlying business problem the cloud solution is solving. What matters to the business user is the business value the solution delivers, the process it helps automate or enable, the cost it reduces or the opportunity it unlocks. While there are many steps in the decision process and many buyer personas that influence it, I have found that simplification is key to success. MORE >>

Clearly presented, educating the reader along every step of their decision making process. How do they impact the buying process? 7 - Performance Measurement With regular reviews of actual performance against goals, you can quickly identify areas for improvement, opportunities for resource re-allocation, process changes, and further education. In analogy to agile programming, we are looking at a highly iterative process that at each step needs to be tested, validated, and tweaked before moving on to the next step. Your B2B markets are changing rapidly. MORE >>

Content marketing is one of the most popular strategies deployed by today's B2B marketers to attract and engage prospects, and guide them through the buying process. But how do marketers measure content marketing success? We asked 20,000 members of the B2B Technology Marketing Community on LinkedIn what metrics they use to measure the success of their content marketing initiatives. Over 500 people responded - and here is a preview of the results. Leads, leads, leads With 73 percent of all responses, leads are the number one metric used to gauge content marketing success. MORE >>

Especially the top-3 challenges have grown significantly from 2009 to 2010: 1) Generating high-quality leads (from 69% in 2009 to 78% today) - Today's B2B marketers are tackling this issue with processes and technologies such as marketing automation and lead scoring in an attempt to only deliver qualified, truly sales ready leads. According to MarketingSherpa , the top challenges for B2B marketers are becoming, well, more challenging. 3) Marketing to a lengthening sales cycle (39% to 41%) - Also a function of the economic environment. MORE >>