I recently was asked to participate in Ambal Balakrishnan's (@ambal) ebook, to be published at year'd end and then available from her blog, Connect the Docs. She asked a bunch of B2B marketing experts for their predictions for 2010. Being one of those tweeps who always barks by mid-January that "if I see one more predictions blog article, I'll puke," I chuckled as I sat down to write.
For the full text, you'll have to check back with Ambal, and I'll promote it as well. Until then, I give you more thoughts to ponder than predictions:
- Are marketing's goals aligned with sales? Do your bonuses share quota?
- Are you shoring up those marketing techniques that are tried and true?
- Are you adapting to new areas that need adapting, such as Social Media?
- Are you measuring everyting? Cost per lead? Cost per opportunity? Leads per marketing event (blogs, tweets, whitepapers)?
- Are you combining inbound marketing and outbound marketing and maximizing unified demand gen techniques?
- Are you going to take time to reflect on what's working, what's failing and make changes?
I'm sure there are some "marketing gurus" out there who still are investing 70% of their marketing spend on Google Adwords and the rest on PR. Too bad ... old-school mix. So reflect on 2009. Hit the ground running in 2010.
What are you going to think about or adjust?