We’ve all had that telltale sense of dread.

After spending days putting together an email detailing our newest offer (Brand new product! Never seen before! Will solve all your life problems, from varicose veins to a bad golf game!), we send the email out and wait for the responses to roll in.

Rather than roll in, however, they trickle in so slowly that a midday email from Grandma makes us sit up and take notice. (That is, until we realize Granny isn’t interested in our product, either – she just wants to know if we’re coming to dinner Sunday night.)

This sense of disappointment doesn’t have to be par for the course when you’re running email marketing campaigns. Rather than resolving yourself to lagging responses and sub-par returns on your investment, make it your goal to revitalize your campaign.

What Successful E-Marketers Do

Email marketing can come across as spam. (Shocking, no?) Successful campaigns begin with trust. The recipients of email marketing must recognize and welcome messages from the sender. Because of this inherent need for trust, strong e-marketers don’t rent or buy email lists. Nothing turns people off faster except, perhaps, Grandma’s meatloaf.

If you’re sending email via a third party, make sure their list is responsive. Are they following the Marketing Golden Rule to give as much as you take? Like any relationship, email marketing requires a balance. If you’re constantly trying to sell people through your emails, they’ll quickly tire of receiving them. Good e-marketers try to provide value as often as they sell. They provide real benefits – not just discounts on their stuff. Subscribers look forward to receiving their mailings because they offer tips, access to information, and other exclusive content for free.

Successful marketers act as if their emails are going to be read by actual humans. This means that their text is written in plain, natural language. Writing emails as if they’d go to a friend or a family member works better than trying to over-market. People see through the awkward verbiage of someone desperately trying to sell a product. But someone who’s writing so that even Grandma understands why this new-fangled contraption is interesting will entice more readers.

When writing, these marketers also pay close attention to their subject lines.

Like article headings, subject lines must grab the attention of the recipient. It’s the surest way to keep them from automatically deleting your message. How do you know what gets them intrigued? Target and tailor your campaigns. You can only knock on someone’s door so many times; when you do, make sure it’s worthwhile for both of you. Determine your ideal audience or target demographic, and build your campaign around them.

For example, my clients are eBook enthusiasts; when sponsors send emails to our client base, we suggest that they offer an eBook or an e-Guide in their campaign because that’s what our audience wants. It’s a win-win for our clients and our sponsors.

What Lackluster Campaigns Do

The least successful email campaigns are created without spam triggers in mind.

Email providers, including Gmail and Yahoo!, review each email before they direct them appropriately. Emails riddled with spam triggers – spam keywords, excessive links, and a low ratio of text to images – get siphoned into junk mail, or aren’t delivered at all. (Are you seeing why these are the least successful campaigns?) It’s impossible to get feedback if your emails are never read, so familiarize yourself with the most important spam triggers so you can make it past first base.

Similarly, bad email marketing doesn’t comply with CAN-SPAM regulations. Companies who fail to properly identify themselves or provide unsubscribe methods are quickly blacklisted. These aren’t optional details – these regulations are law. The only way to make your bad campaign worse is to get fined $16,000 by law enforcement for each email sent. Talk about a nightmare!

Finally, weak campaigns are never split tested. Split testing allows you to see which elements of your campaigns are most successful – or most disliked. Split tests quickly show marketers what’s stale about their existing campaigns, whether it’s their design, their copy, or their offer.

Several variations of split testing exist, so there’s no good excuse for e-marketers to not do it. If, somehow, your business is against split testing, at the very least you should be tracking your open rates, your click-through rates, and which links are getting the most hits. You can’t replicate success if you don’t know what was successful in the first place, but you can certainly fail over and over again by doing the same things.

By carefully considering your text, your approach, and your customers’ needs, you’re more likely to strike gold with your next email marketing campaign.

Keep your recipients’ perceptions in mind as you develop your campaign, and success shouldn’t be far behind. (Heck, maybe even Grandma will want what you’re selling.)

Photo credit: scholesmarketing.com

About the author: Nicolas Gremion is CEO of Free-eBooks.net, a source for free eBook downloads, eBook resources, and eBook authors, and Foboko.com, a social publishing network.

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As B2B marketers review their options for keeping their budgets in line the remainder of 2012, holding the line entirely on spending does not seem to be an option for a number them.

Two recent reports surveying how B2B marketers planned to spend their budgeting funds for 2012 indicate a plan to increase such budgets and a turn toward marketing automation solutions.

First, a recent report from Forrester Research notes that B2B marketers say they will grow their marketing budgets by 6.8 percent during the year.

According to B2B Marketers Must Focus on Partnership and Experimentation as 2012 Budgets Rises, a little more than one-fourth (27 percent) of marketers will increase their budgets somewhere between 10 to 19 percent this year. Twenty percent of them state they will likely grow their budgets between 5 percent and 9 percent, while 18 percent plan to increase budgets anywhere from 1 to 4 percent. Lastly, 16 percent of marketers indicate they will be enhancing their budgets by more than 20 percent this year.

The survey also points out that industries planning to utilize the greatest portion of their budgets on marketing include finance and insurance (3 percent), high-tech (2.7 percent) and pharma and medical (2.6 percent).

While B2B marketing budgets for this year have already been planned out, that does not mean they cannot be tweaked to fit necessary needs.

Among the ways to make sure you came up with the right budget for this year are:

• Review the 2011 budget to see where alterations were made during last year and whether or not those proved to be wise decisions;
• Did you use blank-page budgeting? If so, you are able to construct the budget as you go along, using both the marketing plan and its marketing communications tactics to better assist your needs;
• Allowing for potential cuts. In the event your boss/bosses are discussing plans to trim the budget from its present state, discuss with them which area of sales they would be comfortable part with, given the fact decreasing the budget will lead to less sales revenue;
• See what the competition has done. One means by which to potentially stave off major slashes in the B2B marketing budget is by showing management what the competition has been doing to date. If there are areas to where you can capitalize on moves the competition has made, you are more likely to get approval from management.

Meantime, a Wakefly survey of several hundred B2B marketers’ points out the attention towards marketing automation solutions this time around.

According to the survey, while B2B marketers previously indicated allocating less than 3 percent of their entire online marketing budget to marketing automation solutions in the past, now more than 10 percent indicate doing such.

Overall, 61 percent of those surveyed said 2012 would provide them with budget increase, with 31 percent planning the same expenditures as they had in 2011. A mere 8 percent said this year’s budget would shrink from a year ago.

Other major growth was expected in marketing allocations for PPC search and landing page design, together making up another 30 percent of B2B marketing allocations for this year.

Surprisingly, no increase was noted in allocations over 2011 for both social media marketing and e-mail marketing.

In looking at the first four months of 2012, what appears to be working for you and what is not doing as well?

With seven months left to go in the year, what changes if any are planned for your B2B marketing budget?

Photo credit: marketingprofs.com

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As you put together your B2B marketing content, implementing the right keywords sounds like a no-brainer, but how many of you actually take the time to get it done right the first time?

B2B marketing content contains an array of possibilities, including press releases, guides and white papers, blog postings, e-mail newsletters and more. Which keywords you use and where they are placed, proves critical in order to get more eyes directed towards your copy.

Some things to keep in mind as you look to optimize your content:

• In looking at it through the eyes of search engine optimization (SEO), more times than not it is more advantageous to utilize heavily focused keywords with minimum search volumes. By doing this, your traffic not only stands a better chance of being targeted but you increase the chances of being located. In the event you use popular, generic terminology, your chances of ranking decrease;
• Be sure you know your audience. It stands to reason that you will be targeting different audiences over time, so your keywords need to reflect this. You will have different demographics looking to do business with you, so using the same terminology to cover the entire spectrum will not work. As an example, if you’re marketing to small business owners pitching life insurance, some keywords to consider would be life insurance quotes, affordable life insurance, life insurance for individuals, life insurance for families, quotes for life insurance etc.  Another important facet to your audience is listening to them. Talk to your clients in deciding what terminology they use in their search efforts ;
• Track your efforts. By tracking your keywords through analytics such as those offered by Google for example, it is easy to determine those words individuals are utilizing to come to your site. Don’t only review keywords used to come to a single page or two, but those used to move further into your site. In order to better your standing in organic search, it is important that the keywords you use are tied to and relevant with the overall vision behind your site;
• Be willing to adapt. It is also important that your keyword strategy not be set in stone, as you need to evolve and stay up to speed with what your clients want and need. Put to use keywords and phrases that will provide sufficient search volumes and prove relevant at the same time;
• Determine keyword competitiveness. As you search and track keywords, use an online tool that will label keywords as being either low, medium or very competitive. Speaking of competitive, see what the competition is doing as far as bringing traffic to their site. If there are keyword terms they use and you don’t that appear to be working, consider some changes;
• Understand importance of keyword density. Lastly, make sure you have a firm grasp of keyword density. Avoid worrying over the precise number of times you utilize an exact target phrase, given that when your keywords are relevant and tied to a specific page’s content, they will find their proper placing. Remember, the goal is to come up with material that proves optimal for both search engines and readers. In most cases, a keyword density rate anywhere from 1 percent to 5 percent is oftentimes adequate, meaning the designated keyword would show up in the content one to five times for every 100 words. One note of caution is being careful to not exceed your keyword density ratio in so that search engines perceive it to be keyword spamming.

Photo credit: udemy.com

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A recent study from the Aberdeen Group indicates that those B2B marketers utilizing best-in-class B2B practices are generating, on average, some 17 percent of all leads through their social media channels.

The study reviewed four performance criteria in order to separate Best-in-Class (the leading 20 percent of aggregate performers) from the average industry and worst performing Laggard companies (middle 50 percent and lowest 30 percent, respectively).

According to the study, the Best-in-Class businesses witnessed these performance metrics:

• Average annual revenue increase of 20%, compared to 8% for average and –3% for Laggard organizations;
• Average 10% year over year improvement of marketing leads that lead to closed sales, compared with 3% for the industry average and –1 for those Laggard organizations;
• A 44% of forecasted sales generated by marketing, that compares to 27% for average and 7% for Laggards;
• The customer retention rate grew to an annual 73%, as compared to 27% for average and 7% for Laggard organizations.

Also of note from the study:

• Forty-seven percent of Best-in-Class businesses report increasing lead generation as their main reasoning with social media marketing efforts, and 13 percent note generating leads to be their secondary strategy;
• Twenty-three percent of Best-in-Class companies note forming clear business process for social marketing as their main strategy, and 8 percent report process development to be a secondary strategy.

Overall, the study points out that an overwhelming 84 percent of all the B2B marketers that took part in the survey are utilizing social marketing to some degree.

As it stands, the Best-in-Class businesses are typically showing a greater focus on using social media for lead-generation purposes and are more apt to involve social marketing with their other primary marketing channels and actions.

At the end of the day, B2B marketers have a number of reasons to leverage social media, including:

• Add to company’s brand awareness
• Put a human touch on the company
• Be looked upon as a thought leader
• Interact with both current and potential customers

In your efforts to generate leads, what role has social media played for you in the last year?

Photo credit: leadershippost.com

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With many businesses wanting to track where each and every dollar goes, a recent survey from Pardot leads to some surprising news.

According to the report, nearly 37 percent of marketers state they do not track revenue that is generated through their campaigns. As close to 40 percent of them report, they do not have time and/or necessary resources available to make and study reports.

While the majority of those in B2B marketing find themselves responsible for putting together and implementing productive lead management programs, it turns out this rather large percentage that are not fail to show their real value to their companies.

Among the notable findings from the survey:

• One-fifth of marketers report not measuring marketing-sourced leads in the first place;
• Nearly one-third state they do not track advanced metrics like marketing-sourced opportunities, while the same figure report they do not have the proper tools necessary to follow leads from start to finish in the sales cycle;
• Thirty-five percent claim not to be utilizing lead nurturing when it comes to less qualified leads;
• Approximately 33 percent of marketers responding were in agreement that MQLs (marketing qualified leads) are the key metric to measure, with marketing-contributed opportunities coming in second; less revenue-focused metrics, including Web site traffic and page views, were viewed as lowest on the importance list.

While some of those numbers may seem troubling to many that run businesses, the survey also notes that the message of necessary action is registering with many B2B marketers.

The survey goes on to point out that 80 percent of those polled state they plan to devote additional time to marketing metrics this year as opposed to prior years.

Close to 85 percent of marketers stated that they are requiring that leads meet a noted set of criteria, including job title and/or industry, prior to passing the leads along to the sales department. Meantime, more than half commented that they used a complex group of qualifiers that brought together both demographic factors and lead activity.

According to Pardot COO and co-founder Adam Blitzer, “In today’s lean-and-mean small business environment, it’s crucial that marketers understand what’s working and what’s not, so programs can be improved and forecasts refined.”

As a B2B marketer, how are you going about tracking campaign-generated revenue?

Are you doing something differently through the first quarter of 2012 that you did not do in 2011?

Lastly, what is the biggest challenge you find your marketing department facing through the first quarter of this year?

Photo credit: webdesignerdepot.com

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After last week reviewing a recent nationwide survey from BtoB Magazine and business audience marketer Bizo on how marketers are challenged with attracting attention from their target audience, we look this week at the role e-mail plays in that quest.

According to the survey, a majority of marketers note their greatest challenge in 2012 is coming up with more leads. Could their e-mail tactics that they have employed to date need a little refining or a complete overhaul?

Another recent report from e-mail marketer Constant Contact, states that individuals sign up for e-mail lists and interact with social sites for a large number of the same reasons.

Among the findings from B2B marketers:

• Fifty-eight percent of those surveyed say the main motivation behind an e-mail opt-in was to obtain discounts and special offers;
• Forty-one percent claimed e-mail opt-ins in order to receive discounts and special offers was a good reason to “like” a business on Facebook;
• Being a customer or backer was listed as the number three reason by respondents for both email and Facebook;
• Paid search garnered 36 percent of efforts from marketers, with display ads (35 percent) and social media (29 percent) second and third, respectively;
• Thirty percent of marketers report e-mail to be a mature and well-optimized method for their mix;
• Eighty-four percent of marketers noted the importance of segment targeting in their e-mail campaigns.

While e-mail is but one facet of the B2B marketing campaign, there are ways to improve it and get a better ROI (return on investment) from all of your marketing channels that  are contributing to the size of your email lists.

Among the ways to do this is:

• Producing a marketing video – A well-designed online video can get your message across to countless eyes. Make sure, however, that you keep it short and sweet so as not to lose the attention of your audience;
• Being mobile – It is also important for marketers to utilize mobile marketing in an effort to help increase both open rates and click through numbers. Be sure that images are useful and easy to view. Make sure you provide them with a smooth delivery;
• Re-emphasizing relevancy – In order to get your e-mails messages read, review your message to make sure it is targeted and relevant. Without those two key components, why would someone care what you had to say in the first place? Better to get it right then to get it out quick:
• Remembering what your keys to success are when it comes to e-mail in the first place – The goals behind any e-mail marketing campaign include nurturing leads, adding to your brand awareness, generating sales and constructing a level of customer loyalty that is second to none;
• Getting the right measuring stick – All too often, marketers fail to properly measure their e-mailing efforts, leaving them with the inability to see whether or not a campaign is producing the desired results and missing out on the opportunity to optimize those campaigns;
• Making them an offer they cannot refuse – We all want something in return for our time. Make sure your e-mail campaigns are offering items such as how-to-guides, e-newsletters, white papers and more. When you give your customers and prospects something of interest, you stand a much better chance of retaining them.

As a B2B marketer, what tricks of the trade have you found to be useful when it comes to using e-mail marketing?

One-third of the way into 2012, do you plan to increase, decrease or keep your level of e-mail marketing this year about the same from a year ago?

Photo credit: salesnexus.com

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These days, everyone has a blog.

People blog about knitting, baking, gardening – even dog grooming . These blogs can be fun and even informative, but at the end of the day, they’re recreational.

Business-minded bloggers have it tougher.

We’re always trying to figure out how we can get the best return on our investment. But relax about analyzing ROI numbers! Instead, turn toward creating value so you can generate engagement. I promise the numbers will follow.

Why Blog, Anyway?

I shouldn’t even have to include this section because a company blog is such an obvious and cost-effective way to increase traffic to your company site, show authenticity, and humanize the corporation… I could go on for days.

From personal experience, I know that a business blog is one of the fastest ways to reach people in the shortest amount of time. When clients reach out to you to say they stumbled across a post and forwarded it on to a friend or posted it on a social media site, it’s a magical feeling. Every business owner should experience it. You’ve gained a new follower, made a connection, and established credibility.

The blog I run also allows my readers to see a side of me they wouldn’t necessarily see while sitting in my office. Blogs are a great way to show off a brand’s personality and corporate culture. Use them to depict a level of knowledge, expertise, and even humor. But don’t forget to know your audience. Knowing those you’re trying to reach best positions you for appealing to your core audience.

For example, I help professionals in the workplace, and I always end each blog post asking for people to update me on their progress for the week. Each week is a challenge, and I want to experience those challenges with my readers. Adding value to your blog will result in connections, engagement, followers, and yes, strong ROI.

So What about ROI?

Blogs should be designed to create engagement through providing visitors with value. As engagement grows – you will see value. When I see people connecting with my brand online, that’s when I get excited. This is the number-crunchers’ version of “moving the needle.”

Don’t get me wrong; I also remain intently focused on the financial exposure garnered by my blog. But I believe the value has to continually shine through before you should expect any return financially.

Like any good business, a blog has to grow from the ground up in order to harness the power of your advocates as you blossom!

Here are 5 actions you can take to harness your power:

1. Engage! If someone posts a comment, get involved and, at the very least, thank them for reading.
2. Comment on your reader’s blog. If they engage with you, why not do the same for them?
3. Use images and videos to keep your readers happy – and entertained.
4. Send your top 10 readers a quick “thank-you” email. Because you have to leave your email address when commenting, find their emails through the comments section in your dashboard, and write up a personalized thank-you letter to each.
5. If you see a reader who’s going above and beyond in consistently leaving comments or sharing your content, reward him for it. Create a “Reader of the Month” post, interview him, lend a few links to his blog, etc.

At the end of the day, business is about people.

It’s about their performance, their passion, and their progress. Keep that in mind when designing your company’s blog. Give them valuable content to read and engage with, and you’ll get your strong ROI.

Striking the perfect note of authenticity and value in a business blog is a process. It requires the ability to deliver information that hits on an emotional level so people connect and come back.

Value takes time to build. But remember, if you build it, they will come.

Photo credit: masterlink.com

About the Author: Wendy Komac, is a long-time turnaround specialist that has helped save companies by focusing on changing underperformers to exceptional workers. She is the author of I Work with Crabby Crappy People, a humorous and highly informative book about achieving happiness and success. 

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According to a recent nationwide survey from Crain’s BtoB Magazine and business audience marketing company Bizo, 48% of marketers polled cited reaching more of their target audience a challenge in 2012.

The survey showed that more than 60 percent of marketers claim their biggest marketing task at hand this year is drumming up additional leads, with more than a quarter planning to diversify their marketing tactics this year.

Among the findings:

• Paid search came in as the second-ranked tool for marketing, followed by display advertising (35 percent));
• Sixty percent of marketers claim their biggest challenge this year will be generating additional leads;
• Sixty-three percent of marketers state that their marketing mix either falls short of sales demand or they are not entirely sure their mix is working;
• 56 percent note brand promotion as a major area of focus;

According to John DiStefano, research director with Crain’s BtoB Magazine, “This is a period of creative re-invention for marketers, in the end marketing will emerge as a stronger more potent discipline.

“We have moved from a push environment, to pull style messaging, to finally the permission economy. While this contextualizing of the sales funnel presents challenges for some marketers, others are leveraging the new tools to reach their audiences online and drive more targeted, effective campaigns. This data shows that there is still a tremendous opportunity to further leverage new technologies and emerging channels to boost marketing results,” DiStefano remarked.

Have the Proper Measuring Tools in Place

With close to 40 percent of marketers in the survey stating precise measurement and attribution of online conversations being a top online marketing challenge, it would seem finding more accurate measuring tools should be a prime goal moving forward.

Even with the right tools, if you’re not putting them to use on a regular basis, what’s the sense of having them in the first place?

It is important as a marketer that you regularly examine your analytics, not just with the last month or two of data, but against the numbers you had this time a year ago and even further back where possible.

For lead generation programs, the first step is searching through the data to determine where leads are presently generated. Next you will want to identify the data so that you can put together a most favorable data model. Think of the process as a journey for your customer, a customer that is becoming more and more educated (see below), one that you can be along for the ride from start to finish.

Are You Prepared for a More Educated Buyer?
Another recent study, Marketing Sherpa’s 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report, points out that as buyers become more educated, B2B marketers must prioritize where their allocations will be going in order to avoid wasting resources, along with increasing the chances of making a sale.

According to the report (1,745 marketers participated), even those B2B marketing tricks that could be perceived as most effective like SEO and Web site design, witnessed up to a 50 percent drop in overall success from just a year earlier.

While it should not come as a big secret to B2B marketers, more and more customers are doing their homework online as it pertains to buying well before they initiate the sales process. In order to deal with this, marketers must highlight opportunity zones that are known to be successful, along with trying out different tactics to form a prioritized lead generation performance plan.

A company’s Web site is the obvious starting point of a successful performance plan, but there are important channels tied to the site, most notably SEO, content and e-mail marketing that all play significant roles.

While we will talk about e-mail marketing and its role in the B2B marketing process in an upcoming blog post, let’s take a look at SEO for the moment.

Knowing that customers most oftentimes use a search engine to find one’s site, it is important that your company show up on searches engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing for example. In order to successfully do this, make sure you fully grasp both keywords and content, knowing how they work with one another to reach a prime spot in searches.

For those marketers either new to the arena or needing a refresher course, remember to not only have strong and updated content, but content that is keyword-rich, allowing it to be properly indexed by search engines.

At the end of the day, SEO is but one major component of the B2B relationship between marketer and potential customer.

Take some time to better understand how SEO content works with your marketing automation and lead generation efforts, looking to drive leads from the start line to the finish line.

So, how do you go about measuring your B2B marketing efforts and would you change how you are doing things if given the chance to?

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While fads come and go, the latest social media craze seems to be pinning its hopes on staying around for a while.

Given the surge in people using Pinterest, it leads one to ponder if B2B marketers would be best served by using the site? Is it a wise call to pin your efforts on the site or direct your energies to other and better-known social media venues?

According to a piece from Marketing Profs, Pinterest is engineering a larger percentage of referral traffic across the Internet than Google+, YouTube, Reddit and LinkedIn combined.

For B2B marketers not up to speed on Pinterest, the site allows users to share images on virtual pin boards that are placed in categories for specific themes or interest sections. Users can not only submit their own ‘pins’ to the site, but also re-pin existing images straight to their own boards.

So, should B2B marketers be ‘pinning’ some of their time and efforts to the site, especially given the perception that most folks look at Pinterest as a hobby, design, and craft type site? Keep in mind; one of the advantages to striking now is that Pinterest is still relatively new in social media circles, so why wait for the crowds to show up?

Among some of the companies that are effectively using the site to date include:

• HubSpot – The inbound marketing software provider has some 1,030 followers and has pinned more than 100 items so far (http://pinterest.com/hubspot/);
• Klout – The social media analytical provider has some 1,700 followers, pinning more than 170 items up to now (http://pinterest.com/klout/);
• Reach Local – This online marketer has close to 100 followers and uses the site to share statistics, facts, infographics and more (http://pinterest.com/reachlocal/).

If you’ve been thinking about spending some time on Pinterest, consider a few things:

• Just the facts – According to digital ad agency Modea, those ages 25 to 34 have the biggest presence on the site, nearly 69 percent of users are women, the average user spends nearly 16 minutes on the site, and the site had 11,716,000 visitors in January of 2012 alone;
• Determine how the site will best serve you – Take the time to troll the site and see what kinds of products have the potential to be good for marketing and which of your products would best suit the boards. While the images are nice, which ones will end up giving your company the best bang for your efforts? Also, don’t rely entirely on promoting your products. Pinning items related to your company’s culture, employees, etc. allow you to humanize the company and show visitors that you are not only a good business but one that is well diversified when it comes to your interests;
• Focus in on pin boards that are specific to what you offer – Get products pinned that showcase your company’s marketing efforts and share with others. Just like many business pros use LinkedIn to network, doing the same on Pinterest allows you to gain increased exposure while helping non-competitors do the same. By sharing your pins with your clients, you also learn more about them in the process as to what is and isn’t important in their eyes. You should look to offer exclusive offers to your house list in your email marketing campaigns and newsletters geared towards “members-only.” Among the items to consider are product discounts, useful white papers and daily specials;
• Don’t be the occasional ‘pinner’ – Just like any content you write on your B2B blogs and email newsletters needs to be fresh, don’t get into the habit of being a drive-by ‘pinner’ all the time. It is important to ‘pin’ regularly so that you pick up a strong following that will keep coming back;
• Reap the SEO traffic and benefits – For those B2B marketers that regularly ‘pin’ items, they put themselves in place to receive a boost in SEO traffic. With Pinterest, you can build inbound links to drive people to client Web sites, meaning an uptick in SEO traffic. At the end of the day, building valuable backlinks is worth the time and effort.

When all is said and done, Pinterest allows B2B marketers the opportunity to tell the public their stories and also add to their engagement level with both prospects and clients.

That being said I have a feeling a fair amount of B2B marketers are taking a “wait and see approach” to Pinterest prior to diving into it. Perhaps the recent copyright law stories regarding the site and its terms of agreement in the media have led some B2B’s to think twice before joining.

As a B2B marketer, if you’re not already on Pinterest, what is your reasoning behind this decision and do you foresee yourself joining before the end of the year?

Photo credit: isedb.com

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Successful business professionals of all types and kinds know that continuing their success into the future depends on staying ahead of the curve.

No matter your particular industry or niche, you most likely face very stiff competition; in a capitalist world that sees prominent new products and services launched on a daily basis, no amount of momentary success promises the same tomorrow.

Staying on top of your game means constantly moving towards new goals and utilizing new techniques and methods in getting your message out to the world. In the interest of keeping your mind sharp and your skills honed as you pursue your business interests, here are five fantastic business events to attend in 2012:

1. SES New York

SES New York is the must-attend even for any business owner or marketer. Nowhere else will you find such a busy schedule and those great networking opportunities. More than 5,000 marketers visit the event each year!

Featuring high-profile keynote speakers, hands-on workshops and an overall goal of increasing sales via better utilization of digital strategies, businesspeople serious about their position and their company shouldn’t miss out.

Getting and living there:

• Getting there: The official site of the JFK airport
• Living there: Venue and accommodation (official information)

2. Social Media Strategies Summit

The Chicago Social Media Strategies Conference will include awesome workshops, real-life case studies and high-profile keynotes. Each track includes sessions focused on the following categories: Community Engagement; Corporate Case Studies; ROI and tools; Legal Risks & Strategies; Sales Approach; and Marketing Strategies & Tactics.

The Social Medis Strategies Summit offers its attendees the opportunity to rub shoulders with the best in the business, building skills and learning new strategies via workshops, keynote speeches and peer-to-peer collaboration.

Getting and living there:

• Getting there: Chicago airport (for flight information and “getting there” tips)
• Living there: Official location information

3. CMS Expo

No one ever dreams of shrinking their business but often the dream of growth is left behind in favor of tackling the problems of the moment, particularly in the difficult economic environment being experienced all over the world. If you’ve lost sight of your long term plans for expanding your business and making it more profitable, consider attending the 2012 CMS Expo!

Aimed at business owners and professionals looking for new business opportunities and new ideas to apply to existing markets, this gets together of branding and marketing professionals offers seminars, keynote speakers and networking opportunities all aimed at helping you to make 2012 your most profitable and successful year ever!

Getting and living there:

• Getting there: Evanston Airport and services;
• Living there: Event venue

4. Inbound Marketing Summit

Similar to the Online Marketing Summit but sporting an extra focus on mobile marketing alongside digital and social media efforts, the Inbound Marketing Summit is set to feature high-profile keynote speakers and representatives from companies offering real life case studies of the success gained from and challenges faced with marketing products and services to a modern and technologically savvy generation.

Getting and living there:

• Getting there: Bookmark the official site of John F. Kennedy International Airport for flight, parking and ground transportation information
• Living there: cheaphotels.org

5. Business Startup Show

For businesspeople looking to get their latest startup off the ground is the Business Startup Show to be held in London, United Kingdom, later this year. The show’s events drew more than 18,000 people last year to hear from owners of successful ventures, meet and greet like-minded individuals in the interest of knowledge and opportunity and to be exposed to potential investors looking for the next big thing, and 2012 promises to be even better.

Getting and living there:

• Getting there: London International Airport for flight details as well as the detailed guide on getting there
• Living there: Map for London hotels (via Google Maps)
• Don’t forget the checklist!

About the Author: Ann Smarty is the business blogger and owner of My Blog Guest, the free community of guest bloggers.

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