By Jeanine Leder, Business.com Account Manager

Running a successful PPC (Pay-Per-Click) campaign in today’s highly competitive marketplace requires specific knowledge about the demand and marketability of the product or service you are selling. To achieve the very best ROI on your advertising dollar, it is important to make sure your PPC campaigns are closely monitored and optimized.

Here are the Top 5 best practices Business.com follows to optimize our advertisers’ Pay-Per-Click campaigns:

1)      Data Analysis – Allocate a set period of time each day to collect and analyze keyword data, click volume, conversion rates, sources of traffic and daily uptime of the campaign to determine where the client’s budget is best spent.  Compare how these metrics measure up against the advertiser’s individual goals to ensure that we are delivering the highest ROI.

1. Keyword Data – Business.com performs keyword research at the campaign level to draw the most appropriate audience to achieve the optimal CPL.  Account managers have narrow, specific keyword lists for those clients focused on low CPL and profitability, as well as large broad keyword lists for those clients desiring high traffic and brand awareness. Using the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, relevant keyword lists can be produced using “exact match”, “phrase match”, or “broad match” options to generate the keywords to match the campaign goals.
2. Conversion Rates/Sources of Traffic – Using some form of conversion tracking is critical to track metrics down to the keyword and category levels. It also provides you with visibility into how individual traffic sources are performing so that you can focus on those  sources that are delivering the highest ROI.

2)      Category Relevance – We find that campaign goals and target audience can vary wildly depending on the advertiser, the product or service and so on. Identifying your goals before launching a new campaign ensures that you are starting out your campaign on the right foot.  When we launch a new advertiser campaign on Business.com, we spend time getting to know the client’s business and their specific goals for the marketing campaign. Based on the information gathered from the client, we recommend all categories that may produce high conversions.

3)      Landing Page Evaluation – A landing page is the page that a potential customer comes to after he/she clicks on an ad. High quality, relevant landing pages drive the highest conversion rates.  Our team of account managers are trained to recognize the features of an effective landing page and work with clients to optimize the landing page to maximize ROI on the campaign. For more information on landing page optimization, read our earlier blog post.

4)      Ad Copy – Writing effective ad copy to reach the targeted audience(s) is not an exact science. Account managers work with clients to test different ad copy to find out what converts.  When writing ad copy, put yourself in the shoes of your audience. How do they think?  What would persuade them to click on your ad?  Be sure that your ad copy is clear and relevant to your landing page, but don’t hesitate to get creative and use an eye grabbing phrase that will lure the audience in and get the click.

5)      Budget –Close monitoring of budgets is key to ensuring that your company’s marketing dollars are being used effectively.  All of the steps above will give you the information that you need to make budgeting decisions based on your ROI.

A successful online marketing campaign does not happen overnight. It is rarely a case of “hitting the bullseye” right out of the gates.  It takes time, trial and error, close analysis and a bit of money to get things running smoothly and profitably.  Following the 5 tips listed above will help to get you rolling in the right direction. Tell us where you’ve found success with your PPC campaigns.

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With the recent numbers showing tremendous growth for Apple, many marketers may want to stop and take a look at the formula the tech giant has put together to become so successful.

Reports indicate that Apple registered a whopping $13.06 billion profit last quarter, meaning the company has close to $100 billion in cash and securities. To show you how quickly funds have risen in the company’s bank account, it had some $15.4 billion in reserves just four years ago. Not a bad rainy day fund if you will.

Late co-founder Steve Jobs was great at creating demand for the company’s products, be it the iPod, Macbook, iPad or iPhone.

Even with his passing last fall, the company did not skip a beat financially, reporting earnings for the first fiscal quarter of 2012 of $46.33 billion in revenue.

Needless to say, Apple has done a great job of marketing its products for some time now.

For the everyday B2B marketer, take a bite out of Apple’s success and transfer it to your business.

Among the ways to improve how you do this is by:

• Driving demand and value from top to bottom. Make sure that everyone in the company is engaged and buys into what you are marketing;
• Studying your present customer base. When you study those already in your base, you increase the chances of locating new businesses or sections of your industry that can open the doors to more business. By studying current and potential customers, you enhance your ability to adapt to changes in the industry at a much quicker pace. One of the reasons advertisers choose Business.com is they want to reach business decision makers. Millions of businesses come to Business.com every month to save time and money monthly through our 50,000+ how-to-guides, price comparison tools, leading online B2B directory, and much more;
• Testing through various means. Marketers should branch out and supplement   general search campaigns with a Business.com pay-per-click or pay-per-lead campaign.  Decision makers come to Business.com at every stage of the purchasing cycle, whether they are just beginning their research or ready to make a purchase.
• Tracking your data constantly. Among the ways to most successfully do this is looking at the before and after results of your campaigns, identifying what was of most  interest to such prospects, keeping the pre and post-marketing visual of such data, and looking for patterns over time that may emerge. By using relevant landing pages, B2B marketers can achieve improved quality scores, attain a better ranking, and have much better conversion rates as compared to sending clicks to their home page.

As many who have followed Apple can tell you following their most recent revenue report, their momentum is only going to get better as more of their new products hit the market.

Having created many more win than fail product ventures, Apple is a prime example of a company that has marketed to the demands of consumers, something that is at the core of its success.

Photo credit: thebiggestnews.com

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If your B2B content cross-promoting efforts have been falling on deaf ears in recent times, there are measures you can take to improve such results.

The first and foremost issue to deal with is admitting your cross-promotion efforts have not been working. Yes, admit some failure in this area in order to correct the problem and move on.

When you attempt to cross-promote online content, you are reaching out to other marketers who’ve already shown interest in your material, making it easier to get their attention than someone who you have never had any worthwhile dealings with.

Let’s say your best content work to date was done several months ago and you’re putting together a new online marketing plan.

In that case, cross-promoting the older content that registered with your audience is a great way to promote then and now. You prove yourself to be an authoritative marketer with your past achievements, thereby improving the chances of having this newer marketing content register with the visitor to your site.

As part of the cross-promoting effort, be sure to draw a link between old and new content so that the visitor sees the connection.  Relevancy is key here at all times as you map out then and now.

Some other tips to successful content cross-promotion include:

• Don’t inundate your audience – While you may feel like you need to throw everything but the kitchen sink at your audience, don’t overload them. You want to lead your audience to a desired action and not overwhelm them with decisions;
• Take the opportunity to thank them and offer them something new at the same time. If you’ve gotten a visitor to make a purchase or sign up for a newsletter for example, use the ‘thank you’ message to introduce them to something new, i.e. “We wanted to thank you for signing up for our marketing newsletter. Did you know that we have an upcoming webinar on how to market your small business?”
• Combine your production efforts – In the event you have a blog and a podcast or video production that tie together a common theme, by all means cross-promote them. While they both may be strong individually, they stand to be even better together. Use the blog to get the written message out, while the podcast and/or video piece can bring sound and sight to the message. This is also a good idea in that it allows those who prefer the written word to go to that message, while those choosing audio and/or video can select that medium. As visitors cross back-and-forth, you build up a larger audience, in turn, increase your search engine rankings;
• Partner up – If you are working with others to promote, be sure to promote their products and/or services and request them to do likewise. Especially in challenging economic times, cross-promoting each other’s goods can cut down on promotional costs and subject you to an expanded audience;
• Enjoy benefits of social media – As social media tools continue to expand, so do the opportunities for B2B marketers to cross-promote through a variety of different channels. When it comes to Twitter for example, there are ample opportunities to cross-promote, most notably through retweeting. For example, you have two marketing companies that guest blog on marketing-related topics. Sharing each other’s content opens the door to new audience members for both parties, thereby increasing business opportunities.

Lead Others to a Sale When Ready

Along with your cross-promoting efforts, you want to make sure you properly manage those leads once they arrive and register on your landing page.

Oftentimes, the prospect’s data will be put in a computer system, and then your sales team is on to the new lead. This step is important due to the fact you do not want to have the client and/or the sales rep speaking just yet if one or both are not ready for such a conversation.

Make sure that you properly manage the lead once it comes to your site via a whitepaper download, webinar, etc. and are only ready to speak to the potential customer when he or she is prepared for such a conversation. This is where lead nurturing comes into play.

With such a system in place, marketing can nurture the lead and inform the prospect, then passing along to sales only when the time is right.

As a B2B marketer, what do you find to be your best cross-promotion and lead nurturing efforts?

Which ones are you still thinking about trying and why haven’t you done them before?

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As any marketer knows, having a good landing page optimization strategy goes a long way in determining whether or not one is receiving a good return on investment (ROI).

It is important to remember that consistently testing and optimizing your landing pages is key to achieving better ROI and improving the bottom line. With so much attention given to this area of your marketing efforts, the better the customized or dedicated landing pages in all likelihood means the more visitors.

A recent Marketing Sherpa report looked at a number of landing page optimization benchmarks, including the usage of customized or dedicated landing pages for each source of traffic in 2010. When asked to compare to sending traffic to the default site, 49 percent rated using dedicated landing pages somewhat effective, 43 percent rated it very effective, while 8 percent said it was not effective.

Having kicked off the New Year, perhaps you’re looking back on 2011 and wondering how your landing page optimization efforts could have been better. If that’s the case, keep several of these factors in mind as you strive for optimal performance:

• Remain focused – It bears repeating that you want your landing page to be focused and as simple as possible, given visitors to your page are more than likely looking to get in and get out in a relative short amount of time. Among the tactics to employ are concise paragraphs, bullet points to highlight important items, and an easy manner in which the visitor can act or attain additional information;
• Don’t crowd visitors out – Keep in mind that everyone who comes to your landing page is not a computer guru by any means. If your page is too complex, too crowded and above all too hard to navigate, you stand a good chance of not only losing the visitor at that time, but having them not return. As mentioned in the first tip, don’t make it an adventure for your visitors and save the special effects for the movie theaters;
• Employ useful metrics – Identify the key metrics that you are going to be measuring and set a benchmark so you can measure the impact of the changes. You want to see from start to finish where the visitor goes, at what point where they may be having issues, and where you may be losing them. Assuming you sell items online, start at the shopping cart and follow your visitors all the way through to the checkout point to make sure the visit was successful;
• Be resolute when it comes to success – Marketers also need to zero in on their registration page, wherein visitors provide their information to obtain a white paper, request a demo or make an acquisition. At this point in the process, make sure you give them a call to action, be it a survey, subscribing to your newsletter, or even some form of sale;
• Test, test, and test some more – Another important item to remember is that you need to test your landing pages. Among the things to test are using various subject headers, test the number of questions you provide in a request form, and make sure what products and/or services you are offering visitors are clearly defined. When possible, use A/B/ testing or multivariate testing in order to decipher those page elements that are showing more propensities to convert. The bottom line, leave no stone unturned;
• Keep an open mind – While you have hopefully had success with your landing pages, there is always room for improvement. Be open to changes, but don’t make one after another where it looks like you’ve lost control of the landing page. Changes should be made for a reason, not just for the sake of change;
• Review, review, and review – Last but not least, make sure two or more sets of eyes peruse the landing page before it goes live. Nothing cries out louder when it comes to questioning a company’s ability to deliver than misinformation, spelling errors with content, site navigation issues, etc. Your landing pages should sparkle from start to finish, don’t leave it up to chance. If you have even the slightest question about whether or not this page is ready for public viewing, hold it back until you feel 100 percent confidence in it.

If you are still not entirely clear on how to avoid mistakes when creating your landing pages, then by all means take the time to do it right instead of rushing something out there that may or may not work.

With the right landing pages, your business stands a better chance of landing in the black in 2012.

When it comes to your business, what processes are in place for creating dynamic landing pages?

Also, what do you find to be the biggest challenges with creating stellar landing pages?

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The digital, print and trade show sectors of B2B media all witnessed increases in Q3 2011 compared with the year-earlier period, according to Business Information Network data from American Business Media.

The numbers point out that digital grew 22% in the third quarter, to $1.6 billion. Print witnessed a growth of 4.6%, to $5.7 billion, and trade shows jumped higher by 1.1%, to $7.7 billion.

Mergers and Acquisitions See Uptick

The mergers and acquisition side of things has also seen a lot of activity over the last 12 months.
Overall, M&A deal value in the media, information, marketing services and technology sectors grew 9% to $47.0 billion in 2011, according to investment bank Jordan, Edmiston Group (JEG). The number of deals in these sectors increased 2% to 896.

Marketing and interactive services turned out to be the most active category surveyed by JEG, with 291 deals (an increase of 17% over 2010) and $15.1 billion in deal value (increase of 33%).

“Overall, the interactive markets, including B2B and B2C online media and technology, and mobile media and technology, as well as marketing and interactive services, accounted for 71% of M&A deal activity for the year and 65% of the value,” JEG said in a statement.

The B2B online media and technology category witnessed an increase of 3% in the number of deals, to 63, and a 132% gain in deal value, to $6.0 billion. Among the biggest transactions was Oracle Corp.’s $1.1 billion acquisition of Endeca Technologies, which markets software to assist marketers’ better e-commerce efficiency.

Where is Digital Advertising Spending Headed in 2012?

For 2012, eMarketer is predicting that digital advertising spending will increase 18 percent to $36.8 billion, a figure that does not include spending on marketers’ own Web sites, something which Outsell Inc. projects at more than $60 billion on a yearly basis.

While the nation’s economy still seems to be sputtering, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the B2B marketing industry will be watching from the sidelines when it comes to spending habits.

As a B2B marketer, what are your budgeting plans for this year?

Are you expecting to:

1. Spend more on advertising?
2. Spend less on advertising?
3. Spend about the same amount spent in 2011?

Most importantly, are you optimistic that 2012 will be a good year for you in your B2B marketing endeavors?

Photo credit: windmillnetworking.com

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As we get set to usher in 2012, it is worth taking a few minutes to look back on the year that was 2011, seeing what transpired in the world of B2B social media marketing.

For starters, a number of surveys pointed out that more and more B2B marketers planned to and did incorporate additional social media efforts into their online marketing campaigns over the last 12 months.

According to a mid-year survey from iTracks, close to 90 percent of domestic B2B companies were incorporating social media marketing into their game plans. Sagefrog Marketing Group reported over the summer that close to 60 percent of national B2B marketers would identify themselves as LinkedIn users, 50 percent Facebook users and nearly 45 percent Twitter aficionados.

Among findings from a Social Media Examiner study of more than 3,300 marketers:

• Ninety percent of marketers reported that social media is critical for their business;
• One-third of all social media marketers want to understand how to oversee and measure the return on investment (ROI) of social media and integrate their social media activities;
• A majority of marketers (58%) are using social media for 6 hours or more on a weekly basis, and more than a third (34%) invest 11 or more hours each week;
• Just 28 percent of companies are outsourcing some degree of their social media marketing.

Meantime, a BtoB Magazine report stated that 93 percent of all B2B marketers took part in 2011 in some manner of social media marketing, the majority of who concentrate their efforts on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.

That being said, more than two-thirds (70 percent) of B2B marketers claimed a shortage of resources was their greatest challenge to successfully integrating social media into their 2011 marketing campaigns. Marketers also reported ill-informed success metrics and critical performance indicators (57%), lack of depth regarding social media (44%) and management resistance (22%) as challenges they have faced this year. Maybe the most tell all stat was that close to three-fourths of those surveyed said they fail to measure the ROI in their social marketing programs.

As you go into 2012, stop and think about the impact a well-designed social media campaign can have on your B2B marketing efforts.

Odds are your business has regular contact with potential customers numerous times in trying to educate them on what your company has to offer. With a well-structured social media program, your business can interact with the potential client and nurture those interactions, making them more inclined to go with you at the time of purchase.

If you are still skeptical as to whether or not your B2B marketing campaigns should be employing more and not less social media, take note that Forrester Research forecasts B2B companies will allocate $54 million towards social media marketing in 2014, an increase of more than $40 million from as recently as 2009.

Still think the social media marketing world doesn’t have room to grow?

Tell us how you incorporated social media into your B2B marketing plan over the last 12 months.

Photo credit: mltcreative.com

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While the messenger is important, it is the message at the end of the day that determines whether your target audience will do business with you.

That being said, what is your B2B content telling clients about your business? Is it updated regularly? Does it provide informative ideas, news and tips, or is it like an old Washington politician, a retread?

A 2011 Marketing Sherpa e-mail Benchmark survey pointed out that providing relevant content in emails was pegged as the biggest challenge by close to 70 percent of B2B marketers.

Many marketers will be the first to admit that while content volume and diversity prove important, the relevancy of the content is by and large the most critical point to hammer home. To keep your audience engaged, it is critical to resist the urge to churn out content and posts just to get something out.

How Can I Provide More Relevant Content?

Successful B2B marketers must these factors into consideration:

• Who are we marketing to? – This sounds like a dumb question, but it is important in order to provide better content for them. If you’re not studying the analytics of your audience, you are essentially winging it. Make it one of your goals going into the New Year to gather and analyze the data your metrics are providing you. If your metrics are not keeping up their end of the deal, then find software that better breaks down your client list. Once you have powerful metrics in your hands, use that data to identify what is of greatest interest to your clientele.
• Employ both short and long-term goals for your clients – Use your content marketing to help solve issues for clients. Remember, their needs are your needs, so solve them with that approach in mind. Look at it as building a bridge that leads somewhere, preferably to a long-term relationship. Therefore, you need to connect with your clients via your content;
• Diversity in your content approach – Content comes in many shapes and sizes, and this is especially important from a marketing stand point. Use a variety of mediums i.e. blogs, podcasts, videos, social media and more to connect with your clients. More often than not, think outside the box when it comes to your content. Sure, a blog post or two are great, but doesn’t just about every marketer do that? We’ve talked before about the advantages of things like webinars and videos, but are you using them? If not, why not? While the written content is important, the audio and visual content can be so much more impactful;
• The shorter the better – Stop and ask yourself for a minute what you do when someone tries to market you with long and boring content. Do you flow to it with open arms or reject it? In guessing the answer is the latter, be sure to market your content in a neatly packaged form, with a focus on shorter is better. Companies are operating as lean as ever with most workers are short on time. Get your message across early on in the message, and then wrap it up with a call to action. If you do this, you improve the chances of your message being heard;
• We are one – Lastly and most importantly, be in sync with your sales team. It is not the job of the marketer to sell, but to put clients in place to be sold on your product and/or services. Your marketing efforts should be just that, marketing. If you try and market and sell, you stand the risk of alienating more than just the client.

While these factors seem like child’s play to the seasoned marketer, it never hurts to review them.

Without relevant content, you are in essence irrelevant in the eyes of your customers.

Tell us how you are designing relevant content for your clients.

Photo credit: demandcreationspecialists.com

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Given your business can never get too much exposure, stop for a minute and ask yourself where the social media tool Google+ ranks in your B2B marketing plans for 2012.

According to recent research by BtoB Magazine, 93% of all B2B marketers are involved in social media marketing, with the majority placing their focus on the most popular channels (LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter). No Google+? Well, not so fast there.

Unveiled earlier this year, Google’s new social network tool (reports indicate there are more than 40 million members) and its recently released business pages are a great instrument for constructing relationships with your company’s clients, potential clients, and referral sources online. Google’s “+1” button, the precursor to Google Plus, was unveiled months ahead of the actual social platform.

Building Marketing Plans around Google+

No matter what your B2B market is, there are potential clients waiting on Google+ to hear from you. According to the VP of Product for Google+, he expects brands will notice this (creating pages and using them to construct relationships) and will build marketing plans around it.”

If you have yet to create a Google+ page for your business, then make that one of your important New Year’s resolutions, especially given the simplicity of it.

All you have to do is:

• Make a business gmail account that all of your business development team can access;
• Go to: http://plus.google.com/pages/create, and choose the option to create a Google+ Page. Follow the wizard, and select the closest option to label your business. Once there, you can select from options like local business or place, brand or product, company or organization, and so on;
• Provide the basic details regarding your company name, business Web site URL, classification of page’s content and so on;
• Next, customize your profile;
• You then promote your business page;
• Run some tests on your page and give it some content and feel before you put it out in front of the entire world to see.

Among the different benefits of Google+ for the B2B marketer are:

• Circles – These give a marketer the ability to hyper segment. Marketers can communicate with groups which are segmented into leads, prospects, sales and lastly follow-ups;
• Sparks – These are blog postings, videos and other forms of content crafted to an individual’s focused interests. This is a great way for the marketer to open a line of communication with other marketers and prospective customers;
• Hangouts – This is essentially an online place for individuals to convene and chat about an array of topics. A company can place its sales team together nationwide in order to produce quality face-to-face time with sales leads;

The bottom line for your marketing efforts is pulling the different Google tools together with Google+ to leverage all at one time.

Having another tool to promote your product/s and interact with customers is something you do not have to Google when asking the best way to land more business.

Tell us how you’ve incorporated Google+ into your B2B marketing plan.

Photo credit: androidspin.com

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As the New Year prepares to descend on us, how will you as a B2B marketer take the bull by the horns and make 2012 the best year yet for your company?

Before doing that, keep in mind that the slower holiday period is the best time to crunch the numbers for the last 12 months, seeing where marketing tactics yielded positive results and where some campaigns came up short.

You would think that the majority of marketers would be reviewing their data in earnest this time of year, yes? Not always.

According to Marketing Sherpa’s 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report which interviewed more than 1,700 B2B marketers, 68 percent of them have not identified or optimized their sales and marketing funnels. Yes, nearly three-fourths failed to do that; rather staggering percentage if you ask me.

Other findings from the report noted:

• Sixty-one percent continue to pass on leads, even non-qualified ones, straight on to sales;
• Seventy-nine percent have failed to put together a lead scoring process;
• Sixty-five percent fail to nurture and grow their leads.

Going forward in 2012, here are some tips to better utilize your B2B marketing efforts before the ball falls on New Year’s Eve:

• Put together a year-end report of the each and every campaign you instituted and its results. Measure the ROI and use that data to guide your marketing planning. It is important that you look at the long-term and not just short-term satisfaction;
• Determine what your key performance indicators (KPI) are for the first three months of 2012 (Q1). As you launch your first B2B marketing campaign in 2012, be sure ahead of time to define the KPIs in place to record the results. While the numbers are important, remember that you need to explain the data to each and everyone involved in the campaign. If a new marketing campaign has led to a 50 percent higher click through rate than the prior effort, demonstrate what that result means to the business as a whole in order to meet your company’s objectives;
• Clean up contact data – How many times have you set out to conduct a marketing campaign, only to discover that your contact data is not refreshed? It happens more often than you would realize, meaning having up to date contact data is critical to getting a campaign off on the right foot. Use these last few weeks of 2011 to update your contact data and demographics for both customers and prospects. The data should be cleaned on a regular basis, but especially at year’s end so that you start the New Year off correctly;
• Social media and its impact on campaigns – Even though some marketers have not been entirely sold on social media and its ability to move their marketing campaigns along, most know that SM plays an integral part in each and every endeavor. It is imperative to be able to deal with customers in a real-time mode so that you are not playing catch up to the competition. Be sure to set goals going into January for how you will utilize social media. Will you devote more time to sites like Facebook and Twitter? Will you put more emphasis on items like videos, podcasts, infographics etc. to market your products and services? How will you chart your social media efforts as far as recording the data than in previous years? If you have not been aggressively tracking the data, why is that? What good are your social media campaigns if you don’t know who is following you, where they are coming from, how often they are visiting and so on?

With the economy’s performance over the next year still hard for many financial experts to pin down, your marketing efforts should be clearly stated and ready to roll out Jan. 2.

Your boss is going to demand results sooner than later in order to justify the marketing department expenses.

With that being the case, be ready going into 2012 to provide evidence that the marketing campaigns you are and have been instituting will continue to be profitable for the business over the next 12 months.

Tell us how you are approaching year-end reporting and planning.

Photo credit: leadformix.com

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For the B2B marketer who thinks that their company’s email newsletter has gone as far as it can go, isn’t worth the time necessary to review and is not a vital part of the company’s marketing efforts, think again.

Given that the bulk of B2B e-mail newsletter subscribers tend to opt-in in search of things like tips, best practices, trends and more, the goal is simply to initiate or grow a relationship that is focused around useful product and service content. When that is the case, your readers typically navigate over to your Web site where they may seek more information, talk with a salesperson, download white papers and guides or more.

With a New Year right around the corner, now is a great time to set aside an hour or two and review your company’s e-mail newsletter.

Among the factors you want to review are:

• What is working?
• What is not working?
• What can we do better in 2012?
• Are we spending too little or not enough time on it in-house?
• Should we shift the newsletter to an outside company to handle for us?
• Are we crafting the newsletter so that it is social media friendly and allowing us maximum exposure on sites like Facebook, Twitter and more?

These are all questions that a marketing team should take into account so that everyone is on the same page going into the next 12 months.

Of course a fresh start in 2012 also allows the marketing team to consider new goals over the next 12 months, including the content, design, delivery and viability of the e-mail newsletter.

First and foremost, have you truly defined and understand your audience?

It sounds like a simple to answer question, but those marketers who have trouble answering it are also the ones who are likely seeing so-so traffic regarding their newsletters. The needs of your audience will change sooner than you think, so be sure to keep a handle on their requirements so that your targeted message stands a much better chance of not falling on deaf ears.

The message you send to your customers should be one that promotes your company as:

• Authoritative in its respective industry
• Providing fresh and relevant content
• A trusted source
• Always looking ahead and up to speed on not only the latest trends, but what the future of the industry is likely to bring

One other important aspect of the company e-mail newsletter that sometimes goes unnoticed is making sure it has a consistent ring to it.

From the content theme and design to the delivery of the newsletter, you stand a much better chance of being taken seriously in 2012 by your customers if you are consistent. Go about the newsletter in a hap-hazard way as far as content and publication, and you stand a much greater chance of being dismissed as irrelevant.

Lastly, what kind of metrics are you getting from your e-mail newsletter?

Wait, you’re not really delving into the numbers when it comes to monitoring who is reading and what they are reading?

All the time and effort you put into your company’s B2B e-mail newsletter is essentially wasted if you are not compiling and studying the data with each issue.

If this has been lacking in your approach up to now, take the time with a fresh start to the New Year to put analytics at the top of your wish list.

Your B2B e-mail newsletter can serve you in so many ways; it starts with knowing what and how you are marketing.

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