Are You Properly Engaged with Others?


As a B2B marketer, how do you go about measuring the rate of engagement with your customers? If the answer is we’re not sure, then you definitely have some work to do.

As a recent study from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute (EBI) points out, a mere 1.3 percent of fans of the top brands on Facebook actually take the time to engage with the brands (200 top brands were followed for six weeks). If you’re like me, you scratched your head a bit and thought that number couldn’t be so low.

In arriving at the percentage, study organizers relied on one of Facebook’s own metrics to note the comments, posts, likes, tags and more that define how a user on the social network can spend time with branded pages.

According to one researcher for EBI, the small percentage recorded is not the end of the world.

In her comments following the release of the report, Karen Nelson-Field noted, “I don’t think it’s a bad thing. People need to understand what it can do for a brand and what it can’t do. Facebook doesn’t really differ from mass media. It’s great to get decent reach, but to change the way people interact with a brand overnight is just unrealistic.”

The going notion that rings true more often than not is that most individuals who favor a brand can already be classified as loyal customers. In the event they don’t leave a comment, post and/or like, does not mean they are not buying the brand.

For B2B marketers, getting customers to engage in and buy their brand is crucial.

If your engagement efforts have been a little off lately, consider the following:

  • Better usage of social media – Speaking of Facebook earlier, B2B marketers should definitely be socially engaged. Compile a list of the main social networking tools and be able to check off those that you are presently on. If the list is minimal, it is time to beef it up. Cross-promoting your engagement efforts on a wide array of sites opens you up to new customers and a greater perception of being authoritative in your respective niche;
  • Improved content delivery – We all know that fresh content is critical here, but how can you best spread the news? Make sure your efforts are directed towards not only the content that goes on your site, but also by participating in online forums, responding to comments from those who visit your site and more. When you engage current and potential customers online, they are more apt to come to you the next time for business or assistance. Most importantly, know who your customers are;
  • Lead the way to a sale – The combination of marketing and purchasing are not exactly rocket science. Make sure that sales are tagged with qualified leads that continue to flow more often than those that are perhaps going to lead to business. If a lead just fills out an online form but it ends there, you’re left with marketing pros wondering why it didn’t lead to a sale, while sales folks ponder if marketing really provided them with a solid lead in the first place.

As the recent Facebook study points out, the numbers don’t always truly tell the story.

Being a B2B marketer, what are some tips you could share with your fellow marketers on how you go about successfully engaging others?

Photo credit: mashable.com

 


5 Must-Haves for Your PPC Optimization Toolkit


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.


What Can B2B Marketers Learn from Apple’s Success?


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

 


B2B Marketing Content Better Be Relevant or….


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


Have You Reviewed Your List and checked it twice?


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

 


Room for Improvement with Your B2B E-mail Newsletter


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.

Photo credit: toptenwholesale.com

 

 

 


Business.com blogs redesigned, useful content remains number one goal


Recently, at Business.com, we have made massive updates to the look and feel of our main website. We have also redesigned our two blogs.

The B2B Online Marketing Blog and what was formally known as the What Works for Business Blog (now simply called the Business.com Blog) have both been completely redesigned and moved from subdomains to subdirectories within our domain. With these changes it is our goal to provide a better user experience for our followers, as well as to continue providing useful content for businesses.

In this spirit we now would like to “preach what we practice.”

For any small business to get the most out of its company blog and stay a step ahead of the competition, updates to both the functionality and content of their blogs are an integral part of making them tick.

Given that there are countless blogs out there, what will make your company’s blog stand out from the competition now and going forward?

Make It Your Business to Effectively Blog

At Business.com, we have taken the time to fine-tune our product, including our blogs, to better assist business owners. By doing so, business owners big and small can learn how to make more informed purchasing decisions for their business, improve their company’s outreach to consumers, their return on investment (ROI), and the ability to better brand themselves.

Over the last few months, Business.com has worked hard to improve the site user experience, while at the same time providing business owners with content to assist them in purchasing decisions and the highest quality leads for advertisers.

One of the many ways Business.com assists small business owners is by providing a pair of quality blogs.

The company’s B2B Online Marketing blog helps business-to-business marketing professionals attain viable online marketing solutions, providing valuable B2B online marketing tips. The Business.com blog provides small business owners with tips on how to effectively run their companies, best utilize employees, and find the best way to grow their businesses.

With a pair of quality blogs that are updated weekly, Business.com provides invaluable information to small business owners looking to lead the way in their respective industries.

Why Does Your Company Blog in the First Place?

Business blogs are offered for a variety of reasons, most importantly, to reach out to consumers electronically and provide them with pertinent information in a real-time setting.

So, is your company using a blog to do just that or is your blog inadvertently hurting your SEO performance?

For too many small businesses, they do not effectively utilize their blogs, oftentimes having them prove more harm than good. For a company blog to be a useful tool, it has to provide several constant features.

Among those are:

  • Needs to be constantly updated with proven functionality and strong, fresh content;
  • Needs to be reader-friendly in that it is easy to surf, does not contain a lot of bells and whistles to hinder the viewer experience, and offers real-time interaction with both current and potential customers;
  • Needs to be part of a wider branding program that includes social media and public relations efforts;
  • Needs to encourage visitor feedback. Among the ways to do that is by installing a plugin tool that will highlight some of the top visitors to your blog. The more regular visitors you have to the company blog, the more likely they will pass the word on to their friends and family about your products and services;
  • Needs to provide fresh contact information. Too often when companies change employees, etc. the contact information on their Web sites (including blogs) are not updated. Your company will look like it is not on top of its game if it is not providing updated contact details. Also, having updated contact details allows your customers and those interested in becoming such easier access to your business;
  • Needs to offer powerful headlines with keywords that deliver statements or ask questions. The bottom line is doing so leads to grabbing the reader’s attention;
  • Lastly, if you have not already, you need to decide what exactly you are blogging for in the first place. Company blogs can provide valuable information to customers and/or can be used more for search engine optimization (SEO) purposes. Some businesses will blog often and utilize a large number of keywords tied to their specialty, with the reasoning behind this being attracting links to the company site to support search engine rankings.

When reading the continuously updated Business.com Blog and B2B Online Marketing Blog, small business owners are one step ahead of the competition.

At the end of the day, isn’t that what they most want?



Is Your Message or Lack Thereof Impacting Your ROI?


As any marketer can tell you, a positive return on investment (ROI) is crucial.

While getting and maintaining a positive ROI sounds like a simple task, not all online marketers are adept at going about it the right way, both when planning their business and once they’re fully involved in it.

For some online marketers, they make the process much more difficult than it should be, leaving those they work with and under on edge as to whether or not the company can keep pace at its current growth rate or will require cuts.

Leading the Way to Success

As an online marketer, the bottom line is to be heard by both current and potential customers in order to increase your company’s ROI.

There are several ways to do this, among which are five you can count on one hand:

  • Article marketing – With this approach, you author relatively short, informative articles tied to your industry for distribution and publication.  These articles will enhance the chances of garnering new clients, along with pinpointing you as an expert in your respective field. The articles should include linking words that will also direct search engines to your site and line of work. It is also important when submitting an article to request a profile page and at minimum one link to your site. Finally, share the article across various social media channels to your network of business contacts;
  • SEO - Search Engine Optimization can benefit your business by helping you construct terminology where you have a high Google ranking. In turn, individuals will see that you’re viewed as very credible in this industry by being ranked ahead of so many others. With online forums and articles, along with different content marketing initiatives, there are major SEO benefits to attain;
  • Blogging – When used correctly, this is a great road to travel down. A company blog is your opportunity to speak in first-person terms; talking directly to those clients you are attempting to get to buy your products and/or services. The main challenge here is keeping the blog continuously updated. If you have a blog that receives minimal attention on your end, you’re likely to have readers who become disinterested and go elsewhere for their information. The chances of losing sales by doing so greatly increase. An updated blog is also important in terms of search engines. From an online marketing stand point, be sure  to link to a submitted article from your blog, allowing you to tie everything together. Lastly, be sure to utilize sites like Facebook and Twitter to share and tweet your posts;
  • Online forums – By utilizing these sites, your company can be seen as a professional in your respective industry, along with being one that is engaged. You will want to use a signature box that will direct a link to your homepage. By doing so, you increase the odds of traffic, leading to more potential customers;
  • Social media – Last but not least, where does your company stand on social media? Utilizing sites like Twitter and Facebook just to name two, SM is a great venue to spread the word about your company’s offerings. Much like the above-mentioned blogging, the key here is staying engaged. If your small business employs a Facebook fan page for instance, it needs to be updated regularly. Other than time and effort, SM is essentially free and offers real-time conversations that current and potential customers will hopefully find productive. While you may not be up to speed on share buttons and hash tags, they can be two of your company’s best friends over time.

The bottom line is that when you tie all these items together, your expectations and chances for reaching the optimal ROI increase dramatically.

One way to potentially bring it all together is reviewing what Business.com has to offer. Pay-per-click advertising, pay-per-lead advertising, sponsorship advertising, pay-per download and directory advertising are very viable options for your company to enhance its chances of a successful ROI.

Photo credit: marketinghackz.com


Where We've Been: Recapping the Year and Looking Ahead


We are back! It’s been a few months since we’ve updated you on the latest and greatest in B2B online marketing, but we are proud to say that we are back for good. A lot of exciting changes have happened within Business.com and we look forward to sharing our insights with you as we grow and prosper under new management.

As you may know, in February 2011, Business.com was acquired by Resource Nation, one of the fastest growing B2B lead generation companies. As part of the acquisition, the management team was expanded to include experts from companies like eBay and Experian who bring unique perspectives and who live and breathe online marketing. Since the acquisition we have been focused on improving the site user experience while maintaining focus on delivering the highest quality leads to our advertisers. Business.com is where advertisers reach business buyers online at every stage of the purchasing cycle.

With our new site, we are delivering higher quality leads and more traffic to our advertisers and we have expanded the ways businesses can connect with decision makers at every stage of the buying cycle. Businesses now have the option to reach business buyers through our Pay-per-click, Pay-per-lead, Pay-per-download, Sponsorship and Directory Listing products. Check out our new site and comment here with your feedback: www.business.com


Reflecting on 2010 – The Year the Customer Became King


“I came. I saw. I conquered.”

Were Julius Caesar a B2B online marketer in 2010, his words may have more appropriately been:

 “I created. I shared. I conversed.”

Even five years ago, the concept of engaging the customer in dialogue, let alone allowing the customer to drive the conversation, would have been both foreign and frightening.

Today, marketers that are actively engaging their customers and their communities through social media and sharing relevant, meaningful content with them are leading the charge toward a new era of online marketing – an era in which the customer, not the brand, is King.   

And, no longer is a solid brand message and well articulated value proposition enough for our King. When it comes to learning more about our brands and products, our customers don’t just want a message, they want a conversation.

So, it comes as no surprise that 2010 would be the year of social media.  Would marketers in 2009 ever have imagined Facebook could surpass Google to become the most visited site in the US? Or, that a world of consumers and marketers alike could be so captivated by a man riding a horse, pitching Old Spice? Highly unlikely.

Indeed, creativity and innovation have reigned supreme in 2010 –easily evidenced in the overwhelming draw toward social media and immense push toward new and dynamic methods of on-demand customer engagement, including mobile, whose marketing budgets alone are expected to increase by 124% from 2010 to 2011.

Also expected to increase in 2011 are content marketing budgets, further evidence of the growing demand by customers to take the product information reigns from marketers and educate themselves through E-Newsletters, whitepapers, webinars, case studies and blogs.

If we take anything away from 2010, it should be this: Customers want brand interaction – they want to ask questions, to give their feedback and to gather their own information at their own pace.

And, as marketers, we should want customer interaction – by answering questions, listening to feedback and creating both educational and even entertaining content, we’re able to successfully capture customer attention and build an engaged and enthused customer base that is able to spread our brand messaging farther than we ever could on our own.

At Business.com, we’re particularly aware of the overwhelming participation and support that we’ve received from our customers over the past year, especially in the celebration of our 10th anniversary. We’re honored to be a part of such a sophisticated and engaged online marketing community.  

As 2010 draws to a close, one can’t help but acknowledge that, in spite of the hard economic times and lean marketing budgets, this year in online marketing was one of the most exciting, creative and dynamic years yet for B2B online marketers.

We can only hope you’ve had as much enjoyment engaging your clients in 2010 as we have, and we hope you look to them to help you write your success story for 2011 and beyond.

From all of us at Business.com, we wish you a very Happy Holidays and a healthy and prosperous New Year.