If you’re a B2B marketer, just about everything you do now falls under the umbrella of ‘digital marketing’. Your marketing strategies have evolved into digital marketing strategies, which in turn guide your digital marketing plan. And in today’s world, you’ve got to have a great inbound strategy to reach your prospects – and you’d better be optimized for mobile, because that’s where and how your targets are searching.

Want to know more about the pros and cons of marketing automation for B2B? Read our marketing automation FAQs to learn more.

The days of the email blast are over. Once one of the key tools in the B2B marketer’s toolkit, the general email blast has, thanks to marketing automation, gone the way of the fax machine. It’s been replaced by customized and personalized interactions, tailored directly to your prospects’ information needs and buying stage – and presumably delivering more valuable leads than any generated through an email blast approach.

There’s a big difference between content publishing and content marketing. Content publishing is more or less just putting content up on your website or social media channels, and hoping it will be of interest to somebody. The goal of content marketing, on the other hand, is to get your prospects to do something, to alter their behavior as it relates to your company and product.

If your business identity is the “personality” of your organization, your visual identity is the graphic dimension that communicates that personality to your audiences. And if there’s a mismatch between your visual identity and your brand or business, your customers and prospects may feel a subtle sense of discord – and possibly even confusion.

Why is a strong brand one of the most valuable assets that your organization can possess? Because purchasers are willing to pay a premium for a known quantity. Visual branding is everything for consumer products, or B2C – just consider Coke vs. Pepsi. There isn’t much of a difference between these products, but consumers tend to align fiercely with one or the other.

Are today’s B2B customers empowered? Or are they overwhelmed? For the purchasers of complex solutions, such as enterprise software applications, high-end industrial equipment, or medical technology, information overload can bog down even the most enthusiastic prospect, even at the beginning of their customer journey.

Why is it so hard to measure ROI for B2B marketing activities? Because it is hard – B2B marketing is complex, it involves multiple parts of your organization, and it takes place over a long period of time. In comparison, measuring return on investment for B2C marketing initiatives is easy. You run an ad, you observe the impact on sales. Or you monitor the path from first contact with your website to an online order. It’s a simple action/reaction model, with the measurement metric built right in.

You did everything right when you launched your customer reference program – you ensured that you had buy-in from sales, you held a high-profile launch event and you developed a clear, comprehensive process to manage all related project flow.