Is your primary B2B marketing goal to drive sales? Probably – but unless you define it more specifically, it may be hard to achieve. Eighty-five percent of B2B marketers cite lead generation as their most critical marketing goal. But to choose the goals that are most relevant for your organization – whether it’s B2B lead generation, closing sales, or improving customer satisfaction - you need to start from an in-depth understanding of your organization and the environment in which you’re operating.

If you’re a B2B marketer, you already know the most important thing about setting goals – it looks easy but it’s really quite hard. Anyone can toss out a random number – for leads, sales, website visitors, followers or any other metric – but unless it’s based on relevant, specific information, it’s just that – a random number.

You’ve launched your customer reference program, and created several reference cases – now how do you measure the results? Just like all your other initiatives, you need to be able to measure the return on your marketing investment. There are many different measures that you can use to gauge the impact of your customer reference program (CRP). Here are a few examples:

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.

Customer reference programs are one of the most powerful tools in the B2B marketing toolkit. Whether you call them success stories, testimonials, reference stories, or advocate marketing, these profiles of your customers and their experiences with your company and product are extremely influential.

Unlike in secondary school, likes on your B2B Facebook page aren’t just about how popular you are. Instead, they’re a key metric in your Facebook marketing strategy. When somebody likes your B2B Facebook page, they’re initiating a relationship with your company and signaling an interest in doing business with you. So how do you keep increasing your Facebook likes and strengthen your engagement?

Do you blog? Many B2B marketers consider blogs the most important form of content that they produce, and a key element in social media for business. In a survey of 5,000+ marketing professionals across the US, UK and Canada, researchers found that 49% of B2B marketers responsible for social media strategy described blogs as the most critical format they use to reach audiences – ranking blogs higher than podcasts, video, live video or other visuals.

When you’re developing a B2B social media marketing plan, there are a few golden rules to remember. These rules of social media marketing aren’t carved in stone, but they provide some good suggestions for how to do social media marketing. There are also some differences when it comes to social media rules for business vs. B2C. (And if you want to learn more, you can download a checklist on Content Marketing Best Practices, for 5 easy-to-implement B2B content marketing tips, at the end of this page.)

If you’re a B2B marketer, chances are you’re churning out a lot of content. “Content is king,” you might be muttering, as you compile stacks of blog posts, white papers, case studies, and more. But in the rush to keep the fresh content coming, you may be making some common mistakes. We’ve put together a list of “what not to do with online content marketing,” to highlight the 5 most common digital marketing failures that we see in B2B content marketing.