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In spite of a challenging economy, one-third of B-to-B marketers plan to increase their budgets in 2009, while only 25 percent plan budget cuts. That is the surprising findings of BtoB Magazine’s 2009 Marketing Priorities and Plans survey. Among all B-to-B companies, the areas earmarked for increases by the largest number of marketers included:

• Email (68.3%)
• Online marketing (66.5%)
• Website work (66.3%)
• Search (50.0%)
• Video (46.6%)
• Social media (46.6%)
• Webcasting (42.9%)

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Laura Ramos, a B2B marketing analyst at Forrester, has had a three-part blog series over the last several weeks that provides sound recommendations for improving B2B marketing:

Will B2B Marketing Become Obsolete? (Part I)
Will B2B Marketing Become Obsolete? (Part II)
Will B2B Marketing Become Obsolete? (Part III)

After reading the posts above, I came away with five key takeaways from her series:

1) Anybody in B2B marketing today who isn’t empowering their efforts with the technologies mostly associated with new media is on a sinking ship. As Ramos said,"technology will be a key element (but not if applied indiscriminately) to help marketing and sales shift from obnoxious bullhorn to respectful partner.”
2) Marketers have to switch from a telling mode (cranking ads out the door left and right) to a listening mode (marketing enabled by feedback from the social groundswell). Only by listening to that social groundswell and analyzing interaction data and dashboards will marketers be able to construct marketing methods that work.

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Marketers and marketing firms are accustomed to categorizing the world of commerce into business-to-consumer (B-to-C or B2C) or business-to-business (B-to-B or B2B). All of this neatly assumes that the marketer is the sender of the brand message to a specific audience. It also assumes you can classify individuals into a giant segment of spenders called consumers.

This is old world, mass-media, marketer-in-control thinking. Today, a good portion of brand communication goes on at the individual-to-individual (I-to-I) level. Smart companies know this, but there still remains a substantial amount of marketing rooted in the antiquated command-and-control style.

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There has been a sizable shift to an online marketing emphasis in many company budgets in the last several years, and according to results of a new study from B-to-B Magazine (2008 Marketing Priorities and Plans), that shift is continuing unabated. The B-to-B world is rapidly reorganizing around a webcentric nucleus because that model still has all the advantages of the old analog world of marketing, along with a host of advantages that can only be realized in a “digitally-remastered” new marketing universe.

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According to a story at BtoB Magazine, overall B2B spending in the first half of 2006 was up a total of 1.6 percent over the previous year’s figures. It was up 3 percent among the top 100 B2B advertisers.

Similar to recently released B2C figures for 2007, most of the growth in B2B advertising is directed at the Internet (up 21.4 percent among the top 100 B2B advertisers).

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