For the next few posts I will give you ideas on how to use your marketing dollars more effectively.  I know that’s a bold claim, but take a moment to read these tips, consider them carefully, and then make up your own mind.

Here’s smart way #1 – don’t spend any more money on marketing.  I know that might sound heretical to some who make a living selling solutions, but they will also agree that there are some things that you must do before you spend any money on marketing.  Here are three things to have in place before you start spending money on marketing.

• Have a Sound Value Proposition. Not one full of buzz-word-bingo language.  You know what I’m talking about, you see them all the time and they all start sounding the same – blah, blah, blah.  Instead, survey some of your customers and find out how they describe your company and your products or services.  Develop a Value Proposition that clearly states your value in the customer’s language.  A good resource for some tools you can use in this process is Product 180.
• Develop a Buyer Profile, sometimes called a Buyer Persona. Review the customer data you have for your past customers.  Talk to your sales and customer service people about which customers are the ones that they would like to have more of.  Sort out the common characteristics of those customers – company size, what level makes the buying decision, locations, industries, vertical markets, etc.  Then go to the next level.  Do something really weird, talk to your customers.  Find out what problems you solved for them (in their own words).  What media do they use to search for answers to their problems?  What are their goals?  What images and multimedia appeals to them?  A buyer profile should be a short biography of your typical customer.  For more help with this start with the Buyer Persona Blog by Adele Revella.
• Your Marketing Plan. Now you are ready to start putting together your marketing plan.  Your plan should address how you are going to reach your Buyer Persona with your Value Proposition.  Your research of your Buyer Persona should give you very good ideas as to what channels you will need to use.  Beware of the “shiny new toy” syndrome.  It all depends on where your potential buyers hang out.

Once you have done these steps, now you are ready to start spending your marketing budget.  The above steps will give you a tremendous advantage in allocating those dollars effectively.

Coming up next:  The next smart way to spend your marketing dollars and time.  You do remember that time is a cost too, right?

About the BtoBblogger: Phil Lauterjung is President of Integrated LeadGen Results, providing strategies and tactics for small and medium size businesses to get found, get leads, and get sales. With over 20 years (12 in senior management) of sales & marketing experience helping both small companies and Fortune 500 increase sales, Phil is adept at implementing social media tools with a Certified Inbound Marketing Professional designation, and a member of the Sales Lead Management Association. Phil’s is a regular contributor to BtoBbloggers.com and also can be found on his blog; Conversations Re: Sales | Marketing | Social Media | Etc.

With a lingering recession, the U.S. unemployment rate still near 10%, and uncertain prospects for a quick recovery, marketers need to keep two things in mind. First, that it’s important to continue investing in marketing through the downturn. And second, that funds will be limited and must be spent very carefully. So how should your prioritize spending for next year?

1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – this is the ultimate no-brainer. Virtually every b2b buying decision involves some level of research on the web. Based on my own anecdotal research, natural search typically drives at least 40% and average more than half of all unpaid traffic to b2b websites. Buyers won’t buy from you if they can’t find you. Create helpful and link-worthy content, optimize your pages, and get other sites linking to yours in order to improve your site’s position in the search engines. There are lots of excellent articles on SEO that provide guidance and tips. If you don’t have in-house SEO resources, hire an agency or consultant, but either way, make SEO an ongoing priority.

2. Social Media – according to a study early this year by Forrester Research, 91% of technology b2b decision makers use social media in some form (blogs, video, customer reviews, social networking sites, Twitter, etc.). ROI may take time, and can be challenging to measure accurately, but your prospects are using these sites and talking about your industry, your competitors, quite possibly even your company. You can’t afford not to be part of that conversation. What’s more, social media supports SEO and even branding activities.

Start by listening to the conversations already happening, using a social media monitoring tool like Radian6 or Techrigy SM2. Keep up with the leading b2b bloggers by subscribing to the B2B Marketing Zone and regularly visiting this new site, B2Bbloggers.com. Get your company listed with b2b-focused social media site FYIndOut.com, and encourage your best customers to contribute reviews. Create content on a blog or produce videos, and promote using Digg, Twitter, and other social bookmarking and social networking sites.

3. It Depends – do you absolutely, positively need leads NOW or can you take advantage of the downturn to build your brand for the longer term? If you need immediate opportunities, search engine marketing (SEM) programs such as Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing provide a competitive ROI, make it easy to control spending, and can start generating results as soon as they’re flipped live. However, they are as “instant off” as they are “instant on”—the moment you pause or delete a campaign, the lead flow stops. These programs provide very little if any lasting branding benefit.

Public relations (PR) is pretty much the opposite—it produces limited immediate and direct results, but builds your brand in the eyes of prospects, the media, analysts and other influencers over the long term.

Ideally, do both.

So how do these different activities affect your visibility on the web? Consider the two broad categories of search types, “generic” searches (e.g. facilities management software) and branded searches (e.g. Acme Software Inc.).

For generic term searches, SEO helps get your site in the top results. Social media and PR support this by providing both more links to your website and more places, other than your site, where information about your company and products can be found. SEM gets you on the front page for any keywords you bid on, but only in the paid search results.

For branded searches, you shouldn’t need SEO or SEM—unless your site is truly horribly coded, it should show up well anyway. But this is where social media activities and PR can really help, because they can increase brand awareness and image leading to more searches for your branded terms.

The bottom line is that it’s critical to continue marketing through economic downturns. Online visibility, lead generation and brand-building are all important. By carefully spending scarce marketing funds on the activities above, you can continue generating leads in the short term while building brand equity for the long term, even in the midst of a stubborn recession.

About the BtoBblogger: Tom Pick is an online marketing executive with KC Associates (http://www.kc-associates.com), a marketing and PR firm in Minneapolis, Minnesota, focused on b2b technology clients. He helps clients improve business results through search engine optimization (SEO), search marketing, interactive PR and social media programs. Tom also writes the award-winning WebMarketCentral blog (http://webmarketcentral.blogspot.com), a blog about B2B lead generation, social media, interactive PR, SEO and search engine marketing.

However, those with a business to run still have to develop a plan for 2010 – if you haven’t already done so. To get your businesses to grow you will need more sales (altogether now – duh!?!), and to get more sales you will need more leads (double duh). So, how should you spend your lead generation budget in 2010 to do that? Over the next few posts we will offer some ideas.

First, let’s clarify lead generation. Wikipedia defines it as “Lead generation (commonly abbreviated as lead-gen) is a marketing term that refers to the creation or generation of prospective consumer interest or inquiry into a business’ products or services. Leads can be generated for a variety of purposes – list building, e-newsletter list acquisition or for winning customers.” I would submit one change to that definition, the only purpose for lead gen is to acquire customers. The other purposes they list are the tools to assist in the acquisition.

I would also submit that the main purpose of marketing is to support and facilitate the company’s efforts in the acquisition of new customers. There are numerous terms that marketing folks use, but the ultimate goal, regardless of terms used, is to grow the business.

One question that frequently comes up, especially with small businesses, is how much do we spend on marketing? The typical evasive answer is that it depends. However, a good rule of thumb is somewhere between 3% – 7% of sales revenue – depending on your industry. For those that want to nail it down closer, check with your industry trade organizations for added guidance.

In the next few posts in this series we will give you some smart ways to spend your lead generation budget in 2010. In the meantime, here is some food for thought in terms of trends from a MarketingSherpa study done a couple of months ago.

The survey was conducted in May 2009 and there were 1,491 responses. They tracked the change in information resources used by buyers in complex purchases (mainly B2B). The ones with increased usage between 24 – 30% were virtual events/virtual tradeshows and search engines (30%), business news websites (29%), vendor websites (28%), online research (25%), and technology B2B websites along with social media sites (24%).

The resources with decreasing usage included tradeshows/face-to-face events (down 37%) and print advertising (-18%). How do these numbers compare with your business?

If you have the data available for your own spending over the past couple of years it might be a good idea to check it against what some of your peers and competitors are doing based on the MarketingSherpa data.

Coming up in my next post, I’ll introduce the first of three Effective Strategies To Help Your 2010 Lead Generation Efforts.

About the BtoBblogger: Phil Lauterjung is President of Integrated LeadGen Results, providing strategies and tactics for small and medium size businesses to get found, get leads, and get sales. With over 20 years (12 in senior management) of sales & marketing experience helping both small companies and Fortune 500 increase sales, Phil is adept at implementing social media tools with a Certified Inbound Marketing Professional designation, and a member of the Sales Lead Management Association. Phil’s is a regular contributor to BtoBbloggers.com and also can be found on his blog;  Conversations Re: Sales | Marketing | Social Media | Etc.