The 4 steps
Any (b2b) marketing campaign can be broken down in 4 steps:
1. Intelligence: know your market, industry, technology, target audience. Based on this, you can define goals for your campaign.
2. Develop a campaign kit: develop marketing collateral in the broad sense - brochures, flyers, but increasingly blogs, eBooks, flash animations, webcasts, ...
3. Communicate: deliver your message to the most appropriate channels for your target audience.
4. Measure impact: the return on investment of your campaign
This lens provides an overview of tools of trade available for these steps in 4 themes.
Your comments on missing tools are welcome via our guestbook.
A word of warning: be selective in the tools you use and the communities you participate in! But finding the right tools to invest time can be a challenge.
Latest changes
November 2007: small edits throughout the lens.
August 2007: Updating list of 'greatest business books'.
July 2007: Removing reddit.com from the social bookmarking list. It seems to have evolved into a bookmarking tool for politics & weird stuff. Not very relevant for marketing any more.
Adding Junta42.com as intelligence tool. It's a good mix of automatic search, harvesting user intelligence and moderation.
August 2007: Updating list of 'greatest business books'.
July 2007: Removing reddit.com from the social bookmarking list. It seems to have evolved into a bookmarking tool for politics & weird stuff. Not very relevant for marketing any more.
Adding Junta42.com as intelligence tool. It's a good mix of automatic search, harvesting user intelligence and moderation.
B2B Marketing Blog
By and for practitioners
Fetching RSS feed... please stand byTheme 1 - intelligence tools
- einnews
- a service for global professionals
- google scholar
- google's engine for science
- highbeam
- massive amounts of relatively low quality information
- sciencedirect
- Elsevier's knowledge portal of 8 million scientific papers
- slate
- daily webmagazine with strong editorials
- knowledgestorm
- reach, search, results
- junta42
- Junta42 is an expert and user-generated search engine about content marketing. You can search by category or type in a keyword and promote the articles you like!
- Marketing Profs
- Resources for marketing professionals. Online community.
Theme 1 - search
- report - different engines, different results
- 88% of search results are unique to a single engine!
- findory
- you read, we learn and personalise
Theme 2 - communication tools
- 3D sites: see for example www.expo3d.com - 3 dimensional websites where you select your avatar, and walk around as a person in a virtual environment, meeting and interacting with peers
- eBooks: this can be a downloadable pdf file with the layout of a brochure, or more appropriately a set of web pages, hierarchically organised into chapters and sections, with a navigation structure; eBooks make great landing pages
- flash animations: these can be custom developments in flash. There are also many tools to automatically convert Powerpoint presentations to flash. Or the Articulate suite allows to create a quiz, a how-to guide or other animations from predefined templates
- quiz: a good tool to make visitors realise a knowledge gap. Can be used in combination with a white paper as follow-up
- webcasts: narrated presentations that can be viewed on-line 24/7. Make sure the webcast can be navigated well, so that users can repeat or skip slides
- white papers: a briefing paper with the aim to persuade can be one of your most powerful marketing tools. More information
Theme 2 - Content Management Systems
- drupal
- An open-source content management platform that is so much more than a blogging tool
- Movable Type
- Another premier open-source blogging platform
- ning
- A halfway house between a hosted (e.g. blogger) and a dedicated blog solution (e.g. drupal, wordpress, ...)
- TypePad
- Another premier blogging platform (not open-source)
- WordPress
- An open-source blogging platform that literally installs in minutes, and comes with all the plugins needed
- Edublogs
- Edublogs was started on the 31st of July 2005 in Melbourne, Australia. The site began as the product of several months of serious tweaking of the then pre-alpha WordPress MultiUser (WPMU) code by James Farmer. In fact, edublogs was one of the first WPMU sites, pre-dating even the now ubiquitous WordPress.com.
Theme 3 - social bookmarking
- the ultimate list of social bookmarking sites
- 150 SB sites listed and counting
- addthis
- all-in-one social bookmarking button
- onlywire
- all-in-one bookmarklet
- beetoobee
- social bookmarking for b2b
- blinklist
- just a good old solid bookmarking site
- care2.com
- social bookmarking for environmental, humanitarian and social causes
- citeulike
- scientific references
- del.icio.us
- no introduction needed - more useful as an alternative to your 'favourites' folder than as a marketing tool
- digg.com
- no introduction needed - the right place to be if you're focussing on (internet) technology
- shaz.am
- interesting concept - insufficiently targeted for b2b - use it if you want to offer your users some knowledge-broadening links while not minding some off-topic links
- slashdot
- stuff that matters
- simpy
- intelligent social bookmarking
- netscape
- new netscape's social bookmarking & community building application rocks!
- yahoo myweb
- Yahoo's tool for bookmarking and blogsearch; includes community building. Can be a great choice if you use other services from Yahoo to build up your web presence
- newsvine
- news community
- connotea
- reference management for scientists
Theme 3 - blog promotion
- answers
- Answers.com is an advertising-supported, free website.
- blogexplosion
- explode your blog traffic
- blogflux
- one-stop site for blogging tools
- blogpulse
- BlogPulse is an automated trend discovery system for blogs.
- blogscholar
- Academic blogging portal
- blogsearch
- Google's blogsearch
- connotea
- reference management for scientists
- dmoz
- open directory project
- feedburner
- one-stop site for blogging tools
- findory
- you read, we learn and personalise
- icerocket
- every search is a direct hit
- industry-blogs
- the serious side of blogging
- photarium
- Photarium is a directory of blogs sorted using tags submitted by bloggers
- pingomatic
- Ping-O-Matic is a service to update different search engines that your blog has updated
- scienceport
- scientific newsfeed directory
- blogcritics
- a sinister cabal of superior writers
- technorati
- currently tracking 86.1 million blogs and over 250 million pieces of tagged social media
- mybloglog
- intriguing commuity-based blog promotion
Theme 3 - email marketing
- constant contact
- solid hosted email marketing solution
- newsweaver
- hosted email marketing solution for complex newsletters
- phplist
- open-source list building & newsletter manager
- aweber
- Located in Newtown, PA AWeber Communications develops and manages online opt-in email newsletters, follow-up automation, and email deliverability services for small business customers around the world. Customers access our website 24/7 to manage and send their newsletters to recipients who have specifically opted in on their website to receive that information.
- feedblitz
- Automating the email newsletter publication, delivery and subscription processes, FeedBlitz simplifies newsletter generation, delivery and operations. Not only can you save time and money, now FeedBlitz enables you to earn money from your mailing lists with our unique, opt-in email ad network.
Theme 3 - personal profiling
- Facebook is a social utility that connects people with friends and others who work, study and live around them
- LinkedIn is an online network of more than 11 million experienced professionals from around the world
- XING makes your professional network an active part of your life.
Theme 4 - 50 marketing metrics
The ultimate guide.
Marketing Metrics: 50+ Metrics Every Executive Should Master
Amazon Price: $26.39 (as of 10/11/2008)
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All time greatest business books
A personal pick in random order to start. Vote them up, down, or add your own.
The 4-Hour work Week: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich by Timothy Ferris
Tim Ferriss is an extraordinary young man on a mis more...0 points
