You’ve always suspected that your marketing content needs to be personalized to your buyers. Here’s proof that you’re right.

In our recent ITSMA social media survey, we asked if marketing is the catalyst for social media being used by others in the company (product development, HR, etc.). Sixty-eight percent of our respondents said yes.

New Visions for Marketing

Use the Metrics Board’s Web 2.0 marketing maturity assessment tool to see where you stand compared to your peers.

In ITSMA’s recent social media survey, a paltry 16% of respondents say that they have a good understanding of their target audience’s social media behavior. Additionally, only about 26% are currently researching their target audience’s usage of social media to discover where they hang out.

Social media tools expand the possibilities of competitive intelligence by driving collaboration. XGS used social media tools and principles to create Competipedia, a wiki-based tool where salespeople can go to find and share competitive intelligence.

If we’re going to turn marketing into a content engine, we must support it with an automated, closed-loop process for tracking where all that content goes. If we don’t have an analytics strategy, we’ll never be able to make the connection between business strategy and increased sales.

Back in February, we held an ITSMA Inner Circle meeting in London where some of our European services marketing members revealed their progress (and, occasionally, lack thereof) in social media.

Marketers need to do more research on their target audiences if they hope to be successful with social media in 2010.

We’re analyzing the results of our recent social media survey as we prepare for this month’s series of ITSMA briefings on social media. Working with our sponsor, social media consultancy Digital Influence Group, we’ll focus on two major themes: integrating social media with your overall marketing strategy and “activating” your marketing content with buyers and C-level executives through social media. We feel passionately about these two issues because we think there’s a danger of creating content-poor social media silos in our marketing organizations.

Bev Burgess, longtime authority on services marketing and the former managing director of ITSMA Europe, with her co-author Laurie Young who teaches on the executive education programme at Wharton, ask a compelling question: Why don’t we apply the same level of effort and rigor in developing services as we do to products?

Last month, we urged you to start thinking about transforming your marketing organization. This month, we wrote a report outlining the three steps in this transformation in detail. One of the elements of the transformation is lead management. If we’re going to transform marketing into a content engine, we need to support it with an automated, closed-loop process for tracking where all that content goes.

Our research shows that marketers are beginning to tackle some of the key areas of transformation in 2010.

Marketing budgets as a percentage of revenue are at an all-time low. We can’t spend another year doing more with less. We can’t continue waiting for good times to return so that we can go back to what we used to do. If marketing is to maintain relevance, we must transform. Read on to download a free PDF summary of the research and the strategic changes you need to make in 2010.

There is only one objective in social media and it is common across all companies—even across the infamous divide between B2B and B2C: Create learning networks.

Not only is developing new and more targeted thought leadership one of marketers’ top priorities for 2010, but it is also becoming more important to their marketing strategy.

We’re prepared to bet on the growth of these five trends in 2010. We’ll be discussing these and other ideas at our online briefing on January 26, New Routes to Marketing Innovation: ITSMA’s 2010 State of the Profession Address.

The goal of the effort was simple: Win bigger deals more often by focusing on the most important opportunities and by building longer-term relationships with a target group of 30–40 companies.

Looking back on services revenues for the past decade, we see a mirror image of the trends that occurred in the marketing function: a drastic drop at the beginning of the decade, followed by a gradual – though limited – recovery through 2006.

To fulfill an ever-increasing demand for marketing content, you need a process. The magazine publishing process is a good model because relevance to readers is the primary measure of its success.

In ITSMA’s recent survey, Sales Enablement Practices and Trends: Increasing Marketing’s Impact, we found that marketing and sales not only don’t share the same metrics, they don’t even understand each other’s goals and metrics. We have an answer for that: shared leadership.

In terms of budget priorities in 2010, our recent ‘Market Pulse’ survey found some big winners and some big losers. Marketers who come out ahead will be those who go against the grain and invest in areas where their competitors aren’t investing. Here are some opportunities.

Despite a difficult economy, IT buyers are focused on innovation and globalization, according to ITSMA’s 2009 How Customers Choose Survey. Marketers need to be ready with trend- and idea-based thought leadership to stand apart from competitors when the recovery begins.

How should marketers position themselves for the recovery? We offered five imperatives for marketing during our Annual Marketing Conference in Boston, October 27-28.

When Lawson, an enterprise software company, was considering making major changes to its support offerings in 2007, the company’s executives knew they could not afford to make decisions based on what competitors were doing or on anecdotal evidence from customers and employees. Lawson needed reliable, objective research and a method for converting that research into insight and action.