Looking across the top trends that emerged at ITSMA‘s 2007 Annual Marketing Conference, the dominant theme is clear: B2B services marketers must engage customers on new terms, as participants in conversation and as keen observers and interpreters of customer interests. However, marketers must tread a fine line: They must continue experimenting with unproven new means of engaging with customers while addressing increasing pressure to demonstrate clear payback from marketing.

This Update offers evidence that measuring the return on marketing activities leads to better resource allocation, which in turn leads to improved results. However, the real trick is to move beyond simple historical measurement and begin doing predictive analysis.

Meanwhile, ITSMA research shows that marketers who identify themselves as having a significant impact on the business are experimenting much more with online tactics such as social networks and Webinars than marketers who say they are having limited impact on the business. The dominant form of online communication today is conversation. Whether in real time through instant messaging, in aggregated form through blogs and social networks like Facebook, or in that old standby, email, customers are conversing more than ever. The recommendations these participants make—and the arrows they sling—are the latest iteration of an age-old phenomenon: word of mouth (WOM).

However, beneath the handful of big aggregator sites that attract millions of people, such as Google, Yahoo, and Facebook, are thousands of sites that attract a much smaller but fiercely loyal audience. They are sites that focus on narrow special interests, such as stamp collecting, quilting, or dog breeding—or, in the B2B world, security for procurement transactions, for example. For marketers hoping to reach members of these focused communities, demographics are irrelevant; what matters is discovering the behavior and interests of these people

The focus of B2B communities should be narrow enough that topics of common interest are reasonably obvious. Discovering and researching issues that are important to customers—and creating managed discussions around those issues—is a good way to have maximal marketing impact on a limited budget.

For example, Indian outsourcing and consulting company Infosys developed points of view about four emerging trends in global business: the growing impact of emerging economies like India and China, demographic shifts in age and working populations around the world, technology ubiquity, and increased regulations. It then created multiple public and private hosted forums, both online and offline, and invited top influencers to participate.