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For a long time now, the utopia for online dis­play adver­tis­ing has been to be as tar­geted and as cost-effective as search adver­tis­ing in order to claw back adver­tis­ing dol­lars. The jour­ney has been slow, ad net­works ini­tially helped scale online dis­play adver­tis­ing and pro­vided lay­ers of tar­get­ing tech­nolo­gies to make the cam­paigns more effec­tive. How­ever, pric­ing was based on arti­fi­cial flat fees and seg­ments that had been pre-set within the lim­its of indi­vid­ual ad net­works.

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Mar­ket­ing automa­tion is a pow­er­ful weapon in the mod­ern marketer’s armoury. It offers the abil­ity to tai­lor your approach far more accu­rately than ever before. It can deliver mod­els for suc­cess that can be repli­cated and applied to new and exist­ing cus­tomers. And it can make you more respon­sive to cus­tomer needs.

But how can you get more from your mar­ket­ing automa­tion efforts?

Here are five areas to take a look at:

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Image cour­tesy of http://www.adpulp.com/gamification_se/

There is a grow­ing opin­ion in the dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing com­mu­nity that the con­struc­tion of the social layer of the web is now com­plete, espe­cially with the dom­i­nance of Face­book. The next phase will move from estab­lish­ing social con­nec­tions to the devel­op­ment of game dynam­ics that encour­age long-term brand engage­ment and loyalty.

It’s cer­tainly easy to see how game the­ory has already been applied in con­sumer mar­ket­ing e.g. building-up points on FourSquare to get a free cof­fee at Star­bucks. But, the big ques­tion is how will it work for B2B?

Win­ning new busi­ness is always tough (and get­ting tougher). All that work, all that effort for the pitch, and you finally win! Then the work begins for real and it all becomes a blur of dead­lines, deliv­er­ables and more long nights.

And there’s no praise if you fal­ter in your tracks, fail to deliver and find your new client head­ing back to his pre­vi­ous agency or to the close run num­ber two… who said life was ever meant to be easy?

Win­ning is impor­tant but keep­ing a client happy over a sus­tained period of time is much more demand­ing and, unlike pitch­ing, con­ducted in the real world of blood, sweat and tears.

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I was speak­ing at a B2B mar­ket­ing event the other day about mobile. For many of us it’s a very hot topic. What amazed me at the event, how­ever, was how few peo­ple in the room are actively con­sid­er­ing mobile mar­ket­ing for their organ­i­sa­tions. And, more impor­tantly, how mobile could form an inte­gral part of their cus­tomer engage­ment strat­egy. For me the biggest prob­lem seems to be a per­cep­tion gap between what mar­keters think and the actual mobile usage amongst their B2B tar­get audi­ences.

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We held another suc­cess­ful Hud­dle over at the Ban­ner offices yes­ter­day. The sub­ject was all things mobile. And, over the course of the next few blog posts, I’ll be tak­ing you through some of the insights from the var­i­ous speak­ers who gen­er­ously gave their time to make the after­noon such a suc­cess:

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• Simon Sil­vester – EVP Head of Plan­ning, Y&R EMEA
• Christina Carstensen – Direc­tor of Mobile Strat­egy, IDG
• Matt Findel-Hawkins – Sales Direc­tor, Nikkei BP Europe
• Mark Challi­nor – Direc­tor of Mobile, Tele­graph Media Group

There are many, many cus­tomer seg­men­ta­tions in the world of mar­ket­ing. Typ­i­cally, these involve a chunk of research to deter­mine a set of buyer arche­types. These are often then given names such as ‘big man on cam­pus’, ‘harassed MD’ and ‘dig­i­tal refusenik’.

As an approach, they can be pretty help­ful. They pro­vide a short­hand way of look­ing at an audi­ence – one which enables us to form more tar­geted strate­gies that speak to the real needs of our key targets.

The prob­lem, how­ever, is that typ­i­cally they are sim­ply made up.

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Money is tight. Bud­gets are squeezed. You sim­ply don’t have the resources to do every­thing. It’s deci­sion time: do you spend what you have on grow­ing the brand or on gen­er­at­ing demand and hit­ting the num­bers? If you are like two-thirds of the atten­dees at one recent B2B event, you’ll have cho­sen brand. If on the other hand you are in the grip of the bean coun­ters, you’ll have opted for demand.

But here’s the rub: whichever you chose, you chose wrong.

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Ever since we held the last (and first) Euro­pean Demand Gen­er­a­tion Sum­mit at Alti­tude last Novem­ber, we’ve had a thirst to do it all over again.

As part of the feed­back process on the last event, we asked what peo­ple thought of the day, the con­tent and speak­ers. We also asked what changes they’d like to see in the for­mat of the event in the future and what top­ics they’d like to see cov­ered.

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IDC has made a new report avail­able on Slideshare: Sell­ing in 2009: 10 Ways to find, Win and Keep the Money (embed­ded below). It takes a long hard look at the year ahead and what it means for IT com­pa­nies want­ing to sur­vive and thrive in the year ahead. It is pre­dom­i­nantly US-based but many of the rec­om­men­da­tions are just as valid in Europe (though the tim­ing may be out by six months or so).

While it gives a slightly mixed pic­ture of just what tech com­pa­nies are up against, there are some clear take-outs for sales and mar­ket­ing peo­ple. It makes some pretty plau­si­ble, pretty harsh pre­dic­tions, includ­ing:

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