- LinkedIn and Facebook are the “platform” sites for social media marketing for b-to-b companies. Twitter follows as a close third.

- When the question is changed to “what’s the one MOST IMPORTANT method used,” blogging rises to the #3 ranking (followed by LinkedIn and Facebook). Blogging assumes an even higher priority among tech companies than b-to-b companies as a whole.

- Branding, website traffic and the promotion of products or events are currently the three most common uses of social media marketing. The main metric that marketers look for in gauging the performance of a social campaign is website traffic.

- YouTube reached “effectiveness” faster than any other social media channel. Forty-two percent of marketers using YouTube said it achieved effectiveness within a quick two- to six-month period.

A side note from another piece of research: we’re all getting older, and that includes the people using Facebook. A Pew Research report shows the average age of a Facebook user is now 38 years, and half are 35 and older. Fifty-six percent are female. Teens and young adults concerned about being friended or followed by parents have every right to be worried! (Facebook is now up to 750 million users, rapidly approaching the billion-user mark.)

Now that CEOs are typically in their 40s and early 50s, they grew up as a PC generation of executives familiar with search tools and the web as part of their information-gathering process. And while executives under 40 are most likely to use online tools, it’s not limited to that age cohort. In fact, the study showed that six out of ten executives are conducting more than six searches a day for information.

Significantly, while delegating research may be part of the stereotype, it is not the reality. More than half of C-level respondents said they prefer to locate information themselves, making them more self-sufficient in their information gathering than non-C-suite executives.

The study described CEOs as belonging to one of three digital generations: Generation Wang, Generation PC and Generation Netscape. And beginning with Generation PC, those who began their working careers during the mid-1980s, they’re online all the time, with 81% accessing the Internet on a daily basis. And those executives under 50 years old are 3 times more likely to access information from videos, a mobile device, or an online professional community.

Would spending in those areas return? Many were prepared to yet again write off traditional marketing channels as no longer relevant, that they would not return to be valued by customers in how they learn about products. Yet Goldstein Group research across a variety of clients are beginning to show that customers are relying on both digital and face-to-face methods of communication – particularly word of mouth and trade shows – as important elements of the buying process.

Even further, segmenting the data by age group is showing remarkably little difference in how customers find information about new products – and in what information sources they define as “most credible.”

One interesting side note is that social media appears at the bottom for every client survey we’ve done to date for “most credible” information channels. But there’s an interesting nugget in the data: for a small group, about 7% of respondents, they’re identifying social media as their single most credible method of learning about new companies and products. It’s a channel that clearly is in the early adopter stage, but one that marketers clearly shouldn’t neglect.

+1. The +1 button is shorthand for “this is pretty cool” or “you should check this out.” Click +1 to publicly give something your stamp of approval. Your +1s can help friends, contacts, and others on the web find the best stuff when they search. And it’s easy to add the code to your site. To see +1s, you have to have created a Google Profile for yourself. Click here to learn more.

Sitelink extensions. These are additional links within your paid search ad that allow a user to click once to go to a specific page on your website. These links might allow someone to request a handbook or go directly to the “Contact Us” page. Sitelinks help get the user closer to a conversion in fewer steps.

Remarketing. Remarketing allows you to show ads to users who’ve previously visited your website as they browse the Web and visit OTHER SITES! When you use remarketing, you’ll tag pages of your site that correspond to certain categories you want to promote. For example, you could add a tag on all of your site’s pages where you sell a particular product. You can then create an AdWords campaign to show highly relevant messages (such as ads displaying a special offer on that product category) to people who’ve visited these pages as they browse sites across the Google Display Network. Remarketing allows us to match the right people with the right message even when they’ve left your site. When you combine your keyword campaigns with remarketing, you might see higher conversions for your campaigns overall.

Google Places. One out of five searches on Google are related to location, so it’s important for storefront businesses and professional service firms to use free Google Places to show up at the top of the first page. Your competitors in many cases are already there! When optimized correctly, your website, physical mailing address, and your phone number are displayed in your listing, which allows customers to find you more quickly and get the information they need. And it’s ideal for all the mobile phone searches taking place today. By using citations and reviews, your Google Places will move up in ranking. With high ranking, within eight weeks, rather than eight months or eight years, your free advertising with Google Places will bring you more targeted customers faster than even traditional organic methods.

Adwords Express (formerly known as Google Boost) takes Google Places to online advertising. When you add Google Boost to your listing, you can advertise your business on Google and Google Maps (including mobile devices) and attract more visitors to your website or Place page. With Google Boost, simply set up a monthly budget for your ad, and Google determines what search keywords trigger your ad based on the categories that you select. You’ll only pay for the clicks that your ad actually receives.

The savvy b-to-b marketer knows it’s truthfully the combination of all of those, that no single event can be considered in isolation as the only factor leading to the sale. But marketing ROI calculations can’t work when you give credit to “all of the above.”

In fact, most marketers are throwing up their hands and giving credit to the “last marketing touchpoint,” an admittedly inexact and flawed decision, but one that’s being used by 44 percent, more marketers than any other method. The data comes from a survey on Lead Generation Marketing ROI published by emarketer.com:

44% — Credit the last marketing touchpoint as the lead source
21% — Split the credit for the lead across multiple touchpoints reaching that contact prior to converting to a lead
11% — Measure the incremental leads from a single marketing touchpoint across different response channels using techniques such as marketing testing
3% — Use modeling to identify the incremental leads
20% — Do not track leads to specific marketing touchpoints

Hermes Creative Award for Bober Markey Fedorovich Direct Mailer

Hermes Creative Award for Acquisition Communications Plan for ICC-Nexergy Merger

Aster Award for Medical Marketing for Radisphere Web Site Design

The most recent reminder of that was a June 2011 study by a b-to-b sales organization called InsideSales.com. In its review of the effectiveness of lead management systems, they found that 55.3 percent of the companies in its survey, 159 firms, NEVER RESPONDED to any web leads they generated. This is despite the fact that web leads tend to be the highest quality of any lead source companies typically generate.

Lead follow-up is never easy, and automated email response tools can simplify the process at least with a cursory response. But it’s shocking to see so many b-to-b companies completely disregard the money they’re spending pushing people to their websites in order to engage and generate a response – only to have those customer inquiries fall on deaf ears.

- On ads that link to a video

- On roadside real estate signs that link to a video tour of the home’s interior

- On trade show displays that link to demos or web locations

- On brochures that automatically dial a phone number

- On the back of business cards that load contact information into your Outlook database

There are already hundreds of clever applications, but perhaps the best example we’ve seen are actually mounted on gravestones! The QR code can link to a video remembrance of the deceased, or perhaps even the deceased himself, a voice from beyond the grave!

The rule for B-to-B marketers? Make sure it links somewhere optimized for mobile display, and that whatever link you provide adds value in moving the sales process along. Avoid ideas that mean little: putting a QR code on a webpage that just links to another web page, or putting it on an ad that links only to a home page already listed in the ad.

We’ve been able to monitor click traffic on web pages for a while now by using Google Analytics. But where do a visitor’s eyes go? Where are the dead spots on your web design, and exactly how far down are people scrolling on each of your main pages? We’re answering those questions with a new tool called ClickTale, which provides fascinating “heat maps” that identify where the mouse travels on a web page (but may not click). Why track mouse movement? Because there’s an 80 percent correlation between your eye movement and where the mouse travels. Quick hit: with one client, we learned that the unusual placement of its all-important “quote” button, even though it was at the top of the page, rendered it nearly invisible.