Brand Central Station

An article posted to BtoB Magazine’s web site a while back pointed out an interesting result from a recent Hearst survey: nearly 50% of all b-to-b marketing budgets are spent on online programs.  That spend covers everything from web site development/enhancements to online advertising to SEO to webcasts to Social Media … you get the idea.  The survey goes on to explain that trade shows account for 17% of marketing budgets, direct marketing (12%) and print (11%) account for most of the rest.

But like most media property-driven market research, it ignores a significant pool of resources that often go untapped by most b-to-b marketers and the media.  I understand why.  For a magazine or other media outlet to try and identify how much money and human resource is dedicated to internal communications, training and organizational behavior, they would have to step waaaaaay out of their comfort zone.

It’s kind of like asking an amateur astronomer to find Dark Matter in the universe using his existing, backyard telescope.  They may have an idea where to point the telescope, but they can’t really see what they’re looking at.

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Leave it to John Jantsch, the author of the Duct Tape Marketing blog, to provide yet another great idea for those of you who need to make a big impression on a new business prospect.

John points out that with the new, low price of the iPod Shuffle, it makes a very appealing (and impressive) premium vehicle to carry your B2B pitch via podcast.

Read the whole post here.

Duct Tape Marketing’s John Jantsch recommends a great trick for discovering what customers really value. 

John recommends that during the customer interview process, you ask them a simple question: “What would you Google if you were looking for this kind of service/tool online?”

Try it and you’re almost sure to find some potentially powerful keyword phrases that you may not have considered before.

Thanks, John!

John Jantsch and his incredibly useful blog, Duct Tape Marketing, had one of the best posts of the day yesterday – and not for what John wrote (“What does your drink say bout you?”) but for the comments it generated.

Who thought coffee could be so interesting?

John Jantsch provides some insights on women-owned businesses in this post. As a category, growth of women-owned businesses has been outpacing the economy as a whole for the past five years.

What does this mean in terms of business opportunity for women, in general, and your business, in particular? According to a column by Nan Mooney in Inc. Magazine:

“… now there are more women in leadership positions than ever. Whether they head their division or head the whole company, these women are in a position to do something they may have wanted to do for a long time. Hire other women.”

That means hiring other women to work for them both as employees and as consultants. Agencies and consultancies that refuse to look at the changing social landscape around them and act accordingly will be left behind – and may not even know it!

John used information from the SBA as his source material. An Inc. story on the Census Bureau statistics can be found here.