The World Today for B2B Marketers
If you are a marketer at a mid-to-large B2B enterprise today, you and your colleagues probably work with a broad mix of marketing systems and tools. Here are just a few of them:

Website Tools:

• Content Management System (CMS) to manage your corporate website
• Blogging system (WordPress, Typepad or similar) to run your corporate blogs
• Community Management platform (Open Text, Lithium, or similar) where your prospects and customers can interact with each other
• Analytics tools (Omniture, Webtrends, Coremetrics, or similar)
• Landing page building tools (Adobe Test-and-Target, or similar)

Marketing Infrastructure:

• Marketing Automation / RPM system (Eloqua, Marketo, or similar) to understand prospect and customer behavior on your website, and nurture with emails along your sales funnel
• One or more email marketing systems for push campaigns, third party email lists to drive more inbound demand

Advertising & Media Buying:

• Ad platform, that may be hosted and managed by your Agency partner to help drive brand awareness, and generate more top-of-funnel leads
• Media yield optimization platforms & tools
• A range of third party ad networks (PPC, Display, Remnant, Text Links, Media Exchanges)
• Affiliate networks (Commission Junction, or similar) and partner marketing systems

Social & Mobile:

• Social presence (Facebook pages, corporate Twitter accounts, LinkedIn Groups)
• Mobile platform, for your mobile website, mobile apps, and more

And we’ve probably missed a few other tools, for data cleansing, sales outreach (Salesforce.com), customer service, data segmentation, customer feedback, and more.

The 2012 Imperative: Do More, Do It Better, Across More Channels
As you sit down with your colleagues, and go through your 2012 planning exercise, you are probably pondering these questions:

• What can we do in marketing that could be a “Game Changer” in terms of driving revenue for our business?
• How can we turn each $1 in technology investment into $3 or more in ROI?
• How can we empower our existing staff to be 2X or more productive? How can we best leverage their time, so we optimally tap their knowledge of the business to drive results?
• What should we do about social? Mobile? Increasing campaign relevance to the user regardless of the channel where they interact with our brand?
• Can we deliver on everything we need to, while still having fun, and not have too much to do everyday?

The Core Issue: We have Single or Dual Channel Tools for a Multi-Channel World
As you go down the list of marketing systems and tools, you will notice something interesting. Most of these systems were designed before we started seeing the recent  explosion of marketing channels. Traditional B2B marketing occurred primarily over 3 online channels – email, website, search/display and 1 offline channel – the sales rep on the telephone to the prospect. Many of these tools pre-date the more recent social and mobile channels, and richer data (geo, company, industry, and more) that is now available on the online visitor or user.

The world today has changed. Your customers and prospects are everywhere. And no system can assume that your prospect will make contact with your brand, or engage with your business, only through that specific system’s sphere of control. All marketing systems need to integrate better with each other, to greatly improve the end user experience.

A New Approach to Campaign Design
The traditional B2B campaign execution model assigned different owners for each of the marketing channels, who planned and executed their own campaigns. There is a limited level of campaign concept re-use across channels. While the concept of the B2B “Buyer’s Journey” as discussed by Christine Crandell, Babcock Jenkins, and the Content Marketing Institute  among others makes a lot of sense, a key challenge for B2B marketers is translating conceptual marketing models into campaigns, that deliver both a superior experience to the user, and the desired ROI for the marketer.

Reusable Campaign Components
It is now possible to think in terms of small re-usable campaign components that reinforce the brand, engage the prospect, customer or web visitor, learn more about what they are interested in, and direct them to the most appropriate marketing offer or content asset. These re-usable, interactive, content units (or ad units) can be quickly deployed across all channels where the concept will resonate with the audience.

Interactive Experiences on Every Channel
It’s now possible to rapidly A/B test and multi-variate test multiple campaign concepts, make changes in real-time, and iterate to an optimized campaign execution. As users get more sophisticated in their demand for richer content format experiences (polls, mini surveys, social experiences, videos, slides – all enabled for social sharing and lead capture), we will see these content units deliver similar experiences everywhere. The typical campaign flow will change from banners prompting users to click through to landing pages and fill-out lead forms to rich, interactive branded experiences everywhere. Provide the user a rich experience, ask questions to learn more about them, adapt incentives and rewards to best fit their interests, then seek their opt-in, or word-of-mouth mention or support of the brand with their business colleagues and friends.

A New Way to Look At Existing Templates & Pages
By thinking in terms of re-usable campaign components, instead of an entire web page, landing page, email template or Facebook page, marketers can put themselves in the shoes of their prospects and customers, and think more carefully about how to make each interaction with the brand across channels more interesting, and rewarding for the user.

Here at Kwanzoo, we have thought hard about how we can make it easy for marketers to create and manage such campaign components, easily embed them everywhere, enable A/B and split testing, display the most relevant version based on all known information about the visitor, track the analytics, and help improve all of the ongoing campaigns across marketing channels.

Funnel Acceleration: Grow Insights from Campaigns you have Already Run
It is well known that the B2B prospect does not want to be over “touched”. Thus it’s important that each touch is carefully planned. Each touch is an opportunity to move the prospect further along in a long sales cycle. By leveraging known intelligence about a prospect, and combining that with highly relevant question-based engagement of the prospect, marketers can now gain specific insights, very quickly, directly from the prospect, to accelerate the sales funnel. Managing and executing this entire process inside lead nurturing emails, with the right questions presented to the right prospects, in the right sequence, can result in  significant sales funnel acceleration.

Shared Intelligence Delivers Higher Relevance
Another key recent learning for us has been the power of sharing intelligence, insights, data and objects between an RPM system (such as Eloqua) and a platform for managing re-usable, interactive content units (such as Kwanzoo). Imagine being able to drag-and-drop interactive content units developed on Kwanzoo, onto the Landing Page builder or Email Template design tool inside your RPM system. What if you could instantly drop in an interactive poll, survey, tell-a-friend social promotion so they show up on any web page or email?

When these interactive units are served on a third party media site for a paid media placement, or on a display ad network, imagine being able to target your campaign concepts, creative, and delivered content offers and assets precisely to a web visitor based on her affiliation with a specific Company or Industry. Then collect a lead right inside the unit, and send the user onto a content asset (with no landing page involved). We are not alone in seeing this as the next opportunity for B2B marketers. The good folks at Babcock Jenkins are also recommending Target Account-based marketing as a key B2B initiative to consider in 2012

Wanted: Campaign Dashboards for Non-Geeks
As marketing channels proliferate, and enterprise marketers look to automate campaign execution, and accelerate their sales funnel it becomes even more critical for all marketing systems to support push and pull of campaign and funnel metrics from other systems into a centralized dashboard. It really should not matter if your campaign views are built around your RPM system, your CMS platform or your website analytics engine.  As a marketer, you want to be able to review, analyze and optimize your ongoing campaigns, quickly and easily.

We may not get it all in 2012. But these sure are exciting times. We look forward to working with all of our B2B, B2C and Events customers, as you consider  your campaign and funnel automation plans in the new year. Questions? Are there more discussion points that we’ve missed here? Please drop us a note or write a comment below.

p.s. Also see Part 1 of this 5-part Blog Post series here, B2B Marketing 2012 Trends Part 1: Maximizing Your RPM Investment