In this day and age as B2B marketers flock to online promotion and marketing, a typical business to business (B2B) marketing campaign consists of search engine optimization, email advertising, sponsored search advertising, vertical search engine visibility, blogging, podcasts, social media marketing, white paper syndication, RSS feeds and syndication and viral marketing.  Traditionally the end goal is lead generation or is it?

In 2007, simply generating a bunch of leads from your website is not good enough for your organization to be successful.  Any well planned marketing program should be able to generate leads.  The difficult part becomes understanding your target market, their needs and actual lead qualification of your prospects.  So when putting an online strategy together, what are you, the B2B marketer (or Marketing Manager, or CEO, or Company Founder) looking for?  What do you want your online marketing strategy to consist of?

Last week I posed the question why is online strategy so hard for B2B marketers?  What are the most signifigant challenges for B2B marketers?  Industry reports such as a recent MarketingSherpa report on Business Technology suggest that a key problem for marketers in 2007 is the increase of the "ever-growing committee."  The report goes on to say that "…Whether it's increasing office politics or burned fingers from technology decisions in the dot-com bubble heyday, business technology prospects are bulking up on committee members…"  Knowing this, does this mean that B2B marketers are looking for ways to deal with per-accpint viral marketing efforts and evangelism marketing campaigns?  The answer… most definitely yes.  What does this mean for your online marketing strategies?  What do B2B marketers want as a part of their online strategy?

Here are a number of items that should be considered when developing an effective online marketing strategy.

• Look for avenues such as social media sites that can help place yourself in areas that your prospects frequent.  Are they spending time on industry forums or social networking sites?
• Understand who makes up the decision makers committee for your prospects versus who make up the influencers
• Look for an effective means of prospect education materials.  Evaluate the effectiveness of each… would you be better served using webinars or whitepapers?
• Examine ways to more effectively qualify leads who come from your online presence (not just your website, but any presence that you have on the web.)
• Provide case studies and proof to help intercept your prospect as the progress across their buying cycle.  Provide testimonials through statements on your website or actual audio or video testimonials from satisfied clients.
• Establish a feedback and lead nurtuting mechanism that allows you to hear what the prospects are thinking.  Reputation management is huge in this day and age.  It is better to hear what your customers or prospects think directly than by finding it out on a industry blog or MySpace page that could damage your reputation.

These are but a few of the common items that B2B marketers look for when developing online marketing strategies.   What are some others?  We'd like to hear from you as to what you are looking for as part of your online marketing strategy.  Drop us a line and let us know.  your ideas may be featured in an upcoming article.