To me one of the best parts of life is shared experience. You’re personal world is enriched by the activities you choose to take part in with friends and family. There is no reason that this should end when you get to work.

So many of our awake hours are spent at work, you should expect that time to be just as gratifying. This need can be satisfied in a number of ways – through your company’s culture, your colleagues or with professional development opportunities that keep you on the leading edge of your discipline.

If there is one thing that has proven true with my career in business-to-business marketing, it’s that there is always going to be someone who knows more, has had further depth of experience or possesses more expertise than I do in the work I take on every day. Having come to terms with this, I find that my most satisfying days at work are when I open up my mind, eyes and ears to those individuals who have paved a clear path to marketing success before me.

It is for that reason that I choose to actively participate in the Business Marketing Association. Every month, I have the pleasure of hearing about marketing best practices and emerging trends directly from the people who set them. I get to share those experiences with others who, like me, see marketing communications as a challenging and rewarding part of business.

There is an upcoming opportunity through the Phoenix Chapter of the BMA and the Arizona Technology Council to exercise your marketing muscle at the annual Marketing Technology Summit. The event happens just once a year and in its third year continues to emphasize the ever-increasing dependence of marketing on new technology tools and applications.

The 2011 Marketing Technology Summit promises a fascinating afternoon of speakers and networking, focusing on the latest and greatest techniques and approaches in B2B Marketing.

Check out the events line up of speakers and topics:

Keynote Speech: “Lessons from the Field”

• John Kennedy, IBM

Panel Discussion: “Trends in Marketing Automation: Your Secret Weapon in 2011 and Beyond”

• Brian Kardon, Eloqua
• Greg Head, Infusionsoft

Panel Discussion: “Digital and Mobile Marketing Trends for 2011: Perspective from Top B2B Marketers”

• Laura Ramos, Xerox
• Bob Rinerle, GE Healthcare
• CK Kerley, CKB2B

Visit the 2011 Marketing Technology Summit website to learn more about the speakers and topics. I encourage you to attend this educational event – it’s a great opportunity to refresh your marketing skillset and apply worthwhile ideas to your business. I hope to see you there!

Growing up in Wisconsin, I’ve long had a sense of loyalty to my home-state airline, Midwest. For those of you not familiar with this carrier, it built its name on spacious business-class seating, affable service and warm chocolate chip cookies. Over the past couple of years, an attempted hostile take-over, as well as two acquisitions has left both the cookies and loyal passengers – well – burnt.

Most recently, Frontier Airlines acquired the company.  Along with the name Midwest, many of the amenities the carrier became known for are gone (though the cookies allegedly remain). I noticed not too long ago that Frontier Airlines was running a new ad campaign – presumably in an attempt to win-over passengers – on Wisconsin’s most prominent online newspaper, JSonline.com about “free” checked baggage.

My assumption is that the airline was trying to draw eyeballs to rival Southwest Airlines “Bags Fly Free” policy.

Accompanying the headline on the banner ad was an asterisk – further review showed the promotion was only good on certain types of seats/tickets, which were linked to more costly airfare. In the end, the deal was only as good as a passengers willingness to pay for their “free” bag one way or another.

In today’s B2B and B2C marketplace, companies find themselves relying on giveaways and special offers to vie for the attention of the prospects and customers they seek to engage. The Internet boom over the past fifteen years has swung the transaction pendulum clearly in the buyer’s favor.

People have far more options and much more information at their fingertips. If a company, or the products and services it offers doesn’t seem authentic, customers will click to the next option until they find an organization they want to do business with.

The problem with most offers is the conditions that are attached, something I call the “Asterisk Offer”. In my opinion, the asterisk is the blemish on what should be a genuine opportunity to create a customer relationship.

An asterisk screams “this offer is too good to be true”. Frontier Airlines is not alone in its use of the asterisk. Many companies (some of our clients included) are eager to promote a snappy headline offer in order to generate excitement and instigate action. The fine print, however, reads like tax code and leaves people feeling deflated – victims of attractive bait that leaves a bitter taste.

B2B transactions are more complex in nature (enterprise technologies, multi-year service contracts, etc.) and inherently lead to long-term customer relationships, and it’s important to instigate that first purchase or trial. However, if takes longer to read the restrictions on your promotional offer than it does to actually execute the purchase transaction, it probably isn’t going to lead to a conversion rate you were hoping for.

To be fair to Frontier Airlines, Southwest’s offer also comes with an asterisk, although they offer the service at all ticketing levels. The right approach is to develop an offer that sets up a genuine two-way value exchange. Extend the offer that demonstrates to prospects that you have skin in the game, and make sure it is unconditional. Create simple steps for acceptance. Make it easy for a prospect or customer to participate.

If you make an offer seem too good, and it ends up being too good to be true, it will have the opposite affect you had intended, and you might end up repelling people in droves.

What was the last authentic offer you accepted? Do you have any examples of a promotion that fell flat once you read the fine print?

B-E-E-F. This simple acronym was the mantra of the rec league basketball coach who taught me the fundamentals of shooting a free-throw. Balance. Eyes. Elbows. Follow-through. Each of these components is important to creating the fluid motion and focus needed to become a functional contributor to your team at the free throw line. While each component is important, none are more essential than the last one – follow-through.

In B2B marketing, follow-through is also paramount. A great idea is only as good as your ability to follow-through and execute. Ideas it seem, are easy to come by, but absent a clear plan of action, and a business’s ability to execute operationally, even the most attractive ideas become worthless.

How many times have you been in a meeting where a great idea is born? You see a lot of heads nodding yes. Everyone seems excited and on-board. You think the positive vibes swirling about the room will surly culminate into success for the company. But, inevitably, nothing happens. The good ideas become marker dust in the tray of the dry-erase board. Business as usual perseveres and the company continues to fall behind the marketing curve.

Companies that want to buck this trend, make sure they have the resources necessary to carry out those great ideas. They understand that if you take the effort to plan, and are looking to adopt new strategies and methodologies to engage prospects, that there is also a need execute on that plan. If you are like most other B2B organizations, you understand that it is easier said than done.

Too little time, too few resources and political turmoil make execution seem all but impossible. If these challenges sound familiar, then partner with a firm that is willing to spend the time learning about your complex products and services, that has a comprehension of leading marketing communications, sales support and customer engagement techniques, and who has an infrastructure with complementary resources you need to follow-through.

So is the take-away from this blog post really about something as trivial as execution of marketing plans and tactics? The simple answer is yes, but the challenge is to ask yourself how well you are really doing at executing on your best marketing ideas. Now that we’re almost half way through 2011, ask yourself whether you are just getting to the line, or if you are you actually finishing. While it seems like one of the simple ‘fundamentals’, the reality is that a lack of execution keeps a lot of B2B organizations standing idle. It is only by continuing to emphasize and master the fundamentals that you’ll be able to become a functional contributor to your company’s top line.

What great ideas are you lacking the resources to execute? Is it time to open up your file cabinet and start following-through on some of those plans and strategies you worked so hard at the end of last year to develop?

In the every-increasingly digital world, it seems that many core marketing communications practices have been getting pushed further and further to the wayside. Branding is one such foundational marketing tenet that more and more marketers only pretend to practice. The fact is that branding isn’t just a buzz word. It’s a discipline that, needs to be practiced, honed, tweaked, and constantly improved.

A strong brand and brand strategy should act as a business marketer’s true north, guiding all marketing communications investments. Critical components of a business marketer’s brand such as brand positioning, brand promise and brand personality will act as a much needed common thread that becomes a beacon for all of the marketing communications decisions that get made, particularly online.

Too often, marketers forgo branding and skip directly to one-off tactics. Absent an effective brand strategy, the likelihood for success in any marketing tactics you execute is greatly diminished. In lieu of more direct branding investment, our staff at Canyon works tirelessly to police our clients’ brands from project to project. While this practice can do wonders to maintain some consistency over time, it really only acts as an ‘adhesive bandage’ (Band-Aid® is of course a protected brand) for a festering problem.

If you haven’t been giving your brand(s) the attention it deserves, then getting an objective opinion about the state of your brand is a critical investment for 2011. Doing so will enable you to create a strong and durable brand path to follow, and it will help you be more nimble when making decisions when difficult questions pop up along the way. The experts at Brand Strategy Insider offered these instructions on when marketers should consider getting objective counsel in to be proactive about properly maintaining their brands:

When should you seek the counsel of a brand consultant?

• Your company has acquired or merged with another company
• You’re launching a new product, service or company
• A competitor has mounted an unexpected attack on your brand
• Your profit margin or market share is shrinking
• Research shows that your brand is not understood by your audience
• Customers don’t see a difference between your brand and your competitors
• You’re having difficulty knowing what to brand and how
• You need to decide the relationships between parent and sub brands
• There’s a noticeable gap between business vision and customer experience
• Your brand expressions don’t fit your brand strategy
• Your brand expressions lack excitement or relevance
• Your brand expressions are confusing with too many product names, sub-brands, logos, taglines, etc
• Your brand’s touch points lack consistency across media or cultural borders
• Your creative partners need to better understand your brand
• You need to get executive buy-in for brand programs
• You need to completely understand your brand’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats
• The meaning of your brand fluctuates as executives come and go
• You want/need to educate your organization on the benefits of building a strong brand
• You want to extend your brand into new product or service categories and would like to know which categories have the highest probability for success
• You want to set up brand metrics against which to measure the success of branding endeavors
• You want to make your brand more relevant to certain customers
• You want to bring the brand to life at each point of customer contact
• You want to take your brand global
• You need to revive your brand
• You need to ‘sell’ the brand internally
• You need to build a stronger emotional connection to your brand
• You need to build a ‘Category of One’ brand

The primary take-away from this list should be that branding plays a vital role in every aspect of your business. It is a common thread that is too important to overlook, and it can’t be practiced in concept alone.

When was the last time you audited the state of your brand(s)? Are you ready to ‘refresh’ your company’s most valuable marketing asset?