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Direct response marketing is when you engage in some type of advertising or marketing effort which targets a market with an offer.  The offer is such that response can be measured.  Direct contact is made from the prospective customer to the marketer.  Many B2B lead generation activities fall into the direct response category. Direct marketing is when you target a named company, title, or individual with an offer.  Contact is made from the marketer directly to the prospective customer.  As with direct response, the offer can be a variety of things including attendance, discussion, communication, inquiry, etc.  And response can be measured.  In complex sales environments, direct marketing is closest aligned to sales and sales activities.

Here are 50 more blogs about business-to-business marketing, bringing the total on the complete Big List of B2B Marketing Blogs to 138 blogs. B2B marketing still lags far behind other categories of marketing blogs, so please keep letting me know via comments if you find any B2B blogs that I missed. As always, here is the updated B2B marketing blog OPML file.

Today, MarketingSherpa released the 2008 edition of its Email Marketing Benchmark Guide. According to the press release: "the updated guide delivers exclusive results data from real-life marketers' campaigns. Containing 260-charts and tables, this is the largest and most comprehensive study ever conducted with professional email marketers. Readers will learn how the impact of email marketing has changed over the past year and how to overcome various future challenges of email marketing."

Over the past 7 months, Junta42 has produced a continuous stream of relevant content, now adding up to a knowledge base of close to a 1000 articles. With the recent addition of the top content marketing blog list and the consequent increase of activity, it’s high time for a discussion with Joe about the emerging discipline of content marketing, and how it is supported by Junta42.

You’ll find everything from great newsletters to bad websites… great custom magazines for reluctant buyers… the 7 deadliest content marketing sins… 6 lessons to learn from a shopping mall…using content marketing to speed sales growth curve.

Here is an excellent blog post from OnStartups that compares a Darwinian evolutionary marketing approach to a Big Bang approach.  It’s from way back in July, but I found both the article and comments to be insightful:

Sheep aren’t that knowledgeable; they are trading for any number of reasons, and are the “noise” in the marketplace. Wolves take advantage of that, and consequently they look for markets with lots of sheep. With better information, the wolves will easily have plenty to “eat.” The net result is that those noisy markets are accurate markets.

· Estimated expenditure on B2B marketing communications during 2005: £9.8 billion · Estimated number of practitioners with marketing in their job title focusing purely on the B2B sector: 176,000 · Estimated number of practitioners with marketing in their job title for whom B2B is at least part of their remit (along with B2C): 272,000

Sergio Ferreira is an Electricity & Energy Project Manager at the European Copper Institute (ECI), a non-profit organisation involved in the support and expansion of copper and copper alloys markets in Europe. An environmental engineer, he graduated in 2004 from the University of Aveiro, Portugal. He has worked in a lobbying organisation and in the European Commission, Directorate-General Energy & Transport on energy efficiency and renewable energy sources, and his main area is ecodesign.   • Another is Hans De Keulenaer, who works with the European Copper Institute as a Programme Manager in Electricity & Energy. He has a Master's degree in electrical engineering and an MBA from the University of Louvain in Belgium. With more than 20 years' experience in running pan-European and global marketing campaigns for companies and international organisations in the industrial sector, he is currently working on sustainable energy systems, concentrating on the quality of supply, smart and age-adaptive building installations, energy regulation, and the use of novel Web-based technologies for B2B marketing.

For some reason, I have a fascination with the classic "light bulb joke". Since I'm in the internet marketing business these days, thought I'd take a shot at light bulb jokes for internet marketers.

The most popular post I’ve written to date is a review of prediction market software. Today’s post is going to be the same, but for idea/innovation software (henceforth referred to as innovation software). Trying to even find and identify all the different types of innovation software is difficult because of the different ways people and companies think about innovation. Prediction markets are straightforward; they’re futures markets, so the software is largely the interface between the user and the order book on the database. That is not at all so for innovation software. Different people think about innovation in different ways, which I referred to in a previous post. The list below is likely not complete, but I believe it does pick up the major players.

Based on an article by Junta42 [1], hereby the ultimate list of web-based methods to provide relevant content to users. At Leonardo ENERGY, we use these on a daily basis for non-profit marketing, but they can be equally used for business development, or to build strong reputations and brands online.

Inspired by an article from Junta42 [1], hereby the ultimate list of web-based methods to provide relevant content to users. These can be used for business development, non-profit marketing or to build strong reputations and brands online.

Marketing has been changing as quickly as technology has, so it makes sense that SEO (42%) and personalization (36%) came in at the number 2 and 3 spots. Pulling up in fourth place is green marketing at 32%.

One of the most valuable questions I ask sales and marketing teams is, “What kinds of things clearly add no value to your sales and marketing operations?” People react strongly. They give me examples like:  • Time spent nursing product quality problems  • Time spent on administration, reporting, and menial tasks (leaving little time for customers)  • Trade shows that generate boxes of “leads” not worth calling on  • Marketing literature that no one reads  • Wasting time with the wrong prospects