It’s not everyday Ottawa marketers have the opportunity to see and hear a MarketingSherpa thought leader and influencer in person. But thanks to OCRI (Ottawa Centre for Research and Innovation) and its popular Zone5ive series, that’s about to change.

At tomorrow’s event which is still open for registrations, the guest speaker is Stefan Tornquist, Research Director at MarketingSherpa, and you can bet there will be plenty to learn. With a focus on B2B marketing, he’s promised to share 7 proven tactics for success in 2008. The usual suspects like email and search are a given – but business technology marketing is also listed as a point of discussion and this is open to lots of direction.

Of course, Sherpa does publish a “Business Technology Marketing Benchmark Guide” and from what I can see it offers “practical data on: search, email, PR, direct mail, lead generation, trade shows, podcasting, telemarketing and budgeting.”

Since B2B marketing is very web-centric, I’m really hoping there will be some mention of persuasion tactics like web personalization because this is the technology that is truly capable of heavily influencing online engagement and conversion. BTW Conversion for a B2B marketer might not mean an immediate “close” especially depending on the value of typical B2B deals. Meaningful conversion on a B2B site might be more of a relationship/credibility builder – maybe a whitepaper download or a demo request or a newsletter sign-up. Something to keep a prospect engaged at their liberty without feeling the pressure of a sales person. Something that can keep you front of mind with that prospect.

Sitebrand works with some B2B companies including CableOrganizer.com and they use our web personalization technology to do tons of cool things. To give you a sense of what I mean, here’s an excerpt from our case study:

“CableOrganizer.com has also had great success with key customer campaigns where Sitebrand is used to personalize the site based on the organization’s domain. “It surprises them [our customers] when they show up and see creative that is associated with their logo. I am sure they ask, ‘how did they know that?’” says Shields. Many of these campaigns improved CableOrganizer.com’s conversion rates by almost 10% against control groups that did not see Sitebrand enabled targeted content.”

It’s a great example of savvy B2B marketing so if you want a head start on business technology that’s changing the online landscape, you should read the full case study.

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