Overheard: Calculating ROI in B2B advertising

As short as a few years ago, B2B marketers were limited to search and targeted email marketing. Now you have RSS, podcasts, videocasts, blogs, wikis, mashups, widgets the list goes on. The big opportunity here is for B2B marketers to have a lead nurturing platform in place and then start layering on these tactics to keep the conversation going with potential prospects. Paul Dunay, Buzz Marketing: Thought Leadership with Paul Dunay

First, you have to have a lead nurturing platform in place. One that allows you to segment lists, send specific messages, score activities and profile behavior of those that have expressed interest in your company. Then you can bolt on more search traffic, and then you can serve special ads to those in your database.

You gotta know what’s happening on your website if you EVER hope to be able to calculate an ROI. Second, once you have that in place you can begin to layer on more types of media syndicated podcasts, third party wikis, external blogs and see if your database is going there and interacting with these sites were you are placing your content.