Thursday, March 6, 2008

Thoughts from Forrester B2B Marketing Workshop

A couple of weeks back I attended Forrester Research's B2B Marketing Workshop at their headquarters in Cambridge, MA. Overall it was a good review of some of their recent research, but very little in terms of helping make actionable improvements in how I do my day job. The folks at Forrester said that the details come at other events, but when someone puts the word "workshop" in the title of an event, I expect a little more. Maybe that's just me.

But it's not to say that the day wasn't without value. There was a few good exercises and examples of successful integrated marketing campaigns and SEO that was helpful and good ideas of what we could be doing.

A few days after the workshop, I had a meeting with Mike Gauthier of E-Tractions, a Boston area integrated marketing firm that also appeared on a panel at the Forrester event. As we were talking he asked me if I felt inspired by any of the ideas from the conference. I responded that I was torn between inspiration and depression. There were a lot of great ideas, but the realization that we're not doing near as many of them as we should was really depressing. Some of it was stuff that we didn't even contemplate doing, but a lot came down to not having the budget or internal resources to pull it off.

In any case, I'm going to do what we can, try to experiment and see what happens. Hopefully if we can show some good progress, we can "find" some more budget down the road.

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