By Jeff Giesea, President, FierceMarkets Inc.

When FierceMarkets was formed six years ago, nearly all online advertising was experimental in nature. Few business marketers had budgets for online advertising, much less email newsletter sponsorships, Webinars, or search engine optimization. Pay-per-click advertising didn’t even exist.

Fast forward to today, and business marketers are much more sophisticated. Online marketing, in all of its many forms, has established itself as a permanent and growing slice of business marketing budgets – and rightly so.

Yet there remains a gulf between business marketers who are taking full advantage of online opportunities, and dazzling colleagues with outstanding results, and those who are not. What’s the difference between these two groups? And how can you make sure you’re in the former category? Experience shows that top-performing business marketers embrace 10 basic practices:

1. Know your campaign. It seems obvious, but many business marketers have a difficult time articulating the basics of their campaign – their objectives, timeline, target audience, budget, success metrics, and how it fits into the overall performance of their company. For top-performing business marketers, this is a breeze. They make a habit of covering the basics. Without a firm handle on their strategy and objectives, they realize, there’s no way to measure performance in the first place.
   
   
2. Follow your audience. Let’s face it: We’re still in the Wild West days of online media. Top-performing business marketers know this and use it to their advantage. They realize that there is a greater-than-usual premium on doing their homework to identify the right advertising venues and vehicles. They also invest time and effort to identify where their target audience goes for information now. Not yesterday or five years ago, but now. By keeping up to speed with their target audience, they can take advantage of the lag between ad dollars and audiences, and get lower rates for higher quality inventory. And when they evaluate different venues, they seek demographic information and other evidence of a quality, captivated audience.
   
   
3. Seek value-added service. Some business marketers are so focused on cost and demographics that they lose sight of an important x-factor in selecting ad venues: customer service. Top-performing business marketers seek venues that listen to their specific needs, provide tips and insights based on past successful campaigns, help analyze results, and steer them away from poorly-performing vehicles. With so many different ad types, scant standardization, and few third-party auditing services, finding value-added customer service that you can depend on makes all the difference.
   
   
4. Measure acquisition, not just clicks. It isn’t enough to measure clicks, open rates, or registrants alone. Who cares if you get a great cost-per-click or cost-per-lead if none of them convert into customers? Top-performing marketers take advantage of conversion tracking tools, CRM systems, and other helpful technology to tie together clicks and leads to closed sales. Their ultimate benchmark for evaluating advertising venues is cost-per-acquisition.
   
   
5. Surround your audience. When planning campaigns, top-performing business marketers make an effort to “surround” their target audience and reach them at multiple touch-points. They integrate their online, print, and in-person marketing efforts seamlessly. And they often use one form of online advertising to build on another – for example, a pay-per-click ad campaign to generate Webinar registrations or whitepaper downloads.

6. Provide (and recycle) valuable content. Top-performing business marketers know that the best lead generation campaigns involve a give-away of targeted, valuable content – a high-quality Webinar or whitepaper on a hot topic among their target audience. They invest time and effort into identifying the right topic, but not necessarily into generating the content. In fact, some top-performing business marketers have become highly efficient at repackaging information that’s already been produced. A presentation given at a trade show becomes content for a Webinar. An industry survey used for market research becomes a whitepaper and a press release. People care whether the content adds value, not how much time and effort it took to produce.
   
   
7. Keep ad copy simple. Top-performing business marketers keep their ad copy simple. They know that simple text often works much better than whizbang graphics. They understand the principals of copywriting. They use action verbs, keep copy short, and focus their message tightly.
   
   
8. Target prospects directly. It is easy to overlook a major opportunity wrought by the Internet: the ability to circumvent media and cultivate customers and prospective buyers directly. Top-performing business marketers take advantage of these opportunities. They supplement ad-buying with search engine optimization, house email lists, and other methods of reaching prospects directly.
   
   
9. Stay up-to-date. Top-performing business marketers recognize how fast the industry is changing and make an extra effort to stay up to speed. A few simple activities – such as attending an online marketing conference, reading the marketing periodicals or following a few blogs and e-newsletters – can make a big difference. By maintaining an external focus, these marketers identify and exploit new tools, tips, and channels that give them an edge over competitors.
   
   
10. Be fierce. Top-performing business marketers are fierce. They have a bias towards action, efficiency, and results. They aren’t afraid to try new things – and always build on what they’ve learned. They dare to be remarkable.

By remembering and executing on these 10 best practices, you can join the ranks of top-performing business marketers. While these tactics may not be revolutionary, sometimes the best way to win is to get the basics right.