Content marketing was the big thing for marketers in 2011 and for those still catching up it’s forming a big part of your 2012 marketing strategy too. But now that everyone seems to be jumping on the content bandwagon it’s becoming even more challenging for marketers to set themselves apart from the competition.

Following on from the blog we posted back in March ‘Leverage Pinterest for B2B Marketing‘, here’s a great Marketingsherpa case study from a B2B company that’s making the most of Pinterest.

Developments in technology have been keeping us on our BrightBull toes. A consensus among other fellow marketers is that keeping up with technology is becoming one of their biggest challenges. So it’s exciting news like this acquisition that makes us very happy – in fact it should make any B2B social media marketer very happy.

eConsultancy shared some great statistics on email and mobile devices in a recent blog. They nicely drill down into industries and what stuck me were the figures on B2B - disappointing to see that B2B is one of the lowest for phone and tablet email opens/clicks.

I had to share this brilliant piece of PR with you all – a nice way to end the working day!

We’re real fans of Seth Godin’s blogs – so today we’re sharing the love:

The Center for Exhibition Industry Research (CEIR) have released their 2011 index results – it usually serves as a pretty good barometer for the overall B2B exhibitions/events industry – and it’s good to see some positive news for the industry this year, especially given all the economic doom and gloom.

Inbound marketing seems to be the focus for most marketers that we speak to – with the benefits of lower costs for acquiring leads and higher conversion rates, what’s not to like? If it’s not already part of your winning 2012 marketing strategy, it’s definitely time to pay attention.

Pinterest currently has over 10 million registered users and allows people to create their own online noticeboards to ‘pin’ pictures and videos – a digital collage wonderland!

The news that really made me stop and pay attention was the latest figures from shareaholic that Pinterest generated more referral traffic than Twitter in February 2012.

Marketingsherpa’s 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report has been published – a great piece of ammunition for your budget meetings as ”Lack of resources (budget, staff, time) presents greatest barrier to B2B marketing success.” The report includes endless charts to illustrate trends and findings – and most importantly shares best practice on how to attract and convert more leads.

MarketingSherpa organised a survey of 3,300 marketers on the promise of social marketing ROI for 2012.

I had the pleasure of sitting in Ashley Friedlein’s session on ‘Data-driven decision making – optimising your sales efforts with online data” at FUNNEL on Tuesday.

We attended eConsultancy’s first FUNNEL event yesterday in London. The event brought together marketing strategists and sales professionals all under one roof to better understand how to attract, engage, nurture and convert our leads – and refreshingly for us the audience and content was B2B focused. Finally!

Last week I attended Nimbus Partners’ “Inspiring Performance” event at the Brewery – a Business Process Management event. As you can imagine I’ve been to many events, but this one really stood out for me and really set out to impress. The detail and thought behind the event concept and format was excellent and in my opinion they got all the elements of the event mix right – from the venue, the style of presentations, the catering, the after party - sorry, ‘networking’ – and of course the outstanding entertainment by Naturally 7.

It’s always refreshing to read a specific B2B marketing article and eConsultancy have done well with this one, so worth sharing.

I’ve been spending a lot of time on Google analytics recently, setting up goal trackings. It was very timely that this excellent blog from Anna Lewis featured in eConsultancy – I just wanted to shared it with everyone.

Interesting facts from a technology vendor on the effects of social media lead generation for B2B companies

Internet marketing is forever changing and it can be pretty challenging for marketers to keep on top of it all!

Found this interesting infographic from Marketing Sherpa about lead generation tactics.