I just read an inspiring blog post by Megan Heuer at Sirius Decisions called Five B2B Marketing Surprises From 2009. It inspired me to reflect on what I learned in 2009.

The biggest take-away for me is how great the marketing tools and techniques are today compared to just a few years ago. Consider:

• Twitter (free) to quickly inform and inspire your network
• WordPress (free) to quickly publish blogs and websites. Additional shout-outs to the vibrant community of WordPress developers contributing plug-ins and themes.
• Marketo (pricey, but valuable) which teases out the marketing automation functions and processes from general CRM/sales force automation
• Salesforce.com (pricey, but valuable) for providing an easy to deploy, easy to manage and sales-rep-friendly tool for automating corporate processes for managing customer relationships and the sales process.
• Microsoft Office (not free), especially Word and Excel, for creating content and managing campaigns. I certainly enjoy using many of the newer tools, but, let’s face it, most of us document the bulk of our original thinking and planning using these tools.
• Google Analytics (free) to measure and analyze your web traffic and visitor trends.

Not as neat as the tools listed above is the emergence of multi-media publishing. The web is no longer just a medium of the written word. Podcasts, videos, photos, illustrations–even animations and web apps are increasing in popularity among prospects and customers. More on this topic at a later date…

Improved tools are important, but only when combined with a solid foundation of marketing professionalism. Great results are equally dependent on your sound (and stable) strategy, enduring processes and measurements.

The bottleneck in marketing continues to be the pace of creation of relevant, timely and persuasive content. I guess this means that the pace of marketing is limited by the imagination and creativity of the marketing team….a very nice thought.