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A successful differentiation has two defining characteristics: (1) It is not imitated by your competitors, even though (2) it brings you unmistakable success with consumers. Impossible, you say? Not quite.

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How can B2B companies truly differentiate their offering and be relevant to customers over the long term? This is where brands come in.

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This second article in a series focuses on implementing a successful business blog. It dissects the steps of selecting development tools, working out a content plan for launch, making a debut, developing a style and personality, handling responses, monitoring consumer discussion on your subject, and enjoying the process. Here are nine valuable tips for implementing and launching a blog.

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Marketing research isn't just a way to collect opinions, measure awareness, or test positioning statements any more. Packaged correctly, your research itself can be your message. You can turn your results into media stories that attract favorable publicity and establish you or your business as an authority. Or you can craft compelling premiums—reports, guides, or booklets—with must-have information that generates leads.

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You play by the rules. Your list is confirmed opt-in. You have spent time writing a compelling message and an inspiring call to action. Your graphic designers have designed a stunning custom email. You then send the email to your list but find that deliverability rates are lower than you planned—mostly because none of your recipients at a major Internet service provider (ISP) received your email.... Uh-oh.

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Problems cost money. More often than not, however, the only cost that customers and sales people focus on is that of the proposed solution. The most critical cost, the cost of the problem, remains the best-kept secret in the selling world—and certainly the most overlooked.

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Who doesn't have a business blog these days? Maybe you? Fret no more. Here are the necessary steps to planning and implementing a corporate blog. This first article examines the key decisions on subject, mission, audience targeting, market survey, blogger selection, securing of a corporate champion, and the "go" decision.

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While Leigh is a huge Mac fan, her recent experience at her local Apple store was surprisingly underwhelming. In fact, it was bad. While it's possible that the problems she encountered are isolated, there are nonetheless some good lessons for anyone managing a retail merchandising experience.

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We hear of freelance writers, freelance editors and freelance designers, but rarely do we hear of freelance "marketers." But that is beginning to change. Now that telecommuting is commonplace and workers are more mobile, freelance marketers are starting to sprout up all over the place. This week: Where can you find a good one?

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The US Hispanic population, with its growing purchasing power and impressive growth in media usage, has companies scrambling for ideas and ways to effectively target this barely tapped market. In this new report from MarketingProfs is solid and hard-to-find data on what organizations are doing effectively to target this market, as well as what roadblocks exist.

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To create a complete marketing plan, one that drives near- and longer-term marketing action, I need only four "colors." Here's how structuring the "color set" will help you focus your research, derive relevant conclusions, and then use all that information to create workable, living action plans for your marketing efforts.

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After years of paying lip service to the importance of marketing while engineering and design ruled the roost, technology companies are learning that maybe they need to be more like other businesses after all.

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Salespeople are notoriously poor in following up on qualified leads. In fact, experts say, sales does not follow up on more than 70% of leads. Why? Field salespeople in most organizations are compensated, motivated, and managed to focus on short-term opportunities, not on the pipeline. Contrast that scenario with the strategic marketing experts at CenterBeam, a San Jose-based IT outsourcing firm that provides IT outsourcing services on a fee-for-service basis. By making the lead-generation process a cornerstone of its strategic marketing program, CenterBeam is getting many of its sales from long-term leads cultivated on the "farm"—and a ten-to-one return on its outside investment in the farmers. Here's how.

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Nothing gets the adrenalin pumping quite like an AdWords campaign that delivers a strong ROI. Success brings a big grin on your face when you realize you can invest more in the campaign, expand the base of keywords, and make even more money. The more you spend, the more you make. It's a great moment, while it lasts. But the problem is, it doesn't. There will come a point when you hit a plateau. You have tested and optimized different headlines, body text and ad groups, you have adjusted the bid prices, and included just about every related keyword you can imagine. What now?

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Thanks to the time constraints and laziness of both traditional journalists and bloggers, you may be quoted in a story (sometimes at length), without having been interviewed—the victim of a stealth interview. There was a big brouhaha when something similar happened to actor George Clooney recently, but it's really nothing out of the ordinary.

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Patricia Hume, global VP of Avaya, gives her own views from the top about what she looks for in new hires, why she sometimes hugs her co-workers, and why women just might be the best marketers.

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Do your customers prefer to get information from email newsletters? Web sites? Blogs? Feeds? A mix? A growing number of users are relying on RSS feeds to satisfy their hunger for information.

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One of the most exciting and promising developments in marketing is the emergence of something called Net Promoters. First described two years ago in Harvard Business Review, Net Promoters is now being adopted by a growing number of highly respected firms, including General Electric, Intuit, and SAP. What is it? And what does it do?

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If you run a nonprofit, you know that marketing is essential to your mission. To many nonprofit managers, marketing equals fundraising and nothing more. But your organization exists for more than just bringing in donations. By using social marketing methods, you can boost the effectiveness of programs and activities that are the reason your organization exists in the first place—to make a difference.

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Advertising and marketing has changed. What could possibly be the cause of so many beleaguered established players and fortunate newer ones?