There’s nothing more powerful in marketing than a testimonial from your customers about the value of your products or services.

That’s why so many smart marketers, especially companies that sell business-to-business (B2B) professional services, use client testimonials in their advertising, sales presentations, brochures, and websites.

So how do you get a client to give you a great testimonial for your marketing campaigns? Follow these 10 tips.

Promoting a professional services firm is one of the most difficult challenges in marketing.

Whether you’re selling legal services, marketing services, accounting, IT, insurance, benefits, payroll, or consulting, it can be tough to create a marketing strategy that differentiates your company from everyone else who does what you do.

Here’s the usual approach: “We have great capabilities and we deliver great service.” No offense, but you must, or you wouldn’t still be in business. Plus, all your competitors say the same thing.

Is that really what makes you stand out? Is that the reason clients choose you?

The real value professional services firms sell is their expertise and their ability to use that expertise to solve clients’ problems. Here’s how to create a smart marketing strategy for a business-to-business professional services company by selling your smarts.

The most successful social media marketers create and publish a high volume of original content through blogs, videos, white papers, and other vehicles.

But they also share quality content produced by others. Gathering, sorting, and republishing content from other authors that you believe your followers will value is called curation. By being a great content curator, you help customers, prospects, and colleagues find the “good stuff” online and know what to read. This not only makes you an informative and influential social media contributor, but it also helps attract new followers. Here’s how to find, filter, and share the best content with your social media followers in a smart marketing strategy.

I am a born and bred direct marketer. I learned about direct mail from the legends of the industry – Ed Mayer, John Yeck, Paul Sampson, and Rose Harper – at a seminar for college marketing students sponsored by the Direct Marketing Association in the 1970s. And though I often recommend social media and other marketing strategies to clients of my marketing agency, direct mail is still my first love.

Like all direct marketing practitioners, I’ve been dismayed to watch the U.S. Postal Service struggle for survival. As the organization tries to right its ship by cutting costs, it’s also trying to grow revenue by drumming up new business from mailers.

That’s the right thing to do, but perhaps not the way the USPS is doing it.

Case in point: The latest USPS direct mail campaign mailed to my marketing firm this week. Here’s where the USPS went wrong and how to avoid this mistake in your smart marketing strategy.

If you’re a business-to-business (B2B) marketer, sponsoring your industry’s trade show can deliver high visibility for your brand. But trade show sponsorship can be a big investment. Sponsorship packages for some national shows are topping six figures and even smaller sponsorship options can be costly. Before you spend valuable marketing dollars on a trade show sponsorship, here are 10 guidelines for choosing sponsorships that are worth the marketing investment.

Marketers everywhere are discovering the value of Twitter for sharing content and insights with customers and prospects and creating top-of-mind awareness. I used to be skeptical of Twitter but I’ve become convinced of its marketing power. As I approach my 1,000th tweet on Twitter as @jeangianfagna, here are 21 tips I’ve learned for using Twitter in a smart marketing strategy.

Are you marketing to business decision-makers? Here are my top 10 recommendations for developing a smart business-to-business (B2B) marketing strategy, based on the tried-and-true principles of B2B marketing and my experience as a marketing strategy consultant.

Blogging is one of the most powerful ways to market your company. But only a few of the 156 million people who are publishing blogs achieve a big following.

One is Chris Brown, owner of Marketing Resources & Results, a full-service marketing consulting firm in Northeast Ohio that helps companies attract new customers.

Chris has published the blog Branding & Marketing since 2006. She’s written more than 900 articles on marketing strategy, marketing tactics, branding, social media, and market research. Last week, she reached a major blogging milestone: 10,000 subscribers.

In this interview with Smart Marketing Strategy, Chris shares how she has used blogging to build her marketing agency and offers some lessons from her success.

Smart marketers know that direct marketing can play a crucial role in a business-to-business lead generation marketing strategy.

But creating a direct mail campaign that makes it past the mailroom and the administrative assistant to the desk of a business decision-maker – and captures the executive’s attention – can be a real marketing challenge.

Here are 13 ideas for creative direct mail formats – some familiar and some you may not have thought of – that can help get your next B2B mailing past the gatekeepers and entice business executives to open your package.

The marketing budget for a local, service-based business is a tiny fraction of what a global company spends on marketing. Yet small marketers with limited resources sometimes outshine the big guys when it comes to marketing effectiveness, especially in direct mail.

Here’s how a regional painting business in Cleveland, Ohio nailed a prospect direct mail campaign with a simple postcard, while Dell, a huge business-to-business marketer, committed several cardinal sins of direct marketing in a B2B direct mail promotion — plus four lessons for your smart marketing strategy.