There’s a giant trash can in the mailroom of my office building in Cleveland, Ohio. Every day, it fills up with discarded business mail. Sometimes I peek in the can to see what my fellow tenants have thrown out, and it’s quite revealing. Here’s what I’ve observed as a casual mailroom trash inspector, and three valuable lessons from this experience for business-to-business marketers who want to develop a smart marketing strategy.

Business-to-business marketing doesn’t have to be complicated or elaborate to be effective. In fact, the most successful B2B marketing is often based on a simple strategy: Deliver clear, relevant messages consistently well over time to carefully selected prospects. Here are seven principles of a simple but smart B2B marketing strategy.

The phones are ringing, web traffic is up, and the sales manager is telling everyone you’re a marketing genius. Your business-to-business lead generation campaign is a success! But before you break out the bubbly, remember that getting prospects to express interest in a product or service can be the easy part of business-to-business marketing. Converting those leads to sales is often a lengthy and complex process. Here’s how to build a smart marketing strategy that engages B-to-B prospects and gets them to say “yes.”

If you’re a business-to-business marketer who uses trade shows to get leads for new business, you probably send direct mail and email marketing to prospects after the show to convert prospects to customers.

Lead generation via trade shows can be an important part of a smart marketing strategy, but if leads aren’t well qualified at the outset – and frequently re-qualified if they stay on your prospect database over time – your post-show direct mail and email campaigns could be a waste of your marketing resources. Here’s a case study in how NOT to do it.

Direct marketing can be one of the most powerful elements of a smart marketing strategy, especially if you need to generate leads for a field sales force.
But strategic errors can doom your direct marketing campaign to failure. Here are seven common mistakes in direct marketing strategy and ways to avoid them.

Is direct marketing part of your smart marketing strategy? Here are 10 tried-and-true principles for developing a high-impact creative approach for your next direct marketing campaign.

Great copy is essential for an effective advertising campaign and a smart marketing strategy, but too many copywriters use the same tired phrases again and again in headlines and campaign themes. This is a giant waste of the marketer’s money. Here are seven advertising phrases we’ve seen used a hundred times and hope to never see again — and why you should expect better from your marketing agency.

Loyal customers are a marketer’s best source of new sales and referrals. That’s why smart marketers treat their best customers like gold, and why earning customer loyalty is the goal of every smart marketing strategy. Except at Toyota. Their recent direct mail campaign to a loyal Toyota customer broke many of the rules of effective direct marketing and harmed a 25-year customer relationship. Here’s why this campaign failed and what Toyota should have done instead.

Is it true that the more you know, the more you Kohl’s? Is taking stock in the long term Vanguarding? And will you Bing it if you’re searching for something online?

Kohl’s Department Stores, Vanguard Investments, and Microsoft are the latest marketers to try to turn a company brand or product name into a verb. It’s an old marketing strategy, but it rarely works. Here’s why.

What should you offer to generate higher response to your direct marketing campaign? Here are ideas for producing orders, generating leads, and driving retail traffic through an effective direct marketing offer.