Despite the fact that event sponsorship and participation is costly and time consuming, marketers continue to invest in this tactic. In fact, 70% of B2B marketers rate live events as effective, one of the most powerful tools in their marketing arsenal.

Before addressing this, some context. Given the increasingly saturated media landscape; ubiquitous access to information; and inundated, time-strapped audiences; the greatest competition for your customers’ attention isn’t just a direct competitor, it’s the entire ecosystem of brands.

Enter the customer journey. Buyers tend to go through four distinct phases before deciding to purchase or repurchase a product or service. If you know what your customer is looking for, you can use content more strategically. A white paper might not be right for a returning customer but a webinar on upgraded product features could be.

As a marketer, getting your message out to the right people is your primary goal, and email marketing is still a highly successful way to reach your target audience. In fact, according to a 2014 McKinsey study ...

E-mail remains a significantly more effective way to acquire customers than social media—nearly 40 times that of Facebook and Twitter combined. That’s because 91 percent of all US consumers still use e-mail daily, and the rate at which e-mails prompt purchases is not only estimated to be at least three times that of social media, but the average order value is also 17 percent higher.

Social media hashtags are used to optimize content and increase engagement across social media channels. When used correctly, a good hashtag can help highlight a subject or categorize messages around an event. When used incorrectly, a hashtag can confuse an audience or result in content that looks like spam.

If social media is part of your content marketing strategy, great job! But if you aren’t integrating your social media with the rest of your content, it could be doing more to engage your audience and extend your company’s reach.

Integrating social media with your content means weaving the two together, such as adding a link from an ongoing community discussion to a blog post or e-newsletter article covering the topic of that discussion. And it can work both ways. You could also use that article to introduce a new discussion to your community.

The About Us section of many B2B websites often disregards this maxim. Like a whistle-happy zebra, many companies make this section all about them. Which despite the name, is a harmful approach to take. Customers' interest in your company is directly related to how it benefits them, how you will solve their problems.