Every year our friends at MarketingSherpa collect marketing stories from companies and agencies large and small. The end result is that they publish over a hundred of them in their Marketing Wisdom Report and, quite honestly, this report is one of the most valuable that I read each year. Here are five stories that caught my attention from last year’s report:

• B2B Can be Fun. The marketing automation industry is not known for its “fun” quotient. Joe Chernov at Eloqua said it doesn’t have to be that way.  First off they turned their white papers into green ones with coffee stains and called the series The Eloqua Grande Guide Series. Next they made each paper short for the Twitter-age attention span. They then created Juan Eloqua, a fictitious nobleman, to introduce each guide. The end result – more that 500 qualified leads in one quarter.
• Mobile Media Promotes Interaction. Jason Pinto from InterlinkONE discovered that the number of people that will interact with your company on their mobile phones is actually greater than you think. They offered access to a whitepaper through a short URL or a QR code. More than 70% of their respondents hit their landing page by scanning the QR code versus typing in the URL. That’s significant.
• Testing Leads To ROI. Not the sexiest topic, but I love it when companies who test reap the benefits. Arden Buchman from Wellpoint increased SEM leads 200% year over year thanks to ongoing landing page testing and optimization. Having a nonstop cycle of content testing is the biggest piece of wisdom that he wanted to share with his fellow marketers looking to continually increase ROI.
• Targeted Facebook Promotion Helps Event Grow Overnight. Using targeted Facebook ads along with a small amount of email marketing, the Festival of Books increased ticket reservations from 400 to 1,200 in two weeks. Scott Meyer from 9Clouds wrote that the largest regional Facebook pages from the Humanities Council were targeted for social media interaction and they ran two groups of ads targeted at 20,000 people – one group went to the “like” page and the other went to the online ticket reservation.  Not only did ticket sales go through the roof, but as an added long-term benefit, their community grew as well.
• Starting a Blog Is Easy. Maintaining It Is Tougher. But the rewards are worth it. Marty Knight from OnPath Business Solutions found out what many know already.  What I liked about this pearl of wisdom was that he found that his contributing writers (the ones that are so hard to get to write something) actually had high page views and multiple re-tweets for each of their blog posts.  Also he got his company blog syndicated, which helped boost their average page view by 15-20%. But the biggest plus was that his company got 22 keywords in the top 10 of Google.

Notice I did not say top five pearls of wisdom. There are way too many that I found useful in the 2011 edition of the Wisdom Report (information collected during December 2010).

I know for a fact that the cumulative marketing wisdom of the HubSpot community (that’s hundreds of thousands of you) is awesome in its size.  I think it would be great if members of this community (that’s you), would contribute to the 2012 Marketing Wisdom Report. All you need do is go to the online form before December 14 and share a short anecdote about test results, campaign lessons or other insights you gained during the past 12 months.

Photo Credit: JD Hancock