Some common marketing challenges for marketers may include, increasing sales, increasing market share, boosting profits, reaching a wider audience, identifying new audiences, building a community, interacting more with current customers/prospects, creating brand awareness, so on and so forth.

When implementing an internet marketing strategy, whether it’s through a company’s website or via social media, it’s important you keep two things in mind: consistency and differentiation.

You want to make sure that whichever strategy you decide to implement is consistent with your brand, your brand personality and your commercial image.

Creating original and recognizable campaigns that communicate your brand’s values and benefits to your clients while keeping a consistent voice across all of your e-marketing channels is one way to go about.

Another aspect of it is identifying your unique situation in order to gain competitive advantage. For this you need to study the competition and pin point the areas that make you stand out from the rest and use that as your selling point and the angle for your campaign.

The key to an efficient online marketing strategy is to be consistent in your message and stay focused on the actual brand strategy marketing.

Every day new online marketing communication channels are introduced, which  slightly complicates the situation since businesses try to harness these as much as possible in order to drive traffic, generate leads and convert sales.

However, the focus should be on both- delivering the right message the right way while maximizing the internet marketing opportunites available.

It’s like the first time you were asked to put in your credit card number on one of those e-commerce websites like eBay. Really? What if…?

The same is true for social media for example. It’ll take a while before everyone starts adopting it, not many people are used to the idea yet, whether it’s joining a social network or any other online marketing strategy that’s out of the ordinary; you either apply it to your business practices or be left behind.

Despite these foul times, the last Forrester predictions revealed that more and more marketers are shifting to digital and interactive marketing spend will rise to $25.6 billion in 2009, up from $23.1 of last year.

The biggest spending gains will be seen in the social media and mobile departments, increasing nearly 60% (mobile) and 70% (social media). While some companies have not yet integrated somekind of interactive media program into their marketing strategy, customers are already quite familiar with most technologies available in the market.

A recent study run by the same research company of more than 200 marketers found that 60% planned to increase interactive budgets by shifting spend from traditional outlets.

And finally, Forrester’s 2014 predictions show that interactive marketing as a whole will grow 17%, led by social media, forecasted to grow 34%, followed by mobile at 27%, display advertising at 17%  and lastly search, projected to grow 15%.

The shift from traditional to digital is more apparent everytime. Companies are becoming more and more comfortable with the new technologies and customers continue to set an example with their expertise–it seems like it’s all heading towards mainstream!

• to keep a close relationship with clients and consumers
• maintain an open dialogue with prospects and clients
• brand promotion and awareness
• boost sales
• increase visibility in search results
• drive traffic
• word-of-mouth
• …

Reasons, there are plenty. The number of Fortune 500 that have embraced blogging since last year has more than doubled. According to Socialtext, a people directory with social networking features who’s co-founder is Chris Anderson (Wired), 12.8% of Fortune 500 have taken up blogging today.

This is just a sample of some of the company’s included in this 12.8%, click here to view the entire list.

Included on this list are the links to the different blogs, some have multiple blogs, plus any review that has been written about them. B2B marketing holds an immense amount of valuable content that should be exposed and available to all so that communities may begin to form as contributors add valuable information to them.

Because ‘marketing crisis’, ‘how to market in times of recession’ and the likes have become quiet popular search queries on Google these past months, B2B blogs can serve as a way to demonstrate thought leaders and bring new ideas to the table while establishing corporate credibility.

SocialText has also put together a document discussing the corporate approach to blogging. It’s a good guide where a group of random blogs are selected into writing styles and content style. This way corporations have a wide variety of approaches to analyze and consider for when plunging themselves in this new media universe.