Annual growth in the USA on online B2B marketing spend is forecast to rise by 8% in 2010, with 14% growth by 2012 and total online spending reaching 12% of the marketing mix by 2013.

Although these figures cover the US market, it seems reasonable to assume that other western economies will follow a similar pattern.

Interestingly, this particular survey also highlighted the fact that around two thirds of marketers believe that online needs to be supported by traditional marketing activities to be successful.

We’re seeing a similar pattern emerge among our clients: there’s a lot of interest in online P.R. and advertising, which is tempered by continued support for the print media. In many respects the view is that coverage in the trade and technical print media still represents an important part of the marketing mix, continuing to deliver strong and credible messages.

Where online scores is in its immediacy; it’s ideal for urgent product launches or for covering corporate news stories. Conversely, the B2B print media – at least those that have not sold out entirely to the god of colour separations – provide an increasingly valuable platform for addressing subjects such as longer term industry issues, technical subjects and the impact of legislation.

Although the shift from print to online will inevitably increase in the next few years there will be an important role for both – something that offers excellent opportunities for building market profile and, through careful use of dedicated online tools, the generation of sales enquiries.

At the same time, after growth of 0.1% in the UK economy during the last quarter of 2009, and gloomy talk of a double-dip recession, we’ve had the Bank of England’s quarterly Inflation Report predicting growth of 3.2% by the last quarter of 2011 – so that’s something to look forward to!

The bottom line is that although nobody really knows what’s likely to happen in the coming months, the consensus is that there is likely to be a slow (although not necessarily steady) return to growth in 2010/11.

At 4CM we’re already seeing signs of optimism, as clients start to remove the budget constraints that have been in place since early last year. As a result, we’re now working on longer term marketing and media campaigns that will strongly position our clients and enable them to capitalise on their target markets as growth returns to the economy.

One of the challenges, especially within larger organisations, is that much of the information collected either remains locked in silos, so is rarely reviewed alongside datasets from elsewhere in the organisation, or focuses simply on short term requirements – column inches, web page impressions, site visitors, sales enquiries and so on.

Although all of these metrics – and more – are important for monitoring the performance of suppliers or individual marketing tools, they do not, in B2B circles at any rate, appear to be generally used as part of wider business analyses.

Take sales leads, for example. It’s established practice to define the success of campaigns in terms of the number of leads generated, for example from trade exhibitions. All well and good in so far as it goes, but shouldn’t the value analysis really look at the lifetime worth of each customer, combining data from multiple sources and departments to establish the real return from each activity or, better still, each set of integrated sales and marketing campaigns?

Taking a holistic view of each customer, or even groups of customers, helps to strengthen customer relationships through improved ongoing communication. It also allows cross selling techniques to be applied and enables the reasons for customer defections to be identified and remedied; all of which increase customer value and long term ROI still further.