How will the new cookies law affect your marketing efforts?

Extract: The Direct Marketing Association has told marketers to consider a range of steps to ensure they comply with the cookies law.

It is likely that you will have heard a great deal over recent weeks about the new cookies law, but how will it affect your company's efforts to increase lead generation?

Last month, the UK government implemented an EU directive requiring websites to obtain visitors' permission before using cookies to track them and to make clear what data is being tracked and how it is being used.

What steps should you take?

In light of this, the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) has published a ten-step guide to cookie management, which advocates that organisations engage all key stakeholders, including marketers, in debates about what cookies policy they implement.

Furthermore, it advises companies to check all the areas where cookies may be used and to assess their level of intrusiveness and their function, as well as to develop and test any solutions they do implement.

Firms also need to consider how they will obtain consent from web users to track cookies; there are many ways of doing this: pop-up boxes, homepage headers, providing terms and conditions and so on.

They will need to use these to provide access to content that tells users what cookies are being used, what they are doing and how users can provide or withdraw consent for their data to be tracked.

Non-compliance still rife

It is advice many firms should take on board, but to date it seems that very few are doing so as yet.

Earlier this month, a study of 55 major organisations' websites by KPMG revealed that just ten of them were compliant with the cookies law, despite potentially facing fines of up to £500,000 for breaching this regulation.

The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) last month expressed concern at the continuing high levels of non-compliance, but acknowledged that the heavy workload involved in meeting this new law would take time to complete.

Dave Evans, who has led the ICO's work on cookies, told BBC News that the regulator would instead expect companies not yet compliant to be able to demonstrate what steps they had undertaken over the past year to adhere to these new regulations.

Do your company's integrated marketing services obey the new rules on cookies? What policies should you adopt in response to this law change?

Key marketing trends for 2012 (part two)

Part two of our guide to key B2B marketing trends that will be seen this year.

Now is the time that B2B marketers like you will be considering if and how they want to change their advertising strategies in 2012 in order to win new business.

Some key marketing trends for 2012 have been discussed and now it is time for part two of our guide on what will be lucrative for B2B firms this year.

Integrating email marketing with social media

While many of you may feel that email marketing is a dying advertising medium due to the popularity of social media, it can still be lucrative for you in 2012.

According to Elisabeth Sosnow, who was writing for Business to Community, this is the year for B2B firms to run integrated marketing services that incorporate emails and social marketing campaigns.

She states that 47 per cent of companies intend to increase their investment in email marketing to drive growth in social media channels in 2012.

Beware though as you need to do more than just adding a social share button to your email marketing messages in order to do justice to both platforms.

Julia Peavy, director of Response Consulting at Return Path, suggested adding social media calls-to-action in email marketing messages.

She wrote on the firm's blog: "Test out different wording to encourage sharing or engagement with your social media site.

"While including simple 'follow us' and 'like us' text is better than no guidance, test the social media calls to action to see if this encourages more clicks."

You can also include the option to add comments to a social media page in your email marketing messages to help encourage engagement with your brand.

Content marketing

Producing high-quality content is a proven marketing tool for B2B marketers and the type of material required to win new business is set to develop even further in 2012.

White papers will always be a great way for you to reveal the latest developments in your industry to prove you're an expert in the field but B2B buyers will want to read more engaging content too this year.

This can include corporate blogs, written by your chairman or an industry expert, webinars that B2B buyers can watch online, and even e-books, as e-readers are gaining popularity across the globe.

Social media

Social media was a popular marketing method in 2011, with the launch of new social network Google+, and new advertising tools on both Facebook and Twitter.

These sites are sure to have more opportunities for you to build lead generation in the pipeline, such as Facebook which will be introducing private messages between brands and customers.

As a result, firms will be able to deal with customer service issues directly and in private, rather than on their Facebook page.

What methods will you be employing this year? Take our Poll opposite and find out what your peers think.