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Virtualization the key to enterprise IT savings by 2014: The penetration of virtualization technologies is still low, but that only means it has room to grow. By 2014, according to a new report from Citrix, virtualization will dominate IT enterprise savings – and thus the agendas of CIOs. Citrix surveyed more than 700 CIOs from around the world and found that virtualization has led to IT cost savings of 16 percent, and they expect it to hit 27 percent in 2014.

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Skip paid search: SEO is the way to go: Okay, maybe it’s not that easy. There are some serious benefits to paid search advertising with search engines, such as predictability and control. And, it’s easier to measure your paid search marketing ROI. But, the quality of the leads that come to you this way aren’t nearly as high as those that come via search engine optimization (SEO).

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Corporate blogging Insight: The content funnel: One of the biggest social media marketing mistakes I’ve seen companies make is to emulate the wrong blogs. Whether it’s The VAR Guy or Engadget, corporate bloggers look to popular independent blogs for ideas. To a certain extent, this is smart: the top blogs can have some great features and styles that are worth adopting. But, much of what they do can be unwise (or simply impossible) for you to implement. The reason for this is that different blog types carry their own objectives and constraints.

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IT sales call: Best time is Tuesday at 9 AM: At enter:marketing, we schedule a lot of appointments for our clients. Through the demand generation and lead cultivation programs we run, we’ve learned a considerable amount about how IT buyers prefer to be engaged, the best survey questions for triggering interest and even when they want to talk. What we’re about to show you isn’t the result of some survey: it’s live data. Real. These insights are based on the actions of IT buyers.

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Fill your IT marketing blog in five easy steps: The hardest part of maintaining a marketing blog is coming up with content … and producing it. Many attempts are abandoned simply because tier advocates didn’t realize just how much work it would involve. Doubtless, blogging is labor-intensive, but there are ways to make it much, much easier to keep your blog fresh without turning it into your full-time job. You have content all over the place and just need to put it to work for you.

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Social media marketing nabs 11% of online marketing budget: There’s more to online marketing than banner and text ads. The latest study from MarketingSherpa estimates that paid search is good for 21 percent of online marketing spending and is topped only by the company budget, which picks up 27 percent on average. Social media is clearly no longer the object of dabbling, securing 11 percent of the online marketing budget: beating out search engine optimization (SEO) at 10 percent, online display advertising at 6 percent and other online marketing at 6 percent. But, social media marketing still hasn’t caught up with e-mail marketing, which claims 19 percent of the marketing budget.

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One of the biggest social media marketing mistakes I’ve seen companies make is to emulate the wrong blogs. Whether it’s The VAR Guy or Engadget, corporate bloggers look to popular independent blogs for ideas. To a certain extent, this is smart: the top blogs can have some great features and styles that are worth adopting. But, much of what they do can be unwise (or simply impossible) for you to implement. The reason for this is that different blog types carry their own objectives and constraints.

Think of content as a funnel. At the top is the widest sent of information available, the ability to write about any subject dealing with any company anywhere in the world. At the bottom is the narrowest of topics, tightly defined in order to appeal to the smallest of niche markets. This is how blogging works, with the mass media sites having the greatest flexibility in terms of the content they can use and corporate blogs having to hunt for ideas that are focused on promoting their capabilities while remaining sensitive to their clients.

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Okay, maybe it’s not that easy. There are some serious benefits to paid search advertising with search engines, such as predictability and control. And, it’s easier to measure your paid search marketing ROI. But, the quality of the leads that come to you this way aren’t nearly as high as those that come via search engine optimization (SEO).

According to the latest study by MarketingSherpa, SEO was responsible for both the highest quality and quantity of search engine-driven leads, with shares of 30 percent and 37 percent, respectively. Paid search on Google did post a noticeable 32 percent of leads by quantity, but it was only good for 16 percent by quality. Meanwhile, paid search on the other major search engines resulted in only 6 percent of leads by quality, compared to a similarly meager 9 percent of high-quantity leads.

Commit to a solid SEO strategy (which can be helped along considerably by blogging), and you’ll earn stronger leads in greater quantity.

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[Source: MarketingSherpa]

There’s more to online marketing than banner and text ads. The latest study from MarketingSherpa estimates that paid search is good for 21 percent of online marketing spending and is topped only by the company budget, which picks up 27 percent on average. Social media is clearly no longer the object of dabbling, securing 11 percent of the online marketing budget: beating out search engine optimization (SEO) at 10 percent, online display advertising at 6 percent and other online marketing at 6 percent. But, social media marketing still hasn’t caught up with e-mail marketing, which claims 19 percent of the marketing budget.

Click here to receive enter:marketing blog updates by e-mail >>

[Source: MarketingSherpa]

The penetration of virtualization technologies is still low, but that only means it has room to grow. By 2014, according to a new report from Citrix, virtualization will dominate IT enterprise savings — and thus the agendas of CIOs. Citrix surveyed more than 700 CIOs from around the world and found that virtualization has led to IT cost savings of 16 percent, and they expect it to hit 27 percent in 2014.

While 31percent of CIOs estimate that 5 percent of their IT budgets or less are dedicated to virtualization technologies, 26 percent of them expect virtualization to account for a quarter of their IT budgets in 2014. The UK is leading the adoption of virtualization, with 27 percent of CIOs rolling out desktop virtualization over the next year and 41 percent planning to extend their use of server virtualization. In the United States, server virtualization adoption is currently only 17 percent.

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Overview >>

Manage your information >>

Meet your prospects ASAP >>

Don’t wait … cultivate! >>

Take control of your sales cycle: Meet your prospects ASAP: Since self-service information doesn’t always lead to the correct conclusions, as we discussed yesterday, your prospects need your help, whether they realize it or not. They need competent sales professionals and, at times, pre-sales engineers to walk them through the intricacies of a situation to ensure the right solutions are identified and implemented. Without this layer of support, IT buyers who are smart but pressed for time will not always plunge into the details, leaving major causal problems undiagnosed and, post-implementation, not remedied.

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Five reasons to market using Twitter: Fifty-eight million people can’t be wrong. There are plenty of people who see the value in this social media platform, and they are casting votes with their personal and professional time. As a result, Twitter has become a robust marketing environment. Long seen as a consumer brand sector play, the potential of Twitter for promoting business solutions – including IT equipment, software and consulting – is quickly being realized.

Read the article >>

Fill your IT marketing blog in five easy steps: The hardest part of maintaining a marketing blog is coming up with content … and producing it. Many attempts are abandoned simply because tier advocates didn’t realize just how much work it would involve. Doubtless, blogging is labor-intensive, but there are ways to make it much, much easier to keep your blog fresh without turning it into your full-time job. You have content all over the place and just need to put it to work for you.

Read the article >>

Five characteristics of a highly effective marketing partner: There is no shortage of IT marketing agencies on the market that would be thrilled to have you as a client. You get calls regularly, have listened to countless pitches and reviewed what feels like a never-ending stack of presentations on demand generation. So, how do you choose? If you have a partner in place, how do you evaluate its effectiveness?

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IT sales call: Best time is Tuesday at 9 AM: At enter:marketing, we schedule a lot of appointments for our clients. Through the demand generation and lead cultivation programs we run, we’ve learned a considerable amount about how IT buyers prefer to be engaged, the best survey questions for triggering interest and even when they want to talk. What we’re about to show you isn’t the result of some survey: it’s live data. Real. These insights are based on the actions of IT buyers.

Read the article >>

Most Popular Keyword: Twitter

And, you may have missed …

Take control of your sales cycle: Manage your information: Before the ubiquity of information, prospects were able to get rid of the sales team with the simple demand: “Get me something in writing.” The sales professional, meanwhile, would guard information carefully, letting it slip out incrementally throughout the sales cycle, rewarding the prospect for moving each step closer to a sale. With websites, blogs and message boards available for virtually every topic imaginable, this doesn’t work any more. Most information is already out there.

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If the sales cycle were kept to less than 90 days, everything would be so much simpler. Sales professionals would be able to manage their pipelines to their quarterly revenue objectives and make the decisions necessary to maximize the company’s results and their own. But, those days are long gone. This has led to a myopic perspective, in which leads that aren’t expected to close quickly are cast aside.

The result is an unfortunate dynamic, in which sales professionals are left scrambling for “hot leads” constantly. If they were to allocate some of their time for investment in lead cultivation, they would soon have a robust ongoing pipeline, allowing them to nurture every account and maximize the value of every opportunity.

The opportunity that many sales professionals miss — even purposefully skip — is substantial. Imagine how many leads are cast aside in favor of the needle-in-a-haystack that is ready to make a purchase almost immediately. These are next quarter’s hot leads — or they’ll get hot the quarter after that. In disregarding these leads now, the sales professional could be giving the opportunity to a competitor when the prospect is ready to buy.

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Since self-service information doesn’t always lead to the correct conclusions, as we discussed yesterday, your prospects need your help, whether they realize it or not. They need competent sales professionals and, at times, pre-sales engineers to walk them through the intricacies of a situation to ensure the right solutions are identified and implemented. Without this layer of support, IT buyers who are smart but pressed for time will not always plunge into the details, leaving major causal problems undiagnosed and, post-implementation, not remedied.

Perhaps the greatest challenge faced by IT buyers is that they can sum up a situation quickly and have the strength of reason and experience behind them. This can impede further inquiry and discussion … and result in an ineffective implementation and unhappy client. So, the sales professional needs to begin the process of engaging the IT buyer early, in order to help him move past any preconceived notions that could make a project unsuccessful.

Your prospects will be most interested in answers to the questions they have — even if there are greater issues underlying them. Use their immediate concerns as a starting point, and then guide the dialogue in a manner that gives you a platform for addressing any related or underlying concerns.

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Fifty-eight million people can’t be wrong. There are plenty of people who see the value in this social media platform, and they are casting votes with their personal and professional time. As a result, Twitter has become a robust marketing environment. Long seen as a consumer brand sector play, the potential of Twitter for promoting business solutions – including IT equipment, software and consulting – is quickly being realized.

The hard part, of course, is in figuring out how to harness it. As with corporate marketing blogging, the biggest mistake may be to wait for the perfect plan, but you don’t want to enter Twitter without marketing objectives or an idea of how to achieve them.

To help you plan your entry into this corner of the social media market, here are five reasons to start marketing via Twitter.

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