Do you spend a lot of time knee-deep in Google Analytics, looking at the rise and fall of pageviews, unique visitors and referred traffic? While it pays to know your audience, focusing too much on the numbers isn’t the best use of your time. To gain more value from your marketing blog, think less about organic traffic growth and more about the impact of your blog on your pipeline.

A corporate blog’s success isn’t measured in pageviews or any other traffic metric. Why not? Well, your objectives are totally different. You aren’t trying to amass impressions to generate advertising views, which is the prevailing model used by most of the blogs you probably read. Rather, you want to attract attention that will translate to inquiries from prospects, who you then hope to advance through the sales cycle.

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There’s only one marketing metric you really need to care about: “cost per income.” Everything else you measure really rolls up to this one number, which tells you how much you have to spend in order to reach a particular profit. This all might seem a tad obvious, but few are managing to this approach.

Instead, IT solution providers often look only at the cost of marketing, eschewing the overall result in favor of near-term expense management. Even holding on to your cash comes at a cost … which is equivalent to future returns. Think in terms of what it costs you to make money, and your marketing efforts will become more targeted, more powerful and more substantial.

Piecemeal marketing doesn’t work — and that’s what you get when you look strictly at cost. Change your perspective: measure by cost of income, and you’ll be committed to generating ROI.

Marketing campaigns don’t add up to a strategy. Sometimes it may look that way, but that’s just a bit of luck at work. It’s far more effective to go the other way — start with a strategy and use that to drive your campaigns.

IT solution provider marketers tend to focus on the campaign, a perspective resulting largely from demand generation considerations. The best way to bring in leads, however, is to use a coordinated approach that maximizes the value and potency of your marketing efforts. One-off campaigns just don’t have the same effect.

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“Large” creeps its way into just about every social media marketing endeavor. Companies want legions of Facebook fans and Twitter followers. And a blog that isn’t highly trafficked and packed with comments almost feels neglected.

Resist the temptation to believe that big is beautiful, and refocus on marketing basics — you’ll get a greater return on your social media marketing investment.

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We all know that B2B and B2C are totally different animals. What works for selling toilet paper doesn’t really translate to virtual desktop infrastructures. In e-mail marketing, content reigns supreme … which is why we expect corporate blogs to increase in influence through the end of the year and beyond.

According to recent research by MarketingSherpa, 67 percent of B2B marketing professionals use e-mail to deliver “content relevant to segment,” compared to only 61 percent of B2C e-mail marketers.

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Sometimes it seems like IT sales professionals treat a full lead pipeline as a security blanket. They like to know it’s there … but they don’t do anything with it. The sense is that just having lead available means the future is secure. After all, they can pursue them anytime they want, right? Unfortunately, leads don’t get better with age – especially the hot ones. Eventually, someone will meet a prospect’s needs, taking away the near-term opportunity and giving another company the chance to turn it into a long-lasting relationship. In the end, a full pipeline actually provides little security, if it isn’t approached with swift action.

Of course, there are other reasons why leads are left dormant. Some sales professionals prefer to chase leads that have big tickets, not recognizing that a small client now can become a big one later. And, every rep has his or her favorite accounts, which provide a consistent flow of revenue with little opportunity for growth. In some cases, fear is involved: nobody wants to chase an opportunity and lose.

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Telemarketing is a crucial aspect of IT channel demand generation — there’s no doubt about it. Even in a world where we have Facebook pages, Twitter accounts and e-mail campaigns, there’s definitely a place for having a bunch of guys work the phones … effectively. The problem with most telemarketing efforts is that they are basically random. Even if you buy or rent a list, you know very little about the names on it except company, title and telephone number. Fill your telemarketing campaign with actionable sales intelligence, and you’ll get better results.

Our approach is that telemarketing is best paired with something else — like a steak that’s screaming out to be joined by a glass of cabernet. Each on its own can be good, but together, they create an unbeatable taste. So, we tend to use telemarketing as part of an integrated program that includes direct mail and online surveys. The result is that our telemarketing team is able to focus on prospects who have already opted into the sales cycle. They’ve told us exactly what interests them about a particular IT challenge or solution set. In the end, we’re able to drive higher quality appointments for IT solution providers.

Telemarketing without other marketing tools lacks substance. Pour some intelligence into a vacuous telemarketing campaign, and you’ll get more than just calls: you’ll get results.

Technology adoption entails the temptation to expect over-simplification. We want to streamline to the bone, taking anything that even seems excessive out of the equation. Slicing manual intervention completely, sometimes, appears to be the goal. And, this kind of thinking finds its way to the marketing department. Push-button marketing would be great, right? Just let the marketing happen on its own …

The only problem is that push-button marketing doesn’t always work.

Don’t get me wrong: there is a place for the inflexible, the templated, the boilerplate, the procedural. Not every marketing effort has to be people-intensive and high-touch. For every carefully crafted blog post, you may send an e-mail blast to tens of thousands of people. Rather than try to automate everything — or guide everything manually — the best approach is to find the right mix.

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The potential for social media to build your brand and drive sales is salient, but there’s more to marketing than electrons. Direct mail remains a powerful way to engage IT decision-makers and lure them into your sales cycle.

Direct mail is both effective and increasingly unexpected. E-mail inboxes fill up quickly with newsletters, pitches and white papers, making it easy for yours to get lost in the shuffle. But, a well-designed mailer with a powerfully conveyed message can pop – and it has to be touched, put on a desk and opened.

Paper isn’t easily deleted!

As you put together and execute your marketing plan, be sure to include a significant direct mail component in your mix of marketing tools. It’s another way to reach your market, and one that will make you stand out.

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Right now, the buzz around cloud computing is endless. But, it’s just the latest trend. In the past, it’s been B2B marketplaces, best-of-breed solutions for targeted business challenges and even the internet as a whole. The hidden cost of innovation is that IT solution provider’s need to explain the value and viability of these emerging technologies to skeptical decision-makers who are heavily invested in the status quo. Eventually, you know, today’s innovation will become tomorrow’s legacy platform, but that doesn’t make getting over the hump any easier.

So, how do you approach a CIO or IT director with something new, like private cloud computing solution?

Well, cautiously.

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