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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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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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Virtualization is among the hottest technologies in the IT market right now. Even though datacenter penetration is still low, your competitors are pushing it just as hard as you are. There’s no guarantee that you’ll be the first person a CIO or other IT decision maker has spoke with about virtualization, so you need to make sure your message is a bit different — you need to make it pop. The easiest way to do this is to make it about the competition.

In your own market (i.e., among you and your competitors), you’re seeing the importance of virtualization skyrocket. Do the math — this means a lot of IT solution providers are talking to a lot of IT departments. Virtualization is on the move, and a CIO that doesn’t get on board soon enough will be left behind, leaving the entire organization at a disadvantage in the marketplace. A company that lags technologically will have trouble supporting its business users, serving its clients and managing its operations.

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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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