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Is your blog filled with the content you want to see there? That’s probably a mistake, according to the latest survey from MarketingSherpa. Too often, IT marketers are publishing what they think is appropriate, instead of using the materials that are most likely to drive a prospect to click and enter the sales cycle.

Most marketers have a clear bias toward educational content and free research reports, with 92 percent believing the former will drive clicks and 86 percent supporting the latter. Best practices content? Marketers lean on it 79 percent of the time.

The reality is much different.

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Content-based marketing has the singular goal of driving clicks, very specific clicks, in fact. You want to draw users into the sales cycle as quickly and easily as possible, ensuring that when they reach your sales force, they are ready to move toward a purchase. The longer the process, the greater the risk that your prospects will fall off.

So, how do you drive more clicks? The latest research from MarketingSherpa suggests that you lead with — promotional content?!

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enter:marketing is excited to show off our new website! Our redesign, which includes fresh content to help IT solution providers and manufacturers find the information they need quickly and easily. As we have grown, we’ve found new opportunities to showcase our services and help the entire IT sales and implementation community to use innovative marketing practices to drive demand, cultivate leads and increase revenue.

The new enter:marketing website is a starting point for IT solution providers and manufacturers. Visit the website, and take a look at the services we provide. Then, contact us with specific questions you may have about how to identify, reach and connect with the IT decision-makers who are most important to you. We’ll work with you to develop and execute a marketing plan to put you in front of prospects now — and develop a pipeline of future possibilities.

Check out our website, and read the latest stories on our blog. We’re more than happy to provide free information to benefit the industry as a whole. When you’re ready to talk further, we’ll be ready.

As you begin to enter the social media marketing space, you’ll start to hear about “fans,” “friends” and “followers” — variations on the connections that people make in these environments. These relationships provide a first layer of measurement for social media marketing success, as they define your primary high-value audience.

While you don’t want to evaluate success strictly in terms of the number of followers or fans you amass — their activity, particularly relative to blog pageviews or, even better, purchases is far more important — this is the foundation from which you will drive the interactions that yield returns.

So, why do customers and clients become company and brand fans? Well, the answer varies with the type of social media user involved.

According to MarketingSherpa, there are three basic categories: Daily Users, Max Connectors and everyone else (i.e., “All Respondents”). Max Connectors are users with more than 500 social connections (e.g., on Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter). Daily Users are exactly what you think they are, though they lack the number of relationships as Max Connectors. Finally, All Respondents consists of Max Connectors, Daily Users and everyone else who participated in the study.

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Search and online advertising offer limited upside for Google at this point. Sure, they can still contribute significantly to Wall Street’s expectations, but they won’t be sufficient to fuel the sort of growth Google needs to maintain the reputation it’s developed over the past decade. The company’s expansion into personal and enterprise applications shows that there’s a need for new revenue streams. This is the impetus for Google products that could wind up replacing some segments of the market where IT VARs operate.

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It’s easy not to see Google as a competitor. First, the company’s major operations – search and ads – don’t really interfere with what VARs are doing, namely selling and implementing IT solutions. Also, Google isn’t entering the VAR space, so again, it doesn’t look like a competitor. The problem is more difficult to detect: Google is slowly trying to replace certain parts of the IT market. Enterprise use of its Gmail service, for example, replaces the opportunity to sell mailserver solutions. The problem isn’t widespread yet, but now is the time to watch Google’s moves and determine the impact to your business.

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