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Five Survival Tips for Corporate Bloggers: Getting started is the hardest part. I remember when I launched my first corporate blog. I had a backlog of posts and had worked late nights and weekends for six months. Readership was almost nothing. I knew this would happen, but it didn’t make me any happier. It’s easy to throw in the towel during the first few months, but that means giving up all the return for the work you’ve already expended. Stick with it! The first 90 days are all about survival.

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Chart: How Effective Has Your Social Media Marketing Effort Been: As expected, social media marketing results vary across the B2B space. The general theme, according to the latest study by MarketingSherpa, is that, in general, social media marketing has been somewhat effective. What’s most encouraging, though, is that for most categories, few respondents indicated that social media initiatives were not effective at all.

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Corporate Blogging: Much Ado About Voice: Put yourself in your target market’s shoes. Your potential clients are short on time and have an abundance of information sources. What makes them choose you? If you think it’s the voice that comes through on your blog, then you’re making a bet on entertainment value: you’re trying to engage readers through force of personality.

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Five tips for marketing and selling disaster recovery and business continuity solutions: Disaster recovery and business continuity solutions should be easy to sell. Everybody needs them, and some businesses are required by regulatory bodies to meet specific and demanding standards. They also represent a place where IT solution providers and manufacturers can distinguish themselves because DR/BC is not only a cost, but one that will show a benefit only rarely. So, a company that can shorten backup and recovery times, consume less storage space and lessen demand on datacenter staff is likely to find a willing audience.

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Steer clear: Five charcteristics defetive marketing partners: A few weeks ago, we discussed what to look for in a marketing partner. While it’s always best to shoot for the ideal, it’s also prudent to know what to avoid. There are many mistakes waiting to happen, and being able to spot the warning signs can save you time, budget and a whole lot of aggravation. Here are five characteristics to look out for — and actively avoid — when checking out a potential IT marketing partner …

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Corporate Blogging: Avoid the Wrong Role Models: When you’re launching a business-to-business (B2B) corporate blog, the worst thing you can do is look to the likes of TechCrunch, Mashable and Technorati for a starting point. The mass media blogs that are so popular — and which may have inspired your own initiative — are fundamentally different from what you’re about to kick off. Don’t get me wrong: I read mass media blogs regularly (and even write for a few), but the dynamics are wholly unlike what you’ll encounter with a corporate blog. If you have visions of turning your corporate blog into the next Gawker-sans-edge, take a look at the four tips below.

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Steer clear: Five charcteristics defetive marketing partners: A few weeks ago, we discussed what to look for in a marketing partner. While it’s always best to shoot for the ideal, it’s also prudent to know what to avoid. There are many mistakes waiting to happen, and being able to spot the warning signs can save you time, budget and a whole lot of aggravation. Here are five characteristics to look out for — and actively avoid — when checking out a potential IT marketing partner …

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Five reasons why corporate blogs fail: Corporate blogging has become incredibly popular in the business to business (B2B) sector. Industries that were once thought inhospitable to blogs, these tools are not only popping up but are making a profound difference in marketing, relationship cultivation and client interaction.

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Chart: Adoption of social media marketing metrics: The latest research from MarketingSherpa indicates that businesses using social media to promote their products and services — and fill their lead streams — are employing a variety of measures to gauge the effectiveness of their initiatives. Of course, the metrics you’d expect have been most widely adopted, but there are some important stats being watched by a small group of companies that signal where social media marketing is headed.

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enter:marketing has a new look!: 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.

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Most Popular Keyword: IT marketing

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Five tips for marketing and selling disaster recovery and business continuity solutions: Disaster recovery and business continuity solutions should be easy to sell. Everybody needs them, and some businesses are required by regulatory bodies to meet specific and demanding standards. They also represent a place where IT solution providers and manufacturers can distinguish themselves because DR/BC is not only a cost, but one that will show a benefit only rarely. So, a company that can shorten backup and recovery times, consume less storage space and lessen demand on datacenter staff is likely to find a willing audience.

Read the article >>

enter:marketing has a new look!: 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.

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Tools to click on: What prospects want to see in promotional e-mails: Marketers have the right idea, when it comes to e-mail marketing, but they tend to be a tad optimistic. While they definitely have a sense of what resonates with prospective buyers, according to the latest research from MarketingSherpa, marketers overstate the value of the measures they take to improve click-through rates.

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Want to increase clicks? You need to SELL something!: 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.

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Think like an IT buyer: Choose the right IT marketing content: 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.

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You need more than IT expertise to help your clients: If all you’re selling and implementing is technology, you’re going to have a tough time in today’s market. Your clients don’t need technology — well, they don’t need technology without an attendant business driver. This means that you need to have more than a passing knowledge of your clients’ business, and any solution you are selling should correspond directly to a business need. Of course, the more you know about your clients’ business, the better you’ll be able to make the connection between problem and solution.

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Most Popular Keyword: IT marketing

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Five tips for marketing and selling disaster recovery and business continuity solutions: Disaster recovery and business continuity solutions should be easy to sell. Everybody needs them, and some businesses are required by regulatory bodies to meet specific and demanding standards. They also represent a place where IT solution providers and manufacturers can distinguish themselves because DR/BC is not only a cost, but one that will show a benefit only rarely. So, a company that can shorten backup and recovery times, consume less storage space and lessen demand on datacenter staff is likely to find a willing audience.

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Is it worth thinking green for the datacenter?: Datacenter “greening” periodically goes in and out of fashion. Usually driven by broader economic factors, IT professionals tend to mull the notion of going green when the broader public debate over energy prices and climate change reaches a fever pitch. With the recent discussion at Copenhagen again bringing climate issues to the front of the global economic community, talk of green has again arisen in the IT world.

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Five tips for marketing and selling disaster recovery and business continuity solutions: Disaster recovery and business continuity solutions should be easy to sell. Everybody needs them, and some businesses are required by regulatory bodies to meet specific and demanding standards. They also represent a place where IT solution providers and manufacturers can distinguish themselves because DR/BC is not only a cost, but one that will show a benefit only rarely. So, a company that can shorten backup and recovery times, consume less storage space and lessen demand on datacenter staff is likely to find a willing audience.

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Training: The marketing opportunity at the end of a client technology implementation: After a sale is completed, all attention turns to implementation. Your client is looking to you to help turn its expenditure into an investment. The deployment and configuration of systems is crucial, of course, to the creation of value for your client. At the end of this process, there’s usually a knowledge-transfer exercise, in which you prepare your client to take full “ownership” of the new environment. This is also a sales opportunity: leave your client ready for anything, and the odds that you’ll be the first call for the next initiative skyrocket.

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Selling IT solutions to a world at risk: You need to connect with the CIO or IT director, of course, when you are selling a solution. Also, you’ll need to show the CFO the value to what you are proposing. Getting a new system’s ticket punched by these two executives is standard practice in IT sales. But, there may be another angle. If your client has a risk manager and you don’t know him — find a way to get on his calendar.

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Social Media Marketing Processes Emerging: Social media marketing may have trouble shedding its “Wild West” image — which is a shame, given how it’s being used. Even though it feels unstructured and wide open, the reality for most companies is that the use of social media is carefully managed. According to a new study by MarketingSherpa, 68 percent of the businesses surveyed have either a formal or informal process for monitoring target audience dialogue about brands and the competition. Sixty-six percent have informal processes regarding defining objectives for social media space.

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Most Popular Keyword: manufacturer services

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You need more than IT expertise to help your clients: If all you’re selling and implementing is technology, you’re going to have a tough time in today’s market. Your clients don’t need technology — well, they don’t need technology without an attendant business driver. This means that you need to have more than a passing knowledge of your clients’ business, and any solution you are selling should correspond directly to a business need. Of course, the more you know about your clients’ business, the better you’ll be able to make the connection between problem and solution.

Read the article >>

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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.

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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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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.

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Most Popular Keyword: Twitter

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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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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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Is your company a conversion engine?: You can’t talk about marketing without talking about conversion. Reaching a broad audience that is interested in your company or solution is only the first step in turning contact into a sale, and every professional marketer knows that names fall off from one stage of the sales cycle to the next. Ultimately, the number that indicates your success is revenue – if you’re hitting your targets, you must be doing something right, the conventional wisdom holds. But, there are measures along the way that can help you refine your marketing and sales practices and lead to greater returns on your marketing investment.

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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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LinkedIn unveils new features for keeping track of connections: LinkedIn has been busy with new features this year, and the new tools have clear implications for IT marketing professionals who are using social media. Though the features are intended to make traditional use (i.e., by members who use LinkedIn to manage their personal networks) easier, savvy marketers can turn these new tools to their advantage.

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Choose the right multimedia for your IT marketing blog: Multimedia is becoming increasingly common on marketing blogs, but it’s still early. IT manufacturers and resellers are still figuring out how to use this type of content effectively. Among the sticking points is when to use audio rather than video. The latter is generally assumed to be “better.” After all, it has a visual element. But, the added dimension brings with it an obligation – you need to make both the spoken and visual components compelling.

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Most Popular Keyword: Solution Provider Services

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Limits of the new retweet feature on Twitter: “Retweeting” isn’t new to Twitter. Users have been prefacing tweets with “RT” for a while now, indicating that they are broadcasting someone else’s 140-character-or-less sentiment. Part of the power of this practice is in the commentary that a Twitter user includes along with the retweet. The new retweet feature in Twitter makes it more efficient to RT, but deprives you of the chance to add some color.

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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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What makes a social media user “friend” a company?: 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.

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IT Resellers: Make your blog multimedia without spending a dime: IT manufacturers are producing lots of multimedia content. Those with robust channel programs are investing heavily in video content, and they are making it easy to access and use. All you have to do is embed it in your blog. The method will depend on the video player chosen by the IT manufacturer and the blog platform that you have implemented, but the process is usually straightforward.

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Four reasons CIOs don’t switch (but a big reason why they do): You can run down the list of enhancements and show that your solution could beat the competition head-to-head. And, it’s cheaper – a lot cheaper. It goes on and on. You’re talking to a prospective client and keep hitting a roadblock: he doesn’t want to switch from what he has now. In the IT sales and marketing space, this could be the most difficult challenge you’ll face.

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enter:marketing announces new IT social media marketing solution: The buzz around social media marketing is palpable, but many IT resellers are rightfully skeptical. After all, how do you link tweets, fans and other nebulous concepts to sales opportunities? Through our work with you and the top IT manufacturers in the business, enter:marketing has developed a unique, results-focused social media marketing approach that is designed to extend your reach, target your message to a specific market and generate opportunities for client intelligence and new business. Enter the social media space confidently, and reap the rewards of this robust marketing venue.

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Swing for the fences: Are you trying hard enough?: In IT marketing departments and businesses around the world, the fear of failure is endemic. Nobody wants to have to explain why something didn’t work … let alone carry the stigma of an unsuccessful attempt. This phobia, unfortunately, is costing companies ROI. As we mentioned yesterday, if you’re doing everything right, you’re really doing everything wrong. You should be stretching for bigger results. Take the risk, and you may trade a few unsuccessful for campaigns for a much higher overall marketing ROI.

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Four reasons CIOs don’t switch (but a big reason why they do): You can run down the list of enhancements and show that your solution could beat the competition head-to-head. And, it’s cheaper – a lot cheaper. It goes on and on. You’re talking to a prospective client and keep hitting a roadblock: he doesn’t want to switch from what he has now. In the IT sales and marketing space, this could be the most difficult challenge you’ll face.

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Venture capital trends give an inside look at the IT year ahead: To get a sense of what’s happening in the IT market, sometimes you have to look elsewhere. So, when the latest private equity fund-raising results were published (by Dow Jones LP Source, via VentureBeat), I checked on the venture capital data. Why? Venture capital trends hold some clues as to where the IT industry is headed.

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Are you tuned in to your clients’ compliance initiatives?: The first decade of the 21st century will be remembered, at least in part, as one of the most complex regulatory periods in U.S. business history. IT departments have had to address the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the USA PATRIOT Act and many others. As we begin to sort through the implications of the recent financial crisis, expect more to follow. Some changes to financial oversight rules are already in the works.

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Does my marketing blog have to be “real”?: I’ve heard this one a lot. As a company is trying to get its blog off the ground, an employee levels what, to some, is a stinging criticism: “It’s not a real blog.” The perspective is shaped by experiences in the blogosphere, from reading everything from industry commentators to gossip sites. What’s considered “real” is nothing more than a subset of all blogs … but this is a detail that just doesn’t matter. Instead, ask yourself, “Is my blog helping me reach my marketing objectives?”

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Four ways the role of the CISO will change in 2010: According to Forrester Research, you should expect some major changes in how Chief Information Security Officers – and other IT risk and security professionals – will support their business users next year. Even with the economy showing some signs that it has stabilized, memories of the financial crisis have yet to fade.

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IT marketing budgets to include social media commitment: Budget season is upon us. With last year finally etched in stone, IT marketing departments are looking for the best ways to put their cash to work in 2010. Though companies are beginning to invest more in technology, marketing budgets at IT manufacturers and resellers alike are still being managed cautiously. So, riskier approaches are likely to struggle for a share of this year’s allocation.

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