You and I face marketing questions every minute of the day – from branding and positioning to lead generation issues. And, you may have noticed by now, that the perfect answer never becomes any clearer. Most often based on actual trial and error, we are just making educated guesses. The more experienced we become, hopefully, the more educated the guesses become as well.

Meeting other marketers, as I often do in my position, we tend to have long discussions and email strings about what works and what fails. I have often wished I could capture these conversations to remember and build on them when a new situation comes up. Now, I think I’ve found a way.

I created this blog with my client consulting team to share some of the decisions we, and our clients, have made in marketing to enterprise IT audiences.

My hope is that by sharing experiences and conversations with you - and reading your responses - we will both make more educated guesses and come up with the right answers.

Enjoy,
Marilou Barsam

Bringing a message to a new market is a common challenge amongst many companies.

Recently, a network access management company switched their main marketing messaging from networking decision makers to security decision makers. This company has been very successful in the past advertising to our network audience. They wanted to leverage this success and reach out to the Security Audience.

To get their voice heard above the clutter, we created a single web page listing all their relevant security white paper and Webcast content. We also sent out a large amount of emails and ran banners to gain market presence for them in the Security space. In addition, we highlighted their content assets (linking to their single web page) on the home pages of SearchSecurity.com. Our media plan was to reach as broad yet targeted an audience as possible.

I’m observing a trend with our clients. Lately you hear some of them mention that they may be switching their marketing focus to go after their “named accounts.”

Actually, a client in the webservices space recently announced that a major 2006 initiative would be to do just this. They are reallocating budget from other activities to support this strategy.

They mentioned that their national salespeople needed to penetrate their top accounts in a specific vertical market and needed help in doing so. They’re concerned that even if their most active customers at company x may know them, their goal is to get more prospects within that same company to also consider them and their solutions. To do this they need to conduct a campaign to introduce themselves to new customers and reintroduce themselves to existing customers who may have forgotton about them So they asked what TechTarget could do to help them accomplish this.

Any recommendations for how an IT marketer can do this using resources from a publisher?

You and I face marketing questions every minute of the day – from branding and positioning to lead generation issues. And, you may have noticed by now, that the perfect answer never becomes any clearer.  Most often based on actual trial and error, we are just making educated guesses. The more experienced we become, hopefully, the more educated the guesses become as well.

Meeting other marketers, as I often do in my position, we tend to have long discussions and email strings about what works and what fails.  I have often wished I could capture these conversations to remember and build on them when a new situation comes up. Now, I think I’ve found a way.

I created this blog with my client consulting team to share some of the decisions we, and our clients, have made in marketing to enterprise IT audiences.

My hope is that by sharing experiences and conversations with you - and reading your responses - we will both make more educated guesses and come up with the right answers.

Enjoy,
Marilou Barsam