One question that I have received over and over again is how we can help our vendors can gain interest and demand from those “ever so elusive” IT pros from Fortune 1000 companies.  There are several ways to try and target with one off list rentals, but that offers little return with lots of effort.  How can we help in targeting this audience, especially for clients who spend so much time and money creating content assets fit for the large enterprise?

My answer, the best way to show your ROI from marketing to Fortune 1000 companies is to create an integrated program that ONLY promotes to Fortune 1000 companies.  As an example, one Enterprise Application client was looking for effective ways to penetrate the Fortune 1000 list.  We selected the appropriate online communities that would be interested in Enterprise Applications and organized an integrated program in which all the promotional venues (editorial e-newsletters, list rentals, white paper/webcast promos) contained names defined by the Fortune 1000 list.  Plus, the assets created for this audience will automatically attract enterprise names via search as well.

Clients often come to us looking for comparisons of results of one media vs the other in terms of lead generation.

Recently a data backup/recovery company came to us with a unique challenge.  They were looking to target IT decision makers who are responsible for backup at small/medium-sized businesses.  In the past, this client had great success promoting white papers to the Storage audience. Now, they wanted to test the effectiveness of a webcast vs. the white paper.

To help them accomplish this, we customized a program promoting both media products, the white paper and webcast equally.  We used numerous push out emails and banners to the same Storage audience.  As we had expected,  there was a higher quantity of white paper leads than webcast leads.  However, the leads were then sent to a telemarketing team and the webcast leads proved to be more highly qualified in that they were further along the sales cycle.  The white paper leads still needed more nurturing.

We’ve always believed that IT pros who take an hour out of their day to attend a webcast are ready to short-list a final vendor recommendation. This exercise reinforced that.

Since the Forrester report last week I’ve heard a lot of new doubts about podcasting. The report was rather skeptical about their status and adoption rates for them.  The biggest stat was posted in Forrester analyst Charlene Li’s blog that, “only 1% of online households in North America regularly download and listen to podcasts.”

But this was based on a general consumer audience.  Does it have any relevance to IT marketing?

I know it’s a new medium with lots of room for growth, but in my experience there are too many differences between IT pros and the general public.

IT Pros are always at the cutting edge of new technology adoption and tend to be more avid consumers of information than the general public. “Time shifting” seems to be just what these guys would want to be able to get the information they need.  I know they’re getting great traction across my campaigns.