If you are currently running campaigns which are generating leads, it is critical to establish an effective follow-up strategy that will be an efficient use of time and resources for both your marketing and sales efforts. Email will help give you an immediate and easy touch point that will help you make sure that potential prospects do not go cold, regardless of the point they are in the buying process. It will also help your marketing team foster leads through the sales cycle by further qualifying interest every step of the way, allowing your sales team to focus on closing the hottest prospects.

While establishing a follow-up email campaign is important, you must proceed carefully. No matter how early you reach them, using the wrong messaging will fall on deaf ears (or could end up in a SPAM filter).  There are many factors to consider when re-messaging leads, but in my opinion, here are two key points for success:

1. Know your audience – Whenever possible, segment your audience and tailor messaging to each segment. Many organizations are guilty of “blasting the database” with generic messaging, which is effective for education, but can dilute impact against certain segments. If your prospect has downloaded a white paper on your technology, follow up with product literature or a trial/demo. If someone has responded to a trial download offer, establish further dialogue specific to the purchase of that product. Not using the right offer may result in more work for sales to convert prospects or, in some cases, losing what may have initially been qualified buyers.

2. Eliminate the guesswork – Qualify leads up front in a manner that is conducive to follow-up. Asking the right questions during the registration process will allow you to really target what your approach should be on the back end. Furthermore, understanding how engaged the audience is with your initial offering(s) will help you prioritize and fine tune what your follow-up messaging will be.

Many companies look for ways to position themselves as a thought leader in their market.

There are many ways to build your reputation as a thought leader – press releases, public speeches, and differentiating yourself through content.  I had a client in the CRM space looking to position themselves as a thought leader that offers a service that no other company offers.

My answer was to run a banner roadblock to create initial buzz. To maintain consistent presence the campaign followed up with an integrated online campaign that included banners, e-newsletters and print.  They started with a white paper offer followed by a webcast offer in order to educate and raise awareness for their user experience monitoring solution.  Insightful content (webcast/white paper) is extremely important in how the company differentiates themselves in the market place.  This client used a 3rd party expert to write the white paper and to participate in the webcast.  They also included prominent, easily recognizable companies as case studies to lend credibility and strengthen their case.  The results of the campaign were very successful. This is one example, of positioning a company as a thought leader - Does anyone else have other suggestions?

I notice that clients are looking for a better way to measure the effectiveness of branding.  They have issues understanding how relevant their company, product, service or concept is in the marketplace. Being able to measure the potential effectiveness of a program before launching a broad initiative or understanding to what level of awareness, leadership, or purchase intent a company currently has with a segment of their audience could save millions of dollars in marketing expenses.  This type of intelligence also enables better sales opportunities, shorter sales cycles and higher profit margins.  For example, we measure branding success through pre- and post-campaign surveying online to compare the changes, but how do others do it?  What type of goals do vendors try and use to measure their branding?

One of the most important questions for IT marketers to ask themselves is, who will I have the most success targeting in my campaign? Is it Senior-level executives, managers, or lower-level IT administrators? This question has been the focus of many recent studies and there are many differing opinions as to what the correct answer is. My “answer” is that there is no one correct answer.

There are too many varying factors to draw common conclusions and/or standardize who one markets to in the IT space as a whole. You must take in to consideration the size of technology investment, the size of the company (is it an enterprise or is it a small business?), as well as the IT market segment to understand how decisions are made. For example, to illustrate this point, the purchase process for a printer/copier would look vastly different than it would for a large-scale enterprise application.

While roles and responsibilities are carved out differently based on the above factors, in my experience, one thing remains fairly constant: IT is primarily a group decision-making process. You have recommenders, evaluators, product researchers, and purchase authorizers that run the spectrum from IT administrator to CIO. Understanding that these roles are all integral to IT buying, the question of IT marketing success is determined simply by which constituents in the process will deliver the best ROI - not a question of CIO vs. IT Manager vs. IT administrator.

A couple of you asked for examples of promotional copy that we’ve seen to be effective in supporting clients’ marketing efforts. Rather than share specific client examples, I’d prefer to give you some overall tips that reflect our Best Practices for effective promotion. You can also check out our posted Best Practices link for even more specific suggestions.

When you think about it, your email marketing copy makes or breaks your ability to get the right leads and a lot of leads for your webcasts or white papers. You’ve got to break through the clutter right from the get-go. This means your subject line has to work.

We have found subject lines that identify a benefit in the content or the product being promoted work a lot better than subject lines that “show off” the merits of the item being marketed.

IT prospects don’t initally care as much about why your content or solution is so superior to others. Rather, they are focused on why they should spend time reading the white paper or attending the webcast. They want to be educated, they want short-cuts for their due diligence process, they want easy to understand strategies. They want to know how to avoid wrong decisions or traps.

So provide them with this by organizing your content around these pain points. Examples of the most effective subject lines approaches we’ve used; “Ten Most Important Tips for researching Intrusion detection solutions” or “5 Key Strategies to evaluating (technology solution)” or “The Complexities of (technology solution) simplified”.

The body copy following these subject lines may continue to discuss the problem the IT professional has around the subject at hand and point out how the white paper/webcast will offer sound advise or clear up confusion on the topic.

In general, put yourself in the mindset of the reader, the IT pro who has to research something, make a recomendation for a short list and eventually suggest a finalist. Your first attempts at capturing his attention must highlight what you can do to make this entire process simpler.

I have been noticing that many companies are beginning to position their expertise within particular line of businesses.  They are shifting their sales and marketing strategy to focus on vertical markets.  Many of their field sales force have been reoriented to sell vertically and they are putting a large percentage of the companies marketing dollars behind vertical campaigns. So, how can marketers effectively reach vertical markets?

I recommend segmenting lists not only by vertical but also by content affinity. By isolating the audience by topic and vertical, the audience will see the value of how vertical content can resolve their day to day problems. There are many opportunities for companies if they illustrate why their product appeals to a specific industry.  Through experience, I believe the best way to market to a specific vertical market is to create an integrated program that only promotes to that vertical.