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.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 9th, 2006 at 11:32 am and is filed under Integrated Media, Best practices, Buying process. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.