As the online marketing landscape expands, maximizing existing lead acquisition channels and trying to understand new channels is a challenge all its own.  But, the ultimate goal of building a valuable marketing database remains crucial to the success of today’s marketing programs.

In the beginning, our focus was on member quantity and establishing our brand to both vendors and the IT users. We relied on traditional web-based marketing channels such as list rentals and co-marketing partnerships. However, as online audiences, particularly IT pros, have gotten more sophisticated, so too have our audience development methods and marketing outreach. Today, we’re focused on building a quality member base with lots of defining criteria. The more we know about our members, the more we can target and customize our customer/ prospect marketing programs, which results in an increased client ROI as well as member satisfaction.

Two acquisition channels that currently enable us to capture qualifying member data, which we can later use when developing client programs, are search engine marketing (SEM) and optimization (SEO).

On the SEM side, we’re running ad word campaigns in Google, for example, to generate interest in specific products and IT topics. By running highly targeted campaigns that point to relevant landing pages with incentives, we generate members who indicate their IT topics of interest, as well as share their job or product needs. We also generate leads for products including events, print pubs and search-site specific programs.

In contrast to SEM, search engine optimization is first and foremost a company-wide effort aimed at increasing site traffic.  Acquisition or conversion success is a result of how well we align our marketing messages and registration incentives with the content on those trafficked pages.

There are consistent challenges with both the SEM and SEO channels, however, through both channels we have converted and captured valuable information that can later be used to create a pre-qualified list or audience for vendor campaigns.

Now we use all three of these channels to support our marketing strategy and meet goals. Our approach to building and mining our marketing database has proven its value many times over to clients as increased ROI as well as member satisfaction.

If you’d like to hear how we made this work, join me for a webcast and I’ll share all the details.  “Building a Targeted, Receptive and Valuable Audience”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 3rd, 2007 at 2:36 pm and is filed under Lead-Gen Strategies, Best practices, Lead quality. 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.