Looking at how the recession has impacted businesses, specifically how businesses are making decisions, I’ve decided to look at common mistakes IT marketers need to avoid during a recession.

A misaligned ROI program can aim you in the wrong direction causing bad decisions. Placing too much emphasis on the end game or revenue of an ROI measurement program can cause you to miss revenue opportunities and shorten sales cycles that would have ultimately improved ROI. Online marketing enables you to define and track conversion rates to improve ROI for faster payback. Knowing which target segments are most responsive, which offers generate the greatest interest, and, most importantly, which conversion rates are exceeding benchmarks help you make better decisions, faster and improve program performance. Conversion rates can include: clicks to leads, leads to Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs), MQLs to Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs), SQLs to meetings, meetings to pipeline… through to sales and revenue. Employ a re-messaging and nurturing program to prospects and early stage leads so you can identify the most interested prospects faster, while moving prospects to SQLs sooner.

Prioritizing program efforts on existing prospect lists can cause you to miss the active projects being researched right now. IT buyers are searching online for your solutions right now. 97% of all IT pros start with search to identify the solutions for their short lists. Online marketing offers scalability to reach the buying team when “they” are ready. The most significant trend in IT professional online usage patterns shows search engines and publisher websites are consistently the starting point for any research. IT buyers use search to locate the information they need, but rely on IT publishers to have the resources on specific topics, including editorial content, analyst research, whitepapers, webcasts, videos, blogs and trial downloads. This helps you attract net new buyers, including existing customers, to maintain and grow pipelines, giving you a better opportunity to penetrate and capture multiple members of the enterprise buying team. Use your content to extend your message to where the IT buyers are searching online.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 1st, 2009 at 12:16 pm and is filed under Best practices. 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.