It’s that time of year again. In about 7 weeks we will be hosting our Online ROI Summit for about 300 marketers in Burlingame, California who want new insights on what’s working and what isn’t online - You can apply at www.TechTargetSummit.com.

However, before I plan the agenda for these conferences I make sure to check in with the marketers themselves about what they want us to cover — what is plaguing them the most when it comes to their online campaigns. And, no surprise, what keeps coming up is their need to know the latest best practices around “tightly” managing lead gen efforts and follow-up.

We all know “scrutiny” and “prove ROI” are the expectations du jour for the technology marketer and as economic times have tightened up focus on these aspects of their job have as well…

In rolling up trial and error stories from our actual technology customers what stands out is something that could appear as a huge contradiction but in reality makes sense, and that is the reality that the smaller the company, most likely, the tighter or “closed” is the process they have to stay on top of the leads they generate. The bigger, and often times more bureaucratic the company, the more complex it becomes. And so what we are left with is to figure out how do it the best regardless of company size. No easy feat but one we and our marketer participants will take on.

Check out the link to our Summit www.TechTargetSummit.com and if you want to hear what we all have to say please join us…  October 27th is only a blink away…

I recently sat down for an interview with Stephanie Tilton from Savvy B2B Marketing. In our discussion, we addressed TechTarget’s latest IT Media Consumption and Google/TechTarget research studies. Both technology marketing studies point to IT buyers’ preference for specific content based on their buying stage, which further suggests IT marketers need to align their media types, content strategy, and keyword buys to these IT buying stages.

To read more about our marketing reports, and how TechTarget is helping marketers take advantage of these key findings, read Stephanie’s blog at: http://www.savvyb2bmarketing.com/blog/entry/84801/qa-with-marilou-barsam-of-techtarget-a-top-b2b-advertising-venue--

You can also follow her on Twitter: http://twitter.com/StephanieTilton

A whopping 84% of users like receiving Email from companies in which they register and close to 60% of marketers plan to grow their traditional Email marketing spend in 2009. With these great stats, why is there a perception that Email marketing is not as effective as it used to be? Email is still one of the most effective marketing tools of today. However, I’m not confident that we are all optimizing our Email campaigns for optimal performance and conversion.

After investigating further, it seems that you, the IT marketer, are looking for tips and recommendations on how to not only make your marketing dollar go further, but also make your Email marketing dollar go further. As a result, my colleague Chris Olive and I were asked to run a workshop titled “Best Tips and Common Mistakes to Avoid for Improved Email Conversion” at this month’s TechTarget Online ROI Summit. The goal of this workshop is to go back and re-visit “your roots”. Specifically revisit the roots of your Email strategy. During this workshop, we will provide insight into steps to follow to get the best performance, review real-world examples of how to increase Email performance 2X, and discuss new strategies to assist in making the most of your Email lists.

How is your Email performance? Do you think it could be better? If not, what are your strategies?

If you can’t join us live at the Online ROI Summit, be sure to come back and visit MyEducatedGuess for a recap of the session.

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.

Budgets are tight, the need for measuring ROI of your marketing investment has never been greater, and as a technology marketer, we can use all the help we can get. With the mantra of “Doing more with less,” we need to have an approach that can not only get us through these tough times but can put us in a better position than our competition when we get to the other side. Here are a series of tips for IT marketers to help market successfully in this tough economy:

10. Monitor the competition and the market. If your competition is cutting back, consider adjusting your marketing budget and attacking the market with your message. This will provide a great opportunity to capture - and retain - market share. A recent post on the MarketingProfs blog refers to a study of 600 b-to-b companies by McGraw-Hill Research.

In this study, they found that businesses that maintained or increased their advertising expenditures during the 1981-1982 recession, averaged higher sales growth during the recession and in the three years following. By 1985, sales of aggressive recession advertisers (those that either maintained or increased spending) had risen 256% over those that cut-back on advertising. In 2001, another study found that aggressive recession advertisers increased market share 2 ½ times the average for all businesses in the post-recession economy.

Thinking post-recession maybe hard to imagine now but companies that do will reap the benefits. I found some good information from StrategicOxygen’s blog on this topic that you might find useful.

9. Focus on lead generation efforts with direct-response techniques. In email and online campaigns, use hard-hitting copy with simple benefit-oriented, convincing language, an informational offer relevant to the prospect’s topic interest, and a strong call to action. Focus on the problems that you solve for your customers and how you uniquely address them.

Lead generation is where the rubber meets the road and with this economic situation, you need to focus on the basics of the audience, your message, offer and the call to action. Getting focused so you have the right audience responding in the right way to the right offer taking the right steps will help your efficiency as well as effectiveness of your program and get you the results you want.

I found an interesting recent post on the emergencemarketing blog today summarizing online advertising measurement research published by McKinsey.  For me, the most important finding is that marketers who measure the impact of their online media are significantly more satisfied with their digital marketing than those who don’t. This makes perfect sense, so why is it that only 50% of marketers use basic measurement like CTR?

Are they/we really not accountable for results – as EM suggests?  Do we need better measurement techniques – as McKinsey concludes?  Or is it something more?

Providing leads to the right person at the right time is what opportunity management is all about. You can categorize leads according to territory, product, lead source, level of urgency, or new vs. existing customers. Leads can also be escalated if, for example, they have a short timeframe in which to make a decision, or a ready-approved budget, or if they have a particular urgency or a high value associated with them. With the right technology infrastructure, companies can automate the distribution of leads according to predetermined criteria. This removes the burden from the support staff, and ensures that leads really do reach the right person at the right time.

Best Practices for Opportunity Management include:

•  Marketing should continue to engage with Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) - The marketing process does not end with the hand off to sales.
•  Define the level of ownership, responsibility and accountability when Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) transition to SQLs.
•  Connect the marketing system used for tracking and reporting in Inquiry Management and Prospect Management with the sales forecast system to establish seamless closed loop tracking and reporting for deals closed and revenue realized.
•  Document the process from marketing to sales and sales activities post transition.
•  Consistent follow-up by marketing with sales on leads passed and status within the process.
•  Must resolve the timeframe issue of the handoff of MQLs to sales acceptance of SQLs; one solution could be to automatically populate the MQL to the sales forecast system after a defined period of time, for example 3-7 days.
•  MQLs rejected by sales go back into the nurturing process until they are identified as MQLs.

Track, Measure and Improve - Key to Long Term

Disciplined, constant analysis and reporting while a program is live is the key to demonstrating success, or perhaps identifying what needs to be improved while a program is live. With Sales and Marketing going through a planning process at the beginning of a program, everyone should understand what is being measured, the milestones, and the key success metrics. This information should be tracked, measured and benchmarked against other campaigns. When the ROI at each stage from each campaign is accurately reported, trends and patterns start to emerge to help develop future programs and improve the overall lead management process.

I am hearing from many technology marketers that — in a time in which marketing activities need to deliver tangible results within a tighter timeframe — it is imperative that marketers allocate a portion of their budget dollars toward campaigns which capture more late-stage, actionable leads.

To accomplish this, marketers often use pay-per-click programs that point towards product trials and online product demonstrations.  While these types of programs result in marketers competing for a relatively small pool of leads, they do generate significant results because they reach potential buyers in the late stages of the research and purchase process - the “ready-to-buy” prospect.  

Recent TechTarget market research indicates that “try-before-you-buy” programs are particularly effective in the Application Development software space, because the developer community is immersed in the types of tools and products that they are encountering or implementing on a daily basis.  In the developer community, we see that implementers have a high degree of influence on the IT purchase decision.  The “try-before-you-buy” method is very important in building their loyalty and trust, and provides the IT marketer with an opportunity to demonstrate both the quality of the product, and, in many cases, showcase the quality of the customer service supporting the product.

Also, because the developer community places a high value on peer feedback and product recommendations, marketers can leverage social media to reach this group by providing a platform for experts within their organization to engage prospects in discussions about market trends, not just to gain exposure for their product, but build a rapport with — and establish a degree of trust within — the community.

Finally, although there is a significant benefit to offering downloads and trial versions of software to generate leads from prospects in the final stages of the research and purchase process, it is important that this not be the sole focus of your marketing efforts to the detriment of campaign elements supporting your branding efforts or reaching potential clients at the early and mid-stages of the research and purchase process.  You still need to maintain program elements to generate leads that will generate sales over an extended period of time.

While there is no “silver bullet” formula for what percentage of your marketing budget should focus on long-term or short-term leads, it is important that your plans include a mix of elements - like topical whitepapers to reach IT professionals at the very start of the research process, Webcasts and Webinars to reach mid-stage prospects, and virtual tradeshows to facilitate direct contact with prospective buyers.

Having just returned from the TechTarget Online ROI Summit in San Francisco, I combed through a number of attendee survey responses as I was very interested to know which specific subjects were most interesting and relevant to the 240 IT marketers/clients attending the event.It’s a foregone conclusion that anyone attending is generally interested in Best Practices for Online Marketing and its relationship to proving ROI; however it’s important to note which discussion points resonated with them the most.

It turns out that our data and insights related to trends in “the IT Buyers’ Purchase Process” were most appreciated. Marketers expressed that understanding how their content and media investments line up in satisfying all stages of the buying cycle is critical information when planning a program or campaign.

This explains why our findings around search — and where buyers are in their purchase consideration relative to specific search practices — received such high marks. It also explains why our general session around content strategy as it relates to the buying process is a standing-room only session.

As much as we all live and breathe “the buyer’s purchase process” here at TechTarget, the subtleties of how IT marketing media types and content relate to the process were very much appreciated by Summit attendees.

This makes sense as our insights suggest that marketers must have very distinct content topics and media offerings to attract buyers at the various stages of the research and purchase process.  It also emphasizes the degree to which “content preparation and strategy” are an essential component to success.  Yet based on this reality, nearly two-thirds of our audience admitted to having few resources to build content, and are often expected to produce it themselves.

That is astonishing when you consider how important content is to program success,  and how busy these folks are.  It seems to there needs to be a resetting of priorities in the IT marketing arena so that budgets are allocated to support content development so the burden doesn’t personally fall on the shoulders of the marketing directors themselves, so they can be free to spend more of their time being strategic.

Prospect Management is the process of qualifying and nurturing leads that have been generated through Inquiry Management.  These are the leads that are not yet ready to be passed to your sales organization but have potential for future business. They have demonstrated interest in your company or product.  These are the majority of leads that are typically generated by your marketing program efforts.

Consider this: Not every lead generated online deserves a phone call as the first step in the follow-up process! Remember, people research online for a reason.  Just because they downloaded a white paper or attended a Webcast does not necessarily mean they are ready for a phone call from you.  There needs to be a transition from online research activities to offline interaction.  One approach could be to use video, chat, or blogs to assist in that transition. This “virtual” interaction is a way to keep the buyer in control but start the process of that one-to- one interaction.

In the prospect management stage, leads are qualified, scored and processed according to pre-determined criteria that examines budget, authority, need and timeframe. When this information is known, the lead can be passed to sales as a priority lead requiring rapid follow-up, or a lead that needs further nurturing and communication.

Prospect Management best practices include:

1. A system to capture and consolidate prospect data — and qualification  criteria — in searchable fields for reporting and future targeting
2. A systematic approach to “active” prospects that are being qualified and the “passive” inquiries that are being nurtured.  Defining content for each  type is critical to success
3. Communicate with prospects to qualify and quantify the opportunity
4. Create a systematic nurturing system, and make it as targeted and  personalized as possible, but with the ability to scale as needed
5. Nurturing can be done through multiple touch points; i.e. online, events,  phone, etc.
6. Nurturing system can be structured by contact, company, interest, title, behavior, etc.
7. Measure time to MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead), to SQL (Sales Qualified Lead), to appointment scheduled for every lead

Lead nurturing allows you to maintain contact with longer term leads until the  lead is ready to be advanced into the sales cycle. When the lead is closer to  making a purchase, it can then be passed on to sales.

What are you doing to manage and nurture leads that works particularly well?  What have you tried that didn’t deliver the desired results?