As we move forward into this economic downturn and marketers struggle with their budgets, branding must remain a factor in advertising programs. However, traditional branding campaigns must adapt to new marketing initiatives as companies focus on lead generation and the need to track ROI. I once saw an ad that said, “Your brand is your lifeboat and you never abandon your lifeboat.” This was further collaborated by a blog post on Publicity Works I recently read discussing branding in a down economy. By proactively marketing and staying in front of your customers or potential customers, it sends a message that your organization is strong in this economy. While other marketers may go dark with advertising, organizations that continue their messaging have the ability to stand out and become market leaders.

While there is no doubt about the importance of branding, how can marketers track ROI when all advertising dollars are being closely monitored and sales departments fight for their need for lead generation programs? It is crucial for marketers to invest in programs that provide branding, lead generation and measure ROI.  

So what type of programs work to meet both marketing and sales objectives? Looking at some of the campaigns I’ve managed lately, I find that those that are focused on interactive marketing tools provide a number of benefits. For example, a client of mine created a microsite program, which unlike their corporate website provided a custom environment where marketing controlled the content. The purpose of this was to brand all their business units under one umbrella while of course generating leads, but how do you track ROI for branding?

For the microsite program, we teamed up with Dynamic Logic to show ROI, and the client saw 90% significance in aided-brand awareness, online ad awareness and messaging association. The significance is the index of all campaigns surveyed and how these programs weigh against the norm. A 90% significance means it outperformed the industry norm, which were great results for the client.

My educated guess says that branding and lead generation programs will continue to become entwined rather than stand alone initiatives. What are your thoughts? Please share any branding programs in which you were able to track ROI.

There’s been recent press about the ROI validated for advertisers sponsoring web pages in social web environments; personal pages to be exact. In a recent marketing study conducted by Carat Ad agency and Marketing Revolution the value of an ad sponsorship in a social networking space is explored in an article appearing recently in Ad Age. The marketing study measured lift related to four traditional ROI metrics: intent to purchase, positive brand image, intent to recommend and unaided awareness as a result of vendors Adidas and Electronic Arts testing three different MySpace environments. In short the study results proved positive.

Besides exploring the return on branding investments made on users’ personal pages, the study revisits a provocative question as far as branding ROI goes.

The conclusion of the study basically points to the value of spending branding dollars in a viral environment and reaping the rewards of having an entire social network exposed to one’s advertising message over time.

From an IT marketing perspective it makes sense that if it works on the consumer side it should work as well in social web environments on the btob side. Or is this not true because viral marketing and integration with a user’s personal space is more acceptable on the consumer side but might not fly on blogs and wiki’s frequented by serious professionals? Or is the contextual relevancy of what both parties have to say and sell all that matters?

Anyone care to comment? Anyone have any experience with this?

Web 2.0 is changing the face of branding. Now it is all about creating an online community in which your brand can grow and achieve affinity. Social Signal, a specialist in building online communities, had a recent marketing blog post that introduced reflective glory marketing (RGM). They define this form of new marketing as using Web 2.0 to create an online community that has intrinsic value, and let the activities of that community reflect positively on the parent company’s brand.

How will this marketing strategy impact technology branding? Are there specific types of IT professionals who respond better to user generated content? Developers were the first group of technology professionals to grow and develop user generated content. How do network admins respond? Are security professionals comfortable in contributing to UGC? These type of questions need to be answered to determine the most effective way to grow a community of technology pros who are aligned with your brand.

Last Friday marked the one year anniversary of My Educated Guess!  The Client Consulting team at TechTarget would like to thank all of our readers for their knowledge, comments and readership over the past year. 

As a recap for those who have found our blog recently, here are some of the posts that received the heaviest traffic and the most comments of this past year.

Media Product Performance Comparisons for Lead-Gen Campaigns, by Karen Lefkowitz
Podcasting for IT Pros, by Garrett Mann
The Making of a Global Brand, by Melissa Marron

Again, thank you all for a rewarding year of blogging and here’s to many more just like it!

Sincerely,
Marilou Barsam

A marketing survey that the ANA released found the top concerns on the minds of senior marketing executives are “integrated marketing communications” and “marketing accountability.”

Integrated Markeing leverages multiple media and marketing vehicles to work together rather than permitting each to work in isolation. Integrated marketing increases your share of voice and allows you to target decision makers at every phase of the buying cycle.
We have seen over and over again, that integrated marketing will result in greater recall of your brand.

What has your experience been with integrated marketing?

Last week I had a great webcast with Mary Bermel of HP and Larry Weber of Racepoint. It gave us all a chance to show our experiences and explain our thoughts on Web 2.0, each from our own perspective - that of a large tech company, a cutting-edge agency, and mine as an IT media publisher and marketing consultant.

Take a listen and let me know your thoughts on these new media.

I read a very interesting article this week on ClickZ entitled “The End of Lazy Marketing.” The author, Mark Kingdon, makes the following observations:

* The Internet is quickly becoming the “can’t live without” choice over TV.
* Creation and connection rule as the social Web becomes the big story of 2006. There are more people on MySpace today than were Internet users in the US in 1998.
* People are walking Tivos as they unconsciously and consciously filter out the 3,000+ messages we blitz them with every day.
* The Internet accounts for only 6 percent of marketing spend and 24 percent of consumers’ media consumption. Very quickly, those figures will equalize at the expense of TV and print.

The underlying theme here is that you cannot rely on being able to reach your audience through broad or “lazy” means anymore. In order to increase effectiveness of your marketing, it must be contextual/environment-specific marketing and it must have an eye towards increased engagement. This is not just about spending more money online and less on TV, but about making sure your message is being heard loud and clear. Less eyeballs does not necessarily equate to lower traction. At TechTarget, we have moved towards a topically-based approach to communicating to our user base and have seen the response and engagement increase dramatically. Along these lines, RSS feeds, while still in relative infancy, are also gaining traction - the idea being “show me only what I am looking for.”

Are you currently integrating this approach into your marketing efforts?

Last week I attended the CMO Council’s North American Summit in San Francisco.  The keynotes shared experiences involved with re-branding, brand realignment and customer retention.  Lenovo’s SVP and CMO, Deepak Advani, explained marketing challenges that Lenovo faced before and after they acquired IBM’s Personal Computing Division.  The marketing team was not only challenged with re-branding their products as ThinkPad, but they also had to develop programs that fostered this Chinese company’s growth in the worldwide marketplace.  Subsequently, they launched the largest partnership with the International Olympic Committee.  At the Torino 2006 Olympic Winter Games, they supplied 5,000 desktop PCs, 350 servers and 1,000 notebook computers, supported internet lounges as well as the the technology needs of many media partners.  Their flawless sponsorship led to extensive press coverage and they have since signed on for the 2008 Olympics.

Do you have any experiences with rebranding or growing a brand internationally?

BtoB Online recently posted an article highlighting integrated marketing success stories.  They talk about how it is more important than ever for marketers to create integrated campaigns that communicate their brand message consistently across multiple platforms.  I completely agree that integrated marketing has many benefits.  Some of the most important are: Wider appeal to all buying team members through use of tailored messages; Greater recall rate – your message will resonate with the right audience in the right environment at the right time and ROI – you create top of mind awareness and higher response rates.  What has your experience been with integrated marketing?

I spoke about the potential of social networking in the IT space in my last entry, but what do you make of Red Hat’s current project? Red Hat, known primarily as an enterprise Linux provider, has launched Mugshot.org, a still-in-beta social networking site which will compete with the likes of MySpace in the consumer market. On one level, this is no surprise. The Linux operating system is an open source technology built on collaboration, so a social network in which people can share web pages, music, and other media follows the model. Red Hat long ago abandoned the retail channel to focus on enterprise Linux. Will this take away from that focus?