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.

What is the main purpose for blogging? A blog is a social media outlet for individuals and/or corporations to provide information, commentary, advice, and opinions with the main purpose being to create dialogue or conversation on a particular subject or multitude of subjects. Often, the greatest measure of a blog’s success is how much conversation it can create. But how do you create conversation effectively? First and foremost you must provide good content in which people will want to interact with. But great content only gets you a one-way conversation if you cannot drive people to your blog. Search engines are just one of the many ways you can get people there. This article from ClickZ will help you get started on optimizing your blog to effectively leverage search engine traffic.

After running thousands of papers on our sites, we have seen over and over again that educational papers always outperform product focused papers. However, many vendors still feel compelled to write exclusively on their product or solution.

I just read a very strong book on this topic by, Michael Stelzner, “Writing White Papers:  How to Capture Readers and Keep Them Engaged” about how to write a successful write paper. This book carefully explains how important it is not to be self serving or focused exclusively on a product, service or solution.  Instead, a white paper should focus on the pain points experienced by the reader and talk about the problems caused by those pains.  No matter, how experienced you are in writing white papers, this book could help everyone gain some useful knowledge.  What has been your experience with product vs. educational white papers?

A couple of you asked for examples of promotional copy that we’ve seen to be effective in supporting clients’ marketing efforts. Rather than share specific client examples, I’d prefer to give you some overall tips that reflect our Best Practices for effective promotion. You can also check out our posted Best Practices link for even more specific suggestions.

When you think about it, your email marketing copy makes or breaks your ability to get the right leads and a lot of leads for your webcasts or white papers. You’ve got to break through the clutter right from the get-go. This means your subject line has to work.

We have found subject lines that identify a benefit in the content or the product being promoted work a lot better than subject lines that “show off” the merits of the item being marketed.

IT prospects don’t initally care as much about why your content or solution is so superior to others. Rather, they are focused on why they should spend time reading the white paper or attending the webcast. They want to be educated, they want short-cuts for their due diligence process, they want easy to understand strategies. They want to know how to avoid wrong decisions or traps.

So provide them with this by organizing your content around these pain points. Examples of the most effective subject lines approaches we’ve used; “Ten Most Important Tips for researching Intrusion detection solutions” or “5 Key Strategies to evaluating (technology solution)” or “The Complexities of (technology solution) simplified”.

The body copy following these subject lines may continue to discuss the problem the IT professional has around the subject at hand and point out how the white paper/webcast will offer sound advise or clear up confusion on the topic.

In general, put yourself in the mindset of the reader, the IT pro who has to research something, make a recomendation for a short list and eventually suggest a finalist. Your first attempts at capturing his attention must highlight what you can do to make this entire process simpler.