In terms of branding, I have noticed vendors are looking for an alternative to running site banner placements. Recently, we had a client in the Storage space that wanted to brand their product as the leader in network area storage (NAS) and align with a highly qualified audience of NAS professionals.  We have seen the branding is extremely effective when there is a targeted alignment between vendor and editorial content.  In order to brand this client’s product as a leader in NAS – our editorial team compiled relevant editorial articles and then promoted them across a highly qualified audience of storage IT pros.  Sponsor ads were placed prominently through the articles providing great content alignment and branding.  As an exclusive sponsor, this vendor was able to surround their target market with their product message at a time when they are actively engaged with a target.  What branding vehicles have you found to be effective?

Clients often come to us looking for comparisons of results of one media vs the other in terms of lead generation.

Recently a data backup/recovery company came to us with a unique challenge.  They were looking to target IT decision makers who are responsible for backup at small/medium-sized businesses.  In the past, this client had great success promoting white papers to the Storage audience. Now, they wanted to test the effectiveness of a webcast vs. the white paper.

To help them accomplish this, we customized a program promoting both media products, the white paper and webcast equally.  We used numerous push out emails and banners to the same Storage audience.  As we had expected,  there was a higher quantity of white paper leads than webcast leads.  However, the leads were then sent to a telemarketing team and the webcast leads proved to be more highly qualified in that they were further along the sales cycle.  The white paper leads still needed more nurturing.

We’ve always believed that IT pros who take an hour out of their day to attend a webcast are ready to short-list a final vendor recommendation. This exercise reinforced that.