This past week, SearchCRM.com interviewed marketing guru Seth Godin in its recurring Voices of CRM podcast series. One of the main things discussed was the concept of a flatter world – meaning that marketers no longer wield all encompassing power. This is a concept I wholeheartedly agree with. Customers/consumers now have a much stronger voice and choice for that matter – in fact, according to Seth, over 80 million people now have blogs. Aligning marketing efforts with this new voice may make new media seem an obvious choice, but it really has nothing to do with it. To understand a successful marketing approach is to understand that your customers now have the ability and choice to tell you when and how they want to engage you – and as Seth says, don’t use marketing data to help your bottom line, use it to help your customers.

Over the last week, we have seen many marketers publish their 2007 marketing trends.

A recent BtoB article, Top trends for 2007: Marketers’ influence grows even as customers demand more control of the message proclaims there will be a boom in online video ads. By 2010, spending on online video ads will reach $2.9 billion, eMarketer projected. However, for 2007, eMarketers states that online video ads will make up only 4.2% of total online advertising in the U.S. next year.

At TechTarget, we have been investigating the use of online videos. We have also seen more and more interest from our clients.

Online video is another step on engaging with a prospect to shorten the sales customer. As we launch into 2007, marketers are looking at ways to create dialogue with their customers. Online videos can be an effective way to measure engagement levels.

Are you planning on utilizing online videos in your 2007 marketing plans?

Recently, Melissa discussed the increase in online consumption in the UK. In its most recent global online spending outlook, Merrill Lynch predicts that global online ad spending will reach $11.6 Billion in 2006, an increase of 35% over 2005. Internationally, online spending growth rate is set to match consumption in the UK at 46%, but the highest growth rate by far is expected to be in China at 50%. Leveraging this growth can sometimes come at a price for online publishers and marketers alike. As businesses flock to leverage the tremendous potential in this market, marketers should be aware of challenges as well as the many localized factors that need to be taken into consideration before marketing in China. MarketingSherpa outlines a few here.

This post is a follow-up to Marilou’s blog on the growing popularity of video content.  We just finished up an extensive research study on IT pros media use.  Our results show that, although a large majority of IT pros have not used video content yet (around 73%), those who have thought the content was as effective as webcasts and software downloads.  Here’s a gap anaylsis chart showing our findings.

Source: Media Consumption Survey, TechTarget, July 2006

With video content on MySpace and YouTube receiving significant traction in the consumer space, this is a convenient time to consider where video content fits into the BtoB landscape.  And more specifically, does video have a significant role to play in IT media?

If you ask me, video has huge potential for IT professionals and our experience shows they eat it up.  With constant exposure to long, written documents, such as product collateral and (gasp) technical manuals, it’s obvious why engaging video content is such a strong new medium.

So what does this mean for you as IT marketers?  I’m hearing from that many of you do not have available video ad units to run today, but that will change in the coming months. Still, some recent articles have implied there are greater obstacles to embracing the ad format.

How about the insertion of sponsored video clips that are highly contextual to the underlying content?  Would that ability make you more likely to develop video ads?

Many companies look for ways to position themselves as a thought leader in their market.

There are many ways to build your reputation as a thought leader – press releases, public speeches, and differentiating yourself through content.  I had a client in the CRM space looking to position themselves as a thought leader that offers a service that no other company offers.

My answer was to run a banner roadblock to create initial buzz. To maintain consistent presence the campaign followed up with an integrated online campaign that included banners, e-newsletters and print.  They started with a white paper offer followed by a webcast offer in order to educate and raise awareness for their user experience monitoring solution.  Insightful content (webcast/white paper) is extremely important in how the company differentiates themselves in the market place.  This client used a 3rd party expert to write the white paper and to participate in the webcast.  They also included prominent, easily recognizable companies as case studies to lend credibility and strengthen their case.  The results of the campaign were very successful. This is one example, of positioning a company as a thought leader - Does anyone else have other suggestions?

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.

Since the Forrester report last week I’ve heard a lot of new doubts about podcasting. The report was rather skeptical about their status and adoption rates for them.  The biggest stat was posted in Forrester analyst Charlene Li’s blog that, “only 1% of online households in North America regularly download and listen to podcasts.”

But this was based on a general consumer audience.  Does it have any relevance to IT marketing?

I know it’s a new medium with lots of room for growth, but in my experience there are too many differences between IT pros and the general public.

IT Pros are always at the cutting edge of new technology adoption and tend to be more avid consumers of information than the general public. “Time shifting” seems to be just what these guys would want to be able to get the information they need.  I know they’re getting great traction across my campaigns.