A recent Monash Letter covered online marketing strategy in considerable detail. The complete seven-page Letter is exclusive to Monash Advantage members, but I thought I’d share a summary checklist here. If you’re an enterprise IT vendor, and you don’t do all these things, you’re probably missing some major marketing opportunities. (The good news is – nobody, including your competitors, is doing all of these things yet.)

• Offer both a conventional website and a “developer’s network”-style technical website. Whether they’re on one domain or not is unimportant.
• Absolutely minimize the registration requirements for your sites. Why make it hard for people to accept your marketing pitches?
• When you do pay-per-click advertising, don’t just look for phrases buyers would use. Also go for the tire-kickers, or the people who don’t even know yet that there are tires to kick.
• Devote a website page to every partner. If this doesn’t make sense on your main site, create a separate website just for the purpose.
• Monitor and participate in forums where your products are – or should be – discussed. For most classes of enterprise IT, the first place to look is the old Usenet comp.* hierarchy, most easily found via Google Groups.
• Maintain one or more executive blogs.
• Maintain a news blog hosted on servers physically separate from your main website(s). That’s for business continuity at a minimum, but you can also use it for other purposes.
• Contact influencers regularly and BRIEFLY. Pinging us is OK. But constant press releases and newsletters make our eyes glaze over.
• Increase the number, and vary the style, of your success stories.
• Don’t put all your eggs in the basket of “big bang” message launches. Also build “rolling buzz.” The print publications won’t reduce coverage because the influencers have already figured out what you’re going to do.

Links about marketing and customer communications via blogging

• Dave Kellogg of Mark Logic has a great CEO blog.
• James Taylor of Fair Isaac also does a good job of strategic marketing in his blogs.
• Jonathan Schwartz of Sun has a successful and high-profile CEO blog.
• The reasons for its success are a bit specific to the company, but Matt Cutts of Google writes a blog that’s terrifically important to his employer.
• Google also does a good job of offering many product-specific company blogs.
• Netezza has an “In the news” kind of webpage just for the blogosphere, which also has a link to a good corporate blog. But guys, check the name of the blog you’re linking to, OK?
• Wordpress.org is the home site for Wordpress, the definitive blogging software.
• Even the Catholic Church is seriously into blogging.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 6th, 2007 at 10:21 am and is filed under Blogosphere, Online marketing, Social software and media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.