March 6, 2007
Online marketing checklist for enterprise IT vendors
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.