Marketing tips based on new Sherpa data
Marketing Sherpa recently released their Business Technology and Benchmark Guide for 2006. It is based on surveys of 1,900 marketers, 633 business executive that buy technology, and an evaluation of 161 websites. Here’s a summary of some of the findings and practical tips.
1) Best lead generation tools in order of effectiveness: Free trial demo, Webcast/Webinar, White paper, Blog, Podcasts (podcasts were not highly rated by marketers). It is funny how a blog and a whitepaper are lumped together as equals in the survey. A blog is a tool that can be used to publish and announce everything else on this list.
2) Base ad strategy on size of prospect organizations. Banner ads on general business websites and white papers work well for targeting large institutions. Search ads and banners on industry specific websites work best if you are targeting medium size businesses. Ads in 3rd party newsletters and email lists have the best response from small organizations.
3) Large companies are terrible at search marketing. The data shows a very clear inverse relationship between the size of the business and the percentage of the marketing budget spent online: Solo practitioners spent 58%, Small organizations spent 37%, Medium organizations - 25%, Large organizations - 7%. The statistic for large organizations is the real wow factor here. One result of this lack of online spending seems to be that large companies are terrible at search marketing with only 44% appearing in the top 3 natural search listings for key terms in their industry.
4) Email marketing can be effective, but it is dangerous. Surprisingly, 34% of technology buyers still scanned email newsletters even after they lost interest in them. However, 10% reported the email newsletters as junk regardless of whether they had originally opted into the list. This could have serious repercussions for your company in deliverability of future emails, so make it easy to unsubscribe and be sure to use a respected vendor for e-newsletters and any bulk email distribution. I use Constant Contact, but I’d be interested to learn of others.
5) More marketers are using persona research to target customers. That’s the method where you come up with fictitious characters, e.g. Lounge Lizard Larry, Sunset Strip Suzy, etc. that embody the different personalities of your customers. Then you design your product, website, ads, etc. as something that they would like. Personally, this seems boring as hell. Why not come up with a few really cool ideas and then ask your customers what they think?
