Information Technology Marketing

IT Marketing: Mailing to Your Current Customer Database

admin — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 18:48:10 +0000

IT marketing can get off to a great start by doing a mailing to your current customers. Pitch them to try new services or maximize their current technology through your IT marketing.Doing a mailing to your current customer database is a really great place to start. In this article, you’ll learn why this IT marketing strategy can be so effective.

Your Customers Already Know You

Doing an IT marketing mailing to your current customers is a great place to start because, for one thing, you already own the list. But even more importantly, they already know, like, and trust you. And that’s one of the biggest obstacles to overcome when you’re doing any kind of direct marketing like this.

IT Marketing: What to pitch?

If you feel comfortable talking with business owners and business managers about providing virus protection, firewalls, passwords, data backup, and power protection, you have a good opportunity to tie in the IT audit concept and data protection.

Offer a heavily discounted IT audit package. Let’s say that it’s regularly $400, but as a special now through the expiration date, it’s $299. You might consider putting an extra bonus in there, like an entry-level battery backup unit, or surge protector, or your prized system inventory worksheet template, or a CD or DVD from the last data protection seminar you gave. As part of your IT marketing strategy, give away something you think will have that little bit of an extra pull.

IT Marketing: Keep track of your results

If you see that you get five percent inquiries and half of those inquiries ultimately end up taking the audit, this gives you a good baseline to measure and compare other lists and the responses you get from similar mailings.

You’re going to have a much more receptive audience with your existing customers than anyone else through your IT marketing efforts. If you’re doing any kind of outbound telemarketing, even if they’re not customers you’ve done a lot of work for, at least these people know you and they hopefully like you and trust you.

Help Your Customers Utilize What They Already Have

Look to your existing customer relationships to find out additional ways that you can help them better use what they already own. There is an excellent chance that they’ve bought a lot of things that are collecting dust. If they are using them, they may be only scratching the surface of their usefulness.

IT Marketing: Cementing Relationships

These are not only great opportunities for you to help them get more out of what they already own, it’s also a great opportunity for you to pick up a lot of good, incremental service revenue. And it’s also a great way for you to cement the long-term loyalty and relationships that are really important for any computer consulting business.

The Bottom Line on IT Marketing

Using your existing clients for IT marketing is a great first step. You can either introduce new products or services or help them better utilize technology they already have.

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IT Marketing: Use Trusted Business Advisors

admin — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 18:47:19 +0000

IT marketing can be given a boost by developing relationships with professionals who dispense advice on many different business aspects to their clients. Accountants are a particularly good occupation group to build relationships with for IT marketing.Another way to get your name out there for IT marketing is through trusted business advisors. These are people that small businesses look to for advice. Their customers put a tremendous amount of trust in the reliability of their recommendations. In this article, you’ll learn how a referral from them can be worth their weight in gold. These might come from accountants, lawyers, or bankers.

How do you go about leveraging the trusted business advisor? Let’s think about an ACCOUNTANT for a moment. You can see if they need help with their technology. This can be a very helpful with credibility and a very strong and powerful testimonial if they need help with their computer systems and you do a good job for them.

Regardless of whether you do that or not, you should definitely talk to your accountant about what types of computer problems their clients have and how they address them. Here are some typical things clients might ask their accountant:

1. “I’m looking around for a good retirement account. What vendors would you recommend I work with?”
2. “I’m having a bear of a time finding health insurance. Who’s good out there?”
3. “Where is a good place for a checking account?”
4. “Where is a good place for a merchant account?”
5. “I need a good attorney. I’m closing on my house.”

ACCOUNTANTs often hear about their clients financial, legal, and computer needs. People tend to go to accountants as a very good source of information on a lot of different small business subjects. Accountants are a great group for you to network with to improve your IT marketing efforts.

The Bottom Line on IT Marketing

To get more referrals, develop relationships for the people who get asked for them. Accountants are one of the occupation groups that get asked “who do you know?” quite a bit.

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IT Marketing: The Multi-Pronged Marketing Approach

admin — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 18:46:28 +0000

IT Marketing is best done by not putting your eggs in one basket. Do some advertising, some seminar-hosting and some networking to build your portfolio of IT marketing.Approach your IT marketing and advertising with a multi-pronged approach. Think about your retirement account or your investment portfolio. Would you really want to put all of your money into one stock? You probably wouldn’t have wanted it to be Anderson or Enron! As you’ll learn in this article, you don’t want to put all of your marketing eggs in one basket.

IT Marketing: Don’t Be Seduced by a Sales Pitch

People get seduced by a sales pitch from a friendly advertising person, whether it’s for direct mail, or the Yellow Pages, or some other type of advertising vehicle. They don’t have an idea of what they want to do marketing-wise over the next six to 12 months. They don’t really have a marketing budget or a marketing plan, and then they end up becoming overly dependent or overly weighted in that particular advertising vehicle.

Come up with your marketing portfolio. That might include a mixture of networking and getting active in a couple of organizations in your area. Don’t forget to hold your own seminars-not just go to others’. You can demonstrating your credibility by getting a room of prospects together and talking about a topic that you feel passionately about, that you have knowledge about and that just happens to be about something your company specializes in. This is very effective for IT marketing.

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IT Marketing: Multi-tasking is Key

admin — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 18:45:09 +0000

IT Marketing requires doing several marketing tasks simultaneously. Pick 3 or 4 and do them for several months, than eliminate the ones that don’t work and add new ones to continue with IT marketing.When you do a direct mail campaign, it is very important that you know exactly who you’re trying to reach and that you come up with some kind of targeted message.

If you are just getting started, you may feel overwhelmed when you realize that there are up to 30 IT marketing tasks that you are capable of doing. Look at the list and find four or five of the most appealing, and then just work those a quarter at a time. The key is to be having several IT marketing tasks going on at once.

Ideas for IT Marketing

It might be outbound telemarketing. It may be postcard mailings where you’re sending out a certain amount of postcards to a group and possibly doing a follow-up mailer every week or two or maybe direct mail letters. It may be some trade shows that are in your area, expos or industry or maybe holding a seminar.

Diversify your holdings

Hit different areas, and figure out a way that you can measure and track what you’re doing. Know how much time and money you’re putting in each category. Figure out what kind of leads you’re getting from the time and money you’re investing. Figure out what’s working so you can do more of that and what’s not working so you can do less of that.

Evaluate Your IT Marketing Efforts Every Quarter

Whatever you choose, stick to it for 2 to 3 months, and see how it goes. Once the quarter is over, stick with those that worked, can those that didn’t, and add a couple of new ones to the mix. Marketing is an ongoing process! It’s really a refinement process over time.

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IT Marketing: Measuring the Response

admin — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 18:44:03 +0000

IT marketing is a waste of money unless you know which of your efforts are resulting in new business. Track your results and measure your profit from your various efforts in IT marketing.A really important part of the whole IT marketing effort is tracking and measuring. In this article, you’ll learn how it’s really important to track what the response is and ultimately you want to track how many of the responses converted into sales.

At the absolute minimum, you want to see what kind of inquiries come in from the different marketing vehicles. For example, if you have a seminar, how many registrants were from a chamber flyer? How many were from a small newspaper ad? How many were from doing some outbound telemarketing yourself?

Measuring Response is very important. Here are some ways to do it:
1. Drive them to a specific URL so that you know how many people went to the website.
2. Ask them when you talk to them on the phone where they heard of you.
3. Have them call a specific phone number with a request.
4. Use different response vehicles with different marketing vehicles. For example, the postcards offer a reduced price IT audit and the newspaper ad offers a free seminar.

IT Marketing: Some Real Numbers

So let’s say for argument’s sake we’re mailing 1,000 postcards to 1,000 law offices in the area with some kind of offer like attending a seminar, getting a free report, getting a free needs analysis. I want to know out of those 1,000 postcards how many resulted in an inquiry.

Let’s say for argument’s sake we got almost a two percent response on inquiry, which would be fantastic. We had a 1.7 percent response rate on inquiries, and out of those 17 inquiries, one materialized into a nice-size account and one materialized into a one-shot deal. So, for 1,000 postcards mailed to attorneys in this area, we got 17 inquiries and we got two business opportunities that equated to $19,500 in the first year.

That’s a fantastic return even with list rental, even with printing, even with having it professionally graphic designed, professionally copy written, postage, and everything else that went along with that. For that $500 to $700 investment, you were able to identify a one-shot deal that probably almost covered the cost of your mailing and you found one huge account that paid for the mailing many times over.

The Bottom Line on IT Marketing

Measuring the response rate of your IT marketing is very important. You need to track where and how you spent your IT marketing money and how your ROI was.

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IT Marketing: Postcard Case Study

admin — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 18:43:01 +0000

IT marketing is well-served by mailing targeted postcards. Don’t expect a huge return on your investment by just sending out a few hundred cards for your IT marketing.Sometimes you won’t get the results you hoped for with your IT marketing. In this article you will learn about some common problems with postcards and how to avoid them.

IT Marketing: The Case

“I’ve sent out over 300 postcards offering general computer troubleshooting services, automated online data backup and wireless home networks. From a marketing standpoint, I purchased lists of area businesses broken down by revenue, credit rating, years in business and number of PCs. The wireless home networks went to homeowners that were over $500,000 in purchase price and the automated online data backup were to people that had a recent new business license. The general services list went out to accountants, lawyers, and small clinics

“The results so far have been very disappointing, as I have not received a single phone call or response. Are these the wrong lists? Are postcards the wrong media? Do you have any suggestions in this area that may enhance response?”

IT Marketing: Don’t Expect Too Much

You sent out over 300 postcards. 300 really isn’t a lot-you need to do enough to be statistically valid, but you don’t want to go nuts and spend your whole IT marketing budget in one place before you know whether it works or not. Don’t think, however, that you’re going to spend $180 at 60 cents a unit sending out 300 postcards and for your $180 investment you are going to hit a goldmine. You should not go retreating into the woods and pout for a year if you got no return on it.

IT Marketing: What your Postcards Need to Include

So, are the lists wrong? Probably not. But it may be your copy. What are you offering? Do you have a compelling headline? Did you hit their points of pain, did you use a deadline, and did you use a compelling offer to get them to pick up the phone or send you an email or mail back the coupon?

Are postcards the wrong media? Absolutely not. You know why? They do not have to open the envelope. It is a lot easier for them to make a decision. You don’t have to fight with putting teasers on the envelope or anything like that to get them to open it.

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IT Marketing: Rewarding Referrals

admin — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 18:41:51 +0000

IT marketing can benefit from forming partnerships with other professionals and rewarding them for the referrals they give you.People in some professions, like accounting, can be great people to partner up with. You may even be able to develop a more formal revenue sharing arrangement where your accountant would have a financial interest in connecting you with their existing clients. This could be in the form of:

o A finder’s fee
o A referral fee
o Subcontracting you out
o Bartering services

Other less formal ideas include a gift basket, sporting events tickets or taking them out for lunch or dinner. Work any of these ideas into your IT marketing budget.

Do Their Clients Need You?

First you want to see if they get requests from clients from time to time for this kind of thing and how they typically handle it. If they say we really don’t have anywhere to send them, then those are the magic words for you to propose an IT marketing venture that makes sense.

Talk with your accountant about what IT investments can do for their business. For example, maybe you want to hold an educational seminar in your accountant’s office. Of course you want to do this at a time of the year that’s good for them. You certainly don’t want to broach this subject at the height of tax season, but any other time of the year, especially in the fall and in the late part of the spring is a great time to hold an educational seminar with your accountant.

IT Marketing: How an Educational Seminar Works

The two of you will co-sponsor it. You will invite your customers and theirs and talk about how small businesses can better use their accounting systems or how small businesses can better protect their accounting systems by putting better controls in place and your chartered accountant friend can talk about the accounting issues and you, of course, can talk about the IT issues. The key thing is to at least plant the seeds about computer-related issues.

The Bottom Line on IT Marketing

Personal referrals are great for your IT marketing efforts. To get more referrals, you need to partner with people that get asked who they know. So align yourself with the people who can help you get referrals and reward them in doing so to help with your IT marketing.

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IT Marketing: Successful Seminars

admin — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 18:40:20 +0000

IT Marketing efforts are helped by holding seminars. Educate your audience about IT, capture their contact information and follow up with more IT marketing An important part of your IT marketing is seminars. In this article you’ll learn how to get the most of the seminars you hold.

IT Marketing: Registration is Very Important

Most seminars that you offer should be free, but to make these IT marketing events successful, always require registration because you have limited seating. The reality is, that because it’s a free event, not everyone is going to show.

Have a check-in at the door, do some kind of survey in exchange for a door prize so you can ask them some questions and tailor the seminar to their interests. Make sure that you actually educate them on the things to look for and watch out for. You will have an easier time generating interest in an educated prospect than an uneducated one.

The registration at the door gets you the all important contact information for potential clients. So, what you should you do after the seminar?

IT Marketing: What to do after the Seminar

Provide a handout that has your contact info and put some kind of limited-time special offer on there. Put the highlights into a short article that you can either hand out or mail to your customers and prospects. See if you can get it published in different places in your local area like your local business journal, chamber newsletters, or organization newsletters. Let anyone publish it who has an interest in educating their members or their readers on how and why they should protect their computers from viruses and security breaches and blackouts.

After the seminar, you can take that article and turn it into a free report that you offer with advertisements. If you’re running an ad in the newspaper you can say, “Call us to get your copy of our free report on how to protect your blah, blah, blah.” The key thing is you’re capturing the contact information for you to follow up with for your IT marketing.

For all the above, the seminar and the highlights article and the free report offering that highlights your expertise in this area, you could still offer that same fixed price audit package with some kind of special offer discount, and again, the more of a deadline you put on there, the higher the response you’re going to get,

Consider a Travelling Seminar for IT Marketing

You could also take your seminar on the road. You could go out and offer this for chamber of commerce meetings and Rotary and Kiwanis. They’re always looking for speakers to fill in for 15, 20 minutes at a breakfast or a luncheon. You have a captive audience. You don’t have to worry about generating the demand- they will fill the seats and it’s a great way to showcase your expertise.

You may want to approach some business partners, like setting up a good partnering relationship with an accounting firm. Get their clients together for a data security awareness seminar that could be tied in to something else that they were doing.

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IT Marketing: The Benefits of Direct Mail Postcards

admin — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 18:39:17 +0000

IT Marketing can be accomplished relatively inexpensively by utilizing direct mail postcards. Target your recipient, lead them to a seminar or other freebie and enjoy the rewards of this form of IT marketing.The great advantage to using direct mail postcards is you don’t have to worry that they’ll get tossed in the trash without being read. They are already opened. Additionally, postcards are less expensive than other types of direct mail thereby saving on your IT marketing budget. In this article, you’ll learn how to make your direct mail postcards work best for your business.

IT Marketing: Keep it Targeted

Don’t send the same message to a couple thousand small businesses in your area and hope that you’re going to hit one of their hot buttons. Instead, target a specific group. If you have a lot of expertise with accounting offices, do something that speaks to the hot buttons of a partner or an office manager in an accounting office. Whatever it is, come up with something targeted that makes them realize that you have expertise in their area.

Postcards Build “Relationship” IT Marketing

The goal with direct mail is not trying to close the sale. You will not be able to get them to install a $25,000 client server network all because of a direct mail postcard. It takes time for these relationships to evolve.

The goal with the IT marketing postcards should be to generate a response. You want them to raise their hand and say yes, I’m interested. Once they have, you can focus your energy and your resources on courting the best opportunities that are there.

What’s the next step you want to drive them to with the direct mail postcard? Try seminars where you’re getting a group of people together who have expressed some interest in hearing what you have to say. Another much simpler thing to do it is offer something like a free report or a free needs analysis.

IT Marketing: Time is of the Essence

Have some kind of urgency factor, otherwise you may find people take your postcard and just file it away for six months or for a rainy day and never act on it. The goal is to get people to like, know and trust you, and the best way to do this is one-on-one contact or one-to-group contact where they can see you in person and experience what it’s like to work with you.

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IT Marketing: Sell Your Expertise

admin — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 18:38:08 +0000

IT Marketing needs to be unique to be effective. Sell your experience and your unique background to be successful at IT marketing.How do you differentiate yourself from others in your local marketplace? One of the best ways is by focusing on your unique expertise in your IT marketing. Your clients are really buying you, not a box or a server or a software license. In this article, you’ll learn how to differentiate yourself.

Don’t Become a Commodity

Commodities are cheap and everyone is out price shopping. To avoid this kind of mentality, you must sell “You Incorporated.” Focus on selling your expertise and the special problem-solving value that you bring to the table.

Don’t Be Hidden in Your IT Marketing Materials

Make sure your website lists you as the owner. Don’t try to hide the size of your company and try to make it look big by keeping it anonymous. The best thing you can do in IT marketing is focus on selling your background (and the background of any of your business partners and staff). You should also tell people your unique beliefs and philosophies about how you can help small businesses.
Be Unique

One of the biggest questions I get is “What have you found to be the best, most cost-effective way to get great leads, both in your own business and with some of the consultants that you work with across the country and around the globe?”

The biggest problem that I see is that everyone is going after the same leads with the same worn-out pitch from five years ago. The problem with this is nothing is unique in the message. Nothing is unique in the pitch.

Do Your IT Marketing Materials Look Like Everyone Else’s?

If you think you’re immune to it, here’s the simple test. Get out your business card. Take a look at your home page. Gather up a couple of business cards and home pages from competitors in your local area and see what you are saying that’s different. My guess is that everyone is saying, “We sell PC hardware and software, LANs and service.” This is true… this is what you do. But how do you expect new clients to pick you out over the pack?

Ask yourself; do you want to compete against a dozen potential competitors or a few hundred potential competitors? Do you want to be banging your head against the wall every day trying to compete against everyone that’s saying the exact same thing? Or do you want to compete against just a handful of savvy VARs in your area?

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