Out of the Fog Marketing

Check out IT Database's latest report Business Press Technology Coverage for a fascinating look at how business publications cover the technology industry. Tech gets far less coverage than its finance counterparts even though it's a huge part of our country's economic engine.

Particularly vexing is Gartner predicted $3.3 trillion in IT spending in 2010, yet enterprise IT is barely covered in the mainstream media.

In the study IT Database also asked tech PR pros which companies they thought were overrated or underappreciated by the business press. Look at the results and see that hip and hype really matter when it comes to PR coverage:

Overrated	Underappreciated
Apple (32%)	Cisco (18%)
Google (28%)	Microsoft (12%)
Twitter (12%)	VMWare (12%)

Labels: it, marketing technology, media coverage, public relations, publicity

There is some interesting information in this Forbes article on why you should continue to advertise during a recession. I know, you are thinking these are just advertising and marketing firms that want to keep making a buck.

Well here's some anecdotal proof that increasing ad spend in a weak economy actually works:

1) We increased pay-per-click ad spend for a local IT company this month and their leads have soared. Plus their cost per click is down due to a decrease in the competition's budgets.
2) We increased online advertising for our own firm. In a Google Adwords campaign, we were able to grab the top spot for a competitive term due to competition pulling out. That ad landed us one of our largest clients this month.

So don't spend unwisely, but think about actually INCREASING your budget to outmaneuver your competition this month.

Labels: ad spend, advertising agencies, forbes, google adwords, it, marketing in recession, marketing technology, online advertising, pay per click, recession, weak economy, yahoo search marketing

TechTarget and Google released an excellent report on how IT pros use search during the purchasing process. One data point is IT buyers use the internet to search for comparisons late in the buying cycle. So search phrases such as "product x vs. product y" or "server virtualization comparison" are popular with decision makers late in the purchase process. Our own campaigns backup this data.

However, be aware you'll get very high exit rates off comparison landing pages unless you provide useful objective information, testimonials and hard data. You just can't put up your product collateral and promotional materials.

Labels: ann arbor google, ann arbor marketing, b2bmarketing, it, it marketing, market research, marketing to it buyers, techtarget