ITSMA Newsletter Add-Ins 2010-01-06
ITSMA’s Top Ten Marketing Ideas of 2009
ITSMA clients voted for these ideas with their computer mice. These are the ideas contained within ITSMA research documents that were downloaded most often in 2009, in order of popularity. We’ve created a special report with excerpts from these most popular research documents that you can download for free.
- ITSMA clients with Online Access download your PDF here
- Not a client? Download your free PDF here
Ask ITSMA: What Are Journalists Looking For?
By Chris Koch, Director of Research and Thought Leadership, ITSMA
Each month, ITSMA receives a number of queries through Ask ITSMA, a resource designed to give members a quick and easy way to get insight on important services and solutions marketing questions they face. In this column, we will publish some of our favorite questions, along with excerpts from our replies.
Q: We’re looking to raise our profile in the media in 2010. Any tips?
A: Here’s what journalists really want from marketers and PR people: content and validation.
The content is good thought leadership that focuses on the issues they cover rather than the ability of your company to deal with those issues. The content should display your content experts and quote them with names and titles so that journalists can pick up an interesting point of view, attach a name to it, and send you an email saying, “I want to talk to the person who said that.” Surveys are also wonderful ways to get journalists’ attention, because journalists don’t have to spend time trying to decode the level of bias built into the content. They just have to make sure the survey is legit. If you survey their audience, all the better. Conferences about general topics that feature your reference customers are another big draw.
The way you gauge whether you’ve succeeded is to see if they come to you for validation. Good journalists pride themselves on surveying their coverage areas and picking out threads of logic that are new or unique or that signal change in the status quo. You should have a mechanism for making it easy for journalists to present this thread to you (and it will usually be thin and poorly articulated to start) and a process for helping them develop the thread with content and spokespeople. The analyst firms—both on Wall Street and the technology firms like Forrester and Gartner—have this figured out. They respond to inquiries by getting an analyst on the phone who they thought might be able to figure out the query and say something worth remembering.
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Upcoming ITSMA Events
New Routes to Marketing Innovation: ITSMA’s 2010 State of the Profession Address
Online Briefing
January 26, 2009
8:00 a.m. Pacific – 11:00 a.m. Eastern – 16:00 London (Duration: One hour)
(Free for ITSMA members)
With marketing budgets set to rebound only slightly—if at all—in 2010, leading marketing organizations are exploring new ways to innovate and stand apart, such as partnering with other organizations, accelerating the move online and with social media, and getting out in front of the move to cloud computing. In this Online Briefing, Dave Munn and Julie Schwartz will share data from ITSMA’s 2010 Marketing Budgets & Trends Survey, to give marketers practical insight on how to take advantage of the changes that await in the year ahead.
ITSMA Featured Research
How Customers Choose Solution Providers, 2009:The Importance of Personalization, Epiphanies, and Social Media
Heightened scrutiny and lengthy decision cycles are changing the effectiveness of various marketing and sales tactics. The key to success lies in understanding changing buyer behavior at each stage of the sales cycle and using that knowledge to craft the right marketing programs and vehicles to deliver better results. These are some of the insights from the 2009 ITSMA How Customers Choose research, conducted in partnership with Pierre Audoin Consultants (PAC).
Recent ITSMA Thought Leadership
How to Format White Papers for Readability
Formatting is critical for pulling readers in and imparting value, even when they don’t read every word of your white paper. Here’s how to do it right.
Leveraging Reference Programmes to Help Customers Choose You
An effective client reference is one of the most influential factors in the sales cycle. In this Online Briefing, Paul Smitherman explores how to enhance the sales and marketing life cycle of value-based case studies and create strong propositions and programmes using client referral to drive sales. In addition, Patrick O’Halloran from Orange Business Services offers a case study examining Orange’s approach to reference management.
Lawson Global Support: How to Use Research to Develop Improved Offerings
If research is to serve as a reliable guide for making major changes to offerings, companies need to consider all the pieces of the business that will be affected by the decision and factor them into the research. In this ITSMA Case Study, we outline the research process that software provider Lawson used to ensure that there would be no doubts about the future direction of its support and maintenance offerings.
Getting Closer to Customers: Winning Strategies for Engaging Senior Executives
In this tough economic climate, we could be seeing the demise of high-end hospitability programs. Consequently, marketers need to rethink their client relationship-building programs, from user group meetings to advisory councils to reference programs to hospitality and senior-level events. In this Online Briefing, ITSMA’s Julie Schwartz and Katie Espinola address the questions that get at the heart of how to improve relationships with senior executives at your most important accounts.
