Hey everyone! I wanted to have your opinions and advice on how to spend $20,000 monthly on an online marketing campaign for the company I work for. The company offers Canadian B2B (Business to Business) IT Solutions, Services and Hardware distribution. The target customers are IT Professionals from small businesses, medium sized organizations and large enterprises; that includes Government, Health and Education. I need to find the right websites and advertising services to create the marketing plan to advertise for the company's products, services and solutions and major events. Questions : Where would I find websites or blogs targeting IT Professionals that offer advertisement space? Would you recommend text ads, image ads, flash, video, audio ... ? Do you know of an advertising service which targets IT professionals in Canada? What services do they offer? Where could I rent or buy a targeted email list of Canadian IT Professionals? To send an invitation to an IT seminar for example. Where should most money be spent? Which has the highest ROI potential? PPC, Emails lists, CPM... ? Any other PPC services apart from Google, Yahoo and MSN which could be interesting? An idea for a creative internet marketing campaign targeted towards IT Professionals? You know any other worthy places to advertise to IT Professionals? Some business related keywords : IT Integration IT Staffing (resourcing) IT Infrastructure IT Training IT Provisioning IT Architecture IT Hardware (Procurement + Retail) IT Maintenance Security Data Center Data Management Server Remote Management Managed Services Software License Management I'm a qualified internet marketer and I have numerous ideas for this campaign but I know online communities like the people on this forum are extremely qualified and innovative which is why I seek your advice and recommendations. Thank you for your help!
YOU WANT TO SPEND 20 000$/month and you don't know how!!!!! OK,coool contact me and i'll give you a STRATEGY that will blow your mind (and also your company mind )
lol... this is not cool... This person is up on here with a $20,000 budget asking the most basic questions regarding how to complete they job they were apparently hired to do... C'mon man... really? Try harder...
I think there are a lot of things to do to spend that money right, at least you have an idea on what you want to spend it on. I wouldn't pay much attention to the people that are talking stupid about you. 20.000 is not a small amount and many of them have not had experience with that kind of money. It's always a good idea to ask people for advice. The people that don't give you none are usually the people that don't know anything. a marketing plan is not an easy thing to do. It may take you as long as a week to make a plan. I suggest that you first get 3 different databases, one of the customers, one of your competition one of the different media where you could advertise your product and or service. Start with the database of your customers, you need to make an action plan, what would be the different ways to contact them, emails, direct mail, TV ads, radio ads, fliers, door hanging, promotional package and so and so... Then move to your second database of competitors, find what they have to offer, what are they using to take your share of the market, who is who and what is who doing to make you work so hard to claim your position in the market. once you get all this information it will be easier for you to find info about the media you need to use. Then you move to the media you need to use. Try to use common sense and divide your budget on different categories, take in consideration the first database of customers and the second database of competitors. So much to say never enough time to do it all. If you need any help please feel free to ask. Thank you for allowing me to express my thought.
I'd obviously make sure I had an excellent website for starters but keep it simple and user friendly. The other thing I'd do in your situation is invest in offline advertising to drive traffic to your site. With 20k a month I'd be thinking Wall Street Journal, USA Today and any top flight magazines geared towards the IT profession. Finally, mix in some PPC (hire someone for this to get you started...you got the dough). I could go on and on if I wanted. By the way are you for real? I feel like someone's about to pop out of my closet and tell me I'm on candid camera. 20k a month? LORD! Why not just hire an outside marketing/ad agency?
I'm with the other guys, how is gods name did you get hired for a 20K a month internet marketing job and not even know where to begin. My advice: hire a REAL internet marketing company, give them your whole budget to work with, sit back, and watch the show.
linkedin.com will let you geo target and target by industry they aint cheap but they are targeted and worth the money, about $75 cpm i think first thing you need to do is make sure you can track everything if you find that helpful and want to outsource, pm me
Thank you all for your responses. I know there`s a lot of qualified people using marketing forums and I wanted to see what you guys had to propose as a solution. I`ve noted your proposals and will start working on the online marketing plan. I'll keep you posted with the progress. If you have any other ideas on how to advertise to IT Professionals via the Net, post your tip or trick so others can also benefit from your experience. Thanks again for the help, Alex
By the way, Linkedin sounds like a great solution for advertising but is only available in USA. Oh well...
The first thing that you should consider is getting more links. Try getting some companies to do link building for your companies' site.