IDG — B2B Digital Marketing

Caution sign Among paid media and advertising tactics, lead generation programs are a key source of leads for B2B marketers, especially in the enterprise technology space. Tell a B2B publisher that you are interested in lead generation and the majority will point to some form of white paper syndication program they offer.

For the sake of this post, lead generation programs refer to publisher programs that promote your content and capture registration. These are contacts or inquiries, not sales leads, but in keeping with the terminology publishers use, we will refer to this as lead generation here.

In enterprise technology, publishers like IDG, Information Week and TechTarget have nearly turned these programs into a science, with guaranteed leads volume and a myriad of filtering and qualification options driven largely by email and newsletter promotions. [Read more…]

IDG Enterprise released its Cloud Computing Research results at the end of last year, and I finally had the opportunity to review it recently. I just wish I had looked at it earlier. The research is based on a survey of approximately 1,500 IT and business professionals, with good representation of senior IT management and large companies. There is a lot of great data in the research, if you market cloud computing services, it is worth downloading and spending a few minutes with the slides.

Beyond the data points, I saw four key themes. Each is an opportunity for marketers to differentiate their offerings or position in the cloud marketplace.

IT Expects Control
For CIOs, the top concerns are security (two-thirds), followed by access, governance, and meeting standards. And IT is a key stakeholder in cloud decisions at larger companies (more than 80% of the time). In contrast, concerns about business and employee receptiveness is cited by less than 15% of respondents. [Read more…]