March 15th, 2010
Inside the mind of the IT buyer
There are many, many customer segmentations in the world of marketing. Typically, these involve a chunk of research to determine a set of buyer archetypes. These are often then given names such as ‘big man on campus’, ‘harassed MD’ and ‘digital refusenik’.
As an approach, they can be pretty helpful. They provide a shorthand way of looking at an audience – one which enables us to form more targeted strategies that speak to the real needs of our key targets.
The problem, however, is that typically they are simply made up.
Money is tight. Budgets are squeezed. You simply don’t have the resources to do everything. It’s decision time: do you spend what you have on growing the brand or on generating demand and hitting the numbers? If you are like two-thirds of the attendees at one recent 
Landing pages would seem to be a fairly tedious topic of conversation; however they can often make or break campaigns. And all too often, it’s the latter. Many clients have separated marketing and web teams, leaving the IT-driven web team to produce the landing page. This can cause issues with the linkage between the creative and landing page content, less than ideal landing page structures with call-to-actions hidden below the fold and navigation bars diverting the users from the key action companies want them to take. Alternatively, it could be that the client has outsourced their landing page construction to an external agency that like to build pretty Flash-driven sites that are a nightmare from an