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Your Advice? Got $20,000 to spend on Internet Marketing Campaign

by alexroux
9 replies
Hey everyone!

I wanted to have your opinion 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!
#$20 #advice #campaign #internet #internet marketing #marketing #spend
  • Profile picture of the author Mike Adams
    Just sent you a PM (private message)
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  • Profile picture of the author edpudol1973
    Why not hire someone to do promotion of your site for long term marketing plan of your business.

    Hire someone that can
    - search places to promote your site like gumtree, craigslist
    - SEO
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  • Profile picture of the author Bob Monie
    There are so many great marketing options with a budget like that.

    Where would I find websites or blogs targeting IT Professionals that offer advertisement space?

    Very easily done by doing a Google search for "IT Professionals" and any other related terms your targeting. The top ranked sites are obviously the authority sites in your niche. Go to each site, see if they are offering advertising space, contact them with an offer.

    This also answers your question about finding a webmaster with an opt in list.
    Google search "Canadian IT professionals" or related terms and contact the top ranked websites that appear to have a list and make them an offer.

    Since you are geo targeting Canadians, you could do well with geo targeted PPC using Adwords, Facebook Ads and Myspace Advertising.

    You could build a very large opt in list, very quickly with a CPA campaign.

    Could outsource a few hundred origional articles every month targeting your long tail key phrases, submitted to the most popular article directories, will bring in a good volume of traffic.

    Could outsource some videos to promote your products on the video hosting sites.

    You should definitely spare a few grand each month to hire a good SEO company that will SEO your site full time. Targeting local key phrases initially for fast ranking while working on the most competitive key phrases that may take 6 - 12 months to rank for. May seem like a long wait but is definitely worth it in the end when you consider organic search results receive 8 times as much traffic as the PPC Adwords on the same page.

    I do think SEO will bring you the best ROI but its hard to determin since it varies in every niche. A CPA campaigne to build a list would also be a great ROI since you would own the list. I would presume Cost Per Click would be quite high with PPC when targeting IT Professionals.

    Best to try, test and track all marketing options for a start to see what works for you. Never a good idea to rely on just one marketing technique either.
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    • Profile picture of the author alexroux
      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
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  • Profile picture of the author alexroux
    @Bob
    Where could I setup CPA campaigns?

    Video advertising would be nice but time consuming and I'm not sure it applies to our customers.

    Facebook and Myspace seem interesting if they are able to correctly target our audience.

    Thanks!
    Alex
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    • Profile picture of the author radhika
      First concentrate on local (offline and online) areas to promote the products.

      Most people jump into online web sites and promoting right away. But they don't know they are entering into most competirive world. So slowly start with offline advertising and slowly introducing online promotion (first focused to your local area).

      .
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    • Profile picture of the author Stangracer
      Originally Posted by alexroux View Post

      @Bob
      Where could I setup CPA campaigns?

      Video advertising would be nice but time consuming and I'm not sure it applies to our customers.

      Facebook and Myspace seem interesting if they are able to correctly target our audience.

      Thanks!
      Alex

      As far as video advertising you could put together a screen cast of a powerpoint presentation about your company with a link to your company at the bottom of the video and in the description on the video site.

      If you do live seminars you could record them or real good portions of them and post that to video sites with a link in the description.

      You could basically turn your brochures or white papers into a screen cast video and post them.

      There are a multitude of ways to take existing marketing material you already have and turn it into a quality video and post to the video sites.

      Provide a video tour of your company, talking to management, engineers, technicians, etc... Post it to the video sites, then use them on your own site for marketing purposes.

      This allows folks to get to know your company.

      Just some ideas...

      Hope it helps.
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      • Profile picture of the author alexroux
        Inbound links are extremely important. I'll setup some social bookmarking features but I need to go one step further. Is there a good inbound marketing service which could be helpful for me? Buying links from text link ads is a bad idea right? Too dangerous if search engine notice what is being done? Natural link building is a hard task without valuable content.

        A nice way to get inbound links are with press realeases and we should have plenty of them. Is there a press release ditribution service you would recommend for distribution within Canadian media? Maybe marketwire.com, businesswire.com or emediaworld.com?

        I was thinking about affiliate marketing for our company. We have ecommerce websites to sell IT hardware. Could networks like Commission Junction and Pepperjam Network help us setup an affiliate program? This way we could start building an online sales force. CPA marketing is extremely powerful and sounds like an amazing opportunity! Only pay when an item is sold.

        What are the drawbacks of Affiliate marketing? Difficult and complex to setup? Anyone know what kind of CPA costs could be involved? $1 per Action? $5 ? $20 ??
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  • Profile picture of the author winebuddy
    Just send me the money!

    Seriously - you should invest in some of the better online marketing products and build your own IM campaign. For less than $5,000/month you could generate a TON of business.

    Or - you could contact some of the "IM Gurus" and just hire them to do your work for you - completely outsource the whole project.
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