Has your market moved beyond the free giveaways at tradeshows? Has a bouncing light ball become passé? The reality is simple: Marketing programs once filled with glossy product brochures and glittering giveaways are not bringing in the results they once did.

Downsizing over the past few years and increased pressure to reduce costs means that IT and business professionals are strapped for time and resources. They won't waste that time with gadgets or vendor-centric marketing information. They need real information that will help them leverage their purchases and make better-educated buying decisions.

Marketing campaigns that fulfill this need for information by offering third-party editorial content are not only bringing in the quality leads but also enabling vendors to interact with their market in new ways.

Whether you are looking to increase brand awareness or generate leads, editorial content is the key to a successful marketing campaign. The following list highlights several ways to employ editorial content to influence and gain attention from your market:

·         Bring the Experts-Align your company with an industry expert by utilizing a third-party author to write content for your Web site. You will be offering your readers expert advice as well as inheriting that author's dedicated readers.

·         Require Registration-Prospects expect to find product information on your Web site; when you offer them valuable content from an industry author, ask them to register. This exchange is a classic permission-marketing exchange. You are giving prospects information that they would normally need to pay for in exchange for their contact information. To ensure success, keep the number of questions to a minimum and ask if you can contact them with additional information.

·         Hit the Hot Buttons-For example, if your product manages email security and there have been two viruses in the past days, it is time for you to release a content-centric newsletter to your market explaining how email security can be maintained through these types of attacks. This approach may sound like a no-brainer, but vendors are constantly missing this boat. They either wait too long and miss the opportunity or they send out information about their product without explaining their product's relevancy to the issue.

·         White Papers vs. Brochures-A white paper should offer real-world guidance, preferably from a third-party author. Nothing frustrates an IT reader more than taking the time to download a white paper only to discover that it is a glorified product brochure. Ensure that your white papers are filled with solutions and examples that your market can use immediately. Your product details should not be the feature-include them at the end of the paper in a useful and concise information block.

Budgets are limited and so is time, so create marketing offers that provide value to your market. In turn, you will gain the respect of your target market as well as access to their contact information!

I do recommend that you set up an RSS feed (Real Simple Syndication) for your e-mail newsletter -- the only heir apparent to e-mail marketing. But I'm finding that only a trickle of visitors to my site come through my RSS feed, compared to a flood of visitors who come from receiving an e-mail newsletter. RSS has lots of potential and RSS feeds are growing exponentially right now, but the number of people who have and use RSS news aggregators is quite small. On the other hand, the number who use e-mail daily -- even while under siege from spam -- is huge.

A Shop.org/Bizrate Survey, January 2004, asked online retailers what was their most successful promotion vehicle for online holiday shopping. Far and away, sending e-mail to one's own list was on top: 

Own e-mail promotion	86%
Search engine marketing	58%
Affiliate marketing	50%
Catalog drops	37%
Portal shopping listing	17%

BigFoot and NOP World surveyed 1,019 adults in January 2004 and found that customers who receive permission e-mails from retailers have a more favorable impression and are somewhat more likely to buy products from this retailer. They reported conversion rates from 6% to 73% for permission-based e-mailings from major retailers.

Recently, e-commerce journalist Dana Blankenhorn wrote about the capability of e-mail newsletters as powerful tools for businesses since they allow you to build an intimate relationship with your customers, bringing a continuing flow of orders into the future.

I look at it this way. Let's say you have 10,000 visitors to your website per month (or 1,000 or 100). If you sell to only 2%, that means that you've wasted your marketing costs and effort to 9,800 -- unless you aggressively sign them up to receive your monthly e-mail newsletter or monthly specials e-mail, or whatever you're offering. If you were able to sign up only 25% of your visitors and get their permission to send them e-mails -- quite a reasonable expectation -- your house e-mail list will grow by 2,500 per month. Now you can e-mail monthly to your house list with the result that you'll build a relationship, share helpful information, promote your products or services, and see your sales increase -- all for a very low marketing cost. When are you going to take your company e-zine seriously?