It’s 11 p.m. Do you know where your prospects are?

Well, if they have to get up early enough in the morning, they may well be in bed already.

But if you’re doing B2B technology marketing, your prospects may well be online.

‘Hey, great,’ you might tell yourself, ‘Maybe they’ll check their e-mail and see that e-mail blast we sent.’

Sorry. If they’re reading their e-mails at 11 p.m., they’re doing fire fighting, or prioritizing their first-thing-in-the-morning tasks, or sending notes off to their manager so that they’ll think they’re working 24/7. That, or they’re organizing the Final Four pool. But they’re probably skipping your marketing blast.

What they may be doing is searching, however, and this post is just a short, gentle reminder that you need to make sure that they find you. And that, when they find you, they’ll get the information they’re looking for.

Traditional marketing means are still important and useful to build awareness, and all kinds of other good things.

But we are now, all of us, used to living in the moment. We are used to on-demand everything, information in real-time, when we want it, where we want it.

So your prospects are out there, googling away, trying to figure out what solutions are available to solve their problems. They’re interested in what you have to say about the issues of the day - business, industry, technical. They’re roaming around out there, trying to figure out what your customers think about you and your products, and what people are saying about the competition. They’re looking for holes in your products, in your support, in your company. They’re trying to figure out how much things are going to cost them, and what it would be like to work with you.

Maybe you’re not a big company with a lot of noise out there about you. That’s good news and bad news. (At least no one’s trash talking you.) Just make sure that there’s some news about you, even if you’re making it yourself.

No one is going to plow through a three foot stack of material to find the white paper you sent them three months ago. They’re going to want to download it.

Yes, we all KNOW this. But sometimes we don’t ACT as if we know it.

My point? You need to pay at least some attention to things online that go beyond having a web site.

Resolve to do at least one SEO and/or social media-ish thing every week.

It doesn’t have to be any thing big:

• Google your company/product/keywords and see what comes up.
• Do the same for your competition.
• Comment on a blog.
• Send your sales folks a link to something interesting - and tell them what stage prospect that something interesting will be interesting to.
• Ask some customers what they’d search on if they were looking for you.

If it’s the eleventh hour and your prospects aren’t finding you, they’re finding somebody else. And that’s something you don’t want to have happening.

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