Scottsdale, Arizona-based ITtoolbox (see http://www.ittoolbox.com) was founded in 1998 with a singular goal of building and maintaining an active community of IT professionals. This review will examine ITtoolbox and how white paper marketers can best tap into its 2.5 million active IT decision-makers.

The site has a variety of ways marketers can gain access to subscribers, including newsletters, white paper alerts and discussion groups. ITtoolbox’s white paper directory holds over 50,000 documents, including white papers and peer publications.

The company charges $50 per lead with targeting options such as geography or company size. Discounts are available based on volume. ITtoolbox provides more than 9000 leads to its advertising partners in any given month. The cost for a one-month campaign with one paper starts at $3000 with for 60 leads and includes advertiser reach options in weekly newsletters, daily alerts and white paper alerts. See http://www.ITtoolbox.com/advertising/adabout.asp for more information. It should be noted that ITtoolbox does not syndicate white papers to third-party outlets.

According to George Krautzel, president of ITtoolbox, the site draws a large amount of traffic due to its depth and breadth of community content. As a result, ITtoolbox comes up high on search engine results, a large benefit for the site’s advertisers.

“When people go in and type in their actual problem [in a search engine], our ability to match that detailed search is greater than a lot of our competitors in our space. Search engines are a big reason people are at our site,” Krautzel said.

Advertisers can target the company’s more than 800 discussion groups on topics such as CRM, the enterprise, back-office development and integration and networking.

The company created a proprietary keyword-matching engine to further target its discussion group members. For white paper advertisers, the matching engine boosts the ability to integrate a white paper into ITtoolbox’s multi-level content and out to its readership.

“Our contextual matching engine is why we fulfill white papers very well. For instance, if a user reads a news article on our network about database security, we have a matching engine that scrapes the content of that page and matches it against keywords of white papers that have been posted to our site,” said Krautzel.

For example, if readers were particularly revved about database security, the matching engine not only enables email group subscribers to read about database security, they’ll also see a box that says “related content” which cross-promotes relevant white papers.

For advertisers, the site’s 100-plus blogs also utilize matching keyword technology from blog entries to relevant white papers. This enables the advertiser to get more traction for their white paper by putting it in front of the blog readers who are interested or researching the topic of the paper.

Commenting on the leads capability, Gloria Santilo, senior marcom manager for Cast Iron Systems, said, “In my search to improve lead quality, I discovered ITtoolbox. I see ITtoolbox as a highly differentiated lead source, because they have built a very strong community of IT practitioners by providing valuable content and online collaboration tools.”

White papers can be submitted for consideration via email to Content@ITtoolbox.com, but it’s hard to generate leads with the no cost entries. Premium papers get priority on the site. Krautzel notes that the papers that pull well and exceed their lead goals are the ones that really provide useful information.

Bottom line to marketers, the site has a lot to offer with its matching engine technology and highly engaged IT community.

DISCUSSION: Discuss this topic at the WhitePaperSource forum.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 21st, 2006 at 9:11 am and is filed under Marketing, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.