Everyone likes to be treated with fairness. There is no change to this equation in any aspect of business as well, and Marketing has no exception. If your marketing consultant or partner or any associate is recommending any sort of unfair approach to be practiced in marketing, don’t think twice and fire ‘em at once.

After finishing some reading on the net last evening, I was chating with a gentleman who asked me to check a particular link in crm2day portal – The referred link led me to a white paper download from one of the leading software vendors in the world.

Before I start raising the ticket on the issue and sharing with you, let me remind you the value of white paper download when it comes to marketing via your web channel.

To measure effectivness of marketing programmes on the web, enterprises can run a campaign on thirdparty websites or a corporate portal for lead generation. To generate lead, these enterprises either provide a trial-pack software or a whitepaper download from the aforesaid sites, this is becoming one of the empirical approaches in today’s online marketing world for marketing.

The aforesaid link also lead me to VG, a site to download the whitepaper of CRM Solution for mid-market/sme industry. I surely was curious to read it and was ready to provide a five-field information (Ufff! What a mistake) the site wanted to capture to let me know download the paper. After providing the Zip Code and click submission, I was lead to another form, then another. In total, these blokes at VG were trying to capture close to 20 plus fields to let me download the whitepaper – This is totally absurd! Even credit card application forms have been substantially shortened.

Showing the online audience a carrot of “not much to fill to download the whitepaper” and subquently making them virutually write an essay will make your audience run away for ever.

These marketing cartoons need to realize, by having a simple and crisp form that ensures name, email address and phone number of the audience is good enough to get started. Once received, through eMail communication engage in a one-to-one dialogue to take the relationship forward. But, friends are VG are busy chasing their audience out of their site..

The enterprise partnering with the aforesaid VG is one of the leading German Enterprise Software Solution vendors.  I assume they know what they are doing as part of their marketing. I sincerly hope they realize partnering with such third rated self-proclaimed Guru’ is surely shot futile attempt and wasting their marketing budgets, importantly irritating the wits out of potential audience who are intereted in knowing the offerings from the German player.