Recently we've seen a marked increase in requests for vertical campaigns - programs and initiatives targeting a specific industry. The motivations for such campaigns vary. Some clients are tailoring their entire business strategy - product, sales, marketing - to better address the needs of a niche audience. For others, vertical campaigns are more of a tactical decision, often in response to one or two sales wins within a particular industry - at least from this writer's perspective.

No question: vertical campaigns can be highly effective. But if you're prepared to invest your entire quarter's demand generation budget to target, say, financial services, simply because your company just scored one deal with a major bank, it's time to take a step back.

Vertical campaigns come with a price. First, your media options will be far more limited compared to a more horizontal, cross-industry campaign. Only a small subset of e-mail lists, for example, will make available select criteria (example: SIC codes) that enable you to choose names from a specific industry. Fewer still will have sufficient names from that one industry to meet the minimum order (typically 5,000 names).

Most likely, you'll end up making compromises in your media planning - choosing lists, Websites, and advertising venues that may not measure up to your usual standards but give you the industry profile you're looking for.

Of course, an IT manager at a large bank is more likely to respond to a message that speaks to industry-specific issues than to a more generic pitch. And in general, the more targeted your creative, the more successful your campaign is likely to be.

But to just assume blindly that a vertical campaign will automatically yield a higher ROI ignores two realities: 1) that there will be inevitable trade-offs in your media strategy, and 2) by focusing your investment exclusively on a given industry, you ignore potential prospects that exist in other markets, simply because you don't yet have referenceable customers in that space.

In our experience, vertical initiatives work best when:

1) The company is prepared to make each market a truly strategic initiative, involving product, sales, and marketing resources; and

2) The vertical campaign is complemented by broader, more horizontal efforts that ensure prospects in other markets don't get left out in the cold.