Marketing Strategy

Great articles roundup: Micro-multinational startup, marketing strategy and content, entrepreneurship

By Daylin Mantyka

As a regular feature, we provide our readers with a roundup of some of the best articles we have read in the past week. On the podium this week are ReadWriteWeb, MarketingProfs, Velocity and Startup Professional Musings.

Going global at launch: Tips for building a micro-multinational startup

Gary Whitehill, relentless entrepreneur and driven philanthropist, passes on his advice on how to build a multinational company right from the beginning, even prior to the launch.

4 lessons marketers can learn from Yoga

As a Yoga practitioner and marketing professional, Allie Gray Freeland draws a parallel from these two seemingly unrelated professions: 1. When the foundation is clear, the execution is successful; 2. A mental clean slate helps you think without preconceived notions; 3. Small gestures of kindness can establish customer loyalty; 4. Simplicity helps consumers know your brand better.

The content marketers progress: Surviving the Slough of Despond

Neil Stoneman describes the “content journey” in the form of a hype cycle: A) The Rise of expectation; B) Pinnacle of planning; C) Slough of Despond; D) Restoration of faith; and E) Flight of revenue. Of course, no one wants to get trapped in the depths of “C”. Stoneman’s article provides some valuable insight into surviving the slough.

7 startup habits investors read as staying power

In characteristic list style, Martin Zwilling outlines seven signs or pieces of evidence that may be great predictors of a startup’s long-term success.

Technorati Tags: Allie Gray Freeland, content marketing, entrepreneurship, Gary Whitehill, investors, marketing strategy, MarketingProfs, Martin Zwilling, micro-multinational, multinational, Neil Stoneman, ReadWriteWeb, startup growth, Startup Professional Musings, Startups, Velocity

6 small business statistics that may surprise you

By Brent Barnhart

Small businesses love statistics.

And why not? They help us understand where we’re going and where we’ve been. After all, those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

By better understanding the small business landscape by the numbers, we’re more likely to make informed decisions and keep ourselves from heading our businesses in the wrong direction. As business owners, continuing education is crucial in keeping our companies current.

The following six statistics have a lot to teach us about the state of small business, the economy and the future of Internet marketing. Whether or not they come to surprise you, consider how these stats impact your company.

99.7% of America’s businesses are ‘small’ businesses

Although we may see small business as a tight-knight community, the fact remains that SMBs make up 99.7 per cent of America’s businesses, according to the Small Business Administration (SBA). Of course, the SBA defines a “small business” as any company that employs fewer than 500 workers. To some, that definition may be a bit excessive. But even if we considered as small businesses only those companies that employ fewer than 50 workers, we’d still be talking about most of the country’s businesses. Regardless of the definition debate, there’s little doubt about the economic impact of America’s SMBs and their role in creating jobs.

27% of businesses lost employees within the past year

We often speak of the slow recovery of the U.S. economy post-Great Recession. The recovery is happening too slowly for many businesses, as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce recently reported that over a quarter of companies lost employees within the past year. With the unemployment rate sitting at 7.6 per cent, only a two-percentage-point drop from three years prior, there’s no doubt that small businesses continue to struggle when it comes to maintaining and hiring employees. The numbers prove that there’s good reason for businesses to be cautious when it comes to bringing on new talent. This trend may unfortunately continue until SMBs finally find a bit of economic breathing room.

90% of customers are influenced by online ratings and reviews

The importance of ratings and reviews for small businesses is no joke. As a reported 90 per cent of customers are influenced by online ratings and reviews, consider the place of such reviews in your business strategy. Is your online reputation squeaky clean? Have you not established much of a presence? It’s tempting to dismiss bad reviews or negative comments as spam or people simply blowing off steam; however, these reviews don’t simply go away. Today’s users are incredibly impressionable; a decisively negative review of one business may cause a customer to shift to another. Building a positive repertoire with your customer base and encouraging them to leave positive feedback for your business will result in positive returns.

Nearly 40% of our time online is spent on mobile devices

This statistic may come as a surprise to some, although perhaps not when we consider how glued we are to our mobile devices these days. The numbers don’t lie. Not only are businesses browsing the web and engaging in communication through social media on their mobile devices, they’re purchasing items and looking through those previously noted ratings and reviews. For this reason, your business needs to make sure it has a mobile presence and can be easily accessed by such users. A mobile-friendly site is just the beginning; ensuring that you have a presence on social networks is perhaps even more important as users are liking, tweeting and pinning more than ever.

39% of SMBs see an ROI from social media

With so many users on the aforementioned social channels, however, it may come as a shock that relatively few businesses are seeing an ROI from social media. We’re often told how important it is to reach out and engage through social media and how crucial that engagement is to our Internet marketing success. If that’s the case, why isn’t the ROI there? This may come as the result of poor strategy, with businesses sinking time, money and resources that aren’t being spent optimally.

Consider also that the ROI from social media isn’t always financial. Exposing your business to new customers and reaching out to establish new relationships may very well be more important to some businesses than simply getting ad clicks. It often comes down to your goals; you may get more mileage out of trying to put your name out there than by grasping for cash.

With attacks up 18% last year, SMBs are more prone to security breaches in 2013

According to a recent cyber-security report from Symantec, hackers are targeting small businesses. Surprised? As cyber attacks were up 18 per cent in 2012, business owners must continue to seek protection from fraud and keep their companies safe. How can your business protect itself?

Be wary of scams. If it looks like spam or seems suspicious, it’s probably worth avoiding.
Spam filters don’t catch everything. Don’t assume that something’s safe just because it ends up in your inbox.
Change your passwords often, keep them complicated and don’t use the same password for everything.
Keep the most pertinent information concerning you and your business to yourself if possible.

The bottom line

There’s plenty going on in the world of small business and it’s crucial for us to keep up with the numbers. What small business statistics take you by surprise?

Brent Barnhart is a staff writer for ChamberofCommerce.com. Grow your business online with ChamberofCommerce.com, the most trusted online resource for all your business needs.

Technorati Tags: small business, SMB, Internet marketing, marketing strategy, social media, Chamber of Commerce, SBA, Small Business Administration, Symantec, cyber security, cyber attacks, mobile devices, online reviews, unemployment, statistics, by the numbers

If you’re so afraid of spilling the beans that no one knows you have any …

By Leo Valiquette

During my years as a full-time journo, I crossed paths with many a startup technology venture that claimed to be operating in so-called stealth mode. It was the early 2000s, before the process of getting technology to market was as socially enabled as it is now, and startup CEOs seemed to consider it hip and trendy to apply the S word to their businesses.

Where, I wonder, are many of those startups now?

We wrote many moons ago about the inherent foolishness of trying to build a business by somehow staying under the radar. You can’t define a market need, develop a product to meet that need, secure the funding necessary for operations or build the team that can pull it all off without telling the world who you are and what you are trying to do.

Stealth mode would appear to be a concept as lost to history as nine-figure VC deals for photonics startups. But the term popped up again a few weeks ago when I sat down with an Ottawa CEO. She used the term to describe the operational philosophy of her business, despite the fact that her business, in the space of five years, has grown into a global competitor that is doubling and tripling its revenue each year and taking market share from incumbent rivals.

It’s a family-run business with a secret sauce that is disrupting the status quo of its industry, with its reasons for wanting to keep its cards close to its chest. The other shareholders, the CEO told me, are quite reluctant to engage in any overt marketing or media relations activity that would put the company, or its proprietary technology, in the spotlight. Instead, the company prefers to build its business by attending industry events and letting the quality of its offering speak for itself through customer referrals and word of mouth.

“But,” I said. “How can you be in stealth mode if you are attending conferences, walking tradeshow floors, talking to prospective customers and snooping out your competition with a name tag around your neck?”

I said to her, politely, of course, that she was in anything but stealth mode. If her concern was in competitors finding out too much about her company’s proprietary technology (which at this point isn’t patented, but only a trade secret), she sure as heck would not be walking around a tradeshow floor talking to people about it when there’s no telling who might be lurking around within earshot.

It’s a paranoia that seems all too common – keeping business development and marketing efforts within the envelope of closed industry events is perceived as less threatening than having exposure in well-read media outlets. Which is utterly counterintuitive – the media outlet is likely to have a much more diluted audience, even if it is a larger one, whereas the industry event is likely to have a higher concentration of the people you want to meet as well as the very people you don’t want looking under your skirts.

And in the context of that industry event, it is much easier for a member of your team to have a slip of the tongue. But if you are advertising in a media outlet, you have full control over the message and the information that is disclosed. Even if it is an editorial opportunity, you can prepare in advance to ensure you don’t disclose anything during an interview that you don’t want to see in print.

It’s my biased opinion that raising your profile through earned media coverage, advertising or some combination thereof is not only crucial to raising your company’s profile and driving your business development activities, it is often a safer way to do so without losing control of your message. I am not suggesting that the conference or trade show circuit be avoided – it’s a crucial element of an effective marketing strategy in most industries. But if you are already engaging with your marketplace through that channel, then you should have nothing to fear with pursuing other activities such as advertising buys, public relations and social media engagement.

In fact, the sooner you do pick up these other tools in the marketing tool box and put them to work, the sooner you will develop clear policies and communications strategies for your team that will mitigate the risk of the wrong information being slipped to the wrong pair of ears. If you want to build a business, you can’t avoid exposure, but you can manage that exposure wisely and, ultimately, to the benefit of your bottom line, which is the whole point.

Image: Game Informer

Technorati Tags: stealth mode, startup, entrepreneur, marketing, marketing strategy, communications strategy, public relations

Peeling away the layers of a great CEO

By Denzil Doyle

In my last article, I discussed the tendency of key stakeholders in a high technology company to call for the CEO’s resignation at the first sign of trouble, particularly if the CEO is a technical person who lacks “business management” experience. The pressure for change is usually strongest from the financial community. My advice to a board of directors that must deal with such pressure is to remain focused on the qualities that any good CEO must possess regardless of his or her background, namely leadership, management, technology knowhow, and marketing knowhow.

I cited the example of Ken Olsen, the founding president of Digital Equipment Corporation, who came under severe criticism from Wall Street for turning in a bad quarter shortly after the company went public, despite the fact that he had built a company with sales of over $100 million in less than a decade. (That was the equivalent of over $1 billion today.)

Ken decided to go to New York and address his critics directly. He started with a lecture that went something like this:

“I understand that some of you want me fired because I am no good with the numbers. Well, I want you to know that when the company was very small, I was both the purchasing manager who bought the components that went into our computers and I was the sales manager who set the price of those computers and the modules that went into them. In fact, we sold the modules as a separate product line. I used to buy a component called a pulse transformer for a dollar and have our production people mount it on a printed circuit board and sell it as a module for $10. I soon learned that that nine percent of profit really added up.”

The financial people thought he was a kook and left him alone after that while he went on to build a multi-billion dollar company.

Those of us who knew him personally would confirm that he had the four CEO qualities in spades and if the financial people had listened carefully they would have recognized them as well. As a leader, he demonstrated that he could wear many hats simultaneously and he recognized the value of humour in his communications. As a manager, he demonstrated that he did indeed understand the numbers. As a technical expert, he understood what went into the computers, and as a marketing expert, he knew what the market would bear.

Hopefully, the financial people came away from the meeting knowing that a good high technology CEO is likely to be a very complex person who is capable of delivering more than management knowhow.

Image: Best Investments for Beginners

Denzil Doyle’s involvement in Ottawa’s high technology industry goes back to the early 1960s when he established a sales office for Digital Equipment Corporation, a Boston-based firm that had just developed the world’s first minicomputer. The Canadian operation quickly evolved into a multi-faceted subsidiary. When he left the company in 1981, Canadian sales exceeded $160 million and its employment exceeded 1,500. In his next career, Doyle built a consulting and investment company,Doyletech Corporation, that not only helped emerging companies, but built companies of its own. In recognition of his contributions to Canada’s high technology industry, he was awarded an honourary Doctorate of Engineering by Carleton University in 1981 and a membership in the Order of Canada in 1995.

Technorati Tags: management, leadership, CEO, technology knowhow, marketing knownow, marketing strategy, business management, board of directors, startup, entrepreneur, Ken Olsen, Digital Equipment

April Roundup: What does it take to get technology to market?

By Leo Valiquette

Last month’s lineup featured great posts on how established companies should innovate, a startup CEO’s tips for wooing investors, the risks of discounting your product and the need for philanthropy to be a natural part of doing business. And of course, there was plenty of sage advice on what it takes to make marketing work.

In case you missed any of it, here is a handy recap of our posts, as ranked by the enthusiasm of our readers:

April 18: In search of that Entrepreneurial Spark, by Maurice Smith

April 23: What have you done for someone else lately?, by Leo Valiquette

April 11: Want more business from your website? Here are 6 things your customers need to see, by Tim Peter

April 24: A startup CEO’s tips for wooing investors, by John Hill and Leo Valiquette

April 25: The folly (or possibly the wisdom) of discounting, by Francis Moran

April 10: Best of: The saddest marketing story I’ve ever heard, by Francis Moran

April 17: My top travel tips, by Francis Moran

April 8: When is it time to say, ‘Our CEO’s got to go?’by Denzil Doyle

April 16: The imperatives of leaders, leadership and leading, by Bob Bailly

April 29: In it until everyone crosses the finish line, by Leo Valiquette

April 15: What an entrepreneur can learn from a literary conference: Part III, by Leo Valiquette

April 4: Trademark hygiene: A cautionary tale, by David French

April 30:Patent harvesting versus mandated innovation, by David French

April 3: ‘You can’t cross a canyon in two leaps’, by Francis Moran

April 2: Best of: Just the facts … no, these facts, by Leo Valiquette

April 9: What an entrepreneur can learn from a literary conference: Part II, by Leo Valiquette

Image: April 2013 Calendar Printable

Technorati Tags: entrepreneur, entrepreneurship, Entrepreneurial Spark, philanthropy, volunteering, e-commerce, digital marketing, marketing strategy, website, Screach, Paul Rawlings, investment, investor, VC, venture capital, product pricing, discounting, travel tips, travel, management, governance, board of directors, CEO, leadership, leading, deadlines, service provider, clients, client relationship, IP, trademark, patent, trademark hygiene, media relations, patent harvesting, mandated innovation, white space, emotional intelligence, creativity, productivity

Want more business from your website? Here are 6 things your customers need to see

By Tim Peter

The Internet offers customers lots of options before they make a purchase decision. In fact, it’s cliché to say that on the Internet your competition is just a click away. But it’s true. Research from Google and others suggests that customers view an average of seven to 10 sites before making a purchase decision. In some industries, those numbers are even higher.

Why so many?

Simple. Regardless of whether they are looking for a new car, consultant, contractor, or chiropractor, customers really look to answer only two questions when researching products and services online:

Will this product/service meet my needs?

Why should I buy from you?

And the reason your customers look at so many sites before making a decision is because so few small business websites (and large business websites, for that matter), do enough to answer those questions.

The following six items will help your customers answer those questions — and will drive more business to your door:

Privacy policy

It’s well established in e-commerce and online marketing circles that the first business that gets a prospect to provide some information — any information, whether an email address, phone number, or basic service needs — most likely gets the sale. But you can’t expect your prospects to volunteer their information without first putting their minds at ease about how you’ll use the information they provide. Create a clear privacy policy that explains how you use your customers’ information and post a link to it every place you ask for information. An unclear or non-existent privacy policy raises red flags and sends prospects racing for the exits.

About us

Customers want to know more about who they’re dealing with. What makes you stand apart from your competition? Why do you do what you do? Provide a link to an About Us page that details who you are and what you care about to provide a human face for your customers. Brent Barnhart recently provided a great look at how to make sure your small business site sends the right message to your customers. Take a look if you have a moment and see how you can help your customers get over any concerns they may have.

Testimonials

Of course, nothing eases a prospect’s mind more than seeing what others say about you. The rising popularity of review sites like Yelp, TripAdvisor, Angie’s List, and others illustrates your customers’ need to get clear, objective insights into who you are and what you do. Why not make it easy for your prospects by providing a few quotes from past, satisfied customers?

Pricing and policies

While the topic of how to display prices online could fill several posts (if not a whole book), the basics are, well, pretty basic. If you sell products online, make the prices for those products clear and simple. Nothing botches sales faster than showing one price to a customer on the product page and a different, typically higher price when asking for their credit card. Similarly, how do you handle returns? Are they free? Is there a charge? Do you pay for shipping or does the customer? The more clarity you can offer around the actual price, the better your chances of closing the sale.

Service providers may not sell online, but they’re bound by many of the same expectations. You can improve responses from potential customers by making it clear how you price. It’s OK if you don’t publish a rate card online — though some would argue for that. But at a minimum, you should make it clear how you charge. Is the initial consultation free? Do you accept various types of payment (invoicing, credit card, insurance if you’re a medical provider, etc.)? Let your prospects know what they can expect, and you can expect a much better response.

Contact information

How do your customers contact you? Do you have a physical address? A phone number? A person they can email? You’d be surprised how many websites fail to offer even basic contact information. And that lack of information makes many customers wonder whether there’s anyone they can trust if they have problems with your products or services. Nothing looks more fly-by-night than a business that makes it hard to know who to contact if things go wrong. You’ve worked hard to build a reputation for the quality and service you offer. Prove it by letting your customers know they can contact you if they need to.

Call-to-action

Finally, you have to provide your customers with a clear call-to-action that tells them what to do next. Do you want them to call? Email? Fill in a form? Then ask them to do that. I frequently come across small business sites that fail this basic test and suspect that many of these folks wonder why they’re not getting more benefit from their site. Don’t make your customers guess what they should do next. Tell them.

Tying it all together

Developing a website is not always easy. For many products and services, no matter how much information you provide, your customers will seek just a little bit more. But, you can make your website work better for your business by ensuring you answer your potential customers’ core questions right up front. And nothing can torpedo your sales more than failing to get these six basics right. Remember, your competition is just a click away. Make sure you offer your customers what they need to hear you say before your competition does and put your website to work for your business.

Tim Peter helps companies put the web to work to grow their business. He has worked since 1995 developing innovative e-commerce and digital marketing programs across multiple industries. He launched Tim Peter & Associates, LLC, a full-service e-commerce and internet marketing consulting firm in early 2011.

Technorati Tags: e-commerce, digital marketing, marketing strategy, website, Internet marketing, Tim Peter, purchase decision, about us, privacy policy, reference customer, testimonial, call to action, pricing

The saddest marketing story I’ve ever heard

This is the next entry in our “Best of” series, in which we venture deep into the vault to replay blog opinion and insight that has withstood the test of time. Today’s post hails from January 2011. We welcome your feedback.

By Francis Moran

I heard the saddest story the other day.

A few years ago, we worked on the launch of a new personal finance website developed by a veteran personal financial advisor. The site was detailed, secure, incredibly useful and solved a sharp, expensive and disruptive pain that the advisor had been running up against his entire professional life.

Our media launch went well. We got some decent coverage, both in mass media and, more valuably, in the trade media reaching financial advisors. Although the site was designed for individual subscriptions, advisors were identified as its most important channel to market since they were expected to counsel their clients to use it.

We were a little confused when the campaign was not continued past that initial launch, especially since some of the best opportunities we generated for the client were over the long term, including, for example, an agreement to have the site’s creator contribute a regular column to one of the key trade publications in the space. From the other folks working on the launch we heard encouraging news about the possibility that the site would be white-labelled by one of the largest firms of financial advisors on the continent, and other early signs of traction. So we were at a bit of a loss when everything went unexpectedly quiet.

Still, it wasn’t the first time that a client had invested in a launch only to tell us they would be unable to continue funding the program so we moved on, occasionally curious about what had become of the endeavour.

Then, last week, I heard the full sad story.

I was meeting with the person who had originally introduced us to the account. We had a few completely unrelated things to chat about and, after we had dealt with all that, I asked him how things were going with the website.

Things weren’t going at all, he told me. Nothing more had really happened on the marketing front and the site had eventually been taken down. A Google search on the company name will still find the media coverage we got, and will even uncover a few archived pages of the site itself. Click on those site pages, though, or type the URL into a browser address line and you get the dreaded “The connection has timed out.”

Here’s the kicker.

According to the guy I spoke with last week, the site’s creator invested fully a million dollars into the development of this useful and powerful new tool. And $60,000 into its marketing, about a quarter of which was spent on the media relations bit that we did. When that meagre marketing budget failed to produce immediate traction, he pulled the plug.

This sad tale would depress me all the more if I hadn’t become somewhat inured to this sort of thing during the 20 years or so in which I have been working to bring technology to market. It is far from the first time that I have seen inventors, application developers and otherwise-very-clever entrepreneurs invest their hopes, dreams and hundreds of thousands — if not millions — of their and other people’s money into developing the greatest new whatever. And then, having given birth to their wonderful new baby, they deny it the marketing nutrition it requires and it starves to death.

It’s a sad, sad story, with far too many chapters still to be written.

Technorati Tags: marketing, marketing strategy, startup, entrepreneur, market traction, marketing budget

‘You can’t cross a canyon in two leaps’

By Francis Moran

Canada lost one of its most populist and colourful political characters last week when former Alberta premier and Calgary mayor Ralph Klein died. There are a number of marketing lessons, both salutary and otherwise, to be drawn from the exploits of this seemingly simple man whose shoot-from-the-lip approach and unrivalled common touch made him an object of both admiration and scorn.

However, today I’m going to riff on just one of his more quotable quotes because it applies so very well to the doomed approach too many technology companies take with their belief that market traction and sustainable revenue growth can be achieved through a series of low-cost incremental steps.

“You can’t cross a canyon in two leaps,” Klein said as premier in defence of the sweeping cuts to public services he introduced in the mid-1990s to slash Alberta’s massive budget deficit. And technology companies can’t cross the chasm between product development and customer acquisition in anything less than a single bound.

I’ve written about this before, using the metaphor of achieving escape velocity to explain the huge effort it takes to get a product into market, attract the attention of your target customer, and actually start to gain revenue traction. Products are developed down here on earth, I argued, while customers are up there in orbit. Your marketing efforts must escape the gravitational pull of product development and get your product up there where the customers are. While firing the rocket thrusters is no guarantee of success, failing to do so is certain guarantee of failure. The best part is, once you have attracted the attention of your customers and started to gain revenue traction, sustaining it is as efficient as sustaining an earth orbit, costing a fraction of the effort it takes to get there in the first place.

And so it is with Klein’s pithy aphorism about canyons. It takes a leap of faith, a no-holds-barred launch off the canyon rim if you are to stand any chance of actually making it across to the other side where your customers are waiting. The only question you need to answer is: Are you going to be motorbike stuntman Robbie Knievel successfully jumping the Grand Canyon (Okay, he took a nasty tumble once he left the landing ramp, but that’s a metaphor for another day.) or are you going to be Homer Simpson, falling ignominiously into Springfield Gorge. Please tell me you didn’t just say, “D’oh!”

Image: OxfordWords blog

Technorati Tags: marketing, marketing strategy, escape velocity, product launch, product development, marketplace, customers, target customer, customer acquisition, Ralph Klein, Robbie Knievel, Homer Simpson, cross a canyon in two leaps, market traction, revenue growth

March roundup: What does it take to get technology to market?

By Leo Valiquette

March break aside, we kept up the pace last month with a great lineup of content that featured some excellent posts from our guest bloggers. Hot topics included opportunities in the global smart TV market, criteria for hiring a worthy writer and the risks and rewards of having a product that is truly unique in the marketplace.

In case you missed any of it, here is a handy recap of our posts, as ranked by the enthusiasm of our readers:

March 20: Calling Canada’s startups: There’s a $200B TV market ripe for the taking, by Jason Flick

March 19: Is that writer worth the cost of the ink?, by Leo Valiquette

March 26: The ballad of the undifferentiated product, by Francis Moran

March 27: The ‘Accelerator Bubble’ will pop, but not for the reason you think it will, by Jesse Rodgers

March 25: Three (not so) simple strategies to avoid ‘losing the plot’ in marketing, by Rob Woyzbun

March 07: Oracles, shamans and storytellers, by Bob Bailly

March 13: It’s still rock and roll to me, by Francis Moran

March 21: Best of: My three buckets of customer segmentation, by Francis Moran

March 06: You can’t rely on the channel to grow sales in new markets, by Jeff Campbell

March 11: Drafting your own patent disclosure document, by David French

March 12: Don’t give your customers reasons to ask for apologies, by Leo Valiquette

March 18: Some dos and don’ts of governance, by Denzil Doyle

March 14: Before you jump on the content-marketing bandwagon …, by Leo Valiquette

March 05: From courting Hollywood’s A-list to navigating the Chinese New Year, by Leo Valiquette and John Hill

Image: March2013CalendarPrintable.com

Technorati Tags: startup, entrepreneur, accelerator bubble, incubator, marketing, marketing strategy, market segmentation, product differentiation, customer, customer retention, customer engagement, customer segmentation, writing, writer, governance, board of directors, content marketing, patents, IP, smart TV, IPTV, consumer electronics, patent disclosure document, storyteller, storytelling, sales channel, sales strategy, Screach, international trade, offshore, supply chain, Jeff Campbell, Bob Bailly, Denzil Doyle, Jason Flick, Rob Woyzbun, Jesse Rodgers

The ballad of the undifferentiated product

By Francis Moran

I’ve been doing a lot of work with clients lately on refining their messaging and marketplace differentiation. It has always been clear to me that this is not a trivial thing. Unless you can carve out a unique value proposition for your offering, and communicate that proposition in an arresting and compelling fashion, you’re dead in the water. What I am increasingly coming to understand, however, is how courageous companies need to be in doing so.

Okay, maybe courageous is going too far; courage, after all, is reserved for heroes. Maybe daring is a better word. Here’s what I mean.

Any time a company sharply focuses its messaging on one promising market segment, it runs the risk of turning off other market segments that are also attractive. You have to be okay with that, and that’s the daring part. Because if you try to be something to all people, you will end up being nothing to everybody. A lot of companies have trouble with that. They’d far rather be singing the ballad of the undifferentiated product, an inoffensive little tune that has a few notes everyone can hum along with but no commanding presence that’s going to make it a chart topper.

Here are two examples.

‘Utterly unique’

We are pitching a significant piece of business these days to a company whose product could be viewed as one of the most commodified items on the planet. In fact, many sellers of this product charge exactly nothing for it, understanding that it has little inherent value and is merely a minor loss-leader on the way to selling something more valuable. You’d think this would be a hopeless case for marketers. Except that our prospective client has a version of this product that has an utterly unique value proposition. (Ya, I know; unique is not supposed to take adverbial qualifiers — I’ve added one here for pure emphasis.) For a relatively tiny segment of the marketplace — fortunately, a segment still so large that it adds up to a pretty attractive business case — our client’s product is the only way that segment can achieve its objective. In crafting its messaging to capture a grossly unfair share of that segment, our client is going to willingly abandon practically everyone else who buys this product.

And that’s okay.

In fact, it’s better than okay. Done properly, this company has the opportunity to entirely own the segment for which its product holds this unique value. Even better, it also has the opportunity to expand that segment by promoting the attributes that its unique product version represents. Fortunately, the company realises it has this potent product differentiation, and it is perfectly willing to accept that most of the rest of a vast marketplace is going to go somewhere else because it was never going to get any meaningful share of that vast rest of the marketplace anyway. It might seem obvious, but it’s actually pretty daring — and all too rare — for a company to willingly abandon a seemingly huge opportunity because it knows it holds no unique differentiation there.

Six messages too many

My second example is a company I’m currently working with. In our first session, we went through a standard positioning exercise, the object of which is to define messaging that communicates how a product solves a specific pain for a specific market segment in a way that creates value that is unique and different from the most common competitor in that segment. We ended up with nine (!?!) positioning templates, each of which was saying different things to different segments of the marketplace.

There is no way you can stand out if you are saying nine things. Period. When you’re in that situation, it’s time to fire up the still and start purifying the messaging.

A cursory analysis of the various pain points for which we had developed positioning statements revealed that most of them were really just paper cuts, while one or two were genuine bleeding-from-the-neck problems. So we developed new, far more sharply distilled positioning templates. We developed one for the target market segment that has a clear pain which this company’s product solves in a way that creates massive and unique value compared to the competition. We developed a second one for an important sub-segment of that market, a sub-segment where this company was gaining significant traction, and where an additional product attribute created a further, very-high-value outcome that was critical for this market segment. And we created a third template aimed at a segment of the market that might be overwhelmed by the enterprise-grade messaging necessary for the first two.

Rolling out this three-part messaging is now a simple matter of tactical implementation. Different campaigns and content appealing to each of the three target market segments can be created, with landing and subsequent pages that talk exclusively to that segment. Undifferentiated traffic coming in the front door can by triaged right on the home page, again leading to sharply focused subsequent messaging.

There will almost certainly be well-qualified potential customers who come to this company’s website, fail to identify with any of the three segments represented there, and go elsewhere. The daring part comes in when the company accepts that that’s okay.

You can sing the ballad of the undifferentiated product and nobody’s going to be turned off by what they hear. Of course, nobody’s going to be turned on, either.

Image: www.wpmu.org

Technorati Tags: marketing, marketing strategy, differentiation, product marketing, customers, target market, marketing tactics, value proposition, marketplace, market segment, messaging, unique value

Page 1 of 11
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
...
11
>

Michael Pontious : Well said Leo! I also, do not attend Trekkie Conventions (unless one would occur right here in Cedar Park, Texas!) I could 'trek' down memory lane within th...

Nick Stamoulis : From "How to grow an engaged social media community" - "Social media a two way street so foster conversations around your brand and be quick to respond to th...

Gary James : This is an excellent piece. I am going to save and share with both colleagues and clients alike. Thank you for the time you spent in crafting the piece and s...

Anil Dilawri : All is not lost though. Many clients are willing to devote the time, effort, and resources to improve their presentations. The result is a more consumable me...

Anil Dilawri : The living zombies indeed, Richard. The living zombies indeed!

Nick Stamoulis : The article "Meaningful social measurement: A lesson from the underpants gnomes" hits all the right notes. Besides the fact that half of your followers could...

Francis Moran & Associates — We bring technology to market

We Bring Technology To Market