Technology hypes – and fundamentals of marketing

I have been through multiple technology hypes through the years. About 30 years back when the Unix platform first came out , it was said that Mainframes will be dead soon. They are still going strong.

When the public Cloud became prevalent, there was a talk that people will no longer have their own servers. That’s way away from the truth. People are still buying servers and actually building hybrid clouds.

With the advent of mobile phones, it was predicted that landlines will no longer be needed. Your broadband connection is still via the landline.

In all these cases was that the overall market grew, with multiple technologies running in parallel. The old technologies evolved to keep pace with the new dynamics, but did not lose their inherent characteristics.

All marketers of technology based products or services need to be fleet footed to quickly adapt their offerings to the changing technology landscape .

Even the media choices keep changing – there was a time when there was Yahoo and Altavista and then there wasn’t, there was Orcutt and then there wasn’t. In social media today you have Facebook, Instagram etc. While in search engines you have Google. If your marketing plan is dependent on one specific platform then losing that platform can hurt. But if your marketing is based on strong fundamentals then you can adapt your message to different media.

Print advertising and advertising on television is still going on eventhough everyone only keeps talking about digital marketing. The fundamentals of marketing will stay irrespective of the technological hype which people create from time to time.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

What’s the JOB that you want your campaign to do

campaign, ideal customer, Marketing, Marketing Stamina, media

A few months back I had written a post on the Clayton Christensen experiment on What’s the job of a McDonald’s milkshake. That’s a very pertinent question for everything that you do in marketing. If you’d like, you can go on YouTube and search for the video, on this experiment.

Every email you make, every campaign you run, every media that you choose should have a very clearly defined job description. If you mess up over here all your decisions will be muddled and you won’t get your results.

I was discussing yesterday with a media company on the relative merits of YouTube, Instagram etc. One thing which came out during the discussion was that people choose Instagram over YouTube for running campaigns because they can generate followers faster.

Which got me thinking. Is the objective of choosing a platform only to increase followers which then led me to the base question again of what’s the job you want your video campaign or any other marketing activity to do.

Blindly creating followers should not be the job. The job in my opinion, if I was the advisor to a company would be to say – create followers of a specific kind with certain characteristics defined, which should eventually get converted leads and subsequently business.

If your campaigns on Instagram can achieve this objective, then its the right medium, if not , you need to figure out a different medium. That comes back to my favorite term, Testing. So even though all your planning suggests a given medium, based on the clearly defined job, only testing should clearly confirm it.

Let the market decide during the test about what is the right thing. Once you get your test results then go the whole hog to get business.

Most social media platforms will have a lot audience including yours. The next stage of your testing should include how you can get your ideal customer at the lowest possible price. The economics will decide your staying power . At the end of the day your marketing stamina will decide the winner in the long run.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Lead generation in B2B – 3

B2B, campaign, lead generation, Marketing, media

One advantage of using social media is that you have the ability to quickly test your campaigns, irrespective of your budget. If you have a large budget you can do parallel testing, if you have a smaller budget then you can test serially. On the other hand, with print media and events the adaptability is non existent. So if you make a mistake in the copy and a thousand mailers have been printed, you lose all the money.

I keep talking about testing everything. With social media it is easier to do tests. Most Social Media platforms also give a lot of Analytics to study your response and take better decisions.

Tests are after all, experiments. Like all experiments, you start with a hypothesis, and then verify the variables one by one.

I always prefer to start with the market, then the message and the medium. This is because I feel that the other two items are dependent on the market that we choose.

In case of B2B, one market could be defined by industry, it could be further refined by revenue size or specific location. Now with B2B the key challenge is getting to the actual person who would be responsible to take a decision on what you are selling .

So while you might be able to easily target, based on demographic data, using social media, getting to the right decision makers is considerable work. So you have to think in terms of, who else within that organization, could be impacted because of the problem.

As an example if you are selling packaging paper or wrapping paper. Now the first people who come to mind , because this ia a commodity item, are the people in procurement or factory. But if you were to also look at marketing, because the final packaged item goes to the customers and marketing may be hearing things about their present packaging from customers and could be the key driver for decisions to change the packaging.

B2B in those respects is a little tougher to crack.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Lead generation in B2B – 2

B2B, campaign, education, ideal customer, lead generation, Marketing, media, segmentation, single target market

While events were very expensive, and emails are free, companies would still be willing to spend the money on events, if getting the right audience was assured. Reason being, you get to interact with the prospects on a one-to-one basis. Due to which you can qualify better and you maybe able to close deals faster.

One medium which comes closest to doing a more targeted prospecting, I have found these days, is LinkedIn. Since you can choose the industry, the demographics etc. It can help you reach your ideal customer profile faster. In addition because it allows you to create different segments you can do testing quite fast to identify the best single target market to address.

I haven’t worked on Facebook for doing B2B prospecting, though I am told of a lot of B2B vendors are targeting their clients via Facebook.

With any social media platform, there’s one challenge that I warn my team or customers. You don’t own the information of the prospect. Which means anytime the social media changes its policies or algorithms, you can suffer.

When you have a visiting card of a person or an email id, until the person leaves that organization, you can communicate with her whenever you need to. You are not at the mercy of a third party. This is not completely true with social media, until the prospect share the information with you.

Therefore whenever you’re using a social media to generate leads, always find a way for the prospects to share their email via opt-ins. Once they raise their hand and allow you to share information with them, you get a chance to build a relationship.

Once you have the emails and physical addresses, you can continuously keep sharing valuable information with them and educate them about various things that you can help them with.

Marketing based on education helps build trust as well.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!