vicodin
January 31, 2012
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One synonym for booth is stall, which is what a trade show booth should do.
At Mac World last week, very few booths made attendees stall.
The purpose of a tradeshow booth (or any promotion) is to make attendees believe that you have something of value to offer. Well targeted trade shows provide great opportunities to put value propositions in front of potential customers, many of whom have thought-leadership roles given that in this recession they are the only ones with budget to attend shows. Yet an average trade show booth rarely communicates more than the booth manager not understanding how to nail audience attention.
When planning to exhibit, you have to ask yourself “what attracts the attention of this group of people.” At Mac World, my wife noticed a cluster of highly attractive women in tight fitting and very abbreviated dresses at one booth, and instantly realized their ability to attract attention (despite my consciously looking the other way). When attendees are strolling down a trade show aisle, you have less than five seconds to get their attention. Even if you get their attention, you then have to keep it while communicating reasons they should risk a chat with your sales people.
 In other words you are must clearly communicate relevant value to folks with abbreviated attention spans (they are to busy staring at the booth babes).
This changes for every show and for every phase of market acquisition. Back when Silicon Strategies Marketing was helping SuSE Linux gain their undisputed standing in the market, we guided their communication through several tradeshows and phases of market education, orchestrating an end-run around Red Hat. At one phase, it was critical to demonstrate strategic alliances with major vendors. As the photo shows, banners over the SuSE booth were bragged about relationships with IBM, AMD, Oracle and others. Our targeting was so effective that we had attendees in our booth, listening to integration presentations after the show closed and venue crews were rolling-up the carpets.
To gain this level of trade show connection, you need to use graphics that communicate your key value propositions, or at least attract attention and compliment value proposition words that appear on your booth. If you don’t get their attention, you lose. If you can’t quickly communicate your value, you lose. If the value you communicate is not well targeted, you lose.
Given how expensive exhibiting is, you better not lose.
December 8, 2011
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The word “consternation” could be illustrated by faces of B2B technology marketers trying to leverage social media.
Social media is plate tectonics under marketing terra firma. It is a fundamentally new way of reaching people that at least augments, and in many cases replaces, traditional marketing. Getting unpaid people to carry your message to potential buyers seems to be a gift from the Gods, or at least Mark Zuckerberg.
Well, for B2C marketing mavens. B2B has uneven results in social promotions.
Part of the reason is that motivations for sharing a YouTube video with Grandma are very different from sharing anything with your co-workers, boss or peers. And whereas Nanna might forward your email to cousin Don, your boss might never forward it to anyone. Motivations for sharing are the center of any social outreach, be it passing the collection plate at church or making off with the offerings.
Business buyers share when they must, when it builds better relationships, or when they are compelled for selfish reasons.
 My favorite example of a B2B social sharing comes from Nearsoft, a software outsourcing company in Mexico (yes, Mexico). They eliminate many of the aggravations of outsourcing to India, less chance of theft than outsourcing to Russia, and similar low costs to coding American. Long ago they created their 53 second video (which they admit is over 80 seconds long) and would have accumulated a longer list of views had they not moved it from place to place. The video is so low budget that it makes the montage a bit lovable, like a dog pound mutt, and yet has made the rounds so often that years later, people still regularly email it to me.
What makes their B2B social promo effective? Why would people pass this around? Sure, it has humor, but so do most promo videos and they don’t get the same traction. The Nearsoft video has the added benefit of plainly, clearly and quickly summarizing why the viewer should be interested. Within the first twenty second you know who they are, what they do and which types of companies they serve. By the 45 second mark, you know their differentiation and top value propositions. At the 60 second mark there is a clear call to action.
People decline to share what lacks value. Sending Uncle Phil a video of a politician’s pants falling down has all the value Phil needs, and you don’t hesitate to pass it along. B2B is about selling to businesses, and behind every promotion there is the risk of receiving an unwanted sales call. Knowing the full value and differentiation provided by a company lets the viewer know the promo will not waste the time of bosses, subordinates or peers. Making it humorous makes sharing a social activity as well as a business one.
The lesson is that social media works for B2B, but has to cleanly combine both business and social.
November 29, 2011
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Video is a great marketing tool that people use poorly.
The current vogue in online video, aside from cheap distribution of funny commercials on YouTube, is the animated 60-second-or-less landing page. These short videos relay the primary value proposition of a product, and perhaps some insight into how the product works. In the chain of discovery that buyers endure, this is the very first step – understanding why they should care about you. Short landing page videos give buyers a reason to investigate further.
They then are forced to either divulge personal information in ham-handed calls-to-action (and risk getting a sales phone call), or wade through increasingly dense web copy in order to learn important product details.
 Why do companies stop using video after the landing page? This came to mind while reviewing case studies of Silicon Strategies Marketing clients. We once scripted a series of “deep dive” overview videos for DeviceAnywhere. These videos guided prospects through what DeviceAnywhere products did at a level of detail that technical buyers needed. End-to-end, the videos took about 30 minutes and were broken into sections that addressed specific needs their technical customers typically had.
DeviceAnywhere reassigned two of their three technical sales teammates who had been performing online demos all day long, and DeviceAnywhere saw zero declines in conversions.
Videos have a great deal of potential for guiding different buyer genotypes through the phases of discovery, and allowing them to engage your sales teams at the moment their curiosities are completely satisfied. This is important because selling is a little like dating: leaping from a first date to a marriage proposal rarely works. Buyers go through phases of learning and trust building – from discovering they have a need, through investigating solutions, gathering details, sharing information internally, etc. Yet nearly nobody is chaining videos in such a way as to help people rapidly learn during each of these sales cycle phases.
In our 15-second, sound-bite driven world, it may well be essential.
As always, leading buyers by the nose throughout this discovery and learning process is essential. Unsupervised thinking is discouraged. In each phase, you need to:
- Create specific content that picks-up cleanly from the previous phase, and leads logically into the next.
- Provide escapes and multiple calls-to-action so a buyer at any time can take actions that accelerate sales.
- Separate content based on buyer genotypes and tailor each throughout the chain.
Video communicates better than any salesman, and works twenty four hours a day. Put it to work through the entire sales cycle.
November 7, 2011
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A local Sprint store sale punk demonstrated Siri on the new Apple iPhone 4S by saying “Siri, I’m drunk” to which Siri relied “There are 15 taxis in the vicinity …”
This demo would kill Steve Jobs.
 Other customers on the sales floor were a mixture of amused and offended, though before the demo all had come cash-in-hand to see the new iGizmo. Each now wore a creepy expression on their mugs – similar to the ones they likely wore upon discovering the Santa Myth (which is not to be confused with the Santana Myth which claims that Carlos can sing). The iPhone’s image had been tarnished by a frat boy stunt in a place trying to sell iPhones.
Apple’s G-rated brand was slammed with an R-rated demo, and nobody left that Sprint store with a 4S.
Growing or preserving a brand through channels is slightly more difficult than balancing the federal budget. Not impossible, but prone to failure because channel managers do not exercise the same degree of care vis-à-vis branding that your sales force does. Yet the channel is your differently-paid sales force and needs to communicate your brand with approximate fidelity. Scraggly bearded Sprint sales drones shouting “I’m drunk” into a handset was never part of Apple’s branding strategy.
Key to channel marketing and branding is to educate your channel as well as you would your own sales teams. This takes resources, though in our wired world it is increasing cost effective. Only after everyone in a partner organization knows your brand can you even attempt to enforce their individual behaviors. Given how the other Sprint store clerks responded, they had not received Apple brand training either.
If your go-to-market strategy relies on channels, then assure those partners are appropriate brand ambassadors. Otherwise your brand will be slowly chiseled away.
October 11, 2011
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 Dr. John, the King of New Orleans, sings a song that advises other musicians to “Keep That Music Simple.”
The same concept applies to market messages.
Rushing to tell every audience everything about your product leads to muddled messages. Your headline and opening blurbs have a 15 second shelf life before a reader’s attention wanders. Instantly connecting their motivations to your value proposition requires keeping the message simple.
Oracle has a long history of being blunt in their marketing. Their magazine ads were once the most direct in the business, targeting techies and laying out Oracle’s performance superiority. Prospects instantly understood the value offered by Oracle and thus acquired a bias for the product. Instant believability based on instant cognition.
For contrast sake, let us look at IBM’s top-line message for their DB2 database. It reads “DB2 for Linux, UNIX and Windows is optimized to deliver industry-leading performance across multiple workloads, while lowering administration, storage, development, and server costs.” Aside from run-on sentences being unreadable, it says nothing aside from common claims made by all competitors. No differentiation, no proof, nothing which a buyer might instantly believe.
Tech web sites are filled with even worse messaging. One example of an opening subheadline I recently saw was “ZZZ is both our company and our technology. Our employees, processes, and tools help people solve a range of business intelligence problems to unlock the potential of their organizations.” Simplicity was lost thanks to saying nothing that a customer needs to know, convoluting many non-product elements and omitting anything that resembled a value proposition.
My dictionary defines message as “a communication containing some information, news, advice, or the like.” Pretty simple, no? Do your messages contain essential elements stated simply? Keep that music and those messages simple.
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