Author Archives: admin

Push, Pull, Prospects, Paycheck

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I once had HP, IBM, CA and a few other companies pimping my software. This was long, long ago when my hairline was not retreating faster than a Baptist in a gay bar. I worked for a tiny five million dollar outfit and was brought on to implement their first real marketing department. After studying the market for a bit, it was obvious to me that our plug-in product survived only through partner-side adoption. Hence we carefully selected our partners (who collectively had more than 66% of each target segment) and promoted through them as well as directly to buyers. We pulled prospects through direct marketing and pushed through partners. We bumped top-line revenues over 25% in the first year (well, the first nine months actually). One of the reasons this worked is believability. B2B software buyers are a cynical and skeptical lot because those are survival traits. Blindly buying … Continue reading →

Invisible Competitors

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Want to see me cringe? Be a start-up founder and tell me you don’t have any competition. Every company and every product has competitors. They may not have offices, there may not be a product, and your prospects may not know they are using your competition. But everyone has competition and it can come from very unexpected sources. Even Google has tangent barriers. Google’s Android mobile operating system is the most popular on the planet, especially in China where they appear on 90% of smartphones. The competition is not the hodge podge of OSs in the other 10%. Nor is it the gaggle of Chinese knock-off companies that wish Google would release the source code to new Android versions more quickly so they could create near-real-time Android clones. The new competitive threat is the Chinese government. Mao’s mavens are not entering the smartphone market. These control freaks simply don’t like … Continue reading →

Not Satisfied?

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Not knowing if your customers are satisfied should make you unsatisfied. One of the oldest and yet more ignored market research activities is customer satisfaction surveying. Since customers are the source of buzz – both positive and negative – knowing what your paying customers think and feel is critical to seeing potentially fatal problems and capitalizing on stunning capabilities. It also can uncover where you think what you offer is important but actually disinterests the market. It’s almost as good as surveying lost sales an activity which is very valuable and equally rare. The key objectives of every customer satisfaction survey are to know where a company excels (for promotional purposes), where it lags (for improvement) and where there are opportunities for profitable change. I once ran a customer satisfaction survey that included a pricing sensitivity measure and discovered that my client was undercharging for their product. They received a … Continue reading →

Promotional Propaganda

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Perception is reality, until reality overrides perception. Marketers are branded as liars in no small part because many of them are. So pervasive is the trait that certain smart people have made good money writing on the subject. Marketers are charged with promoting products, which entails setting public perception about the product. In modern use of the word, this often devolves into propaganda instead of persuasion. Effective in the short term, setting unrealistic public perception about a product will eventually backfire. This happens to politicians all the time. Since perception is reality, at least in the short term, you need to have a clear notion of the reality you create for the market. Like the elastic in a fat fellow’s waistband, it can only be stretched so far before it fails. Since product disappointment is the essence of negative buzz, the greater the degree of potential disappointment you create, the … Continue reading →

Content Continence

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Content is king unless it is crud. There is no grand magic to content marketing. Yet many promotion probationers manage to muck it up. Long ago Google established that relevance was what people wanted in search, which really means they want relevant content. Producing relevant content and putting it where your target market can “discover” it makes content marketing works. Producing irrelevant content and forcing people to trip over it will cause you (and your company) to fail. Many content marketers work on the volume of content, assuming that a large number of keyword rich pages will cause customers to connect. Such “strategy” once produced high traffic but low conversions. With Google constantly refining relevance filtering, voluminous content it isn’t even producing much traffic these days. Yet when it does, the outcome isn’t conversions, but annoyed ex-prospects who feel their time was wasted chasing the promise of meaningful information and … Continue reading →

Triple Targeted

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Say goodbye to television (I tossed all mine in the recycling bin several years ago … quite a liberating experience). Broadcast TV’s days are numbered, though when it will fade into distant technology memories is uncertain. Market forces can never be denied, and we are witnessing new and highly profitable ways of wasting people’s time (seriously, have you ever seen an episode of The View?). Broadcast TV’s demise will come both from consumer preference and the profit motives of providers and advertisers. Is there any way we can speed-up the process? Please! Broadcasting has always been a limited medium. Necessary in pre-digital and bandwidth poor eras, broadcasting was expensive and required people to be couch-bound at specific days and times lest they miss their favorite mental gruel. The high cost of entry isolated many creative people and separated viewers from buckets of new and potentially tastier gruel. Even starting a … Continue reading →

Questionable Surveys

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Asking the right question is as important as asking the right people. We do a lot of primary research work at Silicon Strategies Marketing, and that means we do quite a bit of surveying (so much that we run our own software suite for online surveys). Surveying remains the cornerstone of quantitative investigation even in this age of constant polling where nominal surveys receive less than 0.1% response rates. Which makes the oversupply of sloppy surveying mythologies downright depressing. There is both science and art in survey design. It begins with knowing what critical information is to be acquired – what business decision you are making. Non-specific problem definitions lead to non-specific questions which produce non-specific answers (to be specific). Surprisingly many folks do not precisely understand the business decision they face, and we spend a lot of time in business coaching to improve their focus before assembling their surveys. … Continue reading →