Category Archives: Marketing Strategy

Behaving

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My favorite stolen line is that you should never allow customers to engage in unsupervised thinking. As marketers, we are tasked with encouraging specific customer behaviors. Some of these behaviors are rationally based, such as buying software with a known minimal return on investment. Others are completely emotional, such as Volvo suggesting that you are less likely to die a violent automotive death in their cars. Each is designed to get customers to take a specific action, and in complex business-to-business (B2B) sales, this may be a long series of tiny behaviors involving many stakeholders. Unsupervised customers behave as well as unsupervised children. Amazon is in the retail business, not the technology business (that is if you ignore their Elastic Compute Cloud offering). Thus they encourage consumer buying habits. One consumer behavior they need to control is to not allow customers to shop elsewhere – putting Amazon products in customer … Continue reading →

Content Discontent

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All companies, small to large, love and hate content marketing. A recent survey shows that enterprises and small/mid-sized businesses (SMBs) believe content marketing is the most effective inbound tactic. They also rank it as the most difficult. They note that lead nurturing is also tough. This means that they are not achieving their goals, especially at the intersection of content and moving prospects toward buying. I have actually herded cats, and it is simpler than content marketing. Content marketing is important for multiple reasons. It helps you in being found by prospects. Done well, it creates believability and authority in your brand and your products. And used properly, it can nudge a prospect along their path of discovery toward purchase. Yet few individuals or marketing teams have a critical mass of expertise to make content strategy, planning, creation and timing a reality. Even expensive marketing automation suites are useless if … Continue reading →

Liars Leverage

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If your prospects think a problem is not easily solved, you may find it difficult to convince them you can easily solve it . One of the few must read marketing books is Seth Godin’s All Marketers are Liars, the central thesis of which is that all people tell themselves lies and a good marketer merely agrees with whatever lies are being told. This is well and good when the customers’ lies are sympatico with the product’s value, but causes friction when they are not. This came to light recently when a CMO conclave to which I belong started discussing “big data”, the current marketing and IT hype monster. The consensus among CMOs – right or wrong – is that integrated digital marketing intelligence and analysis is difficult – so durn difficult that only the biggest, bravest and wealthiest of marketing organization are attempting it or doing it well. CMOs … Continue reading →

Gutsy

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If going with your gut is a good idea, does indigestion affect your decision? A recent eruption on an executives’ forum centered on the role of gut instinct in decision making, which applies to marketing as well. One camp lobbied for using detailed marketing research to make sound and measurable business decisions. The other mob insisted some things are beyond research, and that instincts about market shifts were not to be ignored. Both were right … and wrong. Market research is wonderful. I make good money doing it for businesses around the world. But even reams of quality information may not present the whole picture. When Steve Jobs and crew developed the iPhone, there was a leap of faith concerning the readiness of the market for an entirely new mobile computing paradigm (well, not entirely new … Palm had mastered pocket devices without cellular connections for years). Research might confirm … Continue reading →

Microsoft Defense Dance

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Is Microsoft buying Nokia a final point of Ballmer failure? Likely not, but with his track record one has to wonder. Microsoft is buying Nokia’s handset hardware business and licensing Nokia mobile technology patents (something that Apple also did after a nasty bout of litigation). Most folks think Microsoft is attempting to clone Apples 360° product offering. Microsoft already started down this road with their Surface tablets, which received rave reviews from both customers. Recognizing that they are desperately behind in the now-dominating consumer mobile market, Microsoft seems to be building a new product offering by bringing all the hard and software in-house. (The obvious punch line is that Microsoft is adopting their own orphan since Nokia is the only handy maker squarely behind mobile Windows) The more interesting aspect of this news item is Nokia’s patents, which Microsoft is licensing (Nokia was wise not to sell that revenue stream). … Continue reading →

Antisocial Media

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“Twitter is an ‘all about me’ place. So is Facebook. Both will be replaced with something else someday.” The radio host who said this, a man who lives in the social space as part of his livelihood, was making a fairly shrewd observation. Perhaps the condition is temporary, but most social media is about micropublishing, allowing everyone and their grandpa to broadcast to anyone who remotely cares. As proven in the last election cycle, everyone voicing their opinions and preferences online strains the patience of others, and over time reduces the desire to participate. As a young store clerk in a Forever 21 outlet recently said to me “Facebook is too noisy. Nobody my age hangs out there.” Sadly, a lot of marketers are in the “all about me” mode of social, and achieving the same sad results. I scanned a few B2B twitter accounts to spot check social activity … Continue reading →

The Price Isn’t Right

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“We lose money on every deal, but we make it up in volume.” That cold joke was tossed around a dying company I worked for a couple of decades ago. Yet behind the gallows humor was a bare truth; the company was bleeding and part of the problem was in pricing our deals. Knowing what to charge is non-trivial, but survival-level important. This is especially true for start-ups: Price too high and you earn no revenues. Price too low and you slowly spiral into the muck of bankruptcy. Knowing what to charge for products and services is often treated like a voodoo ritual, where mystic insight from corporate elders drive the decision. I once took over a marketing department for a software company and asked the innocent question “How did you decide on the product’s price?” The grizzled CEO said “That’s what all products in this market cost.” Unsatisfied with … Continue reading →