Category Archives: Marketing

Observations about the science of marketing technology

Content Conundrum

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If content is king then some content creators are court jesters. Content marketing is a hot topic, which is odd because marketing has always been about content. Long ago we used to buy expensive ad space in magazines (younger readers may need to Google that word). Television is content and product placements in entertainment are as well. Content has always been the marketing communications medium. The new excitement comes from people hot over the idea that creating gobs of digital content, which has a near zero distribution cost, is a great way to market. Except when producing a slick, urban YouTube video for backwoods survivalists. Content has always required targeting – what content, for which audience and at what point in their buying cycle. Mismatch any of these three elements and you are spending money to create content that won’t work, isn’t consumed, or may even kill sales by inducing … 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 →

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 →

Segment Sense

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Ten out of ten start-ups don’t segment their markets well or at all. Oddly, a number of temporarily successful companies don’t either. Segmenting is one of the essential marketing strategy disciplines and yet the least practiced. Many start-ups skip it thinking that they intuitively know their market segments or, worse yet, that they will try-and-pivot their way to success. Of the companies that at least take a stab at segmenting, they often do a poor job. One of our earliest clients – a post-IPO success story facing an industry shake-out and forced pivot – confided they had chosen an industry verticals segmentation plan because “It’s as good as any other.” Such lackluster segmentation sentiment is dangerous because segmentation is the foundation for your go-to-market strategy, and the one that accelerates early revenue while solidifying a survivable niche from whence to grow. Failure to segment is tantamount to failure. Let us … Continue reading →

Homicidal Salesmen

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Great leads keep sales people from poisoning your morning coffee. A set of recent surveys show that marketing folks are split in their lead generation intensions and how they measure campaign success. Approximately 50% of aggregated respondents use lead quality and quantity to gauge campaign effectiveness while 70% claim their content marketing efforts are all about generating a large quantity of leads. In other words, their actions and their measurement means are not aligned. This exposes an enduring truth about marketing and the divide between them and potential sales assassins. Some marketers think their job is to send as many leads to the sales team as possible, then let salesmen sort out the good from the bad from the oh so very ugly. This is way some sales people are two steps away from becoming serial killers, because they are overworked in the sorting processes and earning less per unit … Continue reading →

Sales Quality

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A sales manager asked me to suspend marketing for a couple of months because he could not keep-up with in-bound leads, ones which were achieving an 80% win/loss rate. Peter Drucker must have been smiling from above, for I had fulfilled his mandate, that “The aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous.” Salesmen/women want to sell. When marketing strategy is well developed, it generates highly-qualified leads and biases prospects before they start researching alternatives. Give a salesman an unqualified lead and I’ll show you a salesman who will never buy you a beer. Give a salesman a lead so well qualified that the customer sells himself, and that same salesman will ask you to be his kid’s godparent. Much of the legendary marketing/sales friction comes from marketing abandoning quality for quantity. Some marketers want to generate a large volume of leads (which makes them look effective) and have salespeople … Continue reading →

Pricing Pugilism

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I once raised the price of a product as more competitors entered our market and they were lowering their prices. My boss looked at me as if something were growing out of my head. The COO publicly second-guessed my decision for a year. Our competitors made it a selling point. Yet our top-line revenues rose, unit sales increased, and we drove two top competitors out of our market segments and one into bankruptcy. Pricing is mainly science, but it requires a bit of black art. Measuring the market and triangulating the three major pricing perspectives is essential to ballparking product pricing. But in ever shifting markets and especially in those where there are both young and mature players, pricing also requires thinking beyond mechanical elements and entering the mind of the market itself. While composing a customer satisfaction survey, I decided to add a pricing measurement. I did so mainly … Continue reading →