Category Archives: Promotions

Promoting technology – what works and what does not

Stupidly Simple

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Simple declarative statements communicate most effectively. Kinda like the one above. Marketing messages need to be simple, yet marketing “pros” routinely make them complicated. Nowhere is the situation worse than in tech marketing. Perhaps lingering “feeds and speeds” mindsets pervert messaging. Or worse yet, maybe marketing types are budding authors who use marcom materials to practice their literary skills (there is a novel in every marketing director, which is a damn good place to keep it). Weak marketers rely on buzz words when copywriting skills and product differentiation do not exist. Even I suffer from an alienating allegiance to alliteration. Complexity sucks, and sucks the life out of messaging. People don’t have time to think, and forcing them into unsupervised thinking is dangerous. Keeping messages simple, even sparse, leads buyers rapidly to cognition, self-qualification and motivated interest. Slowing them down with needless and distracting verbiage does the opposite. Yet tech … Continue reading →

Tripping Customers

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My father was too fond of the old joke about a farmer and his mule. The punch line of the joke was that the farmer would whack the mule in its forehead with a two-by-four, saying “First you have to get his attention.” Customers are like that, though I don’t advocate felonious assault as a promotional tactic. Modern life is complicated to the point that we can only be distracted. Thus, distraction is the first act of promotion. If you cannot pry your prospects’ attention away from their work, smartphones, Facebook and on-demand videos, then you cannot possibly move them toward buying. Long gone are the sad old days of advertising when spokesmodels pointing to refrigerators with a disembodied droning voice pitching platitudes about the appliance. Customers are mules and have to be coaxed with similar bluntness. This is not new, though the chain of advertising practice is oddly convoluted … Continue reading →

Play Real Good

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The violin’s heavy vibrato found my ear through the chaos of the subway. Being a music junkie, the stuff tends to get my attention. Hearing a well-played violin in a crowded underground tunnel filled with thousands of rush-hour commuters was a miracle. That it held me for a brief moment was regrettably common. We learned in Communications 101 that there are three factors in passing along info – the transmitter, the receiver and the noise in between. Transmitters, be they buskers or marketers, have to confront noise in order for their product to even be perceived. Like the subway scene in which an aspiring violinist struggled to be heard, marketers have only the tiniest moments of relative quiet to connect. But noise is growing. The ability of people to tune out is positively Darwinian. With promotional messages now coming via radio, TV, billboards, browsers, embedded in apps and on nearly … Continue reading →

Social Shortcomings

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Social marketing isn’t it. With humans living on the net, and with obvious advantages to social media manipulations as a marketing tactic, many people have happily abandoned other forms of promotions in favor of social. Later they unhappily abandon their jobs to fill slots in unemployment lines. Humans, being the quirky bunch they are, need a number of things to occur before a purchase. Most of all they need to perceive value in a product and believe the value will actually be delivered. Good marketers can create a brand (the basic value proposition) and awareness of the brand, then discover this is not enough. Alone, knowing a brand and that it makes a promise is weak soup that omits essential ingredients in the marketer’s cookbook. No wonder social marketing often tastes bland. To believe in a brand requires some form of “proof.” This may be fanciful or it may be … Continue reading →

Old School Social

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My dentist does social marketing. This should surprise nobody because social marketing has existed since the first two cavemen competed by selling left-over mastodon meat (“My mastodon steaks come with 30% fewer fatal microbes!”). Businesses have always used the power of social networking, long before social media became a reality. Social media changes nothing and thinking about primitive social marketing helps to clarify your social outreach. Social marketing is, in essence, assuring that people talk about you in positive terms. As an example, when you move to a new city, odds are you ask everyone about their recommendation for a good dentist. Some will warn you about bad jaw crackers, and others will wax poetic about how gentle and through is their dental doc. This is social promotions in its most basic form. The product (dental services) is referenced by customers based on the positioning criteria they most vale (money, … Continue reading →

Marketing Band-aid

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Performing in a band might be fun if one didn’t have to work with musicians. Bands provide a serviceable metaphor for marketing, which is all too often viewed as one or another marketing function and not the tightly coordinated combination of each function/instrument and performer. Take any piece out of a band or marketing department, and you no longer have a professional outfit. I was recently reminded of a time long ago when I was young (during the Taft administration) and the bass player in my garage band quit, yet our front man wanted to do a signed gig without any bass. The audience was not impressed. Let’s stretch this metaphor some more and match aspects of running a marketing department with assembling a group of musicians into a working band. Start by depriving the members of each group of alcohol, then begin. Mapping: A band has several instruments, and … Continue reading →

Romancing the Market

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There is a reason that blind dates were never very popular. Marketing and dating are both incremental dances with well understood steps in forming a relationship. Amazingly many companies, and most technology companies, lack even a fundamental notion of incremental intimacy, which many also explain why many techie founders remain bachelors. Anyone who suffered the dating process understands the phases of location, attraction, value and risk assessment. Yet your average technology web site avoids all these steps. First off is findability. In dating this may involve joining activity groups or hanging out in the right bar on a Saturday night. In marketing it has always been about advertising, and in the modern extension of that, search optimization. Being found is a requirement to being desired. Failure to promote or to be locatable on the web makes the odds of obtaining prospects nil. But just today I ran across a web … Continue reading →