The Client:
Private Social
Networks (PSN), a vendor of social
network technologies for the healthcare
industry.
The Situation:
PSN was a bootstrap start-up whose outbound
marketing communications were not working.
Silicon Strategies' Role:
Conduct brand and market message investigations in order to focus all of
PSN's marketing communications.
Foreshadow: Within months of
our revising PSN's messaging, IDC included
PSN in their annual "Innovative Software
Companies Under $100M to Watch" report.
Initial Observations:
PSN had a problem many start-ups do, namely
a failure to focus on the motivations of
target buyers in their messaging. Their web
site and collateral did not mention the
primary motivations of their buyers or how
PSN's solutions addressed those motivations.
- There was no discussion of the
business issues hospitals faced.
- There were no high-level value
propositions concerning PSN products.
- Combined, there was no connection
between the market's problem and PSN's
solution.
Identifying brand and value:
Silicon Strategies Marketing conducted a
series of discovery exercises which forced
PSN's management team to articulate their
brand and their value propositions.
With these, Silicon Strategies composed
PSN's
core marketing messages and top-line
value propositions (which commonly appear as
headlines on the PSN web site). The
processes included:
- Two phases of brand identification,
including a short/intensive centering
statement and a longer brand essence
articulation.
- Documenting key buyer
genotypes and their primary
motivations.
- Creation and distillation of PSN's
three
core market messages.
From this foundation, all PSN marketing
materials evolved including:
- Their entire web site.
- Their sales brochure.
- Their ever-present "circle of care"
diagram that guides sales discussions.
The Results: The results were very
positive:
- Testing of market messages and
communication tools at trade shows
demonstrated instant cognition for both
product value and function.
- Early sales phases were shortened
since buyers bypassed difficult
discovery/learning processes.
- PSN moved aggressively forward with
venture financing.
The Lesson:
- Foremost, clarity of communications
begins with fundamental messages.
- If you do not articulate and
simplify your brand and messages, you
cannot communicate them to the market.
- Effective messaging makes products
easier to understand and thus easier to
buy.
Contact Silicon
Strategies Marketing for a telephone
consultation on how to sharpen your
conversations with the market.
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