Marketing 2.0 – What is Really New?

January 9, 2010 by brianhodgson

Social networking tools have completely changed B2B marketing strategy!!

I must get 8-10 e-mails, calls, and posts a week on how social networking is completely changing marketing, and with each one an expert offers their services on how they “can help me.” Even the term “Marketing 2.0” screams of a new approach and a paradigm shift.

When it comes to marketing strategy, this is pretty much hype. Solid fundamental marketing has not changed and includes

  • Identifying a problem to be solved
  • Creating solution with a strong value proposition for your target market
  • Developing your positioning relative to competitive solutions
  • Crafting the right messaging to your prospects and customers

This has not changed for years, and I do not see it changing any time soon. If you send the wrong message to the right audience, or the right message to the wrong audience you have wasted your efforts, and probably lost credibility with the prospect. In fact with the ease of communicating to prospects with social networking tools, the need for crisp, hard hitting messaging is even more critical in order to cut through all the other clutter.

So what impact do social networking tools have on this? Clearly they can be a huge asset in driving the tactics in support of the above. Specifically, social networking tools can

  • Help identify common problems to be solved
  • Catalog current options (competition) for solving a problem
  • Provide a focused target audience for the messaging

Platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. can be excellent tools, but they need to be used as part of your marketing strategy, not take over.

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Any Position Will Do

December 17, 2009 by brianhodgson

Creating and ensuring consistent & strong positioning is one of the most important tasks for a marketing person to do. If the marketing team does not consciously create and communicate the positioning, the market and sometimes the competition will do it for you. I am a big fan of Pragmatic Marketing, and they have a great article on positioning. The key points include:

  • You cannot create the positioning in a vacuum, it has to be supported by the positioning, brand reputation that already exists
  • The supporting messaging has to be credible
  •  Positioning should be problem/solution focused, rather than feature/function

In my experience even marketing professionals get confused between value proposition, positioning, branding, tagline, mission statement, elevator pitch, and messaging. However, if marketing people get confused, imagine the rest of the organization. In today’s world of blogs, twitter, podcasts, it is critical that everyone in your company understand your positioning and leverage when communicating with customers, and prospects about your company.

How does it fit together? I propose that pretty much anything and all major external communications must be positioned. Examples includes: a major product release, job postings, a new product launch, an acquisition.

First and foremost, to ensure consistency, when I say positioning, I do not mean a tagline or elevator pitch, although those can be derived from positioning. I am referring to a one page positioning document. I use the template from Pragmatic Marketing. It covers

  • Problem statement
  • Solution statement
  • Primary message
  • Product description
  • Three supporting benefits-oriented features

It’s design is to support positioning a product or a product release, but it can be adjusted for other announcements.

In putting this together, it should be done with a group that includes product manager, marketing communications, input from a thought leader on your sales team. The hardest part is trying to get it all on one page, with as few words as possible, while at the same time, creating meaningful content.

Finally, to build and leverage consistency product releases should build upon product positioning, which in turn should build on corporate positioning. So whether your company is a start-up or an established market leader, create and write down your corporate positioning, then ensure all appropriate stakeholders know it.

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Influence of SaaS on SAP Pricing

December 12, 2009 by brianhodgson

Today SAP announced “flexible pricing”, allowing customers to effective pay for SAP software in a similar fashion as subscription style or SaaS pricing models. The rational presented was the current economic climate, however, I cannot believe this is the only factor. The pressure of SaaS vendors on the “traditional software” providers pricing and implementation models has to also be a contributor. Of course with SAP “SaaS” pricing the customers still need to buy hardware, support the Oracle databases and infrastructure, but also have the ability to customize.

Other companies I have seen have offered “SaaS” products in their marketing that turn out to be simply SaaS pricing, with traditional behind the firewall software.

Do these tactics increase customers and market share? It does offer more choices which is always good.

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Positioning Consistency

December 11, 2009 by brianhodgson

Creating strong positioning takes effort and is fundamental to your marketing. Once the positioning is created then the next challenge is to deliver it consistently via the various communications channels (web site, PowerPoints, blogs, etc.) In general the consistency across these vehicles tends to decline over time.

So how consistent is your positioning. Please take the poll. I will publish later with any conclusions.

http://polls.linkedin.com/p/68652/pjhzj

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No Software – Makes Great Positioning?

November 18, 2009 by brianhodgson

Salesforce.com is the enterprise cloud-computing company.

Salesforce.com is one of the best marketing technology companies on the planet. Why?

   1) They use simple but compelling messaging

   2) They make grand statements

   3) They back up what they say

   4) They re-enforce their message with consistency

Go to their home page and their messaging is quite simple, “The leader in customer relationship management (CRM) & cloud computing”. On their company page the simply state, “the elevator pitch…” (captured above). They back up what they say with facts such as 63, 200 customers, 1000+ appplications on the app exchange. They are now reaching way beyond their SaaS CRM roots taking claim in being THE clound computing company. this really represents a fundamental transformation. Will they succeeed?

 

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i2 or Me Too

November 11, 2009 by brianhodgson

Now that the i2/JDA merger is back on it reminded me of the “glory days” of i2 and their thought leadership and visionary marketing. In fact a year ago when they were first going to merge I wrote a story on how i2 was a great marketing company.

Now I look at their web site and it seems so boring. No differentiation. Let’s take a look at their primary message on their home page:

As a full-service supply chain company, we help clients in the manufacturing, transportation, and retail sectors achieve world-class business results

How many software companies can fit into that category? When coming up with such a positioning statement (see my earlier post on positioning) you really need to capture what you do, the value you provide, and your differentiation. When I say the value you provide “achieving world-class business results” is a little too vague.

Hmm…maybe the positioning is not on the home page. Are there nuggets elsewhere? Here is another statement that appears in a few places:

For more than 20 years, i2 software and services have helped companies optimize key business processes for maximum profitability

Got it. i2 is now me too. Luckily there are some new players who have taken the lead in excellent marketing, positioning, and messaging. I will look at the better examples over the next few weeks. What are your best examples?

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Great Quotes …

September 30, 2009 by brianhodgson

From colleagues I respect, some serious, some humorous:

Quote“This place would be a lot easier to un if it weren’t for the customers and employees”
- CEO

Shoot in foot“Wow..we can’t even shoot ourselves in the foot properly”
- Product Manager

 

 

Engineer: “The project is too ambitious. You are aking us to fit 20 lbs of shit into a 10 lb bag”
CEO: “Dehydrate the shit”

“Before we do that, let’s make sure we can do this once in a row”
- CEO

“The best deodorant is money”
- engineer

“There are two problems in companies: sales and everything else”
- VP of Engineering

“Marketing is common sense”
VP of Marketing

What are some of the great quotes you have heard?

 

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Death of Legacy High Tech Boom?

September 22, 2009 by brianhodgson

Dell Buys Perot, Oracle Buys Sun, HP Buys EDS…what’s going on? What happened to stick to your core competency?

DeathOK ,when you are growing at 30-50% it is easy to say stick to core competency. Hardware companies should be hardware companies, and software companies should be software companies, system integrators should be system integrators. Well now at 5-10% growth it is mature market growth, time to go after someone else’s market.

Is this another sign that “traditional high tech” is growing up?

In the boom days of the nineties there were 3 seperate pillars driving enterprise applications: hardware (HP, Sun, IBM, Dell), software (Oracle, SAP, Peoplesoft, Baan, etc.) and integrators. IBM led the way showing how an in house consulting shop can drive revenue through boom and somewhat succesfully – busts. Others above have followed.

Where does this leave SAP? Do they need a hardware partner? SI? Does IBM need more enterprise applications? What’s next mixing in the network providers?

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Are You Bilingual?

September 18, 2009 by brianhodgson

SignsOK. So when I grew up in Montreal, being bilingual meant you needed to speak english and french. So what’s that got to do with marketing and messaging? Quite simply one of marketing’s jobs is to clearly engage customers and prospects, guide them to your value proposition, and deliver messages and tools to ensure they buy your product or service. In order to accomplish this in high tech you really need to speak multiple languages:  Technical and Sales.

In my experience it is rare that you have people on your team who can effectively engage with engineering while simultaneously position, message, and embrace sales to win customers. To do this effectively they need to be “bilingual”

So how do you assess candidates on their ability in these two dimensions? I always like it when people can boil things down to a simple concept (another good marketing trait).  One time when I was interviewed as a product manager the interviewer said, “OK you go to a company party. Sales is on one side of the room, engineering is on the other side. Which group do instinctly go hang out with?” This was an excellent question.

Another time I was looking to get product marketing training for my product management team. I explained why I needed it to a colleague, and he said,” OK, you have great guys who know how to build product, you need to teach them how to sell it.”

Another dimension is can you talk to the executives and the worker bees? Heavy Hitter has some good quotes on on exectutives expect.

Are you bilingual? Hang with sales or engineering? Prefer to build it or sell it? Talk to c level or b level?

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Messaging – Black and White

September 1, 2009 by brianhodgson

ying-and-yang1The world is full of grey. One of marketing’s job is to create messaging that makes it black and white: clear value proposition. This is much harder said than done. How do you know is your messaging is clear, or better said “black and white”? You need to ensure that you have consisent messages across the various communications tools to use to reach customers (web sites, press releases & coverage, sales reps, etc.)

Here are the steps you can use to assess your black and white messaging score:

1) Do you have a positioning statement and supporting messages written down? Minimally you should have a set  (3 to 5) of messages for your corporate brand as well as a set for each product. My experience is many companies are product or corporate focused and do not have both. 10 points if you have corporate messaging written down, 10 points for product.

2) Ask a sampling of your sales reps for the slides they use during a sales call. Review the messaging across the samples. Give yourself 15 points is the messaging is perfectly consistent.

3) Review your web site – is your corporate and product messaging consistent with your positioning? How does your home page align with the “About…” page, how do your product pages support your messaging? Score yourself between 0-25.

4) Re-read the last 10 press releases and coverage. If your core messaging comes through give yourself 2 points for each article or release in which this is true.

5) How does your collateral support your message? Case studies, product brochures, corporate overviews, etc. Perfect alignment scores 20.

Where do you stand?

BTW – This simply enables you to know your messaging consistent and clear, making it unique and effective as a whole other ballgame. This requires effective positionining. See recent post on competitive positioning  on Write That Down.

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