Lateral Action
New blog that explores the intersection of creativity and productivity, launched with a short cartoon.
20 Questions…
…about advertising, marketing, the media and popular culture from the NY Times.
Cool presentations
Winners of Slideshare’s world’s best presentation contest. Below is the first prize winner:
Tags: blogging, culture, links, presentations
Smart marketing IQ test from CramerSweeney.
http://www.cramersweeney.com/smartmarketing.html
Ive found that most marketing professionals are great talkers, but many are not as good at listening. It makes sense, since communication is so critical to marketing. But it’s important to remember that communication is a two way street.
Listening to the customer is the most important form of listening. This means not only learning about the customer, their problems, and their processes, but also listening to their response to your marketing. Did they get your message? Did they care? How did they feel about their experience evaluating your product?
Listening to your coworkers is also not a bad idea. One of them might actually say something halfway intelligent one day. I kid my coworkers. Actually I’m surrounded by very intelligent and capable individuals, and I’m constantly surprised at how often hearing someone elses perspective makes me look at things in a new way. Listening means keeping an open mind.
I consider my role in product marketing to be 70% input (listening) and 30% output (talking). The output comes in the form of product messaging, presentations, press interviews, strategizing, blogging, and guiding the creation of collateral. The 70% is what enables me to be at my best for the 30%.
Tags: communication, customers, listening
Advice for mobile marketers from the Obama campaign
NY Times article on lessons learned from the highly anticipated text message announcing Obama’s VP selection.
Advice on eNewsletter advertising from IBM
BtoB Magazine article sharing best practices from IBM.
Advice on testimonials from Copyblogger
How to use testimonials to your advantage when you have no testimonials.
Tags: mobile, newsletters, politics, references, testimonials
Every Monday XM Radio’s POTUS station features Thom Mozloom of The M Network talking about the presidential campaign from a branding perspective. Even with the obvious differences between a presidential campaign and a technology product marketing campaign, I always find something relevant to take away.
Yesterday, when the host mentioned that a campaign ad was factually dubious, Thom said something about facts being irrelevant in this context, since we’re talking about marketing and branding.
Was he saying that it’s OK to lie in your advertising? No. The point is subtler and gets to the core concept of branding.
A company’s brand is much more than just a logo and color scheme. “The brand” lives only in the minds of your target customers, and is affected by everything they hear and every interaction they have with your company. Your own advertising can certainly have an impact, but so can your competitor’s, and perhaps even more important is word-of-mouth or any direct experience target customers have with your company.
By now we’ve all heard of Stephen Colbert’s “truthiness” concept; the idea that it’s more important to know something intuitively than to consider actual evidence or facts. The word is used to satirize politicians and pundits, but the concept is helpful in thinking the right way about branding. Your company’s brand is all about truthiness from your customer’s point of view. It doesn’t matter whether their intuition is accurate or not; perception is reality.
So what can we do to shape our company’s truthiness? For starters, consistency is absolutely crucial. Trying to push an image of rock-solid quality is useless if your product is bug-ridden, and a service-oriented brand is undercut when a customer sits on hold for too long. Every experience and every message needs to be consistent, and it needs to be consistent over a long period of time to have an effect.
As already stated, word-of-mouth is more important than any direct marketing message for shaping truthiness. Customers listen to and trust people like themselves much more than vendors. That’s why user communities have become so important to our marketing efforts. It’s a powerful way to reinforce and spread your brand. Of course, a user community can also reinforce an undesirable brand image if you’re not careful.
So, while truthfulness is always a virtue, you may want to inject some truthiness into your marketing as well.
Tags: branding, customers, mnetwork, politics, truthiness
Analyst day
Our Forrester analyst is coming into town this afternoon. On tap today – a meeting with one of our high level execs followed by dinner. Tomorrow is our all-day consulting session covering everything from the current state of the market from Forrester’s view, an update on our solution, some example customer implementations, a working session on messaging and a working session on ROI. Hopefully it will be a valuable day. I haven’t spent much time with this particular analyst, and I’ve found that the value from one of these visits is directly proportional to how good the analyst is.
Partners
We do a terrible job of partner marketing. We don’t have anyone dedicated to the function, so any co-marketing we do is really up to our product marketing teams, who are all understaffed and overworked. So naturally it falls down on the priority list and rises to the surface only when partners push us. I want to reverse that process and figure out how partnerships benefit us and what type of co-marketing tactics we should be using to best leverage those partnerships.
Customer ROI
As I mentioned the other day, customer referenceability has been on my mind a lot. We’re trying to get some customers signed up for third-party ROI case studies. I have several good prospects right now and need to close a couple in the next week or two.
Tags: analysts, customers, partners, references, ROI
Five market research projects for under $10K
I’m a big fan of market research. Of course, everybody in marketing will say they support market research. Ask the question, “Should we do more market research?” and I guarantee the answer will be a resounding “Yes!” The problem is that many people think of market research only in terms of major projects that can be very expensive and time-consuming.
I’ve been involved with these big market research projects, where we’ve spent over $100,000 and outsourced a great deal of the effort, and they can be extremely valuable. To me though, the more exciting type of research involves the small things that you can incorporate into your daily work routine. And all you need are some customer data and a web survey tool.
For the web survey tool, I highly recommend SurveyMonkey. You can use their limited free version, but it’s well worth paying the $19.95 per month for the added capabilities you get with the professional version. SurveyMonkey is really easy to use, both for creating surveys and doing simple analysis of the results. For more complex analysis you can export the data into a spreadsheet and use Excel pivot tables.
Armed with these simple and inexpensive tools, here are a few easy research projects you can do.
Customer satisfaction surveys
Ask a random sample of your customers how they perceive the experience of buying and using your products. Doing this once is good, but the real value comes when you do it on a regular basis and track the trends over time. Be careful though! Any minor change in your survey, from the way you target respondents to the way that a question is worded, can cause the results to be skewed and inaccurate when comparing one survey to the next.
Evaluation follow-up surveys
Some time after prospects try your product, ask them to complete a survey about their evaluation experience. Ask them what they decided to do and why. Did they end up purchasing your product or did they go with a competitor? You can get some great feedback both about your products and your marketing and sales processes.
Post-implementation survey
Similar to the evaluation follow-up survey, but this time survey customers who have actually purchased. Every quarter send out a survey to customers who should be done implementing your solution. If it takes three months on average to implement your product, send out the survey to those customers who bought two quarters ago. Ask them how it’s going, what information helped them during the evaluation process and what we could have done better. Not only does this make customers feel like you care, but also can help identify potential success story candidates early on.
Industry surveys
This is one of my favorites. It requires having some sort of relationship with the leaders of the industry community. These are the gurus that run the independent community sites, user forums, email lists, etc. Create a general survey asking whatever you’d like to learn from the market. What products do you use? What are your biggest issues? What kind of processes do you use? Then, ask the community leaders to help you promote the survey, offering in exchange to provide them with a summary of the survey results. I’ve never been turned down or asked to pay for this type of access to the community.
Independent satisfaction survey
This one requires a little money and a good customer reputation, but may be well worth it. Several years ago working at a small software company, we had a strong suspicion that our customers were happier with our products than those of our arch-rival, who happened to be the 800 lb. gorilla in the space. So we hired TechRepublic, which is an online industry publication, to do an independent satisfaction survey. TechRepublic targeted their own list and confirmed our suspicions, finding that 96% of our customers were satisfied overall vs. 71% for our competitor. The project cost us around $10,000, but we were able to make hay by positioning these results as a neutral third-party study.
Of course, that’s just a start. I’d love to hear about any additional ideas that you’ve found to be successful.
One more important tip: when you do these surveys, ask a question like, “May a product manager follow up with you to further discuss your responses?” Make it clear that this wouldn’t be a sales call, but purely for market research purposes, and offer some type of incentive like a $50 amazon.com gift certificate. This becomes a great source for setting up market interviews, which is another critical type of research you should incorporate into your routine.
I’m sure most of you have already seen it, but the Will It Blend? series from blender manufacturer BlendTec is everything viral is supposed to be.
Getting customers to help with marketing has been on my mind a lot lately. Executive management has been applying pressure to get more customer success stories, ROI studies, testimonial videos, customer webcast or conference speakers, etc.
The good news is we have a great customer base to work from, with a large pool of recognized names around the world. We’ve had some success in this endeavor, but the amount of effort involved and the number of roadblocks encountered can be daunting at times
In many ways the process makes me feel like a salesperson. You start with a large pool of prospects, find a few hot leads from that bunch then start working those leads. Sometimes you think you’ve closed a deal only to have it snatched away at the last minute by the customer’s corporate communications department. It’s a lot of work, with no guarantee of your effort paying off.
The salespeople are not much help either. They’re acutely aware that a happy customer willing to publicly endorse is a valuable commodity. They jealously guard these customers and ration their use, generally only when it benefits their own territory. And the same sales leadership that complains about a lack of success stories seems unwilling to use either the carrots or sticks at their disposal to force the right behavior from their team.
To make matters worse, the new MarketingSherpa Business Technology makes me think customer success stories may not be as important as I thought. Customer case studies were ranked among the lowest when decision makers and influencers were asked what types of information contributed to a buying decision.
So what is the intrepid marketer to do? Have you had success with customer referenceability? What techniques have you found successful? Are your success stories valuable? What makes them valuable?
Tags: customers, references, testimonials
CMOs earn average of almost $1.5 million
Dell CMO Mark Jarvis did quite well at $15.5 million. When did the CMO title become so common? I had never heard of a CMO until a few years ago. And where do I apply?
Creating stories that resonate
Nice article from Seth Godin’s blog about the importance of storytelling, and the importance of authenticity using the current presidential campaign as an example.
Top 5 ways to keep your blog content fresh
Good advice from copyblogger for struggling bloggers like myself.
