Technology Marketing

The job of a marketer has probably never been more complicated with all the choices and options we have to communicate our messages for lead generation and customer retention.  The advent of new web tools and social media has made keeping up a full time job.  Our friend Joe Pulizzi at Junta42 has done a great job of compiling all the tools you need to know about in the areas of custom media, social networking, interactive conversations, Facebook and Twitter tools, content sharing, blogging, back end operation and of course, measurement.

Take a look at the list and let us know if you have any gems to add.   Personally, I have found the ability to share information with peers one of the best benefits of social media. Later this week I’ll let you know who I follow via Twitter to keep up with the daily changes in our world.  Happy reading.

I am stating the obvious, but 2009 will be a rough year for the Face to Face events business – from trade shows to custom events to conferences.  I have been hearing about cut backs and cancelations from colleagues for months, and then saw this cover story in the New York Times on Vegas.  Business is way down in Las Vegas, arguably the convention and conference capital of the US.  Over 30,000 hotel rooms canceled last month as many shows have postponed or decided to cancel.  At last month’s Super Bowl the famous Playboy party was canceled.  They said a lavish party seemed inappropriate given the economy but I would wager that the only thing that was inappropriate was the lack of sponsor dollars to fund it.

The costs associated with live events makes them easy to cancel during a recession and that is really too bad.  Live events are one of the best lead generation tools available and they do an equally great job with customer retention.  The powers of events are enhanced when they are paired with original and compelling content created for the target audience.  However, event’s benefits come with a high cost per lead due to the fixed costs of running a first class event.   While there is no substitute for personal contact with a prospect or customer, there is another way.

Webcasting has been around for over ten years and is an established lead gen tool being used widely in the B2B world.  The Virtual Show or Virtual Trade Show is really picking up steam this year.  They have been around for a while now, but seem to be reaching a critical mass especially in the technology and life sciences markets.  If you are not familiar with them here is a definition from Wikipedia:

The structure of a typical virtual tradeshow often includes a virtual exhibit hall which users enter with specific permissions and capabilities, to either attend and view virtual trade show displays in the exhibit hall or build virtual booths to exhibit information related to products or services on offer, just as they would at a trade fair in a convention center. The virtual tradeshow may have other components such as a virtual web conference, or a web seminar or a webinar, or other educational presentations. The virtual show thus results in live interaction between all the users on many levels (one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many) and simultaneously. Detailed tracking mechanisms allow organizers to determine the flow of traffic in the virtual tradeshow.

Because this is online you get incredible data on the visitors and the actions they take during the show.  This allows you to segment and score your leads before you feed them into your lead nurturing programs.  And, your sales people can interact with prospects online during the show.  ON24 (King Fish is an authorized reseller) is one of several companies that provide a virtual show platform and they did some interesting research on the growth of virtual shows.  They surveyed 10,000 enterprise executive who reported that 53% of their companies have begun using virtual events and 23% plan to start using them this year.  The majority of these companies are also reporting that they will be decreasing their use of trade shows and physical sales meetings and training events.

If your company is struggling with your live events strategy it is worth exploring a virtual event.  Be aware, it is a large undertaking with project management, selection of a platform, content creation and audience development all playing a big role in your plans.  However, the rewards will be worth it when you start filling your sales pipeline with warm leads at a lower cost per lead (CPL) than a live event.

I just came across some data that shows for the first time in seven years, B2B trade show revenues declined, by 3.7% in the first three quarters of 2008 (source: ABM).  Of course, most people point to the recession as the reason – cut backs in both marketing expenditures and travel restrictions.  Surely, these are a factor, but not really telling the whole story.  It is more than coincidence that webcasting and virtual trade shows are a hot commodity and growing.  According to Frost and Sullivan the webcasting industry was worth $83.3 million in 2007 and is set to grow more than 28.2%. By 2014, they predict it to be a $3.4 billion market.

It is easy to see how cutbacks in travel can help webcasting, but that is just a small part of why it is growing.  Webcasting is one of the best lead generation mechanisms, if not the best, available today in the B2B world.  When someone attends your webcast they are raising their hand and self selecting themselves to view your content and message.  They are committing nearly an hour of their time to your message – the ultimate in content based permission marketing.  Additionally, you get incredible reporting data to know specifically who the prospects are and what actions they took during the webcast which often lets you know where they are within the buying process.  And, if you choose a live Q&A session, you can interact with dozens of potential customers in a personal dialog.  All of this comes at a pretty modest cost compared to traditional in person tradeshows. 

As someone who has once had the pleasure of managing their company’s trade show presence, I can tell you it is a very expensive operation.  The whole operation is designed to separate you from your budget – the space, the booth itself, power, T1 line, staffing, carpeting, plants, shipping and dealing with unions and their rules and rates.  All for the pleasure of standing in a tacky booth waiting for people to come by looking for free stuff and engage you with small talk.  The quality of leads of people who happen to amble by your booth can not compare with someone registering and attending your webcast – and engaging with your content. 

In many industries trade shows have an important role, but at what cost.  Buyers prefer to get content at their desks and marketers want a high return on their lead gen efforts.  Both of those trends point to the reason why webcasting is one of the fastest growing B2B marketing vehicles and it should prosper during tough economic times.

We are heading into the holiday buying season and Black Friday is upon us.  I have a great suggestion for you to do your shopping and contribute to an important cause.  A good friend, Linda Kuehn, has created a site called “Click to Cure ALS”.  She is doing her part to battle a terrible disease that has stuck close to home.  Linda used her marketing and web skills to create a shopping portal with tons of terrific online merchants.  The best way to describe it is from the “About” page on the site:

Click To Cure ALS is a shopping portal built for the purpose of raising money in the fight against ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease).

All you have to do to help is simply visit this site, click a link or an ad to go to the store where you want to shop, and then shop as you normally would. It does not cost you anything and you don’t pay a premium when you use this site. As a matter of fact, you’ll find plenty of money-saving offers when you visit us!

When you click from this site to an online store and complete a purchase, we’ll earn a commission from our participating merchants and donate the profits to the ALS Association and Project A.L.S.

There is no extra cost to click through to sites you would be going to anyway via the magic of affiliate marketing.  I plan on using the site during some down time over Thanksgiving.  There is nothing better than having a drink or two and setting yourself loose on iTunes.  It is always fun when the bill comes.  Linda has put together a nice variety of sites and you may discover a new one such as Kosher.com.  Now I can have Kosher Bison delivered right here to Salem, Massachusetts.  The wonders of the internet never cease.

Give it a try and help to fight ALS.

Happy Thanksgiving from the King Fish Think Tank team!

This week I had the pleasure of contributing an article to the Chief Marketer web site.  The article is about using web casts to drive leads and ROI.  This is a topic quite familiar to King Fish as we manage over 250 web casts yearly for our clients.

To read the article please click here to go to the Chief Marketer site, and check out all of the great content they have on many other issues relevant to today’s marketer.

This year’s Digital Hollywood conference in Los Angeles has been shedding light on the significant challenges marketers face as they try to lasso prospects online. By and large, the panelists have been candid about the immaturity of this medium, but have been unified in their belief that traditional advertising is waning, and providing prospects with meaningful online experiences is the cost of entry.

The panelists, most of which carried senior executive titles, provided sound bites that had me in complete agreement. Here is a sample.

During a session entitled: The Web, Social Media and Advertising: Transforming and Disassembling the World of Traditional Media and Communications, Matt Rosenberg, Group Director, Organic said that to be successful, “Brands are immersing themselves in the content experience…you need to let your brand take a backseat.” I absolutely agree, and that is a core strategy at King Fish Media, where our job is to help clients engage with prospects and clients on a far more meaningful level than brand advertising offers.

Recommended contacts who spoke at this panel:

Raquel Krouse, VP Social Media, Interpublic Emerging Media Lab
Matt Rosenberg, Group Director, Organic
Mark Lewis, Strategic Planning Director, DDB San Francisco

The next session, Bridging TV and Broadband: Strategic Relationships – Advertising, Technology and Content, took the full customer immersion concept to a different level. A senior executive from the Home Shopping Network candidly evaluated her brand, and said that the universal knowledge of her brand allowed for movement into new media platforms (Interactive TV and .TV), saying, “People at the company worried about these platforms, but with the huge brand loyalty, they go wherever the brand goes and build communities there.” We, at King Fish, describe this phenomenon as owning, not renting your own media channel – Private Media.

Recommended contacts from this panel:

Jeff Miller, President and CEO, ICTV
Fred McIntyre, SVP, AOL Video

On a separate note, I hope to never again hear these words as much as I have during the last three days: “paradigm” (thought we were done with that), “frictionless”, “zero sum game”, “net loser” and “value proposition”.

During each of these sessions, I heard frequent confirmation that intent-based vs. interruption-based communications is the most effective means for clients to communicate with their prospects and customers; custom media provides the single strongest venue to effectively achieve success with this effort.

The proposed take over of Yahoo by Microsoft is a fascinating intersection of marketing, technology and advertising, with Microsoft motivated by its inability to compete with Google in search and online advertising.  If I were in Steve Ballmer’s shoes I would probably do the same thing, but this strategy is a classic example of fighting the last war.

Mergers in the tech world never seem to work out for a variety of reasons, but mostly because they forget about the customer or take them for granted.  These deals always sound good in the conference room where insulated executives pitch each other on stories of efficiency and synergy.  They think that one plus one never equals three, in some cases such as TimeWarner/AOL – one plus one equaled .75.

Trying to merge cultures, technologies, people and rivalries is always a mess, and the needs of and desires of customers always take a back seat.  It is always assumed that if “Joe” is a customer of Company B, and it is bought by Company A, then “Joe” naturally becomes a customer of Company A.  This is faulty logic – our man Joe has no relationship or loyalty to the new company, and may not even like them (remember the HP/Compaq merger).  The market has already selected Google as the de facto search standard by a huge margin.  Why they would think that combing the second and third place search engines would get people to switch.  The wisdom of crowds has spoken and it is not talking about the MSN network.

I have always been a big fan and heavy user of Yahoo’s content and email, but frankly, their search is not nearly as good as Google’s.  I have started the day with my customized myYahoo page and used their email service forever.  However, if a Microsoft-owned Yahoo tries to convert me to a Hotmail account, I am gone, and so will others who don’t want an email address that looks like it comes from an adult site.

Microsoft has to be very nervous about Google’s success and plans for the future.  According to the New York Times, MS is heavily dependent on sales of operating systems and Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook) for profitability.  In the last quarter alone their operating profit from Office was $3.2 billion on $4.8 billion in sales.  That is literately printing money and a business model they need to defend.

It is hard to imagine a time when corporate America won’t be using MS Office, but fast forward 10-12 years.  Do you really think we will all still be using packaged software that costs $400 a pop, or will we be using some sort of Software as a Service (SaaS) or ASP model?  Check out Google Docs and you can see they are moving in this direction.  That thought has to scare the heck out of Microsoft.  Not to mention mobile computing and other platforms where they are lagging behind.

Technology is a cruel business, where one moment you are the hot new thing, the king of the hill, and a minute later you are yesterday’s news.  Google will not be toppled by the combination of Microsoft and Yahoo.  However, one day they will likely be knocked off the mountain by a group of brilliant kids who get their start in a garage.

I’ve been talking with marketing managers at vendors and large integrators, and they share a common complaint: their efforts are unappreciated and often dismissed by their sales counterparts.

No shock. Research conducted by VARBusiness last year found that marketing and business development ranked among the least valued items for improving sales and growing a business. Conversely, greater management focus and expanding sales teams was ranked among the best actions to drive growth. In other words, brute force wins over strategic development.

Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, channel dogma holds that resellers (solution providers, integrators and system builders) generate leads on behalf of their vendors. The reality, however, is solution providers don’t generate leads, are horrible at marketing and don’t do enough to promote their own brands.

What’s to blame? Two of the great evils of the IT industry: compensation plans and vendor brand supremacy.

Innovation and growth require risk taking. Compensation plans, however, counter risk taking. As products become commoditized and markets become saturated, vendors and solution providers will bring new and complex products to create new revenue streams. Sales teams are often compensated on gross revenue of best selling products. When they’re given a goal for sales, sales teams will often devote the bulk of their attention to products that will get them to their goal fastest without consideration to overall growth of the business. This is also why companies create special sales teams when introducing new products and services; they’re unencumbered by legacy sales and products.

Solution providers don’t do enough to develop and promote their own brands. Instead, solution providers rely upon their vendors’ brand strength to drive sales and the vendors prefer it this way. To draw an analogy to the automobile industry, no one buys a car body, engine, tires, drive train, seats, windows and lights and then builds a car; they buy a car that is the final product of scores of suppliers. Nissan Motors, for instance, has more than 10,000 suppliers that feed parts to the manufacturer for the assembly of its various cars. Yet, the general public knows few of those suppliers even if they are the best parts makers in the industry. The contrary is true in the IT industry, where vendors want brand supremacy over the brands of their resellers, integrators and solution providers. No one buys an IT system; they buy the pieces and then pay someone to assemble them.

Vendor brand supremacy has the unfortunate effect of creating partner reliance upon the vendor for marketing and lead generation. So long as vendors continue to promote their brands over the brands of their channel partners, the solution providers will look to their vendors to either supply marketing or underwrite their marketing efforts.

To achieve real growth, businesses must be willing to take risk. Corporate leaders may understand the risk imperative; what they need to do is remove the obstacles to risk and structure their channels and compensation plans to encourage their field teams to embrace the challenge of risk rather than just maintaining their personal revenue streams.

Send Larry your thoughts and feedback: lmwalsh@twentyonetwelve.biz or at www.twentyonetwelve.biz

Everyone talks about the midmarket as some magical land of endless riches. It’s as if technology vendors and solution providers will be blessed with pots of gold if they catch the midmarket leprechaun—lucky charms included.Few technology companies are cracking the midmarket or anything below the “enterprise” level because they’re incorrectly sizing up the segmentations. Part of the problem is how they’re defining the various market bands.

The most common market segmentation model is the following:

• Enterprise - Greater than 1,000 employees/seats
• Midmarket - 100 to 999 employees/seats
• Small business - 10-99 employees/seats
• Consumer/home - Less than 10 employees/seats

The market breakdown is far more complex and segmented. Business consumers cannot be unilaterally placed in arbitrary bands based on their number of employees or gross revenue because even though “we” may say they’re midmarket, some very small companies have the IT infrastructure and support needs of very large organizations. Likewise, very large organizations may have thousands of employees, but very few “knowledge workers,” or people who use the IT infrastructure.Some vendors and analyst firms have subdivided the midmarket into upper and lower midmarket; midmarket and SMB; or midmarket, small enterprise and enterprise. Regardless of how they carve up the midmarket, they continue to treat the customers in this aggregated band as the same type of customer. This monolithic thinking typically results in unfocused marketing, higher cost in sales and lower revenue returns.

Technology companies should adopt a more flexible market segmentation model that approximates the position of customers in more realistic bands that reflect the maturity of their business and then adjust their position based on their unique characteristics.

In general terms, 2112 segments the market in the following bands:

• Large Enterprise - Greater than 1,000 employees/seats
• Small Enterprise - 250-999 employees/seats
• Midmarket - 50-249 employees/seats
• SMB - 10-49 employees/seats
• Consumer/Retail - Less than 10 employees/seats

Some may dispute designating the midmarket in the 50 to 249 seat band. Conventional thinking would say that it’s simply too low. The reality is far different. According to Internal Revenue Service reports, there are 31.3 million businesses in the United States, of which 29.9 million gross less than $1 million a year. If you assume that a million-dollar business can only support five to 10 employees, the bulk of the identifiable market actually falls below the SMB level. Once a company gets above the 50 seat level, they start to take on the characteristics of a formal business, but they remain informal and entrepreneurial. Once they peak above the 250 seat mark that they start to take on the characteristics of an enterprise. They have more formal departments, management hierarchy and purchasing policies. In other words, they look and act like an enterprise on a smaller scale. More importantly, they want to be treated like an enterprise.

Because many technology companies don’t understand that size doesn’t matter when you’re talking to a customer, they fail to engage with their prospects on a level that is meaningful to them. Don’t try to tell a $50 million company with 300 employees that they’re a small or midsized business. They may be small compared to ExxonMobil or Goldman Sachs, but they’re the big dog on their block and expect to be treated that way.

Correctly segmenting the market has a direct impact on go-to-market strategies, sales planning and cost of sales. Technology vendors and service providers should reassess whom they consider to be SMB, midmarket and enterprise, and then apply a right-sized products, focused market strategies and appropriate sales models to successfully reap the greatest return with the lowest cost of sales.