Technology Marketing by Tatum MarketingJust another WordPress weblog

It must be nice to have so much money to spend on marketing that you don’t need to worry about whether or not your efforts actually accomplish anything.

Take Microsoft for example. In Monday’s Wall Street Journal there was an insert that was designed to look like a marked-up draft of a letter on Microsoft letterhead. It fell out onto the floor when I opened the paper.

That part was good. I actually noticed it and took the time to look closely to make sure it wasn’t something I or a co-worker had left lying around. They got my attention. Mission accomplished.

But it was downhill from there.

Curious, I read – and reread – the fake draft letter; and for the life of me I cannot tell you what they wanted me to do or think or feel.

There is no call to action. Not even a way to contact them except a website address hidden on the bottom left corner of the page. (microsoft.com/peopleready if you’re curious). The copy is so vague it could be applied to any number of software vendors.

Just look at the tagline: “Because it’s everybody’s business”. Huh?

Anyway, I went to the website (which I guarantee you most people would not do) and it appears that they are providing software that is ready for people. Okay. Now what?

My point with this post is not to bash Microsoft. That would be boring. My point to you is: don’t waste your money on marketing tactics that aren’t specifically designed to deliver some kind of measurable, useful result. And don’t be so subtle that you can’t even bother to tell people what you want them to do.

I’m going to reproduce a copy of the letter at the end of this post in case you’re collecting examples of wasteful marketing and you happened to miss this one.

I can’t even guess what Microsoft spent on the insert. If anyone can explain what they were trying to accomplish, I’d love to know.

Technorati Tags: marketing, Microsoft, call to action

Earlier this week I saw a report from Computer Economics (IT Spending Forecast for 2009-2010) predicting that spending on IT equipment and software will recover faster from this recession than it did after the 2000 technology meltdown. Furthermore, the recovery will begin in early 2010.

This started me thinking. What should marketers and business owners be doing now to prepare for next year’s recovery?

Here’s my list.

1. Use the IT spending report as an excuse to talk to your customers and prospects, and ask about their plans.

When do they see recovery coming? If recovery is going to begin in 2010, does that mean the actual buying will begin or that the buying process will begin? This information will let you know how much time you really have before you’d better have your act together.

2. Clean up your lists and database(s).

Chances are good that right now you’re not worrying about an aggressive attack from one of your competitors. Maybe you should be, but that’s a different story.

Right now you’ve got a little breathing room to do some housekeeping. Prospect lists and marketing / sales databases are notoriously hard to keep clean. (Mainly because it’s boring). But a dirty list or database makes you inefficient at best and ineffective or annoying to your prospects and customers at worst.

So, clean them up. Update contact info. Get rid of the dead ones. Combine various lists (newsletter subscribers, people who downloaded a whitepaper, webinar or trade show attendees) and put them in a single place.

And by the way, people tend to come and go (mostly go) during a recession, so it’s especially important to know who contact when things heat up again.

3. Fix your website.

Eric Gerds recently wrote a great article on Conducting a Website Review. Follow his advice to get rid of old and outdated content, find and fix broken links, and add new content to keep visitors coming back to your site.

More than that, you should take a look at how well your website is contributing to your overall business effort. Is it attracting and keeping the right prospects? The numbers may be lower than in better years, but the quality of the visitor should still be there. Are they spending enough time and visiting the right pages? Are you converting them to contacts?

Now could be a really good time to take a look at your website strategy.

4. Maintain your visibility.

Stay in touch with your clients and active prospects. When they’re ready to buy again you don’t want to be wasting time reminding them of who you are.

Choose your contact style to match whomever you’re trying to reach. At Tatum Marketing, we find some clients prefer email and others like a quick phone call. It pays to know which is which, and use that method for contacting them. (I don’t personally know anyone who prefers a letter these days but you might.)

Prospects may be less likely to take your phone call and email tends to work better for them.

No matter how you contact them, keep your communication relevant and helpful. Most people are overworked, uncomfortable and a little anxious. Anything you can do to help make their jobs easier or spark new ideas will be welcome.

5. Review and overhaul your marketing process.

Most marketing processes are rife with holes – especially where marketing meets sales. If you’re well positioned when the economy picks up, it’ll be too late to find and fill the holes. You’ll be scrambling to turn visitors into leads and leads into customers with a faulty system.

This is a topic I’ll address in more detail in a future article, but here’s a list of places that could likely use a tune-up.

• Target audience. As businesses have evolved to meet new demands and ways of doing business, your ideal prospect may have changed.
• Prospect profiling and ranking. Not all prospects are alike. They’re in different stages of the buying process; they have different needs according to their positions; and some are just plain better than others. Companies that excel at marketing know this and account for it.
• Hand-off to sales. The surest way to kill a perfectly good prospect is to hand it off to sales too early – and with no method for returning prospects to marketing when appropriate.
• Lead development system. 80% or more of the people who show interest in your product or service won’t be ready to buy immediately. Suffice it to say you need a really good program for nurturing these prospects until they’re ready to talk to a sales person.

I hope you’re maintaining some level of visibility and customer / prospect contact even in these tough times. The more visibility and contact, the better. We know from the past that along with recessions come real opportunities to gain market share now or early in the recovery.

Be ready.

Technorati Tags: recession, recovery, marketing, website, strategy, database, prospects

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what keeps good business owners from running a good marketing program. Based on my double-digit years of marketing experience, I feel comfortable in saying that the real reason most companies have less than stellar marketing results is not because of lack of knowledge – anyone can get that.

And it’s not due to lack of budget – that’s where creativity and strategy come in.

And it’s not even the economy that’s the real issue.

Nope. Most marketing programs fail to deliver results because business owners and leaders can’t – or won’t – make time for it. It’s as simple and as difficult as that.

When it comes to problematic business leaders and marketing, I’ve found there are basically three types:

1. Leaders who think marketing is too inconsequential to worry about. These business leaders either a) toss marketing responsibility to someone else and never look back, or b) believe their company can get along fine without it. I hear from these types all the time. They’re the ones who call us in a panic when sales hit the skids and they need something done NOW.
2. Then there are the business owners and leaders who think no one can do it but themselves. These leaders have a delegation problem. I firmly believe that the top dog must always stay involved in marketing to some extent, but all companies reach a point where the leader must learn to delegate some marketing responsibility if their companies are going to grow.
3. Finally there are the business owners who know they need to do a better job of marketing but just can’t find the time to get started. I talk to a lot of these people too. They’re usually feeling pretty stressed and frustrated about not getting marketing done.

I’m not bashing business leaders. I help run a business myself. We’re all overwhelmed with the myriad of things that must be done.

But when it comes to being overwhelmed by marketing, I think I can help.

The reason that marketing overwhelms so many leaders is tied directly to inefficiency.

• Inefficient marketing programs don’t produce enough results to justify the cost or the effort – and they leave us looking elsewhere for new business opportunities and leads for the sales team. We need better designed programs with measurements, accountability and regular improvements.
• Inefficient marketing processes keep things from flowing smoothly. We waste precious resources through leaks and dropped balls or by constantly re-inventing the wheel. We need better workflow.
• Inefficient people reduce the power of the system as well. We need more personal productivity in ourselves as well as others.

So how do you get more efficient when you’re busy running a company? How do you find the time?

Productivity guru David Allen, who has trained thousands of professionals to become more personally productive, would argue that lack of time is not really a major issue. He believes the real issue is lack of clarity and definition about what needs to be accomplished and what next steps should be taken.

David promotes a bottom up approach to overall productivity that he has found to be more effective because, as he says, most people are so consumed by their day-to-day commitments that they can’t focus on the larger horizon. He’s found that once you get the mundane tasks under control then you can focus on ideas and visions.

I’ve followed David’s Getting Things Done (GTD) approach – off and on I admit – ever since I first read his book in the late 90s. I know it works for overall productivity, and I started wondering if at least some of the concepts of GTD could be applied to marketing.

Usually we advise clients to stop what they’re doing and take the time to do some planning. But now I ask myself, is it too overwhelming to have to sit down and think about a marketing plan or an entire marketing program? Can companies successfully improve marketing results by taking small steps first?

Here’s an exercise to try. It’s borrowed heavily from David Allen and it’ll take you less than two minutes to do.

1. Write down the marketing question or project that is most on your mind right now. Maybe you need to be generating more new leads. Maybe you suspect you’re wasting a lot of resources and not getting enough back for it. Maybe your website needs to be revamped. Maybe you’re thinking of hiring outside help. Maybe you just need to get started. Pick one.
2. Now write a one-sentence description of what “done” would look like. In other words, what would need to happen for you to consider this marketing question answered or project completed. This could be a very broad sentence such as “launch new website” or more focused such as “talk to potential marketing firms”.
3. Finally, write down the very next physical step that you need to take to move this forward. What action should be taken? Should you schedule a meeting with your sales team? Should you review your website statistics? Should you ask your associate who handles their marketing? Write it down.

How do you feel? I know your marketing probably hasn’t suddenly fallen completely into line. (If I could come up with a 2 minute exercise that did that – well, I’m not exactly sure what I’d do with it).

The point is that progress can happen – you can break through mental barriers and move projects forward – when you take just a few minutes to really think about what outcomes you expect and what step needs to be taken next.

So maybe the best way to approach marketing really is from the bottom up, clearing up all the day-to-day things that bother you until you have time to see the forest for the trees (and other clichés).

It worked for me when I got stuck. It’s worked for others. Try it and let me know if it works for you.

Technorati Tags: marketing, GTD, productivity, leadership, getting things done

By now you’ve probably read one or more of the jillion articles being published on the subject of how and why you should market in a recession. But, let’s face it. Marketing in a recession is not right for all companies.

How do you know if it’s right for you?

Here are nine triggers that should make you think seriously about expanding your marketing efforts now.

1. You have some cash. If you’ve got the resources, it’s rarely ever a bad idea to increase marketing. In 25+ years of marketing, I’ve never run across a company that had perfected its marketing efforts to the point where nothing more was needed. In a bad economy, extra cash invested in marketing can pay off many, many times over.
2. You’re a risk taker. It goes without saying that trigger #1 is pretty much a requirement. But you also need to be comfortable operating outside of the norm. Most businesses will cut back on marketing during a recession. It’s a very common, knee-jerk reaction. You’ve got to be able to sleep at night while you’re moving against the crowd. Most successful entrepreneurs are pretty good at this.
3. Your competitors are hiding. As I mentioned above, the most common reaction to a recession includes whacking the marketing spend. When your competitors do this, they create a great opportunity for you to jump in and fill the void. If you’re clever, it might not even cost you any extra money.
4. Your marketing has succeeded and you have market share to protect. This is the reverse of trigger #3. If you pass the test in trigger #1, don’t become one of those companies in hiding. Some smart competitor will pull a #3 on you.
5. You need to sell to people who don’t know you personally. Trust and integrity are very big in a recession – especially this one where so many problems have been caused by people who were supposed to know what they were doing. Marketing – especially in the form of client testimonials, case studies, education, word of mouth and thought leadership programs – can help you gain your prospects’ trust.
6. Your sales people are cold calling instead of chasing warm leads. This is a classic sign that you need marketing to find and develop leads for your sales team. Cold calling is a struggle in the best of times, and your most talented closers are never the most successful at it.
7. Your customers love you. You must be doing something right. Now’s a great time to get the word out to other people.
8. You believe in marketing. A recession is probably not the best time to test a shaky belief in marketing. Marketing is a process and people are taking longer to make buying decisions now. You’ll most likely get too nervous and quit too soon. Then you’ll have a difficult time ever learning to benefit from marketing. If you question the value of marketing, maybe you should wait.
9. You like to win. If stealing market share from your competitors, growing your business while others are just hoping to survive, and coming out of the recession on top motivate you, now is a great time to act. Buyers need you. There’s less competition. You may find some good deals on marketing costs. What more could you want?

Next time we’ll look at where to begin.

Technorati Tags: recession, marketing, lead generation, prospects