Coming Soon
The Digital Age of Competitive Intelligence in 3 Parts Blog:
I am also launching a new blog site! Stay tuned!
Denise
Marketing campaign in pics using Pinterest - very cool. Check it out!
Your Product or Service Is Your Brand
Recently I had the pleasure of meeting with one of the greats in technology. He was an early leader at Microsoft and a product guy. The one thing I walked away with from the conversation was this.
You don’t build your brand. Your product or service builds your brand.
American Airlines last week showed off its new airplane paint job on a Boeing 737. But does this really help to build the AA brand? How about AA arrivals and departures being on time? How about a commitment to reliable aircraft that customers feel safe in? How about employees who feel connected to the “brand” and delight in working for AA? AA’s brand is in a state of flux and I don’t think new logos or paints jobs will repair its fundamental challenges.
Brands are about the interactive experiences and relationships customers have with your products or services. The experience starts from initial awareness and continues to when the customer recommends you and purchases again. Coke, Lexus and Apple have built great brands by delivering great products that resonate with and delight their buyers.
So how do you build brand if you’re not a name brand, but an early-stage company? For high transaction, lower touch engagement models you must:
Deliver Value
First – keep the product simple. The initial product must solve a problem and you must deliver value from day one. Period. Even though the early product may not have every bell and whistle, your audience’s first impression with your product/service is the only impression. This may seem fundamental, but so many companies fail to do this. Even worse, they rely on marketing and sales to build their brand with a product that doesn’t hit the mark with the customer. This is a loosing proposition.
Embed Virality into Product/Service
Secondly, you must embed sharing or virality features into your product or service, so that your brand can be shared with others. Sharing should start at the point of awareness and continue throughout the customer’s lifecycle. It shouldn’t be an afterthought – it should an important part of your product and your go-to-market (GTM) strategy. This is one of the reasons why marketing is critical in early stage organizations. For types of virality check out TechCrunch’s article, Eight Ways to Go Viral.
Map Your Brand Strategy to the Customer Lifecycle
Third, build your brand strategy into the GTM. You need to understand how to best reach your customers with your product/service, while understanding the buying behaviors and triggers for the acquisition, activation, retention and referral stages.
Then map your product or service roadmap to the GTM so that you focus on building brand affinity with your customers and increasing their lifetime value.
Brands matter, but not the way some companies think it does. For early stage businesses, your product is your brand. Focus on building a great product that customers want, determine the best way to get the product into their hands, and measure everything along the way. And leave the painting of airplanes to AA.
-Denise
NOT just another BUZZword
Startups are busy bees. Not only do they need to establish their place in the market, but are often swamped with building their company and their product at the same time. The result? Plenty of long hours darting from goal to goal; never enough time in a day or resources.
But that’s life.
Of course, today’s startups don’t have the time to wait for customers to bloom organically. And they don’t have the budget to rely on expensive promotions or advertising. The truth stings, but it can be overcome. That’s where buzz comes in.
For a lot of people buzz is, well, a buzzword. But not for me. In fact, I consider it a very structured goal, comprised of three key components:
1) Build Awareness
Figure out what’s already buzzing and become a fly on the wall in those conversations. Create relevant content as part of a full content strategy and marketing calendar. And remember to leverage that content in SEO.
2) Establish Thought Leadership
Those current people buzzing? They are your thought leaders. And it’s your job to turn them into your champions. Make sure they know what you are up to, and give them an easy way to talk about you.
3) Provide Proof of Team Talents
Evaluate your hive to understand what talent you have within. Make sure your resident experts author their own blog posts and thought leadership pieces. You’ll need to get them all onto an editorial calendar to make this happen.
So now you’ve got awareness among your influencers. You’ve turned some of these thought leaders into actual champions. And you’ve established your own team’s thought leadership. What does that mean?
With influencers, champions and thought leadership on your side, you’ve achieved what I like to call the Buzz Trifecta:
Of course, just establishing the Buzz Trifecta does not mean you’ve won – it’s up to your team to continuously create the blogs, articles, videos and endorsements that help it grow. And creation is just one side of the necessary conversation – many new companies forget that buzz is actually a two way street. Be sure to also comment on and share key industry players’ blog posts and articles, respond to their social media, and even interview them to gather new stories for yourself. They will, in turn, do the same, raising you to their level in the eyes of your audience. But, remember it’s not just marketing - you have to be relevant to the influencers and their fans.
I love building Buzz Trifecta’s for companies. It’s a lot of work, but pollination will happen if you get it right.
-Denise
What Marketing Role Is Getting Attention in Washington Now?
The role of the campaign strategist.
Much like its position in politics, the marketing campaign strategist has a big vision, figures out a plan for getting there, and then works with the campaign team to implement that plan. Plenty of people have big visions, but don’t know how to get there. Other people can write plans, but can’t implement them. Campaign strategists have learned all three skills through practice and discipline. The best of them can cast a big vision for a campaign, write a plan to get to that vision, and manage the implementation of the plan from start to finish.
What is your campaign vision? Are you trying to build brand awareness? Are you trying to reposition your company in a new space, build thought leadership, generate new leads for the sales team or erode competitor positioning? Share your vision for the campaign by creating an internal code name that captures its essence. Your vision and code name become the rallying cry the rest of the company can stand behind. For example, I executed a campaign with the vision of helping a company move from the early adopters stage of the life cycle to the early majority stage. Internal code name for the campaign: Golden Gate. My vision and strategy for Golden Gate was to leverage early adopters as “sales people” to help transition and appeal to the early majority. We were building a bridge to “cross the chasm” in a campaign that consisted of interactive (web), PR articles and bylines and advertising.
Key Campaign Components
The Biggest Challenge for Campaign Strategists
What’s the biggest challenge for the campaign strategist? Defining the message. Your campaign will only succeed if you build strong, unified messaging that supports your vision and positioning. Many campaign strategists struggle with this core concept they are trying to convey to the target. Positioning is just that. Messaging is derived from positioning, but is an external message that speaks directly to your audience. It includes your promise – your paradox; your tagline – your invitation; and your secret sauce - your coolness.
Build a Killer Team
You can’t execute a killer campaign without a strong campaign team. My campaign philosophy is that of “Army style” campaigning. Political parties in the 19th century thought of themselves as armies—as disciplined, hierarchical fighting organizations whose mission it was to defeat a clearly identified opponent. If defeated themselves, they knew how to retreat, regroup, and fight again another day. If they won, then the victory was sweet. Killer campaign teams understand responsibilities and timelines, and they communicate on a regular basis.
Take Action
No campaign succeeds without the proper “proof” to back it up. Your campaign argument is the arsenal of deliverables your team can draw upon to sustain your case, story and claims. Lead with your strongest proof points first and then explain what you do in terms of real benefits to your customers.
Your campaign voice, much like your style in a real conversation, requires a different approach depending on your target audience and their situation. Adjust your level of detail and your “personality” based on the knowledge of your audience and the trust they have in you. Address your audience’s concerns head on and convince them that you’ve removed their barriers to take action.
Killer campaigns drive home your positioning in the way that speaks best to your audience.
Campaigns Gone Wrong
Vomit Girl from Microsoft
Dean Cain starred in the 2009 Microsoft ad campaign, known as the “Oh my God, I’m gonna puke” commercial that announced the arrival of Internet Explorer 8. While we do have to give the company some props for humor, that is negated by the fact they lost sight of their target audience: virtually every computer user in the world. The ad features a wife asking to use her husband’s laptop when he’s through. What she sees launches her into a vomiting frenzy.
Sure, the campaign got plenty of press and was a huge hit with a small segment of their audience. But I’m sure your reaction tells you what you need to know – that the majority of the world does not appreciate Microsoft’s message or like the company any better for having gone down this polarizing path! Were this an ad to convince only 25-year-old boys to upgrade to IE8… well, that would have been another story.
-Denise
OK – my ADD has kicked in…
While writing the next blog in the Marketing Hats series on the Campaign Strategist, I started thinking about social media and marketing.
I recently kicked off a campaign for Virtual Bridges using social media to erode our competitor’s positioning. Code named “Project Termite”, the campaign consisted of a set of stealth-based programs, using social media as the key delivery channel. I’ve coined this strategy, “Social Media with a Guerrilla Mindset.”
How do you go guerrilla with social media and erode your competitor’s positioning?
Net/Net. Social media with a guerrilla mindset requires: Kick-starting conversations with authentic, compelling, differentiated topics; finding and going where the conversations are already happening; and leveraging partner social media channels along with friends and influencers to help tell your unique story. Make sure you’ve established clear goals for your campaign and commit to making an impact daily.
- Denise
What’s Your Story?
Few things are as intrinsic to human behavior as telling stories. From religion to music, politics to entertainment, storytelling is at the heart of everything that draws us in and leaves us wanting more.
No matter the industry, offering or customer, a thoughtful and well-presented corporate story will reach its objective and stay top-of-mind long after others have faded away.
But what makes a great story for your company? According to Christopher Lochhead, it’s about knowing your companies POV, or point of view.
“From a marketing and sales perspective, your POV is the story that encompasses the problem that you solve, the value you provide, and why customers should buy from you. From a product development perspective, the POV becomes “true-north” for what goes into the product and what doesn’t.”
I love this thinking. Great story telling has a point of view. Great story telling amplifies the truth!
Is Your Story Tangible?
I am passionate about bringing stories to life for companies. It’s my specialty.
A framework I use to determine positioning and plan campaigns that bring corporate stories to life is found in The Marketing Playbook: Five Battle-Tested Plays for Capturing and Keeping the Lead in Any Market, written by former leaders of Microsoft Windows and Office marketing. During their years at Microsoft, John Zagula and Richard Tong helped Microsoft Office and Windows grow from a 10% to 90% market share. Yes, the book was published almost a decade ago, but the key messages remain relevant. Understanding market patterns and executing “plays” across marketing campaigns will help create a sustainable and defensible position for your company and products.
The book explains five basic strategies for a competitive market:
(1) The Drag Race Play – you’re surrounded by competitors. Pick one competitor and, like a drag racer, out-accelerate them, leaving them in your dust. Not for the faint of heart. Not a money wise play.
(2) The Best of Both Play - you’re behind a couple of smart players. Zip-up the middle, making yourself look better than both of them. This can also be about defining all new product offerings. Mobile devices, web apps, cloud technologies and social media fall into the Best of Both play. These technologies are bringing down old artificial barriers around the workplace, and companies are creating whole new offerings to compete.
Our current play at Virtual Bridges is a Best of Both play. We compete with huge market gorillas. We deliver a less complex solution with half the cost and all the benefits of the larger competitive solutions. Virtual Bridges does not simply strive to do more or cost less – we’ve built our desktop virtualization solution to do both. We’re currently testing multiple campaigns that support the best of both play: One campaign hits it head on by proclaiming “We’re #3” - We may not be one of the “big guys” in desktop virtualization, but we deliver a big difference –VALUE (Half the Investment, Half of the Resources, All of the Benefits.).
(3) The High-Low Play – You dominate the high end or the low end, or both, and are trying to compete with someone coming out with a best-of-both-worlds product. If you are a front-runner and someone is trying to do a ‘Best of Both’ play on you, block their passage by splitting the category in two and then dominating both houses. Segment further and target more closely than the other guy.
(4) The Platform Play – you won the drag race. Keep potential competitors away by making them into partners. Amazon.com is a good example of the platform play. Stand firm on your platform and repel all boarders. Gather loyal allies. Build impregnable defenses.
(5) The Stealth Play – If you’re not ready for a bruising fight, sneak past your opponents when they are not watching. Quietly wear them down and weaken their weak points further. Stay out of the spotlight and maintain your covert operations.
Of most use in this book and my most tried, tested and perfected takeaway is their framework on how to map the terrain (yourself, competitors, what’s missing,) and how to run a killer campaign that supports your position and brings your story to life. Killer campaigns are internally aligned and externally focused with a sharp precision that cuts through market noise to garner serious attention from targeted customers.
So, one of the hats marketing wears is Story Teller.
A great story has a POV. Your POV is the expression of what your company believes, what makes you different, and why people (customers, partners, employees & investors) should care.
To bring life to your story, POV and positioning you need to understand your market play and have the framework to execute a killer campaign. -Denise
P.S. Next up. Wearing the hat of the Campaign Strategist.
There’s no question about it – hats are back. A fashion statement that fizzled more than a generation ago is now topping the rich, the famous and the style icons of today. In fact, the headwear at this year’s Veuve Clicquot Polo Classic in New York was enough to launch a Forbes column on the trend.
The most popular hat I’ve seen pulled off “in real life” lately is the fedora. In fact, I have a gorgeous girlfriend who can wear a fedora like she was born with it. On the other hand, I’ve heard rumors that my ex-husband has been seen sporting his own fedora. Which brings me to an important hat-wearing tip:
Know which hat works for you, and with which outfit. Look at yourself in the mirror and try your hardest to objectively decide – is this working? Or is this the reincarnation of my parachute pants in the ‘80’s? Take a tip from our hat-wearing British cohorts, who even outlined hat-wearing tips when inviting guests to William & Kate’s royal wedding: “Wearing the right hat and not overdoing it is important.”
We should have expected as much from the English. Actually my ex-husband is English, which might explain those fedora rumors… but what it doesn’t explain is:
What on earth do hats have to do with Marketing?
If you’ll excuse the overused idiom, I have to say it – Marketing in early-stage companies is all about wearing many hats. The key to successfully pulling off the various roles and tasks we perform on a daily basis is to know which hat to wear when – not to mention when you might be overdoing it.
Hold on to your… well, you get the picture—as I take you through a two part series that discusses the Many Hats Marketing Strategy, offering tips and examples that can help anyone who is tasked with trend-setting an early stage business. - Denise
