The core elements of marketing have never really changed.

By Mark Helfen

If you want a product to succeed in the market, you need to focus rigorously on segmentation, create a value proposition, and communicate with your market. Which means that you need to understand your customers.

Or so says Guy Smith, Principal at Silicon Strategies Marketing, a consultancy that helps companies that “reduce the risk of failure and maximize market penetration.” His focus is on “everything to the left of go-to-market,” and keeping his clients from making “classic, colossal mistakes” – not understanding the value of their product to potential customers.

Smith will be speaking at the November 12 SVForum Marketing SIG with a talk titled Start-up CEO’s Marketing Myopia – How to lead marketing without being a guru.

He is the author of the Start-up CEO's Marketing Manual, and will have a few copies with him that he will give away for the best questions asked.

A lot of product developers believe in the “better mousetrap theory,” the idea that a cool piece of technology will sell itself and be used by “everybody.” Smith doesn’t buy into this, and instead preaches the “rigors of segmentation" – clearly identifying your customers, understanding their needs and interests, and how your product will make their life better. To do this, you need to talk to customers and go outside your perceptions.

(As an aside to this, your blogger recently heard a presentation from Daniel Russell who is the “Uber Tech Lead” for Google search. He explained that it’s impossible to find the kind of average or typical user that Google needs as test subjects for their newest developments here in the valley – they need to go to such exotic locales as Stockton or Modesto to find more “normal” people. )

“Most founders don’t understand most of the value of their product,” said Smith.

He has sat on both sides of VC pitch panels, and claims that many entrepreneurs are missing fully half of everything they need to start and have a chance of succeeding.

There are three key items to give your startup a chance – money, a realistic plan to reach your market, and time to execute your plan.

The plan starts with a value proposition – back to the marketing basics – and the evening will give some guidance into creating one. You don’t need to be a “marketing guru,” you need to understand what you know and don’t know about marketing discipline.

So given the current thinking how does social media help in this? It can certainly help with communications, but “there’s no magic,” nothing happens by itself.

So come by on November 12. You might win a book. And some guidance in how to start a process of market segmentation and developing a value proposition.

The core elements of marketing have never really changed.







Please sign up at our meetup site to help us get an accurate count for the eventing - thanks.

 

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Mark Helfen is a freelance writer, journalist, and marketing consultant.

He can be reached at: mhelfen@wordpixel.com
Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/markhelfen
Facebook: facebook.com/mark.helfen
Follow me on Twitter: twitter.com/mark_helfen
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How to get your product elected…

By Mark Helfen


If you can fog a mirror, you can’t miss the election going on. Ads, news reports, speeches, and all the other campaign stuff form a deluge – much more so in so called “swing” states than here in California.

So what does that have to do with marketing and selling technology products?  Maybe quite a bit, according to the speaker at this month’s (October 8) SVForum MarketingSIG, Giovanni Rodriguez. His presentation is titled Social Technology and the Presidential Election: An Insider's Perspective.

Rodriguez is co-founder and CEO of SocialXDesign, a consultancy focused on “social business” and consumer engagement. Social business isn’t social media – meaning tools like Facebook or Twitter, but rather connection and engagement with customers, users, and citizens.

His background includes time as Chief Marketing Officer at Broadvision, a stint with Deloitte consulting, and founding his current company. SocialXDesign works with technology businesses, retail, and also government, including the current White House, where he works with the “Office of Public Engagement,” in getting Hispanic and Asian to be more closely engaged with the administration. Thus his well-informed position in seeing the similarities and connections between how political campaigns and marketing campaigns are alike.

Rodriguez said he will describe the strategies of both the Obama and Romney campaigns, and use them to explain what works well and what doesn’t work. The lessons that are learned can be applied to technology and other product marketing.

Both politics and marketing are most successful when you connect with people, usually in person. Finding people who will speak on your behalf – surrogates in his parlance – can multiply your marketing efforts. This is not fundamentally technological, though tools like Facebook can help the effort, and keep your network communicating. In his work with the White House, he formed groups that met in person, as a core of broader engagement.

Social media by itself “is not the stuff that wins.” An effective marketing program needs to invest in actual humans – in meeting potential customers, and in training employees on how to market your products.

“You need to invest in your people to carry your message.”

The fundamentals of marketing still matter, and the two presidential campaigns can serve as object lessons. Because of the high stakes, the large amount of money spent, and the pressure of limited time they can serve as crucibles, quickly and intensively testing different marketing ideas over a limited time to see what works.

So come by, and see how you can get your products elected.



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Mark Helfen is a freelance writer, journalist, and marketing consultant.

He can be reached at: mhelfen@wordpixel.com
Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/markhelfen
Facebook: facebook.com/mark.helfen
Follow me on Twitter: twitter.com/mark_helfen

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Don't think - the key to engaging presentations

Don't think - the key to engaging presentations...

By Mark Helfen

The key idea to an effective presentation is that you don’t want your audience to think.

Or so says Fabian Venter, who will be speaking on Presenting in a “Wired” World at the next SVForum MarketingSIG, on Monday September 10, at our usual EMC location.

I spoke to him a few days ago about his upcoming presentation.

Venter is founder of Presentography, a consulting firm that helps people who deliver presentations  to quickly get to “yes.” His peripatetic past includes living (in alphabetical order) in Asia, Australia, Europe, and now the United States. South America is in his sights. So his experience is broad both in terms of successful presentations and in geography.

Given the deluge of information coming at people, or at least the fire hose of distracting data, people are pretty quick to tune out one more listing of bare facts. His definition of a presentation includes not only the sales person speaking to a group, but just about any meeting where you want your message to be remembered.

The problem is that the high volume communications age has re-wired people brains with a shortened attention span. If you have ever taught a class where all of the students have an open laptop and a Wi-Fi connection, you’ve seen the effect – people drift away very quickly.

Venter’s methodology is designed to overcome this modern “attention deficit,” by engaging your audience’s emotional brain with a narrative – a story with a beginning, middle and end. By “softening” your data, you can get your message into the “long term” parts of your audience’s brain where it is more likely to be remembered.

Your talk should “not be data driven, but emotionally driven,” according to Venter. That’s the idea behind “don’t think.” The objective is to engage your audience, bypassing the factual, rational left brain. Your listeners enter an “altered state” hearing your narrative.

According to Venter, anyone can present, even if you’re shy or scared. “Everyone has the ability to share a story.”

 “There is no formula for success,” but you will learn some tricks and techniques to help increase engagement and minimize your audience’s drifting attention.

So come by Monday, and learn how to tell your story.

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Mark Helfen is a freelance writer, journalist, and marketing consultant.

He can be reached at: mhelfen@wordpixel.com
Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/markhelfen
Facebook: facebook.com/mark.helfen
Follow me on Twitter: twitter.com/mark_helfen

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Is Pinterest the next marketing channel?

By Mark Helfen

And Now Comes Pinterest…

Social sites seem to have a short if happy life. Myspace, Digg, Delicious, probably others were once the new-new thing, and aren’t anymore. I’m in no position to forecast business model success, but it’s impossible not to see that things change fast.

At Monday’s (Aug 13) SVForum MarketingSIG meeting, Natascha Thomson, Owner & Founder of MarketingXLerator discussed the next new-new thing, Pinterest. According to Bizjournals.com (publisher of the San Jose and San Francisco Business Journals, among other cities) Pinterest was the 4th most popular social media site in July, with more than 24 million visitors per month, starting at zero in early 2011, and on a steep ramp up.

With all those clicks and eyeballs, there must be a marketing opportunity, and that was the focus of Thomson’s presentation (copy on Slideshare here.)

Pinterest is much easier to understand by seeing, as opposed to description, since it’s a visually oriented site. Users “pin” pictures they want to share, either uploaded from their own camera, or from other web sites. Since it’s free, it’s worth signing up to try out.

Like most other social sites, it represents curation over creation, but helps to create communities of common interest. Thomson described it as “scrapbooking for adults,” and added that “it’s strangely rewarding.”

The demographics represent a very specific slice of the market. In the U.S., 80 percent of the users are female. Interestingly, in the U.K., the majority are male. When I signed up for Pinterest (and saw the U.S. site) the majority of images seemed to reflect this. Not to stereotype, but overwhelmingly I was presented with pictures of cats and dogs (all really cute,) shoes, jewelry, furniture, hair styles, and clothing – lots of wedding dresses. Unfortunately I no longer have enough hair for the braid and ribbon instructional photos. And looking around my office, it’s clear that the room decorating ideas are wasted on me.

So what’s the marketing opportunity? I think it would be fair to characterize Thomson’s message with two parts. First, nothing about Pinterest changes the basics – you need a clear set of marketing objectives, a strategy to reach those goals, and a way of measuring results. Second, Pinterest is a new land, yet to be charted. If you get there now, you will be among the first.

At least a few companies have used Pinterest to present concepts about their business, for example IBM and GE. Consumer companies have gotten click through purchases when their customers pin product images from the company’s e-commerce site - clicking on the picture can direct a browser back to the site where the image originated. There is also a SEO opportunity, as Google indexes the text associated with photos and increases page rank based on the number of Pinterest users who “like” an image.

Pinterest seems to be new channel for marketers, with the instruction book yet to be written. Sign up and check it out. And thanks to Natascha Thomson for leading the exploration.



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Mark Helfen is a freelance writer, journalist, and marketing consultant.

He can be reached at: mhelfen@wordpixel.com
Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/markhelfen
Facebook: facebook.com/mark.helfen
Follow me on Twitter: twitter.com/mark_helfen

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It’s too late to start marketing your product when it’s ready to ship.

By Mark Helfen

It’s too late to start marketing your product when it’s ready to ship. You should develop a trusted relationship as a domain expert long before then.

“Build trust before you sell,” said Steve Farnsworth, by regularly communicating useful and valuable information to your market. When your product is released “your future customer already sees you as trustworthy.”

Farnsworth will be the speaker at the next SVForum MarketingSIG meeting on June 11. The topic will be Lean Startup Marketing, Social Media, and PR. He promises that the evening will be less about theory, and instead focused on practical steps to let a startup or small business develop the market for their products.

Farnsworth is the Chief Blogger at the @Steveology blog, and is included in Forbes recent listing of the Top 50 Social Media Power Influencers. He frequently advises Silicon Valley Technology companies on their marketing strategy, but he told me that there is nothing they do that a motivated startup entrepreneur can’t also do. It’s not about money, but it does take time to communicate a marketing message.

The idea is to build trust with your audience, and establish yourself as a domain expert. Farnsworth doesn’t focus on any specific method for doing this – he didn’t mention Facebook (clearly the word of the hour) until I had asked him. His model is to develop the message first, and then decide on the most appropriate tool to communicate with your target market. It could be Facebook, a blog, or even an email newsletter. Your audience should be able to choose the path to get this information that they prefer.

Facebook, Twitter, are all “just tools.” First develop the message, compelling content. Then figure out the platform.

The hard part? “There is no short, easy way to do this,” he said. Communication and developing trust takes time.

Monday’s presentation will be short on theory and focus on the practical, promising “step-by-step actionable ideas.”

 Drawing on ideas from his client base, you should walk out of the room with specific steps to get started. The tools he will recommend are either free or at least cheap, leaving time as the most expensive resource required. Large companies divide these activities across several departments, but a little company can still be effective.

Farnsworth says he tells his clients that they can’t wait until the end of the product cycle to start marketing - it takes longer than they expect. They agree, say they believe him, but then “de-prioritize” the work and just never get started. Perhaps after Monday night your startup won’t make the same mistake.


PLEASE REGISTER IN ADVANCE for Lean Startup Marketing, Social Media, and PR.

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Mark Helfen is a freelance writer, journalist, and marketing consultant.

He can be reached at: mhelfen@wordpixel.com
Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/markhelfen
Facebook: facebook.com/mark.helfen
Follow me on Twitter: twitter.com/mark_helfen
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