Micro Marketing For Big Organizations

They’ll probably contact you first. But they may not need your offering badly enough to buy from you. So they’ll waste your time if you let them, before they finally say, “Sorry, no deal”.

A recent almost-client brought this home to me in excruciating detail. This North American sales manager was looking for someone to tie his overseas company’s technical documents and presentations together in marketing collateral for their expansion into the U.S.

Over the next two months I researched the product and its competitors, generated proposals with detailed outlines for four pieces, and requested information. I left a lot of voicemail, and got very short email replies without anything definite. I met with him at a local technical conference to discuss the projects, and his marketing budget approval process.

Finally, after he’d conferred several times with his CFO and sent me more terse emails saying no decision yet, they chose someone near the company’s overseas headquarters to do the work.

What can you learn from this?

Deal with the guy who has signature authority whenever possible. This avoids the long-distance committee problem.

If the prospect is eager to talk to you and responds to weekly contacts, he’s interested. If he’s hard to reach and makes one-sentence replies, he’s not.

Work with locals, or people who have a burning need for your one-of-a-kind solution.

If your proposal sits longer than six weeks, it’s a no-go. Smaller organizations should take even less time to get back to you.

If you see any of these, think hard about this prospect. You may be better off marketing to someone else.

When you’re a consultant, patience is a virtue - a necessity, really. Clients are so busy these days it takes around three months (or more) to get from initial discussion by phone to proposal to project approval to final work and payment.

Small and large clients are so overloaded they need to outsource. As a consultant and contractor, your problem is getting them to move on the work they need. We’re dealing with 20-year-old approval structures, from a time when executives kept their fingers everywhere and signed off on all of it. Now executive management has no time, and many department-level managers have no signature authority.

The end result is a bit like the gap between editorial acceptance and actual publishing in any magazine. The longest I’ve gone is eight months between the first discussion about writing a technical article and acceptance of the final draft.

When I designed and managed semiconductor products for the traditional analog, battery power and networking markets, I was constantly pressured to get products out yesterday. Schedules were unrealistically tight, but competition was heavy. If your product missed the market window, you lost market share.

Kind of makes you wonder what lowly place marketing tactics and collateral have in corporate and small-business America.

I know a little about many things, and a lot about a few of them. When I need to learn about a product’s benefits, nothing takes the place of interviews. Surveys may give you general trends, but they won’t tell you why your customer needed your product, or what it does for him. Conversations with customers will tell you that.

In fact, most people are eager to tell you why they like a good product.

But first, you need to figure out what to ask. Then you need to talk to experts and customers (not always the same thing).

If you’re working in a company, your management will help with the people to ask. If you’re a consultant, your clients will do it. Heck, they may even help with the questions. But the best source of questions may be your own brain cells.

I haven’t found any magic bullet for choosing questions. I usually focus my practice on areas like semiconductor electronics that I know from career experience. But when I’m faced with a subject I don’t know well, there’s no substitute for online research and actually using the product. I just follow my nose.

When I wrote web copy for Boinx Software’s FotoMagico, a digital image slideshow program, I knew a little about the market. I’d already suffered with PowerPoint, and I knew how put together a quick slideshow with FotoMagico. For the fine points, I read everything on the Boinx web site, and played with the program for a couple days.

Then I thought about why a customer chose the program, what competitive advantages it gave, and what features made it a must-have product.

Boinx put me in touch with their technical support engineer and five professional-level customers. I got some great answers. But I also got information I hadn’t expected.

Everyone mentioned how fast a show could be assembled, so I knew what the primary advantage was. But the emotional impact of smooth transitions with perfectly-synched music, the pan and zoom capabilities rivaling professional video editing suites - those responses were sparked by the original questions.

I always get something I don’t explicitly ask for. That’s what makes interviews so powerful.

In a blog exchange about marketing to engineers with advertising/PR agency McClenahan Bruer last February [2007], I made the point that surveys would never tell you what the customer values most. I acknowledged the agency’s point about interviews being limited to a few customers. I just couldn’t agree with their methods.

If you’re mounting an advertising campaign with mass-market techniques, surveys may tell you how old your customers are, their interests, and what they read.

But specifics - their special job challenges, biggest career problems, what gets them out of bed to go to work - won’t come from surveys. You need to ask them.

The best way around the one-on-one interview limitation may be a blog. Before a blog will work, you need to have readership. But it will be a targeted audience, through readers’ own self-selection. And you’ll get answers from more than a few people.

Most corporate marketing departments use techniques they were taught in school. These mass-market gems worked as late as the mid-90s. But online media and the ‘I’ve had it’ factor really killed them. Spammers are the only untargeted mass-marketers left.

Mass marketing always had a high waste factor. A targeted list reduced it, but response rates higher than 3% were considered outstanding. AOL’s carpet-bombing mailboxes with their get-started CDs won them a large market share among early Internet users, but many of those CDs ended up as coasters or landfill fodder.

And you’re sick of unfocused mass marketing. You’re watching less TV and you always tune out or TiVo to avoid commercials. You ignore most magazine ads - no time to read them. When was the last time you actually bought something from a phone solicitation?

Today, blogs and websites cater to very focused people, folks who want to know about specific topics like marketing to small audiences or taking better wildlife pictures without expensive lenses. Paul Gillin describes ideas for interacting with your audience with social networking.

That interaction is the key. Once they start talking to you, your audience will tell you what they like or don’t like, what new features or services they’d pay extra for, and where they find your product. That conversation tells you much more than surveys, and goes far beyond the limits of one-on-one interviews.

It’s the two-way street that makes it work. Your audience has a chance to talk to you about their passion, instead of being shouted at with a message they may not care about.

Sure, maintaining a blog requires good conversational writing skills and a little technical savvy. So did old mass marketing methods. The time spent is the same. And I prefer talking with people to guessing what they want. The old hard sell is dead.