We can work with you to develop your marketing strategy and plans, prioritize your markets, industries and geographies; help you develop market positioning, value propositions and overall messaging ...
We will help you choose the right mix of marketing channels to match your business objectives and budget: Website, Search, Email, Social Media ...
We will help you define and create great content to engage your audience; articles, white papers, webinars, videos ...
We will help you choose and implement best of breed marketing tools: SEO, PPC, Visitor Tracking, Analytics, Marketing Automation, Social Media Monitoring ...
We will help you rapidly build or augment, and then sustain your sales pipeline of highly qualified prospects.
We know how to build large global audiences for hi-tech companies - people who don't yet know you or your product or service.
Building a large database of contacts can be prohibitively expensive and take a long time.
But we know how to do this really fast, and on a budget even a very young or small company can afford.
We know how to convert suspects into prospects - we do this with style & class, we engage your audience professionally, we automate the process, and we don't do spam !
Lead Nurturing
When a contact in a company first starts engaging with your marketing content, most of the time they aren't ready to purchase.
There's a cycle we all go through from "I'm OK thank you, no problems" - all the way to intensively researching a solution to a problem we are committed to solving - and have budget for. This cycle may only be a few weeks, but can continue for a year or even longer.
It is absolutely essential to cultivate contacts from their first interaction. If its a few weeks - great! but we need to be prepared for the nurturing cycle to be months or a year or more.
To do this across a large contact base we must automate the process - and we must provide timely & engaging content.
Just as there is a Sales Cycle, there is a Marketing Cycle.
Status Quo, Priority Shift, Research for Options, Product Trial, Validation of Choice, Step Backs ...
An effective marketing organization must have multiple content offerings for each of the stages a person will go through - addressing the different questions at the different stages.
For example:
At Status Quo:
Why should I change ?
What will happen if I don't do anything ?
What triggers would force me to need to solve this ?
How are my peers and competitors addressing this issue ?
How is the issue impacting my industry ?
Then at the later stage of Choice Validation:
Beyond the initial project budget what's the total cost of ... ?
How are people, companies like me, finding success with ... ?
In what ways will choosing this solution affect my professional ... ?
What's the return on investment and how long will it take ... ?
What will happen when my needs scale and extend to ... ?
Why should I trust your company to help me solve ... ?
All the key questions that your potential buyers could and likely will ask at all the different stages must be defined up front, and the content developed to inform, educate, maybe entertain, and certainly answer those questions.
You'll need an editorial capability (or outsource it) and an editorial schedule - you'll need to correctly map the content to the stages - and set up a sophisticated marketing automation system to deliver the right content to the right people at the right time.
We have in depth experience of all this and can help you set up, execute and manage best in class content development and marketing automation.
In the recent 2-3 years a new software category has emerged called Marketing Automation.
The market leaders include Marketo, Eloqua, Silverpop, Genius & Pardot.
These are sophisticated systems that perform a wide range of functions including: Tracking web page visits, creating landing pages & opt-in forms, email campaigns including multi-step, rule based "drip nurturing", lead scoring, and all kinds of reporting and dashboards.
These systems have a learning curve and also require quite a bit of "grunt" work and administration to sustain.
"Proper" Marketing Automation is very important - global marketing won't scale without it.
We can help you select, implement and drive the most appropriate marketing automation system that meets your needs in terms of cost and overall functionality.
Social Media in the context of marketing currently means: Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, LinkedIn, Ning & Blogs. (Unless you are marketing in Russia, China or South America where some other networks are more prevalent).
Using Social Media for Marketing (and Customer Support) is an emerging art.
Social networking is accelerating through the rapid uptake of mobile tools - "Smart Phones" like the iPhone, Motorola Droid, and the soon to be announced (I wrote this December 22nd 2009) Google Nexus One phone.
There are many who claim to be experts, but few who are - mainly because the field is experimental & evolving so fast.
Social Media is totally synergistic with other mainstream marketing channels. For example: Twitter & LinkedIn Groups to spread the word, and a Facebook fan page to locate and amplify the buzz ....
We have been studying and using social media since 2006.
We won't give you unrealistic expectations, but the fact is, we and most pundits are predicting that social media will play a fast increasing role for "inbound" lead generation.
So you will likely need to get on this band-wagon, or if you are already on it, will want to explore new and increasingly innovative ways of using it in 2010 and beyond.
We can help you get up to speed on what's working and what's not, introduce you to latest tools to leverage these networks - and provide hands on implementation support.