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Editor's Notebook: Marketing, Community, and ITSMA's Online Access I've been thinking a lot about community lately. From a marketing perspective, there are two big questions. First, how can marketing do a better job in contributing to existing communities in which customers, partners, and others spend time and energy? These can include business and trade associations, online interest groups, and formal and informal social networks. Reaching out and providing value to these communities can go a long way toward building awareness, knowledge, and deeper relationships with the folks you're most trying to reach. Second, how can marketing help create new communities that support innovative thinking, new solutions for common problems across different industries and customer sets? These can be customer councils, user groups, issues-based affinity groups, and so on. Sponsoring and leading communities that create real value for its members inspires a degree of trust and loyalty far beyond that of most marketing initiatives. At a time when so much marketing fails to connect with customers, moving to more of a community orientation on either level can pay substantial dividend—if (and it's a big “if”) the efforts are authentic and the value is truly shared. Healthy communities are all about giving and reciprocation; building "communities" with an idea of getting more than you give will backfire fast. Speaking of community, ITSMA is working hard to share the wealth within our own membership community. So there are no more limits on online access. Anyone from a member company can now receive a password to ITSMA's online library, a unique archive of best practice examples, trend reports, new ideas, and practical tools specifically for marketing and selling services and solutions. To register now, visit http://www.itsma.com/access.  [TOP OF PAGE] What's Hot: Brand Differentiation: Five Priorities for Sustainable Advantage Marketing leaders across the technology industry point to brand differentiation as their top challenge in 2005, according to ITSMA research. Industry consolidation and buyer caution put a premium on brand leadership. Yet marketing budgets are barely growing and traditional brand building has fallen prey to the demands for quantifiable sales results. Buyer skepticism tunes out the constant chatter of me-too marketing claims. And the mergers and acquisitions reshaping the industry confuse buyers even more about who can do what for whom. Real differentiation is possible, however, for companies willing to invest creatively in ongoing programs to build and promote a compelling story. Specifically, there are five investment areas that separate today's brand leaders from the rest of the pack: Build a 360-degree view of existing perceptions. Brand research is like spinach. You know it's good for you but it doesn't always taste great and it's easy to leave untouched. But you can't improve your position if you don't really know where you stand now. Maintaining an ongoing pulse on how customers, prospects, employees, partners, investors, and industry influencers perceive your organization, your competitors, and the market as a whole is an essential foundation for strengthening the brand. Understanding in particular the attributes that customers care about most deeply is a powerful guide to the sources of potential differentiation. Manage the customer experience. Achieving differentiation in the services business is not about logos and taglines. It is above all about service delivery. Ensuring the delivery of real business value is the greatest contribution that marketing can make to build the brand-with each customer and, as important, with each additional prospect and influencer your customers touch. Marketers rarely controls service delivery but they can map out the entire customer experience and work toward constant improvement and brand reinforcement every step of the way. In a time when news of service failure travels at warp speed to undermine the brand, no effort to improve the client experience can be too great. Get your story straight internally. Employees are the essential carriers of the brand, and the increasing transparency of all company operations means that the folks outside the marketing department can have as much or more influence on the brand than marketers themselves. Internal education about the brand vision, promise, and proof points is obviously a critical component of building a consistent, companywide brand, but this priority is far better known than done. Equally important is literally having a “story,” not simply a mechanistic set of marketing buzzwords. Finally, the role of brand champions spread across the organization is a vital one. Employees cannot be forced or berated into supporting the company's core proposition. Positive reinforcement is far more likely to succeed. (For more on internal alignment, see “Marketing and HR: Essential Partners for the Branded Experience” in this issue.) Influence the Influencers. Broadcasting the brand has less and less impact in a world of information overload. Buyers and others just say no. But every prospective buyer looks to friends, colleagues, industry analysts, media, and other “influencers” to seek new ideas, evaluate alternatives, and support decisions. The new twist on this old story is that the influence environment has changed dramatically in recent years. Online communities, bloggers, peer networks, and other grassroots information sources have exploded and more are emerging all the time. Marketers need to look systematically at the most important influencers in this new environment and build more systematic programs to engage and persuade them of their company's unique position. Narrowcast. Developing focused programs to enhance competitive position directly with key clients and prospects is the next wave for brand management. Pioneers in account-based positioning point to three reasons why this matters: declining loyalty among top accounts, diverse perceptions within those accounts, and the increasing strategic importance of those accounts for growth, references, and collaboration on new solutions. Narrowcasting for brand differentiation means applying priority positioning techniques to individual or very small groups of accounts—i.e., investing in research, experience management, internal alignment, and influencing the influencers specifically for those accounts. Creating true brand differentiation is not primarily a matter of money. Resources certainly help, but the most important resources are time, focus, creativity, and relationship skills. Everyone remembers the untold millions wasted on the outlandish brand campaigns of the late 1990s. It was enough to give branding a bad name. But there is definitely a better way. Regardless of company size or budget, differentiation is possible when marketers can lead a companywide charge to listen to the market-and learn from it, constantly improve the customer experience, reinforce the brand internally, identify and collaborate with key influencers, and focus intensely on key customers. For more on the differentiation challenge, see Rethinking Brand and Reputation: New Priorities for Sustaining Competitive Advantage. This ITSMA Briefing is available at no charge to ITSMA members and for sale to all others. For more information, visit http://www.itsma.com/research/abstracts/olb032305.htm.
The transformation of the technology industry toward a services and solutions orientation is well underway, and marketing is playing an increasingly central role. ITSMA's Marketing Excellence Awards, the tech industry's Academy Awards for marketing services and solutions, kick off this month with a call for nominations. This means we're looking for your latest and greatest examples of services and solutions marketing success. Award categories for 2005 are:
The deadline for award submissions is June 15, 2005, and we'll unveil the winners at our annual Marketing Matters conference in Cambridge, MA, on November 8-9. Read all about it on the ITSMA Website. Guidelines and application forms are available at http://www.itsma.com/news/mea. Feature The Microsite Alternative: Online Content for Account-Based Marketing With the proliferation of white papers, datasheets, case studies, and product and service descriptions, today's Web marketers are playing a complex role familiar to professional media publishers. The greatest challenge is figuring out how to accurately inform readers while minimizing the time they require to find the most useful or interesting content. The problem is particularly acute for marketers at large technology and services organizations that have hundreds or even thousands of offerings. The typical response is building larger Websites with more complex content management systems. Centralized databases make content management possible, but access and navigation become critical for client, prospects, and other important users. Visitors access a main corporate Website hoping that navigation tools will help them find the content they want in a reasonable amount of time. The centralized approach can be managed effectively with substantial resources and great design skills, but it runs counter to the latest thinking in targeted and account-based marketing. An alternative approach moves away from centralization toward personalization. The new paradigm avoids putting all content into increasingly large repositories for client access, instead personalizing content for direct client delivery. Rather than making a client sort through large amounts of irrelevant information, you can tailor the material to individual requirements with an account-based marketing strategy and publish just the most important content in customized microsites. Tailoring messages and offerings to individual customers and prospects is certainly not new, but advances in online marketing have opened dramatic new possibilities. For example, companies today can utilize special and relatively inexpensive publishing tools to rapidly customize content for specific accounts and assemble this content in light microsites. With a series of microsites, marketers can create more targeted and relevant messages by reducing the range of offers and engaging in a more personalized online dialogue. The microsites become a valuable tool for account-based marketing and provide direct support to a more robust sales process, particularly when the microsites are linked together with a data management capability. The strength of the microsite approach is underlined by its simplicity of execution. In the case of a leading provider of speech-processing technologies and solutions, the microsite approach has enabled a highly targeted marketing and sales effort directed at 500 key global prospects with a limited sales force and partner network. By investing in a network of personalized microsites with customized and time-sensitive content, the company has been able to accelerate and enhance the dialogue as accounts move through the sales process and new offers become available. The use of e-tractions' EnterAct Microsite Publisher (EMP) provides the company with a secure, flexible, and easy-to-use environment for deploying and managing large networks of microsites. Individual microsites are actually initiated by sales representatives based on an automated system managed and updated by the marketing organization. With this system the company's main clients can find all relevant data regarding their own applications, and the software company can efficiently communicate new marketing strategies. The company gains valuable data by consolidating behavior information as its main customers access the microsites network, and clients are spared the cumbersome navigation through the company's main corporate and divisional sites. For marketers intent on moving toward an account-based strategy, the use of intelligent, client-specific microsites is a powerful support system for highly targeted offers and value propositions. Marketing and sales together can quickly and easily develop new microsites, update content for individual clients and prospects, and analyze real-time tracking of client activity. Corporate megasites may still have their uses, but the combination of user impatience and increasingly affordable alternatives suggests that microsites will quickly become an important centerpiece of targeted marketing strategies and campaigns. —Pierre Jean, pjean@e-tractions.com Pierre Jean is Vice President of Sales and Business Development at e-tractions, a leading marketing resource management (MRM) software and services company providing systems to IT and software companies. For more information on e-tractions and microsites, visit http://www.e-tractions.com. Moving to Solutions: You Are What You Are In 1996, Bill Parcells, then coach of the New England Patriots, was asked if his 0-3 football team was in fact better than the record indicated. "You are what you are," Parcells shot back, a simple but surprisingly perceptive response. "We may look like a Super Bowl team on paper, but we're playing like an 0-3 team. And that's just not good enough." The more we learn about solutions, the more we're convinced that you can't become a solutions company by simple declaration or by looking like one on paper. It is not something you announce; it's something you are. You can't simply tell your client base that you are committed to delivering solutions that have a tangible impact on their business operations, and then run a business-as-usual operation. As the old Nike ad campaign pointed out, you have to "just do it." Many of our member companies are working hard at placing a solutions veneer on their old, traditional business model. Their marketing collateral and Websites prattle on about solutions, but the sales forces still hawk products and discrete services. They create new offerings but fail to consult with clients during the process. They claim solutions to be a corporate priority but have no mechanisms in place to measure them. And they hound account executives to sell larger, big-ticket items from the solutions cupboard but maintain a commission structure that still favors services or products. How do you know if you have truly begun to operate as a solutions company, or at least started to turn the corner? Focus on how your employees behave—not on what they say or which solutions titles or positions exist on paper. Nikki Fisher, an ITSMA senior advisor who works extensively on solutions, has identified some telltale signs that demonstrate you are making progress on your solutions journey:
Companies truly committed to mastering solutions focus much more on changing reality than reorienting rhetoric. Marketing has a central role to play in the solutions transformation, but ultimately your customers and prospects will judge you by what you do and how you do it, not what you say. No matter what your marketing messages, at the end of the day "you are what you are." —Steve Hurley, shurley@itsma.com The marketing priorities for solutions will be a major focus of ITSMA's first Marketing Leadership Forum on May 4-5 in San Francisco, with presentations by experts from Accenture, BearingPoint, HP, IBM, Lucent, and other top firms. See event details below and online. EuroNotes: Marketing and HR: Essential Partners for the Branded Experience In a world of services and solutions, customer experience becomes a critical arena for brand differentiation. Customers today have more information at their fingertips and endless choices of providers. They want to be treated as individuals and they want excellent service. If they don't receive it, they go elsewhere to find it. Thus loyalty in both the business world and the consumer world is built by delivering a consistent, valuable, and differentiated experience for the customer. Operations and delivery organizations are the obvious providers of customer experience, but it is equally important to focus on the relationship between marketing and human resources (HR). When these organizations fail to collaborate effectively, a company can spend millions on developing, promoting, and advertising an external brand that is not understood or supported by the employees. The best scenario here is missed opportunities to reinforce your brand through your employees. The worst case is employee attitudes and behaviors that conflict directly with the external messages and promises. Research Desk
New Research Study: Marketing to Small- and Medium-Sized Business Amid a slow-growth environment, many technology and services providers view small and medium-sized business (SMB) buyers as critical sources of revenue and profit. For providers used to dealing with larger enterprise buyers, however, this SMB push requires a rethinking of traditional strategies. ITSMA's new multiclient study, Marketing to Small- and Medium-Sized Business: Establishing Credibility and Routes to Market, explores the requirements for SMB success with an in-depth analysis from two perspectives: providers and customers. The study will explore the latest thinking on SMB marketing for technology services and solutions with input from senior marketers across a range of technology and services companies as well as a representative sample of buyers from the SMB marketplace. For more information on the study, visit http://www.itsma.com/research/prospectus/mk0525_smb05.htm.
[TOP OF PAGE] Upcoming Events Making Marcom Matter: Content, Community, and Conversation
Building Successful Thought Leadership Programs
Building Professional Services Growing Your Solutions Business
Ask ITSMA! Do you have a services marketing question? (c) Copyright 2005, ITSMA Please forward this newsletter, but only in its entirety. Public citation or publication of any information herein is encouraged but subject to U.S. and international copyright law and conventions. Any citation must include full attribution to ITSMA. Individual graphics or paragraphs can be published without permission as long as attribution to ITSMA is included. Publication of longer selections or complete articles requires ITSMA permission. For permission or more information, contact pr@itsma.com. [TOP OF PAGE] Subscription Information Subscriptions are available in text and HTML versions. To SUBSCRIBE or to change the format of your subscription, visit http://www.itsma.com/aspfiles/press/ezine.asp. To UNSUBSCRIBE, please email us at unsubscribe@itsma.com or mail us at ITSMA Subscriptions, 420 Bedford Street, Suite 110, Lexington, MA 02420, USA. Back issues of ITSMA E-ZINE are available at http://www.itsma.com/News/ezine/default.htm. |
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![[Marketing Excellence]](/images/logos/ITSMA_MEAlogo.gif)
2005 Marketing Excellence Awards: ![[Mastering Solutions]](/images/theme/05SF_ill3.gif)
The
move to solutions raises a host of difficult questions for
marketers and others charged with reorienting traditional
ways of doing business. ITSMA's first-ever Mastering Solutions
forum will provide a unique opportunity for solutions leaders
to gather with peers for an in-depth exploration of the requirements
for solutions-led success. The forum will delve deep into
the key issues for solutions transformation, including offer
development, go-to-market strategies, sales enablement, organizational
change, and solutions metrics.![[Marketing Dilemmas]](/images/theme/05AF1.gif)
Are
you being asked to do more with less again this year? Do
you have to balance the need to deliver results today with
the goal of building a strong business for tomorrow? Are
you trying to influence what customers say about you when
you’re not there for the conversation?