Online Marketing 2.0 and the end of instant gratification

June 3, 2010 1 Comment

For anyone that has been heavily involved with online marketing and social media well knows that things are not as easy as they used to be. Far much than just a simple checklist, corporations need to have a well thought plan for their online marketing strategy. No longer can you whip up a few activities and pretty web pages and achieve instant gratification.

Online marketing and social media are now CORE
A Marketing team cannot anymore simply think of online marketing and social media as secondary to having a web site. These are now core and at the heart of today’s Web 2.0 consumers. I would even go as far that the evolution of social media is pushing us closer to a Web 3.0 experience; where personalization, social media integration and the return of industry experts are cornerstone of a leading online marketing strategy.

Results WILL take time (no matter what you do)
One of the hardest component of an online marketing strategy is to understand today’s complexity is achieving media coverage and marketing buildup. Each consumer is bombarded with a heavy dose of content and you cannot expect to cut thru the noise just because you just announced a cool new product and posted a funny video on YouTube. You need to make sure you have the right channels and networks to spread the news.

Building the network and media channels BEFORE you need them
While social media channels such as Twitter followers and Facebook Fan/Like pages are amazing networks to help you create any form of viral marketing, these need to be built before you can use them. This is where a Web 3.0 approach centered on increasing your credibility and showcasing your industry expertise will pay off greatly. Of course, this will require you to invest in vehicles such as writing eBooks/Whitepapers & blogs, taking part in industry panels and providing sounds bites for journalists and industry analysts.

Industry expertise and credibility comes at a price (and takes time)
This is where I find that most corporations are missing the mark. Companies are too quick to drop any investments in writing whitepapers, or contributing on a REGULAR basis to their Company blog. The deeper your content bank is, the stronger you can make a case on your industry expertise. The longer you create such content (and please make it unbiased as much as you possibly can), the more credible you will be. This will take a serious commitment of human resources, time and financial investment.

If you’ve done this the right way, you will eventually get some serious momentum and once you have inertia, you will suddenly be able to leverage this in a serious way; only then can you really take advantage of it and really drive forward your entire business. It might take a few months or even more than a year but just don’t give up too fast and you will thank me once you ride the wave of online marketing success.

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The cost of Marketing and getting media coverage

April 12, 2010 Leave a comment

I always love to see Apple launch new products (iPad) or new updates (iPhone 4.0 SDK) and the quality of their presentation, message and media coverage they are getting. I don’t know a single company that would not love to have such a marketing machine. Many Entrepreneurs will just assume that this is only possible once you have a gazillion of dollars to spend on Marketing. But then again, if it were the case, every other Fortune 500 company would be just as good, right? While money is key in doing things at a greater scale, there are some basic fundamentals that every company can apply to get an excellent Marketing foundation – that will get just more impressive once you have more money to spend on product launches and marketing campaigns.

Marketing takes time

That is perhaps the most important point. No matter how some people think that marketing can be done in a quickie, it is far from the truth. First, you need to build a team and that does not end once you have hired the staff. As a rule of thumb, I assume that building a team and getting all the contributors to be working as a unified group takes at LEAST 6 months. It does not mean that nothing can be done in the meantime, but you can’t expect a team to function and work cohesively in less time than this (no matter how much you pout, scream, put your foot down and lose patience). I have a similar rule for tracking the impact of Marketing. Getting market traction and media coverage takes time, you won’t get it from a single event or even worse – expecting that one press release or a snazzy re-designed web site will do the trick. Consumers are bombarded with news and information; it takes time to imprint brand value and media awareness into the cerebral cortex…

Spikes vs. marketing buildup

Entrepreneurs (and their CFO) do not often see the hidden cost of doing sporadic Marketing activities. The amount of energy and time that you need to put in order to get a single event to move the needle on media coverage is borderline insane. But I still see companies every day still hoping that this will work for them. What startups don’t seem to understand is that marketing is all about buildup. This is just like collecting wine. Every time someone asks me how I got to build my wine collection (I have about 600 bottles), I simply answer that I just buy a little more than what I drink. After time, this builds up to bigger numbers. Now if I was trying to build the same wine collection over a small amount of time – the effort, pain and cost would be much higher than what it took doing it the right way (if you just won the lottery disregard this comment…). Think of marketing as a long term buildup that after a while (and this is at least beyond a yearly cycle), you will be doing more and more Marketing activities that combined will have a real impact over your business.

Planning and process
In order to get marketing buildup, you need to plan ahead and have simple, yet effective processes. Activities such as blogging, tweeting, writing customer stories & eBooks, and doing press releases all need to fit in a marketing timeline that allows you to successfully spread your message. Each element needs to have it’s own process where things are done on a regular basis and ultimately effortlessly. If each time you write something on your blog, it eats too much of your time, it will be very hard to continue contributing on a regular basis. Without a due process and regularity, you cannot yield more output from your Marketing team. As an example, I rarely take more than 30 min to write each of my blogs. Writing a few times a week then only takes me an hour (two at the most) to support my blogging effort. If it was more than this, I would not be able to sustain such a frequency…

Bottom line is that marketing is more of a process and takes longer than most entrepreneurs are willing to accept. Never underestimate the cost of building a team, and getting this Marketing buildup. Without patience, you will just simply keep changing your team every 6 months to a year, continuously re-working the foundation (and web site) and never achieve any kind of Marketing momentum and media coverage you desire.

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The art of building hype

October 28, 2009 Leave a comment

Nothing is more exciting as having lots of industry and media hype when launching a new product. But how do you get this hype? How can you get lots of people to generate momentum around your release, giving you the ultimate result in demand generation? As an example we will look that the current media coverage that Apple is getting on a product that is not even 100% sure they will ever launch (a.k.a. Apple Tablet).

Identify a market problem

Is there a fundamental market problem that your new product will resolve? What are the specific customer pains that you will be addressing? A company can talk for weeks and months about market problems without having to say what you will do about it. This is key in creating a position for your business – even more when a market is already crowded. Being effective in creating a gap in a market will be highly efficient in demand generation as you prepare your launch. Last April, Apple’s chief operating officer Tim Cook, took some sharp jabs at netbooks: “For us, it’s about doing great products,” Cook said. “When I look at netbooks, I see cramped keyboards, terrible software, junky hardware, very small screens. It’s just not a good consumer experience and not something we would put the Mac brand on”. You already know how they will differentiate themselves IF they were to enter the market.

Line up (and align) your messages towards the big day

Be consistent and coherent in your messaging. This goes for all channels you will use for communication (including employees tweeting). Each message should build on what was previously announced or talked about. The clearer the path towards an “obvious” product release, the more hype you will get. In the case of Apple, there is a lot of people that follow their patent portfolio as well as all the other actions they are doing (and sometimes not) such as iTunes LP, rejecting all ebook apps from the App Store or Steve Jobs being personally involved in the development of a “new” product.

Social media is great for the rumor mill

In today’s world, there are many tools available with Social Media that are immensely powerful in generating demand. And since anyone can write anonymously, it does not take much to have people spread positive rumors that support your official channels. Get your customers and market to discuss potential new product releases. This can also be done with industry driven discussion forums or communities. As well, pre-disclosing the media under a controlled embargo can be quite powerful (“I have seen something and it’s amazing – just can’t talk about it just yet”). Again with Apple, there is almost not one day that there is not an analyst article, rumor from an Asian manufacturer or just plain little tidbits (and sometimes fake rendition of the Apple Tablet) that fuels the market with hype. Currently you can see 1-2 tweet on this rumor coming out every minute (more than 100 tweets per hour).

Make it relevant

Media and market hype only happens when what you are trying to buildup is relevant to the target audience. If you are the only one that thinks that what you are saying on the web is interesting, then you will never achieve real market hype. And please don’t just keep saying that what you will be announcing soon will be revolutionary – let the others say it. Per Tim Cook’s definition of what’s wrong with current netbooks (and no one has denied his claims) and some of the success of the other ebooks or netbooks, customers are already indicating a desire to get a better Tablet/Netbook. This is all too similar on how Apple entered the MP3 and the mobile market.

If a tree falls in a forest, does it make any sound?

Ultimately, never forget that hype is as strong as a lot of people spread the good news. So make sure people will have a common interest in what you are trying to announce. Just expecting a flurry of media coverage at time of announce does not cut it anymore …

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Apple’s Netbook/Tablet and how to differentiate yourself pre-launch

August 25, 2009 1 Comment

From a Marketing perspective, there is a lot of pressure to draw solid market traction immediately out of the gate. How many hits will you get on the web site, how many people are blogging about yourself. To all my Marketing friends: the world has changed and instant effect (although still possible) is quite hard to achieve nowadays. The arrival of blogging and rumor sites is fueled with leaks of upcoming product releases and your future customers are craving it.

Even if you have a large launch budget, nothing comes closer to having momentum from a good buildup. Take for example the upcoming movie Avatar. For the past week, there has been a flurry of web activity around the trailer made available and the exclusive previews in theater. This is huge when in comes to advertising value – most of it fueled by blogs and web sites such as MTV

So how can you use such buildup to create a differentiator for your upcoming release? Let’s take a look at a company this is a master in doing this: Apple. Last April, Apple’s chief operating officer Tim Cook, took some sharp jabs at netbooks (computers that are smaller and cheaper than laptops). “For us, it’s about doing great products,” Cook said. “When I look at netbooks, I see cramped keyboards, terrible software, junky hardware, very small screens. It’s just not a good consumer experience and not something we would put the Mac brand on. It’s a segment we would not choose to play in.”

So we don’t need to ask ourselves WHEN Apple will come out with a Netbook/Tablet but rather HOW it will change the market. The key to this is to clearly identify the elements that you want to differentiate and publicly mark those as negatives in other “competing” products. Then announces something new that beautifully addresses those problems. From fixing the small keyboard issue, empowering with either iphone or OSX, having a sexy design and higher screen size ; Apple will announce something that for many will be tagged as the real netbook this becoming the reference. Also as you can see there is not positioning on price or weight so while these are currently used by other players in the netbook segment, Apple won’t be competing on these elements.

Of course, everybody that reads blogs such as Twitter, Macrumors.com or Alltop.com won’t be surprised. But expect the other netbook players to be in a scramble immediately after the product announcement – like they could not have forecasted what was to come….

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