BOW+ARROW

As goes the technology-driven business, so goes its marketing

October 31st, 2008
by Hugh Kennedy

Over the past six weeks we’ve been preparing for a pitch that gets at what’s been going on in a specific segment of the B2B market but affects nearly all businesses. That is, now that companies have put technology at the heart of their businesses, grafted it into their very DNA, they are able to do amazing things. Yet they also are feeling significant new demands as the bar between them and competitive advantage just keeps rising. It’s as if each technology-driven company is a software sales rep, and last year’s amazing sales performance has suddenly become this year’s minimum expected number.

Here are two examples of this new level of competitiveness, noted by a friend of the agency:
o    A one-second better transaction performance than the next guy is worth $100 million in revenue to a financial services company.
o    All information providers to the New York Stock Exchange must supply the same length of cable onto the trading floor so no unfair advantage is created.

Over time, of course, the blazing speeds required at financial services firms will become the stock in trade of supply chain companies and eventually consumers. Preparing for our pitch, we heard one VP of IT explain with something between amusement and exasperation that the doctors in his hospital can’t understand why they can’t do an MRI on a patient in the basement and access it on their PCs upstairs two minutes later. FYI: that can easily be sixty gigabytes of data.

Of course, there’s not a lot you can do to simplify the IT complexity behind the new technology-driven company, but you can look for ways to simplify the management of that complexity. One clear sign that this is going on is that data centers are centralizing again (with marketing departments soon to follow), and depending on who you read or hear, estimates for 2009 still predict a rise in IT spending of up to 4 percent.

All this being said, what’s in store for technology marketing in 2009? If user demands are indeed driving the way businesses are architected and nearly all businesses now rely acutely on technology, it stands to reason that there will be a lot of confusion, a lot of questions, a lot of opportunistic new players, and a megaton of crappy PowerPoint slides.

A few suggestions on you should keep yourself in the game:

1.    People will have to make very tough choices about the investments they make, so educate them about how to make the right choice now. A search engine marketing seminar we attended this week revealed a huge spike in IT decision-maker searches with words like “comparison” and “vs.” People clearly need guidance. (And remember that CIOs are the most avid readers in the IT world.)

2.    Ensure that your brand sets the table for engaging your audience, but don’t dive to feeds and speeds two minutes after you say hello. Build an integrated, thoughtful campaign with executive guides as well as white papers, conferences as well as trade shows.

3.    Remember that you’re not a tool or solution vendor: you’re the answer to someone’s problem. You’re here to provide customer value. Find out what the customer’s problem is and how to solve it.

4.    Be mobile. If you read The Wall Street Journal on Monday, you probably saw the provocatively titled article Why It May Be Time to Leave the Laptop Behind. The number of companies with mobile Web sites is still pretty shockingly low.

5.    Help someone feel smarter and more competitive with your marketing. Step out of the cliché muck. In some markets it’s not about knowing all the answers: it’s just knowing the right questions to ask.

Category: Planning, Technology | Get the feed | Comment | Trackback