Marketing, Ahead or Behind?

This weeks Businessweek (page 17) is asserting that China must be over because there are so many books written about the bull market there. Apparently, a hot book trend is a signal of a “soon-to-burst bubble” or so they say. Truthfully, rarely has there been a get quick rich fad that has worked out for most of the participants. Biotech market in the 1980’s, .com bust of the 90’s, the housing market of 2000’s and so on and so forth.

Every time a message is repeated by enough people it leads to saturation and less people pay attention.

Which is why most blogs don’t get the traffic even though they report the same news as the larger networks.

Which is why your marketing, probably, has a sucky return.

Hitting the nerve yet? 🙂 Ever wondered why 99% of the direct mail goes to garbage? Because we’ve all seen the same thing over and over and over again. Aren’t you at the point where you no longer even look at the message, you can tell what its going to say just by the wrapper or the sender?

While I can’t help you much about your direct mail efforts, both because I am not a marketing genius and because I don’t have a cup size to qualify me as one, I can help you a little with your marketing efforts to existing client base. Yes, you do need to market to the people that have already given you money. I’ve discussed the success of OwnWebNow here so many times by now you can probably recite it backwards.

We write the software and provide solutions that we think our clients want to buy.

We discuss what we are working on with our client, what we intend to sell.

Our clients tell us what they like about our solutions, what they don’t like about our solutions, and what they want to buy.

We go back and we make the products and solutions our clients want to buy.

Yeah, I’m that big of a genius.

But what if you don’t have the luxury of creating your own software or tailoring your own solutions for the people you already sell to? The easiest way to make money is to make it a reoccurring revenue stream. But most people sell like this:

Ok, so your server is now online and you are all set. We got the system powerful enough so we can upgrade to XYZ when it comes out.

<Zzz… nothing happens for two years>

Hey, XYZ is out, remember we talked about it two years ago? How many can I put you down for? Zero? Your current stuff is good enough? No it’s not, look at ..

And then you lose a client.

It is much easier to have happy clients with inbound marketing, and those leading to the word of mouth references, than it is to spam the world which doesn’t want to hear from you.

Repetitive messages bring desire. Discussing a solution, bringing up a point of view and potential use, highlighting industry trends… those all lead to forming a concept in the clients mind that something is going on, that they can rely on it.

It gives them time to consider how they could use it, so they can fit it into their thinking.

I guarantee you that you will NOT be able to sell Cougar when it ships later this year.

I guarantee that SBS 2003 is not just good enough, but we finally got it to work and that is just too much money for something that, yes, looks pretty.

You won’t be able to sell Cougar in September.

But you can start to sell it now. Marketing differentiation: quick poll, how many of your newsletters have highlighted a feature of Cougar that your clients might have a use for, that they need to start thinking and expecting now? And how many of your competitors are talking about it?