The comeback of offline marketing. Yes, offline.

Online marketing, inbound marketing, content marketing, social media marketing - unless you spent the last 10 years in a cave, you are probably dancing the marketing 2.0 dance yourself.

Problem is, online marketing has become a crowded, noisy party. It's open to all, and it's virtually free.

We all understand the importance of building value adding content, of connecting with our tribe through social media, of sending drip email campaigns, of creating dazzling infographics and running virtual events. We do all of the above and more at the company I work at now, Leadspace, too.

As head of Marketing at a tech startup, I'm a prime target to hundreds of software vendors, numerous agencies and herds of freelancers. On an average day I get north of 200 emails, hundreds of tweets, dozens of webinar invites, e-book download offers, e-newsletters, content shares... you get the drift.

Take LinkedIn as an example. When was the last time you took part in a genuine, valuable, educational discussion on any LinkedIn group? Post a question and a dozen vendors are hitting you. Social networks have become a hunting ground for salespeople 2.0.

Perhaps it's just me, but are we beginning to experience social media fatigue? Is content marketing past the peak of inflated expectations?

Is it time for a comeback of the "old" way of marketing? Of "look 'em in the eyes" type of of marketing? Of the trade show, the seminar, the in-person meeting?

Ok, online marketing isn't going anywhere. Nor is social media marketing, or content marketing. But it seems that people are clamoring for a little more personal touch.

Something to think about as you build your 2013 marketing budget.

Chimps, monsters and super heroes - the new world of software

Google proved you can hide ultra sophisticated technologies and mountains of big data under a page that has one text field and two buttons. Apple showed you can create a phone-to-die-for that does not even have a search feature. At some point, some software companies got it. Simplicity is the new black (white too, if you're Apple).

Alan Cooper, the father of Visual Basic, once said all users want is to "not feel stupid".

The old generation business and IT apps made all of us feel stupid. Real stupid. But the world of software is changing. Some examples:

Marketing automation can be fun!

MailChimp enables marketers to execute and manage email campaigns. It requires no training whatsoever. The interface is beautifully crafted, and the application "hand holds" you from the moment you sign up until you complete your first campaign. A few more features and I bet they will start winning accounts from the higher end, painfully more complicated Eloqua and Marketo.



Monitoring e-commerce sites can be fun!

Shoppimon helps Magento online store owners improve conversions by finding site problems, such as broken shopping carts or unusual slow responses. It is the first service that lets non-techies take matters into their own hands and see how their store performs. Sure, they'll need techies for fixing issues, but they will never leave their store unattended again, and the app is ridiculously easy to set up and use.



Server provisioning can be fun!

PHPCloud is a full-fledged cloud environment for building PHP applications. If you're a PHP developer that hates the hassle of going to IT every time you need a new test environment, PHPCloud is the answer. Sign up and within minutes your environment is ready for you.



There are dozens of other examples. DropBox, SEOmoz, New Relic, Balsamiq, Wix, SlideRocket are some that I used and loved.

The world of software is changing. "Simple" wins.

Social media is not about free advertising!

Ask heads of marketing if they use social media as part of their marketing strategy, and I bet you 9 out of 10 will say yes.

The question is how many really get social media.

If you're like me, you are a member in several groups on LinkedIn, you're on Facebook (although if you're like me, you rarely use it nowadays), you're on Twitter, you're on Quora. Now think about LinkedIn groups. Although I haven't done any formal analysis, it seems like the vast majority of posts on these groups are either people selling or people recruiting. Genuine value-adding discussions are rare. They are rare on most social networks and it ain't getting better. Why? Because we marketers jumped on the opportunity to reach highly targeted audiences. And hey, it's free.

But social media is not about free advertising space.

Those who use it merely for promoting their products or upcoming events are not really getting the true essence of social media. It is all about interaction. It is about sharing knowledge, helping others, entertaining. This is the reason why you need subject matter experts to get active in your company's social media outreach.

Unless you're selling to marketers, if you have the word "marketing" in your title, you should probably stay away and let the experts engage with the community.

Top 10 rules of software demos

Over the years I have delivered more demos than I can count. I demo'ed to investors, prospects, customers, analysts, journalist and other vendors. I also got to watch many others deliver demos.

These are my very own top 10 rules for delivering a killer demo:

1. Establish goals - every demo must have a very specific goal (otherwise why do it). If you're in enterprise software, the goal is often to get to a proof of concept. If you're meeting with a potential investor, the goal might be to explain the problem and how your product solves it differently from alternatives. Make sure every member of your team agrees on the goal prior to the meeting.
2. Customize - in most cases, you have ample information about the audience before going into the meeting. The more you customize the demo to talk to the specific prospect's processes and pain points, the more effective it will be.
3. Prepare - Murphy's law holds true when it comes to demos. The more important the demo is, the more likely it is to fail. Make sure your VM's are ready, you have enough battery power, Internet connection is working, etc., and always have a back up plan. If you're meeting in a hotel and Wi-Fi isn't working fast enough, you already made a bad first impression.
4. Time - make sure you allocate enough time for the demo. When you demo to executives, keep it short. You should be able to get your points across in less than 5 minutes. When you do a deep dive technology demo, plan for 45 minutes or more. Always re-confirm the time when you start.
5. Tell a story - the worst demos are a reflection of a reference manual - a laundry list of technical features. Every demo should tell a story. A good demo tells a story the audience will identify with using the prospect's terminology (see point 2). Remember that most chances are your prospect doesn't care much about your product or technology. It's all about solving particular problems they have or letting them do things they weren't able to do before. Make the prospect think what her life would look like if only she had used your product. Demo is about storytelling, not reading from a fact sheet.
6. Explain - always explain what happens on the screen, what you do and what happens as a result. Remember this is the first time your audience sees your product. Don't ask them to imagine. Tell them how every capability will work in their environment and help them meet a need they have.
   
7. Lay land mines - your audience is likely to see competitor demos, so try to weave in land mines - capabilities your competitors will have a hard time demonstrating. For example, if your differentiator is ease-of-use, show workflows that emphasize this attribute of your product.
8. Interact - giving a 60 minute monolog is easy. It's also a bad idea. Make your demos interactive. Ask the audience questions like "how would you do X in your company?" or "would this help you do Y?". Asking questions keeps your audience engaged and helps you determine sentiment and fine-tune your script. This is especially critical for remote demos, when you can't see if your audience watches your demo or does email.
9. Maintain course - especially when demo'ing to a large group, there will always be a wise guy trying to side track you, usually by asking some real deep questions about a non-important part of your product. It's always better to ask that person to take it offline after the meeting, otherwise you may run out of time and cause everyone else to lose interest.
10. Know when to stop - the golden rule is you need to end the demo as soon as you have reached your goal (see point 1). Remember, the demo is just a means to get to the next phase of the sales cycle, so use any extra time to discuss the next step, or cut the meeting shorter than planned. Your audience will appreciate it.

Happy demo'ing.

The lost art of listening

I wrote here before about how marketers should be conversing with prospects and customers. I'm still struck by how many marketing and sales professionals excel at talking and terrible at listening.

Reading from a sales script or 'shouting' about your ultra cool product/service/webinar/video via email, Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook and Pinterest is is so much easier than listening to what the prospect/customer/community has to say.

I recently attended a meeting with a sales rep from one of the leading marketing automation tool vendors. Before the rep went into the demo, we mentioned that we are already pretty educated about the tool, we think it can do the job for us, and only have a couple of questions we would love to get answers to.

The rep acknowledged, but rather than answering our simple questions, gave us a 45 minute rundown of every possible feature in the product. "You can do this", and "you can see that". Needless to say the demo was generic and did not relate to any of our use cases. 45 minutes later we again raised our question, just to hear that the rep doesn't know the answer and will need to "get back to us".

In all my years in hi-tech, I have delivered hundreds of demos. One of the biggest questions you always face is when to end the demo. The answer is astonishingly simple - stop when you have reached your goal and the prospect is ready to move to the next phase, e.g. discuss a POC. The problem? You need to listen to what the prospect says. You have to watch his body signals. You have to ask questions.

We have an unprecedented number of communication means, yet it seems we're losing our ability to converse.

The Conversation Prism www.theconversationprism.com

Wait, can you answer these 3 questions about your new product?

Just before you start building your shiny new product (which will undoubtedly re-define the way we think of <insert-your-market-here>), make sure you have answers to the following questions:

1. Who will be buying and who will be using your product?
2. What need does your product address for those identified in the first question?
3. How is your product significantly better than other solutions that satisfy the need listed in the second question?

Pretty basic Marketing 101 stuff, right? As bizzare as it may seem, many of the entrepreneurs and heads of marketing I meet either fail to ask these questions or fail to internally agree on what the answers are.

Before devising financial models, estimating conversion rates, building go-to-market plans, creating cutting-edge websites and investing in marketing automation, make sure you have your bases covered - truly understand your target personas, figure out if they would care about your product and why they would prefer it over alternatives.

Note that the answers will most likely change along the way, so keep asking...

PS: While in the process of posting I received Seth Godin's latest post that talks about people's reluctance to ask hard questions... great minds ;)

Social media insights from the 60's

Social media is anything but new. Social engagement, social sharing and even social media marketing have been in existence long before Mark Zuckerberg built Facebook and Reid Hoffman launched LinkedIn.

Back in 1966(!), Ernest Dichter, the "father of motivational research", conducted a large study of word of mouth. One of the questions he looked at is what's driving people to communicate about brands. He identified four motivations:

1. A product delivers an outstanding experience that must be shared
2. An individual wants to gain attention or assert superiority
3. A person wants to express neighborliness, caring, and friendship
4. A message is so humorous or informative that it deserves sharing

Dichter's findings from almost 50 years ago still hold true. The underlying concept of social media hasn't changed. What the Internet and social media tools allowed us to do is take an age long practice and scale it almost infinitely.

The research brings up another important point that I discussed in this blog. The product is the most important ingredient in the marketing strategy.

Witty social media campaigns, snazzy web sites and even good content will not compensate for a bad product...