Author Archives: Anthony Nygren

When Engineers Speak: 4 Key Cloud Marketing Implications

For marketers, almost nothing is as valuable as hearing the unvarnished, unfiltered point-of-view of buyers. At last week’s Massachusetts Tech Leadership Council’s “Cloud Seminar: Choosing the Right Cloud for Your Business,” marketers would have had a lot to listen to.

Speaking to a sophisticated, engineer-centric audience with over 20 years’ experience in development and operations, GitHub’s Mark Imbriaco didn’t pull any punches in presenting his perspective on the myths and realities of the benefits of the cloud.

  • Cost savings? Myth.
  • Means of avoiding IT bottlenecks? Myth.
  • Driver of increased agility and speed to market? Definite reality.

From a value proposition perspective, the implications are clear: be wary of emphasizing cost and operational advantages of your cloud solution because they’ll like meet with skepticism.

A panel discussion featuring engineering executives from Carbonite, Ipswitch, Acquia, and Scribe built on Mr. Imbriaco’s perspective. In responding to questions about their infrastructure evolution, they said that decisions about when and how to deploy IaaS, PaaS, and S(torage)aaS would always be based on the strategic business needs for a given initiative or project: when time-to-market is critical or in which utilization is highly unpredictable, cloud is attractive; in a scenario with consistent demands and a need to control variable costs, cloud is a poor choice.

This nuanced view of the application of cloud services should point marketers towards the development of materials and campaigns that enable the customer to drive the buying process based on specific requirements for specific projects. Specifically, the following would likely be effective:

  • Inbound marketing to allow prospective customers to pursue the information most useful to them
  • Web-based self-diagnostics to help prospective customers learn which cloud solution may be the right one for them
  • Sales enablement tools to facilitate sales’ role as a partner and helpful guide
  • Cross/up-sell marketing based on utilization data to take advantage of natural evolution of needs

Where online sale of lip gloss and B2B software customer retention converge

Sometimes marketing inspiration and confirmation of instincts comes from places you wouldn’t normally look. This recent blog post on getelastic.com is case in point: http://www.getelastic.com/the-easiest-way-to-increase-conversion-by-20/. On the face of it, this post would seem to be quite far afield from the world of customer retention in B2B software, or any of the other B2B industries in which EMI works for that matter. And indeed there isn’t much that links lip gloss and software; but there is a link in the approach to solving marketing challenges.

The getelastic blog post starts off with a research-based data point: ecommerce customers are 20% more likely to purchase a product that has at least one customer review. Then, based on that data point, it presents several reasonable ways to obtain that key *first* review. The ways to do this are only important if you’re interested in driving web purchases. What’s important outside that context – and especially in a B2B context like CSM strategy for SaaS – is the way in which marketing research and analytics have identified an operational measure which becomes the strategic focus. Increasing web sales is obviously the business goal, but it’s so broad and influenced by so many factors that it’s unwieldy as an operational focus. By isolating one key factor that has a significant impact on the objective, exploration and testing of tactical options becomes significantly easier. In mathematical terms, you solve for “reviews” because you know that it will drive conversions.

Take this approach out of the world of online sales of lip gloss and into the world of B2B software customer retention and it is still just as effective. Retention is impacted by a multitude of factors –satisfaction, perceived value, switching costs, depth and breadth of utilization – each of which can be affected by a set of strategies and tactics. To optimize retention, you must first sift through all the potential factors to identify those that actually have the greatest impact. Once you have effectively ranked the factors based on their likely impact, then you can develop retention marketing strategies – new communications approaches, new messaging, testing – that specifically and precisely aim to drive improvement in that factor.

The Three Questions to Ask to Build Sustainable Social Success

Two research studies have been published in the last few weeks (see: http://bit.ly/WqC1Jm and http://bit.ly/WgZiPi) that highlight the same contradiction: while social media marketing has become almost ubiquitous among B2B companies, a minority of them can actually point to its quantitative contribution to the company’s success. From our experience working with and talking to companies about social media marketing, the reason is clear: they don’t start with a strategic foundation.

With social, that lack of a foundation can be even more dangerous than with other marketing activities. Once started, social can quickly turn into an exercise in “feeding the beast”—pushing activity as an end rather than a means to a strategic objective. Even if there were kernels of a strategy at the outset of the social program, they can easily get overrun by the runaway train of pursuing more followers, likes, friends, retweets, connections, etc.

The way to avoid this path of frenetic and less-than-satisfying activity is to start with a framework that enables the implementation of a social media marketing plan that is both strategically-grounded and operationally feasible. At EMI, that framework is constructed through finding the activities and media that sit at the intersection between the answers to three questions:

  • What are the key business challenges?
  • What are the social channels the target audience is active on today?
  • What is the capacity of the organization to execute social marketing programs?

The answers to each of these questions alone can help shape a social strategy that isn’t a complete failure, but it is only when you find the areas of intersection that you will be able to define the channels and messages that will set the initiative on a path to sustainable success. For example, knowing that your business needs to build awareness among your target market will drive some effective decisions about media and messaging, but if you choose to launch a Facebook presence and your target customers aren’t active Facebook users, your results will fall short of expectations. Moreover, if you discover that your target customers are on Twitter and launch a Twitter program, but don’t have the resources to monitor, tweet, and create tweet-able content, your effort will likely end up failing to gain traction because of a lack of relevant, engaging activity.