Mediaboss Marketing

After a rough year for the tech industry, things are starting to look up.

In Q1 2021, tech businesses are likely to see a slow movement back towards normal levels of demand but maybe not full economic recovery. Your business will likely still have to cope with lower levels of consumer and business confidence, a weakened economy and the knock-on effects of a strained supply chain, making tech sales more challenging.

In IT, for example, Gartner predicts sales growth over 2020 but still a lot less demand compared to what we saw in 2019.

These eight tips will help any business improve their tech sales in Q1 ahead of the full recovery that economists continue to predict will start sometime in early or mid-2021.

Old strategies of B2B marketing cold-calling, networking events and impersonal email blasts arent as effective as they used to be. Now is the time to take advantage of virtual sales processes wherever you can.

Taking an omnichannel approach to sales prospecting and using all the data you have at your disposal can provide you with a real competitive advantage.

Right now, B2B customers, just like consumers in general, want marketing that is more personalized and more tailored to their particular needs and tastes and a major portion of B2B marketers believe theyre not doing enough to personalize their marketing efforts.

Adopting sales strategies like email campaigns that take into account client preferences, targeted advertising and digital events may be necessary if you want to find success in 2021.

With resources tight, inefficient processes can be a major pain point for B2B clients. Tools that help clients and individual customers get more done may be especially appealing right now.

When advertising, it may be a good strategy to emphasize how your products can boost customer efficiency allowing them to do more with less.

What businesses dont have right now is a lot of slack. With demand down and the labor market unpredictable, many companies are working with limited staff who may still be adjusting to team collaboration in the era of working from home (WFH).

The pandemic isnt going to last forever but shifts in business workflows and consumer preferences tend to stick around well after a crisis ends. There are already some signs that businesses will continue to offer work-from-home options and that workers who transitioned to remote work earlier in the year may continue to work from home, even once its safe to return to the office.

Improving support for remote collaboration may be a solid long-term strategy even if lockdown measures are lifted in just a few months.

The new year means a fresh start and a great opportunity to take another look at your pricing structure.

During Q1, you may want to take quick stock of your sales data and see if your current pricing model works for your customers. You can use metrics like plan-by-plan conversion rates to see which plans are selling and which ones dont grab the interest of potential customers.

If your clients tend to gravitate towards one plan, leaving others behind, that may be a sign that you should reorganize or simplify how you price your services.

Maybe customers pick your cheapest or most expensive service, with just a handful opting for middle-tier options. Simplifying your pricing structure could help make the buying process a little smoother without limiting customers options.

You may also find that it makes more sense to price based on use, charging by how much support or resources a client needs.

The right changes can go a long way in helping customers find the plan that fits their needs.

Your business can also take advantage of new sales automation tech to improve internal workflows.

Chatbots and various new sales automation tools can make it easier for your sales reps and customer service agents to handle requests potentially giving them more time to spend on the complex problems that require full attention and creative thinking.

Even simpler robotic process automation (RPA) software can go a long way in managing repetitive tasks and freeing up your administrative staff for work that requires a human touch.

Business growth doesnt always mean new customers. Current clients are just as important to growing revenue as new clients and because you already have an existing relationship with them, it can be more efficient to sell new products directly to them.

Depending on the product range you sell, it may be better to focus on cross-selling to existing clients in some cases, rather than pursuing new clients.

No matter how slow your Q4 was, marketing will continue to be key to business success. You may not necessarily want to increase marketing spending, but you definitely dont want to cut your current ad budget.

If you find that your current marketing spend isnt helping your business grow, its a better idea to optimize rather than reallocate funds. Adopting new marketing methods that have proven effective during the pandemic like social marketing, word-of-mouth marketing and even influencer marketing may be a good strategy for optimizing your budget and boosting sales.

As companies move more and more of their data to the cloud, cybersecurity has become an even more important topic for tech businesses.

If youre holding on to customer data or helping companies manage transitions to the cloud, you and your sales reps should be able to answer some basic questions about data security. If prompted, its good to be able to tell customers what youre doing to ensure data is protected from hackers and cybercriminals.

2021 is likely to be a lot more normal than 2020. However, tech businesses may still be in for a few rough months.

Companies wanting to boost sales in Q1 should play to the challenges of the moment. If your products can solve pain points related to business productivity and work-from-home woes, you may have a real valuable selling point to lean on.

Updates to pricing structures and the use of efficiency-boosting sales tech can also help you drum up some additional revenue and build stronger relationships with clients.

The rest is here:
How to Improve Your Tech Sales in Q1 2021 - TechSpective

You have just raised your first funding round and you have to spend a part of it on marketing. Defining the right marketing strategy, identifying the most effective tactical activities and communication channels is not easy, but the choices you make will have a crucial impact on the future of your startup.

As a marketing professional with a hands-on experience in B2B and B2C, I have observed many startups that make a lot of marketing mistakes right from the start. While these companies were from various industries, ranging from ecommerce to digital health, they often share common pitfalls.

Learning about these missteps can help you better navigate your business activity and guide your team during the uncertainty associated with the early days of the startups scaling so lets take a closer look.

It is crucial to set well-defined business goals that you want to accomplish by implementing certain marketing activities. These goals should be specific to a particular startup, with an explicitly-stated timeline, and have achievable metrics.

Some founders, especially those coming from an engineering background, are often confused about connecting the dots between the precise features of a technical product and intangible creative ideas.

They spend the majority of their time building a product, launch it by putting a significant budget into multiple promotional activities, and realize that they dont know how to evaluate their effectiveness.

Thats why getting marketing advice in advance becomes tremendously important.

As a founder, discuss the value offering with a marketing expert, identify the way you will communicate this value to your target audience, and prepare an actionable plan to deliver it. While it may seem a bit challenging to do at first, the derived plan will give your startup colossal leverage in the long run.

One mistake I often see in early-stage startups is zeroing in on two or three marketing activities. For example, promoting a startup on social media and obsessing over SEO.

While digital communication channels are important, especially with the soaring importance of digital marketing accelerated by lockdowns and social distancing measures, you should keep in mind that marketing is a combination of many aspects advertising, PR, sponsorships, just to name a few so dont fixate on a couple of them.

Overall, the reasons for this mistake are diverse. Sometimes, chosen activities are the most familiar and/or the easiest to implement if a startup doesnt have a full-time marketing employee. Another explanation is that some founders rush to repeat the activities which are successfully pursued by their competitors. Either way, becoming attached to a limited set of actions is not the best approach.

To avoid this and to make sure that you arent wasting your marketing budget on irrelevant activities, try to conduct profound research beforehand, and get a diverse set of opinions relevant to your unique situation.

I often hear from entrepreneurs that they just need help with marketing but cant state precisely what exactly they need help with.

Is it writing an annual marketing plan with a detailed description of all activities throughout the year? Or is it running digital marketing campaigns? Or maybe, its overseeing the whole marketing function: from brand building to performance in digital channels?

Thats why identifying the underlying goal and writing a job description for a marketing position with regards to this goal is vital. For example, hiring a social media manager and expecting them to do everything related to marketing is destined to fail.

On the flip side, hiring a huge team of marketing professionals can be too costly for an early-stage company with a limited budget. Startups can mitigate this either by recruiting an experienced marketer with a diverse experience or by outsourcing particular marketing activities to external contractors.

I often witness two diametrically opposed situations. In the first case, founders do not want to hire young people with little experience, but cant afford prominent experts. In this case, I recommend looking not only at the resume but also at the potential of an applicant. Sometimes young marketers strive to grow and can bring fresh ideas to the company that is not visible from the inside.

In the second case, founders hire very qualified and well-known marketers, often from international corporations who are used to working in a completely different environment.

Diverse functionality in marketing, lack of clear guidelines, myriads of challenges that a startup encounters all of this can cause a panic for people who are used to corporate processes. In this situation, you should discuss with the candidate whether she or he is ready for a radical change in their working rhythm and functionality.

In fact, if you want to work with a particular marketer, you can try to invite her or him as an external expert and advisor.

Some founders are strongly convinced that they understand what is needed to be done by marketing people. As a result, they state the required plans and metrics without an objective assessment and a preliminary discussion with marketers.

However, marketing professionals should be involved as early as possible and actively participate during every stage of the startup lifestyle. Ideally, contact marketers even before building an MVP because they can help better understand the needs and wants of your potential customers, identify the strengths of a product or service, and point out its weaknesses.

By conducting market research, in-depth interviews, and customer surveys, marketers can find possible ways to enhance a prototype, prepare a set of best-suited measures to launch a product or service, as well as provide active support in subsequent promotion, aligning the latter with a business development strategy.

Ive encountered situations when there is a ready-to-launch product and founders want to advertise it, so they hire a marketer. However, when they start to analyze the situation, hidden drawbacks become visible. They can be diverse: from identifying the wrong target market, to the unclear positioning and value proposition.

Well, a marketer can deliver a project they were hired for, but the underlying issue will remain untreated and eventually negate the short-term gains from the project implementation. So, in order to save resources, time, and energy, you should talk to marketers early on.

Finally, it is vital to put marketing as one of the core functions, not merely a supporting one. The stakes and expectations are high for early-stage companies. Every wrong step can make a drastic negative consequence on your business.

By avoiding these mistakes and putting time and effort into building the right marketing, you can leverage the level up in the playing field and streamline startup growth.

Published December 15, 2020 07:00 UTC

Read more from the original source:
4 marketing mistakes early-stage startups make and how to avoid them - The Next Web

Coming out of what maywell be the greatest year of self-reflection for all of society, the ad industry had a huge opportunity -- and it blew it. Instead of learning the lesson of what makes a brand most relevant in thethroes of an existential crisis like a global pandemic, the industry has chosen not to think about the impact on its customers, but on itself.

How do I know this? Because the Association ofNational Advertisers this morning announced that -- according to results of an annual poll of its members -- the "Marketing Word-of-the-Year" for 2020 is "pivot."

While that's a powerful businessterm for early-stage businesses, and one normally associated with startups that failed to deliver on their initial "product/market fit" and pivot to a different one in order to find a new pathway tosuccess -- or at least another round of funding -- it's not one that should sum up how the world's greatest marketers reflected on one of the world's greatest existential threats.

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On the plusside, it shows that Madison Avenue has embraced some of the positive attributes of Silicon Valley, especially the concept of "agility," which, along with "resiliency" and "virtual," were runners-upfor 2020's marketing word-of-the-year.

On the downside, it shows that the world's leading marketers are far more introspective than I would have thought, and that they failed to identify themost important element of 2020 from a consumer perspective: the need to show how and why brands care for their customers -- not themselves -- during an existential crisis.

Frankly, I'm alittle surprised by this, because over the past nine months I've seen and reported on reams of marketing research and consumer polls showing that very thing -- from Ipsos to Mindshare to Kantar toNielsen to Wavemaker to you-just-about-name it. They all identified that what consumers most wanted during this unprecedented time was for brands to show customers they care about what they weregoing through and how they could help, even if it was just offering words of support, diversionary content -- or even better, some solutions to the problems they were coping with.

Pandemic andeconomic crisis aside, it was also a year of self-reflection for marketers grappling with responses to an outpouring of racial injustice and their own role in responding to it, as well as diversity intheir organizations and marketing programs.

That's why I was eagerly awaiting the ANA's annual release -- and even made a little side bet with myself to see if they would "get" it -- andidentify that the most important marketing word of the year for 2020 was "empathy."

That's the word I heard most from marketers, agencies and some of the best consumer researchers in the worldexpress as their takeaway from 2020. While it's not always an easy one to deliver on, it is the word that should focus everything organizations do during, and coming out of, a global pandemic.

In fact, it is a word that came up time and time again, while MediaPost went through our annual exercise of reviewing and considering candidates for our annual agency, client and suppliers of theyear for 2020. I will tell you it was an important factor for picking several of them.

While I applaud the ad industry's ability to adapt, be flexible, find new product/market fits, and yes,pivot, during unprecedented times, all of those business maneuvers should be at the service of the people they serve -- including their own organizations, those of their partners, and especiallycustomers, which are the reason for their very existence in the first place.

Link:
What The Marketing Word of the Year Should Be, For Those Who Care 12/14/2020 - MediaPost Communications

Several of the minds behind the design of the much talked-about COVID-19 awareness campaign says theyre happy about the attention it has received.

Kurt Beaudoin of ZGM Modern Marketing Partners in Edmonton says more than 400,000 people have watched the companys two COVID loves ads, which were put out last week.

The ads follow a man with a giant head that looks like the novel coronavirus as he enjoys parties, family gatherings and a Christmas dinner.

The ad company wrote the concept and then the practical Mr. Covid mask was made by hand by Travis Shewchuk, a Fort Saskatchewan-based artist.

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When we heard the kind of pitch [it was] and creating this character in the first place, we were pretty sold on it, Shewchuk, who owns the Ravenous EFX special effects company, said Tuesday.

Beaudoin says that much like COVID-19, the character he calls Mr. Covid or Creepy Uncle Covid is a real shape-shifter and can blend seamlessly into any place where people are gathering.

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Shewchuk worked with the agencys concept and then sculpted the one-off mask entirely by hand in about five days, using various materials like hard plastic, foam, rubber, resin, and paint.

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[The design had to be] not too scary, Shewchuk said. Its gotta be ominous, still kind of mean but yet at the same point kind of PG-ish.

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Its gotta still have a fun element to go with the comedy parts.

Shewchuk added he loved the ad when he finally saw the finished version this week.

It was such a whirlwind to build it that we didnt really get to savour any of it that much, he said. We finally got to see it on the internet, then its popping up on TV and everywhere and then seeing the response, not only across the province but the country.

Everybodys seeing it. So its been exciting in that way.

Beoudoin says Premier Jason Kenneys government had approached his agency to create a relatable campaign for people between 18 and 40 years old.

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He says a couple more ads are coming ahead of Christmas and New Years, and Mr. Covid will be appearing on the video-sharing social media platform TikTok.

With files from The Canadian Press

2020 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.

Read more here:
Artist, marketing company behind Albertas Mr. Covid ads say their success means more on the way - Global News

ATHENS, GA - OCTOBER 10: Eric Stokes #27 of the Georgia Bulldogs celebrates with members of the ... [+] defensive line after a play against the Tennessee Vols at Sanford Stadium on October 10, 2020 in Athens, Georgia. (Photo by Perry McIntyre/Collegiate Images/Getty Images)

Imagine this. Its the summer of 2021, and the NCAA has passed legislation permitting monetization of names, images and likenesses for college athletes. Youre a football player heading back to college excited about seeing what you can do. Your friends Instagram and Tik Tok feeds are filled with influencers like Lil Nas X, DI Nayah and Charli DAmelio, who are creating content and becoming brands in the fast changing social media world. You think, if they can do it, why cant I? How do I get in on this?

While the NCAA will most assuredly provide some guardrails for what products and activities athletes can engage with on social media, its almost impossible to regulate creativity. And now, there are places that are evolving into creative vortexes.

In Los Angeles, Atlanta, Dallas and Las Vegas, a new collection of influencers are cohabiting, sparking creativity and holding each other accountable for producing consistently shareable content on video sites. These pods trade strategy on raising their profiles and growing their revenue streams. Attracted by the locally based entertainment ecosystem (and, in Georgia, favorable tax credits), young adults from 16-22 years old are renting large homes in and around these four cities.

Our football player thinks to himself, now that I can monetize my brand, why shouldnt I live with people who are thinking 24/7 about how to create the next viral video? Forget living with other athletes in the residence halls or in a football house near campus. Im going to be a part of the influencer economy now.

The New York Times NYT calls these creatives hard working, focused and (possessing) a deep understanding of the internet. This is not a party housein fact, some have rules stating you have to produce one or two sharable videos per day in order to stay in the house.

For now, there is a difference in collab houses; for some, LA has become an enclave for white entrepreneurs, while Atlanta has become a haven for black creators, inspired by the tremendous investments that Tyler Perry and others have made in the state. This is sure to evolve as the concept catches on.

How will coaches respond to this new trend? The wrong thing to do would be tell your recruits and returning players you have to live in the XYZ apartment complex where all the other athletes live. You mandate that, and a transfer to another institution who allows their players to live in collab houses begins to look awfully good.

LOS ANGELES, CA - DECEMBER 06: USC Trojans safety Talanoa Hufanga (15) leaps over a player after ... [+] intercepting a pass during a game between the USC Trojans and the Washington State Cougars played on December 6, 2020 at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum in Los Angeles, CA. (Photo by John Cordes/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)

Some athletic departments are contracting with Opendorse, a well-know social marketing firm devising strategies and products while waiting for NILs to become permissible. Once you find your audience, the brand dollars will always find you, their website states, emphasizing that athletes will do best to direct their marketing efforts towards their hometowns. 99% of student-athletes wont be doing deals outside of their college town and hometown. Focusing their brand-building efforts in these communities will allow them to have the best ROI on their time and energy.

But influencer houses could blow that slow walk away quickly. In the last three weeks, two all-Black Gen Z creator mansions, the Collab Crib and the Valid Crib have opened in Atlanta. Their members want to cement Atlanta as a hub for online talent and are hoping these homes will bring a level of legitimacy to their status within the larger creator ecosystem. If your goal as a third string linebacker is to take advantage of this new landscape, where would you live if you had the choice?

Higher education and college athletics are not prepared for what is about to happen. There are forces at play in the new economy of social marketing and management that will attract athletes to programs and locations that are on the leading edge. Why? Simply, there is more to be gained when you are surrounded by others laser focused on being great. Football coaches have preached that for decades.

Which college athletes will be the new influencers in 2021? The ones who are surrounded by other creatives with a collaborative mindset.

See more here:
Which College Athletes Will Be The New Influencers In 2021? - Forbes