best practices
What do they want?
Marketers have gotten used to paying attention to web analytics - the clickstream data from tools like Google Analytics that give us all kinds of insight into what people do on our web sites. That’s great, but there are questions that all that data can’t answer: why are people coming to your site? What do [...]
Walk a Mile in My Shoes
Over on the Trusted Advisor, Charlie Green had a very interesting post last week entitled “A Marketing Company that Really Gets It On Trust.” In his article, Charlie talks about the marketing firm Unit7, with a special shout out to one particular campaign:
… on Type 2 Diabetes…They offered the entire office’s staff a chance to [...]
Effective Product Marketing Rule #12
This is the twelfth (and final) in a series of posts on Pragmatic Marketing’s Effective Product Marketing Rules.
Effective Product Marketing Rule #12: Tell your sales people about buyer personas and they will listen to you. Build tools by buyer persona and they will use them.
Over the years, I’ve come to believe that there is an [...]
Effective Product Marketing Rule #11
This is the eleventh in a series of posts on Pragmatic Marketing’s Effective Product Marketing Rules.
Effective Product Marketing Rule #11: Align marketing campaigns by buyer persona, not just products or services.
The other day, my husband showed me a direct-mail postcard he’d received. It was from a Boston-area boat club, and it was advertising some special [...]
Effective Product Marketing Rule #10
This is the tenth in a series of posts on Pragmatic Marketing’s Effective Product Marketing Rules.
Effective Product Marketing Rule #10: Benefits express answers to your buyer’s problems.
And, let’s face it, if you’re doing B2B technology marketing those benefits at one level boil down to a precious few:
The way you’re doing it now costs too much: [...]
Effective Product Marketing Rule #9
This is the ninth in a series of posts on Pragmatic Marketing’s Effective Product Marketing Rules.
Effective Product Marketing Rule #9: First, say what problem you solve for the buyer. Then, deliver your persona-based message.
Laying out what problem you solve for your buyer is an excellent way to set the [...]
Effective Product Marketing Rule #8
This is the eighth in a series of posts on Pragmatic Marketing’s Effective Product Marketing Rules.
Effective Product Marketing Rule #8: To earn support for your go-to-market plan, give management a business case for their investment.
There are so many times, so many circumstances, when it just seems like one colossal, time-wasting pain in the butt to [...]
Who are those customers?
Who are your customers? If your organization is like most, that question may be hard to answer. I’ve worked at companies with fewer than 200 customers who had trouble coming up with a list of who they were, what products they used, and who the main contacts for each company were. And I’ve worked for [...]
Effective Product Marketing Rule #7
This is the seventh in a series of posts on Pragmatic Marketing’s Effective Product Marketing Rules.
Effective Product Marketing Rule #7: Don’t confuse product positioning with program strategy and messaging.
I’ll take this in two parts.
The first part - don’t confuse positioning with program strategy - is pretty clear and straightforward.
Knowing who the audience for your product [...]
If the Online Shoe Shopping Fits…
Because I have a somewhat odd shoe size - 10 AAA (recently widened from AAAA, but fortunately not lengthened) I order most of my shoes on line. This is a bit chancy, of course, but mostly I know what’s going to work and what’s not. And you can always send them back.
Last weekend, I spent [...]
