best practices
When it hits the fan…
I am a baseball fan, so yesterday - when the news that noted slugger Manny Ramirez has been fanned for 50 games for doping - I went over to the Major League Baseball site to see what they had to say. (Actually, it was the second thing I did. While I am a baseball fan, [...]
If the shoe doesn’t fit (being a gracious loser)
Seth Godin had an especially good little piece last week on how you should act when there’s really not a good fit between your organization/product/services and what you’re prospect is looking for.
Seth started out with a little tale about someone (I’ll assume it was Seth and/or his wife) going into a shoe store that didn’t [...]
Steve Hoffman’s Rules of the Whitepaper Road
Over on Marketing Profs, Steve Hoffman has some well-thought through best practices on writing white papers. As someone who writes and reads a lot of whitepapers in the course of a year, almost all of them are spot-on - 9 our of 10, in my book.
His first rule is keep the white paper to 8-10 [...]
It’s the Little Things…
The other day, I got an e-mail from Borders, offering me 30% off of a book, in exchange for answering a survey that would take 1 minute.
The survey didn’t even take one minute.
It asked me to estimate how much I spent on books during the average 6 month period. I don’t really keep track, [...]
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 [...]
