Speaking to a new and different audience…
March 30th, 2006 | Marilou BarsamBringing a message to a new market is a common challenge amongst many companies.
Recently, a network access management company switched their main marketing messaging from networking decision makers to security decision makers. This company has been very successful in the past advertising to our network audience. They wanted to leverage this success and reach out to the Security Audience.
To get their voice heard above the clutter, we created a single web page listing all their relevant security white paper and Webcast content. We also sent out a large amount of emails and ran banners to gain market presence for them in the Security space. In addition, we highlighted their content assets (linking to their single web page) on the home pages of SearchSecurity.com. Our media plan was to reach as broad yet targeted an audience as possible.
March 31st, 2006 at 12:48 pm
[…] I created this blog with my client consulting team to share some of the decisions we, and our clients, have made in marketing to enterprise IT audiences. […]
April 20th, 2006 at 2:28 pm
Two questions:
We’ve been offering this service to larg businesses along with many other companies. As we are the first to offer this standadrized service to smaller entities it may be labeled as a “disruptive technology”. Is this term understood by smaller businesses and does it have any negative connotation?
The federal deffinition of “small business” is a business with fewer than 500 employees. We want new clients with 100-600 employees. We are finding it nesessary to dance around the issue of size because many in small businesses do not think of themselves as small. How to speak to that market and not call them small is the question. Simply saying “new disruptive technology for small businesses” attracts the under 100 sized entities and seems to repel the 300-500 prospects.
April 21st, 2006 at 6:45 pm
Bob,
Who is and is not an SMB is a very wrinkly area indeed. You may want to use someone else’s definition. I believe for Gartner, 1-99 employees constitutes a small business and 100-500 is a medium or midsized business. Other sources use revenue and some employee-to-revenue ratio.
Or, write your own definition, like I did. As a tech PR pro, I take into consideration the volume of data a business must manage and store. 10 terabytes is 10 terabytes, whether it’s accessed and shared by 300 employees, 30 employees or 3 employees. Their approach to managing that 10 TB will be more or less the same. Data doesn’t discriminate, you might say.
Look at your services from the other side - consider the benefits, not the features, in other words - and I’m sure you can come up with a definition that works better for you than any so-called expert’s. Who needs this? Companies with between $x and y in monthly payroll or telecom bills or insurance bills. Companies with more than 40% of their work force mobile or remote. Etc.
Oh, and I don’t think disruptive technology is a good selling point for the smaller company. Sounds risky and unproven. Most SMB purchasing is reactive, in response to a recent problem that is now out of hand. To make absolutely sure that problem never ever happens again, you want to deliver a proven technology.
What about telling people it’s the same service large corporate enterprises have been able to use for many years to solve their problem, only now it’s affordable and available to the rest of us?
April 23rd, 2006 at 8:19 am
Bob,
See the reference to “disruptive technology” from a google search. I encourage you to read the entire disucssion. It will shed light on your concerns much better than I could do.
“The term disruptive technology was coined by Clayton M. Christensen and described in his 1997 book The Innovator’s Dilemma. In his sequel, The Innovator’s Solution, Christensen replaced the term with the term disruptive innovation because he recognized that few technologies are intrinsically disruptive or sustaining in character. It is strategy that creates the disruptive impact.”