ProspectHill Leads For Technology Blog
Every good marketer knows the value of establishing the right vertical markets for prospecting. After all, if you're not going after the right prospects, you'll never see the results you're looking for. Finding vertical markets isn't necessarily that difficult - it just takes a little brainstorming. But it isn't an exact science either. You may know your customer and your product (or service), but finding your untapped potential is more of an exercise in creative thinking and business analysis than anything else. Here are your focus areas -
Demographics
Let's take it back to Marketing 101 - knowing your customer. Even simpler than that - knowing your product. Getting creative with vertical markets begins with where your product interfaces with their business. Am I boring you yet? The point is to find every type of person who could benefit from you. (It's easier to think in terms of people within companies at this stage to better determine exactly who your target prospect is.) Get creative with this! That's the way you're going to find new verticals. Companies that specialize in business development outsourcing have the benefit of a fresh pair of eyes and a new creative approach to your verticals. If you want to gain the same benefit in-house, you have to think far outside the box.
Buying Cycles
What are the rules around your new set of verticals? When should you contact and when should you wait? Lots of businesses follow similar cycles, but a strong portfolio of vertical markets can present you several buying cycles. Managing each of these effectively can require good organization and a strong marketing calendar.
Where Are They
Once you've done the legwork defining some new demographics & researching their buying cycles, your creative streak isn't over yet. Finding the best way to reach your prospects requires critical thinking. First, what are the business information consumption habits of your prospect? (Again, thinking of people within companies rather than companies themselves makes this much easier.) Yes, cold calling and tailoring your website to your verticals is important, but that's a given. How does your prospect research for business? Are they a part of any offline or online groups or organizations? What about social or business networks? Your prospect's industry, title, age, and geographic location can all contribute to the answers to these questions. In turn, the answers to these questions will each leave you with very different market strategies. Knowing how to reach your prospect is as important as knowing who they are.
The big message here is creative thinking. When you're doing all of this in-house, you have to work that much harder to step outside what you already know about your business and define new opportunities you haven't seen before. Not that every creative vertical you come up with is going to land you the majority of your business next quarter - but when you have a strong list of potential verticals, you can weigh your options and choose the select few that present the best opportunities.
In most organizations, the easiest way to increase productivity is to increase communication between all members of your team. When everyone is working together towards one vision - each taking their piece in the sales & marketing plan, projects go faster and yield better results. As we all know, increasing communication internally is much easier said than done, yet there are a number of new tools available that can help you streamline communication in a way that feels natural to your organization. There's no one-size-fits-all solution, as each company dynamic will benefit from different tools, but look to the communication benefits added by each tool to find which one is right for your organization. Here are a few of our favorites to get you started -
Yammer
Yammer is one of the hot new social networks for larger corporations allowing employees to interact on a simple, closed-network level - much like facebook was for college students in its very early days. Just because Yammer is popular among larger organizations, doesn't mean it can't be extremely useful for your organization as well. Each company network is open to only members of that company, allowing using to share short messages (like tweets), attach documents and files, and send private messages to other members. In the right organization, this can be a highly effective tool to streamline communication.
Google Products (calendar, docs)
Google is a big favorite among small businesses everywhere. The collaborative features built in to the calendar and document applications coupled with the simple, easy to use interface, provide a great workplace collaboration tool.
WebEx's WebOffice offers a lot of similar functionality to Google's products, with a more windows-based corporate-feel to it. The calendar functionality allows for more customization with assignable tasks for individual users, deadlines, etc. Also, a built in web file system makes it easy to host a number of files for collaboration internally on marketing documents.
As you can see, each service offers a different suite of benefits that may or may not work for your organization. If you're looking for a file manager, WebEx certainly has the best of these three (although it isn't free). However, Yammer can host files for collaborating (in less of a file-cabinet, more of a stream-of-consciousness way), while also adding the benefit of direct internal communication. And if you're just looking for a better way to manage document collaboration and calendar access, Google might be the way to go for you.
These are just a few of the most popular solutions used today, but there are plenty of others available. What's working for you?
Since the introduction of Facebook's location-based features last week (Places), there's been plenty of chatter about the location market, google, facebook, and foursquare, but surprisingly very little about what's most important to us - how will us marketers use location services as part of our marketing mix? Really, what do I need to know about the next wave of social networking heading our way?
Here's all you need to know.
The introduction of location-based services into social networking was the natural and inevitable next step for social media. Now that it's here, it stresses one major thing for marketers (at the moment). Simply put - fill out your profiles completely. Creating a full company profile will allow you to take advantage of these features - more specifically, it will allow your prospects to take advantage of these features. The thing about location-based networking is that at the most basic level, it only requires you to enable it's users. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Let's back up for a moment.
What can you use it for?
At the moment, we're still in the infancy stages of location-based networking. Networks are being setup, features are being added, and marketers are trying to make sense of it all. Right now, the greatest use for marketers is in events. If your prospects are early-adopters of technology, they will be using these products already, and you can tap into that usage using these services at events. Whether this is an open house, trade show, or other kind of promotional event, you have the ability to enable prospects to connect with your brand using location-based networking.
Let's keep in the mind the key phrase above - "connect with your brand." Right now, location-based networking is all about users connecting with brands, making it a passive form of marketing for you.
What if my prospects aren't tech junkies?
Even if your target profiles fall outside the current user base of location services, there's still a very strong and simple message here for you: fill out your profiles completely. Making sure your facebook page has your company address on it doesn't take a lot of effort on your part, but it could yield you a return down the road when we see further adoption. If your prospects aren't early adopters, you don't need to spend time and energy joining networks like foursquare and gowalla, because they simply won't be there. However, that doesn't mean you shouldn't spend a few extra minutes on google and facebook updating your profiles to make sure these features are available 'just in case'.
For the most part, the marketing focus here has been on B2C businesses, but that isn't necessarily all there is to see. Creative B2B companies can leverage these new features and networks to build their business as well.
For more ideas and information on the subject, I've attached all the relevant posts I've seen on the subject in the last week below -
Facebook Places Launches, Allows Businesses to “Check In”
