B2B Marketingfor Hi-Tech and Telecommunications Companies

Asuthosh Nair & Jaspreet Sidhu

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INTRODUCTION

When was the last time you watched an advertisement on TV or saw one in a publication and said to yourself 'I must buy that!'? The chances are that it hasn't happened anytime in the recent past. In the last 10 years the world has seen a change in the way people access information, entertain and educate themselves. These changes have been brought about primarily by the advent of the social web.

Whether your target market is the individual consumer or businesses, companies seeking to implement effective marketing campaigns have to take these changes into consideration. From Facebook to Friendster, MySpace to LinkedIn - business and individual consumers are turning to the Internet as their first and often only stop and the power of the social web to influence their buying patterns is huge.

Hi-Tech and Telecommunication companies especially need to be paying attention to this trend as many of their technologies and products leverage on the web as a platform. While the Internet has forums, blogs, and communities built around every conceivable topic in the world technology and telecommunication products remain some of the most talked about, blogged about and reviewed products.

When was the last time you watched an advertisement on TV or saw one in a publication and said to yourself 'I must buy that!'?

GROWING THE MARKET AND CUSTOMER RETENTION

The key goal of any marketing campaign is to reach new customers and retain existing ones. In order to reach your customers its important to keep in mind where they spend most of their time. Before the mass emergence of the Internet as a form of media TV, radio and print was the forum of choice for advertising. Marketing to businesses would take place at trade shows and industry specific events in tandem with print advertising. With the mass adoption of the Internet as the 'place' of choice to gather information for work and play the audience for TV and radio has steadily declined. Print subscriptions for business and commercial magazines and newspapers as well have shown a steady down-turn. Early advertisers tried to use the Internet in the same way they had used traditional media with interruption marketing to little effect. With so many options for media and ways to filter out the content they don't want, the real job of marketing in this space is to draw people to your site by providing relevant and compelling content.   If you're a technology company dealing with network solutions be sure to highlight not just your products and features but show how you can implement entire solutions. Provide free trials of your products online where possible to let your potential customers feel comfortable with the product before they buy. Have a blog to discuss common and some not so common network problems people and businesses may face as well as how to solve those thereby showcasing your knowledge and expertise on the subject matter. Create a microsite around specific product releases to showcase the product and start people talking about it. Drawing the consumer into a dialogue is also a good way to keep them engaged. Listen to their feedback and implement what is feasible as product/service offering upgrades.

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The flexibility of the Internet as a media platform also allows for a much better user experience through the use of rich media to showcase a product through a flash presentation highlighting its key features and facilitate communication through videos on the latest corporate news and offerings. This is a great way to keep your customer coming back to your site and you for information and your expertise but how do you get them to notice you in the first place?   Think about how people access information these days. Chances are if you are assigned a project on which you first need to gather information you will head to a search engine like Google or Yahoo! and run a search on the topic. The searches which come out on the first page are the most relevant results based on the reputation of the site which brings us back to the necessity of providing relevant and engaging content on your websites. Companies with a niche market or very focused market segments can target their marketing campaigns using Google and Yahoo ads where companies come up with a list of search words which they believe their potential customers will use when searching for their products/services. Their advertisement will only come up when someone runs a search matching that criteria which allows you to focus your ad on the people you want to see it - the customers looking for your services.

To further build credibility hi-tech and telco companies can leverage on their advantage of having a strong web-based community. Hi-tech and telco products are talked about. There are multiple online magazines devoted to hi-tech and telco products, blogs with worldwide following which regularly review new technology offerings and forums on every part of todays technology from hardware and software to software as a service (SaaS) applications for business and individual consumers.

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...hi-tech and telco companies can leverage on their advantage of having a strong web-based community.

Bringing together the people who are interested in your product also helps clear up misconceptions about your product/services and helps you set the record straight. The option of anonymity also provides customers who would normally be hesitant to participate in a feedback program a comfort zone from which to air their opinions as well.   All of these efforts have a second and equally important benefit which companies can reap as well - customer retention. Its a common business fact that getting a new customer is on average 5 times more expensive than keeping an existing one. Existing customers who are satisfied with the level of service/product offerings are more likely to buy from you again as their needs change. The high costs of change management alone are not enough to deter a customer from moving to your competitor if you cannot incentivize them to stay with your company. Loyalty programmes, good customer service and relationship managers, acting on the feedback received from the customer - these add up to a customer who knows that they are not just getting a product or service but a partner who will take into account what their experience is and work with them to maximise the benefits they can reap.

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INTERNAL DYNAMICS

So far we've only been talking about what a business can do to attract and keep their customers - communicate and leverage on communities already talking about you. In order for any marketing campaign to succeed it must build and leverage not just external relationships but internal ones as well - employees, partners, shareholders, resellers etc.   Any organization with a distributed workforce and a network of partners and resellers needs to communicate well internally. Employees, partners and resellers can also use the Internet and the community building activities for internal flow of information to ensure everyone from the internal staff to the reseller sitting several continents away are all up-to-date on the latest developments and offerings. An internal social network can help the staff, partners, resellers, distributors keep in touch with one another and facilitate problem solving while strengthening relationships through the communication and exchange of information. Such a network will also help you learn what your network really thinks about new products and gather feedback from a wider internal audience to circumvent some problems which may be faced when its launched or tested by an external audience.

With the community and the network sufficiently primed, it is time to train the marketing efforts on those who sign on the dotted line and hand you the cash, that is, the decision makers.

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MARKETING TO THE DECISION MAKERS

Unfortunately knowing who makes the decision is rarely easy. Even if you do know them, understanding how they make their decisions is even tougher. In most cases, it's not they who need convincing, it's to those who tell them what's good that you need to pitch your efforts. In other words, identifying the decision maker goes beyond chatting up the moneybags; it's about influencing those who get them to loosen their purse strings.

Decisions involving technology are usually made with the assistance of several layers of experts and expertise. If you need to get them on board with your solutions, you need to adopt measures that address the issues each layer would weigh upon when influencing the decision. Consider a university that's planning to implement a campus-wide network. One department that's going to mightily influence which vendor to go with would be the chief of the technology office, the CTO for instance. They would be interested to know the finer points of how you plan to network the whole campus, where the connectivities lie, the sort of routing equipment and its capabilities, quality of service standards, network security,  and so on.

Another group who will play a key role is estate management office who will want to know the physical impact (aesthetics, safety, construction work, digging up of roads, etc.) of your cabling setup and equipment. The users, both students, faculty and associates, would weigh in heavily with their input on what services they would like to see being offered, and how reliable and robust these need to be. The finance team would naturally be looking out for favorable financing options, impact on expenditure and cashflow and so on.

Thus, the more complex the solution the deeper and broader the expertise layers called upon to influence the decision. All of these layers can collectively

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be terms as the decision maker, and indeed probably have more power than the president or CEO of the university. You need to market to each of these layers in different ways, and call out separately the value your solution brings to their respective "business".

Infographics come in handy when you want to convey complex and layered information without losing the "big picture" view. They are also useful in addressing different expertise levels at first glance. For instance an infographic on a connected campus would help a non-technical decision maker, say a CEO or COO, to see how a connected network benefits different campus activities. At the same time, a CTO or the IT manager can make sense of the detailed network connectivities (which reflect the actual network links) and get a fairly thorough understanding of how it's all put together. Besides the information thus conveyed, the overall presentation using visually engaging graphics and actual campus building layouts (instead of simply a "box" as in typical network diagrams), generates instant appeal to anyone looking at it, and becomes a conversation starter with any type of audience. The estate management office would thus see how the network can easily be integrated into their current infrastructure. It's no wonder then that newspapers rely extensively on infographics to communicate complex and layered information effectively. Infographics can be more effective than traditional PowerPoint presentations, brochures or fliers.

Infographics when taken into the digital world using interactive Flash and Flex technologies, become a great way to present information layers in an interactive fashion. Depending on who the audience is, different views of the same content can be presented by simple clicks of the mouse. The ability to hide information irrelevant to the user while focusing on their areas of interest is a major advantage of using Flash interactivity. As with the simple knowledge bytes discussed before, interactive knowledge bytes can be integrated with voiceover and/or video where appropriate and are lightweight enough for web hosting.

Any marketing initiative can get bogged down when going into the details. Undoubtedly details are important, but your targets also want to see a roadmap and a vision if they adopt your solution and technologies. Portraying this using real visuals would not only be impractical but also terribly expensive. Here 3D visualization can be a useful media to adopt. Such means are especially useful when it is important to get strong buy-ins from C-level decision makers who need to see the potential of your solution and how it can help revolutionize their business.

With the decision makers primed thus, it remains to assure them that your solution will hold up to their demands and satisfy their requirements.

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RISK MANAGEMENT

A critical component of your marketing efforts has to be addressing buyer apprehension. With complex solution commanding a high budgetary outlay, the decision maker is bound to have concerns over successful deployment and going the last mile. They are wondering: Will it work? What if it goes wrong? How will they be supported...and so on. Your marketing efforts need to help alleviate such concerns. One of the best ways of doing this is to let them hear from those who have walked the path with you - your customers are your best ambassadors. And provided you have delivered an exceptional experience to them, they would be more than willing to help underline your efforts. Using video case studies you can feature those who are  benefiting from your existing deployments. Typically, the feature will cover the problems your customer faced, why and how your solution was adopted, who were involved in the decisions and deployment, how the customer's challenges were overcome with your solutions, and finally plans for growth and how you intend to keep the partnership with the customer going.

The videos are often presented in the form of various interviews edited together to convey the key message. It is also important to show the "solution in action" via appropriate overlay shots mixed with the interviewee shots. For visual variety, use multiple cameras to capture different angle and cutaway shots that will make for more compelling viewing. You would want the customers to stick to some core themes in the conversation and it would be wise to reach common ground on this before the interviews as part of a pre-filming storyboard. But it is best to let them speak freely without straying too far from these themes so that the interviews come across as more natural and animated. The key is in weaving their words into a compelling message, a message that

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B2B Marketing for Hi-Tech and Telecommunications companies

will encourage the viewer to be associated with the same levels of success as the customer they have just seen.   

Treat video case studies and testimonials as free and persuasive publicity. The more sincere the featured customer comes across, the better. Any sign of glorification or overt appreciation is sure to come across as "they were paid to say this". The aim is to reassure your prospective customer by using the example of a peer. To that effect, it is necessary to avoid jargon, and to focus on speaking their language as far as possible. At the same time it is essential to draw out the difference in your approach to that particular customer to avoid coming across as a cookie-cutter service provider.

Risk management also involves you being seen as an expert of repute in the industry. In today's connected world, establishing this position and reputation is becoming easier. Voice out your views via blogs and whitepapers; actively interact on community networking platforms like user groups and LinkedIn; stay ahead of what's commonly known and using every direct interaction opportunity with the client to share the latest thinking around the solutions they are interested in - these are some of the easiest means of subtly and substantially building up your standing as the go-to person for client concerns, and somebody whom they can rely on take their investments to fruition.

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...it is essential to draw out the difference in your approach to that particular customer to avoid coming across as a cookie-cutter service provider.

B2B Marketing for Hi-Tech and Telecommunications companies

CONCLUSION

Marketing for hi-tech and telco companies requires a different approach from conventional B2C marketing. One of the key challenges is to go beyond the immediate sale and look at growing the customer base through upselling and continuous engagement that promotes customer retention. Because of the complex nature of the solutions and products, education and awareness is critical in gaining acceptance, traction and credibility among the decision makers to better base their buying decisions. Typically the buying decisions are influenced considerably by several layers of expertise. So it is essential to address the concerns and careabouts of each layer using customized rich media solutions. Finally, it is imperative that decision makers are reassured of the effectiveness of the proposed solutions.

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WHERE TO GO FROM HERE

These being the guidelines, it remains to select a qualified content partner to assist you with developing collateral that fulfills the outlined needs. If you need help creating rich media content, and retain and grow your competitive advantage with timely and effective rich media solutions targeted at hi-tech and telco companies, consider GetIT Comms. For more details, visit www.getitcomms.com.

ABOUT GETITCOMMS

We are a boutique outfit focused on using new media solutions to help hi-tech and telco business share business knowledge.

You tell us what you want to communicate and what resources you have currently. We listen to your objectives, and develop and implement best-fit solutions using our awareness of how people pick-up, incorporate and share new knowledge.

Whether in the context of marketing initiatives, customer and partner awareness programs, learning and development, or sales support – the end goal remains getting the message across with speed, accuracy and impact.

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