Marketing collateral does not come cheap. Costs associated with textual content, graphic design, and production quickly add up. Obviously, you want to get an appropriate return on your investment. This article looks at seven common mistakes, or "sins," made when developing marketing collateral for the software industry.
The sins in question consider such concepts as targeting your market, lowering costs, and making it convenient for potential customers to use your marketing collateral. Also considered are the various forms of marketing, such as hard copy, electronic, and e-mail. Finally, we consider the cost of changing marketing collateral and its reproduction.
However, before we start confessing our sins, we need to state the obvious. Marketing collateral must be tailored to your marketplace and products.
To sell a car, you probably would emphasize miles per gallon, passenger accommodation, and maintenance costs. Applying these same metrics to software may not make a lot of sense or demonstrate the strengths of your software products. While it may go without saying, never lose sight of the obvious—know your marketplace.
This simple statement is not considered one of the deadly sins because if you are committing this grievous offense, you need to go back to the basics and seriously rethink your marketing plan.
The good news is that committing one sin may not condemn you to marketing hell, but committing enough of them surely will. So, grab your holy water, prayer beads, or whatever your religion provides for protection, and let's proceed.
Sin #1. Hiding Your Message
Have you ever gone to a Web site that is plastered with customer testimonials, but with either no indication of what it is selling or, at best, with its products or services written in small print? It's like lighting a candle and covering it with a basket. You need to tell your audience what you are selling, what services you offer, and what support you provide.
Tell them up front that "We offer software designed for the process manufacturing industry," "We cater to the food and beverage industry," or "Our software was developed to support the field services industry."
To avoid the "hard sell" approach, it may be helpful to ease into the description of what you have to offer. Consider the example below for the food industry.
They say that "it's the ingredients that make food taste good." However, in a rapidly changing marketplace, it takes a lot more than ingredients to compete effectively and efficiently in the food industry. Our software is designed to take care of the production and operational issues of the food industry so you can focus on the freshness of the ingredients.
Don't assume that your audience already knows what you do. If they did, they probably would not need a marketing brochure in the first place. In creating marketing collateral, assume that the reader is seeing your company and its products for the first time.
Stating the obvious is not a bad thing. With marketing collateral—hard copy or electronic—readers already familiar with a particular content can simply read on or scroll down.
In the case of the cluttered web site, consider your own buying practices. If you were buying a car, would you start by finding out what current customers say, or by finding the car that meets your needs? Your next-door neighbor may be enthusiastic about his truck, but you're hauling kids, not lumber.
Marketing collateral, which includes the Web site, must clearly state what you are about and leave no room for doubt. When developing a piece of marketing material, remember that this is probably a prospect's first introduction to your company and its products and services.
When driving down a highway late at night on a business trip, looking for a place to stop, does the bright neon sign say in big letters "Free HBO" and in small letters "Motel"? Of course not. Likewise, if your marketing material emphasizes effective formula management before you mention that you cater to the chemical industry, you may want to reverse the order.
Sin #2. Swerving Off Course
Too often we give up before the finish line is in sight. We become impatient if the results of a marketing campaign are not immediate. Here are some simple facts. Getting more than a 1 percent hit ratio for a marketing campaign is considered a success. So, if you send out a mailer with a response card to 100 prospects and 1 responds, don't give up. It usually takes between 8 and 10 contacts before you can expect to get your foot into your prospect's door.
Accordingly, when planning a monthly e-mailer campaign, make sure you have enough material for at least eight months, hopefully avoiding repetition. Think about your reading habits. If you are extremely busy, you probably push unsolicited mail into your wastebasket and e-mail into your "deleted items" folder. On those rare occasions when you have time, you may actually peruse the mail, if only briefly. This is why success takes so long. The mail habits of your prospects are not much different from yours. However, if you incorporate consistent, eye-catching graphics, the chances are better that visual recognition will kick in a little sooner than normal.
Constantly changing directions confuses your prospects. Let's say your most recent sell was to a computer manufacturer. Now you want to switch to the discrete manufacturing space, when all along you have been proclaiming software development for process. Sure, make the sale, but don't let it change your focus—at least not after the first sale.
Constantly changing your marketing plan destroys your credibility. Trying to be all things to all prospects is a bad business plan—and a worse marketing strategy.
There was a local dentist whose slogan was "We cater to cowards." On every piece of literature he sent out, the slogan was prominently displayed. Now, he did not have the advertising budget that most companies have, but after three years, whenever someone mentioned his name, the response was "Oh, the dentist who caters to cowards." Staying the course does pay off.
Sin #3. Failure to Create Reusable Material
Being able to use a piece of marketing collateral for multiple purposes can significantly reduce your overall marketing costs and time to deployment. If considered from the onset, this is not a difficult objective to achieve. If not, there could be a lot of redundant effort.
Let's look at a simple example to illustrate this point. Typically, marketing collateral is available in hard copy for one-on-one meetings, and electronically for ease of transmission. A nice, professional-looking, hard-copy format is an 11 x 17 inch paper folded in half, giving four 8.5 x 11 inch sides to the brochure. While you could easily convert this to a PDF format for electronic transmission, anyone who has tried to read such a document online knows it is like paying Pac-Man with your scroll bar. Left, right, up, and down just to center the content on your screen, making it difficult for the reader to maintain a steady train of thought.
However, the advantage of the 11 x 17 inch format is that it can be easily converted into four 8.5 x 11 inch pages. When this document is converted to a PDF, you just read straight down as you would a normal paper document. When advance consideration is given to the various ways of using a piece of marketing material, your overall costs can be reduced.
Agreeing on a standard format and content can eliminate the typical floundering phase that goes into any creative process. Don't be afraid to reuse textual content. An example will illustrate this idea. In process manufacturing, you are always talking about formulas, pack recipes, ingredients, and scalability. If one of the sections of the marketing piece talks about software functions and features, it is all right to repeat these common aspects in a brochure for the food and beverage industry as well as for the chemical industry.
Some might say that you are being redundant. Of course you are. The industries are both process-manufacturing-oriented. Furthermore, you are not going to send the same prospect both the food and beverage and the chemical brochures. With this approach, you need only pepper the functions and features with the uniqueness of each industry—say, catch weight for food and beverage, and carcinogenic reporting for chemicals.
You also want to give some thought to the preferred method of delivery for marketing information to prospects. An electronic transmission with an attachment or an e-mail campaign is the least intrusive and least costly. The problem is getting the e-mail addresses. Unless you have made a concerted effort to obtain addresses over a sustained period of time, the campaign may not have much impact. While you can buy lists, you do not get the list. The owner of the list e-mails your message. Consequently, you must rebuy the list each time. E-books—brochures that you read online as if you were turning the pages of a book—present the most professional-looking, electronic delivery mechanism. Unfortunately, they are typically executable files, which many corporate servers reject as potential virus-spreading attachments.
Another technique is useful for trade shows, where you can expect to meet a cross section of prospects. For them, store all of your marketing collateral onto a memory card, indexed by industry and topic. If you have ever been to a trade show, you know that repacking for the trip home can be a humbling and difficult experience. Let's face it: you have to leave room for the stress balls, tote bags, and, if there is still room, vendor brochures. Memory cards take up little room. Since marketing material rarely consumes all of the space on a card, you can re-stock it with updated information. The major cost component—the physical memory card—is reusable.
There are other ways to promote reusability and delivery options. Thinking about them in the early stages of design may save you dollars, pesos, or yen.
Sin #4. Ignoring the KISS Principle
To borrow a line from a popular movie, "An article should only be as long as it takes to drink a cup of coffee." You usually finish a cup in ten minutes. The KISS principle—keep it simple and short—takes this idea one step further.
Namely, avoid complexity. In this hectic, go-go business world, prospects have limited amounts of time for reading marketing material, and probably less time to fully comprehend what they are reading.
Consequently, it is a good idea to highlight or "bulletize" the key messages you want to convey. The advantage of bullets is that it only takes one to hit the target. A reader's eye can quickly scan keywords, and one just might strike a sensitive cord.
You should assume that your piece will be read by non-technical individuals who may not understand all of the information technology (IT) jargon and three letter acronyms (TLAs). In fact, you really want marketing collateral to be read by the decision makers—chief executive and chief operations officers (CEOs and COOs), and chief financial officers (CFOs). Just as techies may not know the differences between accrual and impress accounts, a CFO may not appreciate software designed to support a service-oriented architecture (SOA) environment.
A good rule of thumb is to let a non-technical editor have a go at the piece before finalizing the content.
Sin #5. Giving Away the Store
Is the purpose of a marketing piece to close the sale? If you have found such a brochure, stop reading this article, and just duplicate the piece. No, the purpose of marketing collateral is to encourage prospects to pick up the phone and call for more information.
If you give away too much detail, prospects may feel that they have a full understanding, decide they don't need the product or service, and never make the call. The more likely scenario is that prospects misunderstand what you are trying to tell them. In either case, the prospect will not pick up the phone or send an e-mail requesting more information or answers to potential buying-signal questions.
Again, using an example for a software solution for the process manufacturing industry, let's say this was your main thrust:
Our enterprise-wide solution for the process manufacturing industry supports flexible formularization, separate pack recipes, and flexible pricing algorithms.
All these functions are critical for process manufacturing. But so are scalability, catch weight, and repackaging. By not mentioning them, are you giving the misimpression that they are not supported? An alternative way of presenting this concept could be
Our software, designed specifically for process manufacturing industries to include food and beverage, chemical, pharmaceutical, and consumer products goods is a comprehensive, affordable, and full-featured ERP solution.
You have given the reader the basic information that you have targeted their industry and that your product should satisfy all the needs of process manufacturing. They can call and ask, "Can the software do this?" or "What about this scenario?" In either case, you should be able to do a much better job responding to a prospect's interest than any marketing brochure could. Right?
Sin #6. Showing Inconsistency
A nagging problem is in maintaining consistency across the spectrum of all marketing collateral. Did I say 1 + 1 = 2 in the brochure for the automotive industry, and 1 + 1 = 3 in the brochure for warehouse management? This inconsistency becomes embarrassing, since you are probably going to send both brochures to the same automotive prospect. Nothing puts you in a deeper hole than trying to explain away inconsistencies on your initial visit. And even if you can talk your way out of the hole, the prospect is looking for instances to push you back in.
Reusability can help greatly to maintain consistency or, at the very least, be consistently wrong. Remember, in a parade you can be out of step, but if everyone else is in step with you, who will notice?
Sin #7. Forgetting to Toot Your Own Horn
Marketing collateral is not the time when you step back and let others shower you with praise and adulation. If you don't praise your company and its products and services, no one is going to do it for you. But remember, the reader is not naive. If you say the software is the best thing since sliced bread or that your company walks on water, you are going to create more skepticism than goodwill. At least, make sure the water is frozen solid.
Summary
Of all of the sins, hiding the message and not staying the course are the two most common and fatal. Too often we create marketing materials as if we were the recipient. Being so close to the subject matter, we tend to assume that the reader has our level of knowledge. It is better to write down to the audience than above their heads. After your initial face-to-face meeting, you can assess and calibrate the appropriate level of knowledge.
Most busy professionals have little patience. Consequently, it is all too easy to forsake the current campaign and try something new. This creates confusion and doubt with some of your prospects, and with others, you never get to first base. At the very least, if you are going to change the strategy for marketing your software, have the good sense to segregate your prospects so that you do not appear to be abandoning relationships you have been attempting to cultivate.
Finally, when you are preparing your annual marketing plan, it may be helpful to add a column for the corresponding marketing collateral—brochures, e-mail campaigns, e-books, flash cards, Web site updates, banner ads, success stories, press releases, white papers, and more. In so doing, you can help promote reusability, ensure consistency, and achieve a greater return on your marketing dollars.
If you have committed some of the sins mentioned in this article, you are absolved. Go my child, but sin no more. If you want to confess sins of your own or have better candidates for the seven deadliest, let me know.
About the Author
Joseph J. Strub has extensive experience as a senior project manager and consultant for the planning and execution of ERP projects for manufacturing and distribution systems, and for small to medium size companies in the retail, food and beverage, chemical, and consumer packaged goods (CPG) process industries. He has developed marketing and communication programs for IT organizations, and consulted on offshore, outsourcing opportunities for multinational companies. Additionally, Strub was a consultant and information systems auditor with PricewaterhouseCoopers, and an applications development and support manager for several Fortune 100 companies. Currently, Strub is an independent consultant.
He can be contacted at JoeStrub@WriteTechnologyPlus.com.