With more than 25 years experience in marketing, public relations and journalism, Francis is an insightful strategist, an expert writer and a seasoned veteran of the specific challenges of helping B2B technology companies engage with their marketplace and those who influence it.
“It’s all about the content, it’s not about the sizzle. You have to give investors the content they need to make an investing decision.” So says Frank Erschen, pitch coach, angel investor and executive in residence at Communitech. Here is a recap of Erschen’s counsel on how Yupi Studios and any other startup in search of capital should structure their investor pitching.
Delivered at the right stage in the sales process, a sharply tuned software demo can make the difference between making the sale and leaving empty handed.
The chief technology officer of a company for which I occasionally do some work dug into his archives this past week and came up with a customer survey that was administered when this company was developing its first major product about 20 years ago. I regularly express concern that this company does an inadequate job of properly figuring out what its market really needs. As a result, it frequently falls into the trap of listening to a single prospect's requirements and building products that ultimately prove to have a market of just one.
Customer service is based on what I have come to call my first law of competitive differentiation, the proposition that, in an age when almost any technological or cost advantage will rapidly and inevitably be eroded, the only sustainable competitive differentiation for most companies is to treat their customers like the center of the universe, which they are.
From charities, to naming rights on community ice rinks and signage at industry events, there are always hard questions that must be asked about whether seeing your organization’s name in lights will, in fact, translate into greater awareness among the customers you are trying to reach and make the phone ring more often.
Last week, I tackled the assertion I all-too-frequently hear from technology executives that everybody could benefit from their product, and so the whole world is their target customer. This week, I’d like to demolish an equally hoary shibboleth that isn’t really a corollary statement but that goes hand-in-hand with the everyone-is-our-customer myth so regularly that maybe it ought to be.
A few years ago, we worked on the launch of a new personal finance website developed by a veteran personal financial advisor. The site was detailed, secure, incredibly useful and solved a sharp, expensive and disruptive pain that the advisor had been running up against his entire professional life.
A lot of entrepreneurs and startup CEOs become reluctant road warriors as they raise funding and meet with customers who can be globally distributed. If today's post helps stretch your scarce travel dollars while making things less stressful, then I will have done well.
The rise of content marketing as an umbrella term for a whole host of marketing activities is an example of how the terms, tools and techniques available to marketers might be in constant flux, with new things flying at us on an almost-daily basis, but the underlying fundamentals have barely changed a wit.
I love working in technology marketing, but every coin has a flip side, and today I'm going to talk about some of the things I truly dislike about tech marketing.
Any time a company sharply focuses its messaging on one promising market segment, it runs the risk of turning off other market segments that are also attractive. You have to be OK with that, and that's the daring part.
Technology companies tend to be engineering-driven, and gears just don’t get marketing, goes perhaps the most common refrain. It’s true that most technology ventures are engineering ventures, but I think marketers are letting themselves too easily off the hook by bleating that the engineers don’t understand what we do and that’s why they won’t support it.
Francis Moran of Francis Moran and Associates tells us why he loves tech marketing and the startup culture that surrounds it.
Given that the cost of acquiring new customers is generally held to be much higher than the cost of retaining existing ones, what is the appropriate level of investment in customer satisfaction? Does it really lead to more sales? Does it convey a sustainable competitive advantage?
It's Super Bowl weekend, that time of year when a very large swath of North America--and even some of the rest of the world--tunes in to see a once-a-year clash of multimillion-dollar Goliaths fighting it out in a no-holds-barred battle.
No sane person setting out on a long journey of indefinite length would wait until they had arrived before filling up the gas tank. And yet technology companies tell me all the time that they’re going to do exactly that.