A Marketing-Communications & Creative Agency
Why should a tech company consider hiring an external marketing firm? One of the most important reasons is that an agency will be made up of team members with years of combined expertise in diverse marketing skill sets. Finding a single person or building an internal team with all of this experience will cost far more than partnering with a marketing agency.
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Marketing is not an exact science and can seem very abstract. On top of that, the marketing industry is evolving at a much quicker pace than other areas of business. Social media, smartphones, and ad block features in web browsers are just a few of the things that have greatly impacted the efforts of marketers. Buyers also behave much differently today than they did in the early 2000’s.
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John Centofanti will be presenting at WordCamp Kent on Be the Expert: Growing Your Business by Educating Your Audience.
This session will focus on how to grow your business by educating your customers and providing value. You already know that your audience is looking for an expert to help grow their businesses. Find how to help your audience succeed and build your expertise at the same time.
Don’t fake it ’till you make it. Learn it ’till you earn it. This session will give you practical ways to grow your own business and your reputation.
Join John and others at Kent State University June 9-10 to catch his full presentation. Don’t miss out!
New website features, styles, and trends appear daily. Some disappear quickly and others become a standard which other sites follow for years.
Best practices for websites may be technical or related to design and content. Some standards have remained for years, while others change year after year.
Think of some website features or styles you’ve experienced:
John Centofanti will be presenting at WordCamp Toronto on Brand Positioning: Growing Your Business by Finding Your Niche.
This session will cover how to develop your own brand, how to position it in the marketplace and attract the right clients. It will also cover ways to develop messaging for your business.
The session is interactive. John will use the branding principles presented with a volunteer to help a real business. This is a condensed version of the work Creative Stream Marketing does with all new clients to prepare their business for effective marketing. This will be easy to understand and practical, regardless of your business size or your expertise.
Many tech companies refer to their offering as a product, others call it a solution, and still others refer to their service. What’s the best way to market your offering?
If you are routinely charging different rates or prices for your offering, chances are, you don’t have a product.
This may not sound like an important point to discuss, but it can influence a prospect’s perception of your company and affect whether he or she buys from you or not. I’ve worked with SaaS companies, software companies, and others who have some type of tech solution. Here are some common scenarios:
Often, these terms are used interchangeably, with no sense of consistency or clarity.
Including software screenshots can help or hurt your marketing.
Many tech companies develop proprietary software that includes dashboards to help users monitor some aspect of their business in real time. Many of these dashboards have interactive or static graphs.
As tech companies develop print and digital marketing materials, it’s common to include screenshots of these dashboards. The dashboards can create a lot of value for the users. It’s understandable that the developers of the software want them included in marketing materials.
Negative marketing messages are everywhere—TV, radio, web, print, outdoor and social media.
Negative marketing can take many forms:
Speaking negatively about the competition
Make strong statements about your software or technology solution without using meaningless buzzwords.
Technology marketing often includes the words below to position a solution above competitors. Yet, these words are overused, weak on meaning, and often can’t be proven.
Innovative
This means, “the act of introducing or the state of being introduced,” according to the dictionary. Your technology may actually be innovative; however, all other technology companies are innovative to some degree or another. Since it’s the nature of technology companies to innovate, you’re just doing what is the most basic, expected level of work in your industry. Being innovative doesn’t set you apart from all other tech companies. [Read more…]
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