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Facebook IPO Fallout–The Seven Doggone-Its of Highly Effective People!

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 27, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

In our April 14th post “If Facebook Were a Country…” we hinted at the “irrational exuberance” that was being generated by the Facebook IPO.  Since early April, MahaTweeter (The Marketing Id’s Twitter handle) had been trying to stand “athwart history, yelling ‘Stop!’”  In any event, before we get to our Seven Doggone-Its of Highly Effective People (with apologies to Dr. Stephen R. Covey, Author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People®) involved in the Facebook IPO, we present a timeline (keeping in character with Facebook’s new look) of MahaTweeter tweets to make our larger point.

A couple of days after Facebook acquired Instagram for an ungodly sum, MahaTweeter fired a couple of warning shots, the first of which included a sarcastic reference to its “insta-acquisition”:

 April 11, 2012 – Instawham: #social #media startup earns billion dollar valuation despite phantom cash flows from non-paying subscriber base of millions! #in

April 12, 2012 – Déjà vu all over again–financiers investing in fantasy business models that promise a #socmed utilization they cannot fully comprehend! #in

MahaTweeter followed up with a quote from our Aril 14th post to highlight Facebook’s ridiculously low revenue per subscriber and net income per subscriber numbers:

April 16, 2012 – #Social #media by numbers: FB generated $4.39 in revenue per active sub and $1.18 in net income per active sub in 2011. http://wp.me/p1zesw-8h

In late April, MahaTweeter wondered about the efficacy of advertising-based social media models in this tweet:

April 28, 2012 – The success of advertising-based #social #media models depends on how effectively those impressions transcend brand to generate demand! #in

By Mayday, seeing no discernible drop in Facebook fever, MahaTweeter warned:

May 3, 2012 – #IPO: It’s no #GOOG–without a plan to monetize its active subscriber base of photo-swapping millennials– #FB is all sizzle and no steak! #in

As FB’s IPO date drew near, some alarm bells finally started to ring.  MahaTweeter read what Francis Gaskins, President of IPODesktop.com, had to say and tweeted accordingly:

May 7, 2012 – #Social #media bubble stress test on May 18th – meanwhile IPO expert warns of getting egg all over your #Facebook http://yhoo.it/J8jgm0 #in

The following day, MahaTweeter was tickled by the hoodie roadshow and remembered how even his hippie idol, Steve Jobs, had to clean up for Apple’s IPO back in December 1980.  It resulted in a Bob Dylan and Dire Straits laced “MahaTweet” that would have hopefully made Jobs proud:

May 8, 2012 – The Times They Are A-Changin’–“don’t-judge-a-Facebook-by-its-cover” #WallStreet raises Money for Nothing during the #hoodie roadshow? #in

During IPO week, MahaTweeter fired daily warning shots as recounted below – even referencing a cautionary Wall Street Journal report on IPO eve:

May 15, 2012 – Caveat Emptor–unless #B2C #social #media demonstrates sustainable, long-term monetization model, we are headed for Internet #Bubble 2.0! #in

May 16, 2012 – Planets aligned for the big #IPO–Jupiter will spawn instant millionaires–but can #social #media reconcile with notion of capital gains? #in

May 17, 2012 – #FB #IPO: public investors rush in where private ones have fled–http://on.wsj.com/JklbRY –we Face growing pains, as they Book early gains! #in

Finally, MahaTweeter put out this deferential (to the markets) tweet on the morning of the FB IPO:

May 18, 2012 – #FB #IPO: When Social Met Capital–markets will now validate whether a billion non-paying subscribers warrant its $100 billion valuation? #in

After the disastrous debut of the Facebook IPO, MahaTweeter expressed relief in a rare Saturday tweet that at least there would be no social media bubble:

 May 19, 2012 – All that glitters is not Google – #FB #IPO indicates dot com bubble redux unlikely; #social #media must learn to walk before it can run! #in

But then Monday after the IPO, we were disheartened to learn that the company that had made its name by encouraging people to share all sorts of information had actually withheld pertinent financial information relating to its future growth from the investing public!  Even before the call for congressional inquiries had begun, MahaTweeter had one last blast on the subject:

May 22, 2012 – More egg over your Facebook–during hoodie roadshow, rev est. cut while IPO price raised–no wonder #FB is tanking! http://yhoo.it/KIzl4W#in

And so, here we are on Memorial Day weekend doing a post-mortem examination of the highly-anticipated, yet badly-botched Facebook IPO.  Our intent is to present readers with what we referred to earlier as the “Seven Doggone-Its of Highly Effective People,” who were involved in some material way with this fiasco:

  1. TAS (Total Active Subscribers) is not equal to TAM (Total Addressable Market)!  Infinity times zero is still zero–even in the new math!  A billion non-paying subscribers can be active for several hours a day on their Facebook pages, yet not move the needle on company revenue.  Typically, TAM is what businesses count on for revenue-generating opportunities, and investors are beginning to understand that TAS is not the same as TAM.  Unfortunately, the highly effective analysts who rave over the social media juggernaut seemed to have missed this distinction.
  2. The Facebook Like has more social value than business value!  It’s pretty apparent that Facebook’s legacy subscriber base (i.e., students from U.S. schools, colleges and universities), which indulges in the use of “likes” in its collective vocabulary, transferred that same sentiment pretty liberally through the use of Facebook’s infamous “Like” button.  From a business perspective, if there is no easy way to monetize that Like, it offers very little redeeming value.  Again, investors seemed to have figured out that the Facebook “Like” thus far has not been all that it is cracked up to be.  So when will the highly effective social media quants come up with a measure already?
  3. Facebook not only made “friend” a verb but also devalued its meaning!  According to HubSpot, an inbound marketing company, the average Facebook user has 130 friends.  In the age of social media that might seem low, but The Marketing Id believes that is a high number of friends for the average Joe to have.  Since its birth in a Harvard dorm room, Facebook has gradually blurred the distinction between friend and acquaintance.  In fact, in the rush to appear popular (i.e., well-connected), Facebook subscribers are quite likely friending strangers.  From a business standpoint, a non-celebrity subscriber is unlikely to influence the purchase decisions of such a “questionable” network of friends.  The highly effective people that derived Facebook’s lofty valuation seemed to have based at least a part of it on an over-valued “friend” factor.
  4. Facebook squandered a “mobile in the hand opportunity for two PCs in the bush!” Facebook had admitted in its S-1 filing that it does “not currently directly generate any meaningful revenue from the use of Facebook mobile products.”  This confession seemed to have not garnered a lot of attention prior to the IPO but gained some currency after the fact.  This “revenue immobility” situation could be attributed to the fact that Facebook’s legacy subscriber base is likely more mobile than its newer and smaller desktop subscriber base from the business world – a possibility that seems to have eluded Facebook’s highly effective management until recently.
  5. Facebook’s “too much, too little, too late” platform strategy?  The Facebook platform had been largely static (i.e., computer-based as opposed to mobile device-based) for five years until Instagram, which was hastily acquired (so it seemed) by Facebook’s highly effective management about five weeks before the IPO.  Most social media pundits believed at the time that Facebook paid too much – $1 billion – to jumpstart its mobile strategy ahead of the IPO.  Then on May 24th Facebook Camera was launched and Forbes suggested that “Facebook purchased Instagram to remove the competition.”  It is unclear how Facebook Camera monetizes mobile, so even if the platform is great and may not be too late, it still remains a too little strategy from a business standpoint.  Again, Facebook’s highly effective management needs to reconcile Instagram with Facebook Camera for a skeptical investing public?
  6. Facebook’s IPO roadshow violated its own mission statement!  A company that wants to “to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected” stumbled right out of the starting gate.  It appears that during the Facebook roadshow, its lead investment bank, Morgan Stanley cut its second-quarter and full-year forecasts for Facebook and “shared” this vital information with only a handful of clients.  It reminded The Marketing Id of that classical Orwellian line from Animal Farm – “All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.” This is a doggone it at the heart of the social media experiment, which needs to be addressed by the Chief Highly Effective Officer himself!
  7. NASDAQ’s embarrassing ~$100 million glitch over a $100 billion IPO!  In the grand scheme of things, NASDAQ’s 20-minute black hole at the start of trading amounted to only 0.1% of Facebook’s market value at launch.  The stars might have been aligned to spawn insta-millionaires as MahaTweeter had tweeted, but according to the Wall Street Journal, “The market-making arms of UBS AG (UBS) and Citigroup Inc. (C) suffered combined losses of about $50 million on trades made during last Friday’s glitch-plagued listing of Facebook Inc.”  Any wonder that FINRA is investigating how the highly effective NASDAQ went dark on FB trades for 20 minutes – an eternity in today’s high-frequency trading environment!

So after a tumultuous week (ending May 25th) as a publicly traded company, FB stock closed 16% below its IPO price.  Notwithstanding the seven doggone-its of the various highly effective people that we have outlined above, it might be still too early to judge whether FB shares had been priced appropriately for the IPO.  Nonetheless, the fallout from the Facebook IPO has significantly reduced the risks of a bubble in social media stocks for the foreseeable future.  Unfortunately, the foreseeable future always comes sooner than later in Internet time; so doggone it, we all need to be vigilant!  Happy Memorial Day!

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Five i-Factors That Can Ensure Every Business Tweet Counts

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on February 19, 2012 | 1 Comment »

In the B2B world, Twitter has the potential of becoming the launching pad of choice for all sorts of business communications beyond traditional PR and marketing to include sales, financial, engineering, operations, customer relationship management, et al.  Given the fact that a tweet can be used to initiate several different types of business communications, never has a tweet’s 140 characters seemed more valuable to the enterprise.  The Marketing Id has previously written about “The Art & Science of the B2B Tweet and Strategic Intent!”  In that post, we had discussed strategic intent and its tactical implications on the actual construction of a 140-character tweet.  Here we will take a more holistic view about the desired psychological effects of a business tweet.

The Marketing Id believes that every tweet, regardless of which business function it pertains to, must conform to a behavior-inducing pattern that runs as follows: Interrupt, Inform, Interact, Investigate and Inquire.   The sequence in this “I” pattern is important, in that, the more of these behavioral characteristics that a tweet induces, the more empowering its effect.  So let us consider the relevance of each one of these “i-Factors” in the proper sequence and their attendant impact on the composition of a tweet.

We begin by assuming that a typical B2B is active in the social media realm and its brand equity has been built to a level where its corporate brand and/or its desired line(s) of business have generated a substantial number of Twitter followers.  So its primary challenge when trying to engage followers, who in turn might be following a significant number of other Twitter accounts, is how to grab their attention with a periodic tweet –which in most cases amounts to them (the followers) looking for a needle-in-a-haystack?

Interrupt.  Despite the identification of tweets by monitoring services, lists and hashtags, it is still difficult for a tweet to make the desired impression.  Therefore the guiding principle for any business tweet must be to interrupt the thought processes of as many as of its followers as possible.  This is a tall order that requires marketing acumen. As followers scan their monitored tweets, lists and hashtags of choice for ones that they might actually pause to read and digest, your company’s tweet must necessarily interrupt their scanning process and get them to pause for that critical second look.  Thus your tweet must not only have a pertinent objective, but also have been constructed using the AIDA principles that have been discussed previously in the above-referenced blog.  It is vitally important to remember that the very first purpose of a tweet is to interrupt a follower’s thought processes.

Inform.  Once a follower’s thought processes have been interrupted, your tweet has but a few seconds to engage and captivate the reader.  In the business world this does not imply sensationalism, which in fact could cause an adverse reaction and affect a follower’s future behavior towards your company’s tweets.  The business tweet must always seek to inform followers in a manner that will peak their curiosity, prompting them to instantly seek more information than what your tweet has to offer.  So it is key for a tweet to inform an interrupted follower just enough to push them towards taking the next step, which is typically solicited within the tweet via an embedded link or hashtag.

Interact.  A follower interrupted, now feeling insufficiently informed, seeks to instantaneously learn more.  Your tweet offers either an embedded link or a hashtag(s) that a curious follower can click on.  The tweet must necessarily enable interested followers by allowing them to interact – when your tweet initiates a click through, it then succeeds in its secondary objective, which is to direct interrupted followers to go where you want them to.  This is no mean achievement because interrupted followers have now acquiesced to instantly finding out more about what your company intended to convey than what was available in your cryptic tweet.

Investigate.  In a non-hashtag click through, followers exit Twitter and land on an external page, where they must be able to satisfactorily investigate what they assumed they came looking for. In a typical B2B marketing scenario, a follower that clicks on an embedded link within your tweet is likely seeking specific subject matter expertise or thought leadership, which your company must be able to provide.  So it is imperative that this landing page empowers the follower to further investigate the subject matter that had been referenced in your original tweet.

Inquire.  If the landing page is intended to create a sales enablement opportunity for your company, it must provide an inquiry form for the curious follower to volunteer contact information.  Form completion is often driven by a need to acquire additional non-public information that followers desire based on their preliminary investigation of your landing page data.  So this additional non-public information must offer substantial value to your followers, such that they feel compelled to complete your inquiry form.

Any tweet that accomplishes the complete “I” journey from Interrupt to Inquire for a follower has successfully transformed that follower into a future business prospect.  The Marketing Id believes that this i-Factor value chain is integral to inducing the required behavioral pattern in a typical B2B’s follower base.  The further along a follower is prompted in your B2B tweet’s value chain, the greater the likelihood of engaging that follower into a more meaningful relationship with your company. And, speaking of relationships, a tweet is like a pickup line–if it is good, followers read it; if it is great, they click on its embedded link; if the ensuing landing page rocks, they offer you their contact information!  So B2B marketers go forth and tweet your best pickup lines – your company is bound to benefit from them in the long run!

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Marketing & Management Lessons from “Steve Jobs” Biography–“This was a man!”

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on November 17, 2011 | 1 Comment »

After reading Walter Isaacson’s biography, “Steve Jobs,” The Marketing Id has come to the conclusion that Steve Jobs was the real “iMan” after all.  Maybe not the original “I-man”–that title probably still belongs to Don Imus of morning talk radio/TV.  In any case, I[1] thought it would be useful to try and glean a few marketing and management lessons from Mr. Isaacson’s refreshingly candid book.

Before I begin, it might be worth reliving my own brief encounter with Steve Jobs from a long time ago.  It was either in late 1988 or early 1989 at the launch of his NeXT computer in New York City.  This was before Steve Jobs became really famous for his meticulous launch events that would later evolve, upon his return to Apple in 1997, into spectacular shows.  Nonetheless, the then 33-year old Steve put on a pretty decent show for the NeXT launch in NYC and curiously had a workstation setup on either side of the stage.  In keeping true to Murphy’s Law, the workstation on the right side of the stage unexpectedly froze in the middle of the demo!  Before most in the audience could realize it, Steve Jobs calmly continued to talk as he glided over to the left side of the stage and seamlessly picked up on the demo as if there had been no problem.  After the presentation, as Steve Jobs was exiting stage left, I rushed into the aisle and was one of the many adoring fans, who got to shake his hand as I muttered to him, “That was awesome!”  Steve stared directly into my eyes and replied very matter-of-factly, “Then why don’t you go out and get one.”  It struck me at that time – always a salesman!  Yet, I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I could not afford its $6500 price tag.  Isaacson brings out this perennial salesman trait as a standout in Steve Jobs’ personality throughout his book, noting that he concluded every launch event with the salesman clincher phrase “and one more thing.” But Steve, as Isaacson notes towards the end of the book, was wary of salesmen, especially when they landed up becoming CEOs–his self-induced experience at Apple with the hiring of salesman John Sculley from Pepsi had left a deep scar which never healed!

Steve Jobs’ life could well be summed up in a famous claim attributed to Julius Caesar, “I came, I saw, I conquered.” Because, in reading Isaacson’s book, one gets the impression that Steve Jobs in his relatively short life seemed to be in a rush to “change the world.” By mastering the art of marrying creativity and engineering, he adapted cutting-edge technologies to simplify life for mankind.  In doing so, as Isaacson points out, Steve Jobs transformed (conquered, if you will) six major industries:

  1. Personal computers
  2. Animated movies
  3. Music
  4. Phones
  5. Tablet computing
  6. Digital publishing

While the impact of these transformations were significantly greater in the B2C world of movies, music and phones; he also created enormous trend-setting influences in the B2B domain of computers and digital publishing.

In keeping with the Julius Caesar metaphors, I am reminded of another great quote from Shakespeare’s play on the life of the Roman emperor, in which Mark Antony grieves after Caesar has been slain, “The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones.”  In reading Isaacson’s book, I got the impression that the reverse of this quote was true in the case of Steve Jobs – some of the “evil” personality traits that Steve displayed during his short life will soon be forgotten, but the tremendous good that his professional endeavors bestowed upon the world will live on forever.

Isaacson made much about Steve Jobs and his “Reality Distortion Field (RDF).”  Every time I came across this nebulous concept in the book, I couldn’t help think that by definition “reality distortion” is an oxymoron.  RDF is a mind-bending exercise that is typically associated with people who experiment with hallucinogens and/or practice intensive meditative techniques.  Steve indulged in both of these activities and this probably convinced him that he had the will power to make subordinates and colleagues achieve the impossible.  But as the old saying goes, “it takes two to tango,” and Steve couldn’t have been a leader of the RDF cult, if he did not have willing followers. The bottom line is Steve used RDF for the public good – he led them to create insanely good products and did not get them to just drink the Kool-Aid.  In any event, this is not a management style that I would recommend because it is not one that can be taught–some chosen few are born with it and Steve Jobs was one of them.

From a marketing standpoint, if there is a single most appealing characteristic of Steve Jobs that stands out in Isaacson’s book, it is the one that gave him an ability to so seamlessly intersect art and engineering in a superior fashion, which can be seen in every product from the first Macintosh to the last iPad.  Steve’s mind naturally converged its logical left brain and creative right brain activities and thus enabled him to gracefully connect the complex with the simple.  More importantly, he imbued his “think different”  philosophy into every product using the KISS – Keep it Small & Simple – standard that required every user experience to be as intuitive and simple as possible, even when it meant integrating very sophisticated hardware and software to make it happen.

The flip side of Steve’s KISS was an insistence on providing a tightly-controlled, end-to-end user experience, which required him to manage a very vertically-integrated company.  In the age of the internet and open systems, this was a rather contrarian approach.  But, as Isaacson points out with several instances in the book, Steve did display some very contradictory traits–both, on the personal side and in his professional behavior.  Nonetheless, these contradictions did not prevent him from achieving what he set out to do.  Again, this is a characteristic that cannot be acquired and probably not a management style that ordinary people would be able to pull off.  But Steve did!

Steve was not only opposed to a horizontally-fragmented, decentralized company structure, but also adopted a very collaborative management style to boot–it involved all functional departments at all stages of the concept-to-launch cycle.  This operating style enabled him to tinker, change and even scrap late-stage designs and start over, if the perfectionist in him was not satisfied with the way a product/service was turning out.  Steve defied conventional product marketing methods and, in fact, did not believe in traditional market research.  Again, this methodology had a better chance of succeeding in the “build it and they will come” naiveté of the B2C world, but would be more difficult to pull off in the stricter demands of the B2B world.  It probably explains why Steve was wildly successful in the B2C industries and to a lesser degree in the B2B sectors.

If there is one big disappointment that I had with Isaacson’s book, especially because it was rushed to print barely three weeks after Steve Jobs’ passing, is that it did not contain an epilogue to cover the tragic event.  It would have been befitting for Isaacson to have mentioned Steve’s sister, Mona Simpson’s stirring eulogy at his funeral where she revealed that Steve’s final words were: “OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW.”  It would have been the perfect ending to a remarkable life.  But since Isaacson failed to do so, I will keep with my analogies from “Julius Caesar” and end my own review with this parting quote from Shakespeare,

“…and the elements So mixed in him that Nature might stand up And say to all the world, ‘This was a man!’”

[1] The Marketing Id wanted to go with “we” here but, in remaining true to the subject matter, first person singular seems apt

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A Salute to Steve Jobs – the Best Marketer in the World!

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 26, 2011 | Leave a Comment »

The World's Best Marketer

We the beneficiaries of over three decades of technological innovation from that incredible marketing machine, known as Steve Jobs, are quite saddened by his decision to step down as the CEO of Apple.  It seems like he was forced to live up to the lines from a 1973 Badfinger song “Apple Of My Eye”:

You’re the apple of my heart
But now, the time has come to part

It was only a few blogs ago The Marketing Id wrote about “the revolution in mobile broadband communications brought about by the iPhone, iPad and video streaming…”  Well, to the millions and millions of happy Apple aficionados worldwide, Steve Jobs has been consistently at the forefront of what is turning out to be a rather ubiquitous cloud-based, communications and collaboration phenomenon.

So it might be worthwhile trying to figure out just why Steve Jobs has been so successful in this new converged paradigm of computers, communications and collaboration that makes available any type of content to anyone, anywhere, anytime on any device.  The uncharitable might say his success was, in large part, due to another C – control, which he undoubtedly cherished.  But control is ineffective, if you cannot command respect, which he definitely earned from customers, competitors, employees, partners, vendors, stockholders, investors and what have you.

Aside from this dominant personality trait, recent developments in the afore-mentioned converged space have convinced The Marketing Id that Steve Jobs has always been ahead of the “marketing and innovation” curve–Peter Drucker’s famous “two-and only two-basic functions of the business enterprise.”  Only in the past couple of weeks we learned about Google’s $12.5 billion offer to buy Motorola Mobility and HP’s $10.3 billion offer to buy Autonomy.  When one looks beyond the hefty price tags, it is simply one of the world’s leading software companies buying a hardware company and one of the world’s leading hardware companies buying a software company.  As a consequence of these actions, The Marketing Id had tweeted the following on August 15th:

“When Harry (hardware co.) met Sally (software co.) combos will energize the #Cloud/SaaS/Mobility/Communications/Collaboration paradigm.”

But, guess what?  Steve Jobs’ Apple had Harry and Sally as fraternal twins from the day the company started in his garage in 1976!  Yes, Steve Jobs wanted to control, both the hardware and software aspects of his product from day one.  Ask any Apple user about why they love their Macs, iPods, iPhones and iPads – it’s that one stop shop of integrated quality and satisfaction that just can’t be beat!  Steve Jobs was championing convergence long before it became cool!

After Steve Jobs announced that he had resigned as CEO, The Marketing Id tweeted:

“Steve Jobs, the world’s best marketer, took his last bite as CEO of that iconic ‘American pie’–it sure feels like the day the music died!”

The Marketing Id would encourage readers, who can spare 15 minutes, to check out Steve’s inspiring commencement speech at Stanford University in 2005 – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc – it tells you a lot about what made Steve tick?

Finally, the magnificent overall imprint that Steve Jobs leaves behind reminded The Marketing Id of more apt lyrics from Stevie Wonder’s immortal song “You Are The Sunshine Of My Life” also from 1973.  An older, wiser and more compassionate Steve Jobs might just be signing its words as he exits the “One Infinite Loop” of his beloved Apple campus:

You are the apple of my eye
Forever you’ll stay in my heart

As will you, in ours, Steve – for you have given all of us a wonderful ride just by thinking different.  More importantly, you brought product and marketing together like nobody else has and for that you will be sorely missed!

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Integrated Marketing Value Chain

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on May 17, 2011 | 1 Comment »

A question that is often asked in marketing departments across the B2B world – so how do we integrate these new inbound marketing elements using various social media features with our existing outbound marketing efforts?

This can be very easily done by taking just a few inbound activities and combining them with a few traditional outbound activities for maximum effect.  In fact, in the example below, you will notice that value is added at each stage of a simple integrated marketing plan centered on a seminal company event – a new product launch.  So let’s begin by laying out the product launch plan scenario and its associated components below.

Scenario:

Your company is ready to release a new product in a few weeks and related to this launch, it is going to put out a PR on the wire early AM tomorrow.  The new product is also being demoed in a couple of weeks at your company booth during a very important industry trade show, which is referenced in the PR.  In addition, marketing collateral, including a product datasheet and a related white paper has also been developed.

INTEGRATED MARKETING VALUE CHAIN

Proposed Inbound Activities:

  1. Twitter
  2. LinkedIn
  3. Company Blog

Proposed Outbound Activities:

  1. Press Release
  2. E-mail
  3. Trade Show

Required Marketing Assets:

  1. Product-related white paper
  2. Product datasheet
  3. Product demo

Intended Timeline:

  1. PR scheduled for release early AM tomorrow
  2. Trade show starts two weeks from today

Integrated Marketing Plan:

  1. Using the company’s Twitter handle, send a tweet every six hours over the next 24-hour period with appropriate messaging/links to the actual PR on the company web site.  Dedicated company salesmen and other marketing representatives may each choose to disperse a similar message/link just once via their individual LinkedIn accounts.
  2. The PR landing page must display a complete text of the actual PR, which should offer a call to action early on within the text of the PR.  This call to action must provide the visitor an option to link to the company blog – where, after a summary product description, a company whitepaper (including datasheet) related to the new product should be offered for download to the visitor upon filling a brief form (name/company/e-mail address).  Visitors, who choose not to fill this form, should be directed to a product datasheet-only page after being politely reminded again of the upcoming product demo at the trade show two weeks out.
  3. Over the next ten days, all visitors who have completed the form for whitepaper download must be sent a personalized e-mail from within the company CRM system by an appropriate marketing staff member.  This e-mail should offer a personalized demo to each visitor who will be at the trade show.  If the visitor responds to the e-mail offer, they are now a prospect, so it is best to confirm a specific demo time slot for this prospect.  Requisite sales person will need to be present during each personalized demo at the trade show.
  4. Using the company’s Twitter handle, every day for a week prior to the trade show, re-tweet once daily a reminder of your company’s product release announcement and its demo at upcoming trade show.
  5. During trade show, additional non-scheduled visitors who sit through the demo should be presented a hard copy of the whitepaper with post-show follow-up action in the usual fashion.  Previously scheduled visitors who keep their demo appointments can be offered additional product-related incentives (such as a discount).

This simple marketing plan is a quick and easy way to integrate standard inbound marketing techniques at no significant additional cost to your existing outbound marketing campaigns.  There is a clear value-add in an integrated
campaign, in that, your company will generate qualified leads using this approach.  If your company relies on purely outbound activities–such as PR and trade show, even when they are linked together–do not produce the same quality of leads as an integrated campaign. More importantly, standard metrics can establish that these integrated marketing campaigns are also more cost-effective in generating qualified leads for your company.

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