Tomicide Solutions, April2017

7 Misdirected Inbound Marketing Practices That Can Play Wrecking Ball on IT SMEs Bottom Lines

By Tom "Bald Dog" Varjan

"Morris dancing is the most fatuous, tenth-rate entertainment ever devised by man. Forty effeminate blacksmiths waving bits of cloth they've just wiped their noses on. How it's still going on in this day and age I'll never know." ~ Blackadder (Season 1 Episode 2: Born To Be King)

You may or may not agree with Blackadder's regal taste on this delicate matter and Morris dancing's place in contemporary entertainment, but he may be right.

But there are seven equally fatuous inbound marketing practices that can cause irreparable damage to IT consulting firms... with or without Morris dancers.

Yes, inbound marketing has been spreading faster than a speeding bullet on steroids, but IT consulting firms that have spent a lifetime using outbound marketing have been adopting inbound marketing simply by reversing outbound marketing.

As David L. Cooperrider and Diana Whitney write in their short book, Appreciative Inquiry: A Positive Revolution in Change, you can't study floatation by observing objects sink and simply reversing your findings.

So, without reversing anything at all, let's take a closer look at seven inbound marketing problems that can plague IT consulting firms.

Defining The Market Too Broadly

The first reality is that information technology is a broad term. Firms can offer a broad range of services to a broad range of target markets.

But without establishing what specific service we offer to which specific market, development firms can't position themselves.

For best inbound marketing, you want to position your firm both vertically and horizontally.

So, with that in mind...

  1. "We do IT stuff " is too vague.

  2. "We provide IT security services for mid-market manufacturers ($50-250 million annual revenue and 50-250 employees) in the American Midwest with a special emphasis on cyber- and cloud security" is very specific.

The firm with the #2 tagline has a better chance to succeed in inbound marketing because their search engine keywords can be more narrowly defined, so the website can attract the right visitors.

The other good reason for specialisation is that people by packages of services and prefer to buy them from specialists.

Let's see the difference...

People don't buy IT consulting, buy they do buy secure operation.

What that means is that if you want to charge premium for your services, then your firm has to offer highly differentiated specialist service packages to specific target markets.

There are four factors to consider when selecting your target market...

  1. Demographics is a collection of factual data on your target market.

  2. Psychographics is a set of behavioural characteristics of your target market.

  3. Technographics is a set of technical characteristics that describes the technical advancement or laggardness of your target market.

  4. Firmographics is a set of characteristics of your target market at an organisational (vs. individual) level.

Defining these four factors, you take a giant step towards positioning your firm the right way.

Amateurishly Obsolete Or Plain "Black Hat" SEO

The insidious temptation of the cheap third world is lurking in the shadows, so be afraid, very afraid.

While SEO experts in those countries too have information on up-to-date search engine optimisation (SEO) practices, there are two vital factors to consider.

  1. Proper "White hat" SEO is neither cheap nor easy to design and implement.

  2. Working in far-away lands, the repercussions of "Black hat" SEO tactics backfire at you not at them.

If their "black hat", a.k.a. unacceptable or plain illegal SEO practices cause your website or even business damage, they are thousands of miles away from you to hold them accountable to their actions.

Many of them are relaxed about search engine rules because they know they can quickly disappear on their clients and then re-open shop next morning under a different name and web domain.

This video by SEO ace, Jill Whalen, can help you to select the right SEO company. She considers factors like,

And here are some of my additions...

SEO is a complex science and since you're not in the SEO business, there is no point in having full-time SEO experts on your payroll.

But select wisely.

Wasting Time And In-House Talents On Non-Core Work

You have to decide whom you need on a full-time basis and whom you need on an "as needed" project basis.

If I remember the year correctly, it was in 2003 when the Royal Bank of Canada did a study and concluded that companies that do non-core activities in-house using full-time employees, lose 38 cents on every dollar.

But first, let's define core business.

Core business are the business functions that are absolutely and positively required for the daily operation of the business.

For an IT consulting firm, setting up backup systems is a core function but graphics design is not, although graphics design is required for the firm's website and collateral materials. But it's an IT consulting firm not a visual design studio.

You may or may not know that meat processing plants employ hundreds of meat cutters and own hundreds of knives and cleavers, but don't employ a dedicated full-time employees to sharpen them.

When thinking of core vs. non-core work, let's consider the Stan Shih's Smile Curve of Value, named after the Taiwanese businessman, Stan Shih, the Founder and former President and Chairman of Acer Inc.

Smile Curve of Value
Credit: Chaitravi's Blog

As you can see, from the client's perspectives, the concept, marketing, sales and post-sale client service are the most valuable components.

And while as a IT consultancy firm leader, you work with manufacturing companies, it would be plain retarded to employ every position that your clients have.

For instance, it's estimated that of the $400 price of an iPhone, a mere $5 (1.25%) goes to manufacturing in China, about $45 (11.25%) goes to Japan for parts, the other $350 (87.5%) to Apple in the US.

This is why every iPod, iPhone and other IDoohickey states on its cover: "Designed by Apple in California. Assembled in China."

For instance, yes, you need graphics work done from time to time, but not on a full-time basis. You're not running a graphics design agency.

Yes, you need web programming work done from time to time, but not on a full-time basis. You're not running a software development agency.

Over the last few years, it's become fashionable to save money by replacing the kind and friendly voice of a skilled receptionist with the cold, apathetic "couldn't care less" voice of a voice mail announcer, dragging callers through seemingly endless labyrinths of options. Halfway through the message maze, most callers either hang up or slit their wrists in frustration.

The receptionist is the first contact of interested buyers, and as such, it's the receptionist who sets the tone of the subsequent relationship.

A client of mine had this problem a few years ago.

Qualified buyers would call the company and talk to the receptionist. After a short chat, the conversation ended and the buyer vanished.

And it kept happening.

Why?

Because the receptionist was unable to relate to the buyer and see him eye-to-eye.

Surprise, surprise!

The $35,000 a year receptionist wasn't a peer to the $250,000 a year buyer.

For the buyer, the receptionist was just an obstacle that he must go through by any means in order to connect with a "real" professional.

Then the CEO beefed up the reception desk with a tech support lady who had both technical and business expertise, and knew how to talk to buyers. From then on, she would take calls from buyers, and the original receptionist would do the normal receptionist work plus would go into intense learning mode.

More importantly, the CEO doubled both the receptionist's and the tech support lady's salaries. After jumping into a higher socioeconomic category, both women felt more confident in their work and this change changed the quality of interactions with buyers.

Soon after, both the original receptionist's and the tech support lady's salaries surpassed $100,000 + bonuses. As their personal circumstances improved, so did the quality of their interactions with buyers.

And this improvement significantly boosted the firm's bottom line.

As Dave Stelzl puts it in his book, From Vendor to Adviser, "$10 people run $10 businesses, employing $10 workers and selling $10 products/services."

I may be wrong, but I don't think that cheap (as a mindset) companies led by cheap leaders, employing cheap people can create and sell anything but cheap crap.

Knowing that, you'd better find and recruit the best receptionist you can afford.

Working In A "Tell Me What You Want And Get Out Of My Way" Fashion

Firm leaders often make the mistake of telling their marketing people what they want and then get out of the way, expecting their marketing people to do everything without further input from boardroom dwellers.

And then after the creative process is done and marketing people show it to their managers, they often get beaten up because it doesn't follow the boss man's (almost always men; most women are natural collaborators) idea to the letter.

But this must be a collaborative process. From Peter Drucker we know that...

"Because its purpose is to create a customer, the business has two - and only two - functions... Marketing (you get paid for creating a customer) and innovation (you get paid for creating a new dimension of performance). Marketing and innovation produce results, all the rest are costs."

This also means that firm leaders must be actively involved in marketing. And whoever is not willing to get involved is holding the firm back and should be fired before they can say Jemima Puddle Duck. Yes, that quickly.

It's the marketing folks' responsibility to sit down with the firm leaders and craft a creative brief for the specific marketing campaign.

Here are some questions to address in the creative brief...

Project Name:

Throughout the marketing process, there must be ongoing communication between the marketing folks and the firm leaders to make sure that the marketing campaign is congruent with the firm's overall strategy.

Neglecting Or Ignoring Social Media

May it be LinkedIn or Facebook, social media has been playing a more and more significant role in our lives.

Vancouver-based social medical software developer, Hootsuite reports that...

Yes, some channels are more ideal for B2C (Facebook, Pinterest) and some for B2B (LinkedIn, Youtube), but the stats clearly show that every business had better start playing the social media "game" because it's far too serious to be neglected.

As a developer firm, being in the B2B world, you may want to start with LinkedIn by setting up a profile and then start connecting.

Pay special attention to your...

Your headline stops browsers and your summary keeps them.

You can also check Donna Serdula's book, LinkedIn Makeover: Professional Secrets to a POWERFUL LinkedIn Profile. It walks you through the process of setting up an attractive LinkedIn profile, how to attract visitors and how to make connections.

After having set up your LinkedIn profile, use indicators like total connections, number and level of new invitations, profile views, level of interactions and endorsements to track your LinkedIn success.

Entrusting Your Firm's Online Presence To A Web Designer Or Developer

Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against web designers or developers.

All I'm saying is that your website is a marketing platform and it should be under the command of a marketing person.

Every good website is the result of collaboration among several professionals, like...

And among those professionals, someone has to be the project leader.

And if you plan to use your website as a client acquisition tool, that project leader had better be a marketer. Good marketers understand both marketing and selling.

As we discussed in a previous section (Wasting Time And In-House Talents On Non-Core Work), on this website team

Only the marketing person, the webmaster and the content writer are payrolled employee. He others re independent professionals, coordinated by the marketing person who also doubles up as a project manager

One more point. After the quality of your prospect list and offer, your sales copy is the third most important ingredient of your marketing recipe, but pure copywriters shouldn't be put in charge either. By pure, I mean copywriters who are not marketing savvy, although many of them are.

Also, forget about hiring Ivy League MBAs. Those courses teach "big corporation" marketing with tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars in the annual marketing budget. That approach is just not suitable for entrepreneurial businesses.

Find someone who's learnt both from entrepreneurial marketing contemporaries like Jay Abraham, jay Conrad Levinson or Dan Kennedy and from the classics, like David Ogilvy, Claude Hopkins or John Caples.

Make sure your marketing person is an expert in education-based results-accountable direct response marketing (entrepreneurial) not in institutional image (big corporation) marketing.

Also, as you assemble your website team you may consider testing your team members. At the minimum, run them through a Gallup Strengthsfinder and a Kolbe A test.

These two tests help you to select people who can form cohesive team as opposed to a perpetually arguing work group.

Committing Content Rot

Just as in nature things that are left alone start rotting, so do marketing materials, including web pages.

But unlike in nature where we have perturbation, that is, nature reorganises itself, when obsolete content is left alone, it keeps rotting in cyberspace without ever to re-order.

IT is a dynamic, rapidly changing industry with lots of intricate moving parts, and your website must represent this rapid change.

Savvy buyers can easily recognise derelict websites and they move on to firms that are up to date with recent changes.

Quality content is the heart and soul of effective inbound marketing. But you have to be careful here. That content has to be up-to-date.

One trick you may consider is that when you post your content, set yourself a reminder in your calendar one year from the day of publishing, and when the review day come...

If you decide an article is totally obsolete...

One Agency Vs. Several Solo Professionals

There is a very good chance that you will need some external help in more than one aspects of inbound marketing, and then the question comes up whether to hire an inbound agency or several individual professionals.

My experience is that when you hire a marketing agency, the agency does the work but you never know who exactly.

You never know how much of an expert the PPC person or the SEO person is.

Are they in your own country or even on your continent and not in some third-world country with dodgy electricity grid and dubious Internet connection?

It's common practice in large consulting firms that senior partners, with some grey on their temples, hunt down clients and then the junior worker bees in the back office do the work, while learning the profession on their clients' dimes.

In the agency's case, all you know the agency has won some awards, whatever that means.

According to British actress, Helen Mirren, "Awards are crème-de-la-crème of bullshit".

Many marketing agencies garner prestige by winning awards, not by helping their clients to make money.

Have you thought about why highly successful marketers, that is, real world marketers, like Dan Kennedy, Perry Marshall and Jay Abraham have never received any awards, although their clients have made billions of dollars based on their advice, help and support?

With that in mind, your best bet is to engage individual specialists for specific services.

If you need SEO, find and engage a kick-arse SEO person who's willing to put his personal promise behind the services he offers.

I don't man he guarantees results. That's unethical. No one can guarantee results. I can't even guarantee that I go to the gym tomorrow. I intend to, but I may get hit by a beer truck or eaten by an elephant and end up "missing" my workout... well, all my future workouts.

Yes, that specialist is highly likely to use some contractors to do some back office work, but the high-level work, that's vital to your success, is done by that person. For instance, in copywriting, I always engage external editors and proofreaders to make sure the final copy is stylistically and grammatically correct. But I also make sure the copy keeps the tone and the overall message that I've given to it.

Why is the solo professional option so important?

People who are really good at what they do are proud of their expertise and know that as employees, they would earn a fraction of what they could earn as freelancers.

So, they don't become employees. Well, they do at the beginning of their career fresh out of school or college.

But as they gain expertise and experience, they become aware of the level and the value of their expertise. They also realise that they would always be underpaid because their employers want to make the big money.

It means when you hire an agency, you're likely to work either with inexperienced people who are at the beginning of their careers and might become great one day or people who are employees because they're not good enough to step up and become freelancers.

Do you know why public schools are borderline useless? Because the good teachers have quit their professions and now teach the same stuff online as freelance educators.

And the remaining teachers are so bad that they need union protection to keep their cushy jobs and insane benefits and privileges. I reckon, they know they would starve to death in the free market.

At this point some people say, what about highly talented people who don't want to put up with the daily hassle of running their own businesses and getting clients?

Well, running a business or getting clients is a hassle for those who don't know how to do it.

But if they don't know how to do it, they can't be truly client-centric in their subject matters either. And this leads to agencies that pursue awards for themselves not success for their clients.

Employees are employees, except for very, very few of them, because they have employee mentalities (getting paid for elapsed time).

As a business owner, you pay for the value you derive from a professional's help, not the elapsed time she puts into helping you.

So, my suggestion is that if you need external help, engage several solo professionals, reassign one of your full-time employee project managers to forge these professionals into a cohesive team and get the work done.

Look at it as a Hollywood team that is assembled for a specific movie, makes the movie and gets dissolved. And the same team may or may not meet in the future for another movie.

Summary

In closing, I'd like to give you some numbers, in case you're a number's person, like me, so it can help you to make the decisions whether or not inbound marketing is right for your firm.

I think it is, but you may have special circumstances that I don't know about, and as an engineer, I'm reluctant to make absolute statements.

Let's see...

With all these numbers, hopefully you can better decide which way to go.

As Apple Fellow, Guy Kawasaki has put it...

"If you have more money than brains, you should focus on outbound marketing. If you have more brains than money, you should focus on inbound marketing."

I know good IT firms are not short on money. But as far as I know neither are on brains. And if they use more brains, they can use their money in other areas where only money talks.

In the meantime, don't sell harder. Market smarter and your business will be better off for it.


Attribution: "This article was written by Tom "Bald Dog" Varjan who helps privately held information technology companies to develop high leverage client acquisition systems and business development teams in order to sell their products and services to premium clients at premium fees and prices. Visit Tom's website at http://www.varjan.com.