CMOs Must Redefine Traditional Marketing

Posted on January 20, 2012 by kaonmarketingguru

In 2012, CMOs must adapt to changing customer behaviors and redefine the traditional marketing organization. If companies don’t make the transition, they run the risk of being bested by competitors that have mastered the new era of marketing engagement.

Today’s mobile customer desires interaction and ‘hands-on’ involvement in the buying process, which has lead to real-time ‘experiential’ marketing. At the end of the day, customers no longer separate marketing from the product—it is the product. Every interaction your customer has with your product (e.g. sales engagement, website, social media, trade show) counts. Therefore, modifying your marketing strategy to create an end-to-end customer-engagement experience is now an absolute requirement.

One innovative marketing solution provider, Kaon Interactive, creates interactive touch-driven 3D marketing experiences that allow companies with complex products and solutions to crisply demonstrate and articulate advantages in a way that makes it easy for sales to communicate and simple for customers to understand.

Kaon’s customers interact with photo-realistic 3D product models from every angle, explore options and features (e.g. remove components), as well as investigate interactive scenes, dynamic solution diagrams, videos, presentations and collateral. Kaon’s content is created ONCE and reused across EVERY sales and marketing platform, including; iPads, laptops, websites, touch-screen appliances, and more.

The ongoing challenge facing the CMO has been to create a marketing environment where employees and partners can clearly differentiate their products in a consistent manner, at every touch-point, 100% of the time.  This goal has eluded event the best CMOs due to the deep proliferation of their organizations, but unifying your corporate message with cross-platform interactive marketing solutions (like Kaon’s) may be easier than they think.

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What Marketers Can Learn From Blaise Pascal

Posted on January 4, 2012 by Gavin Finn

True, he lived in the mid 1600’s. Yes, he was the mathematical genius who invented the first mechanical calculator. And, he is best known for his trailblazing work in geometry and probability theory. So, what does any of this have to do with marketing in the year 2012?

Well, we are all confronted with the reality of very short attention spans (the sound bite and elevator pitch are a couple of examples of life in today’s fast-paced world.)  It is critical that we learn to get to the point quickly, so that we can be sure to capture the attention of our intended audiences before they lose interest. We need to concisely and effectively articulate our value proposition – without being able to count on our prospects and customers reading a great deal or sitting through a long pitch.

And this is exactly why Pascal is relevant today. He once wrote,  “I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter.”  (This quotation is often incorrectly attributed to Mark Twain!) Pascal knew even then that it is much more difficult to write an effective message in a few words, than to ramble on. And yet, this is precisely the challenge that every marketer faces today: say what is important in as few words as possible.

Yes, it’s hard work to reduce the amount of verbiage in a  product marketing piece! But it’s worth it. Wouldn’t you rather your prospects understood your key message after the first 50 words or 30 seconds?   Take the time…..make it shorter.

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The Highs and Lows of Event Marketing

Posted on December 30, 2011 by kaonmarketingguru

In a recent survey by Marketing Sherpa, large B2B companies invested about 33% (one-third) of their entire marketing budget on trade shows in 2011. Ironically, virtual events ranked on the other end of the spectrum, coming in at a mere 8%.

Many predicted that the advent of online technologies and virtual events would eliminate the need for B2B sales professionals to meet prospects in person, turning business into an impersonal exchange. Fortunately, that proved to be a wildly exaggerated forecast.

Challenge: Because no two prospects in your booth are exactly the same, personalization of content is what makes sales and marketing messages fully resonate with a prospect.  Therefore, the goal is to enable all audiences within your event space to view and experience content that is targeted and relevant to them as an individual.

Solution: New interactive marketing technologies have afforded us the ability to tailor and personalize a presentation in real-time by putting users in the “driver’s seat”, allowing them to select and explore the content that is of interest to them on iPads and touch appliances on the trade show floor.  Additionally, many of these innovative tools can be re-used in a virtual show environment to supplement the trade show experience.

Results: The introduction of these marketing tools over the last few years has enhanced  personalized communication within the booth and may very well be an  influential factor in the perceived increase in trade show effectiveness. Marketing Sherpa’s survey found trade shows moved up from the seventh most effective tactic last year to the fourth position in 2011.

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