Product Knowledge & Training as a Marketing Strategy

Educating existing and potential clients on the unique benefits of a product or service or simply creating awareness for your brand is poorly understood by many companies and organizations. The process of offering your clients information that for free - they can benefit by - without a clear ROI has long been considered a benefit that only large scale organizations can afford to entertain.

This has changed dramatically as new online technologies make the process more cost effective to implement in a broader geographical marketplace. The one thing , however, that has not changed is the focus and investment that has to be made on the part of the delivering organization to ensure that the information is professional, responds to clients needs and is valued by clients.

The most cost effective manner to implement “Knowledge Training as a Marketing Strategy” is to create an interactive “on-demand” presentation or “live-event” online event.  These events help your customers understand how your products benefit them and helps recognize their unique needs through such ancillary assets as case studies, frequently asked questions and live interactive question opportunities.  Once such a marketing tool is developed it can be delivered repeatedly with little cost and can be revised to respond to changing customer needs.  In this discussion I will focus on the “Live Event:” scenario but many of the same steps apply to the “on-demand” scenario.

The 11 steps to “Knowledge Training as a Marketing Strategy” are as follows:

1. Define one product or service that will define your brand in the marketplace
2. Write it down in a brief overview - the features and benefits and the “how-to’s”
3. Develop one statement defines the unique selling feature or allows the client to relate to your message best
4. Visualize: how this story can be made easier to understand through video, images, simulations, etc.
5. Determine if this can be passive interactive information or live interactive information online
6. Consider a budget for marketing channels: this tends to be online - complemented by other mediums
7. Create a marketing plan & database for the live event:  PR, e-mail, print awareness, follow-up, etc
8. Create a database to capture contact info: use existing database, online invitations, meetings, calls, etc.
9. Define who are the players in implementing a live event online: script the event from beginning to end
10. Determine what assets: such as images, video, documents, interactivity, questions, etc
11. Pre-plan and implement follow up on the event with phone calls, e-mails, in person presentations

The only drawback to producing such “Knowledge Training as a Marketing Strategy” events is that you do have to focus resources on developing a complete professional presentation to maximize effectiveness. However, this is an elegant solution that allows small and medium sized businesses to reach into the marketplace like never before. The cost of acquiring (qualified) contacts, developing the media event and following up can be managed easily and can be very cost effective.

Trade Shows...is your USF Showing?

We’ve all read the many articles that offer tips and strategies for taking advantage of conferences or trade shows. Newsflash - most of this information is either inaccurate or just plain wrong.  These obvious strategies can range from recommending, “Use a Prize Draw or Contest” to, “Make sure you’re your booth is staffed at all times.”

While some of these tips can be useful if you are just getting started, they remain very basic and do little to differentiate you from your competitors. Trade shows and conferences will often have displays lined up, aisle after aisle; each jammed into a small space; each with its own colours. It can all be very confusing to visitors. For many of us the cost of registration, creating a display, allocating the time from a busy schedule, delivery and set-up and the cost of marketing before and after the trade show can be overwhelming.

As a result we don’t take the time to understand why people are attending, what they want to learn, and what attracts them to one display versus another. The psychology of trade shows and conference attendees crosses many boundaries and there are as many reasons for visiting as there are visitors; but one factor that is common to all attendees …the Human Factor. In the final analysis, a trade show or conference display is still primarily about…one-to-one selling with a focus on your USF!

Your Unique Selling Feature (USF) is the inalienable truth about your product or service that creates demand. This is what separates you from your competitors; and it helps create a focused message and profile for your company or product. One clear message, sparse text in large fonts and dramatic images that tell a story can bring a clear focus to your message.

Preparing a focused message means research before you attend the trade show or conference. It means taking the time to understand your customer’s challenges and distilling them down into a single statement on your display that engages them as they walk by. This lets them know that you understand their need and are not just trying to push product. If you’ve done everything right, the customer stops at your display - now what?

Having experienced, knowledgeable staff at the display that are passionate about the products and services is extremely important. Perhaps even more important is ensuring that the people you have at your display know how to listen. As David Ogilvy (Advertising Icon) once said “we are not selling ¾" drill bits . . .we are selling holes.” What he meant was that it is our responsibility to sell solutions and to do this we need to listen and ask probing questions that will help us understand a potential customer's challenges. Once we understand the challenges we can then propose solutions from our products and services that are tailored to overcoming challenges for each customer.

Taking notes while speaking with prospective clients can be an asset but it often leaves them feeling left out. Making good eye contact and engaging one customer at a time in a meaningful discussion can be far more effective than having many visitors flowing through your display, picking up trinkets. Staff who are attending a display should be able to provide notes for follow up at the end of the day. It is always a good idea to debrief after a trade show session and discuss each encounter and their prospective potential for your company. Often a gut feeling about a client can be just as dynamic as detailed notes. In a recent book, entitled “Blink”, Malcolm Gladwell discusses the concept of choices that are made in an instant. He brings together a number of research studies to help define the strength of the gut reaction in the decision making process. Make sure the trade show booth is staffed with experienced people – not just junior stand-ins!  

Another fallacy in trade shows and conferences is that the displays with the most traffic are perceived as more effective. The total number of potential visitors does not often support effective strategies at a trade show because it is not about the quantity of visitors to your display but the quality. You may go to a show and only get several visitors but if they are the right visitors they may help increase your sales significantly.
Consistent and timely follow up will help determine the ROI on your trade show. This, along with a marketing strategy that combines a well-maintained web site, professional collateral materials and frequent if not strategic ad placement make all the difference. A large client is always harder to bring to the table and takes much longer to do business with you as their business cycle can often take 1 – 2 years and so needs to be exposed to your consistent message over a longer period of time through a variety of mediums.
Is it luck when you finally land that large client – perhaps not – remember that luck is the combination of preparation and opportunity!

The Window of Opportunity

A window of opportunity can take many shapes and forms and can have impact on a company’s destiny regardless of where that company is in its lifecycle. As businesses we are always seeking to take advantage of some opportunity either through an innovation in a product or service, a trend in the marketplace or a change in the forces that regulate the marketplace.

Each of these can have a ripple effect and catapult a company to success but as with any window, the opening is narrow and the opportunity brief. To benefit from the “Window of Opportunity” we first of all have to be looking for it – ready to change and rise to meet the challenge of that opportunity. This means in part that we have to ensure that we are scanning the horizon (this is where your SWOT Analysis “comes in) . This simple SWOT chart provides us with the parameters for scanning that horizon.

By embracing change and understanding that a company has to evolve in the marketplace just as its customers must evolve we can begin to evaluate the potential windows of opportunity. Equally important is that we also have to understand that as people it is our natural tendency to avoid change and to embrace clear predictable patterns especially in business given its turbulent nature.

The most important component in the process in scanning for these “Windows of Opportunity” is understanding how your company, product or service can evolve to respond to marketplace demands. You must have clear understanding of your current company, products, services - features and benefits and how they meet the needs of your clients. This coupled with a change in the forces that shape the marketplace can offer ideas and unique solutions that can be adopted into your product or service design.

Some clues to identifying "Windows of Opportunity" can often be seen in some of the most obvious places. These can include traditional news media, online trend magazines and directly from the mouth of your client. A combination of these and other indicators will provide you with some insight into changes affecting your clients and how they use your product or services.

In more than 25 years of marketing I can’t say I have ever witnessed a client directly advising a provider or supplier to change a product or service to better respond to their needs. This may occur but only when the client/supplier relationship is so integrated that it become more difficult to supplant the existing supplier. Often, there is an alternate provider who has already seen the opportunity and is only too ready to fill the client’s requirement and displace your company as the supplier of choice. To take advantage of the "Window of Opportunity" you have to be ready to change your business model (and in some cases dramatically) to respond to those changing needs.

The idea that the "Window of Opportunity" is short is very important, since it suggests that you have a very limited time frame in which to act. Developing a plan, incorporating good advice from business advisors, gauging the client’s appetite for the evolution of your product or service and actually making changes that will affect company production and personal at the ground level in your organization all take time. This usually suggests months rather than weeks or years to take advantage of the "Window of Opportunity".

This applies to new and innovative technology even more so. New technologies today are eclipsed very quickly and the new technology that was a “have-to-have” just a few months ago could be old hat tomorrow. One final point, don’t over consult about this – rapid change usually is a result of one person’s vision because they have their finger on the pulse of clients and they have to champion the idea through the process. This is where the old adage of “no pain – no gain”, can be applied very effectively but it can be the difference between closing a business down and becoming a viable business in a very difficult business climate.

Channel Marketing

“Horizontal, vertical or multi - your clients want it. Are you giving it to them?”

Regardless of the type of business you manage, you are already using some form of marketing channel. The question is, “are you doing it as effectively and profitably as possible?”

What is a channel?
In the broadest sense, a marketing channel is a process for making a product or service available to a specific group of potential customers. A channel can be simple or complex. It can be organized in a horizontal, vertical, or a combination. If you are providing your services directly to clients you are operating the simplest, and most common, channel - a direct-marketing channel. You may not feel the need for more ways to reach your clients. But they may need more ways to reach you! The two most common channel arrangements are known as horizontal and vertical.

Horizontal marketing channels
Horizontal channels are formed when two or more unrelated providers put their resources together to capture a market opportunity. An example of horizontal channel marketing is H&R Block offering tax preparation inside department stores such as Sears, Roebuck & Co. Another might be a software developer and an accounting firm teaming up to provide custom products for clients that neither could provide alone.

Vertical marketing channels
Vertical channels exist when members in a marketing channel cooperate to maximize the gain of the entire channel rather than just their portion of it. One H&R Block channel uses offices to extend its customer base at lowered costs. In fact, of Block’s 8,923 offices, 45% were operated by franchisees.

How do you decide on a channel strategy?
You can use as many channels as possible to reach clients. But beware. A trap that many firms fall into is when a firm tries to be, “Everything to Everyone Everywhere.” Don’t try to provide the same level-of-service options through every channel. Instead first assess your client’s needs and adopt only those channels and services that provide value to clients, complement each other, and contribute to profitability. A service firm may develop a channel strategy where one channel is used to deliver the service (in person tax preparation or other services), another channel to dispense general advice and information (on-line contact information, tax organizers, forms, deduction guidelines or product reviews) and yet another to offer customers general and/or specific advice and information (telephone).

The Internet as a Channel
Today innovations in technology and the Internet are allowing large and small businesses to evolve from static “bricks and mortar” operations to dynamic “bricks and clicks” enterprises. One of the most important considerations in utilizing the internet as a key component of a channel strategy is that consumers, empowered by richer and greater amounts of information accessible online, increasingly drive and control the exchange process. This demands greater focus on resources and support for the development of this channel strategy, responding to its more fluid nature

How do you decide which channel is best?
Given the number of marketing channel options, how do you decide which is best for your practice? In Marketing Management, Philip Kotler suggests three channel evaluation criteria.

Economic – Each channel type will produce different sales results for different costs. As a result, some channels will provide a higher return on investment for a low volume of sales and other channels will provide a higher return on investment for a high volume of sales.
Control – With an in-house sales force there is more control over skills, training, and marketing approach than with a contract sales force.
Adaptive – In periods where the marketing environment changes rapidly, marketing channels must be able to adapt equally rapidly to these conditions. Compare the adaptive ability of the content on a web page to that in a brochure.

Conclusion
Marketing channels are an important part of any marketing plan. However, the appropriate channel type and combination of channels for your practice depends on your clients’ needs, your objectives for the channel, and the resources you make available to manage these channels.

Challenging …. a Client

Many of us have experienced a challenging relationship - as client or supplier. I will address the issue from the supplier side but I am sure each of us has experienced both sides of the relationship at one time or another!

We are invited to develop marketing or advertising materials and as such we undertake a thorough and professionals review of the company we are trying to help. We spend time researching products, services, customers, company culture, etc., and we then present creative ideas or marketing programs that respond to the needs identified by the client.

Ultimately the client simply disregards what we have presented and decides arbitrarily how they want to proceed. The client, in their position of authority as the payee on the project decides that they will forge their own creative or the details of the marketing program, regardless of the logic presented.

It happens a great deal and the size of the company or the project has little to do with it. Left brain people tend to be those in charge of companies or organization because of their business acumen and linear reasoning skills. Marketing and advertising tend to use a more creative lateral thinking process and as result make more use of right brain thinking.

Challenging a client to move beyond linear reasoning and understand the need to tap into the emotions of their customers is an important part of the success in a creative project. Convincing clients that they need to look at their products, not from their own needs, but from those of their clients is one of the most difficult demands of a marketing project if it is to be successful. I would take the time here to define success as not just getting paid for the project. Success for marketing or advertising must be defined by the success the client realizes through sales and customer awareness.

If you are defining your success on any project based by getting paid by the client then you are not truly a marketing or advertising professional. You have to be prepared to walk away from a client – to stand behind your convictions, your research and creative intuition, if you and your client are to be successful in any marketing initiative.

Walking away from a client or standing firm on an idea based on sound logic will result in one of two things – losing the client or gaining the trust of the client. Let’s take a quick look at “losing the client”. I would suggest that losing a client who seeks to implement their ideas of marketing on a project, to the detriment of the project are often clients who are more concerned about cost and the certainty of their own perceptions in marketing. Typically the relationship with this kind of client thinking is short and there is little opportunity for a relationship to grow beyond this current project. Often you will spend more time and effort satisfying this kind of thinking with poor results. “Gaining Trust” based on mutual respect has many positive benefits in terms of a longer term relationships, repeat business and the success of the project - not to mention the satisfaction you feel when your ideas prove to make your client more successful.

When is it time to stand up and be counted? Well that all depends on the preparation you have undertaken to ensure that your ideas are sound and the client understands the ideas and the research that supports those ideas. Working with clients that want to work with you based on a mutual respect of roles and knowledge is the key to a successful relationship and a successful project.

Why Collaborative E-Learning?

While E-Learning has been around for many years, a new and more sophisticated model is beginning to emerge as the standard for learning and comprehension. The concept adds a sense of community to the learning process where individuals can learn through a shared experience. The technical name is Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL).

The short description for this evolution in E-Learning is, it allows learning to venture outside of the individuals learning silo as they sit at their computer - and they can take advantage of social media tools to discuss relevant issues with other learners in forums, chat rooms and blogs. It can create a dialogue around learning that simulates the classroom experience without the many distractions and delays. It also helps reinforce comprehension leading to a change in behaviour, a common expected outcome in adult learning.

Most E-Learning in Canada remains antiquated and text based with the occasional use of images to underwhelm us - ultimately leading to an uninspired learning process, similar to written training that would sit on shelves in the past. The promise of a technology that would give learners the power to pursue knowledge and learn at their own pace has gone largely unfulfilled, and all in the name of lower cost. It is important to realize that the cost of developing an immersive E-learning experience is greater at the beginning. We just can’t take an existing curriculum or subject matter and convert it, as is, into E-Learning. E-Learning uses the full spectrum of media and in the case of Collaborative E-Learning, it utilizes social networking. This demands a more media savvy approach to developing collaborative E-Learning. Subject matter experts must undertake due diligence in developing the basic knowledge that will be presented in the E-Learning program but it is in the domain of the E-Learning content developer to synthesize that knowledge into a more immersive learning experience that is consistent with expected learning outcomes.

Our experience suggests that this can often lead to misunderstandings at the outset of E-Learning projects as subject matter experts seek to main control and authority over the content development process. Their experience in text and classroom based learning offers them a skewed understanding of what the final product might “look and feel” like. As a result it is important to “focus on content rather than the wrapper” in developing an E-Learning project to ensure that once the content is developed it will serve as a knowledge base and a learning experience that can be built upon rather than discarded as pedantic and boring.

This is where collaborative E-learning so comes in - it means really two things, first it suggests that we collaborate as learners with other learners in the pursuit of knowledge and secondly it creates a scenario where the learning content, once developed need not be re-developed by other organizations since the cost of developing sound content in a well thought out curriculum can be utilized and updated in perpetuity or shared with other organizations. Often times, sharing content with other organizations allows the original developer an opportunity to recover the costs of the more costly initial curriculum development and it allows the organization seeking to utilize the shared knowledge an opportunity to access the content at a significantly reduced cost.

In the end it simply means that an organization that has spent the time, effort and cost in developing a truly effective Collaborative E-learning module can recoup costs by sharing the content in a collaborative process. This coupled with the unique learning outcomes resulting from a truly CSCL approach can make Collaborative E-Learning more effective than classroom learning from a cost point of view and from a knowledge retention point of view.

Barriers to Collaborative E-Learning

Collaborative E-Learning - it’s not a new concept, just one that has never been utilized effectively in the “Canadian” learning experience. Ycommunicate has worked with many government organizations across Canada developing a broad spectrum of unique healthcare related E-Learning projects and one theme seems come up continually when we answer questions, explain our development process or respond to RFPs. The focus is always on cost and technology.

Surprisingly, behavioral change or comprehension is generally not evaluated in the process of determining value in a collaborative E-Learning or any E-Learning project. As recently noted in a Higher Education Strategy Associates’ 2011 report, The State of E-Learning in Canadian Universities, “In Canada, universities have been implementing e-learning and purchasing virtual learning environment platforms such as Blackboard and Desire2Learn and so on. However in comparison to the United States, there has been less focus on cost-savings and almost no focus at all on outcomes.”

I guess I’m bias in many ways on this topic, in that we have focused a great deal of effort on developing E-Learning modules that are media rich and create an immersive e-learning experience. The objectives for E-learning are to inform and facilitate the retention of information and/or to change behaviour. Given that this is the most important outcome for any E-Learning module it is hard to understand how organizations can continue to focus solely on technical specifications or budgetary issues. I will try and address both of these issues individually.

Let’s tackle the technology issue first – most organizations, when deploying any communications technology must first prostrate themselves before the alter of the IT department, the guardians or technology and secure confidential communications. Often times as part of their mandate, the IT Department wants to manage, advise and otherwise control any technology process. Their first choice is often to buy a product and install it so that it can be managed. E-Learning product manufactures are only too happy to accommodate by bombarding organizations with many such products and reaping the long terms rewards in renewable licensing and product support. Given the fact that most administrators within organizations are not technical experts, they rely on the IT department to guide them through this decisions making process. The reality of the technology dilemma is that there is no need to purchase and install “an E-Learning product” as there are many solutions available now that are web based and offer easy management by organization of shared individual and group participation. For example ycommunicate has deployed an E-Learning environment for dozens of organizations and thousands of unique learners that has run without so much as one hour of down time in over 8 years and the best part is that no IT department is involved. The truth is that technology has not been a barrier in terms of cost or technology for the past 6 – 8 years as a result of a relatively mature technology, yet the focus remains on the technology rather than the results for E-Learning.

The second issue relates to the first in many ways. The very fact that the IT department is involved complicates the decisions making process and ultimately the time, effort and cost of implementing E-Learning. E-Learning also cuts across many disciplines within any organization and as such demands careful attention to detail and participation by many levels of an organization to ensure the efficacy of the content and this tends to drive up costs from both an internal and external perspective

While cost is always an important issue relating to any project, it is our thought that the cost of a project be linked directly to the goals of the E-Learning. Of course if the goals include behavioral change or demonstrated understanding of the content than it makes sense that budgets must reflect that. Defining a budget because that is what we have available” does not necessarily result in achieving your learning goals. Sometimes it is just better to wait and ensure that the project is designed to achieve your goals against measured learning outcomes.

Our E-Learning approach has always tried to consider, technology, cost and perhaps most importantly the collaborative nature of the experience. This is not a new approach - but perhaps it’s new to the marketplace. We call our approach Collaborative E-Learning. The term has been around and called Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL)for a few years but we first launched approach to E-Learning back in 2003.

In my next blog I will expand on out take on CSCL!