A few posts back I talked about how enforced brevity can sharpen your marketing focus (Trade Show Challenge: What do you guys do? In 20 words or less).
In this post I want to pass along another lesson learned at a trade show, this one about faulty assumptions (the lesson is about faulty assumptions, not the trade show, although that might make an interesting show, no?).
Obviously, faulty assumptions can impair your message delivery to customers and prospects. Almost as obviously, this can cost you money.
Let’s face it, nobody wants to push out a message through paid channels only to find that the recipients don’t “get” what you’re talking about. When that channel is the web, A/B testing can provide a sanity check for messaging and iterative testing can weed out false assumptions.
But regardless of the channel, you have to start somewhere, and fewer false assumptions in your starting point means you arrive at a clear and well understood message much sooner (and probably at less cost). Consider the key differentiator that I chose to include in my boiled-down, 20 word summary of Monetate: “Zero I.T.”
A few months ago we decided–purely on the basis of in-house A/B testing–to print “Zero I.T.” in big letters on our trade show booth (a marketing channel where live A/B testing is somewhat impractical) . I also had some buttons made that said the same thing but graphically. And therein lies my false assumption.
Before I get to my false assumption, allow me to paint the background picture. The intent of this Zero I.T. statement is to condense a longer statement that goes like this: “Monetate enables companies to execute marketing campaigns without contacting the Information Technology department.” From past marketing efforts we know that this message definitely resonates with the folks in charge of major online retail sites.
(For the lucky few who can’t relate to this problem, here’s an example: Suppose you manage online marketing for electronics retailer Exabuys.com. Your Sony rep gives you co-op dollars to discount all Sony TVs through the end of the month. You can launch a Google Adwords campaign featuring Sony TVs in about 5 minutes. But when you ask the I.T. department to code the offer into the appropriate web pages and tie the discount into the check-out process, they say “Sorry, we can’t get to that until next month.” And that’s a problem.)
Just to be clear, I don’t have anything against the good folks in the I.T. department. I’m sure they are hard working and working hard, probably with limited resources like the rest of us. In fact, the I.T. folks themselves are often unhappy that a. they can’t respond quickly to requests from marketing, and b. marketing keeps making requests.
Which brings me to the Zero I.T. buttons we had at the Monetate booth during the recent Internet Retailer show (IRCE 2009). These buttons were a hit with some e-retailers who stopped by our booth. They even got a thumbs up from a few folks who confessed to being in an I.T. department. However, there were other folks who looked at that button and said “What does ‘No it’ mean?”
And that’s where I learned a valuable lesson. When we first discussed using the phrase “Zero I.T.” we debated the pros and cons of using IT versus I.T. My preference was for the crisper “IT” and I was convinced that everyone in our target market would read IT as Information Technology. However, my boss wanted to put in the periods. He wasn’t sure that all of our potential customers would be hip to plain IT.
And darn it, he was right. There are some people in our target market to whom IT does not say “Information Technology.” How do I know? Well like I said, some of those people saw me wearing the button without the periods at IRCE and asked “What does ‘No it’ mean?”
Now, that’s not all bad. At least it started the conversation, but it really made me think hard about the assumptions we all make about our respective target markets. In our case, the purpose of our product is to improve the commercial performance of web sites. A significant percentage of commercial web sites are “web pure plays” without a big payroll or big company structure. They may not have departments at all, let alone an I.T. department (but these are not necessarily “small” companies–there are numerous companies in the Internet Retailer Top 500 with less than 25 employees and you don’t get into the Top 500 unless you have annual revenues of at least $9 million).
On the other hand, a lot of e-retail players are mixed play (combining web operations with bricks-and-mortar stores or other channels, like mail order or tele-sales). These companies typically have I.T. departments. So what are the lessons for online marketers in all of this?
1. Know your target and don’t let your own assumptions cloud your judgement.
2. Test your messaging to make sure it connects with your target.
3. Realize that your market is likely composed of several segments who understand things differently and may require specific messaging.
4. Be prepared for the fact that even something as small as a period might make the difference between getting it and not getting IT.
5. Accept that the boss might be right!
