New Marketing Channels: Winning by Going Off the Beaten Path

Find less known messaging channels and outmarket your competitors

In the hyper-competitive software industry today, marketers are under a lot of pressure to perform. We have discussed many reasons why this is the case:

• As marketers and their consultants become increasingly sophisticated with Adwords campaign optimization, high performing keywords are getting very expensive, and even longer tail keywords, once the domain of SEM adventurers, have become the staples for almost any search marketing campaigns. The typical campaigns now consist of thousands of keywords and are being managed professionally by highly skilled consultants, freelancing experts on platforms like Trada, or being automated with complex algorithmic bidding. The net result is that SEM, once the mainstay of technology marketing, is becoming harder to win, and instead is becoming a staple that everyone needs to be excellent at to even compete.
• Social Media Marketing, once considered the frontier of online marketing, has come of age with unstoppable force. Given the explosion of social media channels and volume, marketers are playing catch-up with the medium to master social media and turn their social media marketing investments into actual results. There are a lot of opportunities to expand the marketing funnel with social media and having a well featured, effective Social CRM platform like CoTweet or Hootsuite is an important step. However, because everyone is playing catch up with the technology, no one is at a distinct advantage.
• Inbound Marketing and its closely related cousin Content Marketing are extremely powerful concepts that span more than just a single marketing channel or channel type. The evangelizing efforts by marketing software vendors and content marketers like HubSpot, Junta42 and MarketingProfs have helped brought these techniques into the mainstream consciousness of digital marketers. In these areas, software and technology marketers are becoming very proficient and sophisticated, and competition is just as intense as in more traditional marketing channels.

The competitiveness and costliness of marketing campaigns described above is due to the fact that with the increasing access (anyone can use Google Adwords, anyone can get access to the major ad networks out there) and transparency of marketing channels performances, marketers can find better marketing channels and make better selections, and the better channels are therefore becoming even more popular and competitive.

Does it mean that despite all of the exciting developments in marketing strategies and technologies in the last few years, we are back to the zero-sum game where the bigger budget wins simply because there is more to spend? Where can fleet-footed upstarts challenge flat-footed incumbents who have grown rich and lazy in their dominance?

One way to think about this is a reconceptualization of what a marketing channel means and when a marketing channel is appropriate for your product/industry. As Content Marketing experts have rightly pointed out, today communication with prospective buyers is a multi-directional process, where customers are becoming more vocal and proactive about seeking out information that they need on products they care about, even as they get more proficient in tuning out blatant advertising and other broadcast-style media. But exactly because of the multi-directional nature of this communication, there are more possible touchpoints, and there are more ways to deliver a message, and there are many more types of messages to be delivered. That is where we think the less known marketing channels await your discovery.

We now think of marketing channels as distributed in concentric circles, depending on the type of messages that they carry to the prospects:

• Product Features/Benefits: Channels that carry primarily content topics that are directly relating to specific product features, their functions, distinctive use case, business benefits unique to the product and its competitors
• General Industry Topics (including Competitors and Partners): Channels that deliver content topics relating to the large product market that the product fits into, either in terms of industry vertical, or application functionality, topics relating to competitors and/or partners (resellers, services providers, add-on providers, enablers)
• Direct Personal Benefits: Channels that deliver topics relating to the buyers’ personal goals and objectives, pain points/needs that can be addressed by the product and its functions, which might or might not be directly correlated with the actual functionality of the product.
• Behavioral/Contextual Match:  Marketing channels that deliver content that match well with the buyers’ personal habits (behavior), or the context of their information consumption (how they typically get information, what type of contact they have with various sources of information and media in their everyday lives).

In a way, this is a recognition that Content Marketing has expanded our definition of what marketing can do and should do. As the messages become broadened, so too are the applicable marketing channels. For example, a typical marketing campaign involves placing an ad in a trade publication about how better your product is compared to that of your competitor. Its more updated version is bidding on Google Adwords with the keywords on the products and its benefits, and placing ads that highlight your products’ key differentiation, especially vis a vis the competitors’. As noted above, these tactics become expensive and really spark an advertising war for existing customers, while give free new market exposure to your competitors.

But we can be a lot more creative than that. Firstly, we can think about what the prospects really care about and how they will go about solving those issues. If you have a proper target segment, then the issues that your prospects face should overlap with what your product or service can offer, and you can possibly do this a lot better than alternative solutions. Our message then is not necessarily about “differentiation” or “features”, because it is too far fetching for the immediate needs of the prospects, but rather about first empathizing with the prospects on their concerns, and second, inspiring them to take the next step to learn about it.

The message then opens up a whole slew of potential venues to talk to the prospects, many of which are going to be outside of the typical product market specific channels everyone is competing so hard for. For one, social content channels like YouTube, Vimeo, Slideshare, Scribd are great platforms that allow your message to be available to a broad set of audience at minimal costs. However, what about building a useful mobile app and release it for free on the various App Stores? The app does not have to be a mini version of your product – it just has be useful to the same prospects in some ways. It should not be extremely complex or even complete – it is just a mean to start a conversation with the prospect.

If your target audience is sufficiently large, then you can take a page from the consumer marketing playbook: put your message along the everyday path a prospect takes (literally). To target travel-heavy executives (in general management, advertising or sales), for example, inserting helpful messages on their printed boarding passes, or offering free branded stationery at the airport or transit hub can be a simple but effective way to start a dialog with them.

Another example: Developers frequent sites like Stackoverflow.com, Slashdot.com, whose advertising rates have increased considerably. But they also attend local user groups meetings, and love programming contests or mashups contests.

Thinking of the prospects’ everyday path will also let you find potential co-marketing channels partners that you do not think of before, because they were not in your product market. You should think of the tools that they use, their interactions with colleagues, partners and vendors, their environments, their routines, and find suitable touchpoints for your message. For example, It can be a well-frequented local spot, which you can access through location-based services such as Square or Facebook Places.

That is not to say only new marketing channels make sense. For example, last year Central Desktop, a portfolio company of ours, was very successful in a combined direct mail and online campaign. It was nicely reported and analyzed by Marketing Sherpa as an example of effective multi-channel, multi-modes marketing.

Our upcoming best practice series on Marketing Channels Discovery and Prioritization will elaborate further on this, and focus on the discovery of these lesser known marketing channels that can be incredibly effective for your marketing efforts.