Out of the Fog Marketing

Many small to medium-sized companies often dismiss marketing guideline documents. Tech entrepreneurs are not big on formal marketing documentation and process. However it's a huge oversight not to have your rule book in place before you begin the marketing game.

Marketing, and especially advertising, can be a large part of your annual budget and expensive to design. Create a play book that defines your target audience, key messages, short company descriptions and logo usage will go a long way to avoid costly collateral rework and messaging errors.

Then be consistent. If you logo is purple in Canada and blue in the U.S. this does nothing to reinforce your brand. The presentation the CEO uses should have the same look at feel as the one the sales team has on its laptop. Everyone in the company should be able to describe in 30 seconds what value the company's products or services bring to its customers.

One of my favorite books on this topic is Harry Beckwith's Selling the Invisible. It now new, hip or trendy (it was first published in '97), but it contains solid, easily digested advice on consistently positioning your company and what it sells.

Labels: b2bmarketing, biotech marketing, guerilla marketing, marketing budget

Getting the Most from Your Marketing

Seth Godin had an amazing quote in his blog last Friday...
"The art of marketing is not finding more money to do more marketing. It's figuring out how to tell a story that spreads with the resources you've got."

Read closely..."spread the story" is the important keyphrase. You don't have to have a $200K per year chief marketing officer or a glitzy New York PR firm. You just have to make the most of an established and reasonable marketing budget.

Our firm handles marketing for a Seattle biotech firm that consistently gets kudos from Fortune 50 pharmaceutical firms for its marketing efforts. The CEO consistently hears "You guys are all over the place." Yet the entire marketing budget for this firm has never topped $150K and in the first 3 years of the firm's existence was never over $75K. This is less than the salary and benefits for ONE senior level marketing executive!

Outsourcing marketing efforts has let the company focus more budget on the "story" and less on in-house resources.

Labels: biotech marketing, outsource marketing, Seattle biotech, seth godin