Tag Archives: Differentiating

How Do You Increase Brand Awareness? Six Observations

Situation: A CEO wants to increase brand awareness for her company and its primary service. The objective is to increase the client base and drive revenue growth. They have identified their primary growth opportunity and differentiating advantage. What else should they do? How do you increase brand awareness?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • What is lacking is a clear vision, path, and marketing plan. These are prerequisites to deciding either the solution or hiring a high caliber individual to execute the plan.
  • What steps are involved?
    • Survey 20% of current clients. Ask “why did you choose us?”
    • Develop the tools to track and show clients service performance online.
    • Use these same tools to show company performance online.
    • Tune messaging to potential clients to highlight demonstrated service performance.
    • Play elite – as the company’s name and reputation grow, clients should aspire to being accepted as clients.
  • Think long-term.
    • What is unique about the company’s ability to manage and extend the longevity of clients’ key assets?
    • How well prepared are potential clients to manage this on their own?
    • How does the company help potential clients to manage and extend the life of those assets?
  • Once there is a clear plan, fine-tune the internal focus of the company to align with the plan.
  • Increase involvement in communities where potential clients are found.
    • Host seminars and webinars on relevant topics.
    • Evening seminars in locations that potential customers congregate – existing clients attend and bring a friend.
    • Focus on referrals from existing clients – with a reward – a free consultation.
    • Look for non-competing service providers who can be good referral sources.
  • Make it easy for potential clients to switch. Use mass-marketing to spread the word with a multi-tiered approach to different segments of the target market.

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How Do You Expand Business Development Efforts? Four Thoughts

Situation: The CEO of a software company needs to increase revenue to cover expenses. He doesn’t want to cut salaries because if employees leave it will be hard to find replacements with the required skills. The better solution is to increase revenue. How do you expand business development efforts?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • Look at the markets which are growing rapidly:
    • Gaming. This is currently a good investment area. Large casinos are spending heavily on high end projects, and people just keep gambling!
    • Medical imaging. Potential targets include:
      • Pharma and Biotech R&D and Marketing/Sales – the ability to show how a drug binds with the cell receptors and how this impacts the cell is interesting to both groups. Also look at Medical schools. This is where you find the top researchers and they love teaching and presentation aids.
    • Military markets, particularly simulation spaces and unmanned vehicles. They value realistic simulated environments. Also look at training programs that value visually intensive simulations including marine and naval applications, aircraft, and battlefield simulations.
  • Consider the company’s business focus and strategy. How can it move from a “next project” model to a recurring revenue model? Is it possible to write client agreements to include a piece of the recurring revenue stream from client products?
    • Look at what the company does and package this as a product/service vs.an hourly problem-solving model. Focus on where the market is going. For example, iPhone apps – cheap to the customer, so millions buy them People now interact differently using electronic media. This opens new options.
  • What is the company’s key focus – Product Leadership, Operational Excellence or Customer Intimacy? How is the company’s differentiating strength presented consistently to client audiences?
    • It is important to clearly define the company’s niche – what makes it truly different. The communication must be clearly understood both by the engineers, and the business development and marketing people.
  • Invest additional funds in business development – with payments highly weighted on success.

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