EFFECTIVE B2B MARKETING SERVICES

Case Studies: Success breeds success

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07 June 2010

You don't have to go too far to find the most persuasive marketing tool, it could be right in front of you - a satisfied customer.

Testimonies from clients carry a unique degree of credibility and can make a powerful statement about your company. A well crafted case study is a story that demonstrates how your product solved a customer need and can be one of the most compelling ways of explaining your value.

Our experience also shows us that case studies are extremely popular with potential clients. Time and again, when we review our clients web analytics/ statistic we see a similar pattern - case studies gain a huge percentage of hits, often outperforming all the other content on the site.

The team at Redmill can help you with creating powerful case studies and then show you to use them to maximum effect - as a sales tool, a positioning statement or as great linkbait for your website.

There's a clear process we follow to ensure maximum impact from your customer testimonial...

Interview - The first step is for us to speak with the customer to get the story from their perspective. It's key to understand the challenge they faced and the difference you made.

Key message definition - This is where we boil the story down into its crucial components. Exactly what value did you add? Did you save the customer money? Did you help them make money? Did you solve a technical problem? Enable them to address new markets? What was the value to the customer?

The story - It's not just before and after. We try to tell the story in 5 stages - the challenge, the search, the discovery, the implementation and the result. We find that clearly signposting all the component stages really gives our clients the chance to shine.

The audience - It's important to write the content for different media. The level of detail in the online version of the case study is going to differ from the full-blown pdf.  We know you have to cater for this so we'll deliver a full downloadable version and an abridged signpost version for the site.

Release - This is where we ensure that the study performs for you. We'll show you how to optimise it for online performance, give you advice on how to get it out to the right media outlets and help you use it to create valuable inbound links to boost your website performance.

We can develop a compelling case study for around £750, so if you have a success story you'd like the world to know about - let us know.

MicroTCA: Standing up for the little guy

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03 June 2010

Last week we spoke briefly about the question of next generation COTS hardware and the decisions that face TEMs when considering product re-design.

As we mentioned last time, the PICMG xTCA family of standards seems to be where the clever money is heading due to a number of must-have technical features - serial fabric support, hot swap, support for 40 Gigabit Ethernet and so on.

AdvancedTCA certainly seems to have established itself as the technology of choice in the core. Figures we've seen from ATCA manufacturers suggest that all the main Network Equipment Providers have an ATCA based solution in the field or in development.

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5 steps to an effective keyword strategy: Step 1 - Start from Scratch

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01 June 2010

So, you've decided to refresh the content on your site and hit the realisation that, hey - there's actually an awful lot to consider!!

So, where do you start?

Well, not with the keywords I am afraid. Not yet at least.

Why not? Well, a comprehensive content overhaul could very well mean a new site structure.

There might be new sections, new routes to information, new entry and exit points for the customer, new forms and new protected content, the list goes on and you can't define the keywords until you have defined the pages. The "Information Architecture" (a lovely bit of baffling jargon we like to use) needs to be defined.

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Thoughts from IMS World Forum: IMS and IPTV

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01 June 2010

There were some interesting contributions and observations on the role of IMS in IPTV initiatives at the IMS world forum. An excellent presentation outlined a host of innovative features available to subscribers.

This was very interesting, but overlooked a key point. Content is king.

Unless you have the right content (which in most cases seems to mean premium sport), you won't get the market momentum you need.

Features are all very well, but they are not the differentiators looked for by the man in the street. He wants content and the provider with the best content will win in the subscription model.

Thoughts from IMS World Forum: Segmentation, segmentation, segmentation

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01 June 2010

Many speakers were critical of efforts to build operator application stores. Indeed, we saw some example of such application stores, but few CSPs had even a basic business model for them that could be clearly articulated. Perhaps application stores make sense in certain areas, but for the overall consumer market, they already exist - outside of the CSP domain. As we commented in the Moriana keynote, although 16% of the applications offered through Apple are games, these constitute 65% of the total volume of downloads. There's money in this - but not much, maybe as much as $45 million per billion downloads. So why is this interesting to CSPs? Why replicate this?

Instead, wouldn't it be better to offer much more targeted services and focus on enabling ecosystems to service specific segments that can offer more profitable relationships? In short, don't go for the so-called long tail; that can take care of itself. Rather, go for applications that deliver real value and have a fair price. Consider opportunities in the enterprise and SME market, look for key verticals and work out how you can increase the data spend of those customers that aren't going crazy for free applications but just want to get online.

Give us a call or email us to talk about how we can help you to develop a strategy.

References

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