5 areas where we were really wrong in IT promotion
Obsah
Every business needs to spread the word about what it does or it’s just out of luck. And that awareness needs to be spread especially when you are going up against the big names of the global market.
And so we too went on a pilgrimage through promotional channels and found out that IT and advertising are quite big enemies and they don’t really want to cooperate. So, in our wanderings, we encountered some dead ends, which were the result of various guesses and guesswork. And what did we find out? I’ll tell you now.
Agency Selection
As the outsourcing guide advises, if you can’t help yourself, you need to find a suitable partner. For us, that meant finding someone who was perceptive enough to understand what we actually do. If you’ve ever tried to explain to someone what the cloud is, then you know how difficult it can be.
The first aspect that is the foundation is the B2B promotion experience. The methods of providing products and services are diametrically different if we are talking about people or companies. We’ve also tried organizations that focus on B2C and it just doesn’t work.
And then there is the little thing – listening. In our journey through several agencies, we came across a problem that was at the heart of poorly set keywords and campaigns. In order to promote services in IT, you need to know what they are for and who they will help. And if your promotion partner, despite their best efforts, sets up a campaign for words you’ve said are wrong, then that’s simply a doomed partnership before any campaign even gets off the ground.
And another detail is proper analytics. Today’s time simply cannot do without data, and it is not possible to properly adjust the direction of one’s activity on the market. But some agencies that provide promotion end up exactly at that step. We’ll set up the ads and see how they do.
But that’s not enough today. Campaigns are a great tool for accurate information about potential customers and what to do in marketing overall. What to focus on, where it is a waste of time. But it won’t help you if someone just gives you an overview of the results, which you will also see in GA. Collecting data is not enough, today we need to work with the data.
Wrong Assumptions
Unlike the first category, where it may not always be the customer’s fault that they chose the wrong partner, this part is entirely the customer’s fault. Because every company forms certain opinions about its customers and potential customers. Otherwise it would be impossible to aim.
It’s unfortunate when those basic assumptions are completely off. It happened to us relatively recently. We were preparing a PR article for the ROOT.cz server, which was supposed to be a fairly detailed technical chronicle of the construction of our new cloud (if you are interested in what went wrong, check the link at the end of the article).
After long discussions between our technicians and the marketing department, we have decided that the article will be purely technical, completely non-promotional and intended to inform. And then our colleague who was in charge of the article had a light bulb turned on, because her marketing nature just couldn’t let it be published just like that, and she put a link at the end of the article for the opportunity to try our cloud for free.
Our suprise was overwhelming. Not only was that article our most successful PR article in terms of reach and time spent on the text – it was also our most successful campaign in terms of generated leads.
It’s true that technicians are overloaded with information these days – who isn’t – but there’s always someone who’s curious and has a few spare moments in their busy week. Moreover, our colleague did not give up, even when she received convincing arguments. Sometimes you just have to try things, despite the bad prospects.
People stopped reading
It’s actually related to the previous topic. It would seem that PR articles are already passé because people generally don’t read. But here another principle comes into play – on which, for example, the Google algorithm is also based – relevance.
If you have information that is interesting, informative, inspiring or imaginative, why not share it. Our article was much longer than the recommendations based on best practices for publishing on ROOT, but it was still very successful.
It’s about the idea. So it’s definitely good not to be bound by developments in society, because where there is a standard, there is also a non-standard.
Text is better than pictures
When I compare the results of banner campaigns with that one PR article, it cannot even be done. A picture is worth a thousand words, but only if the graphics are not counterproductive. Which in our case turned out to be the case.
Graphics are nice, but we have much more valuable “equipment” – our technicians. After all, experience and know-how cannot be captured by an ordinary picture.
Price only on the first place
I guess I could have put this in the bad assumptions category, but I think finance is always an area that deserves its own 15 minutes of fame. Although price is undoubtedly one of the most important aspects that we tend to base our decisions on, it may not be the most important. That is, if the current provider doesn’t rip you off (this also happens in the cloud industry, too often for my taste).
Our cloud-for-half campaign wasn’t nearly as successful as we’d hoped, precisely because IT is about so much more than price. Companies may have legacy systems, the need to keep data on-premise, and many other individual reasons. And the price can’t even play a role at that point.
What have we learned from our failures?
Something for sure. We are more open to possibilities and also pay more attention to the data that flows to us from marketing. Based on them, we adjust our course. And we also see that sometimes it’s best to put effort into organic content anyway. What are your experiences?
p.s. Here is the promised link (in Czech): https://www.root.cz/pr-clanky/staveli-jsme-novy-cloud-a-tohle-se-po-kazilo/
