First off, a quick confession. I’m not really a marketer, and never had the word marketing in job titles, ever. What I really enjoy is starting something from scratch, nurturing and watching it grow. I’ve started a couple of businesses prior to DotEnablers, and I loved it.

While developing businesses, I did not realize that I was also doing marketing, until I got involved in SoftwareCEO, an online portal for software businesses. I’ve learned about marketing from talking to forum moderators and business owners, reading articles and participating in webinars at softwareceo.

I’ve learned that business is all about building relationships. Strong and lasting relationships with your customers, prospects and partners (employees) can definitely be a barrier-to-entry to your competitors. I’ve also learned that marketing is all about building relationships.

I’m a geek at heart so building software applications to solve business problems come second nature to me. I can build the fastest and simplest CRM application in the market (we are actually developing one), but anyone with the right resource can build it. What’s my competitive advantage, what’s my barrier-to-entry in this market?

I believe that by instilling a marketing approach where building relationships is the goal can be a formidable barrier-to-entry. You market by offering valuable content, you communicate regularly, you capture and nurture leads, and you prosper. I also believe that by helping others succeed create a satisfaction, or at least a motivation that along the way will help you will achieve success.

So you can say that we are focus in Creating and Building Relationships…

Do you believe in that statement? Do you believe that failure is really success? I do, only if I learn from it.

Found this great article by a very smart bear. Read it and learn.

3 things NOT to do on a demo (a summary of this awesome webinar):

1. Not understand your customers - Before your scheduled demo, you need to qualify or do a discovery assessment of your prospect’s situation. Get their job title/roles; identify critical business issues; determine reason of pain; and a critical date that a solution needs to be implemented.
2. Spend a lot of time introducing your company - Who cares that you were founded on this date? Who cares about your mission statement? It’s is important that you introduce your company, but be brief here - 2 mins max.
3. Do a feature dump - This is actually the most important take-away I got from the webinar - ‘Do the Last Thing First!’. Highlight the solution of their problem first, and then provide information on how you achieved this solution. You don’t want your audience to sit through 10 mins of your demo and wonder ‘How does this apply to us?’.

A good demo should last about 12-24 minutes:

1. Introduction - 1-2 mins
2. Illustration - 1-2 mins
3. Do It - 1-2 mins
4. Peel back layers - 5-10 mins
5. Q&A - 5-10 mins
6. Summary - 2-4 mins

With permission from Peter, I will be posting the bonus items (white papers) he gave out to attendees on the resource section of InfoBureau. Go read them!

Amazing! Granted that not all 19m results provide a definition, but the word ‘entrepreneur’ is still a very overused and tiring word.

I admit that I have used that word a zillion times to describe myself, but how else can I convey a person who has failed 3 out of his 4 ventures?

I believe an entrepreneur has the following traits:

• has failed at least once.
• thinks failure is a blessing in disguise.
• accepts and learns from mistakes.
• believes that there is always a better way to do things.
• eventually succeeds and attributes successes to failures.

So, do you share the traits above?

You can be an employee, or your own boss. The bottom line is this: Do not be afraid of failing. If you don’t succeed, learn from your mistakes, change your assumptions and try again.

Marketers have been experimenting with the best ways to reach their target audiences in the best way for a long time coming now. Run-of-the-mill advertising is weakening. Informed consumers don’t really care much for fanciness in any kind of advertising medium. Unless your product is revolutionary and will carry its own weight and then some, your next best bet in reaching a large audience is a revolutionary system of marketing.

“Tryvertising” is a new form of advertising that has been successful. Some call it a new kind of place placement. It’s a good way to blend goods and/or services into everyday life in a useful manner. In this way potential customers can decide for themselves how useful the product or service is, rather than try to trust you. This combats a large problem with advertising, as consumers are skeptical of anything they hear in advertising.

Tryvertising blends free samples with strategic placement. Classic examples of this are the shampoo sample in the magazine kind of thing. However, older tryvertising such as this often failed to be as strategic as they could be. In the magazine example, there is no certainty that the samples are going to be tested by the right people and the right time, or under any other necessary circumstances.

Product placement is a methodology that is commonly used to increase product exposure by putting them in the viewpoint of the consumer. Tryvertising takes that directly targets potential customers in their natural environment. When an individual actually tries the product, their experience of the product will be considerably better than if they had only heard about the product or seen it in an advertisement.

How can you tryvertise? Well, of course you can always consider the above concepts and be creative, but consider some famous examples to see if they can inspire you into taking a mental shortcut.

• Major car companies have teamed up with luxury grade hotels to offer cars to be test driven at the hotels. The mutual benefit is clear and strong.
• Furniture companies have also done this same type of partnership with hotels, sometimes by creating a “quiet room” with a variety of furniture to try.
• Coffee machines have been placed at major bus stops.
• Shoes have been brought to marathon events.
• Tooth and mouth hygiene products have been given following flight meals.
• Software can be downloaded and tried first for a limited time

So you see, you can always be more strategic in your marketing, it just requires a little more creativity. With increasing creativity and empathy, you can cut down on your efforts while increasing your results.

Marketers, any thoughts on this?

In Web 2.0, a pyramid model of influence from traditional public relations is turned upside down via the internet with peer-to-peer communication. Web 2.0 technologies are changing the way that product messages are sent and received. Social media powered by Web 2.0 is a significant change in standard marketing, analogous to the way the printing press changed communications. Previously, in the Web 1.0 world, marketing on the internet became similar to other marketing channels. Banners, newsletters, and other internet mediums were and are great tools for marketers. Now with Web 2.0, the message does not need to be controlled; the audience can make and give shape to the message. The nature of this social media is different from traditional TV, radio, and print marketing, as Web 2.0 media can be considered to be engines rather than channels. “Word of mouth” advertising, strong in effect but weak in reach, can be combined with the internet with a powerful result.

There are a number of ways to market using Social Media or Web 2.0 tools. The first step is to learn about social media. Youtube, Myspace, Flicker, Digg, Facebook, Twitter, and other related sites that are examples of word of mouth engines. Once you are familiar with these, consider your marketing plan. Use your creativity and consider how you can make the social nature of the engines generate your message or awareness of your product. If you apply this correctly, your audience can create your content for you and pass it on as well.

Social media is essentially a kind of viral marketing. Having something genuinely interesting to any niche will grow on its own just like tossing the right seed in the right place. You might not even need to do much else. When people find something truly interesting to them, its enjoyable to pass it along, isn’t it? Adding fresh content and updates about your product or service aids in the hype. Participating yourself is another way of doing this, or will allow you to just take more observations. Creating a Myspace profile or making Wikipedia entries are common examples of this.

Webinars and Youtube videos are very effective, and if you’re doing programs already the extra effort is well worth it. Youtube has over 100 million videos downloaded every day. Setting up newsfeeds for releases is great. Allow your audience to be able to opt in for updates and news releases. Allowing your users to repost videos, podcasts, photos, and other such things will help your content travel.

There are infinite ways you can use Social Media. The possibilities are endless. The challenge with Social Media is picking what to do first, not a lack of abundant options.