Picking a target market is one of the most fundamental decisions a sales and marketing team makes. Your target market determines what products you build, where you promote them, and how you talk about them. Socratic Marketing in the budding conversation economy demands a rigorous approach to this question as…
Blackboard’s booth at NECC in Atlanta was one of the best examples I’ve seen recently of Socratic Marketing. They asked teachers to write a brief paragraph on how they intended to use a free trial of the product in their classrooms. Then they took a polaroid of them and pasted…
The National Education Computing Conference NECC put on by ISTE in Atlanta this week was the most active education tradeshow I’ve seen since the dot com bubble burst in 2000. Ironically the 2000 show was in Atlanta, the Big Peach bookended a lull in the ed tech market that looks…
Few education companies do marketing well. Many are good at sales and distribution, others are product driven and innovative, but very few are able to drive high growth through world class marketing. What does great marketing look like? * Reps have so many leads they triage them. * Customers recommend…
Web 2.0 is providing another nudge to the conversation economy. As advertising becomes less relevant the power of engaging your customers in a real dialog increases. Listening should be a core competency at the corporate level. A productive conversation is Socratic, it focuses more on good questions than on staking…
TORONTO – From the vendor perspective the big story out of IRA this year is attendance which is less than half of the number that attended last year. Final numbers are not available yet but rumors on the exhibit floor ranged from 5,000 to 7,500 and at times it felt…
Has your company ever honed a promotional activity only to see it lose its potency right as you perfect it? The frustrating fact is that promotional activities have a shelf life. This happens because the more effective you get at targeting a market the faster you tap the folks who…
Most companies switch their marketing messaging too frequently and undermine the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns as a result. The power of repetition is one of the foundations of world-class marketing. So if it is a bad idea – why do so many companies do it? Find three reasons on…