Pull back the curtain – Analysts are expected to know what’s going on in their industry, and that includes publicly available information and the confidential stuff too.  Don’t be shy about opening the door and giving the analysts a sneak peek at your company’s next big thing. They’ll remember your hospitality when you’re ready to launch.

Put words in their mouth – In new markets and segments, the names and criteria of product categories may not yet exist.  By helping analysts define your market, you not only give them a starting point for the work they’re responsible for, but you also get to influence how your category is referred to, defined and measured. 

Show them you’re listening – In briefings and message testing sessions, analysts can give you a lot of information.  While it’s often impossible to roll everything thy say into your story, try to extract a few important nuggets of information that help you create a better value proposition. When you modify a presentation, press release or other tool based on an analyst’s recommendations, send it to him, let him know how helpful his guidance was, and thank him.  Analysts are experts, so treating them as such  establishes respect.

Buy their research – While analyst firms are often targeting the same markets you are, they have a secondary set of customers- vendor companies like yours.  Even if an analyst will accept briefings with you for free to keep abreast of your company’s activities, it doesn’t mean that they don’t want to make a client out of you.  If an influential firm publishes a report on your market, buy it and reference it in your conversations with their analysts.  Chances are you’ll show up in the next one.

These masses of competing signs remind me of crowded markets, and how difficult it can be for a company to get its message across when so many others are plastering the neighborhood with their own signs.  When you find yourself up against several other companies that all claim to do exactly what you do, it’s time to stop printing signs, and start looking at your messaging and marketing mix.  Here are a few tips that might help your company slice through the noise.

Get to know your market and audience

If you expect to reach your audience better than your competitors, you need to know your audience better than your competitors.  By segmenting your market into a few manageable groups, you can talk to each group of companies based on their unique attributes rather than as a single unrelated mass.  But go beyond segmenting your market – profile your audience too.  Whenever there are multiple stakeholders involved in a purchase (as is often the case in high tech business to business selling), it’s important to separate those who can recommend, influence, overturn or approve a deal.  Once you know who you’re talking to, work to understand the unique concerns of each group as the foundation of good positioning.

Be Different

If your competitors are all saying the same thing, don’t join the party.  Look at what the other companies in your space are claiming, then find the holes in their stories that present an opportunity for you.  The more you can align a differentiated message with the unique concerns of your audience, the better chance your message has of getting through.

Change The Channel

Just because your competitors are printing signs, it doesn’t mean you have to.  Look at all the options available for generating awareness and find a venue that nobody else has thought of.  If all of your competitors are advertising in a trade publication, sponsor their monthly newsletter instead.  If everyone else has a booth at a trade show, secure a keynote speaking slot and sponsor their cocktail reception.  If everyone else uses lawn signs, get a blimp.  You get the picture.

Just because everyone else is saying or doing it, it doesn’t mean you have to join them.  The key to standing out in a crowded market is doing a better job of talking to people on their terms, presenting a better story than your competitors and selecting opportunities for awareness that nobody else does.  

With that, Our Ten Most Popular Posts: 

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Idris’ blog entry rips Lenovo’s brand like a hurricane, erasing my gut feeling that the former IBM division is organized, responsive and trustworthy, and casting doubt on their ability to deliver.  Since I have come to trust the FUTURELAB blog and its authors, reading this post was like getting a warning from a friend…order from Lenovo at your own risk. This is a warning I’ll most likely heed.

In the age of social networking, blogging and pervasive consumer ratings, customers can easily and instantly share their experiences with many others.  These conversations about real experiences can be a powerful force in establishing, reinforcing or contradicting a company’s brand.  This begs the question of how to harness these winds to propel our brands toward their target, rather than sit idly by as they blow our efforts off course.

For big ticket items, especially in the business to business realm, a microsite must transcend cute and sticky, finding a place in the buying cycle where it can advance a prospect down the path to purchase. For example, instead of pasting my face on a dancing elf’s body, perhaps I could engage an online configurator to discover how a new data center appliance might speed up my company’s order processing system. Of course, in order to find the microsite I still need to recognize I have a problem, understand that an appliance is a viable solution and know who the company is: so market conditioning, solution positioning, category creation and awareness generation better be checked off the marketer’s list. And call me Scrooge, but I’m probably not going to pull the trigger on a product after playing with an online configurator…I’m going to check out the competition, meet with the company, ask for a demo and negotiate pricing: which makes differentiation, sales and marketing collateral and a defensible price list a must. Can microsites catch on for big ticket items in the B2B world as they have for low end consumer products? I think so…but they better have a well defined role in a long, multi-touch buying cycle if they are going to have a chance. What do you think?

The high tech industry is not unlike the situation with Joe. A company often enters a market with a new product and wants to earn recognition for the innovative company it is and the game changing solution it has developed. But, without consistently using the right words and phrases, the company risks general market confusion about who it is and what it does. These words and phrases go beyond the standard, accepted industry nomenclature found in a company’s glossary, and include only those key expressions that help solidify a company’s brand. Together, these strategic words and their meanings represent a company’s marketing lexicon.

A marketing lexicon is not intended to define every word, term or phrase a company uses for external audiences. After all, that’s what a glossary is for. Instead, a marketing lexicon is an internal tool that is developed as part of a company’s verbal identity and consists of a few strategic terms that best articulate its category, market position, industry vision and/or competitive differentiation. Where a glossary provides the generally accepted meaning of a word, a lexicon defines why a term is specifically meaningful to the company, and outlines how it should be used to garner mind share.

The purpose of a marketing lexicon is to establish a common vocabulary that properly characterizes a company and its solutions in the marketplace. These words should be used continually and consistently by all corporate stakeholders and infused in all company materials and programs. Developing and implementing a lexicon helps ensure that the words you use to embody your company and solution work to send the right impression when you make your big entrance.