Search Vendors and Mad Men
November 8, 2010
What’s on the horizon for search and content processing companies? When it comes to marketing, there are changes afoot. I want to highlight some marketing methods that don’t work too well and identify three that seem to be working for certain vendors. Azurini, take note. Some of these methods involve your selling contacts in the guise of objective analysis. Believe it or not, you are now more Madison Avenue than most professionals understand.
My hunch is that you, gentle reader, are immersed in the excitement of every day life. You get a paycheck or send an invoice to a sugar daddy client. Life is reasonably good. Just don’t peer too far down the Road to Tomorrow is my advice.
Who can omit the lucky individuals who have to meet payroll, keep vulture capitalists high in the sky, and cope with the Peter Principle experience a different type of thrill. That thrill is the adrenaline rush of avoiding failure, ridicule, and becoming a bit on the Colbert Report.
As the search and content processing sector limps toward 2011, the challenge of generating big revenue looms larger. Maybe the proposed $600 billion in borrowed dollars will turn the trick?
Here’s what I have observed in 2010 about marketing search and content processing systems. These activities seem to be less effective than they were a year or two ago.
- Web site traffic. Vendors get really defensive when one looks at the traffic to search vendors’ Web sites. I know the usage states are wrong, but the data do indicate general trends. The trend I see is that traffic to the top 50 search and content processing vendors I track more closely than the 250 I monitor via Overflight is that Web site traffic is not so hot. Our review showed most Web sites have fewer uniques than this Web log. Run your own tests at www.compete.com. The situation is probably going to get worse in 2011, so that investment may not deliver a pay back beyond brochureware a person may stumble upon despite Google Instant.
- Web logs. These are not working. My Overflight system makes it dead easy to spot vendors with Web logs and the poor track record in updating the content with new posts and corrections. Blogs seem so easy to do, yet are beyond the reach of most search and content processing companies. Consulting firms like 451 and Gartner benefit because their services shift the content burden and the traffic acquisition from the search vendor to the marketing “experts”.
- Big trade show booths. Wow, these are expensive. One vendor told me that qualified sales leads are difficult to find at trade shows. Some types of events do work, but the 1980s style approach is a bit like wearing spurs when I drive a rental car.
- Terminology. I am not sure what some vendors are selling. The buzzwords are an effort to communicate. Most of the explanations from vendors are so similar I could cut and paste paragraphs from different collateral and most people would not notice. How about “information optimization” or “business intelligence”. So easy to say. So fuzzy today.
The real point I want to make is that there are some vendors who have figured out how to make sales. I don’t want to create an exhaustive list, but I do want to highlight four trends in search and content processing marketing that warrant attention in the coming months.
User Meetings
As traditional conferences have struggled, vendor-sponsored conferences have surged. In fact, for some vendors like MarkLogic, the user conferences compete with traditional trade shows on the trade show organizers’ turf on the same day of the week. User meetings are a useful marketing method. ArnoldIT.com helped Lucid Imagination stuff 330 people in a Boston hotel for two days. For more information about this, write seaky2000@arnoldit.com.
Webinars and Rich Media
To make this method work, the search vendor needs an outfit with a readership and a mailing list. The vendor can’t generate an audience alone, so savvy vendors are paying outfits to host an event. We did events for Fierce Media and ETM in 2010 and now offer our own series of audio and video podcasts. I stuff social media in this bucket, but it could easily be a separate dot point.
A Trade Association Connection
A third method is for a vendor to identify a trade association that serves a specific niche. There are many examples ranging from health and wellness informatics to customer support groups. The idea is that by going to a niche, the vendor can build relationships and make sales.
There are other successful techniques as well. The point is that marketing has to shift. In order to survive, search and content processing vendors must adapt, no matter how painful. Look at it this way. Finding a way to make sales is less painful that having the vultures nibble on one’s liver.
Stephen E Arnold, November 7, 2010
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