The Intangible Presentation: Tips & Hints

Let's face it, non-tangible products are difficult to present (demonstrate) to a potential customer. With this in mind, here are a few tried and true methodologies that will make the process bear fruit when all is said and done. Some of these tips are essential to the bottom line and others will increase your numbers significantly. Like everything in the sales world, if you don’t have a plan you might as well give it up because it isn’t happening.

1) Know your audience

Gathering data about your prospect’s needs before the presentation is like piecing together a jigsaw puzzle. Some information comes from sales, some from prior contacts, and some is gathered on-the fly during the presentation. The key is to piece together what each decision maker cares about and why. Armed with this information you can be sure to  cover the topics they care about and to drop the ones they don’t.

2) Know your product

You’re the product expert; prospects expect you to know how there signing on to your web advertising site solves their problems. As a rule of thumb, if you can’t answer 85-90 percent of the questions asked during the presentation–you’re not ready.

3) Understand the issues faced by your prospects

Compelling presentations demand a deep understanding of the issues faced by your prospects and customers. Understanding lets you to map the benefits of your product to your prospects needs.

4) Use a story based structure

Structured presentations are memorable presentations. If you just string together feature after feature, the prospect won’t remember what you showed them. Instead, why not try a time-compressed story based on a “day in the life” of your prospect. This style demo mirrors what happens in their world, making it easy to follow and remember.

5) Use customer stories and references

Customer stories show how your product solves problems and third party references can do amazing things for your credibility.  Ask other members of your team for stories they use and build a collection for all to share. Example: Dr. Smith signed on with us 6 months ago and word of mouth alone with his site presence has increased walk in business by 22%.

6) Practice your presentation

If your presentation looks clunky prospects will get spooked. Find a safe way to show the good stuff, and then practice until you can do it on autopilot.

7) Add some spice

The last thing you should do to improve your product presentation is to add some spice, specifically: humor, quotes and props.

• Humor can put your audience at ease and help them feel more comfortable with the presentation overall. Sets a good mood as well.
• Quotes, as long as they are relevant to your product, can make a presentation more memorable and interesting.
• Props are a great way to clarify a point or to punctuate your presentation to make a specific feature stand out.

Ultimately, preparedness and confidence will win the day. Go in knowing you have
something viable and unique. Something that will not only provide a solution but enhance your customers presence in the business world. What you have is valuable and it's not a question of if but when your prospect will buy in. (For those at MapWide, 6 platinums between a thousand competitors means now rather than later).

Author: Chris Borowski

SEO Optimization Part III: Facebook!

There are many forms of Search Engine Optimization, and once you have made sure that your website has the highest ranking possible in search engines, the next step to completing your website marketing campaign is to look outside of search engines to get more traffic to your website. However, a professional SEO Consultant will consult you that this is also part of SEO as you are creating backlinks to your website which will then be indexed and used to increase your ranking. Facebook is currently one of the most popular social media websites, others have come before it and many will follow, however, so far none have reached its popularity. There are many ways that you can utilize it to better help your business as well as popularity of your website.

First and foremost it’s important to create a profile. Make sure that it’s very interesting and well written with a lot of information about yourself or your company. Offer details about what your website and company offer. Utilize all of the points of information input that they offer, as well as post contact and website URL. You may also want to include pictures in your albums of your company, products, and events. Most importantly, make it public, so anyone can find it online.

Building your company network is overall the same as building your personal network, however, there may be far more people you don’t personally know in it. Start off by finding all of your friends, family, and acquaintances. They will be the stepping stone to getting more people viewing your profile and network. Talk to them about helping you promote your company to their friends that may be interested. Also, it’s good to do a search in Facebook for other people that are either in your area or have the same interests as you or may be interested in the company. However, keep in mind if you are too pushy about getting your friend request accepted, it may look spammy.

There are new applications available daily, most of which are completely useless to what you are trying to achieve. Rarely can you find some that will actually help, but every bit counts. There are applications such as widgets that track blogs, so your profile is constantly updated. Also, you can get the MarketPlace widget or even one that helps you cross post to twitter to save time. Search through the different applications using different options to help you find the right one for you.

Aside from just building a profile, you can also use the ads offered on Facebook. These are the ads that pop up on the left hand side when browsing through Facebook. They are chosen specifically for each user, based on location, interest, job title, etc. So it’s a great way to reach people that will most likely be interested in your website. There is a small fee, but it’s a great form of advertisement. Another way to get noticed is through creating a group, something pertaining to your website. This way you will get more people that have the same interests and be able to accelerate the traffic through your website.

Having a public profile on Facebook may be a little too much for some people, as it is a lot of private information out there for anyone to see. A great way to avoid this is through separate profiles. You can create a personal profile that is completely private and visible only to your friends, and a public one that is more to the point and directed to customers. There you can offer the company information, with limited information about yourself. Also, you don’t want your potential or current customers knowing what you did this past weekend anyway.

Lastly, and most importantly, don’t just create the profile and forget it. You must log in daily and be active. Part of being active is posting daily, maybe you don’t have new information to post, or a new note to add, however, a simple status update will keep you in peoples’ minds. Another way to get more attention to your website is through visiting others profiles, groups, and visit their websites. Post comments which will in turn bring the people to your website, and possibly end up reading up on what you have been doing lately, and eventually clicking on your website. It’s definitely going to take a lot of time and effort, but it’s well worth it.

So, when you have finished with the Search Engine Optimization for your website, it does not end there. Speak with your SEO Consultant about giving you some more suggestions as to how to further utilize the many media websites online that you can use to get a higher ranking as well as get more traffic to your website. It’s important that you don’t just create and forget a profile, but continue to be active in order to have any sort of effect from it, so participate and make great contacts for future business.

Search and Display

As we continue to prepare ourselves for the inevitable conjuncture when search engine marketing becomes performance marketing, the question of where display fits into this equation lingers on, and it isn't evident that search marketers have really had the opportunity to piece it all together yet. These pivotal points should influence how you approach display in an integrated performance marketing offering. Here are the most important ones:

Push vs. Pull

Searchers know what they're looking for -- you pull them in with keywords, ads, and content matching their request. In the world of display, you need to push your offer much more aggressively to distract the customer from what they're actually doing (i.e., consuming content).

Top vs. Bottom of the Funnel

If we can picture the conversion funnel with conversions at the bottom and awareness at the top, it's clear that search and display live at opposite ends of the funnel. The role of display in performance marketing is in great part to widen the top of the funnel, in order to drive more conversions at the bottom.

Scarcity vs. Abundance of Supply

In the world of search, supply is scarce. There are only so many keywords describing your target, and they will only search for these things so many times. However, supply in the world of display is much more abundant. It grows each time a new page of content is published. As display matures as a channel, all consumers will likely see more relevant ads, and less of them.

The Auction

Historically, display has been largely an "un-winnable" media for performance marketing, largely due to the lack of fair market pricing mechanisms, such as an auction. It's no surprise that the sudden rise of display advertising is directly linked to auction pricing, but auctions for impressions are different from those we have in search.

Search is a cached or hosted auction. Marketers specify in advance what they're willing to pay for a given keyword and that bid sits on the search engine's server. This means that Google (or other) controls the optimization via smart pricing and other means. In display and the emerging real-time bidding auctions, the optimization is maintained by the buying technology. This gives buyers more control in display -- although with more variables and more unknowns to manage, the channel needs it. The auction is better served as a market-clearing mechanism that lets buyers be in control; too many variables simply fall outside of the actual media being bought for a complex market to try to do everything.

The Role of Data

Much could be said about the role of data in both mediums. This is especially true in display. Methodologies of retargeting and user-based targeting are staples in display. Display can't be successful without user-based targeting. Outside of keywords, search doesn't allow for much user targeting. In the future, using data across search and display -- especially using the data from search to target display -- is critical to success.