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by Owen Scott
Here’s some free marketing advice for Kiwi exporters, especially those from the technology sector. Trash your twitter, burn your brochures and axe your advertising.
Ignore the hype about marketing and take a cold, hard look at some fundamental questions.
Who actually wants to buy your product and how can you sell it to them at a profit?
Social media is actually a very exciting development for Kiwi exporters, with its ability to cost-effectively reach and develop direct relationships with potential customers.
But how often have you blogged, spent money on Google Adwords or posted an online video with the uneasy feeling that you have little idea of whether it is actually helping?
That’s because without a strong understanding of your marketing fundamentals it is hard to know.
Focus on the basics
Market Measures, a study of the sales and marketing approach of Kiwi tech companies, published by Concentrate and PricewaterhouseCoopers in 2009, identified this lack of focus on the basics as a problem.
“. . . while investment (in sales and marketing) is significant, companies lack targeted marketing strategies which would allow them to develop new domestic and international markets and help them grow into larger-scale enterprises,” concluded Owen Gibson, Partner - Private Client Services, PricewaterhouseCoopers.
A big challenge for New Zealand technology exporters is facing the realisation that marketing is probably the greatest threat to their success.
Products are not the problem, our brilliant engineers and inventors seem capable of solving almost any problem. The challenge is finding and exploiting profitable markets.
Effective technology export marketing is not a mysterious thing you have to pay enormous sums to an advertising agency to achieve.
It is actually about applying the same discipline and intellectual rigour to marketing that is applied to engineering problems.
Building what I call a ‘marketing foundation’ is crucial.
This foundation is created from understanding and quantifying your market, determining what’s important to this market and how to express it powerfully, and then how to go about securing and satisfying customers in this market.
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