Concentrate Blog
Blog post from Greg Williamson of Concentrate
Earlier this month while riding in a fully electric car from Guangzhou to Dongguan in China, while ‘talking’ to the driver through a translation app, I reflected on how awesome technology is, and how it can help solve seemingly intractable problems. Journalists might be busy writing stories of climate change doom and global and local racial tension recently, but technologists are busy coming up with solutions. Here’s a few stories from the world of technology marketing.
Scaring your prospects off with marketing
One of tech marketing’s biggest failures can be messaging. I was once in a marketing team that was required to describe our product as an ‘’object oriented client server development environment.’’ Getting in the customer’s door was a challenge. As tech companies we can be so focussed on describing what our innovations are, we can fail to accurately convey what they will actually do for a customer. Another trap is positioning our products with messages intended to hype up our offering, which often have the opposite effect. This article from Entrepreneur magazine takes a look at few of these potential missteps, and here’s an oldie but goodie from the Concentrate blogging vault, that talks about the danger of underestimating a customer’s intelligence.
Tall poppy fertilisation
While the media routinely seems to focus on commercial failures, it’s refreshing to see celebrations of tech success. This article is a nice round-up of some under the radar Kiwi tech firms, from Soul Machines to Syft. It’s another indicator that tech is becoming a mainstream sector in New Zealand. You can read our own ongoing series of on technology tall poppies here.
An overnight success in 10 years
If you read any article linked to this email, try this one. It’s a brilliant insight from Vend founder Vaughan Fergusson in a column for Idealog magazine. From hard-won experience, Fergusson relates how most ‘overnight successes’, especially in the tech sector, are often the products of years of hard work, failures and finally triumph. On the way he celebrates having the courage to make decisions (and mistakes), while decrying the tall poppy syndrome that can hamper Kiwi entrepreneurs.
Getting lubricated at Inbound
More than 24,000 business people from 110 countries gathered at HubSpot’s annual INBOUND convention in Boston, USA earlier this month. Attendees included Concentrate’s own Owen Scott and Achan Bedi. A focus of the event was ‘lubrication’ – not when the lads were out on the town, but the concept of reducing customer friction. HubSpot’s primary focus has become on how to make a customer’s journey, from initial engagement through to happy customer, as smooth as possible. Owen discusses this and other ideas in his blog summarising the event.
Calculating your website performance
A company’s website is a key component of attracting and converting people into sales leads. Often it’s hard to know how your volume of website traffic compares to your peers in the tech sector, and more importantly what proportion of those visitors turn into leads. We’ve crunched the numbers using data gathered from hundreds of Kiwi tech companies and come up with this handy calculator. You can do a quick comparison with our handy calculator, available here.
Greg Williamson
