Blog

Effective marketing requires crisp differentiation. Define a unique market segment and be the best in that segment. Simple enough, but be careful – it is not product differences that define your segment, but rather buyer differences. Segments are defined by unique buyers with unique needs and desires.

I saw two great movies last week. The first – The Sapphires – was an independent film with unknown actors. The other was Iron Man 3, starring Robert Downey Jr. You couldn’t find two more different movies in terms of star power, production values, and overall polish.

Two questions clients ask me all the time about online video are “how many views are enough” and “how can I get more views”. These are great questions. The answers might surprise you.

Yogi Berra famously said “You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you’re going, because you might not get there.” You never knew what Yogi was really talking about, but in this case he may have been talking about choosing your marketing targets carefully. Here are three things I’ve learned over the years about choosing your marketing targets:

A couple of years ago I was skiing with a group of general partners from top Silicon Valley venture firms. At dinner one of them was raving about Facebook. I mentioned it didn’t seem like a good fit for our B2B clients who sold to CIOs and senior IT staff. He assured me that was changing – that Facebook was refocusing on business. Skeptical, I mumbled something like “we’ll see.”