SubscribeWhat pain do you solve?
by Jennifer SmithOn Tuesday 7 July, OneIS hosted our first event. We’re really keen to encourage people from the various IT and Information professions to collaborate together, so we invited people from a variety of related professions to a Marketing Masterclass led by Chris West.
The professions, working together
I kicked off the evening by encouraging delegates to take advantage of the oppourtunity to meet people in related professions. I illustrated how we were all involved in helping people to find the right information at the right time, and that we could do this even better if we worked together.
Trade barriers and opportunities
We invited Dr Chris Jelley of BeSupported to give his impression of the potential role for Information Professionals within small businesses. He likened the situation to two countries previously unknown to each other, with the potential for trade.
Marketing ourselves
Our main speaker, Chris West, took us through what we needed to do to get into the “marketing mindset.”
He turned our thinking from focusing on ourselves, to focusing on our customers and thinking about the pain they have, which we can solve. He stressed the need to describe what you deliver in terms of the benefit to the customer, not just describing the features of the service you offer.
Chris’ 5 questions:
- What’s the pain?
- Who for?
- What are you going to do about it?
- Why should people switch to you?
- Says who?
We in the knowledge and information worlds have great difficulty in describing and marketing our services. Chris suggested we “productise” our services. If you think of them as a series of products they are much easier to market.
So, instead of getting bogged down in describing the minutiae of what we do, we need to focus on:
- what pain our customers have
- how we can solve this pain
- proof and credibility of the value we bring, using case studies and testimonials
The British Library Business and IP Centre use client case studies very effectively to market their services. I think a lot of other information services could benefit from doing this, and most of the audience agreed, with much talk about case studies afterwards.
Unusually for a marketer, Chris played down the role of branding for a one person consultancy. He stressed that the values you portray and the way you behave are your brand. You should protect your brand and reputation, but you shouldn’t spend too much time on logos and visual identity.
Finally, we should make sure it is easy for customers to buy from us. They need to understand the services we offer, how to go about ordering them, and how much they cost.
Effective marketing is required whether you’re running an internal information service in a large corporate or a one-person consultancy, and the approaches for marketing are much the same. I was really pleased that everyone seemed to take away something useful from the talk.
And finally, we were very grateful to our guests for sending in their feedback! We’re glad you found the evening useful.
“A very good balance of being informed and networking.” Michele Bate
“A Really great evening thanks so much. Got some great tips – CASE STUDIES very useful.”
“Wonderful evening. A well organised event with useful content and great networking.” Fiona Wilson, emmersons Ltd
“A great evening. As as small business I came away with lots to think about in terms of how to market my business and enthusiastic about the potential opportunities for partnerships with information professionals.” Dr Chris Jelley, BeSupported Ltd.
“An interesting and enjoyable evening, with lots of ideas to take away and work on. I’ll look forward to the next event.”
