• 08
  • January

Calling all Waterloo Region tech marketers!

At the very least, I hope to spur some productive discussions, but my ultimate goal is to help to advance our region’s tech marketing effectiveness, overall. Update: On February 12th, we released the Waterloo Region Technology Marketing Spotlight, which combined a top-down study of publicly available company information with a bottom-up survey of technology marketers. Click the link in the image to view the full report […]

  • 18
  • December

Is A/B Testing (Mis)informing Your Business?

Improper optional stopping increased the average False Discovery Rate…This generates two possible costs for a company. The first is a cost of commission. Facing a false discovery, the company will needlessly switch to a new treatment and incur a switching cost. The second cost of a false discovery is a cost of omission. Erroneously believing to have found an improvement, the company stops […]

  • 06
  • December

Growth Marketing in a Technical Market

Your customers are looking for solutions to problems, they’re not Googling for your product or technology. Talking about solutions and problems helps you get discovered, and makes your message stronger by relating to an acute pain point; done right, this approach earns you the product and technology conversations that come later. The last Communitech Marketing P2P of the year took a Lightning […]

  • 03
  • December

How to Boost Your Business by Overcoming Buying Barriers

The good news is that investing just a little bit of time and effort to understand and address real-world buying barriers delivers wonderfully asymmetric returns, because doing so empowers you to develop high-impact messaging, effective content, and efficient sales processes. In practically all of our client engagements, I ask about ‘buying barriers’. Most times, I receive a quizzical expression in response; occasionally, I’ll hear […]

  • 29
  • November

Crommunity Podcast, Episode 2: Warren Pamukoff (Magnet Forensics)

“You can’t change the product, but you can change what you’re focusing on.” Hey there marketing fans, what time is it? That’s right, it’s Crommunity podcast time! Joining us this time around is Warren Pamukoff, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Magnet Forensics in Waterloo. Warren was Magnet’s first product marketing hire, so he really got to build the ‘program’ from the ground […]

  • 27
  • November

The Ad is Dead; Long Live the Community

In a very tactics-obsessed industry and environment, Alex advocates for a strategic approach to longer-term success that, in all likelihood, will take time to develop; however, when presented against the backdrop of the unsustainability of digital advertising, it seems a prudent, logical course of action. The last Communitech Marketing P2P of the year took a Lightning Talk format that featured two guest […]

  • 23
  • November

The Tyranny of Tactics: Is an over-focus on marketing tactics dooming your business?

Tactics are important, obviously – they’re the part where stuff gets done – but they have to work for you, and not the other way around. I’m just gonna come right out and say it: start-ups and scale-ups doom themselves with well-intentioned, but dangerously stifling, overemphasis on marketing tactics. And I’m not going for hyperbole here. I mean the literal meaning of […]

  • 19
  • November

Facts, Factoids, and the Most Over-Cited Statistic in B2B

“People can come up with statistics to prove anything. Forfty percent of people know that.”—H. J. Simpson If you’re even remotely involved with B2B marketing, then you’ve almost certainly seen the oft-cited B2B statistic that 60 percent of a customer’s buying decision is made before you even learn they’re interested. It shows up everywhere…I’ve personally come across it in at least half […]

  • 15
  • November

A Different Model of the Customer Experience Journey, and What it Means for Marketers

It is not your customer’s job to buy from you. It is your job to find out what would make for an exceptional experience from their point of view, and invite them into it. – David Nour Recently, I finished reading Co-Create, by David Nour, and perhaps my biggest take-away was his model for the Customer Experience Journey. TL;DR At the very […]

  • 18
  • October

Talkin’ About Technical Communication

As foreshadowed previously, last night I had the pleasure of speaking at the Technical Communication P2P group down at Communitech. A dozen or so folks braved the wintery (!) conditions to hear me go through a presentation with the intriguingly bland and broad title, How Tech Communicators Can Help Businesses (you can find a PDF version of the slides at the bottom of this […]

178910