Consumption Marketing: Micro-Marketing and Micro-Buzz

This week, we present Chapter 7: Consumption Marketing: Micro-Marketing and Micro-Buzz. This is the eighth post in a series dedicated to helping MSPs understand and adopt the recommendations of Consumption Economics–The New Rules of Tech. Chuck introduces the chapter by sharing how the content resonates with his 30+ years of industry insight.

A FEW WORDS FROM CHUCK

As I mentioned last week, we are now into the “meat” of Consumption Economics – taking the information from the first five chapters and putting it into action. We are learning how to transform our business model by changing the way we do business. Remember, it is the consumer’s new behavior for technology purchases and consumption that has forced us to reevaluate and pivot.

Last week, we learned the importance of listening intelligently to customers. This allows us to find out what they exactly want and need – what they would be willing to buy today if that specific product was available (as discussed last week). Similarly to how we had to rethink product development, we now have to transform marketing efforts.

Consumption Marketing: Micro-marketing and Micro-buzz is this week’s focus. Keep in mind that the target customers are the same people who already said they would buy these products, if they were available. Gone are the days where you can sell a technology product or service to 100 people by convincing a single decision maker (the CEO) – you now have to persuade them all individually. It is all about creating a buzz in the customer base and taking advantage of direct connections to the end users – the same people we listened to, intelligently.

The thought of having to market to 100 end users (instead of the decision maker in the company) sounds like a monumental task. Fear not, because this chapter will show you that in the “end user technology consumption-driven world”, it is easier than you think.

AN EXCERPT FROM Consumption Economics—The New Rules of Tech

Chapter 7: Consumption Marketing: Micro-Marketing and Micro-Buzz

We believe that the new world of Consumption Economics and the cloud are about to give tech marketing a whole new job and a cool new set of tools to do it with. Why?

1. The decision maker for the micro-transactions we need to grow big accounts is now the end user.
2. In the cloud, we can know absolutely every one of them.
3. Intelligent Listening has given us the usage data from which to construct ideal Consumption Roadmaps. These paths to value will provide unprecedented insight into what these buyers want, need, and are authorized to buy at any point in time.
4. We can then put our highly targeted offers right under their noses—guaranteed—100 percent of the time.
5. We can track every reaction to every offer—exactly what worked and exactly what didn’t.

The next “big thing” in tech marketing will be “micro-marketing”—individual end-user marketing, fueled by dynamic Consumption Roadmaps, targeted specifically at end users based on their unique industry, company, job role, and level of sophistication.

Altogether, this represents a huge new frontier of competitive differentiation. After all, who can really claim to be able to accomplish this today? Nobody. Just think of the value to the customer of such a capability! An ability to basically guarantee the high end-user adoption rates that radically improve the ROI of a technology investment.

Our micro-offers need to be helpful, not overly commercial. In fact the most common ones, the feature offers, may not generate any new revenue at all—at least not directly. The most common offers we tee up for the end users have to be quite altruistic. By this we mean that they really have to be designed to further the interests and the priorities for value that the customers and their end users have. Over time, this will result in monetization for the whole cloud/MT pyramid because it will mean more transactions, more data, more processing requirements, etc.

Here is another cool concept that could be enabled by your new Consumption Model: “buzz” in an account.

Micro-buzz is all about using your direct connection to the end user to promote ideal consumption offers and news about what is going on with their peer’s use of the product—just like games and Facebook do in social groups. Imagine a user being able to see that they are in the top 10 percent of all their peers in getting value for the company through your product? Imagine another user being able to see that they are in the bottom 10 percent? And imagine the company’s management being able to see both? Whoa.

Because D3UC is dedicated to and entrenched with the MSP community, each week a new chapter of Consumption Economics will be discussed with emphasis focused on the challenges faced by VARs and MSPs who are transforming their companies’ business models to survive and thrive in the new, Cloud-driven world.

If you would like an overview of the book Consumption Economics, you can download a copy of the “abridged” version written by the TSIA from our website.

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Published: June 2015
Reviewed: November 2016, March 2018