Those of us in sales and marketing understand how difficult it can be to tailor the right marketing message for your primary customer. Marketing is a real challenge today. It’s one thing to understand how your product can benefit your user base and communicate that message, but it’s an entirely additional problem to find a way to communicate around all of the noise.
You understand what I mean by noise, right? I’m as addicted to the Internet as anyone but I often long for simpler times when ads were confined to radio, periodicals, TV and bill boards. Today we are overwhelmed with ads. Our minds are continually under threat of distraction. Distraction by phone calls, interstitial ads, remarketing ads, banner ads, text links, email offers, ads on YouTube videos, ads on Twitter, ads on Spotify or Pandora, political ads, online news ads, snail-mail pieces, planes with banners, stadium names, and yes even blog posts.
What is up America? Maybe we should support a constitutional amendment for a once-a-month no advertising day? End rant.
Still, we all have a job to do and for many of us it involves asking people to buy a product or service. There are lots of rules about how you should present your marketing messages:
· Offer a benefit not a feature
· Sell solutions not software
· Make sure your use the active voice
· Include a call to action
· Explain how your product will make your user a hero
“Waterville House of Pizza – because you are a Super Dad. Stop-by today.”
So I ask myself, on a regular basis, “What do my customers really need to know about Map Business Online?”
We talk to many customers in the course of a day, across all channels. For a company the size of Salesforce.com or Amazon.com those communications are massive and to an extent automated. But in our smaller world, we’re able to pay special attention to each inquiry, request, complaint, or compliment.
We had one email last week where a customer requested we “stop sending [him] emails.” It happens. His email was immediately set to ‘do not contact,’ but we discussed the request. Are we too heavy-handed with email? Should we respond? Probably not, because that would be doing exactly what he asked us not to do. A marketing paradox! My point is, here at Map Business Online we take customer contact seriously and consider the impact of reaching out.
Because we offer a software-as-a-service (SaaS) cloud-based product, we only get contacted for assistance by a small percentage of paying customers. Most users try our business mapping software through the free trial, buy it and renew their subscriptions a year later, without ever contacting us. This, in and of itself, is quite remarkable to me. In addition to being indicative of how the Internet has revolutionized shopping, I believe it shows how truly easy-to-use our software is. Otherwise we’d be overwhelmed with complaints or have no sales at all, when in fact sales have grown exponentially and continue to do so.
It could also be that the Map Business Online price point, a relatively inexpensive $299.95 per year list price, makes the buying decision a rather simple process. Sales and marketing people, managers, and financial advisers (just a few of our common customer types) can simply purchase the tool and expense it. Even if permissions are required, the Internet makes it easy to research the tool, compile competitive information, try it and justify the expense.
It’s fun when we’re giving a web demo and the customer tells us how easy our business mapping is to use. “This is exactly the tool we require to replace MapPoint. And it’s even more advanced,” a prospective customer said last week. “That’s exactly the feature we were looking for.” A salesperson’s dream, selling Map Business Online.
Advertising tag lines come and go. Some work, I suppose. Some don’t. Tag lines are hard to measure. What I do know is that our business mapping software adds value to customer processes and work flows:
· Powerful customer map visualizations
· Accountability defined and maintained through sales territory alignment
· Market analysis enabled by layering business and demographic data against an accurate map
· Derived location intelligence and situational awareness enhancing strategic planning
· Cross departmental team collaboration through shared map editing
These business mapping capabilities all contribute significant value to a growing list of corporate and non-profit customers across North America.
But it all boils down to this: Map Business Online – We’re Easy, affordable, advanced, and we’ll help.
Find out why over 25,000 business users log into www.MapBusinessOnline.com
Contact: Geoffrey Ives geoffives@spatialteq.com (800) 425-9035, (207) 939-6866
MapPoint users – please consider www.MapBusinessOnline.com as your MapPoint Replacement.
Please read customer reviews or review us at Capterra, or at the Salesforce.com AppExchange.
