How mid-market needs and performance shape even bigger opportunities for startups and small business

By: Bill Van Eron Friday August 1, 2014

 

The Innovation Advantage with Bill Van Eron

By Bill Van Eron

CMO/Value Creation Architect

Headwaters Marketing

There was a time when aspiring startups and small businesses strived to mirror the success of large companies.

What many respected about having that bellweather compass was how smaller companies could leverage efficiencies that larger companies took years to refine. Going one better then afforded smaller companies as 'challengers' the opportunity to grow faster and even leap past competitors.

Dial forward to today and it's easy to see how many of yesterday's Fortune 500 no longer lead and an alarming percentage are no longer even in business. That is part of a greater realty that the rules governing success continue to change exponentially. While some large companies are finally rediscovering their entrepreneurial roots, it will be a while before they regain the aura of true leadership.

So, how can startups survive and thrive in this age of opportunity and uncertainty?

After a lengthy study of primary business needs, priorities, resistance factors and a lot of attention to why, it's safe to say mid-market companies have taken over the challenger position and are showing greater optimism, growth and openness to new thinking. So they now appear as a meaningful compass to reference as you set your startup or small business on a course to survive, leap and thrive in the decade ahead.

The charts below are credited to the Razorfish Adobe recent executive mid-market survey. They are just one of dozens of indicators I studied, yet quite revealing. It has to do with how mid-market companies are embracing site-side* analytics or resisting it. They also offer a view into the larger business condition. That view is important to us as we serve the mid-market as well as leveraging and improving on success they experience so others may leapfrog it as an advantage.

(* Site-side analytics refers to a company's ability to measure the customer experience within digital assets, such as a Web site, Instagram pages, LinkedIn or other 'owned assets'.)

While site-side analytics are certainly an important part of a company's ability to assess and improve performance, we take the position that external market-wide indicators are also essential. We also believe earned assets are better than owned assets.

With that in mind, the issues and challenges you see listed above only increase in scope as smaller firms examine their possibilities and challenges. One should carefully internalize all of the items on this list as you plan your marketing strategies. The first three items - access to data, platform complexity, high cost - are even more critical for startups and the two larger challenges - high cost of platform management and organizational support required - are emerging needs I identified many months ago when I promoted the strengths of AllProWebTools (APWT) as a far lower-cost, integrated, easier-to-use site-side and beyond Internet automation tool. For larger orgs, we work with Domo, but even their offerings appear less aggressive than APWT in really solving these challenges.



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This next indicator reveals the challenges in real time marketing in its early stages. We all tend to see how technology is moving in this direction to enable marketer's greater customization and responsiveness, as dynamic to real time prospect inquiry and investigation. What many miss is as follows:

-       How increased levels of invasiveness put off customers as a factor to manage.

-       How critical it is to understand that potential customer's fast-changing influence ecosystem.

-       What it really takes to manage analytics, disparate solutions, and be effective in social and content marketing.

-       How to best blend objective outsourced guidance with internal capabilities now that the two are integrally connected.

-       The sheer speed of business as it relates to defining your own focus, speed, value and in an ongoing manner.

-       What kind of system your CEO and organization will respond to as truly vital to survive and thrive.

While I am refining Headwaters' ability to help mid-market and smaller/startup companies to define more agile marketing approaches, there are many lessons we can learn from the mid-market space. I encourage you to discover your own as they inherit the challenger position and now smaller organizations can learn from and make smarter upstream and downstream decisions.

I love the gamesmanship in marketing as it now again has far less to do with size than relationships, relevance and value creation. Most definitely it is 'game on' versus some future, soft requirement. I hope to help some of you as you shift your own expectations from conventional marketing to again reinvent 'awesome' as an external descriptor and internal synergy.
Bill Van Eron

About the Author: Bill Van Eron

For Bill Van Eron, life & work are all about conscious observation and earning our needed humanity high bar. Whether Bill was an art director or lead designer in NYC, the most demanding marketing environment, or shaping a more relevant brand for soon to be major companies in Denver, or across his 25-year career in HP, as its champion for progressive enlightenment, diversity, inclusion and the highest relevance, which followed every project, Bill stays inspired to help others shape a better world, lives & work as connected to greater attention to our humanity, creativity and value-creation. All as vital to any organization's greater success. Bill now is championing the first and most conscious innovations that resolve challenges to our planets environment, as well as business and government realizing each’s greater purpose and brand value. Tired of conventional approaches and willful ignorance, Bill was recruited as one who can champion each solutions authentic relevance. Bill hopes Colorado and Fort Collins can open up and get in flow, as a community Bill & his wife only wish the best for as also enabled with a view all others benefit by, whether they see it initially or not.