Let’s Talk about Branding Your Business
Let me formally introduce myself. My name is Jeremy Jordan, and I’m the person who publishes the articles, web updates and Cincom Smalltalk™ Digest each month. Although you can see my name as the publisher on our website, I’m usually the guy behind the scenes working with the rest of the dedicated Cincom Smalltalk Team. As the Sr. Marketing Manager for Cincom Smalltalk, it’s my job to make sure our messaging is constant and consistent and that we are communicating to our customers, partners and users in ways that make sense to them. I’m always looking for ways to improve my skills with marketing and messaging and realize that many of you may be in the same boat. I also know that some of you are the users of the products, and maybe you’re looking for ways to communicate with your manager or management. Also, if you’re building your business, you also want to know how to share value with your prospects and customers.
So, let’s talk marketing!
Moving forward, I’ll be sharing some insight from various resources and articles that I come across from day to day. I’ve even created a new Twitter account (@smalltalkmktg). Here, I’ll be tweeting and retweeting things I come across that might be interesting to you, from a marketing perspective.
As my first article in this series, I want to talk a little bit about branding and why it’s important. With Cincom Smalltalk, we have two simple distinctions that make up our product: it’s a commercial product built by Cincom and based on Smalltalk.
Our customers and partners know we provide stability, longevity and dependability from over 50 years in the software industry, which is why they trust us with their business for commercial Smalltalk. They also know that Smalltalk is a clean, simple, easy language for creating business applications that make sense to developers and customers. These business models form the core of systems that have to evolve over many years. The fact that code is modeled in a simple and elegant manner allows the developers to understand it, enhance it and evolve it simply and easily.
In all of our communications, we share those two distinctions. Even though new features and functionality may come out with each release, we emphasize to our customers and partners those key distinctions and show the benefits of what commercial Smalltalk looks like here at Cincom.
This reminds me of what the Cincom Founder, Chairman and CEO, Tom Nies, said a few years ago:
“Those … who engage in Sales and Marketing … are aligned according to a product line. So, it may be natural to have a close affinity to something we are closer to (our product) rather than something more distant (our company).
“Consumer sales and marketing do heavily promote a product brand. If the company is promoted, it is a secondary promotion. Thus, since we as consumers buy so many items based on a product-line image, or branding preference, we may be influenced to believe that all types of products should be. So, it is also natural to have a close affinity to something we are closer to (their product) rather than something more distant (their company).
“But, this is not the way that most highly successful Business-to-Business (B2B) firms operate. Rather, they heavily promote their company. The products they offer benefit because they are associated with the highly branded company.”
Cincom has successfully developed and sold software for over 50 years, and more specifically (as we highlight here), has been a leading provider of commercial Smalltalk for 20 years. There’s value in not just using Smalltalk for your application development needs, but doing so with the power of the Cincom brand at your side.
That leads me to you. How are you branding yourself and your company? If you are a start-up or small to medium-sized business, what are you doing to promote your brand? Unfortunately, especially for startups in the tech space, sometimes branding is the thing most overlooked.
That brings me back to a program that I want to highlight, because this very reason is why we offer our Partner Promotion Program. Our team understands that it can be difficult for most start-ups and small to medium-sized companies to come up with enough resources for every critical business function. The cost of getting products out to your customers can be major and sometimes daunting, often forcing you to cut or decrease budgets in important areas such as marketing and branding.
That’s why I want to reintroduce this program and extend this offer to our current customers and partners. We’d love to assist in helping you to market your applications. Oh, and here’s the best part … it’s FREE! This assistance is being offered as a free service in an effort to help partners and users grow their brands and increase the usage of their Cincom Smalltalk applications.
So, what are you waiting for? We need to have a conversation!
How It Works
Here’s how this will work. As soon as we start working together on this, my team will gather information about you and your company via a quick online survey. We’ll then take that information and begin creating a really cool user story that can be used to market your applications on your website and social media accounts. It will also be handed to your prospects when you communicate to them. What’s even cooler is that we will take your user story and post it to the Cincom Smalltalk website and our social media accounts, which will give you even more exposure.
Our users and partners are extremely important to us, and we’re happy and excited to help them succeed.
Examples
If you would like to see a few examples of how this works, check out the following user stories: