Executive Summary

• Software vendors make frequent mistakes in their marketing.
• We cover some of the major ones in this article.

Introduction

IT media is more concentrated than in the nation’s history. This poses problems for small vendors in obtaining fair coverage.

Our References for This Article

If you want to see our references for this article and other related Brightwork articles, see this link.

Mistakes

A listing of the mistakes I have witnessed by software vendors and consulting firms would take a while to describe in full.

However, a few examples include the following.

1. Believing marketing companies that obtain hits on social media posts without checking the connection to real leads.
2. Handing money over to Gartner without understanding how Gartner functions.
3. Trying to develop a partnership with a major systems integrator without understanding that the system integrators are normally “spoken for” and prefer large vendors as dance partners.
4. Jumping over the process of spending on conferences before one’s messaging or website is in a complete state.
5. Using young and inexperienced (and inexpensive) writers to create articles.

A major issue with the mistakes made by vendors comes from overconfidence. Marketing is, in general, a qualitative field that is based more on assertions than evidence. And it turns out that a lot of confidence displayed by the marketing department is posing to the rest of the company that they have the answers and they know what they are doing. However, many areas of marketing are quite grey and the confidence displayed by marketing is in many cases a bluff.

Example in the Study of Promotions Management

A good example of this is found in my earlier book Promotions Forecasting: Forecast Adjustment Techniques in Software.

In this article, I cover the observations from many companies where I found the marketing departments were faking their ability to measure the impact of promotions. Several departments created forecasts based upon what they wanted to sell. This is of course not a forecast. Several marketing I analyzed were running promotions that they could not quantify the benefit of but were asserted by marketing to benefit the company.

The book goes on to explain that the academic literature on promotions is extremely contradictory on the topic of promotions. However, the marketing departments I analyzed in real companies never seemed to communicate this uncertainty in the other departments in the companies for which I consulted. And operations never asked that marketing demonstrate the effectiveness of the many promotions they were forced to account for. These companies had marketing departments that were much more interested in running promotions than accounting for them in operations.

Assertion Combined With Strong “Confidence” As a Cover for a Lack of Evidence

This is just one example of this assertion-based philosophy of marketing, but there are many other examples. In fact, working off of unsubstantiated assertions is very common in marketing agencies. One of the major methods employed by marketing agencies is to have extremely nice offices and a strong air of confidence. Even in what should be the most quantitative area of marketing, online advertising, it turns out that Google and Facebook have been exaggerating the effectiveness of their ads, as I cover in the article How Much Are Google and Facebook Overstating the Effectiveness of their AI and Ads. And the ad running marketing agencies that were managing these ads for their clients both did not catch it and were primarily involved in promoting these ad services to their clients.

The Problem with Attempting to Leverage IT Media

IT media is a highly consolidated avenue of getting coverage. It should not escape your attention that most articles in IT media are written about mega-vendors. And that the biggest vendors are the biggest advertisers, and that for example, just two media conglomerates, IDG and TechTarget run most of the most popular IT media properties.

The 1996 Telecommunications Act was a major factor in consolidating media in the US (not just IT media). Furthermore, Google has stripped a great deal of the advertising revenue from media sources, which is covered in the following article. Google’s Hollowing Out of Media and Corruption in the IT Media Space Now Controlled by Vendors.

This led to several acquisitions by conglomerates of media entities that used to have a balanced approach (as they received income from their readers). However, deprived of income from readers, they have both consolidated in ownership and represent the industry’s interests exclusively. This is covered in the article Computer Weekly as a Marketing Automation Front. Computer Weekly is like G2Crowd, just a marketing automation front for software vendors covered in the following article. Computer Weekly as a Marketing Automation Front.

IDG (not IDC, IDC is the IT analyst and IDG is the IT media company, but they are part of the same overall holding company owned by a Chinese company) and TechTarget publish most of the major IT media online magazines. The readers generally have no idea about this media concentration. These websites look innocuous as if they are just ordinary media entities. However, their website pages that communicate to advertisers tell a very different story. The talk about getting information in front of buyers at the opportune moment that buyer is ready to make a decision.

As with IT analysts, in the current time, IT media is both highly deceptive and a game dominated by the big boy vendors and consulting firms. Authors are expected to write on short deadlines and provide corporate-friendly and mostly low content pieces. As this article is not directed towards the mega-vendors, I am not going to explain how to buy advertising or paid placements (that is, articles that look like they are authentic but are written by the paying entity (see the “Industry Voice” articles on Forbes for how it works)) IT media, and other industry media, have large groups within them called ad sales. Ad sales run everything. And ad sales do not like realistic articles being written, as naturally, it is bad for making more sales. These departments do nothing else but reach out to vendors and consulting firms and present advertising offers. Several industry media websites I am aware of selling the cover to the highest bidder. The readers think that the cover is what the media entity believes is pertinent, but actually, the cover was “put out to bid.” Readers are consuming the highest bidder for the cover. The media entity itself is indifferent. It has a “fiduciary responsibility” to its shareholders to sell every article allocation on its website to the highest bidder.

As an industry source myself, I have stopped talking to any IT media entities when they reach out. IT media will find a view from a financially biased individual and place it alongside mine, without telling the reader that I am a researcher without financial biases. At the same time, the other source has a quote to sell that specific item. However, IT media never divulges financial bias, as those with the highest financial bias are the high bidders in advertisements. The IT media is also cautious never about performing retrospectives to see who made accurate versus inaccurate predictions. Again, if they did this, they would lose many of their funders.

Conclusion

Therefore, IT media cannot be incorporated into any vendor marketing strategy unless one has reached a significant scale. For most vendors, the scale required to participate in the IT media game will never be reached.