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Tech start-ups and the problem with neology
25 March 2021
Amongst cutting edge automation technology start-ups, there’s a well understood problem with language; nobody uses new and emerging words when they are buying things. In a guest column, exclusive to Connectivity, Richard Stone, Managing Director of Stone Junction – the first ever PR agency for the Fourth Industrial Revolution – explains how to tackle the challenge.
Anyone who has ever launched a new technology category, with a new name, will sympathise. You’ve spent years developing your bleeding edge tech, months in endless meetings deciding what to call it and now you’ve launched it, probably with a big buzz at an event, and you are waiting for the sales to roll in.
And you are waiting. And waiting.
The problem is that your new thingamabob, software doohickie or entire new category of thingamajigs is simply not attracting any web traffic. And it should be, because you are no idiot, you’ve made sure that your site ranks top of the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page) for the product name and category name. What more could any CEO of a radical and disruptive start-up do?
Nobody is buying it, because they aren’t visiting the site, and nobody is visiting the site because…Nobody is searching for your new category. It’s simply not possible for your potential customers to search for something they don’t know exists.
Half a pound of Industry 4.0 by next Wednesday please
Do you remember, back in the early part of the last decade, when you had an amazing Industry 4.0 product, but nobody was calling up and asking for it? You had enquiries for all sorts of other things though; real time reporting, big data analysis, bring your own device integration – hell, some people even used to ring up and ask for actual products with names that you actually sold. But hardly anyone got in touch asking for your best price on half a pound of Industry 4.0 delivered by next Wednesday.
You might remember that around about the same time you launched your first collaborative robot, and nobody asked for that either. You had all these pesky customers explaining the problems they had finding a robot solution that could work alongside a human with no caging or physical safety equipment. But no one would just come right out and ask for your shiny new cobot.
The problem is universal to companies that create a new word or phrase to describe the category of technology that their product occupies. Invariably, the product or service fulfils an existing problem in an entirely new way. For instance, when the world decided that wireless broadband was how it wanted to get its information, telecoms carriers had to find a way to communicate the benefits of the new category, not just its name. They understood that, just because it’s the future, it doesn’t mean your customers are Googling it. Also, it was 2002 and Yahoo! was still more popular that Google. Crazy days.
Jarvis Cocker and a three headed dragon
The eldest readers among you might remember one of the way’s that British Telecom tackled the challenge of explaining broadband to its customers; by running TV spots that featured a burst broadband pipe and a BT engineer gamely trying to get all the things that escaped from it back underground.
Amongst other things he tackled Jarvis Cocker from the band Pulp, a three headed dragon, a couple of American football teams, some characters from Mortal Kombat and a teenage boy with a pizza on his head. No, I don’t know why either. It was the noughties.
This worked well, broadband was positioned as a utility (because it came out of a pipe – duh) and it was clear that it could deliver entertainment into your home. Why else would the engineer be chasing all those weird and wonderful creatures?
Jarvis Cocker on a budget
The thing is BT had a huge advertising budget. At the time, a 60 second slot in the ad break between each half of Coronation Street was a cool £50K and they had dozens of them. This communicated the message that a new category of utility existed by saturating the audience with the message until everybody understood.
For most automation or industrial companies trying to launch a new product category, it’s not possible to do the same thing. For one, you probably don’t have a budget that will stretch to a moderately well-known indie rock star and lashings of prime-time TV advertising.
More importantly, your audience is far smaller than the one BT wanted to make aware of broadband, and probably smaller than the audiences the German Government and Robert Bosch were playing with when they launched Industry 4.0. As a result, it’s much harder to saturate them with content, after all, they might not even be watching Coronation Street, let alone watching it live so they can see the adverts.
Saturating your niche
All of this brings us back to the core marketing tactics that will allow you to reach your target audiences and in 2021 there are a lot of them. Your website, LinkedIn, the trade media, email marketing, trade shows and events (Remember them? Remember how your feet felt by the end of day three? – Ed), webinars, brochures, direct mail, video, Podcasts, organic search, paid social, PPC, organic search… I could go on.
Despite this proliferation of mediums, the core truths that have always underpinned marketing remain; your customers need to hear about you, decide they like the cut of your jib and then make an enquiry.
You need to be found, trusted and chosen.
For that to happen, you must understand which elements of the marketing mix have primacy and which serve to support them. The pillar page on your website that sells the product is the most obvious – because it provides all the information you need to be chosen. Furthermore, it’s self-evident that the best way to be trusted is to build a position of thought leadership, by securing earned media coverage on sites and in magazines that your customers already trust.
But, how do you get found?
Getting a bit technical with my PESO
This is where you are going to have to forgive me for getting a little bit technical.
Every marketing tactic I described earlier, and every other marketing tactic for that matter, can be described as fitting at least one part of the PESO (Paid, Earned, Owned and Shared) model.
Paid media is self-explanatory; you buy it. That includes advertising, advertorial, PPC, paid social and a whole realm of other activities. Earned media covers the area of marketing where you must convince someone to do something for you for free; media relations, influencer relations, lobbying, partner relationships and so on.
Owned refers to a platform where you have 100 percent control, such as your website and shared to one where you have a great deal of control, but not total authority – such as social media. Each of these elements of the PESO mix brings with it different benefits and drawbacks, which are traditionally summarised like this:
| Trust | Scalable | Cost | Predictable? |
| Paid | Low | Yes | High | Yes |
| Earned | High | Medium | Low | No |
| Shared | Medium | Low | Low | No |
| Owned | Medium | Low | Low | Yes |
Bear with me, I did say I was about to get technical.
The key issue is that the platforms that allow us to be trusted and chosen, aren’t the best for allowing us to be found. Media coverage is, of course, earned and the pillar page on your website is owned. Neither are highly scalable traditionally as the table above demonstrates.
(I use the word traditionally advisedly by the way, the PESO model was created by author Gini Dietrich in her book Spin Sucks in 2014. It’s really good, you should read it.)
The PESO model argues that paid media, AKA advertising, is the only scalable way of reaching your audience and most people believe that to be true. But I’ve always believed that advertising is a shield and PR a sword, as Al and Laura Ries argued in their book, The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR, in 2004. Also, really good, by the way.
I think that earned media should be used to build a brand and advertising should be used to defend that brand once it has been created and achieved a position. These are generalisations I know, and the complexity arises when you consider that a sword and shield are best used in tandem.
However, the core point remains, which is that if you are building a brand, whether it’s a company brand or the brand of product category you have created, you need to do so with a tool that is scalable. You need to be not just trusted and chosen, but also found. And without question, the most scalable tool on the market is also the one that most easily allows you to be found, the search engine.
Making your website scalable
The answer, in this case, is not to create a new tool or category, but to use the ones that are already available. The answer is to make your website, and notably the pillar page on your site that I referred to earlier, scalable and to use your earned media coverage as vocally as possible to ensure you are trusted.
This means bringing together all the tactics at your disposal to elevate the page as high up a search engine, for words that are genuinely searched for in high volume, as you can get it. It means bringing as much attention as possible to that page through social media, through events, through email and through every other tactic in the mix as you can.
It means making owned content scalable.
At Stone Junction, we’ve launched a suite of services called Joined-Up-Content, which we know can do exactly this. It takes your predictable, controllable and manageable pillar pages and makes them rapidly scalable, while also providing the strategic thinking, technical understanding and audience insight to allow you to be found, trusted and chosen. It doesn’t matter whether you have invented a new thingamabob, or you are tasked with maintaining market position for a global giant.
The tactics with primacy in our Joined-Up-Content approach are still trustworthy, high level media coverage and the core pillar pages on the client’s website. The rest of the mix works to elevate those, making them scalable.
Tech start-ups and the problem with neology
We began this discussion by addressing the example of a tech start-up selling an innovation in an entirely new category; a product which might well be life changing but which nobody searches for. It then creates a new word, a neologism, to describe that category and often that’s the last the company is heard of.
Joined-Up-Content solves that problem by creating an environment in which the word becomes searched for, as we did for our client Inspekto in 2018, when it launched the concept of Autonomous Machine Vision. But it also provides marketeers with a way to create or improve a position in an existing category. It can do pretty much everything to be fair, although we aren’t convinced that it can put Jarvis Cocker and a three headed dragon back in a burst broadband pipe. That said, we are working on it.
Richard Stone is the founder of Stone Junction, a specialist technical PR agency delivering international and digital PR and marketing services for scientific, engineering and technology companies. He loves a bit of Pulp and a good book about marketing or PR and secretly hopes that one day a giant pizza will fall on him, like the teenage boy in the BT advert. Drop him a line on richards@stonejunction.co.uk or call +44 (0) 1785 225416 if you want to talk about Joined-up-Content.
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