Episode Summary
During this episode of Tech Qualified, Justin Brown chats with Nick Waterhouse, Senior Marketing Manager at Evaluator Group. This interview takes a deep dive into his past work experience as an entrepreneur – when he built and sold a company that made headphones. After exiting his headphone company, Nick took on a role as Senior Marketing Manager at Evaluator Group. Evaluator Group is an IT analyst consulting firm based in Boulder, Colorado.
Episode Highlights
- Nick starts the interview by providing some insight into his entrepreneurial efforts when he started and then ultimately sold a headphone company that specialized in ergonomic, memory foam earbuds.
- When starting the headphone company in China, Nick was introduced into a wide range of digital marketing disciplines and realized how much he enjoys spending his time there.
- After a period of success, Nick describes how he sold his headphone company and decided to dive into the marketing field head-on by working for an IT analyst firm.
- Nick explains the fundamental similarities and differences between B2B and B2C companies.
- Nick describes how a consumer can easily see a set of headphones and understand its cost structure, whereas the same is not the case with working for a consulting firm.
- Nick takes some time to provide a description of Evaluator Group’s ideal customer profile, which really includes two major types of customers – vendors and end-users.
- For vendors, the company mostly relies upon relationships with major players such as IBM, VMWare, etc.
- From an end-user perspective, Evaluator Group’s ideal customer is anybody who’s looking for a new solution in the data storage industry, or a person who’s having a problem with the way they’re currently managing their data.
- Nick discusses the challenges with marketing the company’s services because, in this day and age, there are so many types of roles who manage a company’s data – IT Specialists, Cloud Specialist and a range of other titles.
- Webinars are one of the successful approaches to attract potential customers – and the company really tries to keep them unscripted and “personal.”
- Product reviews of data storage products attracts prospects and also serves as a great tool for marketing.
- The company is completely unbiased and does not have any pay-to-play relationships with vendors. All information available on their website is researched by analysts.
- Nick’s team sits down and schedules video interviews with either past clients, current clients, or potential future clients which have helped them in relationship building.
- Promoting webinars natively on BrightTalk and pushing videos out on social media ensures the company gets the most out of these webinar and video assets.
- Video interviews are posted on various social media platforms and in emails which further adds a lot in relationship building.
- The company is focusing on SEO and it’s working efficiently for them so far. In-depth, free information on the site is what’s attracting the right prospects.
Key Points
- Nick pinpoints the basic similarity between B2B and B2C companies and said “in terms of digital marketing, you’re really just selling a product. So…I was selling headphones before, now I’m basically selling a service. But it’s still, somebody’s knowledge, solving a problem for somebody.”
- On Evaluator’s website, a prospect can find every single product in this space, access a detailed writeup and view a product brief – all of which are free and beneficial for people who are actually looking to make a purchasing decision.
- Each analyst at the organization has a different technology they cover and they are some of the foremost experts in their respective fields.
Resources
- Nick Waterhouse: LinkedIn
- Evaluator Group: Website
- Evaluator Group: LinkedIn
- Evaluator Group: Twitter
- Motion: Ultimate Thought Leadership Course for B2B Tech Companies
