WePay’s payback to PayPal & the art of guerrilla marketing

PayPal is the 800 pound gorilla in the online consumer and B2B SaaS payment space. Today they were attacked by WePay’s guerrilla marketing (history from WikiPedia) ! I think this was an excellent tactic – it has brought WePay tons of press for few thousand dollars. Moreover, it symbolically represented an issue many PayPal users have experienced.

PayPal’s developer conference turned out to be an ideal place for WePay to attack them in pure guerrilla marketing fashion. WepPay brought in 600 pound block of ice with hundreds of dollars locked beneath the surface. A clear message to PayPal community that “PayPal freezes your accounts” and that you should “unfreeze your money”… by switching to WePay, of course !

I liked this guerrilla marketing tactic WebPay employed, but would have been nicer if they could have gone with a 800 lbs ice block to attack the 800 lbs gorilla !

(Image source: TechCrunch)

Influencing the influencer…in B2B marketing

I have been thinking about effective means to engage influencers, so I found Gillian’s post on CMA’s blog interesting.

However, it is not clear to me from her post if the “content/message” of the direct mail/email should speak the influencer to get his mindshare or should it actually be ammunition for the influencer to cajole the decision makers in the case of B2B marketing?

My own view on influencing the influencer is not quite concrete; nevertheless this is my take in the B2B space for complex, multi-touch point sales items. In situations where one enjoys influencers mindshare one can target them with content that can aid them to cajole decision makers. And this has worked for me. What has often been the challange is tailoring a message that speaks to pain-point of influencers to get their mindshare!

How have you dealt with influencing the influencers in B2B space?

Marketing for new customers or not…

Paul Dunay, the award-winning B2B marketing expert, had an interesting post titled “B2B Marketing needs to Curate a Vibrant Community.”

The crux of the post is it is far easier to convert existing clients than to acquire new clients. In other words marketing ROI will be greater if we focus on superior service to current clients than on new client acquisition. Paul discussed in his post about creating an online and offline client community to serve (& market to) the clients well.

While I think academic research on CRM (in both MIS and marketing field) would definitely agree with Paul’s perspective that it is more efficient to up-sell and/or cross-sell than to acquire new customers. In my view there are two mandatory precondition for this approach to be meaningful and they are :

1. be more than a one trick pony (in other words have multiple products or a product with premium features), and
2. 2- have a sizable client list.

What do you think?

Links:

• B2B Marketing needs to Curate a Vibrant Community