Talking Business with J. Sean Branagan

Thanks to Andrea Wiggins for these notes of the event. Sean was interviewed by Jill Hurst-Wahl.

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This event was sponsored by Enitiative and the WISE Center, whose board members are in attendance and sponsor, Key Bank, has a table in the back. Sean Branagan is the speaker; he currently runs two businesses and is described as a "serial entrepreneur," having started 5 businesses. His current businesses include Communigration and C3 Strategic. Communigration is a technology and interactive agency that works with complex business technical services. C3 Strategic is a management consulting firm for early-stage IT firms. Sean points out that management helps you get funding, and they work with other strategic activities like mergers and acquisitions.

Question 1: How did you get started with marketing?

Branagan Sean went to Newhouse (at Syracuse University), but in the process of studying journalism, he discovered that he didn't want to write about others doing cool stuff, but would rather do the cool stuff himself. He started a business right out of school doing typesetting, which ended up providing marketing services.

Question 2: Have all of your companies been marketing-related?

The first three companies were marketing companies, but C3 Strategic doesn't seem to be quite as marketing focused, although marketing expertise plays into success. Sean worked for Syracuse Supply Company at one time, a "mini-conglomerate", as their corporate communication manager, which he characterized as a learning experience that got him further involved in marketing.

Question 3: How have you built emotion into your marketing?

Sean explains his work to children by saying, "I help nerds sell their stuff. Nerds grow up and create really cool and complicated stuff, but people don't buy complicated stuff. They buy stuff they understand." He makes the point that marketing requires writing, through which we make something understandable and add meaning to it. Marketing is a methodical way of adding meaning to a product.

Question 4: How did you add meaning to Communigration?

Branagan Well, the name of the company is a "90's name" made up from merging the words communication and integration. In a way, the name itself requires people to add meaning themselves as they realize that the nonsense word is made up from two other words that have meaning to them. It is likely that most of the people in the room hadn't heard of the company because they market to a very specific target audience, "high on the tech stack" as they like to say, and dealing with small-to-large B2B services.

Question 5: When Jill goes to tech conferences, she sees Communigration often listed as a sponsor. How does the company achieve such regular notable presence?

There are three ways that they have a presence at conferences: official (usually paid) sponsorship gets your name on a banner, a trade (presumably in-kind services or the like), or unofficially, such as attending in a way that gets attention. Sean sees some seminars and conferences presented by out-of-towners as an opportunity rather than a threat, because they provide a gathering of the target audience. By attending these talks and strategically asking questions, he can get new business. His strategy is to compliment the presenter, saying something like "I love that you brought this up because we're web designers too, and here's a resource for that." This puts him closer to the audience than the speaker who will leave at the end of the day. He recommends underselling yourself, making just enough noise to raise interest, and attending these conferences for the opportunity to make contacts more than for the learning experience.

Question 6: Your business involves communication for high-tech companies; why do you have low-tech imagery on your site?

Sean wants to attract clients who see that the company understands the broader context of marketing, not just Internet-based marketing.

Question 7: What nugget of advice would you give, especially for small business owners?

You should never stop working on your elevator speech. Start with a 50 word, then 25 word, then 10 word description; ideally, reduce it down to the essence in just 3 words. Do this for your business as a whole and for each project, for each market - so if you have 10 products with 5 distinct markets apiece, you need 50 elevator speeches! Start with something like a mission statement, and take out everything extra, everything that is potentially misleading (like claims of being the "best" or other subjective claims), and make it simple and understandable. Keep shrinking your elevator speech in case you're in a very short building; one example is a plumbing truck with the slogan, "We show up." If they stand by what they say, then that plumbing service really meets a target market need, and they communicate it clearly.

A second piece of advice is to stay focused on your core purpose; can you pass the restaurant test? (What kind of restaurant did you eat at?) Declare what kind of business you are; advertise your primary service/product as that's what will bring people in. Define yourself very specifically, but offer more, and err on the side of brevity in your definitions. Jill makes an example of a rug-cleaning business specializing in catastrophe recovery, whose phonebook ad starts out by instructing potential customers on how to start dealing with their rug catastrophe, and only provides the business name and contact information after having demonstrated that they understand the needs of their target clients.

Audience question: When marketing an online business with many competitors selling identical items, what can you do to bring your storefront to the forefront?

Branagan Sean suggests doing search engine work, which his business got into early. People who go to Google to find products or services are active buyers, looking for something specific. Start by making your site friendly to Google; install the Google toolbar and use the PageRank meter to check the relevance rankings on your web pages. PageRank (named after Larry Page, a Google founder) is an algorithm that requires the pages to be machine-readable, so images need to have descriptive tags and so on. There are many resources out there to help you get started on doing site optimization yourself. You can start by checking how often your target keyword phrases - the ones that you would like potential customers to use to find your site - appear on your site pages by highlighting the phrases on the pages. Well-written pages that mention keyword phrases regularly (but not too much!) will get better PageRank. Another good tool is Google AdWords; people who look to buy are more likely to click sponsored links than people who are doing research on products. You can get started with a very small budget and try it out to learn how it works before scaling up. An ad spend of even $100 a month could make a great start.

Audience question: How are Google Toolbar and Google Analytics different?

They are different kinds of tools. Google Toolbar helps you check the PageRank of your site pages - how the search engines rank your pages. Google Analytics is used to see what people do once they have arrived on the site, and can be used in combination with Google AdWords to track how well AdWords keyword purchases generate sales.

Audience question: I have a cardiac technology business for sale; how do I find a buyer?

Would need more specifics to make a strategic recommendation, but in general you should market to both active and passive buyers. Marketing to passive buyers would take the form of one-to-one emails or letters to prospective buyers to try to generate interest.

Audience question: How do you market to people who don't yet know what they need? I.e., how do you educate your market?

Two big business examples are provided: AFLAC is one that everyone has heard about; no one knew what supplemental insurance was until they started their advertising campaign. Their competitor, Colonial, has doubtless benefited from AFLAC's consumer education efforts. Second example is Welch-Allyn; outside of CNY, only healthcare providers are familiar with their products, but this is because Welch-Allyn spends their marketing budget on the target audience, which is healthcare providers. When you have a very large group of possible customers, reduce it down to the best possible candidate customers by applying the MAD concept - those who have the Money, Authority, and Desire to make a purchase.

Thanks to Sean for sharing his knowledge with the group. The next Talking Business event will be June 25 at the Syracuse Technology Garden, 235 Harrison St., from 5 - 6 p.m. Networking and light refreshments will be available before and after the event. A $5.00 donation per person is requested with proceeds used to support the series. (Donations should be in cash or a check payable to Hurst Associates, which in charge of the series.)

Event photography courtesy of Kelvin P. Ringold, Custom Photogenics