The RP Photonics Marketing News > 2024-07-18

What If Your Prospective Customers Do not Know That They Need Your Product?

When marketing products of any kind, we usually assume that those who need such products at least know that they need them. The challenge is then essentially to let those people know that you have something of interest to them, and to convince them that what you offer is better than what they can get elsewhere–and also better than doing nothing.

A more challenging starting point is when a substantial portion of your prospects do not even know that they need something like what you offer. This means they are not looking for it; how are they going to find your products? This may seem like a pretty ugly marketing challenge. It is – but I believe it is not a particularly exotic situation, and fortunately there are solutions.

Example: Simulation Software

To give you an example, RP Photonics offers simulation software for various areas of photonics, e.g. the RP Fiber Power software for simulating the operation of active fiber devices such as fiber amplifiers and lasers. Of course, the real professionals in this field know that it is unrealistic to expect that you find optimized fiber amplifier and laser designs by trial and error in the lab alone; instead, you need to simulate such devices on your computer in order to understand their inner workings accurately and comprehensively. Based on this understanding, you can quickly work out and the best possible designs, saving a lot of time and money. However, it seems that there are still many who follow the trial-and-error approach – not necessarily because they believe it is the best, but because they feel that simulation is beyond their skill level.

Understandably, unless you are a laser physics guru, you may feel that building simulation models is too challenging. In reality, it is not, if you use software that is not only powerful, but also easy to get started with: fill out some forms, run the simulation, and inspect the resulting diagrams. Our technical support also helps a lot. But what if people are not aware of this and do not even think about getting into simulation and finding a tool for it?

Rest assured that the challenge described is not exotic; it occurs in many other photonics product marketing situations:

• Various cute tools are developed to solve or mitigate certain common problems. But what if people are aware of the problem, but haven't heard of the solution?
• Certain solutions may be known, but considered too difficult or impractical to use for some other reason. In such cases, people will not seek out a solution, even if it is available in a very usable form.
• Similarly, many people may have had bad experiences with certain tools (e.g., digital marketing campaigns that fail too often) and therefore are not interested in them – even though there are tools that work very well (e.g., our Buyer's Guide).

Meet People Where They Are

Obviously, the only way to reach these people is to imagine how they work, what they read, and place the appropriate information there. This takes some effort, but it can work.

In our example case (simulation software) it works like this:

• People trying to get a fiber amplifier or laser system to work will often encounter various obstacles and questions like the following:
  • What length of rare-earth-doped fiber should I choose, knowing that both a too short and too long length can cause various problems?
  • Does my active fiber need to be single-mode, or would a few-mode fiber do?
  • How much power will I lose to amplified spontaneous emission?
  • How strong will be the effect of gain narrowing?
• (There are numerous other questions of that type.)
• They will then often just use Google, which tells them where to find information on those topics: often in my encyclopedia.
• Now, if they read these encyclopedia articles, will that be enough to make them aware of our simulation software, which is described on the same website? Originally it was clearly not, but we have been working on it and are still doing more. Some examples:
  • A not so effective approach is to place banners in a column on the right side of pages explaining various physics and technology issues. This might make people aware of software solutions that are very suitable for them. However, if you are concentrating on the content of an article, you are unlikely to notice such a banner outside of the actual article text.
  • Ads inserted into articles are another possibility, but they also face the problem that we are all used to skip such content and focus on what we are looking for.
  • We place illustrative diagrams in the encyclopedia articles, created with our software – and of course we mention that in the caption. She may not be interested in reading an advertisement, but she wants to find out how to make such diagrams with the parameters of her problem.
  • We offer a substantial number of tutorials and case studies that focus on specific physics and technology issues (not on software or simulation!). They explain many issues with example cases simulated with our software. We do not need to emphasize that the software is very powerful, flexible and useful – that is obvious from what we do with it in these articles!
  • Note: If we wrote articles about how many useful things you can do with our software, many potential customers would not read them. However, such case studies and tutorials that focus directly on the technical challenges (rather than on our solutions) are read by people who have certain technical problems as mentioned above – even if they have not yet realized that simulation is really the way to go!
  • A remaining challenge is to attract many readers to these tutorials and case studies. It is not enough to make them accessible through the site navigation. Also, they cannot get huge loads of traffic through Google, because there they compete with our encyclopedia articles (among many other pages). The primary method is to use the huge traffic of the popular encyclopedia articles, i.e. to show the readers of those articles that we have interesting related case studies. To do this, we have carefully optimized the way we embed these references to tutorials and case studies in the encyclopedia articles.
  • It is not good to have these things in boxes that are too visually distinct from the article text. We now do not even use a border around these hints – just a gray bar on the left and some indentation.
  • By the way, we also carefully integrated our advertisers' product descriptions into the encyclopedia: in the last section, titled “Products”. Visually, this is presented as part of the encyclopedia article text. This way, we avoid a visual signal telling the reader to stop reading.
  • Note that you should not use such tools to trick people into doing things that are against their interests; that could easily backfire. But we don't have that problem here: it can clearly be useful for readers of my encyclopedia articles to learn about related case studies and tutorials, or to see some examples of products (including photos) as discussed in the article.

Conclusions

Several conclusions can be drawn:

• There is often a risk of missing a significant part of the relevant audience because they are not yet ready to search for what you want to show them.
• There are many different reasons why they are not searching – lack of awareness, misperception of practicality, etc.
• To meet this challenge effectively, several steps are necessary:
  • First, you need to understand the challenge with a portion of your relevant audience: why are they not searching, and what are they doing instead?
  • Then you need to find a way to reach those people - where they are, of course (e.g. on the web). And that should be a place where you can present the relevant information.
• As in many other cases, the key is to get the relevant information in the right form to the right people in the right place. Simply shouting louder and louder that your product is really the best is usually not enough.
• It is generally difficult to get attention for something that people are not looking for. Therefore, we need to find ways to present our information in a way that is interesting. Of course, the only way to do that is to understand what most people do and what they need.

Some may wonder how a photonics expert can be motivated to study the details of marketing. But I tell you, these things are also intellectually challenging and interesting. As in physics and engineering, you can understand non-trivial things, do the right things based on them, and ultimately be successful!

This article is a posting of the RP Photonics Marketing News, authored by Dr. Rüdiger Paschotta. You may link to this page, because its location is permanent.

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