For ISVs that target specific segments of the Microsoft Dynamics user base, this year’s conference season is sure to be a challenge.
Microsoft has shifted its own event planning, it has transformed Convergence into Envision, a destination for C-level executives. With the other marquee events designed for IT, developers, and partners, there is, as our columnist Mark Polino recently pointed out, no place for Dynamics end users in the current Microsoft lineup.
Clearly, 2016 will offer a much tougher row to hoe for ISVs that insist on finding their sales leads via conferences. Those leads are becoming much more expensive, based on the fact that users are attending fewer and more distributed in-person trade shows, from the international events down to country- and region-specific events.
Actually, it’s worse than that. ISVs are discovering that the remaining user-oriented trade shows aren’t necessarily focused on the right niche audience, but instead are focused only on a broader Dynamics product group.
Paying higher prices for more shots using terribly imprecise targeting isn’t the way to improve sales efficiency, by any stretch of the imagination. If you’re going to, in effect, pay rising rates for each event-driven user sales lead, then you need to achieve vastly more precise targeting than live events typically can provide.
In other words, you need to target users based on additional criteria, such as their industry, business focus area, and Dynamics product, among others. Ideally, you want to be able to distinguish between warm leads—those users prepared to buy within the coming three months, for instance—and others.
The radical shift in conference opportunities now under way is clearly about more than the simple challenge of finding active Dynamics users. They haven’t disappeared, or even declined in numbers. It’s just that the users that ISVs are targeting have become more elusive, often attending one or none of the in-person events that litter the calendar.
One thing is certain, more users are actively engaged at MSDynamicsWorld.com than ever before. MSDW readers can be precisely targeted by industry, business focus area, and product, among a number of additional criteria.
Online marketing programs like those provided by MSDynamicsWorld.com empower you to not just target users of all Dynamics products, they allow you to test different approaches, immediately measure your results, and adjust for optimal performance….for a fraction of the price of setting up costly exhibits at watered-down conferences.
No more agonizing about elusive Dynamics users—the mystery has been solved, to your marketing benefit.
