Marketing Autotomation – Be Careful What You Wish For

0 | November 11th, 2011 | Posted in internet marketing, marketing

Marketing automation tools promise better results for less effort, but the devil is in the details.

Fully taking advantage of marketing automation – not just using it for e-mail marketing, but for tracking web activity, notifying sales reps of prospect activity, and so on – will tightly integrate your website and CRM system, such as Salesforce, with the automation tool.

What that means is, no more flying by the seat of your pants. Website changes can upset your automation programs and campaigns. E-mail blasts need to be thought out several steps ahead before the first drop. Marketers need to do more planning and be more methodical in their execution. This has the potential to slow down your campaigns, at least in early in the marketing automation learning curve. So much for better results with less effort.

But it is manageable – all that’s needed is some discipline and simple tools.

If you haven’t already organized your workflow and thinking into development, stage and production categories of activities, now is the time. It should be obvious, but development is where you figure things out, staging is where you perform unit and system testing, and production is where it goes live. A simple checklist, which may be campaign dependent, gates promotion from development through to production.

Your nurture campaigns need to thought-through fully in advance, and plotted on a calendar. Website changes can no longer be made on-the-fly, as you’ll need to check for dependencies in the automation tool and CRM. Otherwise, you’ll be doing retroactive repair work and clean-up after mistakes or a missed dependency.

You’ll also need to plan for the development of a toolkit of housekeeping tasks and activities, to clean-up after testing, purge bad or test data and so forth.

All of this is even more important if you are tinkering with the airplane while in flight; that is, moving an existing live marketing and demand generation environment to a marketing automation model. Serious mistakes can result in missed opportunities and lost revenue.

As you can see, your marketing group really becomes something of a development shop. This should be no surprise as many marketing automation tools are a programming language unto themselves.

But just as with any development team, the group should ultimately, (eventually?), learn to operate like a fine machine. The payoff from automation should come around, it just might not be as quickly as you’d like, or as quickly as the vendor promised.

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Customer as Afterthought

0 | November 11th, 2011 | Posted in business strategy, internet marketing, marketing, recommended reading, technology

This is another in my continuing series on the insights I’ve gained as I’ve talked with leaders and technical heads at numerous startup ventures. This installment: It’s hard to remember the concept you started with when you’re up to your Red Bull-fueled eyeballs in a tangle of code and you have lost sight of your customer using your product in their real world.

Set aside the Gantt charts, scrums, and to-do lists for an hour each week, close your eyes, and visualize your customer, using your product. How does it enhance their life or workplace…what does it mean to them…how does it change their world? How does the way they use your product look? How do they feel as they use it? Is there a smile at the corners of their eyes, or a furrow in the middle of their forehead? Then open your eyes and look at your product through their eyes, touch it with their hands, and hear it through their ears. I promise you, you’ll have a revelation every single time you put your customer avatar on and let it play in the field of your product.

All of this comes from watching the stumbling answers I receive to seeing someone’s demo and asking the simple question, “How do your customers feel about it?”

It’s truly remarkable how many times they pause, look confused, then start again to describe their product’s wonderful features, how masterfully the code executes, and how everyone in the room loves the way it works. They’ve solved its problems, not a customer’s problems. And, sorrowfully, sometimes they haven’t even made a down payment on the problem they set out to solve in the first place.

Perspective is like gold dust–it easily blows away in the wind to be lost forever. It’s even more like falling down a steep mountain, an endless slide without a sudden stop at the end. Once you’re at the bottom, you have to slog endlessly and toil to get back up to where the air is clear and you can see again. Yet, make your customer your sherpa guide, and you’ll be surprised how easy it is to take your eyes out and see with theirs. Your customer is never wrong, no matter how much they ignore, abuse,  or disdain your software baby.

They’ll choose the wrong menu item every time, punch every incorrect button, be endlessly distracted by something you didn’t expect, and will come up with mistake after mistake to confound your program’s logic and tie your UI in knots. Once in awhile, they’ll even crack a smile as something only you knew about makes a connection with their real world. Because that’s what it’s all about—your customers’ real world, not your lab petri-dish culture of self-amplifying feedback loops.

I once worked in a shop that put a artist’s rendition of our customer on every desk. I looked long and hard at that face over a period of many months. It’s remarkable how often that picture mocked my progress and tore up my carefully contrived assumptions. Today, I don’t need the picture to see that face—or the faces of other customers for other products. They are deep in my head, looking over my shoulder, tapping me on the elbow for recognition and input, straightening out my path.

Where’s your customer? Are you building your users and their world into your products, or are they just afterthoughts?

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comScore Reports U.S. Retail Online Spending Up

0 | November 9th, 2011 | Posted in internet marketing

comScore released numbers today on third quarter U.S. retail e-commerce spending and the numbers are up.

According to the report, U.S. Q3 2011 retail e-commerce sales reached an estimated $36.3 billion, up 13 percent compared to the same quarter a year ago. It’s the fourth consecutive quarter of double-digit growth rates, and the eighth consecutive quarter of positive year-over-year growth. The first two quarters of 2011 saw sales growth of 12% and 14% respectively.

The best-performing online product categories were Digital Content & Subscriptions, Event Tickets, Jewelry & Watches, Consumer Electronics (excl. computer peripherals) and Computer Software, each growing at least 15% versus a year ago.

comScore attributes the overall growth rate to an increase in the number of buyers – 74% of all Internet users made a purchase in the quarter.

“As we approach the critical holiday shopping season, we are optimistic about the continued health of the e-commerce sector despite other factors – including stubbornly high unemployment and volatile financial markets – currently weighing on the economy. More consumers than ever before are relying on the online channel for product and pricing information, which along with the Internet’s fundamental appeal of convenience and attractive pricing, are contributing to the sustained upward momentum in e-commerce spending,” said comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni.

It sounds like online marketers would do good to review their marketing spend and strategic marketing plan for the rest of this quarter and the first half of the new year in light of these positive developments. Consultiq can help.

 

 

 

 

 

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Google Does it Right with Google+ for Brands

0 | November 8th, 2011 | Posted in marketing

Google has finally launched Google+ for brands and companies, including the ability to create a Facebook fan page-like Google+ page. Additionally, Google has included the important ability to traverse Google+ as a brand you manage.

It took Facebook a long time to realize the need for this feature; Google has rightly rolled it out from the very beginning. Sometimes it pays to be a “fast follower.”  Or at least a follower. This is a critical feature for consultants that manage multiple brands, or just for marketers that need to put their corporate brand, and not their personal name, on their social media traffic.

Once you activate the “use as this page” feature, Google warns you, “You are now using Google+ as this page. Your posts, comments, and notifications will be from this page.”

This is also the time to revisit your corporate or business website, and make sure you are including social media buttons on your pages to enable sharing via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, the Google+ network and others. Google is increasingly relying on social media signals to determine relevance and timeliness.

In the same vein, Google Direct Connect let’s you put a badge on your website that ties back to your Google+ branded page. It’s a smart feature to quickly ramp-up user affiliation with brand pages – a brand page with no fans and nobody in its circles is a lone tree in the wind. And for select brands, it helps users quickly navigate to your Google+ page from the Google search page; try searching for “+youtube” for example.

Of course, the problem for marketers is that a Google+ page is one more social media presence to manage. For that reason, I might suggest you pass on this one, if it was anyone other than Google.

 

 

 

 

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Google Move Reinforces Value of Social Media Marketing

0 | November 7th, 2011 | Posted in marketing

Last week, Google announced an update to their web indexing system that they estimate will impact 35 percent of searches by providing more up-to-date results.

Google’s intent with this update is to provide more relevant results for hot topics, current events, regularly recurring events (like the presidential election) or topics that have frequent  or periodic updates, like product news.

These changes reinforce the need for corporate marketers to use all available social media tools at their disposal for news, events and product information.

Do you have a corporate blog, and are you posting your press releases to it? Make sure your content management system is actively pinging the major search engines as well when posting new content – don’t wait for the search engines to come crawling, invite them!

And are you fully exploiting the SEO capabilities of the news wire service that you use? Do you make sure that links to your press releases are cross-posted to your LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook pages? And not just press releases, but product news as well, even minor news, ideally including in your updates one or two keywords that visitors typically use to find your product or product category. (Look to Google analytics to help you determine your high-volume keywords.)

Even though social media tools are important, don’t ignore your static web pages – have a designated product page that you update frequently with product news and make sure the update frequency is set correctly in your sitemap. Do the same for a corporate events page, if you have one. It’s important that you tell the search engines to crawl your pages as often as you update them. Include dates and times in your page content to help Google know how recent your updates are. And of course, be sure to include keywords your audience is likely to search for.

Marketers can also begin to think if and how, as well, they can honestly attach their content to the hot topics that Google is working to rapidly index. This requires more work and planning, but it can generate returns with increased impressions when you connect with high-volume search topics.

With a little bit of thought and effort – and honest content – marketers can make these recent algorithm tweaks pay off.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The Build vs. Fund-Raise Dilemma

0 | November 7th, 2011 | Posted in business strategy, recommended reading, venture capital

Nothing is in shorter supply than time for an early-stage startup except money. Yet, often I see teams distracted from getting their product or service to the market as they enter an all-consuming focus on raising capital long before their venture has a value proposition investors can accept.

Take last week, for instance. I spoke to a founder with a product in the marketplace—yes, and dogs eating dog food—who understood that his customers wanted more from his product. He was systematically testing concepts and getting customer feedback on improving his product, an interactive-design, tool-driven service. He understood that his resources were too limited to employ a scattered approach, and he was well on his way to improving his product and determining the optimum price point his customers would pay through a program of careful customer testing and surveying. That was heart-warming for me to see. He had his head in the right place to get a successful venture that will grow and become profitable.

Still, he benefited from hearing me repeat how investors view risk in a young startup. Eventually, he asked a question than any startup advisor constantly hears—”How much “traction” or “revenue” is enough for investors?” I had to explain that the answer to that question is always, “It depends;” not something that he or any other founder wants to hear. So here’s my explanation:

A conceptual startup is 100% risk to an investor–it has no product, no customers, no team, etc. At the other end of the curve is the mature startup about to cash out through an IPO or other exit. Nearly all of the risk is known, and that risk which remains unknown is quantifiable. Investors know what they are buying, in short. In between, it’s no-man’s land. At any point, the venture has some quantifiable and some unknown risk. Investors first try to figure out the level of unknown risk. If it’s too high, they pass. If some has been quantified and made predictable, they move forward to learn more and make a judgment call on whether the investment is right for them. OK so far?

Here’s the deal: Over hundreds of assessments, nearly every startup fails this simple test if it doesn’t have a product in the public marketplace—the only exceptions are for strong teams with a superstar founder and a track record of personal history with the investors. Most fail the test if they haven’t started charging for their product or service and had some customers buying it at that (or any) price. By contrast, the odds start shifting toward making the investors’ grade when the product’s cost is known, its revenue is known, and enough customers are buying to predict a trend towards break-even and profitability. By the time the venture is making profit, it has an even better chance of attracting an investor. And those odds improve again when growth accelerates. At each of these points, some additional risk has moved from unknown to quantifiable and become more predictable.

Yet, for some reason, I see far more teams concentrating all of their energy on fund-raising in the impossible-to-fund stages than I ever see of ventures with leaders focused on getting their product to market or selling it to customers. I call it the impossible equation—no matter how much time, energy and resources you expend, nothing makes your venture fundable until the risk is quantifiable and predictable. Diverting your attention from hitting those critical benchmarks just means that the startup is more likely to fail and its founders (and often, their friends and families) will be hurt before the team realizes that they missed the boat.

Give it some thought. If you were an investor, and you had a field of potential places to put your bets down, what would you be using as your criteria? Hot idea or growing revenue? Enthusiastic, smart team or strong net margin on each item sold? Wish list or customer applause? Competitors trying to enter your space and take market share, or stealth and silence? Founders, it’s your venture, your vision, and your execution to choose. Make your milestones count.

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The “Freemium” Trap

0 | November 2nd, 2011 | Posted in business strategy, marketing, recommended reading, social ventures

It’s easy to confuse the traction gained through free-user adoptions with real traction based on customers buying your product or service. It looks like Facebook is now learning how expensive their freemium model can be. More abut that in a minute.

Large advertisers with large campaign purses to spend also face frustration in their social media spend but will take advantage of fire-sale pricing that stems from small thinking built into many social media startups from their inception.

The first thoughts a founder should have after they conceive their venture’s basic product or service should be, “How will I get my customers to pay for it and what’s the margin for us on each sale.” It should not be, “How can I get lots of customers to use my product or service for free?”

While it’s not quite a given in the real world, you can usually give stuff away for free and get lots of people to take the offer. When they have to pay any amount for those products or services, they become much more choosy. As the price gets increasingly steep, they become choosier yet. Conversion—the direct marketing term for “converting someone with interest into someone who buys”—is the name of this game—turning triers into buyers. That, and margin on each new customer, so the company doesn’t go broke while it builds a paying customer base.

Facebook seems to have confused its open-to-all, free audience-building offer with its paying-advertising customer offer. While it took in US$ 1.6 billion in the first half of 2011—double the prior year—most of that revenue came from small advertisers, not the big guys (says ComScore). A Wall Street Journal article on November 2, 2011 recounts a Ford Motor Company campaign that spent US$ 95 million advertising its Focus model in traditional media, but less than 5% of the presumably much smaller total online ad budget on Facebook. In part, Ford’s Scott Kelly said that their small Facebook ad buy stopped entirely after the Facebook ads caught fire and went viral. Ford spent the remainder of its online budget on non-Facebook ads to keep the viral fires burning.

Moral: Facebook is penalizing itself for being highly effective with consumers and for its advertisers  by not structuring their offerings to large companies in ways that maximize Facebook’s revenue and profit. All of the consumer traction in the world—and Facebook can fairly claim that distinction for now—won’t pay stockholders dividends if a venture doesn’t build profit into their model from the get-go.

Consider it an object lesson if your startup venture is building traffic and you expect to talk about revenue and profit later.

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Clean Tech Startups Hit Hard Times

0 | October 31st, 2011 | Posted in cleantech, recommended reading, technology, venture capital

A funny thing happened recently on the way to the liquidity event…the much ballyhooed expectation of infinitely rising energy prices that many in Silicon Valley expected to drive a Clean Tech revolution failed to materialize, leaving conventional wisdom to scratch its collective head. Then, with a crash, the roof fell in.

As Bloomberg reports, from 2006 to 2010, over U.S. $535 Billion flowed into Clean Tech startups from venture capital firms, private equity, and IPO, fueling 4,236 ventures. What they didn’t count on was a combination of blindsiding by technological innovation, market forces, and irreducible physical laws that KO’d many of these startups before they could emerge to liquidity events.

Then the first hammer fell—Solyndra went under and brought a glaring spotlight on the dual questionable practices of trying to beat a foreign government intent on dumping solar panel prices and milking public policy for loans unsupportable through due diligence. Within weeks, several more Clean Tech giants were under intense scrutiny.

Simultaneously, worldwide oil price benchmarks—having stabilized after skyrocketing to over $100/barrel on Middle East uncertainty, supply interruptions, and global debt crisis speculation—suddenly flattened out. Bloomberg’s article implies that one reason for this paradox was the discovery and deployment of new fracking technology that vastly expanded the recoverable natural gas supply worldwide, but especially in the U.S.A. Without fuel prices marching upward, the economics of Clean Tech couldn’t compete.

Where does Clean Tech go from here? Not back to the venture capital well for more infusions, if the sentiment on Sand Hill Road has any say. I’d put a vast majority of those 4,236 ventures on the slate for write-down, sale, consolidation, or old-fashioned fire sales.

There’s a lesson to be learned here for everyone who tried to milk this cow that refused to stand still and obey their predictions. Imbalances in the market tend to be self correcting—and markets are never as reliable as regulators in keeping markets in check. So, there’s no Sarbanes-Oxley repeat in Clean Tech on the horizon—rising energy prices answer to more than a federal mandate to spend compliance dollars. Take those moral certitudes to the bank.

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Seeking Alternatives to Fundraising

0 | October 31st, 2011 | Posted in venture capital

This Reuters story on The Huffington Post reinforces what I wrote about last week – the need to remember that job #1 for the entrepreneur is to build a successful business, not raise money.

It also repeats two recurring themes we’re hearing at Consultiq – too many companies chasing too few venture capital dollars, and acquisitions for proven development teams rather than product.

One alternative to venture fundraising is to build the business, and generate revenue – all your efforts should be focused on building a minimally viable product that can start to generate revenue. Once you’ve figured that out, and it is often different from what you thought it was when you started, and wrote your first draft of your business plan, you need to build and extend the product to accelerate that revenue growth and your customer base.

More than ever, in the current environment, entrepreneurs need to self-fund through revenue generation. It’s hard to drop the fund-raising efforts, but doing so will eliminate a distraction and bring clarity-of-mind to your product development effort.

Build the business, generate revenue, grow customers, and note, from the Reuters story, ”Of course, the hottest companies are having no trouble winning new rounds of funding.”

 

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Caution Advised When Marketing Through Bloggers

0 | October 28th, 2011 | Posted in internet marketing, marketing

Bloggers can be key influencers and have wide followings on social media websites like Twitter and Facebook. But some care must be taken when trying to work with them to get your message out.

Journalists that blog on the side, or bloggers that otherwise have a journalism background are easier to work with and best understand the nuances media relations. That doesn’t mean they’ll be easy on you, but experienced journalists better understand the to’s and fro’s between source and scribe. Nonetheless, one still needs to be mindful that blogs are generally more opinion oriented, and generally have no editorial oversight, let alone fact checking.

“Amateur” bloggers, or bloggers with little or no professional journalism training or experience, are a different breed. Although they can be highly influential and valuable to the marketer, more care must be taken with this group. Anything you send them – including the format of your press release – whether intended for publication or not, is fair game for them to write about. More so than with professional journalists, it’s important to establish a strong, collegial report with these writers and deal with them on a more individual basis if you can. If you have to aggregate and “shotgun blast” communications out, try at least to tailor your communication a little more carefully to the citizen-blogger, lest they reproduce more of what you sent than you intended.

 

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