Managers Guide to SEO Part 2
Posted by Michael White in Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization on January 31st, 2013
What is Product Market Fit?
Posted by Michael White in Marketing, Technolog Marketing, startup marketing on January 30th, 2013
The secret to business success is easy to describe and hard to get right:
- Make something people want
- Sell it to them
Or as Peter Drucker said “the aim of Marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself”.
I was lucky enough to attend a recent one-day seminar on growth strategies for startups, hosted by Sean Ellis, formerly VP of Marketing at DropBox. The seminar focused on Product Market fit i.e. “making something people want”. The key points were:
- Product market fit is essential – you need to understand it when introducing a new product
- Get your product market fit sorted out before you pull the trigger on your full product launch
- You can test for product-market fit at low cost
- One you have achieved product market fit, stamp on the accelerator pedal and drive up customer acquisition as quickly as you can, using scalable channels (i.e. online and automatable).
I thought it was worth writing a post on the subject, because I think technology startups commonly get product market fit half-right and then hit the road too early trying to build a customer base. I’m not suggesting that you slow things down – fast is always better than slow in startups. But by using the Lean Startup approach and the advice from Sean Ellis you can continue to make progress in your business, in a way that is likely to lead to product market fit.
What is Product Market Fit?
Product Market fit is the point when your product closely matches the urgent needs of a well defined and large group of customers. They have to have it. This is still a pretty vague definition – how can you be sure you’ve reached product market fit?
Sean Ellis proposes a more precise definition. He suggests that you survey your customer base and ask the question “How would you feel if you could no longer user our product?”, with the response options of (a) very disappointed, (b) disappointed and (c) not disappointed. If you get 40% or more respondents saying “Very disappointed” then you are achieving product market fit. If you’re at 40% or less then you have to iterate and experiment to identify a different blend of features or services or a different target customer group. You are trying to achieve what Ellis calls the MHX or ‘must have experience’ – that stage where your customers use your product on a daily basis, see and appreciate the value it produces for them, and don’t think it’s easy or desirable to switch to an alternative solution.
Don’t Pull the Trigger On Your Product Launch Until You Reach It
If you are lucky enough to have access to sales and marketing resources, it may be tempting to throw money into acquiring customers. However, you’ll quickly burn through that money without having identified the secret to meeting a target customer group’s needs. When the money runs out, you will still have the product-market fit problem to solve. Instead, you should hold that money in reserve until you’re sure you have a winning product for your target customers.
How Do You Get to Product Market Fit?
It is unusual for a startup to hit the ground running with a new product that immediately presses all your customers buttons. There are usually a few hurdles to jump first. It is more likely that you will have to:
- Tweak your product’s features and how you promote it until it starts to achieve “traction”
- Redefine who your target customers are, or
- Do both
Using the Lean Startup approach you should run a series of controlled experiments that give you insights into your customers and what they actually need (the key step in achieving product market fit).
Eric Ries’ “Lean Startup” book uses the example of a company that thinks a new feature could improve customer traction. He suggests that rather than building and deploying the feature, which could take months, the company could instead promote the new feature from their product website as if it already existed, driving web traffic with online ads to test the response, at comparitvely low cost. (This is known as ‘smoke testing’).
Additionally, Sean Ellis suggests running a customer survey to calibrate how they perceive your product’s value versus what you think the value is. He recommends writing out 5 very different statements of the value your product delivers to customers e.g. “Our system reduces your IT management costs by 30% in 9 months”. Then send a questionnaire to your customers, asking them to pick their favourite of those 5 statements, and to explain their choice. This is a quick way to verify that what you’re thinking matches what they’re thinking. When you have a match, make sure your website and all outbound communications consistently promote that value.
Now Hit The Accelerator
Once you’re confident you’ve achieved traction (i.e. 40% of your customers will be distraught if you unplug your servers and join a monastery) then it’s time to shovel in some resources. You want to identify scalable, automatable channels for customer acquisition, ranging across paid search marketing, search engine optimization, email marketing, social media and any other channels you think could work.
Carefully monitor and compare performance of campaigns, and watch what your competitors are doing. When you get a tactic that works, then “double down” on it – don’t just increase it by 10% or 15%, double it and double it again while you can see straight line growth.
Finally, Sean Ellis emphasizes that it’s a competitive world out there so tactics that worked last year may not work so well this year. Keep measuring, improving and testing new tactics.
Technology Startup Marketing
Posted by Michael White in Lead Generation, Marketing, Software-as-a-Service, Technolog Marketing on January 30th, 2013
A quick overview of why web marketing is critical for promoting technology products, for both B2C and B2B products and across all industry sectors. 24 hours a day, some of your potential customers will be looking online for your type of product or service. If they don’t find you they’ll find a competitor. This is a presentation we gave to campus-based companies for the Ignite Technology Transfer Office at the National University of Ireland, Galway (NUIG).
What is Social CRM and why is it a big deal for Business-to-Business?
Posted by Michael White in Marketing automation on October 31st, 2012
Buyers are acting like consumers – they are doing more research online before talking with potential suppliers of products and services. Initially, most of that research was being done through the 3 big search engines – Google, Bing and Yahoo – plus some specialist sites for particular industries, such as GlobalSpec in the US for industrial supplies. However, in the past seven years people have also begun asking their contacts on social networks for advice on potential purchases. The Edelman Trust Barometer examines trust in sources of information. Since about 2004 people have indicated their most trusted source of information is from “people like me” – 65% gave this response in the 2012 Barmoeter. This means they are using the input from friends, colleagues and their professional peer group across their social and real world networks when making purchase decisions.
First things first: what is CRM?
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is an approach to maximize the value of your relationships with customers, based on how you manage (1) sales, (2) customer service and support and (3) marketing. The idea is to have a “single view of the customer” across an organization, and to have an up-to-date view of the most recent interactions with that customer. CRM also means implementing processes to ensure smooth and efficient customer interactions from the initial sales contacts at the start of a relationship through to ongoing customer service and, hopefully, repeat purchases.
Since the 1990s the term CRM has been used interchangeably to describe the technology used to implement CRM, which range from enterprise scale systems like Oracle CRM through to systems with a focus on salesforce automation (SFA) such as Salesforce.com and then to specialist CRM systems for particular sectors, such as Lagan for public sector deployments. (And a shout out to a client of ours, OnePageCRM, which focuses on sales automation for small businesses).
Early CRM programs initially focused on automating customer service centres. Next the focus moved to sales force automation –using automated workflow to coordinate the work of sales teams from first contact with a prospective customer through to processing an order. More recently the emphasis shifted to managing marketing processes. Throughout the basis of CRM has been to maintain a central, accurate picture of the customer and use that to guide how the organization manages its communication with that customer.
It’s worth noting that the CRM market is pretty big – Gartner estimated it to be worth $13 billion in 2012, growing to $17 billion in 2015.
So what about Social CRM?
Over the past 4 years social media has had a huge impact on how companies interact with their customers. Initially social media was viewed as a new channel for marketing departments, but it quickly became clear there were implications for sales and customer support too. For example, customers expect to connect with customer support via Facebook and Twitter as well as via phone and email. And potential buyers are doing a lot of their research online and more of this research is being done via contact on social networks. Sales staff need to be aware of their prospects’ social media profiles and behaviour on social networks as they pursue a sale.
The original intention of the older enterprise CRM systems was to build a single, accurate record of the customer in a centralised database owned by the corporation. But today, the most accurate, up-to-date information on many individuals is the one they self-maintain on their preferred social networks, be that Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Google+. They keep their own information up-to-date, but restrict access to it and distribute it across networks.
Definition of Social CRM
According to the commentator Paul Greenberg, Social CRM is an extension of standard CRM, one that reflects the impact of social networks on business and particularly the fact that customers have greater control of the relationship because of those networks. He offers this definition of Social CRM (http://the56group.typepad.com/pgreenblog/2009/07/time-to-put-a-stake-in-the-ground-on-social-crm.html):
Social CRM is a philosophy and a business strategy, supported by a technology platform, business rules, workflow, processes and social characteristics, designed to engage the customer in a collaborative conversation in order to provide mutually beneficial value in a trusted and transparent business environment. It’s the company’s response to the customer’s ownership of the conversation.
What are the implications for businesses? Well, with the advent of internet search, it became essential that businesses know how to bring their target customers to them online. With the increasing use of peer group referrals and contacts it is also imperative that businesses understand how their customers use social networks. How can you monitor if someone is looking for your kind of product? Where can your customers interact with you? If they try to contact you via a social channel will you be able to respond quickly and effectively? How do you generate sales and leads from social media?
How to Get Started
The social media solution providers Lithium, in their paper “Nailing Social Media Maketing ROI” suggest a four-step approach:
- Listen to your social customers
- Engage them with purpose
- Operationalize your business around the social customer and
- Extend the business value of your social interactions
As a first step on the road we suggest putting together a short plan of action, time-boxed for about 3 months out. Start by assessing your existing social network capability as a business:
- Do you have a company page on LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, Facebook, other networks?
- Do you and your staff have LinkedIn profiles? Do these link to your company page?
- Do you know where your existing customers hang-out on social networks?
- Are you posting to social networks?
- Are you monitoring social channels? Would you notice if someone was asking on a network about your type of product or service?
Next, set one or two clear objectives, with the focus on driving business results. For example, set the goal of generating a specific number of sales leads from your blog, Twitter or LinkedIn within the next 3 months.
With the goal defined, identify a set of steps to achieve that goal. These could include:
- Set up an account on any networks you think your customers use
- Ask your staff to setup profiles on LinkedIn and link those to your company page.
- Set up a blog so you can post information on industry trends, innovations, general news of interest to your target customers. Have “calls to action” in each post to help generate sales leads.
- Ask staff to add an email signature that links to the company’s other social media accounts too.
- Use Google Alerts to monitor mentions of your company, your products and services, and your competitors.
- Identify a list of social media monitoring tools that you could use.
- Identify any additional tools that will make managing your social media easier e.g. Hootsuite.
- Test ways to profile target organizations and target prospects using LinkedIn, Twitter and other social networks they use.
How to Use Social Media to Drive Lead Generation
Marketers and sales staff can use social media to generate leads, identify prospects and to profile those prospects. Deborah Ann Gibbs provides some great examples at the Windmill Networking blog http://windmillnetworking.com/2012/02/06/social-media-roi-marketing-automation/
- Capture information shared in social channels and add it to a contact’s profile
- Use social sign-in for quick response on landing pages
- Use “social sharing” features in email to encourage recipients to share content
- Embed social feeds or videos into landing pages
- Track contribution of social sites to website traffic
- Monitor conversations by prospects on key social channels
- Manage updates to major social channels (automated posting)
- Adjust lead scoring to reflect social conversations
Some additional points to remember
- In B2B, you are targeting the entire prospect organisation, not just individuals, so use social media to profile the company and the group you are targeting as well as specific target prospects.
- Leverage the social media connections of your colleagues – make sure everyone in your organization is connected so you can access their networks of contacts.
Social CRM Resources and links
- Paul Greenberg, author of “CRM at the speed of light: Social CRM strategies, Tools and Techniques for Engaging Your Customers” blogs on social CRM at http://www.zdnet.com/blog/crm/
- Forbes Magazine review of Gartner Magic Quadrant for Social Media 2012 – http://www.forbes.com/sites/louiscolumbus/2012/10/02/gartners-magic-quadrant-for-social-crm-and-the-social-enterprise/
- Forbes Magazine review of the 2012 Gartner Hype Cycle for CRM, with some good stats – http://www.forbes.com/sites/louiscolumbus/2012/07/27/gartner-hype-cycle-for-crm-sales-2012-sales-turns-to-the-cloud-for-quick-relief/
- A short introduction to Social CRM at the Social Media Examiner – http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/what-is-social-crm/
Website Design Guide
Posted by Michael White in Website Design on September 9th, 2012
Your website should help you generate sales leads and acquire new customers. This presentation describes the key steps to deliver a website that helps you grow your business.