Marketing

Marketing Technology Landscape

Scott Brinker Follow @chiefmartec provides a must read summary of the 5 meta-trends that underly most modern marketing.

The great digital migration of marketing (and business).
The convergence of paid, earned, and owned media.
Customer experience as the core of marketing.
Rise of the creative/marketing technologist.
Agile marketing management.

The post lays forth a strong foundation for marketers and investors looking at understanding the competitive landscape of different offerings. Interestingly as a practitioner it also provides a great summary of the tools available to enable potential tactics. There are a few logos and companies I think are missing in the landscape, for example, Calls section is missing Twilio and Voxeo/Tropo. And the diagram is missing the entire SMS marketing enablement which are both part of the breakdown of VoIP and SMS through programmatic APIs. I am also trying to figure out where in the list to put Influitive, Custora, Totango, Spinnakr, Bloom Reach and a few others. It is an amazing list. There are a few new companies that I need to check out and learn more about.

Thanks Scott!

Scotch tape, safety pins and spaghetti – SMB marketing automation

by davidcrow

Image courtesy of gotosira some rights reserved

I was talking to a friend who runs a >10 person distributed professional services firm. He was looking for better tooling to automate his customer processes. He had recently dropped Salesforce, not because it was too much or too expensive, but because the configuration and usage was too complicated for his non-enterprise sales staff. We’ve been talking about his constraints and what he’d like the software to do.

It is part CRM, part project management, part marketing automation. Similar to the “Poor Man’s CRM“.

Constraints

Must access the FreshBooks API – All client billing is done in FreshBooks. It works. His staff is familiar. It is easy enough to send, track and account for with FreshBooks. They are not replacing this.
Preferably cloud based.
Must work with Microsoft Exchange email.
Costs <$150/person/month – this is an all in cost. However a preferred cost is $6000-12,000/year.
20,000 contacts
5,00 active clients
Prefer commercial offerings to custom development, and modify workflow to fit new processes.

Work Flow

It’s a pretty standard workflow. From lead capture to opportunity identification. The opportunity is defined by multiple stages, each stage has a series of tasks that usually result in an email being sent or a web form needing to be completed or a signed document. The workflow is pretty linear with clearly defined actions that move a opportunity through each stage of the engagement.

The majority of the business is referrals and business developers sourcing leads (50%). New business from existing clients (30%). And the remaining 20% is from web contact forms.

Possible Solutions

We’ve been talking about both CRM and marketing automation solutions, particularly those that are able to match both an organization or a person to their FreshBooks contact information. The goal is to be able to show outstanding invoices before a new project kicks off.

CRM/Project

Web Forms & Electronic Signatures

Email Automation

ToutApp
Vero (email automation with CapsuleCRM or Pipedrive)
YesWare

Scotch Tape, Safety Pins & Spaghetti

I keep leaning towards solutions I have used in the past. But I think they are not the right fit, given that I’m going to have to automate a number of webhooks using Zapier or itDuzzit, which are amazing, but the complexity scares me given the friend. It’s starting to feel like my advice is going to end up with scotch tape and safety pins holding together a spaghetti of web services.

I have no idea if it is the professional services aspect, or the hand off from lead generation to sales to project management. Maybe it is because of the FreshBooks integration (which I have never done). But I’m unclear about what the best options are. I keep finding more interesting solutions. Maybe it is that the past 3 years I’ve been deeply immersed in inbound activities for SaaS offerings that makes me drool over HubSpot and Performable. But I’m just not sure where to go from here.

Thoughts? Guidance on where to look next? I’m stuck.

Marketing Automation Startups

by davidcrow

Marketing technology, if you believe the infographics and Gartner, that marketing will spend more on technology by 2017. There are an incredible proliferation of new tools available to marketers and product developers. Here is a short list of the tools that I have been evaluating for automating different parts of the marketing process.

Totango – Trial conversions and user engagement.
Portrait Sofware – Predictive analytics on best next action and behavioural customer segmentation.
Custora – Behavioural segmentation and analytics for retail customers.
Intercom.io – It’s like Rapportive for new customer signups.
The Sunny Trail – It’s like Rappportive for new customer signups.
Spinnakr – Custom target content based on behavioural analytics.
RJ Metrics – Hosted analytics.
Retenion Science
HubSpot – CRM/Marketing Automation
Spark by Marketo – Marketing Automation for SMB
Pardot – Marketing Automation

A combination of Pipedrive CRM System and HubSpot for the CRM (I just love the stage view for Pipedrive, it’s like Trello or Asana for sales) and then adding Intercom or The Sunny Trail and Spinnakr for specific situations.

What marketing automation and customer engagement tools are you track?

SMASH Summit in NYC

by davidcrow

Dave McClure and the 500 Startups folks are producing a great looking conference focused on “hack-tics” of customer acquistion. They ran a similar event in April 2010 in SF. – check out tthe presentations on SlideShare and the feedback. At the event speakers provided examples based on real usage and data. David Cowling provided a list of the social media statistics by different speakers (stats current as of May 2010 — so you hope they are crazier 14 months later), they reinforce the power of mass media platform and while fragmented the web/mobile is a great way to reach people (customers, prospects, leads, fans, haters, almost everyone).

Twitter has 105,779,710 users. 300K new users per day. 600 million search queries per day. 175 employees.

Salesforce thinks that their Youtube channel has the ROI equivalent of 35 super efficient sales reps

Facebook says sites that have added Like button have seen triple growth of fans

Stumbleupon 2010: 10 Million users, 115,000 Facebook fans, 600 Million stumbles/month, 1 Billion ratings, 45 Million URLs, 50,000 discovers/day

Top 5 countries after the US for Facebook usage/traffic: UK, Indonesia, Canada, France, Turkey

70% of Facebook traffic comes from outside the US, 10% increase in the last year alone

37% of tweets originate from mobile devices

Most of YouTube’s views are from videos older than 6 months old, invest in a content strategy.

I am hoping that Michael McDerment might apply to tell the FreshBooks metric story at the SMASH Summit. He first gave this talk at DemoCamp back in 2007 but he continues to evolve it based on the FreshBooks business. It’s one of my favs. And given the updated focus on both acquisition and retention it makes it a perfect opportunity for FreshBooks.

SMASH Summit will feature presentations and case studies on strategies, tactics, and “hack-tics” used in successful internet campaigns across multiple platforms—from search to social to mobile. Led by both tech geeks and savvy marketers, you will walk way with new tips and tricks for pumping up your customer acquisition and retention. In 2010, SMASH Summit debuted to a sold-out audience including speakers and attendees from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Apple, Google, Virgin America, National Geographic, Mint, Twilio, Sony, Slideshare, and many others.

I am hoping to attend because I want to see some of the approaches used to acquire customers for $0 dollars. Why? I spent part of Monday, in my role as EiR at VeloCity, asking students and entrepreneurs how they could get to 10,000 (or 100,000 or 1,000,000) users in 30 days with a $0 budget. I’m curious to see both the tactics and the tools that other high traction startups are using to attract and retain customers. Apparently I’ve been spending time understanding marketing and sales automation (again).

Great list of speakers including the infamous Dave McClure (@davemclure), Charlie O’Donnell (@CEONYC), Victoria Ransom (@wildfireapp) and others.

B2B Marketing Guide by KISSMetrics

by davidcrow

The team at KISSmetrics has provided a B2B Marketing Guide infographic. Some of the facts I found interesting:

85% of B2B marketers invested in event marketing in 2010

28% of this group plan to increase their event marketing investments in 2011

69% of B2B marketers intend to try new digital marketing approaches in 2011

Lots of great stuff. Make sure you also check out A Startup Marketing Framework by April Dunford and 10 Marketing Lessons for Early-Stage Tech Startups by Mark Suster. Great contexts to better understand B2B Marketing.

Marketing metrics 101

by davidcrow

Reposted from my original on StartupNorth.ca

Photo by Darren Hester — Photo by Darren_Hester

Mike McDerment from FreshBooks gave a great presentation on the basics of web application marketing metrics. He focuses on the metrics, systems and reporting that all companies should be building into web and mobile applications. It is a must read for any entrepreneur building a web application.

Metrics

Cost Per Acquisition (CPA): How much does it cost you to get a customer? It’s a simple enough calculation, how much do you spend on sales and marketing to acquire each customer. Roll up your staffing costs, your ad buys, your outbound marketing, etc.
Average Revenue Per User (ARPU): How much revenue do users generate? How do you track it? Does it change based on segment? How do you increase it?
Churn: What percentage of your existing customer base leave every month? This is different than CPA because this is about customer satisfaction and retention. Don’t think this is important? According to April Dunford churn is a killer. “The probability of selling to an existing customer is 60-70%. The probability of selling to a new prospect is 5-20%”
Lifetime Value (LTV): How long does a customer continue as a subscriber? Does their ARPU change over time? Do you have ways to increase their spend or reduce their churn?

These basic metrics are expanded by Dave McClure in AARRR! Startup Metrics for Pirates. Where the metrics are divided into 3 main categories:

Get Users (Acquisition, Referral)
Drive Usage (Activation, Retention)
Make Money (Revenue)

Startup Metrics 4 Pirates (Montreal, May 2010)

View more presentations from Dave McClure.

It seems so simple on surface, but as CEOs and startups we need to be committed to building the systems and metrics into our products. I was just floored at MeshU when I heard Dan Martell talk about the Flowtown.com Startup Immune System where they are beginning to use the lower level business performance metrics to automatically rollback design changes based on performance against the baseline. You can only start doing if you’re building on top of metrics. The idea of having automated your software deployment and sufficiently built business metric baselines that you could autoroll back poor performing changes. At Nakama, I wanted this so much. Not because I had bad developers but because we often made design decisions based on limited customer feedback and I wanted the system to protect me from my own hubris.

Metrics are good place to start. One of the best ways to understand how your company is performing is to begin measurement. Mike has done a great job