I just read an interesting article over at Neuromarketing, which talks about the importance of touch in making a good impression. Those with a firm handshke score significantly higher in job interviews. The researchers also found that in an economic experiment involving the exchange of money, if someone was primed with a back massage, they would return 243% more money than those who were not primed.
Perhaps WebNotes' next advertising campaign will be free massages before demos of our tool.
Sorry for the massive amount of posts on marketing, but that's my job so you're stuck with it :-)
For the last several weeks I've been pondering the differences between inbound and outbound marketing (i.e. creating and sharing information so people search for you vs. cold calling, direct mailings, and commercials/advertising where you go to people) and it's amazing to me how much more effective inbound marketing has the potential to be, yet how few businesses are employing these techniques. In my previous life as a consultant all marketing attempts were focused around direct mailings and taking people out to dinner, yet most of the business that I saw come in was through referrals, or people who saw the website and found it interesting or from conferences where our experts were giving talks.
If you can't tell, I've been reading a lot of blog posts from hubspot and have clearly been drinking the "juice". Creating a wealth of information which inspires people to go to your website means that those visitors have been primed for your product. Its not a direct mailing for them to throw away, they are WANTING more information! Sharing more means people also will link to you more and thus your Google Search Rankings will go up!
If you are in a business and don't have an ACTIVE web presence then I suggest you start. It's a lot more time consuming but the end result is not only cheaper but more efficient.
Congrats to Tom O'Keefe [http://tomokeefe.com/] of Bizak who's product is now out of Beta. Tom has been a great mentor to us here at WebNotes and has given us a lot of good advice. We wish him all the best with Bizak (and also hope he can somehow get WebNotes a mysterious valuation of a few billion dollars :-) )
Last night was the latest iteration of WebInno and it was much better than the previous one in terms of being able to hear the presentations. Three companies presented and while none of them blew me away, I wish them all the best. Here is a picture from the presentation of "Pixily" who won the best product award. It's taken from my phone so the quality is rather horrible.
Every once in a while I have an experience with a company so extreme that it makes me either never want to deal with them again or makes me a customer for life. In the last 2 months, I've had both kinds of experiences.
Bad Experience:
A little over a month ago, my Treo started malfunctioning. It would put people on hold at random intervals and would text people blank messages constantly. Needless to say I was peeved, but it had been *almost* two years since I had gotten it. In fact, I was about 4 days shy of two years. Thus, I went to my friendly neighborhood Sprint retailer to see if I could qualify for my "two year discount". After a lengthy wait I was told that they couldn't give me the discount on a new phone, but if I were to call their 800 number, they could give me the discount (I obliged, but why can't the store manager give me this discount?? I've been a customer for over 10 years...don't ask why). So I called, waited on hold for 30 minutes, and was put in touch with a woman who decided that I while I didn't qualify for the discount I did qualify to fill out a claim on my Treo. I spent an additional 20 minutes on the phone with her, was told I couldn't buy a new phone even if I wanted to, and had a fairly miserable experience. So miserable that I just hung up. Regardless, I called back again, and kept getting pushed from person to person until I finally got my discount. In total, I wasted about 2 hours of Sprint's time, and 4 hours of mine. How much did this cost both of us in the name of bad customer service??
Good Experience:
Luckily, I've had two great experiences in the past month. The first was with Zappos. I ordered a pair of shoes which they overnighted for free. Turns out they were the wrong size, so I called up admitting to my mistake and they offered to overnight the correct size for free! They also gave me free return shipping which was fairly easy to take care of.
My second good experience was with newegg. I ordered two optical cables for my entertainment center at home. Unfortunately, I didn't do the due diligence required on my receiver and after-the-fact realized that my receiver didn't have an optical input for my DVD player. Bah. So I email Newegg so as to order the correct cable. Newegg then emails back saying that not only will they ship me the correct cable for free but they don't even want me to return the original cable!
I am forever a customer of both companies, and will recommend them to everyone I meet. Good customer service is possibly one of the best marketing schemes that companies can employ. They don't have to waste valuable employee time dealing with customer complaints and repeated phone calls, and they also get their customers to rave about them to all of their friends!
Hopefully we can employ this knowledge with WebNotes to give each of you a better experience.
As the resident marketing “expert”, I have needed to learn a few tools to help WebNotes understand where our traffic is coming from, how users of our webpage are behaving and how to make our site better for our visitors. Thus, I have been playing around with Google Analytics.
http://www.google.com/analytics/
I’ve enjoyed the tool thus far, though it does have a slight learning curve. I’m not proud to admit it, but it took one of our programmers and me about half an hour before we realized I wasn’t able to edit our diagnostics because I hadn’t been given administrative access! So step one, make sure that you have access.
Initial problems aside, I then went on to watch a few videos to get a feel for how I should be using Analytics. The following video was pretty helpful.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5XpYm-B5Fs
We then created a few “goals” for our webpage. They include:
1) Seeing when our users click the registration button but either stop the registration process or continue onwards. We also want to see how many people demo the software on our homepage before clicking to register.
2) Seeing when our users create an account and successfully download our software.
After creating your goals you can then see people as they “funnel”through your site. i.e. How many people get to your homepage, then how many click through to register, then how many continue on to install. High “bounce” rates signal something is wrong, and high “conversion” rates signal immense success.
Obviously there are a whole host of other features that Google Analytics has, but I’ll leave it to you to check out. As usual, if you find cool resources explaining additional functionality, highlight and send them on to aking@webnotes.net!
As someone relatively new to marketing, I've been scouring the web for various resources which I think would help WebNotes reach its future audience. Many sites have recommended tapping into social networks and other "new media" outlets. But how does one do this?
So far we have:
1) Created a corporate blog
2) Created a twitterfeed (www.twitter.com/webnoter)
3) linked our blog to our twitter feed and also to our facebook accounts (I'm using www.twitterfeed.com)
The eventual goal is to create a unified online territory where our userbase can find useful information on us regardless of their preferred method of internet traversing. i'll keep you posted as I start employing other resources, as well as how effective these methods are. Let me know if you have any suggestions! Feel free to annotate using webnotes and send them to aking@webnotes.net by using the share feature :-)
Cheers!
Today is my very first official day in the WebNotes office, though I have been a WebNoter for about 3 days now. I am officially the Director of Marketing and have been at a conference called "The Business of Software" (http://www.businessofsoftware.org/) for the last few days. Needless to say it's been a whirlwind, but a great whirlwind at that. Some key thoughts from the conference:
1) Seth Godin: be remarkable, tell a story with your product, let your consumers spread the word, get permission to continue marketing to your new consumers. Marketing should be built into a product!
2) Jason Fried: Target Non-Consumption Demographics, those with a problem but not solution. Don't worry about stealing consumers from your competitors. Out teach, out share, out contribute: be a cookbook for knowledge.
3) Mike Milinkovich: coevolve your innovation within your particular niche of the ecosystem.
4)Noam Wasserman: 65% of all startups fail due to problems with people.
5) Steve Krug- "Don't make me think" when it comes to the User Interface.
6) Tomas Jennings: Align the interests of the VC, the founders and the employees. On a dorky note, I thought it was really interesting that while in the US VC historically returns more on average than buyout funds, in Europe it is the opposite. Intuitively this would mean that buyout funds in Europe should be riskier than VC funds...that strikes me as pretty unexpected!
7) Steve Johnson: Less documents, more development. The "L" in User is silent. Find your best ideas from your potential market, not your current customers.
8) Paul Kenny: Listen to your customers!
9) Jessica Livingston: How can I get customers to LOVE me?
10) Dharmesh Shah: On pricing? Pick a price, any price. Don't do financial partnerships. Use market analytics!
11)Joel Spolsky: Make people happy, Obsess over Aesthetics, Observe the Culture Code. Interesting fact: people on the right side of a theater will rate a movie 10% better than people on the left side. Joel calls this "misattribution".
There was tons more, so you'll just have to go next year if you are interested! Also, to just see moment to moment thoughts, visit www.twitter.com/webnoter
Happy highlighting!