Adventures in Marketing

Back again, missing for a while

Been a while since my last post - too busy practising rather then writing about marketing! During the last year, have been extremely busy developing business in emerging markets of India, China and Latin America.

Obviously all three areas are enjoying tremendous growth, but it is interesting to me how different the opportunities are that each one presents. Caveat: my comments are coloured by the fact that I market enterprise software to large companies in life sciences, health and safety, petrochemicals, mining and minerals. Compared to the US and Europe which are growing at 4-5%, these markets are growing at 15-20% for us.

Latin America is all about petro, mining and minerals - mostly to provide the hungry appetites of China and India.

India is all about white-collar outsourcing - and this often means that the Indian companies follow the lead of their outsourcing partners in the West.

China is all about "safety" - right now, China is very concerned about the safety of its exports.

For different reasons, each market is investing heavily in lab instrumentation and software for monitoring and testing applications. Business norms are also very different between these places. More on that in future blogs.

Negative Keywords

In my current capacity as VP Marketing for Convoq, I use paid search marketing to drive prospects to our corporate website where they can download a free trial of our online meeting software. In working with the folks at Google recently, I was pleasantly surprised to learn about "negative keywords" - words or phrases that you select to NOT drive prospects to your business. How did I come across this and why is it important?

Over the last few months I noticed that over 50% of the people downloading our free trial software were just not qualified to ever become customers - basically a bunch of freeloaders from all over the world looking for a free way to communicate! I had to find out how they were learning about Convoq and our free trials.

Turns out that most of these people were inputting "video conferencing" as their keyword phrase and Convoq was one of the companies showing up as a result. I went back to my campaign, entered "video conferencing" as a negative keyword and Bingo! No more bad prospects!

Highly recommend you check this out if you use paid search marketing for your business.

Salesforce.com's Dreamforce event

I recently attended the annual Salesforce "user group" event called Dreamforce. We launched a version of our online meeting software, showcasing tight integration with salesforce.

I must say I was very pleased with the whole event - over 4,500 attendees, of which at least 3,000 were either existing or potential users of salesforce.com. These attendees were knowledgeable, attentive and looking for new ways to improve their usage of salesforce. The event was very well organized with lots of tracks to attend as well as lots of time to visit the expo pavillion.

It has been a long time since I felt that a trade show was worth the aggravation and expense, but this one changed my mind. I have already signed up for next year's event!

B2B Viral Marketing

Towards the end of last year, I had the pleasure of working with ClickSoftware on a B2B viral marketing campaign. Here is what their VP Marketing had to say:

Wanted to share with you a very exciting viral marketing campaignthat my team ran recently.

For comparison, our webinars are getting around 150 responses each. An email campaign with a white paper/case study offer will get 300 response on average. That's not bad at all considering the size of our market (field service software)

A couple of weeks ago, we launched a viral campaign based on an on-line game called "Service Tycoon." Briefly, I would describe it as 2 parts fun, 1 part education, 1 part marketing. See for yourself.

Within a couple of weeks, we overwhelmed by over 7500 responses, mostly within our industry. Plus, great anecdotal comments from
customers.

If anyone is interested, I'll be more then happy to share the details. Just drop me a note, or call me. You can actually see the game here http://www.servicetycoon.com

Best

Amit Bendov

Senior VP, WW Marketing
ClickSoftware, Inc
(781) 272-5903

Trade Shows

I am trying to remember when I last attended a technology trade show, and I am failing! There was a time when I attended every Windows World, PC Expo, Comdex and a few others whose names escape me now. I know I was younger then, and maybe that is why I think I enjoyed going to these shows.

What happened to them? Was it 9/11 and the fear of travelling? Was it the clamp down in marketing expenditure after the bubble burst? Was it that corporate IT budgets were slashed so much that there was no point in buyers going to shows? Or did the Emperor finally admit to having no clothes on?

I am not sure I know exactly why. I am however happy that I don't have to plan for another booth, spend weekends putting booths together and then spend all day on my feet.  Maybe Internet search replaced the need for trade shows!

I remember one year when a trade show manager was busy opening boxes in preparation for her show, and she let out a huge scream. The box contained leads from the previous year's show - nobody had touched all these leads that the company had paid tens of thousands of dollars to acquire!

Having said that, next week is CeBIT week in Germany - only the most gigantic trade show on the planet. Why has this show survived when our own Comdex has gone? Anyone know?

Helping a Warehouse Club increase membership

I am currently advising a Warehouse club on ways to increase membership. I have suggested a few ideas, would love to hear from you with any feedback.

As I see it, these clubs have three direct touch points with their members:

1) Personal touch when the members are shopping in the club

2) Through print media, either flyers or newsletters

3) Through email, with customised offers

Here are some suggestions:

a) While a member is at the club, often with a friend or family member, give them an aggressive incentive to get their friend or family member to join. Give away a $20 discount, or a cute and topical prize (a cuddly bunny at Easter, or a party hamper for July 4rth).

b) Offer existing members a coupon at a related business, but make sure this business is an online one, requiring email registration. For example, tell your existing members that you have negotiated a special member rate with an online photo service.

c) Create a campaign whereby each shopper might hold a winning number in their hand - probably best if printed on their receipt. The shopper has to go home and log on to a website to see if they have won a prize.

The last two ideas are more to build an email database which would then make it easier to create and execute future marketing ideas - such as, give the gift of membership, on Mother's Day or at Xmas etc.

Any new ideas, anyone?

Reflections on DEMO 2005

Just got back from Phoenix after attending yet another well organized event. We had the pleasure of launching ASAP Express, a FREE personal web conferencing and collaboration system, allowing users to conduct one-on-one online meetings, featuring text, audio, video, screen sharing, PowerPoint sharing and file transfer.

You can get your own copy by going to www.convoq.com

There was a bigger buzz at DEMO this year then the last few. More VC's, more press and lots of interesting products and services. Here are a few that got my attention:

Homestead Technologies showed their website building and hosting tool - very easy and very cool. Lots of template driven examples of websites to choose from.

LiveVault showed their data backup device which felt very comforting to have in your company.

LiveDeal had some interesting thinsg to say about search that results in local results - much more useful.

Jigsaw had a much better Sales networking tool than Spoke.

Smartonline showed a terrific new offering for their small business customers, called OneBiz - an integrated set of service offerings designed to help them function better.

The others were great too, these stuck out to me.

Viral Holiday Greeting

The year was 2001 - very bad things had happened in our country. We felt that a warm and fuzzy online greeting was just the thing the country needed, so we created a virtual snowglobe:

www.e-tractions.com/snowglobe

We sent it to about 5000 people in our own database, and they in turn sent it to another 5000 or so. But it stopped there. The following year, unbeknownst to us, someone found it in our archives and sent it to a few friends, who sent it to a few more friends etc. Before we knew it, 250,000 people had seen it.

Last year, the same thing happened  and 15,000,000 people saw it! Who knows what will happen this year:) Check it our for yourself. Let me know what you think, or better still, send it to a few friends!

Asking without giving

Some time ago, we worked with an Office Super Store company where we all learned a nice lesson. If you want your customer to give you something, you owe them a credible explanation first.

Our client thought it would be a good idea to let it's online visitors search for "hot deals". The visitor was first asked for their zipcode, in order that our client could give them hot deals at the store nearest the visitor's location. BUT, there was no explanation given, and hence over 95% of the visitors would drop off at this point.

A simple solution was to add a few words of explanation on that page: Please give us your zipcode in order that we can list the hot deals at a convenient location for you. Bingo, drop off rate went to below 5%.

What's in a name?

Some time back, I did some work with BJ's, the warehouse club that operates mainly up and down the East Coast. The project was to test the use of email and banner ads to generate customers for their clubs as well as leads for their database.

When we got to discussing the email, we ran into a roadblock - using the name BJ's in the "From" and "Subject" lines was a problem. All spam blockers would attack this name because of its porn connotations.

The problem for BJ's, is that if its name couldn't be used, the open rates on the emails dropped drastically - what to do??? So far we have tried various options:

1) Use a generic: From your favorite warehouse club, for example

2) Talk to the spam blockers, but there is no real solution here

3) Thought about creating a new related brand - BeeJay's, for example   

What do you all think? Let me know if you have any ideas.

Kim