Know-How Exchange : E-Marketing

Hi Sanjeev,

Very interesting product, it obviously has extreme value in any environment that would benefit from an instant and portable network.

Certainly you have some sort of budget? Please don't tell us your company went this far without allocating sufficient funds for a respectable marketing rollout.

Viral and word-of-mouth will be your best friends, you need to get a buzz going and for this a healthy dose of PR is recommended.

CPC and Search Engines work one in the same. If somebody tells you they have a CPC program that works "great" and doesn't leave an impression on either Google or Yahoo and any of their search or contextual networks, turn and run away from them.

Can't you find a couple thousand dollars to run an effective AdWords campaign for a month or so to see what kind of results you get? Remember, you only pay when people click and if you get it set up and optimized correctly, you will get qualfied searchers.

Contact me offline if you care to discuss further.

I hope that helps.

Sanjeev, The product has all the attributes to attract a huge response from conventional PR (Pepper Blue’s response).
• Its novel
• Its innovative
• It has some real feature / benefit aspects which even a CEO could understand (Apologies to CEO’s who have moved beyond quill pen and parchment!)
• Its mimicry of the original internet model (Multiple pathway connectivity in the face of potentially massive loss of nodes) should be newsworthy in itself.

Could I also suggest that you direct your PR towards the magazines and journals which your potential readers might dip into as well as the usual IT heavyweights, so rather than just Computer Week or IT Review, go for Management Today, Process Engineering, and Retail News etc where you will have a heavy operational and marketing management, computer user readership.

In addition, could I suggest that to fulfil your brief, you direct the responses from the PR primarily to the website rather than the phone, email or your address. Yes, you will still have to handle “Bingo Cards” but in every response to an enquiry ensure that the covering letter directs the reader to the website and make the paper literature as light as possible without looking tacky.

Next, find as many niche user websites and web based directories where your potential users may be members and get a free listing on them. If you have vertical markets where you have identified synergies for your product, seek out all the relevant websites in their industry and list your company, your product and if they run stories, get your PR onto the site. The major search engines rank the free listings by a complex algorithm, but it includes the number of cross listings from other sites, so this will drive up your page rankings.

If I can offer a piece of advice for vertical PR its don’t put an identical story about your Self Organising Network into “Food Processing International” as the one you supplied to “Construction Weekly” It takes a lot more effort, but not only will the PR have about a 700% greater chance of being printed, the responses will be of much higher quality. If your budget will stretch to it, hire an industrial PR company to do the trade PR. They cost about 10th as much as the consumer PR companies and tend not to work out of Madison Avenue (Dean Street in the UK!)

Next, hire a website optimisation specialist. (Not necessarily your website designer – the skill sets are different) My tips on cross-listings etc are about 1% of what these guys know. If your budget is limited, then get someone to work within it. If you boss is enlightened, persuade him to allow you a rolling marketing spend – if you can prove that sales and revenues accrue from your limited activities, surely it makes sense to allow you to do more of the same. Make your case real by ensuring that you are not in danger of hitting a plateau where increased spend produces a diminishing return.

Lastly, record everything you do and every enquiry that comes in on a CRM system. (Some have a means of recording activities with “Partners” rather than prospects or customers) Then when the enquiries come in, log them against the marketing activity that generated them.
Modify your website response form to indicate where the enquirer came across the product (PR, another website etc). If possible, get your web people to alter the script behind the web-form to fire off an enquiry which produces not only a printed information request, but also creates or adds to a fully populated record on your CRM system. That way you can have a set of campaign statistics generated accurately and automatically and it certainly beats looking at web-page hits, click throughs and counting emails by hand.

That last point is perhaps one of the most important to the profitability of the campaign and the benefit to your career. Too many promotional campaigns result in leads which are not actioned efficiently – or in some cases actioned at all. Where they are acted on, the campaign manager rarely knows what happens to them. Over a suitable period of time (The enquiry to order cycle for sales people or for marketing people, the campaign inception to order cycle) you should be able to track every lead.

Where it came from, what it was for, who it went to, what they did with it, what quotation arose, the value of quote, the order that came in, the date and value of the order and any customer service issues arising. To hold onto your job whilst all this is happening, the sales organisation should also be forecasting sales. A lead is an unknown, especially for a new product. But a lead which has been qualified by phone can acquire 3 attributes – potential value of business, potential order date and percentage probability of winning the order. Log them on the CRM system and be able to show the boss a sales funnel or pipeline.

I apologise if I appear to have digressed and expanded the topic, but there’s no point in giving advice on a front-end aspect of marketing (Directing Traffic to your Web Site) if you don’t consider what you’ll do with the traffic and how you will analyse it to your benefit.

Good luck and when we re-wire our UK wide network, we’ll certainly look at SON

Steve

May I add you can do a whitepaper on the problems your great product would solve, the productivity improvements etc. Then you can offer to give it for free. This when combined with banner or text ads will attract people to your site.

You may ask why when you already have the lite version out for free. The answer is that you are showing you are an expert and two you trigger a nod to the various needs that your target customers could not have thought about.

How do you get it to the customers- You will need to do alot of google search into sites that offer information relevant to your product and visited by your taget people.

Get them to talk of it and buy some burner ads there. Better still do articles that they can publish for free on various aspects of issues facing your target market.

Have you heard of affiliate marketing this one could do well for you. Affiliate marketing involves getting other people from their websites and newsletters promote your product for free and you pay them for reffering any customer who buys your product. You can mail me if you are interested in more details about this.

Regards,
sammykarij