Small Businesses Need a Minimum Viable Marketing Strategy

I’ve taken to thinking that marketers should view marketing on the web as a product.  As I said in my post on the Pitfalls of Free Content and Inbound Marketing:

Marketing is a Product that has a UX and Competes Like Any Other Product

It’s easy to forget because we don’t charge for it that Marketing is a product too.  In particular, online marketing is increasingly indistinguishable from an online software product.  It has a User Experience that we want the consumer to be delighted with.  It has Business Logic and is the System of Record for critical Enterprise Value if you want to get all Enterprise Software about it.  Think about Marketing as a Product and you’ll find some breakthrough insights.

And don’t assume you don’t charge for marketing either.  You’re charging your customers the highest price they pay for anything you sell–you’re asking them to give you their trust.

If we’re going to think about Marketing as a Product, then the concept of Minimum Viable Product makes a lot of sense for Marketers to think about as well.  MVP is all about the idea of not building in every possible feature and refinement.  It’s about building as little as possible to make a product that you can get in front of customers sooner, so you can learn from their feedback.  Doesn’t that sound exactly like what marketers should be doing to avoid making mistakes that were tragically knowable?

I was reminded of all this while reading through a brief post and subsequent comments from Hubspot, called “How Valuable is Social Media, Really?”  In the post, some charts are presented that show Social Media produces very few inbound visitors but its conversion rate to leads may be higher.  Readers are implicitly invited to speculate that the obvious conclusion–Social Media is not valuable–might be wrong and follow on posts will reveal why.  I opined as how I saw it as an inventory problem:

We’ve got 4 to 8x the volume from the non-social and only a 50% better conversion.

It ain’t enough.

Reminds me of Bing. I get much better conversion from Bing searchers–makes me think it may be a better engine. But so many fewer show up than Google that it doesn’t matter.

Someone else raises the issue that the cost of getting the different kinds of visitors affects the ROI and therefore may change the picture.  But as I say, we have an inventory problem (potentially).  If I can only get x conversions from Social Media and that number is sufficiently low, that’s the inventory available for marketing dollars in this kind of program and it doesn’t matter what the cost is unless it is to make the program even less attractive (e.g. if there are too few leads AND they’re very expensive, we really don’t like this kind of spend).  Last aside, they talk about conversion to leads, but that isn’t conversion to revenue.  I have also remarked and believe that optimizing the wrong metric is the root of all marketing evil, so we may have been led down a primrose path on that one (though the $ money bags on the chart are a tacky misdirection if so, LOL).  What we want to optimize, in other words, is not leads but actual sales.  Marketing and Sales departments fight like cats and dogs over that one all day every day at nearly every company.

What does all this have to do with a Minimum Viable Marketing Strategy?

It’s a perfect example of why you need one–to avoid the distraction of programs that can’t produce enough results to make a difference even if the results that are produced may be good and cheap.  Put another way, when you are small, one more good, cheap, but relatively insignificant marketing program is just like one more good, cheap, but relatively unimportant feature on a product.  You don’t need the distraction, shouldn’t spend the time and money, and it won’t move the needle.  Cross it off the list until you are much bigger.  You’re looking for big hits.  Test as many small ones as you can until you find the big ones and then double down.  These numbers, at least what we have so far, don’t make Social Media look like a big hit for the business as described.

Lest we leave the subject thinking I am not a Social Media believer, let me just say that my own business experience suggest much better numbers are possible for Social Media.  For example, my CNCCookbook business is my test bed for these kinds of experiments and gets numbers more like this:

We can see that Social is generating quite a lot (15%) of the traffic to the site.  However, its conversion to leads is just the opposite of Hubspot’s numbers, being lower than many other sources.  Being a heavy content marketer, I’m of the opinion (unproven), that getting so many visitors is worthwhile and I will eventually nurture them to conversion.   In addition, I suspect referring sites link to me partially because of my content and partially because I have a following on the social communities peculiar to this space.  For example, I know a lot of machinists through the social who may then go on to connect.  FWIW, while I have tried Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and maintain presences on Facebook and Twitter for CNCCookbook, these are very poor sources of leads and visitors.  The richest sources are niche communities totally focused on the market CNCCookbook is in.

Here is the more interesting thing to consider, though.  If you’re looking for the minimum viable marketing strategy for the CNCCookbook business, which programs should you focus on?  Which should you ignore?  FWIW, I have sorted the data series in order of most to fewest leads produced.

For example, the Paid category (largely Google AdWords) has a very high conversion, but doesn’t yield enough leads.  I spent months tuning it until I was only paying for clicks that actually yielded profitable business.  That mostly resulted in long tail keywords, which are cheaper to bid for than mainstream more generic keywords.  Unfortunately, they have an inventory problem–not enough long tail searches with profitable economics.  Will I keep running the AdWords campaign?  Yes, the work spent tuning is sunk cost.  But I won’t spend more time trying to improve AdWords other than to monitor that the ROI stays profitable and cut it back when it doesn’t.  In retrospect it wasn’t worth the amount of time I spent on it and shouldn’t have been part of the minimum viable marketing strategy for CNCCookbook.

For this business, the cutoff is after email.  It isn’t worth focusing on Bing (and I definitely wouldn’t buy ads there) or PPC.  My email is worthwhile, largely because it is low effort and consists mainly of periodically asking my customer base to refer their friends (hence the very high visit to lead ratio).

What I should do next is find some more things to test, and that’s what I’m doing.  Keep in mind, your mileage not only can but will vary–you have to test, test, test to know what works and what doesn’t.  Double down on what works, cut what doesn’t, and keep some powder dry to keep testing new things.  Cast your net wide and don’t get focused on going deep except in a very few areas that are well proven.

Conclusion

Small Businesses should look for a Minimum Viable Marketing strategy.  Don’t get distracted (as I did) trying to optimize programs that can’t possibly produce the results you need.  Run some tests and ask yourself how much improvement you would need to see in those tests before a program would be in your top 3 or 4.  PPC was never going to get there for me, so I never should’ve invested in improving those results.  It would’ve required hundreds of percent improvement, and I had proven viable programs already doing much better.  Focus on those and keep enough bandwidth to keep testing new possibilities.

Pitfalls of Free Content and Inbound Marketing

Let me start this article by saying it’s not intended to be a negative article against free content or inbound marketing.  Rather, I want to talk about some of the strategic considerations when you use these tactics.   I believe wholeheartedly that, properly employed, there are no better tactics for building your customer base and getting the word out.  Let’s also define “inbound marketing”, at least for purposes of this post, as follows:

Inbound Marketing is giving away valuable content for free in order to attract an audience and earn the right to sell them something.

This may not be exactly what firms like Hubspot who are experts on the topic use, but it is how I think about it and it will work well for this discussion.

This post was motivated by some thinking that’s been going on in the back of my mind about inbound marketing that all bubbled to the surface when I read John Jantsch’s “When Free Becomes Free For All — 5 Reasons Free is Hurting Us All“.   Along with Seth Godin, John Jantsch is one of my top two favorite marketing bloggers. But, with this latest post, I think John has missed some key points and gone off the track.  Rather than debate his 5 points up front, I want to drop back and paint a more strategic backdrop for understanding the value of free and I also want to call attention to the alternatives.  To paraphrase Winston Churchill’s famous quote about democracy:

“It has been said that free is the worst form of marketing except all the others that have been tried.”

Let’s start from that premise when considering John’s proposition that too much free is damaging by asking, “What are the alternatives?”

Just enough free to get the job done and charge for the rest?

Pay walls?

Intangible costs and friction like registration landing pages you go through over and over again to get one white paper, webinar, or slide show at a time?

I’ll bet John will have a hard time defending those alternatives, I know I would.  As an aside, ironically, I had gotten a new Hubspot email (one of two this morning, easy there boys) offering me a white paper that looked valuable.  I clicked to the landing page and was immediately presented with an old style fill in the form to get the content.  Now I know you want to capture the individual’s contact information, get them on your house list, yada, yada.  But I’m on Hubspot’s list–they’re emailing me for cryin’ out loud and I haven’t opted out. They can tell I’ve clicked through with silent instrumentation.  This is an artificial and annoying barrier that cause me to think them slightly less enlightened and to click off the page and go on about my business.  They either did it that way through sloth or because they are trying to “qualify” me by making me do the work of reentering my information.  Either way, it cheapens the Inbound experience.  If you’re going to be Inbound, be inbound.  Once you get someone’s information, treat them as you would want to be treated.  End of rant, these guys should know better.

Distracting as it may be, the anecdote relates to John’s complaints about free.  Let’s talk about the 5 things he worries about (paraphrased):

It doesn’t hold the content consumer accountable.  

If it’s free, they can sign up and then no-show.  This is a variation on the VP of Sales contention that you have to charge a lot or the customer won’t respect you.  My problem with this perspective is it reflects artificial scarcity and a presumption about the stage that the prospect has reached that isn’t justifiable.  When you’re engaging in Marketing, you’re not yet at the stage where you’re entitled to demand a price.  You’re not ready to close a sale.  You’re earning the customer’s trust and any artificial scarcity or cost interferes with that trust, just as my experience with Hubspot made me trust them a little less.

With respect to artificial scarcity, the history of any market is a march to commoditization unless the participants find a way to create defensible unfair advantage that limits competition and creates artificial scarcity.  Other than via legal entanglement, content is not amenable to unfair advantage through limited availability because it can be reproduced and communicated too easily. Your only opportunity for unfair advantage is to make your content better than the other guy’s.  Leaving aside all that, think about monopolies, patents, record labels and other cases of successful artificial scarcity.  Do you want your marketing to reek of that?  As I said, you’re earning trust, not selling patent-pending titanium toilet seats to the Air Force.

It would be awesome to see my two marketing blogger idols, John and Seth Godin, debate this proposition.  My impression from Godin’s writing and tactics for self-promotion is that he totally gets this business of creating unfair advantage through better content and then making it even more unfair by aggressively giving it away until it goes viral.

Let’s turn this one around from a unpleasant problem to a prescription for success:

Make sure you are accountable for your content and it is so good that it is irresistible.  And then give it away.

That formula will knock the cover off the ball of Inbound Marketing every time if you can deliver.

Eroded Value

John’s description of this point is worth repeating:

When content is consistently given away it loses its value–not only for the producer, but also in the eyes of the content consumer. How good can something that’s free really be?

This lumps thoroughly researched, well-presented, useful content in with shoddily veiled pitch fests.

My problem with this argument is two-fold.  First, it goes down the traditional Mad Men marketing and sales path of assuming consumers are sheep.  I know it can be easy to fall into that trap, but John knows better.  Consumers are better judges of your content than that.  The ones that matter know a “shoddily veiled pitch fest” from useful content.  Go back and read the endless admonitions to content creators for Inbound Marketing about delivering value.  If you’re not delivering enough value that it’s obvious to consumers, you may have accidentally produced a pitch fest.  Blame yourself, not the consumer.  Value is in the eye of the beholder, not the author.

Finding great content is hard.  If it wasn’t there wouldn’t be so much controversy over search, there wouldn’t be so many bookmarking services, and there wouldn’t be a long tail.  The great content would be obvious, plentiful, and easy to come by.  Instead, there are relatively few Duct Tape Marketing or Seth Godin blogs, so we read them incessantly and don’t take them for granted.

This brings me to my second point–be aware of the state of the free content ecosystem in your space.   John Jantsch’s Duct Tape Marketing content plays in the most crowded on-line space that there is for great free content–marketing.  The bar in that space is absolutely sky high–so high there is almost no oxygen up there.  Social Media, Email Marketing, Inbound Marketing, Affiliate Programs, on and on.  There is lots of great marketing content available free.  Whenever a content market gets that big and there is so much great content available, value is eroded.  You can’t take it back by deciding not to give it away.  There’s too many struggling for competitive advantage by giving their great (or even pretty good) content away.  Markets are eating their own dogfood, drinking their own champagne, and practicing what they preach.  It’s tough love, but you better get over it.

I’ve come to believe this is a key strategic point for entrepreneurs to consider.   Not every space is as crowded as the Marketing space.  In fact, very very few are.  Most spaces are still very much starved for great free content.  For entrepreneurs, when you’re evaluating a space, do a careful evaluation on your chances of becoming an early Thought Leader there through your content.  You want to be a big fish in a small pond where the bar is set extremely low for your content.

Lowered Expectations

John says:

This creates an atmosphere where content producers can simply slap something together with little value because, “What are they going to do, ask for a refund?”

I’ve nothing new to say here other than that you are accountable for your content and you have to make it so good that it is irresistible.   If you don’t and you’re in a crowded content ecosystem like marketing, you’ll never be noticed.  May as well go buy banner ads on AOL or Yahoo.   If you don’t and you’re one of the first fish in a small content pond, you’ll be noticed but vulnerable to a fast follower.  You will also miss igniting the level of passion for your content that you may otherwise have had, which will slow people passing on and talking about your content and prolong the window for the fast follower to take you out.

Blocked Revenue

“When the expectation is that all of your content, speaking and presenting will be made available at no fee, your business’ greatest potential asset is cut off.”

First, if your only business is content, you need to think carefully about your strategy.  In the ideal case, you have something else you’re making the money on besides the content.  Inbound Marketing is a wonderful no-brainer if you do have something else to sell.

Second, even if you don’t have anything but content to sell, who says it’s all or nothing?  Will they pay to see you deliver your content directly?  Will they pay for you to apply the mind that produced that great free content to their problem?  Will they tolerate ads in the content?  Will they pay to have your content in a different format, perhaps one that’s easier to consume or more compact?  Thinking of books that are compendiums of content that already exists where curation and packaging is the value.

Seth Godin is a master of this.  He gives away books he’s actively selling.  He encourages buyers to give their book to someone else when they’re done reading it.  It works for Godin, why not others?

Community Buster

Having spent a fair bit of time in the Social Web both personally and professionally, this is one I totally do not understand:

When people are invited into a community where everything is free, there’s actually less chance of building a strong community. Community builds when there is value.

That has not been my experience in the least, and I’d like to see such a community to understand what it’s real underlying problems are, because they’re not due to “free”.  Let me give two strong examples:  Stack Overflow and Quora.   Everyone reading this must have heard of one or the other.  They’re completely free, they are strong communities by any measure I have ever seen, and they deliver huge value.

Free has some really odd dynamics where behavior and community are concerned.  People will polarize around and defend free in ways that you just don’t see for things people pay for.  Try to make your living attacking virtually anything Open Source and you will see.  Free begets fanaticism because it creates obligation.  If you give somebody something for free, they feel an obligation to reciprocate in some way.  If they pay you, however little, they have discharged that obligation.  This is problematic for companies that want to be the cheapest offering in their space.  To me, they attract the worst of all worlds.  They don’t get the fanatical support of free, and they’ve attracted a legion of penny pinchers who feel no obligation and who are ironically much higher maintenance than the sort who buy premium products.

People generally have good intentions.  Give them a lot of valuable free content.  Set them up in a free community where they can get free help and give free assistance and I have seen magic happen multiple times.  If you find yourself in a space where no such resource exists, stake it out quickly–it will turn into a gold mine and you won’t be sorry.

Conclusion:  Marketing is a Product that has a UX and Competes Like Any Other Product

It’s easy to forget because we don’t charge for it that Marketing is a product too.  In particular, online marketing is increasingly indistinguishable from an online software product.  It has a User Experience that we want the consumer to be delighted with.  It has Business Logic and is the System of Record for critical Enterprise Value if you want to get all Enterprise Software about it.  Think about Marketing as a Product and you’ll find some breakthrough insights.

And don’t assume you don’t charge for marketing either.  You’re charging your customers the highest price they pay for anything you sell–you’re asking them to give you their trust.

What are Customers Looking for From Social Businesses?

There’s a great conversation going on right now around what Customers are looking for from Social Businesses (e.g. what is Social CRM, really?) between Dennis Howlett, Paul Greenberg (via Dennis), Mitch Lieberman, and no doubt several others I haven’t yet tracked down.  It starts from a survey IBM did on what businesses think the value of being Social is versus what Customers think:

Like any great discussion topic, there are layers of data and possible interpretations that become a Rorschach tableau on which to justify one’s personal predispositions; hence I won’t hesitate to share mine!

The money quote is the one Dennis plucked from Mitch’s piece:

Customers do not want a relationship with your business, they want the benefits a relationship can offer to them.

Ouch! Those darned selfish customers, we just want to be their friends!

OTOH, there is an evil part of me that speculates that an awful lot of our “friends” are not much less mercenary most of the time, particularly if they’re just business acquaintances, so why are we surprised?

The other reaction to the chart is that in terms of measuring whether customers want a relationship, they didn’t ask all the right questions and may not have interpreted the ones they did ask very well.  After all, “Feel connected” and “Be part of a community” are pretty much content free touchy feely BS.  What sort of person do you have to be to seek that sort of companionship in the bosom of a corporate entity?

OTOH, if I consider a more realistic view of Social Interaction, all the areas that scored big on learning seem perfectly Social.  And, when I look at “Purchase”, it makes me wonder what that really means.  Here is a chart from IBM that shows why Consumers go Social:

Presumably, this is the chart we’re meant to compare and contrast with.  Let’s consider some of these categories and ask whether they have a place, even indirectly, in the business Social world.  Consider it a way to think differently about your Business Social efforts in order to increase engagement.

Connect with friends and family

The desire to “Feel Connected” and “Be Part of a Community” is evidently much less important in Business Social.  The corollary seems obvious: if you want to increase this motivation for connecting, get some friends and family in there.   Family is hard, but there are countless Social sites where people go to meet and interact with others who have similar interests.  When I was with Callidus, one of the most popular components of our User Conference was a session we called “Birds of a Feather”.   This was essentially a beer bash organized by industry vertical where customers could go compare notes.  The session had two parts.  First, we had our domain experts present, one at each table.  Their instructions were to listen and only chime in when nobody could answer a question.  They were told to act strictly as a resource and not to try to guide what was going on.  Second, we had a closed session where all the Callidus people left.  Customers were welcome to talk about us, our competitors, or whatever else they needed to in our absence.

I can think of no reason why this “Birds of a Feather” type interaction couldn’t be done in an online Social context nor why it wouldn’t be extremely popular.  Some vendor or other probably already does it and I am just not aware, so please chime in if you’ve heard of it.  In a broader sense, think about whether your Social CRM efforts are purely hub and spoke, meaning they force too much interaction with your company and not enough peer to peer to do very well in this context.  Get out of people’s ways and facilitate their getting to know one another.  Empower the gregarious networkers whether or not they are customers.  They will keep the party rolling.

Access News and Entertainment

This ranks pretty high on both scales.  If you haven’t already figured it out: content is king.  Give away as much valuable content as possible.  Call it Best Practices or whatever it takes, but be the best educator in your space and do it for free.  Free means not even pestering incessently for contact information.  BTW, at my last company, we had a Best Practice Community filled with content that went over extremely well.  Some of our highest landing page conversion rates came from the signups for the community.  People didn’t see a signup to join a community as egregious in the way a signup for a White Paper seems to be.

Sharing

Several of the entries amount to “Sharing” of one kind or another.  Too often businesses see Social as just another direction to point the megaphone.  Are you giving your customers voices too?  Are they empowered to share?  Are they encouraged to share?  Are your customers actually trying to share and then getting shouted down or smothered by the people in your company that run the Social program?

This is one of the hardest things for businesses: giving up control to the customer, even just a little bit, doesn’t feel right.  But go talk to your best Salespeople.  Aren’t they good listeners?  After all, Social isn’t some High Priesthood that takes years of learning and arcane knowledge to master.  It’s just people.  Go ask people who are good with people how they’d solve a problem and then try that in the your online Social context.

Bottom Line

These are just a few thoughts about turning some of the Social Debate and information on its head to try to get new insights.

If your Social isn’t, well, Social enough, try thinking about it from your Customer’s standpoint.  Forget about what you want from them, give them what they want from you.  Establish reciprocity, and the rest will follow as best it can.  Forcing the issue won’t necessarily help and it may very well hurt.

Postscript:  The Pepsi Refresh Failure

In his post, Dennis refers to the Pepsi Refresh failure :

The Refresh Project accomplished everything a social media program is expected to: Over 80 million votes were registered; almost 3.5 million “likes” on the Pepsi Facebook page; almost 60,000 Twitter followers. The only thing it failed to do was sell Pepsi.

It achieved all the false goals and failed to achieve the only legitimate one.

While Ad Contrarian views this as Social Media’s massive failure, and an indictment on Social in general, I look at it differently.  I don’t think Pepsi’s problem is merely about what they measure or how they engage.  It’s a lot deeper.

How much do you and your friends talk about Coke or Pepsi?  I think the longest conversations I’ve ever heard happened because some restaurant had the wrong brand and someone made a snide remark afterward.  Is it any surprise that while such brands can bribe people in various ways to visit, that these people don’t really want to engage?  These Pepsi guys could’ve saved their $20M.  Rather than asking why Social didn’t increase sales, they could as easily have not spent the $20M on any marketing at all and wondered why it didn’t affect their sales.  Heck, if Coke would save the money they spend to advertise at the beginning of every movie I see I would thank them, “Like” them on Facebook, or whatever.

At some point I will do a post on what sorts of brands benefit from Social or not, but for starters, just observe whether parties who should be interested spend much time talking about it.

Similarly, Dennis in his post touches on some cultural issues companies may have that will ultimately prevent them from being very Social.  Some Company cultures are flat-out anti-social when you expose Customers to them.  But, these two points are peripheral to my main theme, which is to try to think out of the box or at least in your Customer’s corner of the box where Social is concerned.  You have a lifetime of monkey-see monkey-do formal marketing to overcome, but it’s worth it.

This Product Roadmap Kerfluffle is Getting a Bit Silly

In case you’ve missed it, there’s a big Kerfluffle on right now over whether SaaS companies should share a product roadmap with customers or not.  The charge against is led by Kashflow CEPO Duane Jackson, who says sharing your roadmap is flawed because:

- Reduces agility

- Creates expectations that make it harder to delight customers

- Introduces competitive risks

- Sets companies up for a fail if they have to change their roadmaps

Coming at it from the other corner is Dennis Howlett, who thinks it is “bonkers” not to share the roadmap and insists customers have a right to know and prudent customers will insist on knowing.  In a third corner is Ben Kepes, who seems to have decided that while the arguments to share make sense, the success of KashFlow and others (37Signals to name one high profile example), and because he says as a small business owner, he knows it just isn’t that important because the decision cycles are so much shorter.

I’m coming down on the side of Dennis and sharing the roadmap

I’m on the side of sharing for multiple reasons.

First, the arguments against sound an awful lot like companies are afraid their customers will have too much control.  Sorry, but that’s no way to partner with your customers, and I believe above all else that it is critical for you partner with your customers.  That is the road to delighting them.  Why live in fear of your customers when you could partner with them?

This all sounds so much like arguments I’ve heard from Product Managers against Social Product Innovation Sourcing (aka Ideastorms).  It sounds like the arguments I’ve heard against Social CRM.  ”We’re afraid of what our customers might say or the standards they might hold us to under the public spotlight.”

Hey guys, get used to it.  The whole world now operates in that spotlight courtesy of the Internet and all the many ways it gives your customers to get the word out.  You can’t just choose not to participate, especially if your competition is wholeheartedly embracing it.

Second, having worked with customers of all shapes and sizes, from small to gigantic Fortune 500, I’ve never had a problem of having a customer back me into a corner I couldn’t get out of. You’ve read all the advice about authenticity, honesty, and candor with Social Media?  Guess what, the Social Media guys didn’t invent that stuff, it’s simply the right way to deal with your customers.  If I don’t have a roadmap that’s baked well enough I can talk about it, shame on me.  That means I’m waiting for some sort of Monkey-on-a-keyboard A/B testing to figure it out for me and that’s not going to happen.  That’s a vision-less product organization and it is doomed to be inferior for a lot of more fundamental reasons than lack of a roadmap.

If I can’t have a well-reasoned conversation with a customer wherein I explain the business reasons why I have to change my roadmap and they don’t get it and can’t abide it, shame on both of us.  Shame on me for being unable to sell it, and for not having delighted the customer enough elsewhere to get the benefit of a doubt.  Shame on the customer for being so high maintenance and not understand that their best course is for me to be successful and that means satisfying more than just them.  I will tell you in all honesty that’s never happened to me, despite having to break the news of roadmap changes more than once.

One of the best product managers I’ve worked with (Hi JP!) used to have a saying about this.  There are no stupid features and no “No’s”.  There is only prioritization, and that is fluid.

Third, let’s talk about the competition.  Are they truly that clueless that they don’t have their own roadmap that’s pretty similar to your own?  Particularly when it comes to things customers are asking you to sign in blood for?  Don’t you think their customers are asking them for the same things?  Of course they are.  Those areas are not secrets and you’re kidding yourself if you think they are.  On things that are truly visionary and innovative, precisely the kinds of things you don’t want the competitors to know about because they’re not thinking of them, who says you have to share the whole roadmap?  There’s your opportunity to delight customers and confound the competition right there.

Things your audience is begging for are not plums waiting for you to pick and hold up for the adulation of the crowds.  They’re cases you got blind sided and should’ve paid closer attention to.  Fixing them is the elimination of a negative, not the creation of a positive.  If you think otherwise, you are the man to be in charge of innovation at Microsoft, because that’s always been their problem.

Best Practices for Sharing Product Roadmap

Okay, so let’s get past the argument and talk about how best to share product roadmaps, because there are some important ingredients to maximizing the benefits of the practice.

1.  Everyone does not get to share the roadmap and it isn’t public. As SVP Engineering/CTO, I have insisted that deep roadmap dives be presented by the CTO and/or Product Managers and not by Sales.  Roadmap entries need a firewall separation from the negotiation and sales process.  Getting to see the roadmap is a tightly vetted process.  Only real serious customers who are also good customers get to see it.  We will not drop it on leaflets out of airplanes to every lukewarm lead that comes along.  The salesperson that wants a Roadmap Briefing for their customer has to make an impassioned plea for why that makes sense.

2.  The roadmap is high level. It talks about areas of focus at the 20,000 foot level, and it calls out just a very few key features for each area of focus.  Features you’re absolutely certain you must have as part of the area of focus, and are therefore unlikely to change unless the whole focus changes.  It is not a detailed Market Requirement Document replete with UI mockups, giant bulleted feature lists, and all that stuff.  It’s just enough so that if the customer says they need “X”, you can tell them when you will be focusing on that area, ask to understand the exact problem they’re trying to solve, and render an opinion on when you might (or frankly might not) attempt to solve the problem.  The goal of such discussions is to assist the customer with the phasing of their own roadmaps, and to help them to understand whether the strategic direction they’re moving in matches your own direction.  In other words, is this marriage going to get better, or are we really destined to go our separate ways?

3.  We do not change the roadmap as part of a negotiation. We accept input that will be factored in, but we’re not going to talk about the outcome until post-sale.  This is a strong ingredient in selling what we have, or at least what we’re firm we intent to build.

4.  The roadmap is fluid.  Get the disclaimer out there right up front.  We’re not here to negotiate contractual obligations.  We’re hear to share our best thinking, and that can change based on new information.  We will promise not to act arbitrarily and capriciously, and to communicate well.  But we will also promise to be good businessmen intent on maximizing overall customer satisfaction as best we can.

5.  We do not talk much about how the features will work. Instead, we talk about the problems we intend to solve.  Benefits, not feature roadmaps.  These are not joint UI and Architecture design sessions.

6.  We’re very honest about not doing something, and very diplomatic about how we say “No”.  Product roadmap sessions are not the time to say “Yes” no matter what.  They’re the time to get some cards on the table and understand the problem the customer is really trying to solve.  If it’s a problem you think many of your customers have to solve, there is a strong business reason to tackle it, and you should say so.  If you don’t you need to get that out front too.  There are really a couple of different key “No’s” to be able to deliver:

-  This doesn’t make good business sense for very many of our customers, so therefore we aren’t going to go there.  If we hear more requests for it, we might revisit.

The subtext, particularly for smaller companies, is that the customer should want you to be successful by working on areas with the broadest demand.  Discuss this candidly and you will have implicitly helped that customer to understand their problem better too.  I have more than once seen a customer walk out of the discussion and wonder whether they might deep six the idea themselves if nobody else was doing it.  Customers know when they’re being unreasonable.  Those customers that know it and don’t care may not be the customers you want to divert your whole roadmap to satisfy anyway.

-  This makes sense, but it can’t be done immediately.  We’ll slot it into the roadmap, but it will be out there a ways.

Do not talk about your roadmap for more than 4 quarters out.  Anything beyond that is baloney anyway.  So the worst case answer is, “Yes, that makes sense, but it won’t be this year.  We’ll keep you in the loop and work with you as our roadmap unfolds.”

More than one very smart person has said negotiations don’t start until you say “No”.  Be honest with your “No’s” and your customers will respect your candor more so than the sucking up, even if they are handome and powerful men.  You may scare the odd sales person along the way, but they’ll recover when the customer decides to trust because they’ve had a real conversation with you and buys as a result.

Follow those 6 Best Practices, and you and your customers will be very happy that you’ve chosen to share your roadmaps.  Pray your competition decides not to share theirs.  Guess which meetings will make the customer feel like they have a better partner?

 

Black Hat Social Marketing (aka Maybe Scoble Was a Little Bit Right About Authenticity)

I have to admit: when Scoble blew up over the idea that the Facebook comments adopted by Techcrunch might reduce authenticity, I was convinced he was wrong.  The premise is a simple one: the Facebook commenting system forces you to leave comments under your real name.  The theory is that a lot of people will be afraid to say what they really think for fear of angering Techcrunch, which can make or break startups with their bully pulpit posts.

But then I happened to notice a weird thing in Eric Schonfeld’s Techcrunch article lambasting Adobe’s Wallaby for being weak.  It was the usual sort of Apple Fan Boy post you see so often on Techcrunch and a few other places.  He hated Wallaby, a Flash to HTML 5 translator, because it has limitations on which Flash features it can translate and there are bugs that can crash the browser.  Never mind that said limitations might be limitations of HTML 5′s current maturity not to mention the crashing of the browsers when fed HTML directly conflicts with Steve Jobs assertion that it was Flash doing the crashing.  I didn’t really expect much, but being a Flex developer and a great fan of the platform, I was out reading the articles on Wallaby and this was the only negative one I saw in my Google Reader.

So how did Scoble get to be a little bit right?  Well, of course you have to read the comments on Techcrunch.  They’re the real value on Techcrunch as I see it.  The posts are sort of like the Hockey Game and the comments are the Fights.  You’re there for the Fights, not the Hockey Game, silly!

One of the posters, Steven Sacks (hey, we get to know his real name), points out:

Ever since TechCrunch switched to Facebook comments, all their anti-Flash posts have a slew of comments supporting Flash. Prior to this, all the anti-Flash post comments were predominantly anti-Flash. Good to see all those anonymous posters don’t have the guts to post under their real names AND can’t write negative comments under numerous names.

Sure enough, there were a ton of comments, all but one were pro-Flash and very negative on Techcrunch as I write this.

That’s fascinating.  OTOH, I look at Scoble’s argument, and it seems obvious that if you can’t be anonymous and you want to say something negative, you might hesitate.  But here were folks not afraid to use their real names when trashing the mighty Techcrunch, and they were nearly all pro-Flash.  Where had all the Apple Fan Boyz in the commenting audience gone?

So far, I only have two working hypotheses:

First, maybe the Apple guys just didn’t get there yet.  Only problem with that is that the Techcrunch post went out several days ago, so they had time to mobilize.  That hypothesis is looking sketchy.

Second, maybe Techcrunch was being gamed.  What if a whole bunch of those anonymous Fan Boyz were actually just a very small number of people who disappeared once the veil of anonymity was no longer available?  Wouldn’t it be fascinating to know who they were?  Employees of an Adobe competitor even?

It’s fascinating to consider the impact on perception if you can scare up a virtual cyber mob any time you want to say anything you want and nobody is the wiser.  Maybe we’re seeing some evidence that just as there is Black Hat SEO, there can be Black Hat Social Too.

I actually don’t think Facebook is the cure for bad comments, but the dynamics we see here are fascinating.

Related Articles

4Chan founder says anonymity is authenticity.  I’ve decided the authenticity is a function of what’s being discussed.  Yes, there are topics where anonymity begets authenticity.  But as we’ve seen above, there can also be topics where anonymity begets manipulation.

Scoble does a good job explaining how anonymity hurts.

Efficient Marketing Means Doing Something Different

Startups have to solve three problems to succeed:

1.  They need a great product.

2.  They need a business model that results in profitable growing revenue.

3.  They need an efficient marketing model that results in a profitable growing customer base.

As Om Malik’s great post on business models and Twitter points out, too many companies are exclusively product-centric.  They’re focused on #1.  But just adding #2 isn’t enough either.  You also have to get the word out, and as a startup, you can’t afford the luxury of advertising as your medium.  You need Efficient Marketing.

By “Efficient Marketing”, I mean marketing that doesn’t cost much in relation to the value it delivers.  It’s marketing that is profitable from day one.  You know, the kind of marketing startups and bootstrapped companies have to do, but also the kind of marketing larger companies want to do.

Efficient marketing only happens when you do something different.  Something the rest of the crowd isn’t doing so much of.  Marketing is about standing out and getting noticed, and that’s hard to do if your marketing plan is the equivalent of standing in the middle of Times Square at midnight on New Year’s Eve and trying to make yourself be heard.

What are some examples of Efficient Marketing, and what are the ramifications of thinking about “Doing Something Different?”

First, on doing something different.  It’s ironic that most of us go through life studying what successful folks did and trying to emulate that success by doing the same thing.  The irony is that most of the time, when the successful folks did it, they were doing something different.  By the time we get around to copying them, it’s no longer unique, but we still wonder why copying their formula verbatim doesn’t work.  In this case, the old saw about insanity being the expectation of a different result when we do the same thing tells us that Marketing takes a little bit of craziness.  We expect the same result when we do the same thing, but we should be doing something different to get that successful result!

Assuming that last bit hasn’t gotten you completely confused, let’s delve into Marketing Differently.

As my loyal readers know, I am a huge proponent of Content Marketing.  Content Marketing is still relatively rare, though it is rapidly gaining in popularity.  It is a sub-genre of what Hubspot calls “Inbound Marketing.”  If you make the decision to lead with Content Marketing, you’re already doing something different from the masses.  But, consider how much further you might take it.  Instead of leading with a conventional corporate web site that’s all about you, how about leading with your content that’s all about delivering the value of the content free to people who might one day become your customers?  That’s pretty different, and you can go much further down that path than the Carbon Fiber Gear folks.

If you’re going to focus on Content Marketing, you’ll want to make sure your content has the opportunity to be different.  Are you in a space where there isn’t a lot of quality content available?  Some markets are better about that than others.  The first one to bring premier content to a market lacking in good content will be a big winner that’s hard to unseat because they have the benefit of inertia (they’re in everyone’s blog readers and already receiving the newsletters) and network effects (everyone is already referring others to this wonderful source).  So in the spirit of the 3 problems a startup must solve, check into whether your proposed business has the opportunity to excel with content.

As I have mentioned in the past, App Stores are another way to market differently or market different, as Apple might say.  But not all app stores are equal.  While they are relatively new, and a lot of companies have benefited by being early to the App Store craze, some are getting very crowded.  You’re no longer doing something different if you’re counting on a listing in the Apple app store to get your product noticed.

What to do?

Check this great article on how one game developer is finding the Android store to be more profitable than Apple (thanks Techmeme for bringing me this one!).  According to the article, “Spacetime, which is supported largely by in-app purchases, says its Android users generate 30 to 50 percent more revenue than its iOS users do.”  30 to 50 percent is huge, but why does it happen?  I love the money quote from Gary Gattis, Spacetime’s CEO:

“Android’s a smaller pond for apps right now,” he says. “The support on the Google side has been much more tangible — they’re really trying to nurture the gaming community.”

Bingo–right now, being on Android is doing something different.  As a result, Gattis says Spacetime has stopped advertising on Apple entirely and thrown their whole marketing budget behind Android.  That too is something very likely different.  Most companies love the idea of balanced scorecards–a little bit here, a little bit there, spread the risk.   Unfortunately, where marketing and a lot of other business is concerned, unless you’re already big and protecting your position, spreading the risk isn’t your job.  Take exceptional risk by doing things different and doing them big.  Double down on what works and try another experiment when it doesn’t work.

We’ve got Content Marketing, choosing the less popular App Stores (and potentially platforms), what about some of the common patterns?  For example, stealth launches.  I’m not a big fan.  First, you should be building content day one to attract the audience who will eventually buy your products.  Second, it’s been done to death.  There’s even a service now to automate it for you. With respect to Scoble and LaunchRock, how much is your startup going to accomplish if it does the same thing the last 1000 startups have done and uses a service to homogenize the experience on top of it?

Let’s try some more, rapid fire bullet style:

-  In an age where business views customers as “people with our money in their pockets”, what happens if you take a different and refreshing view of your customers.  By now you must have heard the Zappo’s story of exceptional Customer Service.  Others are catching on, but there’s still plenty of opportunity to be different in how you treat customers.

-  Advertising:  If you must advertise, you’d better do it where others aren’t.  That means finding the long tail keywords if you plan to use AdWords.  Keywords that others haven’t discovered so your ads run where they’ll be noticed and can be placed very cheaply.  How about advertising in specific online forums where your tribe may be found?  This can work if your tribe is focused and there isn’t already a ton of advertising there.  Running a bunch of ads on Facebook probably won’t quality.

-  E-mail campaigns:  Not a big fan of email to get noticed.  In this age of Spam, it’s too easy to do yourself more harm than good.  As a tool to nurture your audience after they’ve asked to be on the list and could opt out at any time, it works.  But look for ways to make your mailings different in some way.

-  Social Media:  Yeah sure, but the opportunity to be different is fast dwindling as everyone gets focused on the new new thing and it suddenly becomes the tired old thing.  As with email, figure out how to be different with Social Media, and realize that folks on the receiving end are even tougher about Social Spam than Email Spam.  What can you offer that is genuinely fresh and isn’t just gaming the Social Web?

-  Snail Mail:  Marketing moves in cycles as the herd seeks to do something different to improve response rates and cut costs.  Snail Mail direct marketing has been around forever, so it has probably seen more of these cycles than any other venue.  If you can strike at a time when the Snail Mail Direct tide has ebbed, you can stand out.  You’re going to have to do something different with the piece you mail and you’re going to have to test it to see whether there has really been an ebb and you can stand out.

-  Viral Marketing:  Everybody loves the idea.  It’s so compelling.  And so hard to realize when it’s your turn to try.  It may be too late to catch this train, unless you can come up with something that is different.  Many people are starting to complain they’ve hit the wall with viral signups.  Many platforms no longer make it easy to go viral on their coattails.  Find a way to be different if you want to succeed here.

The next time you’re sitting in a meeting, hashing through marketing programs, ask, “What’s different?”  If the answer is, “Well this worked for XYZ, they got really big on it,” ask yourself whether it’s too late to jump on that bandwagon because what XYZ did is no longer different.

Ask, “What are we doing to be different?”

Does the Internet Mean There Can Only Be One?

I read with interest today Hubspot’s coverage of their new monster VC round.  They’ve raised a $32M Series D monster round from Sequoia, Google, and Salesforce–certainly an all-start cast.

There’s a lot of interesting data in these announcements, such as Hubspot’s view of what market shares look like for the Marketing Automation category:

If true, and we should wait to hear what the other vendors have to say before concluding it is, it suggests Hubspot is blowing away their competition at Eloqua and Marketo, and not by just a little.  That’s pretty big news too.

But there was one part of these announcements that really caught my eye.  Brian Halligan says:

In industries formed prior to the internet, oligopolies naturally formed where there is a market leader holding 20% market share, a 2nd place competitor having 18% or so, a 3rd having 15%, etc.  In industries that have formed in the last 10 or so years, the opposite seems to be happening where the winner takes all (or at least 80% of the market cap in that given industry).  A few examples include Amazon, VMWare, Zappos, Salesforce.com, Google, and even Groupon.

Dharmesh Shah follows with:

For the following leading companies, see if you can name the #2 player and #3 in their category.  You have 30 seconds, I’ll wait:

• Amazon
• NetFlix
• VMWare
• eBay

Difficult, isn’t it?  Chances are you struggled a bit with coming up with the #2 and failed completely to come up with #3.  The point here is, as these tech categories evolved, the #1 player became so dominant that we often don’t even know who #2 and #3 are.

I don’t know about you, but I’m skeptical about this new “rule”.  There’ve been so many “rules” that the Internet has supposedly changed in some form or fashion.  I think it’s worht delving into this one.  First, is it really true that there can be only “one”, or is there something about this list or this environment that makes it a temporary abberation?

First, we could as well have asked whether there can be “only one” SaaS company in each category.  Certainly that market is closer to what HubSpot is than these companies they’re holding up as examples.

While there are not tons of companies, there is often more than one public SaaS company in a category.  I’m going to call that a strike against the “only one” hypothesis.  But, I will point out, that it is very difficult to fund a new SaaS company today and they take a lot of capital.  It may very well be that a factor at work here that has nothing to do with the Internet is the funding environment.  VC’s today are focused on companies that can be bootstrapped before they bring their millions to bear.  HubSpot got their first capital before we had fully entered that era.  It would be hard to found a company today on a slide show and team, which is where most of the SaaS world started.  So that’s a factor that has changed, but that could change back.  Personally, I think that when VC’s get tired of funding 12 different add-ons to each popular service, each with no perceivable barrier to entry, and each at the mercy of services like Twitter, they may start to look for opportunities with more substance than the usual Consumer Internet Plays that need no marketing.  From that perspective, the more firms like HubSpot that succeed, the better.  But, for the time being, we’re immersed in Dot Com Bubble 2.0 as huge valuations roil around us in markets where “there can only be one.”

Second, some of these companies mentioned have profound network effects.  That’s an ideal reason for there only to be one.  eBay is the best example.  I did an auction e-commerce business called PriceRadar that was aimed at delivering some cool optimal merchandising and selling tools for online auctions.  When we started there were circa 8 auction houses and more being announced all the time.  There were going to be not only huge horizontal auctions like eBay, but every major Internet service would have one (like Yahoo!), and there would be vertical auctions for industry (DoveBid).  Within 2 years very little was left except for eBay.  That’s how strong the network effects are for that business.  Netflix has network effects.  How many subscriptions to movies will a household tolerate?  Amazon may have network effects.  They are the online superstore merchandise-wise, they control some key franchises like books, they sell readers that read their books and create further network lock-in, and Clouds may have network effects due to latency.

The upshot of network effects is that there is a very short window for competitors to respond.  If they don’t, the compound interest associated with the network effect and the lock in makes it impossible to catch up.  That should be a sobering thought if you’re competing in a market with network effects, but it isn’t clear to me that Hubspot is.  Do companies plug and unplug their marketing automation software?  To some extent they do.  I was given that perspective by no less an authority than a key executive at one of the three Marketing Automation companies I’ve mentioned so far in this post.  Color me skeptical about network effects for these guys.

What else leads to just one?

Platforms, which are related to network effects.  Sometimes they become so pervasive you must deal with them.  Google owns search.  Facebook is another.  The network effects aren’t as striking as eBay’s when you deal with a platform, but it is a function of needing to be compatible with the status quo and it being too hard to reinvent all the wheels you get with the platform.  Oracle and SAP have platforms in this sense.

What about VMWare?

That one is pretty easy–there are VM managers that are just as popular as VMWare, but they’re Open Source.  You could argue MySQL was just as popular as the big DB vendors, but never hit their revenues because they were Open Source.  This is a scary thing about building a business around Open Source–you may succeed without getting much for it.  It’s very tricky to find exactly the right balance that ignites passion while delivering profits.

How about properties like Groupon?

Man, hard to believe they won’t see a #2 and #3 that make good money.  Living Social is already on that road.  Moreover, there’s been a spate of articles lately that are finally recognizing that coupons aren’t really even all that unique and they may not be the best thing for you and your customers in terms of fostering a long-term relationship.  It’s like the world started switching from newspapers to online media and forgot to bring their coupons along.  So, wow, Groupon is great, I have coupons again!  And then pretty soon we’ve got coupons coming from 18 different mailing lists, we’ve got flash shopping sites, we’ve got small businesses getting hit with tons of visitors who buy below cost and then never come back, and we realize we weren’t missing all that much.

I’m not buying “there can only be one”.  There may only be one if the others don’t get moving soon enough, and the Internet may shorten that window, but that’s all it does.

What do you think?

Related Articles

David Raab, longtime marketing automation expert, raises a little heck with the idea that the game is over, there can be only one, and it is Hubspot.  He also pointed to the little inconsistency in Hubspots graph of lead sources which shows email and not inbound to be the lion’s share.  That caught my eye too.  Read David’s article to see what Dharmesh had to say on that one (good explanation).

Google’s New Algorithm Puts Content in the Driver’s Seat

I saw the difference Google’s new algorithm was making to reduce spam the very first time I tried one of the searches I do very commonly.  Almost all of the old favorites I was used to ignoring because I knew that a quickly through would buy me nothing were gone.  A host of new sites that showed quality results had taken their place.

Bravo Google!

I can’t say that every query is enormously improved, but the difference is very noticeable.  I use Google for research, usually pretty deep research of various topics.  When I go looking for information, I want high quality deep content, not somebody’s ad-laden content farm that tells me in 63 languages the obvious things I already know.  This is cool, but it sends an important signal to marketers:

Content is Back in the Driver’s Seat!

This is not something I have had any doubts about, even before the algorithm change, and I’ve written about it in several posts:

-  Who is Your Chief Content Officer?

- Content Marketers: Are you a Teacher, a Curator, or a Pundit?

- Content Trumps SEO and Links

I have this belief that content trumps SEO and Links not out of any religious fervor, but because I have seen it firsthand.  I have a hobby business that I use to test Boostrapping strategies, tools, and techniques on.  It’s website is called CNCCookbook, and it caters to machinists both home shop and professional.  Despite the fact that the graphic design would make any decent designer shudder, the navigation is a mess, and most of all there is no SEO done to it whatsoever, it regularly produces fantastic amounts of traffic.

Consider this Compete report on the traffic received by CNCCookbook, the market leader in CAD/CAM and a $100M+ business (Mastercam), and one of the most popular and rising star competitors (Gibbscam):

If you’re running a startup, especially a bootstrapped startup, your #1 problem is how to get noticed.  What would it be worth to you to have the same traffic to your site as your $100M a year competitor?  For most companies, achieving that goal could only be a dream, but here’s CNCCookbook managing to accomplish it with a hobby site against much larger players.  How?  With content.  The other guys have standard corporate websites if you check out the links.  FWIW, I sat down and figured out one time how much I had invested in the CNCCookbook content that accounts for the lion’s share of inbound traffic.  The answer was about 1 Bob-year of effort (YMMV).

CNCCookbook is not my only experience with this strategy.  We made my last company, Helpstream, get noticed with content in a remarkably short time.  I am still asked by executives of competitors how we got so much PR so fast.  They don’t believe me when I tell them it was the content.

As a result of all this, I have been telling startups that there are two “first things” they must do to get started.  The First-First thing is all the obvious moves around building a product that every startup knows.  But the Second-First thing is to get started building your content Day One.  Don’t go into Stealth mode and hide out all coy.  That stuff is getting old and lame.  It was cute the first 100 startups that did it, but it doesn’t cut any ice any more.  There’s no street cred in it.  Saying nothing does nothing in a world where it is so easy for so many to say something.

Instead, start creating content.  Figure out how to make your site the go-to destination site for people who are likely to be your customers.  Do not start out marketing anything to them.  Give them valuable content.  Free.  Give them plenty of it.  Do not hide your content behind registrations or other standard marketing nonsense.  Get it out there.  Make visiting your site to check your opinion on anything in your space an automatic impulse for anyone who has the slightest chance of being your customer.

Why?  Because you need to be noticed.  And because these Google algorithm changes are the first shots in a war that isn’t going to end.  Search needs to improve its results and it will do that by identifying content that consumers find valuable.

Does that mean you don’t need SEO or Inbound Links?  What does it mean about Social?

Good points.  I had a good SEO consultant take a look at CNCCookbook because I wanted to quantify what could be done.  His initial reaction on analyzing pages was that it would be a piece of cake to improve the site–I had done none of the standard things SEO espouses.  Then he started analyzing search results to create a baseline against which to measure the improvements.  Eventually he came to me and said, “Bob, I’m not sure how much we’re going to be able to improve these results–you’re getting some really good rankings already, better than a lot of my other clients after SEO.”

Fred Wilson says marketing is for crappy products.  I don’t agree with that at all, unless you substitute as Seth Godin did “advertising” in place of marketing.  However, one could argue that SEO is a bandaid for crappy content.  That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t SEO your content, but get some great content first, especially if you have little or no marketing budget.

On the question of links, they are hugely valuable but there are scary penalties for cheating.  Just ask JC Penny.  Any kind of cheating or gaming isn’t worth the potential downside, particularly now that we’re seeing competitors report each other to Google.  Yet, links still drive the mighty Page Rank and they matter.  A lot.  So how do we get links?  How about by creating content that’s worth linking to?  How about by creating content that gives away value for free instead of spamming “calls to action?”   Now you’re catching on.

As for Social, it works the same as links.  There are penalties for cheating, and cheating is way less effective anyway in a social context.  If you want to be talked about, give ‘em something to talk about.  Get deeper than the usual marketing messages.  Quit selling so hard you can’t close and deliver some value.  Become a trusted advisor to your community.  Then selling is easy.

Last words:  Get ready for the pendulum to tilt more and more to quality content.  Content is the New Marketing.  Changes in Google’s Algorithms will only accelerate that trend!

Related Articles

Chris Dixon writes that SEO is dead and Danny Sullivan responds, thanks Techmeme!

Dixon’s issue is he doesn’t see any big startups succeeding with SEO.  The comment thread is very telling as people like Dharmesh Shah, Dave McClure, and Fred Wilson wade in to say he is wrong.

His article would pass for me if he means SEO = gaming the search engines versus writing great comment.

On the question of, “How else besides search can startups get noticed?”, I would consider that there are two alternatives we’ve seen more and more of in recent years:

-  Viral Growth.  My favorite example is EchoSign, just because it isn’t a gimmick.  It’s a service for businesses aimed at signing contracts electronically.  One you sign an average of 6 EchoSign contracts, you like the service well enough you’re ready to look at using it for your own business.

-  App Stores.  Where we rely on the virtuous conflation of a popular platform and getting to the app store relatively early.  Needless to say, arriving the new kid in today’s world is tough.  There are a lot of apps competing for your attention.

I still believe quality content used to deliver search traffic is the best way for Startups to get noticed.  Add to that PR, which is very much related as it happens these days online and via blogs, and you have a winning formula.

The 1972 Chouinard Catalog

I’m certainly nowhere near the first person to suggest that content marketing matters, but as I was writing this post, I came across this wonderful note from 37Signals (a company that has made its bones marketing via content) about the 1972 Chouinard climbing catalog.  Check it out.  The catalog is a masterpiece of content.  I remember similar catalogs from my youth. For example, the Leica catalog always had the most wonderful content about the value of different lenses.  You could learn a lot reading that catalog even if you could never afford an expensive Leica camera.

Quick Thoughts on A/B Testing for Boostrappers

First thing is, if you’re not A/B testing, you’re missing out.  It’s an absolutely essential tool for marketers.  It’s completely free and easy too, thanks to tools like Google’s Website Optimizer.

Second thing: most of what you test will fail!

Yeah, pretty crazy, huh?  It’s true.  I keep an agile backlog (fancy way of saying a little more than a todo list and a little less than a project) of marketing ideas for my bootstrap experiments.  I subscribe to a number of blogs and come across all sorts of ideas and advice for marketing landing pages.  Luckily, I started out being pretty agnostic due to my marketing mentor’s (Marc Randolph, the guy that came up with the idea for Netflix) advice that all marketing is tragically knowable through testing.  But it really is amazing to go through the litany and see what works and what doesn’t.

So far, I have found that the most reliable things boil down to eliminating clutter, making things harder hitting but terser, and the like.  Streamline.  Things I have had less success with:

-  Focusing on benefits instead of features.  You hear this incessantly from marketers, but it doesn’t necessarily always hold true.  My suspicion is my audience already had a pretty good idea what they wanted to get by way of benefits and were focused on whether they believed the features would deliver those benefits.  Eliminating too much discussion of the features made the landing page less impactful.

-  Headline tuning.  They tell you the headline is absolutely the most important thing you can tune.  For whatever reason, my initial headline was a winner.  Every blessed alternative I’ve tried has been inferior.  Even the ones I thought ought to work better.

Aside from making the page more concise and hard hitting, things that have worked have been things that subjectively reduced risk.  Familiar credit card logos and a written guarantee, for example.

Third thing:  the test ain’t over ’till the fat lady sings!  Yep, it is amazing to watch tests go up and down.  Do not stop the test until your A/B test software’s confidence interval is telling you it is a valid result.  I’ve had tests start out great and look like a slam dunk and then suddenly go south until they were clearly a bad idea.  Google says not to quit until you’ve had at least 100 visitors check out each alternative.  It often takes 200-300 to be sure.  Until you get a statistically significant result, you have to keep going.

Last quick thought: if most of what you test will fail, and if it takes at least 100 and perhaps 200-300 trials, be careful spending too much traffic testing if revenue matters.   You need to be constantly testing new things, otherwise, how will you discover things that work?  And, since most things don’t improve the response rate, that begets even more testing.  But, if all of your traffic is directed to tests, and most of the tests don’t work, what happens to your response rate?  Darn!  I hate when that happens!

I am fortunate to have a web site that delivers 60,000 unique visitors a month to use as my bootstrap test bed.  Even so, I don’t like to spend more than 50% of the traffic on the testing.  I tee up something at the beginning of the week, and generally a week to a week and a half will yield a result.  I keep the winner and tee up another set of tests.  Even so, if 50% of your traffic isn’t pulling because it is stuck doing tests that mostly don’t improve the response rate, that’s hard on your results.

Such is the life of an A/B tester!

Postscript

If there is anything that will convince you that it’s risky betting your marketing on your gut, A/B testing will do it.  My mentor, Marc Randolph was right, marketing is tragically knowable.  Don’t make the mistake of not knowing!

Virtualization Made Mac What it is Today

Sam Diaz is writing about Apple’s latest Draconian App Store subscription policies and how they’re not a bad thing.  Forrester CEO George Colony says Apple is headed for a repeat of their defeat at the hands of Windows with these policies:

We know what happened — the world has had to use a lowest-common denominator PC operating system for decades, with excursions into wonderful places like Vista. This time around, Apple’s hostile position could result in a 2014 App Internet market that looks something like this: 80% Android, 10% Apple, 10% Other.

Colony’s concern is that this is the formative time for app consumption and app markets.  It’s too early to exert a monopolist’s egregious tax on those markets.  People aren’t locked in enough yet.

Diaz has a counter-argument:

Here’s the thing: Colony says that like it’s a bad thing. Say what you will about Apple’s share of the PC market – but the fact is that Apple’s lineup of Mac computers are far superior to anything that’s running Windows. And increasingly, quarter after quarter, the company notes that its share is growing and that about half of the Mac purchases in a single quarter have been by consumers who switched from Windows.

My problem with Sam’s argument is that none of that shift started happening until Virtualization meant you could have your Mac cake and eat some Windows software too.  It isn’t really clear they’re leaving the door open to do that with their App Store policies.  This isn’t about not only having Apple wonderfulness PLUS everything else in the world when Apple doesn’t happen to have the right answer.  It’s about ONLY having the Apple wonderfulness and being glad of it, dammit.

It’s going to be interesting to see what happens come the June 30 deadline for compliance with the new policies.  We will no doubt get hints along the way.  As an iPad user who set aside his Kindle but still constantly reads using the iPad’s Kindle app, I’m keenly interested.

During his last go-round with book publishers and Amazon, Steve Jobs largely managed to get book prices on Kindle raised.  That may turn out to be the result here too.  Kindle charges a “publishing expense” fee back to the book publishers.  So far it covers the wireless costs for Kindle’s built-in Sprint modem.  Perhaps Amazon will decide to roll the iPad 30% into that fee, making books sold there dramatically less profitable for publishers.  There would be a certain poetic justice in that.  The publishers leaned on Jobs to break one walled garden only to see another spring up immediately in its place.  What are they going to do about this one?