Marketing strategies

Howdy! I am back.

Last week was the Thanksgiving weekend in the US. Having no direct connection with the Mayflower boat people, it is not really a major holiday for me as such. On the other hand, I would take a four day weekend any time.

It is kind of sad that the business environment in the US is quite stingy when it comes to vacation in the name of higher productivity output. The worse part is that France has higher per capital hourly productivity despite the 35 hour work week. I do not know what this means really, but I can tell you that I was green with envy when Isa told me that she had ONLY six weeks of vacation in her very first full time job. I became a serious francophil all of a sudden then.

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Thanksgiving notwithstanding, life continues to be hectic.

All is going well in the case study land. Just got a new case study done with a well known medical school. The trick is to get that news out to the press. So, I am working with the PR agency to get a feature story for an IT publication and a medical trade journal. Fingers crossed.

But the true excitement these day is the website revamp. After all the noises and posturing, I am finally getting down to the nitty gritty of getting the new website implemented. It is somewhat of a thankless task but it has to be done. The tricky part is that I am working with an outside web implementer with whom I have never worked with. I am, to be candid, a bit anxious as to how the initial output would be. It is sort of like dating - we are still trying to figure out how much we would like each other's style.

One major stumbling block is that the web designer is holding onto the design templates until we cut a check for her work. That is reasonable. I am hoping that she would send me a file or two so we can get started as the payment process will take a few more days and I want the implementer to get started yesterday. This is one of those little tricky things working for a startup - gotta manage the cash flow and work within these limitations.

In the Google land, I continue to experiment with new ideas. My latest is to have each keywords in all three matching incarnations - broad, phrase, and exact. So, for example, if =chocolate cookies= is a keyword that I want, I would have chocolate cookies, [chocolate cookies] and, "chocolate cookies" in my keywords list. It was not obvious at first that the performance would be significantly different. On the other hand, the matching is different and both the impression and conversion rate also differ. This is kind of freaky actually, but I am glad that I found it.

Google recently made Urchin a free offering as Google Analytics. I was all gun-ho about implementing it for the new website as part of the on-going optimization process. But, I was just been told that it is closed to applicants as the flood of requests had overwhelmed the current infrastructure. So un-cool! After all, my needs are obvious more pressing than the rest!

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I have been pushed quite a bit lately on increasing the lead flow. The irony is that I am generating more than enough leads for the current sales team. Actually, they are feeling a bit overwhelmed by the flow. But the concern is that if we ramp up with more sales people, we would need more leads.

The problem right now is that we do not seem to be able to find the sales people we want. And, until we get the sales infrastructure in place, the desire to generate more leads is kind of academic. And, if anything, I would not want to generate a significantly higher level of interests if we do not have the sales coverage for it.

Nevertheless, I have been thinking about what are the possible venues to boost leads. The major caveat being that I do not want to adversely impact the per lead acquisition cost - after all, it is all too easy to throw money to the wind and hope for best. (Alas, it brings back memories of the exploits of the internet bubble. Ah, those were the heady days...)

So, the first thing is to work the existing leads harder. To the extent that sales does not have the resources to cover the current lead flow, it is quite possible that there are perfectly good leads that are being neglected. To what extent is that a problem, or how much more we can squeeze at the current level, I do not know. There is no way for me to know in a quantitative sense beyond gut feels. I have been arguing for having an in-house lead person to scrub the leads for a while but there is reluctance because there is the perception that the same investment would yield better return if we hire another sales person instead. Maybe, maybe not. I will do some analysis and see if I can come up with a more compelling argument backed by numbers.

The second thing is to tap into the existing network of resell partners. They each have an install base and it would be good to be able to target their in-house list and see if we can convert them into customers. The key issues right now is how to structure a program where the partners are incentivized to do this kind of joint-marketing activity. I have worked with a few partners and the preliminary result has not been encouraging.

There are also a slew of SEO and on-line marketing activities that I am working on. They all look promising and I am sure that they will yield good results. But, I do not know if it would be a spike or just incremental changes.

PR, my new hope. It is going okay. I cannot say empirically that the new PR firm is better than the old one. There does seem to be more activities in terms of ramping up. So, we are not getting that much more media coverage. Yet. But, we are definitely getting more briefing opportunities. There are also scintillating promises of more coverage as we roll out more case studies and new product releases. On this point, I just need to keep on their rear to make sure that they deliver as much as possible.

A few ideas. it is late. I am going home. :-)!

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Getting by

It is kind of late. So, I will make it short and sweet.

I am swamped and this sucks.

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15 seconds of fame

When it comes to internet groups, I am pretty much your average lurker. Taking lots of notes but maintaining radio silence all the same. So, it was kind of surprising to be mentioned by somebody in the AdWords Help group about my dynamic keywords posting. Beyond being flattered, it was really a bit surprising to know that people actually read my blog.

People! Surely you have better things to do?

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The truth is that I am not terribly motivated this week. So, instead of coming up with new brilliant ideas, if I've ever achieved one, I focused on house keeping tasks. For example, finalizing case studies and press releases. The trouble of working with a PR firm on writing works is that the writer would never know as much as you do. So, it is a futile effort to demand the writer to somehow translate your thoughts into words in a manner that you had imagined. This minor insight took me years to realize as I used to fight with the writers. In my current wiser age, I just take whatever has been written as the base and go at it with a critical eye to have the piece say exactly what I want to say. Oh, and, I also control the input, so I give the writer the script, usually interview notes, on what the piece is about. Not sure if this means I am a control freak, but it does significantly minimize surprises and re-writes.

But, no system is 100% fool-proof. For whatever reason, the writer refuses to change the boilerplate information on these pieces. (In case you are wondering, boilerplate refers to the standardized text that describes the company/product that you just copy and past at the end of a press release.) I have told him several times and also furnished him with the latest boilerplate file. So, earlier today, I was going over a new piece and updating the boilerplate info.

But, it is not all work and no play with the PR people. Recently, I received a care package from my PR account manager. She recently went on a business trip to Europe and I jokingly suggested that she should bring back some bonbons. So, when I open up an overnight package this afternoon, I was pleasantly surprised with some chocolate goodies. Like the saying about happiness to a man's heart is through his stomach, the happiness to a client's heart may very well go by the same route...

I have been busy in the case study land lately. My graphic designer asked me why I keep including a picture of the client in these case studies. "Elementary," said I. What more cost effective way is there to give the client that extra incentive to flaunt his/her recent appearance in a nicely formatted document that says nothing but how smart they are? Viral marketing in its best, I would submit.

KS program has been running for about one week now. No significant pickup just yet. I see a lot of Google alerts as the content propagates throughout the KS network. The latest being Germany. But, I only see a trickle of inquiries. But, it is still early in the program and I shall continue to monitor the program with bated breath.

The program with InfoSearch, on the other hand, is giving me some unease. As noted last week, the keyword selection has been over and I was notified that I would be contacted by a copy writer to start the content development process. Nothing. I sent an email to ask what is the next step and was told that the copy writer will not contact me until next week. The reason for my unease is the fact that all these time, my meter is running. So, if InfoSearch drags out the process, I would have to pay for the time when I do not have the content. I am not thinking of the worst, but this is a concern. I will bug my account manager about this. I need to make my marketing budget count!

I am working on my November newsletter. There is a format that I follow and I have more than enough content to put something together. The special challenge for this newsletter actually has to do with a challenge to use a specific word in a clear and meaningful sentence. Still working on it. (Yeah, this is how you create "fun" in marketing land. At least the challenge is not to use the seven forbidden words. Not yet, anyway.)

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A random thought. I just watched the 10 year edition of "Leon, the professional". Great film. Anyway, as I was enjoying the film, I came to the realization that Natalie Portman was a better actress in the Professional than she ever was in the new Star Wars. Granted that I am partial to the original trilogy, but she was in a much more fluid form as an 11 year old girl who wanted to become a hit-man.

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Muahhaa...

Happy Halloween.

Speaking of this candy infested day. I have one report and one bone to pick. First of all, I'd completely forgotten about the day and when I went home in the evening, my neighborhood was crawling with kids. The problem was that I had neither the candy nor the time to entertain these little critters. (I know it sounds kind of un-neighborly but I am being honest here.) So, I had to employ the time honored strategy of shutting off all lights in the house to simulate the appearance of nobody's-home. Beyond feeling pathetic, I had to break out my flashlight several time to find stuff in the house.

On the bone picking part, what is the story with Halloween candies? Specifically, what kind of scary ingredients are people concocting these days? I mean it tastes nothing like the Halloween candies of yore. If I am going to fatten myself with sugar and other junk, at least make it taste good!

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Right. Back in the Marketing grind.

Most important grip for the day. My color printer is dying. I use it to print collateral for our sales super heroes. In the old days, the printer used to jam every other day. Then, it started to jam every other job. Now, it jam on every page. This is a serious pain. Why people do not take their file delivery in digital form is beyond me. Anyway, I am searching for a new color printer and if you have any suggestion, please let me know.

Right, so last week I was mumbling about my experience with FindWP. The changes seemed to have yield some result. The key thing being that, I am theorizing, I also upped the bidding amount to get #1-3 position in the listing. The quality of the click-through improved meaningfully. However, it also chew up my budget extremely quickly at about 2x to 3x of the prior rate. Bigger budget is not an issue as such if the ROI is there. But, the quantum leap in budget does require me to sit down and regroup a bit. Unfortunately, I have been too busy to do that - no time to think. Hope to get on it next week.

Also signed up with KnowledgeStorm which is another whitepaper/case study serving service. It differs from FindWP in the delivery method - people click on KS's links instead of my links. Then, KS delivers the users info in a spreadsheet. KS does a good job of making the whole thing as painless as possible by creating the content for the whole campaign. However, having a disinterested third party creating the content has the disadvantage of not having that crispness in good copy writing. So, I spent some time before it went life to enter in all the keywords to boost its performance. I still need to scrub the rest of the detail contents but that will take a bit of time.

Another question on KS. Since I was clicking on some of my listings to see what is is like for users, I do wander if my info will be "captured" and sent to me as a lead. They better not! And, if they do, I will demand that my info not be counted toward the minimum raw leads guaranteed. We will see tomorrow as the daily leads info come in.

Another service InfoSearch which provides targeted content for better natural search ranking. Just finished the keyword selection process. It is an interesting exercise to see how these "experts" come up with the most relevant set of phrases. We started with the Google AdWords campaign keywords as the seed. Some of the initially proposed keywords had the issue of relevance, the lack thereof, when created by disinterested third party. That happens. But, what I find a bit disturbing is that some of the proposed terms I already have very high natural search ranking (#1 or #2). I am not paying to get these terms targeted since I am already there. Between you and me, you would think that the professionals would have the sense to scrub the proposed list by doing searches against Google before presenting to the clients. Anyway, this one is going along fine. I cannot wait to see the initial contents.

On the PR front, I am a bit inundated with case studies, press releases, etc. This is a good problem, I suppose. I am in the middle of getting two case studies formatted for production. I have one case study waiting for final approval. I have a press release approved which I hope to push out soon. Another press release is kind of stuck because the customer who is giving us a quote is dragging his foot - I may decide to switch the customer to get the press release moving. Finally, I need to get a partners release produced. And, this is just what is going on this week!

My PR firm is doing their job. I will have a good chat with them tomorrow. Partly to cover the various activities underway. The other is to see if we can get more press pick-up. I know it is not the easiest thing but they is why we are paying the big bucks!

Oh, not sure if I've mentioned this before. Part of the grand scheme with the press release is to structure it so that it is also optimized for search engine. The upcoming releases all have varying degree of search engine optimization. It will be interesting to see how the experiment pends out.

Producing another newsletter. This one is for the install base. I got feedback from some of the customers that they feel a bit "lonely" since we do not talk with them that regularly. Hey, if people want to hear my rambling, I am game.

Not doing a heck of a lot on the Google front. I am running the budget optimization thing and have been adding a new keyword here and there. I am sort of in my maintenance mode. Most of my Google exciting these days come from the AdWords Help group where people ask the most obvious of questions. I know it is unnatural to look for documentations, but, people!, asking obvious questions do not improve your stature in my mind...

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BTW, just thought that you should know I only learnt of the expression "Muahhaa..." recently from JC, a Californian transplant in Texas, who is many years junior and, in all likelihood, smarter than I am. But, hey, an old dog can too learn to say Muahhaa...

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