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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