How do you choose technology for your online marketing?

I just read a great article on MarketingProfs that talked about what marketers should consider when looking at different online marketing technologies.  I think the information in this article is very valuable for any marketer looking to add new technologies in their marketing mix.

I think this advice is especially important for those looking at our TestDrive online demo service and have never been exposed to online demos in the past.

Some of the principles they recommend considering when making a decision in online marketing technology:

• Familiarize Yourself With the Terminology
•  Define and Prioritize Your Objectives
•  Avoid Commoditization
•  Automation and Integration
•  Training Is the Key to Success

Click here to read more about these guidelines and the entire article about Guidelines for Choosing Online Marketing Technology.

Do you consider any of these things when evaluating new technologies?  Are there any other principles you would use when looking at new technologies for your online marketing?

Ideas for a Successful Holiday Marketing Season

Regardless of what your business is selling, email can play a very significant role in terms of profits. However keep in mind impacting your bottom line requires more than just filling up inboxes. Your success depends on earning trust and putting the subscribers first to ensure they receive emails that are timely, meaningful, and relevant.

A few thoughts on how to make your Q4 more jolly this season:

Early Bird Gets the Worm.
We should all be taking a cue from retail stores, supermarkets and other retailers who start putting out holiday decorations and flyers between Halloween and Thanksgiving. It’s much better to have shoppers pick up a purchase from you early, than for them to wait until the last minute once they’ve already overspent their budget and not likely to spend as much.

Don’t OD on the Email
Pass up the temptation to send email too often. This can be difficult since competition for email users’ attention gets intense in the holiday season as businesses try to make various sales goals. Stay away from the mentality that “the more I send, the more chances I have to make a sale!”Remember all that email adds up. So don’t take the chance your subscribers could soon be crying “spam!”

Offer Customer Loyalty Savings
Use email marketing around the holidays to reward returning or long-standing customers with special offers or discounts to show them that you value their business and look forward to working with them in the new year.

Get into the Spirit of the Season
Giving is the heart of the holiday season, and part of that selfless spirit is reaching out to the less fortunate.

Select a charity to donate a percentage of your sales to. Tell your subscribers what percentage you’ll donate from their purchases. Track your total donation as sales increase, and then send that information to your subscribers. Purchases made that also help others will make your customers feel good about not only what they bought but also the company that it came from.

Have some great BtoC holiday marketing ideas to share? We loved to hear them!

How to accomplish software marketing in an economic downturn – Inbound Marketing

I regularly follow a blog called the Inbound Internet Marketing Blog published by a company called HubSpot.  Inbound marketing is the type of marketing where you are attracting customers to you rather than having to go out and get customers.  The Inbound Marketing Blog often has interesting articles on tactics and topics that can help all marketers increase the traffic to their sales department.

As the news of our economic hardship has been all over the TV and internet, I've been thinking a lot about how to continue our marketing efforts - especially as it's going to be harder and harder for businesses to spend money.  Hubspot had some great suggestions that I think are very valuable - here is an excerpt from their post:


"R.I.P Good Times"
That was the message from Silicon Valley venture capital firm Sequoia Capital last week. In a slide show it presented to its portfolio company CEOs, it documented the roots of our current economic problems, the outlook for recovery and advised caution.

For marketers, the most chilling piece of the Sequoia presentation is a slide on the advertising market. They show the total U.S. market beginning to shrink and growth of online advertising beginning to slow.


Sequoia's advertising numbers say more about ADVERTISING than they do about MARKETING. Companies are not marketing LESS, they're just finding ways to market BETTER.
If you pull a Chicken Little, assume the sky is falling and retreat from marketing, you will be devoured by competition that figures out how to market more efficiently.

Specifically, we're doing three things:
(1) Creating More, Better Content -- The economy isn't going to slow down our content production -- it's just going to force us to get more rigorous about assessing the content we create. We're going to do a better job of creating content that engages people, helps us get found, and interests qualified customers. We're also going to rethink the way we organize our content.

If you want to read the other 2 things Hubspot is doing to increase their inbound marketing, you can read the entire article here.

Webinar: Optimizing your TestDrive Demos: Profile, Target, Convert

In our 2nd educational webinar, Optimizing Your TestDrive Demos: Profile, Target, Convert, Olivier Chaine, the CEO and Founder of magnify360 (www.magnify360.com), a Runaware technology partner, will share the 3 most effective steps to maximizing the conversion rate of your TestDrive demos. Registrants will also take away proven strategies to optimize their other marketing channels with the user data revealed from TestDrive.

Called a “Hot Company to Watch” by Forrester Research, magnify360 is the expert in behavioral targeting and profiling.

This 30 minute presentation will show you how to use TestDrive Demos to automatically test and serve the most effective micro site content, layout and page flow to drive visitors towards purchases, subscriptions or other calls to action.

Join us for a short but informative presentation followed by a Q&A. Don’t miss the live webinar so that you can participate and ask questions specific to your business!

When: Tuesday, October 21st, 10AM PT/ 12PM CT/ 1PM ET

Speaker: Olivier Chaine, CEO and Founder, magnify360 

Register:  https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/449609121

The Next Generation - SaaS? Virtualization? Cloud Computing?

Recently on Motley Fool, Anders Bylund wondered if virtualization is getting played out as a hot technology and is on the brink of being replaced by cloud computing. This is just a few weeks after VMWare’s attempt to redefine virtualization did little to wow analysts. Is this the beginning of the end for virtualization?

To me, this question sounds like the kind of alarmism we’ve seen in this phase of many technology cycles. As any new technology approaches commoditization, the nature of product innovation must be adjusted.

There are several successful strategies for how to differentiate product offerings in a commoditized market, most revolving around different ways to apply the base technology to specific verticals or interesting combinations or mash-ups with other technologies. In How Breakthroughs Happen (ISBN: 1-57851-904-7), Andrew Hargadon argues that the mash-up process has always been the main engine for technology innovation. Technology factories created by Thomas Edison, Henry Ford and at the Xerox PARC were all based around this process.

I had a great view of one such transition in process. At Citrix 8-9 years ago, there was a vocal subgroup in the engineering department who wondered what could possibly be added to the Presentation Server product line since all possible features for Server Based Computing had been built and market penetration was virtually absolute. While Presentation Server feature development never stopped, Citrix also adopted a strategy of expanding into adjacent markets. I was fascinated to see how each new product added into the product line provided fertile new areas of feature ideas and combined value until the limits of the old product had been rubbed out. The continued evolution from Server Based Computing to Access Infrastructure to Application Virtualization to Application Delivery has succeeded in redefining the original technology in a way that VMWare has still not been able to manage.

Still, while the core technology of OS virtualization has been commoditized, it has in no way become less relevant. Mr. Bylund does grudgingly admit that cloud computing relies heavily on OS virtualization but seems to think this represents small comfort for virtualization vendors. In fact, as each new technology innovation wave builds on the last it is the very experts in the building blocks from the previous wave who have the best insight into the recombinant forms of the base technologies. To utilize these insights requires the organization overcoming Clay Christiensen’s Innovators Dilemma, and the individuals learning to see beyond the lines they’ve used to define themselves for years. It’s not always easy, and history is littered with companies that have failed to meet the challenge, but the future is bright for any virtualization vendors who do.

At the same time the mash-up process, like its close cousin evolution, has always favored diversity. Many of the more interesting applications of the virtualization/cloud computing/Software as a Service evolution are coming because now that the tool box is so full of options, areas like online application marketing and application rental can take radically new approaches to old problems and dramatically change companies abilities and options to reach new customers. My guess is that the next big buzz word that in a few years will be “about to kill cloud computing” will be growing from a combination of several of these seeds.

Thinking about a corporate blog?

Like so many other marketing professionals out there, especially those that work for smaller companies, the internal question of blogging I am sure has come up on your plate more than once in the past year.

At this point in the game you will never know unless you try. Remember not all social networking efforts are for all companies but assuming that is not for your company is just being short sighted in an unpredictable online world. In my opinion if you have customers you have readers and if you have readers and tap into them they will give you feedback. Planning ahead is key when starting your corporate blog.

Here are some key things to keep in mind when taking on a corporate blog.

1. Figure out what will be the focus of your blog
Will it be about uses for your product and making the most out of key features or will it focus on addressing the needs of your customer and getting their feedback to improve your product? A blog can be about anything but its best to keep it focused so as to ensure you get the best results from your efforts.

2. What type of blog will you have
Corporate blogs can be broken down into 4 mani categories: CEO blogs, Aggregate blogs, Staff blogs and Customer blogs.
CEO blog: This is usually written by a senior level executive, it does not have to be the CEO. The author is typically considered to be a thought leader and helps to provide a view of the company.
Aggregate blog: This type of blog has several contributors. A broader range of subjects can be presented when using more than one author which makes for a more interesting content overall. This type of blog is also easier to take on if your resources are tight and there is no one individual that could keep up with frequent postings and comments of the blog. Our very own Runaware Software Marketing and Technology blog is a perfect example of an aggregate blog.
Staff blog: Staff blogs allow for the employees to take center stage and offer their own thoughts and feelings on products thus producing a more human side of the company.
Customer blog: These blogs are written and driven by your customers and what they think about your products.

3. Know how you will handle comments
Having a plan for handling comments is important. In a perfect world everyone would love your product and never have a bad experience or even a major "fatal error" episode, but we don't live in that modern day utopia so it's best to expect some less than desirable comments will come your way. So before even starting your blog you will need to be thinking about things like...will you moderate comments? If you do decide to have a moderator than your next step is to create a process and a point person to review those comments before they get posted and in what timely manner you will give a response back. If a reader feels you are not committed to an open dialog they could very well let others know this. So make sure to keep up with the comments that come in.
Keep in mind at all times that you want to encourage your blog readers to comment it's what makes a blog a living, breathing entity. Many companies don't do blogs because they worry about what their customers might saybut this fear has to be diluted if you plan on having a successful blog.

4. What will you do about feedback
The biggest thing to remember here is to make a full blown effort to respond to all feedback readers leave whether its good or bad.
For those positive comments dont't take the easy way out and only send off a qwuick Thank you or a simple Cheers. This is your chance to make a first impression back and begin a dialog with your customer to encourage them to tell others who might feel your product or brand will be a good fit for them. You don't sell to them directly just offer a little help where you can.
Bad comments need to be dealt with right away. Someone who has had a negative experience with your product is more likely to spread the word to others. Notice that this person even though they were upset took the time to make a comment which means they want to start a dialog. Handling negative comments quickly and correctly can help turn a bad situation into a positive experience when the commenter feels that you cared enough to take what they had to say seriously. Other readers will also be able to notice that offering their voice can evoke a positive action.

5. Stay out of the pits
No solicitations please- blogs are hubs for information exchanges not sales centers. That doesn't mean you can't post an entry about a new product but that does mean it's not a one stop shop for company press releases, client quotes and case study discussions; save that stuff for your web site.
Look twice before posting- don't get so excited to put your post up that you forget to have a second pair of eyes review your content. Keep in mind you are still representing your company so make sure your saying what you mean to say.
Don't be a leak- steer away from discussing activities or projects that you are not directly apart of. There is nothing like ruining the unveiling of a new product launch or a company merger that is about to take place.

Overall company blogs can be a great asset to have when done right. They are a lot of work but with some careful planning and with a true approach to really listen to your readers you should do just fine.

What are your thoughts or concerns when thinking about starting a corporate blog?