New Addition to the TestDrive suite - TestDrive Insight integrates demo recording

I’m pretty excited today; we have announced the release to production of a new add-on service to our TestDrive online demos, TestDrive Insight. I’m especially thrilled about Insight as it’s one of the first deliverables (there are many more in the pipeline) from the new Development team we established our India office.

Insight to me is a logical extension to TestDrive that will bring added benefits to our current customers as well as increase the relevance of TestDrive to new markets. Insight further solidifies Runaware’s market leadership in the Online Marketing and Demo space by automatically recording the online demo that prospects take and then giving the ISV the ability to replay the demo (fast forward, rewind etc…) to analyze what the prospect was looking at. This is the first time that software producers will have this level of insight into what a prospect is really interested in.

This may seem an obvious addition, but it wasn’t until I started talking to our customers about this and researched it further that the significance really sunk in. Think about how much more targeted your sales people could be when they call that hot lead that TestDrive just delivered in real-time to your CRM system if they take 5 minutes to review what the lead did when they tried an online demo of your product! Maybe there is a particular feature that they focused on and you know from their profile that you are in a competitive sale against the market leader. Knowing what feature(s) they focused on will let you get straight to the point in the first few minutes of the call and increase your chance of winning the deal.

Insight will also be invaluable for our customers to analyze how people navigate their existing software and new beta versions so their product design team can optimize the user experience for their next version.

We have built a secure site that will provide access to the demo recordings and where customers can search for the Insight demos they want to review and download the ones they want to retain for the long term.

Insight is the first TestDrive add-on of many, in the futurelook to see added features to Insight and other add-ons from us soon – all focused on increasing our customers’ Return on Investment from TestDrive.

Search Marketing Showing Some Muscle In Tough Times

Many marketing folks out there are concerned with what’s best to run with when it comes to marketing during a time of economic crisis? Where are less dollars not to mention time going to be spent well? Budgets are getting cut in half and some items are falling off the marketing to do list completely. So with all of this pull back which tried and true tactics will rise up during tough times?

From the looks of things on Online Marketing Blog, search engine optimization is at the top of the leader board when it comes to what tactic marketers plan on using over the next several months. This poll was conducted over a 6 month period and over 400 business marketers participated.

Search engine optimization is a high impact method for reaching online audiences that you can do yourself. Many people find what they’re looking for via search engines, thus your goal as a marketer should be to include content on your web site that will get on the first page of results for the keywords your product or service is recognized for.

Despite the uncertain economy paid search marketing is also holding its own and why wouldn’t it? It makes sense, paid search is one of the few marketing activities that can be measured down to each penny spent and every click made and it happens to be one of the most inexpensive forms of lead acquisition around. Because of its accountability many marketers find it an easy way to attain their aggressive goals in such a volatile market.

Forrester Research projects that paid search marketing will grow 26% this year, reaching $11.4 billion in the U.S. However it is still possible that with continued budget cuts and dismal b-to-b sales things could change but for now paid search marketing and SEO are proving to be the way to go when the going gets tough.

If you're monitoring your own SEO efforts - here's what NOT to do

If you manage or like to keep an eye on your own SEO efforts, I'm sure you've read up on the many, many things you SHOULD do when optimizing your web pages and web site to rank higher on search engines. But have you given much thought to what you SHOULDN'T do?

I read a great blog post on Online Marketing for Marketers called "When a Good Idea Goes Bad - SEO oopsies," which was a great summary of the things you should be wary of if you are new to search engine optimization or are just beginning to learn.

Some of the tips are pretty common sense, but you might be surprised at a few.

Here are a few tips that I liked the most and have helped us in our SEO efforts:

• The page title either lacks a kicker keyword phrase, is the same as every other page title on the site, or both.
•  The site uses javascript, flash or images for navigation making it difficult or impossible for spiders to follow the links.
•  The site is one big flash site.
• Make sure there is enough text on each page to keep a spider fully informed about the page. In doing so, make sure to actually use the words and phrases that a user might search for when researching the topic you’ve written about. 
  

Something that a "noob" (or newbie) may think work:

“Oh look”, thinks the noob, “putting that keyword phrase in the first paragraph of text bumped my rankings up a little bit. Hey, I know! I’ll put that phrase in the text another 50 times! Yeah! That’ll work great!

Key lesson: SEO is not a recipe that can be duplicated - you can't do the same thing a hundred times and expect good results!

If you would like t o read the full blog post, you can go to the Online Marketing for Markers blog and see what else Donna has to say about "SEO oopsies."

Do you have any to add to this list?

Is this the right time?

The key boom of the late 90’s followed by the bubble bursting in the early 2000’s have many factors that played a part but the main factor behind both was the idea of making software work over the internet and no longer on your desktop or laptop. As a CEO of a tech company if can see the benefits for this as a way to cut cost when it comes to implementing software and purchasing hardware. I can also see the benefit of why a Software Company would want to have their software online; cheaper production cost and new subscription based revenue model making budget and forecasting much easier.

So the consumer whether it business or end user both benefit and the ISV’s benefit also, a true win win situation and a major factor in the tech boom. The problem was timing the world just wasn’t ready for it; Internet infrastructure and speeds were still being built, securing and storing people personal details was very expensive, and consumer confidence was low as the internet still was relatively new for most people.

It’s almost 2009, close to 8 years have passed since the tech boom burst. The past 8 years we have seen huge growth in the internet with consumers buying more and more each day on the internet, the speed is now making it possible to work remotely changing the way we do business today. Web meetings are now the norm, basically redefining the way sales people do their jobs. Not only has it changed the way sales people do their jobs but the way companies sell their product more companies are now selling direct over the internet and cutting out the resellers.

Last week Microsoft launched Windows Azura, a new platform specifically for CLOUD Computing, basically allowing developers to build SaaS applications that span from PC to the web to mobile phones and everything in between. This with the success of Apple’s IPhone is making the dream of the 90’s become a reality today and more so in the near future.

The main concern that I see in the near future is…are the consumers ready to change the way they do business? Apple, Microsoft, Google, and all the major software companies believe they are as they are all investing heavily in creating application that works over the web, sure today we already have some web apps that are doing really well, especially a database driven application like Salesforce, they are very successful doing this. But most web apps today still are limited in the functionality hence the reason why software companies that have these apps still produce a desktop version. Every day that passes they all get closer to finding ways to make their web apps fully functional. Once they do get to this point will the consumers have a choice but to accept that their application is no longer on their system but on the web somewhere?

I think at first people will be a little cautious as they were about making purchases over the internet but over time they will accept it especially as it will make their world much easier. There willno longer be the need to bring your laptop everywhere, you can access your software and data from any computer, your phone or even your TV. This is what I believe will make users flock to applications online, radically changing the way we live our lives, just as the introduction of the PC did in the 70’s and 80’s as did the introduction of the internet did in the 90’s and the turn of the century.