The Adaptive Marketer

November 18, 2009

7 Steps to a Successful Trade Show

It seems every good marketing plan needs to include industry event participation to be complete. Sometimes we go to trade shows to leads, sometimes because “you have to be visible” and sometimes because we went last year so we signed up for this year as well. Yet , in my humble opinion most marketers do a poor job at events.

Here are my 7 suggestions to make your trade show participation a success.

1. Define a Strategy – Why are you going to the event in the first place? Are you there for awareness? to drive leads? to engage with press and analysts? defining a very specific and clear goal is the first step to a successful event. Think about the number of leads you will get in relation to the total costs for exhibiting (booth, travel, opportunity cost, etc.), the right conclusion may be not to be at an event.

2. Refine your Value Proposition – Have you ever walked a show floor? think about how you scan booths as you walk by. Most people probably spend two or three seconds reading the signage on a booth before deciding if it is something they are interested in – otherwise they will continue walking and scanning. Next time you go to a trade show study how people walk by the aisles.

This means you have about 8 words to tell people why should they stop and talk to you. You have one chance to get their attention. I find it amusing how bad we marketers are at this: most booths have meaningless slogans like “High Performance Digital Solutions” – what does it mean? what exactly do you sell? why should I care? You could play bulls##t bingo walking a trade show.

3. Focus – Attract the right people. Surely you have studies the event prospectus and you know what kind of people will be attending. From here, based on your strategy, you need to decide what titles/roles and company profiles you want to talk to. We are too quick to think in terms of booth visitors, coming up with ever more creative giveaways. Handing out t-shirts will surely keep your booth busy, but will it attract the type of people you want? Would the qualified buyer you wanted to talk to walk by because your team was too busy handing out t-shirts to everyone?

4. Time Management – For most companies, the goal of trade show participation is to generate leads. This means three things: first, qualify every visitor to your booth. Second, spend as little time as possible with non-qualified leads: be courteous, hand out a datasheet or a giveaway if they request one and move on. Third, spend quality time with qualified leads but not too long: once you know the lead is a viable prospect, you have provided valuable information to increase their interest and captured their contact information, it is probably smart to move on to the next customer. There will be more time later to continue the conversation with this customer, do an in-depth demo or needs assessment. Of course, you need to use your judgement based on your product and buying process, customer interest and how busy your booth is.

5. Ask, don’t tell. Good sales people listen 70% of the time. Do the math: you only need to speak 30% of the time. Most booth staff are too quick to jump into a sales pitch and a demo as soon as someone walks by. After qualifying a person ask them why they stopped, what problems they are trying to solve, what solutions they have considered, how much they know about your company and your product and what specific questions they have. This will accomplish a couple things: first, you will come across as more genuinely interested in helping the customer; second, you will know enough to tailor your presentation or demo to the specific needs of the customer; and third, it will save them from spending 5 minutes listening to a pitch that makes no sense at all.

6. Follow Up. Marketers do a terrible job at following up on trade show leads. Often, what happens after a trade show is that a spreadsheet with names and contact info is sent to the sales team or to the telemarketing team where they go to a black hole. If you involve sales from step 1 when you are defining your strategy, you should have a follow-up strategy and plan weeks before the event. At the very least send each prospect an email thanking them for attending, providing useful resources and contact information. Tink about creative ways to engage customers in the form of a poll, a free analysis, a white paper, or some other high-value material.

7. Learn. Trade shows are great opportunities to learn about the market, trends, your competition, and above all to learn about customers. Often times, the most valuable conversations I have had at an event have been during lunch or dinner when I go to the main meal room and seat at a table with 9 customers or industry peers that I had not met before. Yet, most booth people miss this opportunity: as soon as booth duty is over they have lunch together as a pack. Make the most of every opportunity to meet customers. Some times, I seat at more than one table during lunch to maximize my opportunities to learn – and to have an extra dessert :-)

Have fun at your next event!

November 18, 2009February 19, 2016

Web and Social Media Trends for 2010

With only a few weeks left in the year, this is a good time to think about what are the top trends that will impact the Web, social media and customer engagement.I have posted this on the Corporate Social Media strategist group on Linked In, but would appreciate any comments on my blog.

These are the trends I think will be important in 2010:

1. Content is set free and is continuously evolving. What started with RSS feeds continues to accelerate. Content will increasingly be syndicated, aggregated, tagged, rated, mashed-up, re-published, filtered and transformed. Technologies like REST APIs and open ID are enabling this trend.

2. Browsers are dead. Well, not really, but a browser-PC combination is no longer the main way people experience and interact with Web content. Mobile devices, car systems and other internet-enabled devices will continue to grow in importance.

3. Social media maturity. Organizations starts to see social media as a tool that supports a strategy, a new way to engage customers, employees and partners, one that is fundamental to any business and that becomes an integral part of your job. Twitter plateaus, new tools emerge but there is more consolidation.

4. Semantic Web. With so much content available online, tools that help find relevant content become more important: tagging, rating, filtering, recommendations, folksonomies, semantics. The focus needs to be on simplicity.

5. Key challenges need to be solved. Openess will result in a new focus on privacy and giving people control of what and how their information is shared. New technologies introduce new security concerns: viruses, spoofing and hacking in social networks, authentication across multiple sites (passport was not a bad idea, after all), tiny URLs make it impossible to know where you are going before you get there. At the individual level trust and authority become more important, creating an opportunity for reputation management systems, badges, and federated identity.

This is just a starting point, and of course these things won’t happen in 2010 only: they have already started and will go on for some time.

What do you think? What am i missing? I look forward to your comments…

Thanks,

Gerardo

November 13, 2009

Web Industry Trends

A few days ago CMS Wire gave me the opporutnity to do a guest post summarizing what happened at Content World, which they published here. I am re posting here as you may find some of the observations inetersting in terms of the trends in web strategies:

Open Text Content World is coming to a close today. Like most user conferences and industry events, I find everyone gets the highest value from connecting with other people. Everyone loves the networking, sharing stories and best practices, bouncing ideas, building friendships and having fun. The breakout sessions and PowerPoint decks are almost secondary.

I would like to share some of my observations from this week resulting from talking to partners, colleagues, customers and friends. These are the topics and trends I identified.

Focus and Consolidation

Everyone is being tasked to do more with less. Many customers I talked to are considering, in the middle or completing projects to consolidate multiple web properties into one to drive cost savings and have a batter grip on their web strategy.

There is a growing concern that tactical departmental social media deployments can make this problem worse. During a session, I asked the audience how many had made an audit to find how many social media sites existed in their organization, no one raised a hand.

Social Media is Everywhere

I think every single customer I talked to had a strong interest in social media. For most of them, finding a way to leverage social media is becoming a requirement in their organization; and while some companies have had great success others are being cautious about their approach. On one side, there are concerns on compliance, safety, governance and control.

On the other side, applying social media inside the firewall produces very real but also hard to measure or soft results. Everyone seems to agree with the concept we have been promoting since early this year about social media not being a strategy but a tool to support a business strategy.

Portals are Cool Again

A few months ago, Portal was a term many wanted to avoid: Portals were perceived to be aging technology from the 90’s. Now, I see Portals re-emerging as the operating systems of the enterprise (a term I borrowed from John at Sutro Software)- providing a unified and personalized user interface to multiple applications and information sources.

There was a lot of interest in the vision of the social intranet, which was presented in the general session and a number of breakouts – a vision that is reality at Motorola who shared details of their intranet in one of the event’s favorite sessions.

Convergence

The worlds of Knowledge Management, Portals, Collaboration, Social Media and document management are converging. The lines are blurred. Organizations need modern collaborative processes to get things done and to capture the collective intelligence (and IP) of the organization, they need to make this information safe, meet compliance requirements and provide a simple and integrated user interface for users.

Enterprise 2.0 is Becoming Strategic

The role of many people I talked to was evolving and the value of these solutions to the organization is being recognized. A few years ago collaboration and document management were considered to be IT infrastructure, now with the addition of Enterprise 2.0 elements and other innovations, these solutions are considered key company assets that can transform organizations, impact productivity and directly affect the success of the organization.

Use of Video is Maturing

It was very interesting to hear how the use of video is maturing in large organizations. Video is being used in many ways: as an engaging way to connect with customers and employees, as a training tool, as a universal communications media that does not require translation and as a way to connect more personally with people.

I find that many companies are starting to think about how to more effectively deliver video (one of our customers has 200,000+ people going to their video-enabled intranet home page every morning) and more effective ways to manage video assets from a storage, security and consistency perspective.

If you think about the array of solutions that were talked about in Content World (from WCM and DAM to records management and compliance) it is easy to come to the conclusion that they serve very different use cases and are being implemented in different areas of an organization.

However, when you take it one level higher, everyone at this event was thinking about how to store and manage content (making it safe, compliant, managed and accessible) and how to improve the way people experience and interact with content (make it more personal, relevant, social and pervasive).

Storing and Managing Content

To me, storing and managing content is something companies have to do. The biggest value and potential for impact in an organization, however, is in improving the way people experience and interact with content.

That is what is unique. And hard. And difficult to measure. But also very exciting. This is where social media, widgets, rich media, personalization, mobility, content recommendations and other exciting technologies can help. Inside and outside the firewall.

The Present and the Future

A summary of the event would not be complete without talking about VCM 8. It is a major release. There are too many stories to tell. Which goes back to my first point about how people get the most value of these event by learning from each other

August 21, 2009

The link between productivity and caffeine

A little bit off topic – one of my favorite cartoons making fun of our coffee dependency

July 28, 2009

The Online Marketer’s Quest for Web Effectiveness

Online marketers, like most other professionals, are expected to do more with less – especially in challenging economic times. Onlinemarketers are trying to find out how to increase Web site and campaign effectiveness, which can be measured in terms of unique visitors, click-throughs or leads. Marketers in eCommerce companies have a bit more focused goals, focusing on conversions and average order value, often acheved via up-selling and cross-selling.

Key to meeting these objectives is to ensure people visiting your Web site or receive email communications from your company are presented with the most useful information and the most powerful offers for them. In this quest of finding the best message, the best offer, the best banner ad, marketers have tried a number of different tools from personalization to analytics to a/b testing. It is easy to get too exited about these tools, but at the end of the day, it is critical to understand these are only tools to improve relevance.

Relevance is the key to Web site effectiveness. But how to make your messages more relevant? Most studies show Web site visitors have very limited patience: if they can’t find what they need in three clicks, they are gone. This means you have one or two chances to give each individual customer exactly what he or she is looking for: the product they want, the answer to the question they have, the information they need. This post aims to provide an overview of the tools available to increase relevance.

The first step is Analytics. You can’t improve what you can’t measure. Analytics can tell you how many people are visiting each page or consume each of the resources that you make available on your site, what are the most common click-through paths, exit pages and many other useful data points. Unfortunately, most organizations don’t have the people or the time to properly study the analytics data to derive business insight and to act on this insight. maybe because it is hard to show ROI for these activities outside of media and online commerce.

One of my favorite phrases is “Your opinion (as a marketer), while interesting, is irrelevant“. No matter how smart you are, you can only guess what will be most attractive for your customers. therefore, one of the fundamental principles of marketing communications is to test everything. In this age it is inconceivable to run a banner ad without at least testing a few messages. Testing multiple messages takes very little effort and, in my experience, the results often surprise you. When testing 4 or 5 different banner ads, it is not uncommon to find a 5x difference in performance. The same applies to direct mail, email promotions, etc.

But testing banner ads and messages manually is very time consuming, although certainly worthwhile for large campaigns. This is where a/b testing comes in. A/B testing tools automate the process of presenting multiple offers to customers, sometimes based on a specific segment, reporting results in real time and adapting your site to use the message that proved to be most effective in tests.

MVT Testing take this concept further by testing multiple variables: message, color, position, offer, etc. – and all their possible permutations. MVTcan be incredibly powerful to fine-tune offers and promotions in any website. As good as they are, adoption of A/B and MVT tools has been very limited, mostly in eCommerce companies. As with analytics, resourcing is part of the problem.

A/B and MVT have their own challenges: First, it is still for the most part a manual process. Second, you could be testing all the wrong things – the process still requires someone to decide what messages or what elements to test. Last, these tools require some time to run (the more variables in play the longer it takes for MVT to produce statistically-valid results) and they are focused on past behavior.

This is where a new breed of tools come in: Content Recommendations, offered by companies like Vignette, Omniture, Loomia and others. While there are differences between how these products work, the fundamental premise is the same: to observe customer behavior, and to automatically determine what is the most relevant content, product or offer for a particular customer based on what similar customers have found to be useful.

A short story to illustrate: An architect builds an office complex with multiple buildings a parking garage, a cafeteria and other services. The buildings open to the tenants but there are no concrete pathways between buildings, the architect has left all the open space covered in grass. After a few weeks, the paths that people take to go from one building to the other are clear from the wear in the grass. Over time, the grass is gone in these paths. The architect then paves thee paths with concrete. He did not try to guess which way people would walk. He observed and acted on actual behavior. Recommendation technologies pave the path between website visitors and the content they want.

Now a specific example: An online tax service is trying to make their website more useful. During tax season, many customers would go to their site and look for “Form 1099”. Traditional search tools would use a keyword-based algorithm to find the web pages and documents where the keyword “Form 1099” occurred more often. Instead, Recommendations technology observes that most visitors who type “form 1099” in the search box actually end up opening, downloading and printing a file called IRS1099-A.pdf and then spend some time in a page labeled “how to fill your tax return”, so it presents these two resources at the top of the search results, even though the keyword may not even appear i the actual page or file. This scenario is what is being called social search.

Another advantage of Recommendations is that it can adapt in almost real-time to changes. Imagine a celebrity appearing on TV on a Friday afternoon wearing some very chic aluminum sunglasses. Everyone who is watching the TV show wants to buy these sunglasses. The first visitors to your eCommerce site would have to navigate a bit to find the exact product, but after a few visitors buy the item, recommendations technology “paves” the way for other visitors, a process that could take minutes. Your analytics person or campaign marketer could be asleep or on vacation and recommendations technology has learned from customers and adapted the site to show the now very hot item in the most prominent position.

As with any new technology, there are differences between the offerings from recommendation technology vendors. There are a couple key aspects to consider when evaluating them:

The observation technology – it can go from the very simple (clicks-based) to te very advanced (some measure over 30 heuristics).
The algorithm to determine what to recommend – some call it the wisdom of crowds engine
How similar visitors are grouped – behavioral segmentation and integration with your explicit profile data
Content database – how it is organized, categorized and updated as items become available or are retired
Presentation model – how the recommendations are integrated into your overall website experience

This is very exciting technology that is likely to produce big results for most web sites who implement the technology but more importantly for customers in general.

July 27, 2009June 15, 2015

Is SaaS reaching critical mass in 2009?

I just read this blog post which starts with a very bold statement “SaaS adoption will move beyond the “Tipping Point” in 2009”. . Countless analysts’ reports have prophesized about the explosive growth of applications delivered under a SaaS model for some time now. The reality is that adoption of software via this on-demand model has been quite limited (outside of CRM, thanks to Salesforce.com).

Sometimes it seems like the IT industry is looking for the next big acronym that will revolutionize the way we look at technology. In reality, customers and IT departments are much more cautious than what most vendors and analysts would like them to.

While not exactly the same, there are very few differences between SaaS and the ASP model that was the vogue in the late 90’s. Where is the money? The Forrester slide in the aforementioned blog shows 24% of companies are “interested in SaaS’. There is a difference between being “interested” and signing a check.

First, I think it is important to understand SaaS is a delivery model that can be broken down into multiple components: hosted offering (off premise), monthly billing based on use, small or non-existent upfront cost and quick deployment. This in contrast with the “traditional” software deployment licensed as a perpetual license, deployed on-premise by the IT department and variable deployment times.

Most SaaS offerings are available to purchase online via a credit card with self provisioning. To enable these self-provisioning and instant-on capabilities, SaaS offerings are usually templetized with limited options. Integration with other systems is not as flexible as with a traditional on-premise solution. I say mostly because there is a wide range of vendors with different models. To support many customers from each server, SaaS vendors usually require multi-tenancy.

In my humble opinion, the SaaS model is not nearly as important as the evolution in the market towards managed services. What is the difference? Managed services are also hosted off-premise by a vendor that also provides software deployment, management and maintenance. In other words, a managed services vendor takes the pain from IT hosting and managing a discrete piece of infrastructure. If you look at Salesforce.com in terms of implementation costs and resources it probably looks more like a managed service than a true SaaS model.

Let’s look at email as an ideal candidate to move off on-premise IT. Most It departments see e-mail as a business critical service from It but also as a solution that is pretty standard in terms of the ability for It to add value. Microsoft Exchange Server has a very large and growing market share (70-80%) and is used everywhere from small companies (licensed as part of Microsoft Small Business Server for organizations with 5 users or more) to the largest enterprises.

There are two markets for off-premise Exchange services: Hosted Exchange (SaaS) and Managed Exchange.

Given the advantages of hosted Exchange in terms of cost, availability and security most in the industry (myself included) expected droves of small and medium businesses to go to Hosted Exchange. Microsoft had hundreds of Hosted Exchange partners – from companies like 4smartphone.net to USA.Net to Microsoft’s own Exchange Online offer. Yet, despite effort from Microsoft and all these partners, adoption had been very limited.

Managed Exchange is a different story. Vendors like HP, EDS and AT&T hosts millions of email inboxes for the world’s largest companies but not in a SaaS model. They manage their Exchange servers on their behalf, with a team of certified Microsoft Exchange IT experts in a datacenter. There is no multi-tenancy, each customer is likely to have a cluster of dedicated Exchange servers. There is no online self-procurement: these are multi-million services deals done in person.

What is my point? Analyzing this data, one can come to a couple conclusions:

The SaaS model is especially attractive for the SMB space.
Yet it has failed to gain the traction that the industry expected .
There are very few success stories outside of CRM. I can’t think of many successful and profitable SaaS vendors. Omniture, Salesforce.com, who else? Wordpress?
The SaaS model still has many challenges ahead:
- Information security perceptions – would you trust all your information to Google Apps and Google Mail? Many CIOs I have talked to would not.
- SaaS software deployment model has its own challenges: it can break things
- Reliability (SLAs) – the best example is the 38 minute Salesforce.com outage this January (do a search on “salesforce outage” results in over 100,000 hits)
The Managed Services model, on the other hand, is very successful and gaining momentum.
Many large IT organizations are offloading core low-value IT services like email to managed services vendors.
In other words, while SaaS is not being adopted as fast as everyone though, Managed Services have reached critical mass and are already a significant business.

Mid 2015 Update

Today I found this old post. How much changes in six years. My first thought was that maybe I should delete the post. Then I thought I should just add this comment to acknowledge my prediction was wrong. SaaS has hit a tipping point and is the future of software – for the most part.

Then I saw the date and read the post and realized maybe I was not so wrong, that many of the challenges have been solved in the past 6 years. The SaaS model itself has matured, and in some cases a hybrid between SaaS and managed services has emerged as the winning combination. The signs that SaaS had hit a tipping point were clear as early as 2010. At the end of that year I joined a SaaS company. But I have to recognize back in 2009 I was wrong in being so skeptical of the speed at which SaaS would mature. Which is OK I guess, ad my track record with predictions has been pretty good so far.

May 29, 2009November 12, 2014

Enterprise 2.0 – Boosting employee productivity with social media

Enterprise 2.0 is one of those buzzwords that is looking for a definition. In my mind, it refers to the application of Web 2.0 ideas, processes and technologies to inside the company – to the intranet and the extranet.

I am presenting on June 10th for the Technology Executives Club on this topic. These are my slides for the webcast.

Enterprise 2.0: Boosting Employee Productivity With Social Media from Gerardo A Dada

March 20, 2009October 20, 2014

How to Use YouTube as a Marketing Tool

There is no question about the importance of video as a key component of a marketing strategy. We live in the age of the video-centric Web.

There are opportunities and dangers in using YouTube as a marketing tool. First, it is important to understand the profile of the typical YouTube visitor. By looking at the most viewed videos, I think it is safe to assume most people spending time on YouTube are teens looking for entertainment – music videos, comedy or funny videos. This is not to say that is the only demographic using it.

The opportunity is to use YouTube as a distribution mechanism to fish for customers. The danger is in using it as your video platform. Let me explain:

There are a number of problems with embedding your own YouTube videos on your own Web site: Google may insert contextual advertising about your competitors and customers can click on the video to be taken to YouTube.com where they can get lost watching at Coke and Mentos videos, forgetting why they went to your site in the first place. In other words, you don’t control the experience. Any medium to large company probably is going to have to manage dozens or hundreds of videos, and you need a better way to manage those videos, to understand who and how they are viewed and to connect them with other resources on your site in a synergistic way.

You can’t do this with You Tube. You probably need a video platform that provides all these capabilities. You need to own your Video experience, because Video is as important as any content on your site. This is why we built Vignette Video Services, to help companies who want to take control of their video strategy.

The opportunity is to use YouTube as a channel to fish for customers. The ideal scenario is the opposite as what I described above: people go from YouTube to your site. Posting your content on YouTube to make it easy for people to find will probably increase your reach and viewership. What you need to accomplish is that at the end of the video customers don’t click on the funny video that Google is promoting but on your site because they need more information or they want to learn more.

At a minimum you should promote your site’s URL at the beginning and end of your video. you may want to create a series of videos and only make the first part of the series available on YouTube, customers would have to go to your site to get the rest of the story.

It is interesting that we live in the age of the video-centric Web, yet most of the industry is still learning how to use it. This tells me Video presents an opportunity to get ahead. It is an opportunity to build a strategy that gives you a competitive advantage.

The question is – what are you doing with Video?