Monthly Archives: July 2010

Product Management: Why You Should Care About "End-of-Life"

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I tend to focus heavily on outbound and inbound marketing strategy here on Return on Now. While there are hundreds of related topics in those areas, let’s take a moment to look at an important topic associated with Product Management.

What is Product Management?

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the discipline, Product Management serves a hybrid role that sits between Engineering (or the equivalent product development group, depending on what your product is) and Product Marketing. This function is important for strategically translating market requirements, collected via research, campaign results, sales and customer feedback, etc., into product roadmaps and plans for upcoming development. They then feed information to the Product Marketing group for use in messaging activities leading up to a product launch or release.

Clearly, Product Management serves an important role in nurturing products as feature set is expanded, as well as defining new products to be developed and launched into the market. Everyone seems to understand that part implicitly. This role also includes a crucial responsibility that is often undermanaged or even completely ignored: Product End-of-life.

Why to Care About Product End-of-Life

If Only Product End-Of-Life Were This Simple...

If Only Product End-Of-Life Were This Simple...

Like customers, products have a full product life cycle. There are a slew of publications and courses about how to identify a market opportunity, concept a product, develop alpha and beta releases, finalize feature set, outline a roadmap for development, and launch into the market. This model is proven and important, but what happens when a product is no longer needed or superior products have made it obsolete?

To coin a very cheesy cliche: All good things must come to an end.

This is the area where I see the ball dropped by companies the most frequently. As businesses grow, this part of the process becomes a requirement, rather than something to “get to when the products get old.”

For early-stage companies who really don’t have official documented customer support plans, end-of-life is much simpler. Stop selling it, market a new product to the existing customers, consider offering discounts for upgrades or updates for those who still wish to work with you. Case closed.

Managing End-of-Life Properly

As your business grows, the situation becomes much more complicated. Customers will be more critical of businesses that cannot smoothly manage the transition from older products to new versions. Some important topics you might have to address would include:

  1. When to stop providing guaranteed maintenance or warranty terms
  2. Outline of the upgrade or update path
  3. Whether to “Grandfather” in old terms and conditions, rules, benefits, etc.
  4. Directions for customers to use old and new products together, if applicable
  5. Documentation of historical release path (for software / hardware technical products)
  6. Obsolescence of product accessories

This is most certainly not an exhaustive list, but enough information for you to get an idea of the challenge. Basically, you’ve established that there is a need, you’ve addressed the need, and now you simply cannot drop customers cold without some negative reaction. Particularly if you have a growing product portfolio, it is essential to help usher customers along from product version to product version, release to release, etc.

For those customers who will not upgrade, it is also important to clearly communicate when and what is being eliminated over time. Before making these types of changes, you need to advise all users of the product in question that a change is on the horizon. Provide ample time for them to upgrade or find another solution, and be sure to reach out to them multiple times. In this media and content-heavy world we now inhabit, frequency becomes even more important for ensuring your message is received and understood.

Conclusion

This seems like a lot of work, and in all honesty, it is! There are some darn good reasons for this function existing in the first place, and end-of-life is one of the most important, yet least understood.

How do you phase out products over time? Do you have established practices for this part of the product management puzzle? Do you ignore it? Let me know and indicate the size of your business; I am curious to learn whether our social-everything world is changing some or all of this practice as we better learn how to live in real-time.

Social Media or Journalism?

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After the response I received to the previous cartoon from xkcd.com, I had to come back with another one that caught my attention.For those of you in the true  journalism profession, surely this hits home.

Look for a “real” post later this week, but for now enjoy the following…

Social Media or Journalism?

Read more posts from Return On Now about Social Media.

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Negative Keywords Improve PPC Advertising Efficiency

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Please enjoy this guest post by Gary Walker, my colleague over at TopSide Media. It recently appeared on the TopSide blog, and it really hit home since I’m the client who put him through all of this! Gary was great with this project, so take a look at his account of what we did and why.

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Recently we rebuilt and launched a PPC account for an Austin client that had over 3,000 negative keywords. In our 5+ years of search marketing, this was a record at TopSide. The research and collaboration with our client on negative keywords was very productive, and took about as many days as all the other components combined.

A quick definition of negative or excluded keywords is as follows: a filter that prevents ads from showing. They are used to exclude aspects in your business category that you don’t want to trigger an ad for your particular business. Negatives (or NKWs as we call them around the office) increase overall efficiency of online ads. Proper use of negative keywords increases the CTR clickthrough rate, and this an important indicator of efficiency and relevance. The search engine ad programs reward efficiency with a lower CPC cost per click. More relevant ads usually produce a higher conversion rate and lower cost per conversion also.

Although in many ways they are opposite, like “positive” keywords that are used to trigger PPC ads, negative keywords can be single words or phrases. In some PPC ad programs, such as Google AdWords, negative keywords have broad , phrase, and exact matching options. Once an account is built and launched, we use a report called a Search Query report to look for additional negative keywords and topics for additional refinement.

The example we referred to is a Business-to-Business advertiser. B-to-B companies, particularly those in technology, tend to need more advanced negative keywords and tactics. The reason: many enterprise technology products and services have consumer level counterparts. Some of these (a couple of examples would be anti-virus and data backup /storage) are even free. In addition to negative keywords, filtering text in the ads can help filter out individuals who are not good prospects for a specialized or more costly product or service.

In summary, to make the most of your search marketing budget, a significant number of refinements are necessary to the default settings in PPC ad programs. Some of these are done up front, and more need to be done as search and click data comes in.

Google: Can You Really Trust Them Or Not?

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Google Logo

Surely you have seen the news by now that Google allows certain employees to manually adjust index rankings under special circumstances. Needless to say, the implications are rather widespread.

According to what I’ve read, employees sometimes have to make a judgment call about whether to lower a site’s ranking for a particular keyword or set of keywords.  The main scenario where this is deemed “okay” by Google is when companies vertically integrate to a content-heavy model, using existing “SEO Juice” to enjoy visibility that is not yet deserved. That certainly seems like a good thing, does it not? Particularly since big brands can leverage existing budgets, SEO benefits, etc. much more easily than the smaller outfits or self-employed. In a sense, it can serve to provide a little bit of level to the playing field, whether inconsequential or not.

The issue that this raises is much more concerning, though. If employees can manually adjust rankings based on that situation, what else might be going on “behind the curtain?”

Let’s look at a few spins on this scenario where this is particularly concerning:

  1. The employee has a significant portion of his/her nestegg invested in the company in question
  2. The employee has relatives or friends employed by or invested heavily in the company
  3. The company in question is one of the top advertisers on Google AdWords (i.e. they contribute a rather noticeable amount of revenue to the company’s coffers)

Obviously, you have to presume that Google takes every precaution possible to employ honest, trustworthy individuals.  But even the most stringent interviewing, background checks, and even IQ/Compatibility testing can be fooled or just plain incorrect. In other words, in a company of this magnitude, you can’t hit the bullseye every single time you make a hire.

When you insert human judgment into the equation, everything changes. This mystical and ever-changing Google “Formula” is no longer strictly driven by rules and standards. The whole model comes under question. And, much to Google’s chagrin, they may no longer be able to keep their”secret sauce” so close to the vest, lest the company open itself up to an onslaught of potential legal challenges.

As perplexed as I am about the news, I’m also intrigued to see where this takes us. Will the “new Microsoft” finally take its first big legal smack to the face? Will this blow over without much ado? I don’t know about you, but I want to be sure that they are actually doing everything they say they are. One lie suggests there may be more, so best of luck to the Google PR department on getting some rest over the coming days and weeks.

What do you think? Am I overthinking this, or do you also have issues now with their credibility? Can you afford to bail on AdWords completely, or is it too important to your ongoing operations to bail?

Goodbye Corporate Website – Hello Web Presence Management Framework?

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The following article was written by my colleague Julie Hunt, after we had quite a few conversations about the ongoing CMS / WEM evaluation project I’ve mentioned here previously. I really enjoyed the opportunity to exchange ideas with her, particularly given her vast understanding of the global B2B software market as a whole. this post is well worth sharing.

Prior to my syndication of the content here on Return On Now, it has appeared on Highly Competitive and CMS Wire, and it was received very well in both places. Please take some time to consider Julie’s thoughts.

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Recently a colleague was exploring options for improving the web marketing capabilities of the company that he works for. He started his efforts by looking at “traditional” Web Content Management (WCM) software, with an eye to Web Experience (Engagement) Management platforms. But since his company is itself a mid-market-sized company, he was very uncomfortable with the options – and not just because of cost and time to implement. As conversations with his company management evolved, my colleague realized that he was not satisfied with a WCM / WEM solution because it didn’t seem to be the right platform for their web marketing strategy and business goals.

These days, companies of all sizes have tired of the expense and complexity of many WCM / WEM solutions, and would dearly love agile alternatives. And, yes, there are lesser expensive options. But what may be the most important factor for a lot of companies, is a strong emphasis on the customer-focused web presence for the company. And this may mean that company web presence will show up on other websites, instead of on the corporate website — which leads to the notion of whether or not the “corporate website” is becoming obsolete for many types of companies.

Web marketing and customer relationship strategies are changing (and improving) – companies need new solutions and practices to manage the new world. More companies have come to understand that first they must build the web marketing / presence strategy that will accomplish their goals. Then they have to figure out how to achieve the goals of the marketing strategy, which will involve preferred practices and processes, as well as technology.  With web presence evolution, marketing strategies should include orchestration of web presence via other sites, and how to integrate with conversations and content from those external sites.

B2C or B2B – Which Organization Needs A Corporate Website?

Whether or not a company should have a corporate website can depend on many factors. For both B2C and B2B companies, content still matters and has to be located somewhere. The B2B company has the greater need for a corporate website, but must now evolve the corporate website to a social / customer hub. B2C sales and marketing goals might be less about content per se and much more about customer conversations and brand awareness that take place anywhere on the web. Jeremiah Owyang points out that the corporate website is less and less the most likely place to connect with customers.

B2C – Time to Get Rid of the Monolithic Corporate Website?

Is the corporate website obsolete? Most corporate websites do not work well for customers. The sites are designed from the corporate POV, with too much useless content that is hard to find anyway. Frequently corporate websites become money pits, requiring too many resources over time compared to the benefits received.

Particularly for B2C businesses, new thinking is that the corporate website might be completely unnecessary for customer interactions and brand promotion.  Going where the customers are, i.e. social sites, seems to be an effective way to better connect. Monitoring web presence and participating in conversations on other sites help companies reach out to current and new customers in ways that matter to these customers and can bring effective results to companies.

Current thinking is that social sites are taking sales endeavors to a new place since customers can now participate in spreading the word to potential customers through forums, communities, ratings, reviews. On the flip side, corporations have the responsibility of finding and responding to concerns, complaints, feedback, and requests posted on social sites, hopefully to resolve problems, to engage and attract customers through answers, and to learn from customer POVs.

B2B Companies Still Benefit from Corporate Websites, With Social Improvements

One approach to introducing more web presence into corporate websites is to add improved social capabilities that interact well with customers and potential buyers. This approach appeals to companies that want a measure of control over customer “conversations” and also makes sense if the company is using social capabilities as part of a customer relationship and support strategy. Content still matters for B2B websites – B2B are customers still looking for a lot of different kinds of content that they want to easily find on the corporate website.  However, many potential B2B customers are also influenced by interactions and content on external social sites – the savvy B2B company had better understand the importance of such sites.  Integration with and monitoring of social sites are key.

Hubspot – inbound marketing and social media advisors:

Your website may very well be the most powerful tool in your marketing kit. Not only is it the place prospects and clients go to learn more about you and your services, but it has a huge impact on their ultimate purchase decision.

The Hubspot post goes on to discuss a survey conducted by RainToday.com that looked at buyers of professional services and the amount of influence that corporate websites exerted on the purchase decision:

According to the survey, 74% of buyers report the service provider’s website holds at least “some influence” over their ultimate decision to buy services from the provider. This is 23 percentage points higher than in 2005 and represents a significant increase in the importance of websites.

B2B corporate websites need web management solutions not only for creating and maintaining more social and interactive experiences for customers visiting the site, but to monitor and participate in the conversations that take place on other sites. Other sorts of off-site social-related analytics need to take place, such as sentiment analysis. The results of monitoring and analytics must be used to fine-tune product and marketing strategies, and to help corporations better serve customers.

Jeremiah Owyang on the Future of Corporate Web Presence

Owyang throws out some compelling assertions: In the not-so-distant future, he states that there will be no “old school” corporate sites. There will only be sites assembled on the fly based on social data, a sort of dynamic personalization mashup of content and social engagement.

Today, I’m pleased to see that the thinking –and technology, has emerged, where we’re finding a variety of companies that are integrating social technologies right into the corporate website, bringing the trusted discussions closer to the corporate site.

Although the highest state of nirvana (seamless integration) doesn’t yet exist, we should expect there to be very little difference between social technologies and corporate websites as content will assemble on the fly.  I predict URLs won’t matter, as content will be dynamically assembled around the buyer and their context in a variety of devices.  Sure, that’s far out thinking now, but that’s why we have several other stage gates that companies must first go through.

Owyang continues on the new social web presence:

  1. Although it’s a new and experimental medium, brands should plan a roadmap.
  2. The future of web experiences will be based around people – not products.
  3. Take inventory of all corporate web assets and identify where they are in the framework.
  4. Next, identify the desired state, and then build a plan against it. Start small and slow, and be sure to have a strategy.
  5. Don’t arbitrarily jump into the social marketing space without measurable KPIs. Be deliberate in your actions.

Owyang’s thinking is important especially for vendors of WCM / WEM software solutions since he may be pointing the way to future web presence solutions (a future that is not that distant).

Should WCM / WEM Software be The Hub — or one of the components?

Some vendors of “traditional” web content management solutions have been transitioning their offerings to WEM platforms where managing and enhancing the web experience or engagement of the customer is the central purpose. The current WEM platforms focus mainly on customer and social capabilities existing in the corporate website, and are in very early stages of supporting integrations with external social sites.

Those supporting the notion that WCM/WEM Platforms should manage web presence and continuation of corporate websites include:

Brice Dunwoodie of CMSWire is What is Web Engagement Management:
It’s how you create and manage content, including primary web content, multi-device content, blogs, forums and wikis. Your WCM platform is also the hub of your social media integrations and increasingly the dashboard by which you view your brand’s conversational world.

Further expansion on the WEM platform from Barb Mosher, CMSWire: The 5 Pillars of Web Engagement Management

  1. Content Optimization: analytics, content and experience personalization, multi-variate testing, optimization and SEO.
  2. Multi-channel Management: delivering same message/experience to customers across devices and channels both online and offline – new mobile web
  3. Conversational Engagement:  corporate website-based communities, UGC, commenting, trackbacks, micro-blogging, social media integration, analytics, social media monitoring and sentiment analysis.
  4. Demand Generation: customer engagement/experience through targeted marketing – increasing the number and quality of relationships, through need recognition, relevancy enhancements and engagement triggers.
  5. Sales Automation: two-way CRM integration, social CRM; e-mail or other campaign integration with the content platform.

As described by CMSWire, WEM platforms would provide capabilities and monitoring of brand and customer conversations on corporate websites, as well as bi-directional communication extensions to external social sites.

On the other hand:

If the customer experience of a particular brand is taking place on external social sites, then there is now a distributed model for managing a brand’s web presence; the web experience/engagement for the customer is now remote from the corporate website.  So there is even more need for tools/solutions to monitor, listen, act, engage…for customer-focused purposes, as well as for corporate business goals (which should lean heavily towards the customer).

A WCM/WEM platform may not be the hub for the overall solution, but instead one of the components of a new management framework for all web presence (management of web content is still important but may not be tied to a specific website anymore).  But content is also integral to a lot of web marketing plans and strategies, and content is the meat of most social sites, whether it is a conversation thread, a video, a blog post, and so on. So look for WCM/WEM solutions themselves to continue to evolve as the means of managing and delivering any kind of content for sites anywhere on the web, through any channel.

Future Web Presence Management Solutions – What Could They Look Like?

A Web Presence Management Framework may be the best approach for monitoring and supporting a distributed web presence. With an emphasis on Management: the orchestration of all pertinent activities on social sites external to a corporate site. And the management of: marketing to / connecting with customers, monitoring and listening, responding, acting, analyzing, more acting. The Management Framework would be agile, timely, dynamic, flexible, open.

A starter list (high level) of potential capabilities and attributes for a Distributed Web Presence Management Framework:

  • Sophisticated, agile management / orchestration capabilities
  • Web presence “mashups”: dynamically creating personalized sites for each customer
  • An evolved WCM/WEM component: delivery to external sites, advanced support of corporate site if still in play, handling of relevant content/conversations published on external sites
  • Support / interoperability for content curation as well as content management
  • Management of all types of “conversations”: Auditing – Listening – Capturing – Integrating
  • Multiple kinds of analytics, including convergence with “traditional” data analytics
  • Dashboards for different internal roles
  • Agile, context-sensitive Search / recommendations-like technology to contextually filter content/search
  • Integration is big (lots of API support)
  • Orchestration and Integration with multiple kinds of “external solutions” that are in play for distributed web presence
  • Usability for business as well as tech teams
  • Workflow and automated processes for WCM, CRM, SCRM practices, other corporate systems
  • Company roles will also evolve:  we’ll see new marketing technology roles, product marketing and product management roles for “caretakers” of company web presence on external social sites, among the possibilities
  • Segmented customer advisory groups will also play much more interactive roles with management of distributed web presence
  • Eventual alignment with semantic web, link management – for reach throughout the web. Here is a current view of opening up content to anywhere on the web:

Forget the fancy names of “semantic web” or “linked data.” Associating structured data with your content assets lets you take advantage of Open Graph, Google RichSnippets, Yahoo Search Monkey, and a new generation of agents such as Siri. Disseminating your content with metadata through APIs enables developers to spread the seeds of your brand in a variety of mash-ups and apps. Sharing your data sets in collaborative venues such as Factual and Infochimps helps build relationships with the world of analytic power users, improve your data quality, and turn those dusty data silos into tools for advocating ideas and brands. (from Chief Marketing Technologist blog)

OK, WCM / WEM vendors of all sizes: should your current plans for your solution for corporate websites go forward unchanged, or should you start now to create a Management Framework for distributed web presence?

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Related Posts on Highly Competitive:

SMB / Mid-Market B2B Software vendors – Findability + web presence + social: attracting the “customer as buyer”

B2B Social CRM for Software Vendors and the Lifecycle of Customer Experience

Moving beyond WCM – Web Experience Management software solutions and markets

About the author: Julie Hunt is an accomplished market intelligence analyst, providing strategic market and competitive insights for the software industry. Her 20+ years as a software professional range from the very technical side  to customer-centric work in solutions consulting, sales and marketing.  Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Market & Competitive Intelligence Services

Marketing Automation: The Importance of Lead Scoring in B2B

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As I’ve mentioned in this space previously, I have spent a great deal of time of late evaluating various marketing related technologies to build out some efficiencies and adopt some of the newer tricks out there. Last month I dug into my view on the content management space. As it turns out, several of the content management and WEM vendors also include Marketing Automation. So I thought I’d talk a little how to use it to nurture leads.

Marketing Automation: What Is It?

If you already work in Marketing, there’s a good chance you already know what this means. Just to be certain we’re all on the same page, let’s put out there a quick definition to get on common ground.

Marketing Automation is a software-based solution that offers advanced email marketing functionality such as drip marketing, multi-step campaigns, landing page generation, and full analytical tracking. It also can include more advanced message testing and targeting features not commonly found in simple email marketing products.

Essentially, these products exist to help marketing teams better nurture and qualify leads in the early stages of the sales funnel. That way, once a lead makes it to sales, the person is more likely to be qualified, interested, and ready to dig in to consider the product in detail. They likely have a real project and budget, maybe even a desired time line, leading to a true opportunity waiting and ready for your sales team.

Lead Scoring: The Key to Nurturing and Qualifying

In order to achieve that vision just described, it is absolutely critical that you think carefully about how you want to designate what a qualified lead is. This can be done very simply, or it can be quite complicated in larger enterprises or businesses with a broad product portfolio.

Simple Version: Response Indicates Interest

The simplest example of how to implement lead scoring is to start with a multi-step campaign. Let’s say that, once you identify a new lead, they go into an automated campaign that sends the following emails:

  1. A welcome email with links to free information about your product and the problems it solves
  2. (Two weeks later) A second message including a little more product information, as well as contact info should they wish to demo a product
  3. (Four weeks later) A third message leading with a more focused offer centering around a demo
  4. (Eight weeks later) A fourth and final message extending a more premium or urgent, time-limited offer that moves them along the sales cycle

Like I said, this is very simple. Basically, you are providing a little more motivation to respond each time. If this does not get a response, then perhaps they are not ready to buy quite yet. Or maybe they haven’t gotten the project approved, even though they will. But one way or the other, they were willing to let you be in touch with them. Unless they unsubscribe, you still have a reason to push on.

Long-Term Plan: Poised For The Right Time

If you try the simple approach above, a certain minority of the contacts added to the database will convert. But you will still have quite a lot of names who did not respond, but who may one day still be a potential customer. For these contacts, you need to have a long-term drip marketing approach in your back pocket.

Drip marketing works similar to multi-step campaigns, except it loops in analytics and progressive profiling. That way, you can build an understanding of who they are, what they care about (particularly content and offers on your website and in emails), and how likely a true purchase is in the future. In most cases, it is absolutely crucial that email open and click data, web site paths and behaviors, and any dripped data fields be aggregated in a single Marketing Automation product.

Going into much more detail here would make this blog post a candidate for splitting into multiple entries, so I may take a moment in the future to dig into specifics. For now, just know who you want to sell to, know how to understand when they are ready to consider your product, and have a concrete set of standards for identifying true opportunities, then build your web content, site map, and email campaigns to “lead the horse to water”, to coin a tired-but -appropriate cliche.

Lead-Scoring Holds It All Together

In case it didn’t jump out at you, lead-scoring is the key to this whole approach. Sales teams have been scoring leads for years, so if you find yourself struggling to figure out how to score prospects, get some face time with whomever it is who does your sales pipeline management. Their model may or may not be ideal for you since it’s focused on actually closing the deals, but seeing how they build from first contact through a closed deal or lost deal is something you can extend out to earlier stages of the life cycle. That’s the part Marketing should be managing on behalf of sales anyway, and if frees up your sales team to generate revenue more quickly once leads and opportunities do make it to them.

Do you use a solid lead-scoring system? What works for you?