10 tips to morph users into adopters

Rolling out a new Through-channel marketing platform? Make sure you don’t end up like many business leaders. In a recent survey, 52 percent claim they were not successful. Why?

No plan to convert users into adopters.

So before, during and after you buy, try these tips to get everyone using—and loving—the new system.

Before you buy…

Get buy-in upfront

Talk to key users to identify and understand their goals, their core competencies and their pain points. They will be more confident and more willing to adopt the platform if they’ve had a say in choosing it from the beginning.  

Check if you can tailor the interface
This doesn’t mean adding in your logo or changing the colors. Instead, you’ll want to ask if the user interface (UI) can be tailored with your systems and workflows in place. For example, can it accommodate single sign-on authentication for easy access and greater productivity? If things like menu items, tagging criteria, filters and terminology used within the platform can be tailored to your existing workflow and structure, your team will be more likely to adopt.

Create an organizational strategy
Why? Because it will help define easy-to-use navigation as well as a framework to audit materials and see what content you may need. (More on this next.)

Once you‘ve chosen a platform, but before you’ve rolled it out…

Audit content
Using your organizational strategy as a framework, collect and categorize all of the materials used by your company. This way you’ll be able to identify gaps and overlaps when mapped against your users’ objectives.  

Plan upfront
To promote the platform and rouse use among your staff, develop a communications schedule that will let you talk about how to get started, what tools or training are available. . . and why they will want to start using once it’s live.

After you’ve launched…

Offer a tutorial
Tutorials from your provider are a great resource, but they’re often too general. So to build confidence and adoption, develop your own tutorials to show “real-world” examples. This will help illustrate how your team can use the platform to save time and make their jobs easier.

Celebrate successes
Keep your users hooked and connected to the platform by promoting how others in your company are using it and having success with it. Talk about what the need was and how someone used the platform to meet it. Showing a key success can be a powerful lever to boost use, tailor future training for your staff and nurse innovation across departments.

Nurture interest
Not only do users want to be shown what’s available, they want to be shown how to use it best. Include the following as part of your communications plan:

• Emails: Send emails each month to sell specific tools and areas of function that align with your current goals. If you segment your email list into distinct types of users, you will be able to tailor your message and call to action, for example, to power users versus those not using the system.
• Quarterly newsletter: Send out “best practices” to share tips, highlight materials, and/or spotlight an active user.
• Workshops and webinars: Offer webinars for each area of the platform and promote them through your emails and newsletters.

Measure results

Of course, measurement is key. Make sure your platform not only measures what’s most important to the c-suite, but tracks usage among actual users. Knowing this level of activity will give you a better gauge of your content, who’s using it and who’s not. 

Survey users
To keep in touch with users (and ensure they keep using it), send out short, simple surveys once a month so you can see what’s working and what’s not. Based on the results, you can confirm your strategy, offer more tips in the areas where users need more training, or use the insights to change your plan.

In the end, these tips will not only help tailor the experience for your users, but they will also raise the chance that the platform is widely accepted and used. Not to mention, make your investment well worthwhile.

A firm is demoing a software solution for your organization. Just five minutes in to the presentation, your gut tells you this single piece of software is “genius” and will immeasurably help with your enterprise’s strategic marketing goals.

Yet, you find yourself thinking . . .  why would I “pay” to subscribe to this software when I’ve got an entire department on staff to develop any technology that our organization needs?

In an effort to manage tighter and tighter budgets and wring as much ROI out of every marketing dollar spent, it’s understandable that corporate leaders must carefully weigh the pros and cons of whether or not to develop homegrown software solutions or pay to subscribe to a cloud-based software service.

Of course, subscribing to a software service on a shared platform via the Internet is the whole idea behind the popular software as a service (SaaS) model. In fact, large and small enterprises across the board are adopting this model as a viable alternative to either purchasing traditional licenses to install software or investing resources in developing their own proprietary applications.

Why? Here are five reasons to forego traditional, licensed software or in-house development  . . . and choose a SaaS provider.

Reason #1: Cost
Because they’re already developed, tested and functional, SaaS solutions avoid the costly and time-consuming activities associated with proprietary development and/or an installed software implementation. Typically, an installed solution requires the purchase of the software license or licenses as well as the purchase/building of the servers and infrastructure needed to support it. Plus, whether building it from scratch or installing a third-party solution, you’ll also need to factor in the cost of you of ongoing maintenance support of the hardware and software updates, which are often overlooked.

Web-based, SaaS solutions, on the other hand, are usually offered at a monthly or annual subscription fee that includes updates, maintenance, and support.

Reason #2: Time
A typical implementation timeline for installed software could be anywhere from three-to-six months once you factor in the purchase of the software license, the purchase/building the servers and infrastructure need to support it. However, because IT departments typically support the entire enterprise, if/when priorities shift, so will the timeline (and resources) for your project.

With a SaaS solution, the software is already up and running on the vendor’s data center. All you need is a browser and an Internet connection, which lets you avoid many of the time-consuming and costly tasks associated with developing a solution in house or licensing installed software . . . which invariably means the difference between getting up and running in just weeks, instead of months.

Reason #3: ROI
You know the old saying “time is money?” Well, it holds true here. If you decide to develop that marketing software in-house, waiting months, from initiation to launch, can be a long time before you start to see a return on your investment, which most likely was rather sizable.

As previously stated, a SaaS alternative could have you up and running in weeks and accessible from anywhere, increasing your window of opportunity at a fraction of the upfront cost.

Reason#4: Flexibility
When you subscribe to a SaaS solution, you pay a monthly or annual subscription. This fixed cost can be much more appealing than that of a traditional software installation that has a large initial expenditure that must be capitalized and amortized over the useful life of the software — not to mention the expense of staffing and resources to maintain it.

In addition, many SaaS solutions offer modular functionality that may be added on or eliminated from your service as needed. A feature that is so attractive if or when you ever need to scale your expenses to your organization’s changing needs. Some service providers even offer a metered approach where what you’re charged is based on your actual usage, ensuring that you only pay for what you need.

Reason #5: Innovative benefits
With traditional software installation, you typically wait a year between upgrades. These updates may come at an additional fee and can potentially require updating your operating system and hardware to support them. Unfortunately, this makes upgrading impractical for most organizations.

SaaS enhancements are rolled out continuously and can be leveraged immediately throughout the organization. When you subscribe to a SaaS, your organization becomes part of a much larger user base whose activity and workflows are monitored across the entire platform. This allows SaaS providers to make improvements informed by their client’s actual needs and allows you to benefit from enhanced functionality, user experience and streamlined workflows and best practices across industries — seamlessly.

Still thinking about building your own software? Didn’t think so.

Through-channel marketing. Cross channel marketing. Channel partner marketing. Enterprise marketing automation. Call it what you will, the marketing technology that allows your company to create, customize and distribute content to prospects and consumers through your sales teams is all the rage.

And the number of vendors talking about this and soliciting subscribers for their platforms is growing. In fact, a recent Google search on the topic yielded 276,000,000 results.

That’s not a typo. Two hundred seventy-six million is correct.

With so many platforms vying for your attention, how do you begin to evaluate which brand of through-channel marketing automation (TCMA) platform may be right for your organization?

First thing to understand is that each platform offers something a little different. Some have their roots as email platforms or variable data printing. Others as tech developers. Still others are pros in CRM systems.

So before you start evaluating platforms, look at your objectives first and decide what is most important to you and your organization. The last thing you want is to get seduced by the bells and whistles that a certain platform offers only to discover after you subscribe that it doesn’t serve your immediate needs.

Here are five steps you can take to hone in on your specific needs:

1. Identify the different types of users who will access your new marketing automation platform. If they’ll have access to the same type of materials/functionality, write down each group and identify what types of materials and capabilities are the most important for each.
2. Identify the critical business objectives for each group that will be using the system. Recognize the primary and secondary objectives for your user groups including administrators, management and other stakeholders. 
3. Assess your available materials and resources. Do you have the marketing materials available to support the objectives you identified? What types of materials are most readily available now? Do you have the resources to fill any gaps that may have been identified? Do you have the internal resources available to administer the platform?
4. Understand your current landscape. Determine if there is a need to integrate with any existing platforms e.g., CRM systems, single sign-on, etc. 
5. Consider the measures of success. How will each group measure success? To get an idea, think about how you would answer this question: “Our investment in a marketing automation platform will be successful if…”

Once you have a better sense of who will benefit from a marketing automation platform and what’s most important to your organization, you can start your evaluation process. Here are five questions you and your team can ask to guide your process:

1. What types of content does the platform support? Not just email, for instance but social, video, whitepapers, and infographics? Then, think about how they are organized. Will your users be able to find and access the materials they need? Will only relevant materials be served to each user group? Can materials be organized by your objective or be tailored to reflect your organization’s workflow?  
2. Can the platform provider also be a strategic marketing partner? Can the platform provider offer guidance on how to most effectively leverage existing materials? Can the provider be a strategic and creative resource when it comes to prioritizing and filling any gaps that may have been identified? 
3. Does the platform allow for customization? Does the platform provide the ability to customize content and tailor messaging based upon user group, region, service product, etc? 
4. What capabilities does the platform offer for sharing and distributing content? Can the platform support ads, collateral, video, ecards, articles, white papers, etc.? What distribution channels are supported, e.g., email, direct, landing pages, banner ads, embed code, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter? Can materials be organized into pre-packaged, automated campaigns to ensure best practices?  
5. Does the platform offer analytics? This way you can measure things like platform utilization, material use and effectiveness. Can the reporting be tailored to align with your measures of success? Can data be exported?  

Bottomline is… picking the right platform depends on what you’re looking to accomplish. Keep this general rule in mind and you’ll find it will be a little less overwhelming to select from all the platforms out there.