It will be interesting to see how this influences marketing via Adwords and its impact on email marketing. One of the challenges of email marketing is growing your list. This could definitely help businesses grow their lists, but not sure about the quality of those subscribers as they will have limited interaction with the business prior to subscribing and it may be a little disturbing for those who are logged into their Google account to see their email address pre-populated in a “Subscribe” form. Perhaps this will work best for larger brands? Could it work well to help start-ups build an email list as they are preparing to launch? Not sure, but a very interesting step for Google and those who advertise via Adwords.

One of the major challenges for start ups and early stage companies is getting those first customers. If it’s a web-based company- how do you get more visitors to your website? How do you get these visitors to pay for your product or service? It’s not easy and it goes without saying that if you aren’t getting more customers then your business is dead in the water.

There are a number of important things you must consider both pre and post launch to get those first customers. As your customer base grows you’ll gain momentum and it can get easier, but you’re simply faced with different challenges as you work to scale customer growth from one stage of your business to the next. The toughest stage is going from 0 to those first few customers.

There has been a lot written about “product-market fit” and entering an existing market versus trying to carve out a new space or an entirely new approach to an existing market. I’m making the assumption that there’s a solid product-market fit and you’re entering an existing market with a number of competitors in the space. Also, building a successful product takes a lot more than just marketing or “getting the word out”. It starts with a solid product that’s executed well and makes the user’s life easier. I’m a firm believer in 20% idea and 80% execution. If you can execute well, it can make marketing and sales a heck of a lot easier.

When trying to get those first customers, many try to look for a home run. They look for that one channel or they think “if only I could get picked up on one of the major tech blogs”. In actuality, everything you do can have a small impact and those small steps that you take can have a much larger impact collectively than any one thing that you do.

Pre-Launch

If you have yet to launch it’s not too soon to begin thinking about getting those first customers. You should be talking to potential customers anyway to better understand their challenges and how your solution may be able to help them. Don’t keep your business a secret. Talk to everyone you can about what you’re working on and get feedback from as many people as possible. These individuals can help shape your product and could become your first customers.

Work to build momentum leading up to the launch of your business. Taking the simple step of providing a landing page where visitors can sign up to be notified when you launch can help generate interest.

Post Launch

Once you’ve launched there’s a ton of opportunity to build awareness for your product and get users on-board without having a huge marketing budget out of the gate.

Here are a few tips and suggested channels to get you started:

Provide Consistent and Valuable Content
Providing consistent and valuable content on your blog can help build awareness for your company and trust with your market. You can also write for other blogs that target a similar market and link to your website within the byline of your article. Writing for other blogs that already have an established base of readers can give you additional reach that you may not currently have for your company’s blog. A third option is to provide whitepapers and similar “guides” that require a user to provide their email address prior to downloading. This gives you the opportunity to collect email addresses from visitors and follow-up with targeted messages based on their interest.

Integrations
Be careful with this one as you do not want to put a lot of development work into this only to realize that the partnership stinks and you have no customers to show for your efforts. Instead, reach out to these companies you’d like to integrate with and treat it like a partnership and learn as much as you can about their core customer-don’t make any assumptions. This will help determine if you share a similar target market and will give the integration the best chance for success. By integrating with a solution where the customer benefits, everyone wins and this allows you to tap into an existing, targeted customer base.

Partnerships
Similar to integrations, partnerships can be a great way tap into an existing and targeted base of customers. Seek out potential partners who have customers who could also benefit from using your solution and consider different ways to approach a partnership with another company. It could be a simple link to your site within the company’s application and you in turn provide a share of the revenue generated (basically an affiliate arrangement but with much more care taken as to the structure of the partnership).

Affiliates
Providing an affiliate program can help you grow your customer base by providing a scale for advertising that you may not be able to afford if you had to pay for it upfront. You probably know how affiliate programs work  -someone advertises via a text or banner ad and you pay an upfront or recurring commission for any sales they refer. While running an affiliate program can provide scale, it can also be expensive if you go with a major network and are required to maintain a minimum account balance, so definitely ask about any minimum balances when talking to potential networks. CommissionJunction is the leader in the space, but can be expensive. In addition to CommissionJunction, check out PepperJam, ShareaSale, and Linkshare. If you’re looking to run and manage the program in-house there are some software-as-a-service options including: HasOffers, DirectTrack, and HitPath.

Viral Component
If possible, try to build in some sort of viral component into your product. At iContact we included a “powered by iContact” link in the footer of every email that was sent. However, do not place the motivation to get more revenue over the experience of your customers, but incorporating some sort of component that inexpensively amplifies the growth of your product/service with every additional user can lower your acquisition costs while growing your customer base. Incorporating a viral component goes beyond simply including a link to your website. Think about ways to encourage users to share an element of your service via social media. Game sites like Zynga and location-based apps like Gowalla and Foursquare have done a great job of incorporating viral components to help expand the reach of their platforms. Even if you aren’t building an online game or a location-based app, how can you incorporate a similar component into your application?

Paid Search
Start by using Google’s Keyword Tool to see what people search for and the monthly search volume for these terms. If you have a limited budget for Paid Search, don’t forget to use the Broad Match Modifier as a match type. It can extend your impressions beyond that of Exact and Phrase Match, while mitigating some of the risk of investing in Broad Match and adding negative keywords. Send this traffic to a targeted landing page that’s consistent with the AdGroup and Keyword to help your Quality Score to gain more efficiency with your campaigns (ie: paying less per click, but ranking higher in paid search results). Creating this consistency will also help increase conversions by delivering on the expectations of users as they click an ad for a keyword they’ve searched for and are taken to your landing page.

Case Studies
Case studies from your customers are wonderful and necessary, however here I’m referring to providing case studies for products and services that your company uses. I am by no means suggesting that you should make up great things to say about a product you’re using in order to get free press. What I am suggesting is to think about those products that you use and love and reach out to the company to see if you could provide a case study. This can give your company additional exposure and build brand awareness for your solution.

Speaking Engagements
Seek out opportunities to speak at various conferences. There are a tons of conferences that vary in size and target audience. Reach out to the conference’s organizers to see if you can participate in a panel or speak about your area of expertise. This can help build awareness for your company and perhaps more importantly help position yourself as a trusted leader in your market.

Press and Blogs
Get into the habit of consistently writing and sending press releases to your media contacts, whether you’ve landed a well-known customer, a significant partnership, or released a new feature. In addition to press releases, reach out to well-known blogs in your space to see if they would be interested in covering your story, whether it’s a recent but significant feature that you’ve built, or the story of why you’re building your company.

Email Marketing
I’m including email marketing here as a conversion tool, not an acquisition tool. You should have an existing relationship or have had some sort of interaction with the person that you’re sending an email newsletter/message to. If you’re taking the necessary steps to drive traffic to your website and get them to sign-up for a trial, email newsletter, or provide their email address prior to downloading a whitepaper, then you should follow-up via email. If a user has signed up for a trial, send a message to welcome them aboard, another to let them know how to get started, and what support resources are available- to name a few. If they sign up for an email newsletter be sure to let them know how often they can expect to receive a newsletter from you and send the newsletter consistently to keep them engaged. The same holds true after collecting a visitor’s email address prior to downloading a whitepaper. The visitor has shown an interest in the content you’ve provided in the whitepaper, so send tailored messages to these users that speak to their interests and how your company could help. I would even suggest including a survey to better understand their challenges and the types of visitors that are downloading your whitepaper. This information can help shape the content you include on your website, where you place ads, and how you position your product moving forward.

SEO
Search Engine Optimization is an ongoing process and something that can take time to pay-off, but it’s also an important part of the process and something that should always be taken into consideration as other marketing channels can impact SEO. The major onsite components that should be considered include: title tags/meta data, H1 tags, keyword density, URL structure/canonicalization, and internal linking. There are a ton of great resources available that cover each of the topics mentioned above and in far greater detail than I could ever provide here. As you’re designing/developing your website, adding additional content, and looking for ways to improve your rankings, I recommend checking out the blogs and tools provided by Aaron Wall’s SEOBook and Rand Fishkin’s SEOMoz.

Social Media
I saved Social Media for last because it should work to help other channels. Potential customers will likely interact with your brand via Social Media at some point and while it can result directly into someone signing up, it’s likely that the customer will also interact with 1 or 2 other channels prior to coming on-board. Social Media allows you to do a number of things very well: reach a wider audience through your current followers, allows you to have a conversation with a user instead of simply advertising to them, and gives you a platform to share your content and content of others which helps to build trust and respect in your market. Be sure to focus on the quality of the content, not just the quantity, and make sure you’re tracking the performance of your social media efforts. Just like any other channel, social media should be tracked.

Many of your customers will likely hear about your company, and hopefully sign up, via word-of-mouth. This will hold true not just early on but throughout the growth of your company. You have control over word-of-mouth marketing by delivering a great experience for your current users. It doesn’t matter whether you have 1 customer or 100, provide a great experience for them. We can sometimes focus too heavily on the language we use to “convert” a visitor into a customer, but think about how you communicate to your current customers about what you do. If it’s simple to explain, as it should be,  your customers will not have a tough time explaining what your company does and what sets it apart from the competition as they spread the word.

Right-brain versus left-brain or designers versus accountants, both refer to two different ways of viewing the world. I call them Crunchers (as in ‘number crunchers’) and Creatives and there’s a healthy tension among these two camps in almost all organizations, but what about the influence they each have on the growth of a company?

We’ve seen companies like 37signals burst onto the scene in the last few years with a great appreciation for design and user experience. Both supported by their preachings of simplicity which has launched a mentality of “less is more” in designing apps and has made a convincing argument that design is key to growing your business. We’ve also seen Apple’s focus on design skyrocket the company into a leader in technology. We see this happening around us but for some reason there are companies that continue to downplay design and its importance in impacting the bottom line. The companies that are ignoring this haven’t built a culture that understands the power of design and realizes its real impact on business and my guess would be that these companies are filled with Crunchers.

So let’s look at Crunchers and Creatives. Both understand the importance of revenue but approach its generation a bit differently. Crunchers tend to develop a laser-like focus on the goal of acquiring revenue and make a b-line for it without paying close enough attention to user experience. Examples of this would include aggressive sales tactics in order to “close the sale”, bending the truth in their messaging in order to attract more customers, or selling customers products or services they don’t need. They can get a little too aggressive with closing the deal. I believe that this effort is needed to makeup for a lack of clear differentiation of their product in the marketplace which could be achieved due in large part through great design and a focus on user experience.

When strong design and focus on user experience is non-existent or weak, marketing must work that much harder to compensate for these shortcomings. When design and user experience are strong it removes a burden from marketing by making the benefits of using the product clearer and empowers users to share their experience via word-of-mouth and through social media. In short, if your product is easy to use and empowers users, they will share their experience with others. When this happens marketing can simply play a supporting role and doesn’t need to work twice as hard in convincing prospective customers on why they should use your product over a competitor’s.

The Big Picture and How These Elements Work Together

The diagram below illustrates Design & User Experience, Marketing, and a solid Business/Revenue Model working together to generate revenue and growth for your company. You can also see what happens when you have two out of the three working for you.

Marketing Must Overcompensate for a Lack of Quality and Focus on Design & User Experience

We can see what generally happens when there’s a lack of quality and focus on design and user experience. Marketing must work harder to tout the benefits and competitive edge over similar products.

A Greater Focus on Design & User Experience can Relieve the Burden Placed on Marketing

By focusing on the quality of design and user experience and improving it, marketing dollars can be spent much more efficiently and work to support a product that has a clear competitive edge through ease of use and quality of design. In addition, making the product easier to use can reduce the amount of effort and resources needed to support it, which can lower costs and increase your return on investment.

Creatives tend to do a great job of focusing on the customer’s experience and also attracting the right customers. If they can do these things well there can be a clear differentiation among their competitors and customers will be easier to support. Creatives also realize that by focusing on the customer and their experience customers will trust you, pay you (and perhaps even pay a premium), and continue using your product leading to a higher lifetime value.

However, there needs to be a balance between these two approaches. Creatives must remember that there’s a difference between building a product and building a business. An extreme example of this is Twitter. I love Twitter, but they have yet to develop a business and revenue model around their product. That’s not to say that it won’t become a revenue generating machine, but it’s currently lacking the model. Building a product will serve your customers, but you must develop a business model around the product in order for it to be sustainable and serve your customers, you and your team, and thrive. If Creatives can do that successfully and team it with great design and user experience, and support it with targeted marketing, the sky is the limit for their business.

Crunchers on the other hand must realize that not everything can be individually and directly tied to a return on investment and it’s the small things that collectively contribute to a customer’s experience with your product and brand. In addition, don’t treat design as an afterthought. Design is king. Design is the reason Apple is a success, design is the reason you chose your car over others, design is the reason you chose the clothes you are wearing, design is the reason you chose one app over another- you get the idea. Do not downplay its importance in generating revenue and growth for your business and its impact on customer retention.

On that note, one of the greatest things we’re witnessing are creative agencies building businesses. They are taking the talents they have provided clients and developing apps for the rest of us that solve the problems they, and/or their clients, are experiencing. I love seeing this. Who better to launch an app than a company who has all the tools to build it and an in-depth understanding of what users are looking for based on their experience working with clients. As a result, we’re seeing well-designed apps that solve real problems all while inspiring us to better serve our users through great design.

Whether a company is lead by a Cruncher or Creative a culture should exist that emphasizes design and user experience and a realization that without them, innovation, differentiation among competitors, and solid growth cannot and will not happen. If you’re a Creative and leading a company be sure to include a Cruncher on the team for balance and healthy tension and leverage what they do well like financials, forecasting and planning and if you’re a Cruncher leading an organization it’s time to embrace design and user experience, spread it through your organization and realize that nothing can have a greater impact on your bottom line.

I recently left iContact after 6.5 years as their VP of Marketing. It was a lot of fun, a ton of hard work, a great learning experience, and I made many life-long friends during my time there.

I absolutely without-a-doubt knew I wanted to join a start-up after college because I wanted to start my own company some day and what better way to learn the ropes than joining a start-up, jumping right in and gaining an understanding of what it truly takes to start and grow a company?

I was the fourth member of the team at iContact in 2004 and early on I did everything from answering phones to creating and managing our marketing campaigns. It was what you’d probably expect at a start-up – lots of hustle, many long hours, and we still weren’t sure if we’d be successful. We stayed with it, made some mistakes, but learned from them and pushed forward. We maintained our focus on growing the company and were fortunate enough to be named to Inc Magazine’s 500 fastest growing private companies in America three years in a row: 2007, 2008, and 2009. Today, iContact has over 300 employees, generating tens-of-millions of dollars in annual revenue and is continuing to grow extremely fast.

As exciting as the last 6.5 years have been I am even more excited to build a company of my own. I’m excited about the challenges we’re setting out to solve with our software and I’m looking forward to launching later this year. Also, I’m looking for 1-2 developers to join the team. Get in touch if you are interested or if you know someone who would be interested in joining a start-up.

I love that the start-up scene is continuing to grow rapidly here in North Carolina, especially in Durham. There are a number of early stage companies here that are working to solve interesting problems and are lead by some very smart people. While I’m setting out to get my own company off the ground I am also looking forward to helping other start-ups here as well.

The next year will be very exciting as I work to get my company off the ground and running and I also look forward to connecting with, and helping, other entrepreneurs in the area.