The tradeshow was filled with companies selling iPhone and iPad covers and cases, headsets, speakers, smartphone cleaners, scanners, styluses and printers. Fortunately, in amongst all of those companies’ booths were some occupied by businesses with unique solutions that marketers can benefit from using. This post highlights the ones that I thought were standouts at the show.

Aquafadas – Aquafadas’ Digital Publishing System is intended to streamline the process of creating apps. It enables graphic designers to take existing assets, such as collateral, videos, audio and images and incorporate them into apps that can run on iOS and Android. There are all sorts of marketing use cases for this publishing system. It can be used to extend web-based marketing promotional materials onto salespeople’s tablets and smartphones. It can be used to train salespeople on new products. It can be used to make print and e-zine content mobile. It can be used in plenty of other ways as well.

Aquafadas’ AVE Appfactory, its desktop application for generating customized apps, is free to download. Appfactory guides the designer through every step of the app creation process. No coding is necessary. According to the company, “when an app and its content are ready, you just pay a one-time, life-time fee for your app and your publication.” Prices start at $150 for an app and $350 for publication.”

Quickoffice – Many companies are using iPads as their preferred platform for customer presentations these days. But Microsoft has not released a version of its Office Suite for the iPad platform yet. Quickoffice solves the problem of creating and editing Office files on an iPhone, iPad or Android device.

Let’s say you are getting ready to show a Power Point presentation to a customer. You’ve transferred it to your iPad and are using a reader app, such as GoodReader, to show it. Unexpectedly, just a few minutes before the meeting, you learn that some of the customer data in the presentation is inaccurate. You need to quickly edit your presentation, but how? Pre-Quickoffice you’d need to use your laptop or desktop to make the changes and then transfer the new file to your iPad. That’s a lot to do under pressure.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJl9jVFBX34

Quickoffice does away with that massive inconvenience. It allows users to create and edit Power Point files on the iPad and other mobile devices. This app also delivers similar functionality for Word and Excel files. Additionally, Quickoffice provides integrated access to cloud services, such as Dropbox, Box.net, Huddle, and SugarSync, so users can get the files they need from wherever they may happen to be.

Prices range from zero for QuickOffice Lite for the iPhone to $19.99 (special offer rate – regularly $24.99) for Quickoffice Pro HD for the iPad and Android tablets. The iOS versions of the product are available in the App Store.

Game Your Video – These days it seems that people would rather watch a video than read text to learn about a company, a product or whatever else they’re interested in. This means that there are all sorts of uses for videos in marketing campaigns. But the cost of creating professional quality videos can exceed businesses’ budgets. Many companies are looking for inexpensive tools to produce and edit videos. In a previous post in which I wrote about videos and product launches, I offered suggestions of low cost creation and editing tools for budget-conscious businesses.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_ULfh1KUw0

I’m adding the Game Your Video app to the list. This app adds a gamification approach to video editing. Using an interface inspired by a video game control unit, you can add motion effects, add audio filters and sounds and apply image filters that change the video’s mood. It seems incredibly easy to use and is very reasonably priced. Global Delight has created this app to run on the iPhone 4, 4S and iPod Touch. It costs only $1.99 and is available in the App Store.

Powis iCase – Marketers know that it’s wise to have a selection of gifts for salespeople to give out to prospects and customers. Some companies also like to give their employees items that have their company’s logo on it. With so many people regarding their smart devices as business-critical lifelines, it makes a lot of sense to have corporate gifts for mobile platforms.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=FcHxfqGGM6I

That’s where Powis comes in. Powis iCase sells company branded iPad covers that are attractive and well made. Customization can be done on the inside cover, outside front cover and spine. The custom designed cases are made of leather and cost $79.95 for a single order.

We all have become savvy at creating buffers and filters to prevent advertising from inundating us through email, TV, smartphones and other means. So, as a way to break through those barriers, many marketers are putting more resources towards WOM campaigns. Anyone who gets a recommendation from someone they know will give it more credibility than claims that advertisers make.

Broadly stated, there are two different ways that WOM gets triggered. The most common, and most authentic, is when customers are so thrilled with a great brand experience that they take the initiative to spread the word about it.

Without a doubt, every business wants to achieve the marketing nirvana portrayed in the 1980s TV ads for Faberge Shampoo. But, most businesses are not the beneficiary of hyper-organic WOM where a customer tells “two friends, and so on, and so on, and so on.”

www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgDxWNV4wWY

The second way is in response to an incentive that a business offers to its customers – a discount, money back, a free item – for telling their friends about a brand.

In his book The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell dubbed the people who like to pass along knowledge as “Mavens,” and the sociable personalities who bring people together as “Connectors.” People who possess both of these characteristics are the ones that marketers ideally want to get talking about their products because these folks have a large sphere of influence and higher social currency.

What is “social currency?” According to Wikipedia, it is “the entirety of actual and potential resources which arise from the presence in social networks and communities.” The larger a person’s network, the more influence she is likely to have on the people she is connected to.

Each of us has social currency, both online and offline. With the creation of tools, such as Klout and PeerIndex, that calculate the influence people have in the social media sphere, it’s becoming a lot easier to determine a person’s influence on the Web. Measuring it offline remains a bigger challenge.

Using the scores that these social influence tools assign, marketers can target the people whose recommendations have a greater chance of spreading to larger audiences and reward them for having higher online authority than other customers. Essentially, it’s payday time for people who have a lot of followers on Twitter, friends on Facebook and/or blog subscribers. These avid social media users have the opportunity to get compensated for brand recommendations they promote through their own media channels.

Take the campaign that CapitalOne and Klout recently ran as an example. It offered CapitlaOne credit card holders “up to 10% bonus cash back on all your credit card purchases” based on the number of reward points that they accrued over a seven day period.

Customers were eligible for two types of reward points. The first type was allocated based on each participant’s Klout Score at the time of enrollment. The higher the social currency (aka the Klout Score) a customer had already attained through his or her social media activities, the greater the number of reward points he or she was granted by CapitalOne.

The second type of bonus reward points were awarded after customers’ tweets or Facebook posts directly resulted in their followers and friends signing up for the CapitalOne promotion. As stated in the promotional email, “It’s our way of thanking you for spreading the word.”

There’s no way to know how successful this promotion was. The rules were complicated and I question how many people would eagerly comply with the requirement that to participate they must give their credit card company access to their Facebook and Twitter accounts. No matter, this word of mouth campaign that compensated customers based on their social media influence is a harbinger of more to come.

The buzz and excitement that a launch triggers will wear offthink Segway and Tesla. What then? So many companies focus on how to get their products to market and not on how they are going to grow sales once the products are available.

Every company needs to have a plan for sustained customer acquisition of its products. As important is what it’s going to cost to convert prospects to customers. What is your company going to spend to get a lead? How much is your company going to pay to close a transaction?

The average cost to acquire a customer can easily surpass the amount of money that an average customer will spend with your company. The aggregated Lifetime Value of a Customer (LTV) needs to ultimately exceed the cost of customer acquisition (CAC), or the business is unsustainable in the long-term.

Related: Read David Skok’s For Entrepreneurs blog post for a well written explanation of the relationship between CAC and LTV metrics.

For most companies, the goal is to keep sales and marketing touches to a minimum so that the business’ acquisition costs do not soar out of control. There are certainly exceptions to this approach, such as Groupon, which seems to be the current poster child of the “spend whatever is necessary to get customers” strategy. (It’s too early to tell if their mega-marketing expenditures will crush the company’s finances or result in a profitable, on-going business.)

As your company considers its cost structure in light of the product it has to sell and the methods available to market it, consider the following post-launch customer acquisition strategies:

Free Trial– Allow prospects to trial your product for free for a limited period of time. Encourage them to use it during the trial period. Then, try to convert them to paying customers. Examples of heavy promoters of free trials are Netflix, GoToMeeting and Salesforce.com.

Freemium Product – Make a scaled down version of your product available for free. Get sign ups and hopefully hook people on using it. Then encourage them to pay for the more robust version of the product. This strategy has become increasingly common in the software and app industries.

Inside Sales - Hire an internal sales team that uses the phones, email and social media to close deals. Have them offer real-time sales assistance to website visitors, respond to inbound inquiries, make outbound calls to people who opted-in to promotions, or send upsell emails to free trial participants.

Channel Partners - Don’t sell your product alone. Extend your company’s reach through partners. Have others sell it for you. The cost structure of an indirect channel is often less than selling via a direct sales team. Depending on the product, partner types may include online affiliates, VARs, system integrators, service providers, retailers and more.

Search Engine Marketing and SEO - Getting listed at the top of the first page of a Google search is internet nirvana for businesses. Doing so organically requires a commitment to SEO. Doing so via Google Adwords requires an adherence to an ongoing search engine marketing campaign.

Word of Mouth and Social Media – Word of mouth (WOM) momentum usually takes time to build. The company must invest the resources to fuel it. Some methods of sparking WOM include identifying who the influencers are in your market and spending the effort to cultivate them as evangelists. Social media helps bolster WOM through the blogosphere, build-up awareness and brand affinity via Twitter followers and Facebook Likes and trigger viral opportunities using YouTube.

These approaches to customer acquisition are a sub-set of the many options available to businesses. What others would you suggest be added to the list? Why?

The CMO Survey, which is conducted twice yearly, found that companies are planning to increase their marketing budgets to account for 10% of their overall corporate expenditures over the next 12 months, up from a projected 8.1% reported in the February 2011 survey.

As the marketing function gains internal investment, CMOs will increase their rate of spending on new product introductions by 10.4% and new service introductions by 6.6%. More products and services coming to market at a faster rate, requiring more product launches and services launches, may be the reason.

At the same time, CMOs will reduce their rate of spending on traditional advertising to 1.3%, as the shift from legacy methods of marketing (e.g. print, TV, radio, outdoor, etc.) to mobile and web-based marketing continues.

CMOs will also be allocating more money to social media resources. According to the survey, social media spending is expected to grow over 10% in the next five years, from 7.1% of the budget today to 17.5% by 2016.

Marketers are increasing their spend in social media so that their brands are where consumers are, especially prospects who are likely to purchase online. Nielsen’s Social Media Report, issued this week, confirms that avid social networkers buy online. Nielsen found that “70 percent of active online adult social networkers shop online” and that they are “12 percent more likely than the average adult Internet users” to do so.

CMOs admitted in the study that social media is not well integrated into their companies’ corporate strategies, with just 9.1% replying that it is “very integrated” and 22.3% responding that it is “not integrated at all.” This shouldn’t come as a surprise. New methods of marketing often take time to be broadly incorporated into corporate cultures.

The marketing landscape is always changing. Now it seems to be doing so more rapidly than ever before. New methods to communicate with one another, new ways to get information and new tools to streamline the way we buy are all making it more challenging for marketers to come up with the right “formula” to influence purchases. Thankfully companies are deciding to increase their investments in marketing so that CMOs and their teams will have the opportunity to do their best to figure it out.

The CMO Survey is co-sponsored by The Fuqua School of Business at Duke University and the American Marketing Association. The August 2011 survey was the seventh time the survey has been conducted. It was inaugurated in August 2008. The study takes place twice a year. Respondents submit their answers via an online survey form. Two hundred and forty nine CMOs participated in the most recent study.

Image courtesy of Squawkfox.

Each company’s business strategy is different. This means that the amount of time and resources a company will invest to develop a new product and nurture its adoption and growth will vary. No matter what your firm’s strategy is, when planning the launch of a new product, take steps upfront to avoid launch mistakes.

A previous post outlined eight “Must Haves” when planning a product launch.” To avoid mistakes, follow these eight “Don’t Do’s” when preparing for a launch:

1. Don’t assume that a market exists for your product. Early on in the development process do research to confirm that there is a large enough market for what you’re creating. Segment the market and size it.  Identify your target users and project the return this market can generate. Is your concept financially viable? Will people want to use the product or service? What is different about it? Does it solve an unmet need? Get answers to those questions and more before heavily investing time and resources into its creation.

2. Don’t develop a product without customer input. It’s not enough that the research showed that there’s a market for the product. Whether you’re creating a whole new product or improving an existing one, have people try it out first. Expose the product to different use cases and types of users. Leverage social media to help recruit beta or focus group participants. Given that business is increasingly competitive and many buyers remain cautious with their spending, customer input early on is essential so that you ultimately produce something that customers will want to purchase and use.

3. Don’t release a product that doesn’t work. If the product has technical issues or doesn’t do what is claimed, then fix it before releasing it. This may sound like obvious advice, but companies have been known to forgo quality concerns and push product to market prematurely. As the saying goes, you only get one chance to make a good first impression. Mislead customers’ expectations and they’re unlikely to forgive and forget, much less buy from your company again.

4. Don’t start preparing at the last minute. Launches should never be an afterthought. A lot of planning and effort goes into the creation of a new product. Inevitably it needs to be introduced to the marketplace. Start preparing months in advance, not weeks. Two months is the absolute minimum, but even that timing may be way too tight.

5. Don’t go forward without a launch strategy and plan. Without a clear strategy and plan, operational chaos can easily erupt. Prevent that outcome. Early on, determine what the business objectives are for the product that’s coming to market. Build a strategy to achieve those targets and a plan that captures the tactics necessary to do so. Specify how the launch’s success is going to be measured. Circulate the plan, so that everyone involved in executing it understands it, knows what they’re responsible for and when their tasks must be completed by.

6. Don’t forget to get all the involved departments ready. Form a core team consisting of members from all the departments that have responsibility for some aspect of the product’s introduction. See that they work as one cohesive unit, not as separate functions, so that all the deadlines are met on time and the debut goes off as envisioned.

7. Don’t keep your partners out of the loop. Your partners are an extension of your company. They need to be knowledgeable about your products so that they can do as good a job of selling as your own salesforce. Educate your partners on what’s coming so they are ready to help move product right away.

8. Don’t spend your entire budget on the launch. Launches are essentially the kickoff campaigns for new products. Make sure not to spend your entire budget on them. You’ll need funds to continue to build awareness, generate leads, run promotions and provide superb customer support. No matter what combination of advertising, social media, PR, email marketing or other marketing methods you use, it all costs money to do.

If any of these “don’t do’s” sound familiar, you’re not alone. We can all learn from past marketing mistakes. Follow these tips and you’re likely to make fewer errors when launching a product.

Determine what the purpose of the video is. Is it to generate buzz and interest, as Audi recently did with its R8 GT teaser video series? Is it to showcase the product’s benefits, along the lines of TaylorMade’s Spider Golf Club video?

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kcl_kebuHPw

Or maybe you have another goal in mind?

Decide whether you’re going to use live action, animation, graphics, slides, or a combination thereof. Whatever direction you take, make sure that you develop for the medium of video. Resist repurposing marketing or sales tools “as is.”

For example, don’t take a power point presentation that’s cluttered with text in small typeface, record a delivery of it and post it online as so many companies do. People can’t read what’s on the screen and they will abort watching it ASAP.

Along those lines, consider the multiple monitor display sizes that your video may be viewed on. It could be watched on a screen as small as a smartphone, or on one as large as a 52 inch flat screen TV. Your video must be suitable for any screen size so that your audience remains engaged long enough to consume your key messages.

There’s also the matter of whether you want to convert your video to Flash or HTML5 to post on your website and elsewhere so that people can watch it via their browsers. That’s only an issue if you don’t want to rely solely on video sharing platforms, such as YouTube or Vimeo, as the viewing platforms. There are many factors to consider when making this decision and this fine article by Periscopic will help you think it through.

When it comes to cost, companies no longer need to allocate a large portion of their launch budgets to video production unless they want to produce a high end quality film. If that’s the objective, then hiring a professional film crew, actors and a video editing team makes sense.

There are now low cost video creation and editing tools available for firms that prefer to take an economical approach. Stupeflix and One True Media let users mix pictures, videos, text and music to create videos. If animation is the preferred direction, take a look at GoAnimate and iClone3D.

Do you want to create a tutorial or demo video of a software program? Then give CamStudio a try. It’s a free open source video solution that enables screen recording and audio/video sync.

Whatever tools you decide to use, when launch day arrives, post the completed video on your company’s website, its Facebook page, if the business has one, and on YouTube. After all, as the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words.

Every email marketing campaign is competing against the “Report Spam” button. Providing content that is valued by the receivers is key to retaining active subscribers. Still, as the inbox continually grows, each person reaches a limit to the number of emails that he can read, digest and act on. When people get overwhelmed by an inundation of email, they start to delete and unsubscribe. Think of it as email’s version of “survival of the fittest.”

In an earlier post, I highlighted how Groupon is using video to pull people back from the “brink” of opting out. Another approach is to allow subscribers to “opt-down” by reducing the frequency of the emails they receive, or by fine-tuning the types of emails they get from your company.

To implement an opt-down program, start by selecting an Email Service Provider that offers opt-down options. After signing up, create an “Email Communication Preference Page” instead of an opt-out page. Lay out the page in a way that clearly highlights multiple options.

Place copy at the top of the page that touts the benefits the receiver gets from the emails your company sends. Then provide a selection of subscription choices for the recipient, such as getting emails once a month instead of weekly, or only emails on a certain topic. Below that section, provide a change of email address field. The next section should be the “Unsubscribe” button.  Make sure to also include an option that allows the recipient to continue receiving all emails from your company. Here is an example of how Carnival has implemented their opt-out page.

Below is another example of an Email Communication Preference Page. This one is courtesy of Kenneth Cole.

Create a single web page with easy to consume text and lots of whitespace. Make it visually appealing and make it simple and you’re likely to keep some potential unsubscribers from going AWOL.

But findings released last week by Nielsen call these claims into question. Nielsen’s research is showing that the targeting capabilities of online ad campaigns are typically no more precise than targeting results achieved by traditional TV campaigns.

Nielsen Online Campaigns Ratings system was introduced in September 2010 as a new way to measure audiences of online ad campaigns by “combining traditional Nielsen TV and online panel data with aggregated, anonymous demographic information from participating online data contributors.  Using its unique approach, Nielsen will be able to provide reach, frequency and Gross Rating Point measures for online advertising campaigns of nearly any size, running nearly anywhere on the web.”

Nielsen has used the system to assess approximately 40 campaigns for over 20 brands. Having aggregated data from million of internet users, it is yielding a higher sample coverage than average, at 42%. A larger sample size infers a greater accuracy in the results.

So, let’s look at the recently announced findings. According to Nielsen, “an analysis of the campaigns showed that when comparing campaigns with narrow audience (less than 20 year age span or age + gender) vs. broad audience (greater than 20 year age span), narrowly defined demos typically delivered 30 percent on-target vs. 77 percent for broad.” For companies that have been spending thousands, or even millions of dollars advertising online, this preliminary discovery should get their attention immediately.

The study also concluded that “Age + Gender-specific campaigns exhibited the highest delivery outside of the desired audience (27% for age + gender vs. 75% for general).”

This means that companies that want to reach women within specified age brackets through online advertising are either having their offers viewed by women outside those ranges, or by men a whopping 72% of the time! The mistargeting is one percentage worse for advertisers marketing and selling to men online.

What is to be made of these findings? First off, this is a new methodology and it will be in beta until mid-summer. Like any company debuting a new product, Nielsen wants to make a big splash with its introduction and unexpected findings get attention.  Also, Nielsen has not publicly stated whether the bulk of the campaign analyses were done on SEM, Facebook or other types of ad platforms. This would be helpful to know, as some platforms are going to be more accurate at targeting than others. A portion of the mistargeting can likely be attributed to non-cleansed databases filled with bogus user data  intentionally provided inaccurately by people or spambots.

No matter, Nielsen’s early findings are provocative. They should prompt marketers to take an even closer look at the effectiveness of their online campaigns and to demand highly accurate and verifiable analytics from their agencies, ad networks and publishers.

The most recent and significant change is that social media has gone mainstream. According to Bill Tancer, GM, Global Research at Experian Marketing Services, research conducted by his organization found that 51% of the adults online ages 50+ are using social networking sites.

Boomers are actually surpassing their younger cohorts when it comes to engaging in the web’s foremost social media hub, Facebook.  In fact, Facebook visitors 55+ years old are 23% more likely to go onto Facebook than other age groups. This visit share is in contrast to the 35 – 44 year old “Gen X” generation, which actually decreased its Facebook visit share from 23% to 21% in 2010.

Bill Tancer also reported that, after Facebook, the most popular social media sites for Boomers over 55 years old are You Tube, MySpace and Yahoo Answers.

Delving into the preferences of Boomer women, AARP’s research has found that nearly half are active online, spending an average of 20 hour per week on the web. More than 50% of these women are on Facebook, where they average 50 friends each.

However, social media is not Boomer women’s primary activity online. Stephen Reily, CEO of Vibrant Nation, shared that it is most common for these women to be spending their time on the internet using search engines and email, followed by doing research and visiting health-related sites. Online gaming is also a popular pastime.

The most connected Boomer cohort is the “Social Media Maven.” As described by Lori Bitter, President and CEO of Continuum Crew, this group is 53% female, communicates intensively and is regularly exploring and expanding its networks. Social Media Mavens are more likely to try new products and refer them to friends, thereby influencing their networks’ buying decisions and preferences. Interestingly, because they thrive on being in touch and on personal interactions, they use the phone more often than email.

While Boomers are active consumers of web content, they are not as inclined to react to what they read by adding their opinions to the online conversation. Lori Bitter stated that 90% of Boomers just view content, 9% comment and 1% upload information related to what they’ve read. One of the reasons that the comment percentage is so low is simple. Boomers like to be asked to participate in the conversation before doing so.

All of these data points leave no doubt that Boomers are entrenched in the online mainstream. Marketers striving to influence this notable market segment need to broaden the design of their campaigns to include email and social media components, in combination with offline and, where appropriate, mobile tactics as well. Don’t forget to ask Boomers to join in the online conversation and share their opinions.

What do you think? Do you agree? Yes, I’m asking you to please join the conversation.

Buyers’ preferences will inevitably change. Technologies will evolve. New markets will form and existing ones will disappear. Companies that don’t adapt by rolling out new products, or creating new services will, overtime, become less relevant or even fold. This reality is summed up by the mantra “innovate or die.”

Companies must keep rejuvenating themselves. Product introductions are a way to do so. They are important milestones for businesses. No matter the frequency at which new products or services are released, each introduction should deliver value to customers. Each one should have business objectives and success factors tied to it. 

The last post examined the criteria that customers use to evaluate whether a company’s product release is a success. Now let’s flip the equation and consider the company’s perspective. How does a company judge whether its launch is successful?

I believe that there are eight factors that comprise a company’s criteria for a successful product launch. They are:

1. Satisfaction – Buyers love the product. They tell their friends and anyone who will listen about it.

2. Financial Success – The results meet or exceed the company’s goals. Whether success is measured by revenue, units sold, downloads, increased market share, stock price, or some other metric, it’s achieved.

3. Marketing Success – With so many marketing metrics to choose from, it may be a combination of brand awareness, website traffic, new leads, email opens, inquiries, clickthroughs, coverage, social media reach & influence and more that the company is after. The targets are nailed, no matter what they are.

4. Organizational Success – The launch is managed well. Cross-functional teams works in unison.

5. Training Success – Customer service, partners and salespeople are trained on the product and can knowledgeably answer users’ questions on day one.

6. Operational Success – The public is unaware of the complexities of the launch process. To them it all looks seamless and easy. Product development meets all the deadlines. The supply chain functions as expected. Engineering, manufacturing, QA, fulfillment and distribution all get it done.

7. Competitive Advantage – The competition has been beaten to market, or major strides have been made against them.

8. Accomplishment – Members of the launch team feel like they’ve achieved something significant, both personally and professionally. It was a lot of work, but it was worth it!

The combined customer and company criteria provide guidance for how to pull off a successful launch. If you are planning a launch, begin by tying metrics to each of the success factors. Then build and execute a launch plan that is designed to achieve each one. Do it well and your launch will be a sensation!