Smart Software Marketing http://smartsoftwaremarketing.co.uk Marketing consultant for software companies Thu, 19 Feb 2015 09:36:04 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.7.5 Software Marketing Tweetables 16 December 2013 http://smartsoftwaremarketing.co.uk/software-marketing-tweetables-16december-2013/ http://smartsoftwaremarketing.co.uk/software-marketing-tweetables-16december-2013/#comments Mon, 16 Dec 2013 00:10:38 +0000 http://smartsoftwaremarketing.co.uk/?p=3607

Catch up on last week’s favourite articles featuring useful insights and tips for marketing your software

5 Articles on Product Marketing

The SaaS analytics lifecycle

The plethora of analytics tools and advice, like the data, is overwhelming for most people. Focus on what you need to make decisions now. Don’t waste time on aspects you think may come in useful later.

Price By The Pound: Pricing Strategies From Drug Dealers And Others To Help You Make More Money

Pricing is hard. There are many ways to structure your pricing. Several great examples of companies who use their understanding of customers to adapt pricing to align with customers’ motivation and increase revenue / cash flow.

When Customers Make You Smarter

Example that demonstrates importance of interviewing customers and learning how a market really works. This team learned an extra quantifiable benefit worth $1800 to their customers.

What’s an ideal ratio for product and marketing spend for a consumer Internet startup?

There’s no point spending a whole lot of money driving people to a product no-one wants to buy. Founders should initially be focusing on finding a problem worth solving, and then solving it. But it can really help to have those marketing skills within the team to test messages and gain an initial audience.

10 excellent video-embedded landing pages

Video as a prime asset for your landing pages. Draw inspiration from these media / brand examples.

5 Articles on Startups

The A to Z of what I learned in 5 months to $112,000 ARR

A whole lotta startup learning in one post. Alex McClafferty shares painful experiences, mistakes and actionable advice.

How to Negotiate Price Without Being a Jerk

The absolutely worst way to talk to an investor and how it should have been done. Read this before you negotiate price on a deal.

Why We’re Losing $300 Per User, Every Month

The purpose of a minimum viable product (MVP) is to prove demand, uncover how this business would really work. It does not need to be scalable at all. Usually it makes no sense building a full solution until you know customers will definitely buy.

The Wisdom Of The 20-Minute Startup

Another example of an MVP, using a creative way to avoid building a product until demand proven.

Why Worrying About Startup “Competitors” is Ridiculous

Rivalry between startups makes good stories for PR, but the reality is that you’ll both end up in very different places. Watch them, talk to them but don’t get stressed aboutyour competitors.

5 Articles on Software Marketing

How to Write a Great Email to a Cold Lead

Smart advice on how to write individual emails that will really work. Perfect for cold prospecting emails but also for any emails you send to busy people.

How GoToMeeting Reduces Churn

See how GotoMeeting have built in ways to reduce customer churn. Instead of just letting customers cancel, they offer softer options to stop for now or downgrade.

7 Content Marketing Myths Debunked

Content marketing is going through a hype phase. See which rumours you can safely ignore.

The Other C Word: What makes great content marketing great

The hype of content marketing means your content marketing will have to work that much harder to stand out from the crowd. Excellent slide deck.

Targeted Ads Without Retargeting

In the future we’ll look back and wonder why websites delivered the same information to everyone. We should be able to figure out what people want and adapt the content / ads / format to suit them – individually.

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]]> http://smartsoftwaremarketing.co.uk/software-marketing-tweetables-16december-2013/feed/ 7 Software Marketing Tweetables 2 December 2013 http://smartsoftwaremarketing.co.uk/software-marketing-tweetables-2december-2013/ http://smartsoftwaremarketing.co.uk/software-marketing-tweetables-2december-2013/#comments Mon, 02 Dec 2013 00:10:31 +0000 http://smartsoftwaremarketing.co.uk/?p=3585

Catch up on last week’s favourite articles featuring useful insights and tips for marketing your software

5 Articles on Product Marketing

Chill With The Product, Bro.

If you’re an engineer who built a product no-one is using or a non-technical entrepreneur looking for a coder, stop focusing on the product. First, find demand and prove customers will pay.

Infographic: SaaS Operating Metrics Uncovered

Shows a sweet spot around $2-5M where economies of scale kick in. Provides banchmark figures on how much you should be spending on sales + marketing combined.

Top Predictions about Software Companies in 2014

Predictions on 2014 software industry show common belief that Google and Amazon are both still on the way up. Older pre-internet vendors are struggling to impress analysts and face challenges with large on-premise installed base and legacy technology e.g. Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP.

Case Study: How We Improved Landing Page Conversions by 79.3%

Great to see an A/B testing example where some tests fail to beat the control.

Why Does Tone of Voice Matter?

For most people, branding means logos and a visual identity. But it should include core beliefs and the copywriting equivalent to visual identity – tone of voice. Establishing a clear voice is essential for product marketers to establish a personality – a memorable brand.

5 Articles on Startups

You have 30 days to win a customer

Don’t just let your trial users, try your software out for 30-days. Develop a structured induction programme designed to get them to see real value. To do that you need to figure out what is the tipping point that makes users really experience the value.

How We Signed Up 4,400 B2B Customers in 30 days

How to use partnerships and product integration to reach broad audiences.

5 Founders Split $36K from $82M Startup Exit

VC funding and bootstrapping both have their advantages and pitfalls. Here’s a warning story for any struggling founders – never give up your board seats.

How Startups Can Get Pricing Right

Pricing always seems to be the hardest decision for startups – but remember it does not have to be set in stone. You can offer enterprise deals, discounts, you can vary the price from month-to-month. There is nothing to prevent you experimenting with prices.

From the Trenches: 23 Entrepreneurs Share Their Most Valuable Lessons Learned

Inspiration advice from 23 startup founders / industry figures. My favourite – Jason Cohen “You spend 99.9% of your life working on the path, and 0.1% experiencing the euphoria of an exit or the disappointment of a final failure. If you’re not fulfilled by the journey, you’re wasting your life.”

5 Articles on Software Marketing

8 B2B Companies That Deliver Delightful Copywriting

Almost all B2B marketing is boring and bland, 8 exceptions include Dropbox, Velocity Partners, Airclic, Help Scout and Zendesk.

10 of the Best Email Subject Lines You’ve Ever Read

Examples of email subject lines that demand attention – most are really short.

Why You Should Build a Habit of Writing Every Day

Writing regularly as its own benefit, not just as a chore. With practice, writing becomes easier, more effective and helps you clarify your own thinking.

Storytelling 101: How to Seize the Attention of a Distracted Audience

Stories have captured human’s attention for milennia as they have been used to teach moral, practical, and philosophical lessons. They work because binding facts and ideas into a story makes them interesting, memorable and worth repeating.

If Someone Is Shouting About You, Shout About It

Telling people stories about how other people profit from using your software is effective. But social proof, where customers themselves are describing their own success is even more effective.

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]]> http://smartsoftwaremarketing.co.uk/software-marketing-tweetables-2december-2013/feed/ 4 Software Marketing Tweetables 18 November 2013 http://smartsoftwaremarketing.co.uk/software-marketing-tweetables-18november-2013/ http://smartsoftwaremarketing.co.uk/software-marketing-tweetables-18november-2013/#comments Mon, 18 Nov 2013 00:10:52 +0000 http://smartsoftwaremarketing.co.uk/?p=3559

Catch up on last week’s favourite articles featuring useful insights and tips for marketing your software

5 Articles on Product Marketing

Top Hacks from a PM Behind Two of Tech’s Hottest Products

Tips for Product Managers 1) Earn engineering’s team trust to speak for them 2) PM gets blame, team gets credit 3) do the boring stuff that moves things forward

Why “Simple” Websites Are Scientifically Better

Visitors should never have to learn how your website works or figure out what it does. Use web conventions so visitors are thinking about your message, your product, never your website.

Web Giants Threaten End to Cookie Tracking

Wall Street Journal on one of the thorniest product management problems. Google, Microsoft, and Facebook all fiercely compete for free users and monetize via advertising. Increasing privacy would increase users and hurt the competition but also hurt their advertising revenue – all to play for.

Manage Customer Success to Reduce Churn

In a commercial sales-driven world, making customers happy may seem naïve. Smart companies ensure customers are successful – think of them as an unpaid sales channel bringing in highly qualified deals and paying you for more.

The 10x Product Launch

This is absolutely the way to think about product launches. Forget 1 “big bang”, plan in chunks first 10 customers, then 100, then 1000… Use high-touch to start, it won’t scale but the learning is invaluable.

5 Articles on Startups

From Idea To Validation To 3,500 Users

How an introvert can start researching a startup idea without having to actually talk to people. Using online research to confirm need, competition, and then blogging to get initial audience.

Could we hatch a British Twitter?

Would Twitter have worked if launched in the UK? There are very few (if any) UK startups that have become household names. But Silicon Valley is losing its dominance – development, design, entrepreneurial, and design skills are spreading everywhere. And big VC money is no longer essential.

Why only fools write code first

Building code is fun and controllable. Don’t start there. The risk is almost always a market research. Find out what people will buy before any coding.

Startup Marketing is About Passion

“Armed with passion, startups can connect with target audiences because their sales and marketing activities are authentic and compelling”

Deconstructing PR: Advice From A Former VentureBeat Writer

PR myth debunking: you don’t need to be friends with journalists or hire a PR firm. Tips from a journalist on what you can do to make it easy for them to write a story about your product news.

5 Articles on Software Marketing

Diary of a programmer with no clue about marketing

“I built this thing over several years because I wanted it and thought others might want it too. Last week I launched it. So now after years of neglecting anything to do with marketing. I get it. Marketing is hard. So crushingly hard. Also I was incredibly naïve in thinking that the product was so good that the marketing would just snowball itself into action.” Hard lesson to learn.

How We Grew Our Blog to 5,000+ Subscribers in Five Weeks

Investing a lot of time and talent on your content marketing can pay off big time.

B-to-B Firms Need Content Marketing

Some more ideas on moving your content marketing forward.

How to Use the Persuasive Power of Mini-Stories in Your Sales Copy

Stories have proved to be the most effective form of communications / message for millenia. Think fables, legends, religion, culture… Stories engage at deeper level than facts and logical argument – you need your audience to feel something to create a strong memory.

7 Free Sales Tools to Help Close More Deals

Free tools you can use to help online prospecting for people to interview or pitch to.

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]]> http://smartsoftwaremarketing.co.uk/software-marketing-tweetables-18november-2013/feed/ 8 Software Marketing Tweetables 5 November 2013 http://smartsoftwaremarketing.co.uk/software-marketing-tweetables-5november-2013/ http://smartsoftwaremarketing.co.uk/software-marketing-tweetables-5november-2013/#comments Tue, 05 Nov 2013 14:39:08 +0000 http://smartsoftwaremarketing.co.uk/?p=3539

Catch up on last week’s favourite articles featuring useful insights and tips for marketing your software

5 Articles on Product Marketing

Draft: From Zero To Kickstarter In $5k

Great product launch lessons for any product. Test alternative value propositions / messages before spending any money. A video is a cost-effective compelling way to tell your story, but get the message right beforehand.

4 Essential UX Resources

Top resources to learn about usability and user experience – as recommended by an expert.

Market Research for Software Products

Before “customer development” there was market research. The goal is the same – learn what customers will buy and why. Proper market research is just as effective, but too many research projects have been poorly executed over the years.

How to Educate & Persuade Customers

3 types of communications. When people want to do a task but it’s hard *Simplify*. If it’s easy and they want to do it then *Nudge*. If it’s easy but not something they want to then *Persuade*

How to Write Good Blog Posts

Don’t write to impress. Write for the reader. Unlearn all your bad habits from school days and write naturally, like you talk. But more concise.

5 Articles on Startups

Excel template for cohort analyses in SaaS

The basic idea of SaaS cohort analysis seems straightforward. But it takes a while to figure out how to read it and much longer to create your own spreadsheet. Save your mental energy and time for your own products – use this template and explanation by Christoph Janz.

Thoughts on Internet startups, early-stage investing and other things I care about.

Another great template by Christoph Janz, showing how to put together a KPI dashboard for a SaaS startup.

Postmortem of a Venture-Backed, Acquired Startup

There is almost nothing useful to learn from startup success stories. In hindsight, with rose-tinted glasses they make everything seem far too easy. Kudos to all founders who share failure stories – this is where we can really learn. e.g. sell before you build, only invest $£ when marketing is working.

Post-mortem of a Dead-on-Arrival SaaS Product

Another failure story. Again sell before you build. Scratching your own itch is a poor excuse to avoid customer development.

How We Acquired 100K Early Bird Signups with Zero Marketing Budget

Growth hacking tips, many are specific to their type of products – but still should be able to spark ideas for you.

5 Articles on Software Marketing

Growth Hack: Warm-Up Your Leads Before You Email Them

Lincoln Murphy has put together a great set of marketing tactics of other ways you can use to contact people when you know their email address. Useful before an email blast or ongoing.

The Biggest, Yet Never Mentioned, Benefit of Content Marketing

Done right, content marketing gets you more traffic, increases conversation rates, and helps you raise prices.

10 Reasons Your Startup Will Fail

Main reasons startups fail 1) coding before knowing people will buy 2) spending £$ before proving marketing drives a positive return.

How To Come Up With 100+ Content Ideas In 10 Minutes

Use a brainstorming session with your team, or if you’re working solo, use a friend. Don’t analyze just generate ideas. Augment by always carrying a notebook.

Lead generation and social marketing key for marketers, says Forrester

Forrester research shows the importance of investing in marketing for SMEs. Treat your whole lead process professionally – this is your business.

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]]> http://smartsoftwaremarketing.co.uk/software-marketing-tweetables-5november-2013/feed/ 4 Software Marketing Tweetables 21 October 2013 http://smartsoftwaremarketing.co.uk/software-marketing-tweetables-21october-2013/ http://smartsoftwaremarketing.co.uk/software-marketing-tweetables-21october-2013/#comments Sun, 20 Oct 2013 23:10:36 +0000 http://smartsoftwaremarketing.co.uk/?p=3519

Catch up on last week’s favourite articles featuring useful insights and tips for marketing your software

5 Articles on Product Marketing

Eleven Secrets of SaaS Product Design

Great tips on how product and marketing should blend together for software as a service (SaaS) e.g. make user content with your app part of your SEO approach; build sharing / inviting / referring others as a natural product feature – not an afterthought.

SaaS Customer Success: Best Practices for Unplanned Outages

Remember the whole customer experience includes planning for problems. Actually, handling problems really well is more likely to be remembered than 100% uptime.

Why people will NEVER buy your product!

“People buy on emotion and [later] justify with logic.” You need to trigger desire, fear … anything but apathy.

What Product Managers can learn from playing StarCraft

An over-stretched analogy used to explore how product managers need to work both strategically and tactically.

Using Gaming Product Hacks to Maximize Freemium SaaS Growth

Free to play games have to be addicitive to make money. Game designers have become very skilled at how to keep users coming back. Which techniques can you use to improve SaaS retention?

5 Articles on Startups

3 Early Fails That Nearly Killed Our Startup

Startups should never be embarrassed about their website being too simple, too spartan. Don’t worry that people won’t take you seriously like the big guys. The opposite is true. People love clear direct websites that are obvious.

Three Phases of Scaling Startup Marketing

Start with free marketing tactics that “just” use your time or you can build into your product. Next, build simple marketing where the expense can be clearly measured vs results. Finally, build up less-measurable investment marketing e.g. content marketing.

The cold emails that got me meetings at Twitter, LinkedIn and GitHub

Tips on how to use emails to make “cold” contacts. You need to find the right person to contact not just anyone at the company. People who are more active on social media are usually more approachable.

Autopsy of a failed side project

Side projects are a great way to learn, in this case user retention and legal issues were the big learnings.

How To Interview Your Users And Get Useful Feedback

Interviewing to learn is far more than just having a chat. Biggest mistake most people make is talking too much and slipping into sales mode.

5 Articles on Software Marketing

4 Easy Growth Hacking Wins

Simplify, simplify, simplify. Find 1 easy marketing tactic. Streamline home page and signup for clarity. Accelerate user’s time to experience product’s value.

Content Marketing Not Converting? Hakuna Matata

Using tools like Qualaroo you can get your audience more engaged with your content and guide them into the next step.

How to be the James Bond of the Web: 37 Best Marketing Tools to Spy on Your Competitors

There are many services that help you see how your competitors are doing their marketing. Great way to research marketing tactics worth trying.

B2B Content Marketing is About More Than Publishing

People read business articles to learn. If you don’t express strong opinions, clear advice, or detailed educational tips they’ll get bored and go away.

The rundown: New products and features announced today at the #GASummit 2013

Lots of new features for Google Analytics – including demographics for the first time.

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]]> http://smartsoftwaremarketing.co.uk/software-marketing-tweetables-21october-2013/feed/ 5 Software Marketing Tweetables 7 October 2013 http://smartsoftwaremarketing.co.uk/software-marketing-tweetables-7october-2013/ http://smartsoftwaremarketing.co.uk/software-marketing-tweetables-7october-2013/#comments Sun, 06 Oct 2013 23:10:24 +0000 http://smartsoftwaremarketing.co.uk/?p=3497

Catch up on last week’s favourite articles featuring useful insights and tips for marketing your software

5 Articles on Product Marketing

The Rise of the Social Business Software Buyer

B2B software vendors used to hide most info from buyers. You could only see a demo, have a trial, learn the price at carefully controlled points in the sales process. Customer reviews are the final piece in the jigsaw. In a perfect market buyers have 100% visibility.

How Shortcuts Turned Writely Into Google Docs

When you decide to build, build fast. Don’t perfect or engineer it. Take shortcuts, but don’t scrimp on backups or security.

User-centric vs. Maker-centric Language: 3 Essential Guidelines

Small business marketing has dramatically improved its use of design and social media, but copywriting has a long way to go. Stuffy, boring, marketing hyperbole confuses customers and undermines your brand image.

Don’t fixate on your first feature: Avoiding premature optimization

“Don’t prematurely optimize the first couple of features you build. Get them to be good enough and keep an eye on the big picture by making sure you know what metrics matter for your business, by talking to your customers, and by learning from your failures.”

How to build great products

Some product features are like hygiene, people will never chose a product for that feature but without it they’ll never buy. You have to build them even be in the market. Look for the wow features that people will love with a passion and change the game.

5 Articles on Startups

Marketing First, Product Second: 5 Contrarian Ideas For Building A Better Startup

SEO guru, Rand Fishkin shares smart tips that will be counter-intuitive to most startup founders who focus on the technology. We know what we’re good at, what we like so we overvalue those activities and avoid the rest. Successful founders embrace new challenges and focus on what’s needed.

A SaaS Startup’s Journey to $100,000 a Month

There are so many stories about startup success that have been written afterwards with 20:20 hindsight. They always make it seem too easy, too obvious. Read Groove’s story as they transparently share data as they strive towards $100k/mo.

39 Actionable Growth Hacking Tactics Part 5/5 – Revenue Hacks

Last in trak.io’s growth hacking series. Focusing on increasing revenue: how to increase prices, upsell… Switching people to an annual plan has massively improved cash flow for many startups.

How to get your first 10 customers

The easiest ways to get new customers (AdWords, Twitter, forums…) involve sitting behind a keyboard. But you need to *talk* to customers to learn… what they want, why they buy, where the value is, how to make your product more valuable.

Why you should blog before you build your startup

While blogging is not as useful as talking to real customers, it’s the surest way to build up an audience, establish credibility, and discover whether people care about a topic.

5 Articles on Software Marketing

How we tripled our revenue by adding one button

Marketing apps is incredibly hard. Prices are ridiculously cheap and there’s very little direct interaction with customers. But still really understanding your customers, what motivates them is the key.

Six Visual Solutions To Complex Digital Marketing/Analytics Challenges

Google Analytics guru, Avinash Kaushik uses Venn diagrams to illustrate what most companies do wrong with their content marketing.

Startup Marketing Strategy With SEO As Its Core

Content marketing should probably form the core of most software companies marketing – especially if their budgets are restricted.

MTurk + Google News API = Press

But when you have your product nailed and colid content marketing in place, then you can plan a big PR push. The recommended route is to build up PR contacts over time, learn about them, nurture… Here’s an alternative route where you can use your coding skills to grab journalists’ email addresses.

10 Free Design Tools for Creating Stunning Visual Content

For when you can’t afford a designer here are some free tools that can help when you need some images.

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]]> http://smartsoftwaremarketing.co.uk/software-marketing-tweetables-7october-2013/feed/ 5 Software Marketing Tweetables 23 September 2013 http://smartsoftwaremarketing.co.uk/software-marketing-tweetables-23-september-2013/ http://smartsoftwaremarketing.co.uk/software-marketing-tweetables-23-september-2013/#comments Sun, 22 Sep 2013 23:10:40 +0000 http://smartsoftwaremarketing.co.uk/?p=3479

Catch up on last week’s favourite articles featuring useful insights and tips for marketing your software

5 Articles on Product Marketing

How To Build Your Audience Well Before Launching Your Product

The most frequent mistake I see startups make is building first and only thinking about marketing afterwards. Start marketing from the outset. If you can’t get people to read a blog about your topic – you’re not going to convince them to buy your solution.

Pain is a catalyst for change

Your biggest competitor will be doing nothing. Focus on the pain, if customers don’t feel enough pain they will stick with what they have.

Minimum Viable Product

Using something to help you test demand, does not make it a minimum viable *product*. Use experiments before building an MVP, but until they are delivering value they are not a product.

9 Ways to Make Your Expensive Product Look like a Total Steal

Convincing prospects that your prices are not too high is a cornerstone of product marketing. Two classic techniques are 1) offering a more-expensive comparison to frame the price and 2) expressing as a lower daily amount. These classic techniques still work.

The Art of Creating a Magnetic Value Proposition

Creating a value proposition – it must be clear, relevant, and concrete. Show you are addressing a specific audience and how your solution is different

5 Articles on Startups

Introducing Product-Value Alignment: What Comes After Product/Market Fit

Reaching product/market fit is a great achievement but not a final destination. Don’t just try and scale what’s worked so far. You’re aiming for a new audience – probably a wider segment who are not as adventurous as your early adopters.

How to Get Customers to Want to Pay Even Before Building Your Product

Buy Ash Maurya’s book “Running Lean”. This excerpt is a masterclass on using customer discovery to test real demand for your product and generate desire.

The seven stages of startup analytics grief

Despite most startups being naturally inclined to use data to measure progress, almost all find it much harder in practice to get actionable results from Google Analytics. Takes some planning to be really useful.

Six Key Benchmarks for Your SaaS Startup

Benchmarks from other startups won’t tell you what to do, but if you know where your numbers are unusual it’s worth understanding why.

It’s Not a Conversion Problem, It’s a Customer Development Problem

Trying to optimize conversion rates when your product doesn’t solve real problems is like putting lipstick on a pig.

5 Articles on Software Marketing

SaaS Marketing: 21 Growth Hacks to Test Today

A creative list of ideas that could help your SaaS marketing. Many will be too aggressive for you, but might spark off more appropriate tactics for you.

The Myth of Growth Hacking

Growth hacking might be a more palatable term for tech startups, but basically it is marketing. It does help to distance from dull corporate big-budget advertising style marketing.

The seven stages of startup analytics grief

Even more growth hacking tips. These are focussed on how to design a referral program and keep those viral marketing hopes alive.

Reverse Engineering Marketing : Where Do Other Sites Get Their Traffic?

A big advantage for a little company is being able to see which marketing tactics work for your competitors. There’s a lot of data available to help you quickly learn and save years of guessing.

It’s Not a Conversion Problem, It’s a Customer Development Problem

Funnels are a convenient model that work well now for simple purchases and used to work for all B2B buying. But nowadays most buying is far more complex than a linear funnel.

If you found these useful, you can also

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]]> http://smartsoftwaremarketing.co.uk/software-marketing-tweetables-23-september-2013/feed/ 3 Software Marketing Tweetables 9 September 2013 http://smartsoftwaremarketing.co.uk/software-marketing-tweetables-9-september-2013/ http://smartsoftwaremarketing.co.uk/software-marketing-tweetables-9-september-2013/#comments Sun, 08 Sep 2013 23:10:53 +0000 http://smartsoftwaremarketing.co.uk/?p=3461

Catch up on last week’s favourite articles featuring useful insights and tips for marketing your software

5 Articles on Product Marketing

How to Properly Increase Your Software Pricing

Price increases can cause customer backlash unless you: price based on value, set clear expectations, provide notice and explanations.

Pricing Your Product: How to Discover What to Charge in Customer Development

Use customer development to understand how to structure your pricing and what level to set. Don’t waste time asking “what would you pay?” Ask what they pay now and why. Test later by asking them to actually pay.

Dark Patterns: inside the interfaces designed to trick you

Sleazy marketers trick you into signing up for email updates by using double negatives and weasel words. I can’t see how annoying your customers and damaging your brand helps your marketing.

Deadly Conversion Rate Optimization Mistakes that Marketers Make

There are hundreds of conversion rates studies that focus on the impact of trivial changes like the colour of a button. Forget that. Focus on delvering the right message first – why people buy. Every change you make you be testing a hypothesis you formed from observataion – not random flailing.

Picking your Pricing Model

If you’re targetting large enterprises, low pricing could lose you sales. Be clear who is buying and the value they get. Enterprises expect higher prices and better service – an account manager.

5 Articles on Startups

A Content Marketing Planning Template for Startups

Don’t generate content randomly. Start with a simple strategy based on buying stages, the main issues at each stage, and involve your sales experts from the start.

How Paypal and Reddit faked their way to traction

Break through marketplaces’ “chicken and egg” situation. Artificially create the initial supply or demand so there is a reason for buyers / sellers to sign up.

14 essential tools every lean startup can’t live without

Collection of well-know popular tools used by startups.

Asking customers what you want to hear

Confirmation bias is real – you are far more likely to find “evidence” that supports your theory. Apply the scientific method and design impartial experiments.

Why you should ignore startup failure stats

Yes, most startups “fail”. But that’s based on a fallacy that anything bar a mult-million acquisition is a failure. A steady business that real customers pay money for is not a failure. Trying an idea and learning what works is not a failure. Invest in yourself, go for it, start up your own startup now.

5 Articles on Software Marketing

The Definitive Guide to Growth Hacking

If you want to learn about growth hacking here’s a great resource. Easy to read but long – you may want to just read a chapter at a time.

14 Social Media Tools Used by Marketing Pros

Lots of interesting tools around social media covering analytics, researching leads, co-ordinating many employees, finding content…

Using In-App Messages to Get More Social Media Followers

Using your own app to encourage social media mention, likes… has 3 benefits 1) increased audience and credibility 2) you have some control over the message 3) by asking for a small commitment (micro conversion) you’re increasing the likelihood they’ll buy later.

How to Write Landing Page Copy That Converts

The key to a landing page is thinking 100% about your customer, never your product features. What is the problem they’re trying to solve, why do they need something. Keep it clear and simple.

If you don’t think you need it, you haven’t seen greatness

Don’t need a lawyer, a designer, a support specialist, pre-sales, product marketer… ? You’re almost always under-valuing the value that these specialists can bring. This may be because you don’t really understand what they do or could be you’ve not worked with a great practioner yet?

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Catch up on last week’s favourite articles featuring useful insights and tips for marketing your software

5 Articles on Product Marketing

8 Ways To Use Email To Improve Your Customer Retention Strategies

Email continues to be the most effective marketing tool. Just don’t keep sending boring marketing offers. Build regular email contact into your whole model, make email positive and useful.

About Products: A Few Things I Think I Think – Part 2

List of product management articles curated by Joshua Duncan.

SaaS Sales Funnel: Stop Optimizing for the Wrong Customers

Great example of why you must understand your customers. If you blindly optimize your traffic and conversions you may well end up focusing on customer segments that are less profitable, less strategic.

10 Product Management Hacks for Times when you’re strapped for Resources

Tips for product managers – how to hack your product releases when you don’t have enough resources (does anyone ever have enough?)

The Right Type of Customer Conversations

Embrace customers wanting support, they are showing you how to improve your product, documentation, onboarding… It’s only unsustainable if you just answer questions without tackling causes.

5 Articles on Startups

How Cheap a Product Can You Have And Still Have Salespeople?

Invaluable data for anyone selling SaaS to businesses. Calculate how profitable your sales should be and how using inside sales staff should still work, even if your prices are as low as $99/mo.

Choosing a payment provider for your Europe based SaaS startup

Payment providers are one area where geography matters a lot. Many services are US-only. But this is an area that will change a lot soon, several startups looking to disrupt the payments market.

12 ways for non-tech founders to build a startup

Coding is not essential for a startup, there are plenty of ways to hack a solution without code. Be wary of jumping into building a solution before you need too.

My app and I are hurting

Almost every founder’s story published makes their success seem easy. The reality is almost all fail slowly.

The Ultimate Cheat Sheet For Starting And Running A Business

Pithy nuggets of startup advice. Some humour but lots of valid points.

5 Articles on Software Marketing

How to Suck Less at E-mail Marketing

Start collecting email as soon as you can. Send lots of email to keep contact but make it useful. Use autoresponders and personalization.

Choosing a Content Marketing Strategy for Your Startup

How should you distribute your content? Probably a combination of RSS, Email, content hubs, and social media.

How NOT to Lose SaaS Sales

Amazing stats show how speedy responses to sales enquiries dramatically increases conversion. Even waiting just 1 day will reduce leads by 60x.

Marketing Made Simple. A {growtoon}.

Marketing strategy should be simple, but it all depends on understanding your customers and their problems.

How To Be A Content Marketing Rockstar

More content marketing tips by Heidi Cohen.

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Catch up on last week’s favourite articles featuring useful insights and tips for marketing your software

5 Articles on Product Marketing

95 Ways to find your first customers

Long, long list of tactics to find your first customers – the opposite of strategic marketing – these are very “hacky” and quick ideas. Useful for customer discovery and first 100 customers.

13 ways to master UX testing for your startup

Tips from founders and product managers on usability testing. If you only take away two ideas 1) test your onboarding experience from a new user’s perspective 2) simplify everything.

What happens when Google offers your product for free?

If Google does bring out a free version of your product, you can give up or embrace the opportunity. You’re the specialist, let them expand the market while you focus on delivering a superior *differentiated* product.

5 Steps to $5,000 in Monthly Recurring Revenue

Useful example of a startup getting traction by focusing on a problem. It helps that they were similar to their target audience.

How I increased conversion 2.4x with better copywriting

Forget all those A/B testing studies that find a 5% conversion rate uplift by changing a button color. Make big bold changes to see a difference.

5 Articles on Startups

What Entrepreneurs Need to Know About Coding

In a tech startup you really need at least a basic set of coding skills. There is a vast spectrum from writing simple HTML, complex Excel formulae through to expert software engineers. Even a small set of skills will help you understand and contribute.

Interview with Brian Murray from Yammer about Lean Startup and using Minimum Viable Products

How Yammer product managers and user experience designers apply lean startup to launching and improving products.

From a MailChimp email and Wufoo form to $25k in 3 months

So long as you’re learning, you gain even if your startup fails. Big lessons: 1) Simplify 2)launch early.

57 startup lessons

A lot more startup lessons here. As a marketer, I think this list downplays the importance of marketing – but I’m biased.

How to Convince Investors

Securing investment is not about becoming a great pitch artist. Build a great product that people really need, show traction and explain really clearly.

5 Articles on Software Marketing

Hacking Content Marketing: How a Parking Ticket Turned into 40,000 Customers

Tripl got a lot of press exposure by “hacking” an event for VCs. Placing fake parking tickets on luxury cars near the event got them a lot of coverage.

Help! My SaaS isn’t growing!

Amy Hoy realized she needed to shake up her startup, stop tinkering and make *big* changes. Raising prices was easy, complete landing page rewrite worked well, more changes to come.

Practical Advice on SaaS Marketing

Only spend money on getting your message out there if you know that message really sells well. Start with customer development, confirm by testing messages, then testing channels, then spend real marketing budget.

7 Utterly Useful Mobile Apps That Help Redefine Marketing

Direct marketing or interruption marketing is unlikely to be effective with your target audiences any more. Using content marketing to educate your audience is the main form of indirect marketing or you could create mobile apps that are genuinely useful for your prospects.

Get More Conversions NOW – Funnel Optimization 101

Introduction to the idea of a marketing > sales funnel and how to improve conversions.

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