Smart Software Marketing http://smartsoftwaremarketing.co.uk Marketing consultant for software companies Sun, 16 Jun 2013 23:06:00 +0000 en-US hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.1 SmartSoftwareMarketinghttp://feedburner.google.comSubscribe with My Yahoo!Subscribe with NewsGatorSubscribe with My AOLSubscribe with BloglinesSubscribe with NetvibesSubscribe with GoogleSubscribe with PageflakesSubscribe with PlusmoSubscribe with The Free DictionarySubscribe with Bitty BrowserSubscribe with Live.comSubscribe with Excite MIXSubscribe with WebwagSubscribe with Podcast ReadySubscribe with WikioSubscribe with Daily RotationThe Smart Software Marketing blog is a free series of Giles Farrow’s product marketing tips, new techniques and ideas to help software companies improve their marketing, product launches and to sell more software. Giles is writing this blog to provide practical advice for software companies without large marketing teams and to market his consulting business. Software Marketing Tweetables 17 June 2013 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SmartSoftwareMarketing/~3/5Cg3lTcWxn4/ http://smartsoftwaremarketing.co.uk/software-marketing-tweetables-17-june-2013/#comments Sun, 16 Jun 2013 23:06:00 +0000 Giles Farrow http://smartsoftwaremarketing.co.uk/?p=3237

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


5 Articles on Product Marketing

Evolution of a Landing Page

An entrepreneur gets critical advice on his main landing page from experts on messaging, copy and design. Check the links to compare before vs. after.

Use Tiny Tests to Get Fast, Cheap Feedback on Your Product

You can get far more benefits from user testing and feedback if you get into the habit of doing it quickly and regularly. In-person testing is ideal for quality, but using services like Skype and usertesting.com is cheaper, quicker, and easier.

How Do You Compete Against Free?

Many large software firms have laughed off free offerings as being insignificant. Don’t be so arrogant, free is an important marketing weapon that you can use or have it used against you.

That’s Not Your Customer.

“As entrepreneurs, often there exists a temptation to please a customer – ANY and ALL customers. Especially all those people who AREN’T your customers”. Be disciplined about reducing features, not just chucking more and more in.

How do you create a product people want to buy?

Amy Hoy recommends not starting with your idea. Start with *Who* your customers are then *What* they need then *How* you can reach them.


5 Articles on Startups

How to 10x Your Growth if You’re a Startup with Early Traction

Mark Saldaña on not rushing into growth too soon, with a step-by-step guide for 4 phases. Make sure you are getting real traction with your early customers, then work on growth: 1) Qualify who your best customers are 2) Identify where they go 3) Access – how to get their attention 4) Automate for scaling up.

5 Free Startup PR Tools To Start Using Right Now

PR advice for startups on a low budget. A list of (well-known) free tools – with tips on how they can help you for PR.

11 Customer Development Anti-Patterns

Everyone makes some of these mistakes during customer development. Recognize your own faults and plan how to avoid.

Startup drugs

Getting funded can add a lot of pressure. Success or failure can be accelerated and out of this world. Bootstrapping is better suited for founders who want to keep their feet on the ground.

The Most Effective Price Discovery Question for Your Startup

Instead of asking people how much they would pay for your product – ask them to compare prices with alternatives and ask why they would spend more / less.


5 Articles on Software Marketing

Steal These Ideas: 5 Tech Companies Who Are Killing It With Content Marketing

Buffer, Hubspot, Kissmetrics, Moz, and Unbounce all chose to invest heavily in content marketing. They all regularly produce engaging, compelling content that has powered their growth.

What journalists can learn from content marketers: Q&A with Erin Scottberg

As content marketing is becoming increasingly important, people have to learn to write and produce marketing that is more educational and promotes ideas that indirectly promote their products.

Writing like it’s your job.

Writing (like coding) requires concentration. Tips on how you can plan to concentrate more and get more writing done.

17 Essential Content Templates and Checklists

A collection of templates and checklists to help your content marketing initiatives.

12 Marketing Tools You Should Know About

Podio’s own software is slick, modern, and collaborative – so it’s interesting to see what they publicly endorse as the software they use for marketing.

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]]> http://smartsoftwaremarketing.co.uk/software-marketing-tweetables-17-june-2013/feed/ 0 http://smartsoftwaremarketing.co.uk/software-marketing-tweetables-17-june-2013/ Software Marketing Tweetables 10 June 2013 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SmartSoftwareMarketing/~3/CT6-P9jEQAA/ http://smartsoftwaremarketing.co.uk/software-marketing-tweetables-10-june-2013/#comments Sun, 09 Jun 2013 23:10:54 +0000 Giles Farrow http://smartsoftwaremarketing.co.uk/?p=3231

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


5 Articles on Product Marketing

How I Grew Plugin Sales By 21% By Increasing Prices

Freemium is a vital part of the WordPress plugin market as WordPress.org is the definitive source for free, and only free, plugins. But even here, a plugin developer found he could significantly increase revenue by increasing prices.

Sneak Peek: Moz Analytics Dashboard

Moz (formerly SEOMoz) have put together a great product tour for an upcoming inbound analytics dashboard. Excellent design showcases lots of features quickly and clearly without the usual wall of text.

Converting Customers with the Right Message at the Right Time

Sending messages to users while they use your product is a great way to reach them at the right time – as they experience value or in this case as they run into a problem that may prevent them moving forward.

Why Being First Doesn’t Matter

Being first in a market has major advantages and disadvantages. If you find yourself being a “snow plough” read this interesting article.

Babe Ruth and Feature Lists

A simple list of prioritized features can be completely misleading, when considering how much resource to allocate to each.


5 Articles on Startups

Don’t Count Your Users Like Sheep

Ash Maurya describes the problems with just treating users as simple numbers following a set process through a funnel. Instead of defining a set funnel he recommends user behaviour to see what types of users do which activities before they start getting real value.

Pivots, Pirouettes and Backflips

Dan Norris in his monthly report describes why he had to shut down 2 products he was passionate about so he could focus on the third. The B2B market may appear less sexy, but it is much easier to make enough money from a small number of businesses than trying to earn a living by scaling a technology product across thousands of paying consumers.

How is it even *my* company anymore if “the market” tells me what to do?

Founders should set a vision about where they want the company to go and what they enjoy doing. But you must listen to the market and selling solutions for real people’s real problems.

Startups: How to Storyboard your Pitch Deck in 10 Steps

Great technique for a team collaborating on building a critical slide deck. Decide purpose and flow for every slide before contents and way before touching PowerPoint.

New college grads: Don’t sell your time for a living

Most “wage slaves” yearn for freedom from cubicles, office politics, and bad bosses. Start your career by making stuff and not just selling your time.


5 Articles on Software Marketing

How to Create Marketing Your Customers Love

“Whether in product design or planning for growth & marketing, knowing your customer is the basis for everything else. You can’t create products your customers will love if you don’t know what your customers love, and you can’t excite your customers while you talk to them if you don’t know what excites your customers”

Flywheel Marketing for Software Companies

Create quality content for people wanting answers, wanting to learn how to do something. Never create content for SEO. Keep creating content, it’s a slow payoff but the returns accumulate and keep bringing in leads without further time and money.

5 Reasons Your Visitors Don’t Fill Out Your Contact Form

Tips to check for optimizing your contact forms.

Startup of the Week: Teddle

Great to see another startup from Salim Virani’s FounderCentric program doing well. Teddle turns a traditional business model upside down and get cleaners to pay them for clients.

Can You Really Earn a Living as a Freelance Writer?

Writing professionally is very different. Quality writers deliver copy that is original, effective, clear, and entertaining. It looks disarmingly simple – but it’s a whole different ball game from writing as a sideline.

If you found these useful, you can also

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]]> http://smartsoftwaremarketing.co.uk/software-marketing-tweetables-10-june-2013/feed/ 6 http://smartsoftwaremarketing.co.uk/software-marketing-tweetables-10-june-2013/ Software Marketing Tweetables 3 June 2013 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SmartSoftwareMarketing/~3/eFH7imsrYGI/ http://smartsoftwaremarketing.co.uk/software-marketing-tweetables-3-june-2013/#comments Mon, 03 Jun 2013 07:33:39 +0000 Giles Farrow http://smartsoftwaremarketing.co.uk/?p=3222

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


5 Articles on Product Marketing

The Six Worst Decisions Sales VPs Make

Sales leaders learned how to sell to enterprises in a different era. Sales methodologies and technology will no longer drive success. Educating buyers via content marketing is essential.

Pricing Strategies: 13 Articles You Need to Read

Great list of useful articles on pricing experiments and pricing advice.

Four Pricing Principles to Never Forget

More pricing advice with an emphasis on setting prices for Software as a Service and startups.

An eBook pricing model that resulted in $100,000 in sales

Comparison of 3 authors’ pricing strategy – see how you can maximize revenue.

What is Product Marketing & Where Should It Live?

Product Marketing, the intersection of marketing and product teams is a discipline misunderstood by many marketers. It’s more important than ever to have strong overlap and alignment between product and marketing teams.


5 Articles on Startups

How Draft grew paying Customers by 200%

Draft used Intercom.io to send upsell messages to engaged freemium users as they were experiencing the value. Far more effective than competing for attention in crowded inboxes.

Problem, Revenue, Channel: The 3 Critical Startup Questions

Kevin DeWalt argues that all web and mobile startups have the same 3 core risks: 1) Does Your Product Solve a Real Problem? 2) Can You Get Paid to Solve the Problem? 3) Is there a Cost-Effective Way to Acquire Customers?

Google’s Dead-Simple Tool For Making UX Decisions: 2 Jars Of Marbles

Google has a strict set of 17 UX design principles. Any design changes must pass 3x more of these tests than fail.

Pick the right metric to incentivize the behavior you want

Be wary of setting metrics that just reward short-term results.

Startup Pricing: How to Manage Channel Conflict

Most startups have a top tier, where they negotiate terms for enterprises on a deal-by-deal basis. It’s important to include additional value (e.g. superior service) to avoid steep discounts as a commodity.


5 Articles on Software Marketing

The non-sleezy way to sell on forums

Forums are a great way to engage customers. You can sell “softly” if your provide value first.

How to Build a Strong A/B Testing Plan That Gets Results

Thorough explanation of A/B testing with a clear introduction, lots of detail, and a quick roundup of available tools.

21 Ways You’re Screwing Up Your Landing Pages (And What To Do About It)

Peep Laja regularly does great reviews of landing pages – tearing apart the mistakes that marketers keep making.

These 5 Steps Will Make Your Content Development a Breeze

Openview are keen advocates of content marketing. Kevin Cain advises understanding audience, planning, getting feedback, and repurposing content.

Three customer acquisition levers

Essentially marketing “just” has to work on 3 factors 1) customer acquisition cost 2) conversion rate and 3) transaction size.

If you found these useful, you can also

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]]> http://smartsoftwaremarketing.co.uk/software-marketing-tweetables-3-june-2013/feed/ 5 http://smartsoftwaremarketing.co.uk/software-marketing-tweetables-3-june-2013/ Software Marketing Tweetables 27 May 2013 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SmartSoftwareMarketing/~3/m4Hy8gm8PBo/ http://smartsoftwaremarketing.co.uk/software-marketing-tweetables-27may2013/#comments Mon, 27 May 2013 10:11:39 +0000 Giles Farrow http://smartsoftwaremarketing.co.uk/?p=2869

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


5 Articles on Product Marketing

Does your product suck? Stop adding new features and “zoom in” instead

Software that tries to do too much fails. Users hate bloated menus, complex interfaces, and a steep learning curve. Do the opposite, strip down to your core product and do that really well – but first test what impact that will have.

Tiered Pricing vs Pay-As-You-Go

Having a fixed price per month can be attractive to some customers, but pricing that is based on usage is attractive when customers find it difficult to predict their usage. Ideally you should offer both.

Respect Your Competition

Just like your own company, your competitors are talented, smart, and have a great product. It may be good for morale to poke fun at their mistakes, but underestimating them is a big mistake. Don’t kid yourself – watch and learn what they do well.

SaaS Pricing: Features that Make People Upgrade

Drawing the line between free and premium is a delicate art in freemium pricing. Users must experience enough value to use the free product – and experience desire for more – without feeling too hassled by upsell nag messages. Examples of how to get the balance right from Buffer, WebEx, and HelloFax.

12 Tips for Obtaining and Using Customer Testimonials

How to regularly get genuine customer quotes and testimonials and use them effectively.


5 Articles on Startups

3 Super-Cheap Marketing Tactics

Spend as much time as you can learning everything about your customers. It’s the cheapest, fastest route to effective marketing.

The BIG list of today’s marketing channels

Long list of different types of marketing – many more in comments. With a limited budget, startups can safely ignore the expensive options – but check through this long list for ideas.

Entrepreneurial Advice from SaaS Pioneer and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff

Marc Benioff was the early pioneer in Software-as-a-Service. In SalesForce’s early days the message was all about “No Software” setting out the vision for how SaaS would change the face of enterprise IT. Read a summary of his advice.

20 Hot London Startups You Need to Watch

Startups are becoming less dependent on Silicon Valley. London has obtained a critical mass of technical, design, and entrepreneurial talent.

Shipping is Your Company’s Heartbeat

When software used to be physically shipped it had to be packaged into major releases. Now you can constantly update software through digital downloads or SaaS. It completly transforms every aspect of your company – decision-making, strategy, support, responsiveness, innovation, and testing.


5 Articles on Software Marketing

6 hacks to boost the conversion rate of your content

Great advice from Dan Norris on how you make your content work much more effectively for your marketing. How to find popular topics, get more people reading and convince them to sign up.

6 ‘About Us’ Pages That Are Probably Better Than Yours

After your ‘home’ page and your ‘pricing’ page, your ‘about us’ page probably gets the most traffic. Get ideas on how to establish your brand, identity, purpose – what you stand for. It’s the one place to blow your own trumpet – just don’t be boring.

What IT Buyers Really Think of Your Marketing

If you were buying software, would you really want to sift through piles of your marketing collateral and your competitors’ ? IT buyers want to hear independently about other customers’ experiences.

How Call Tracking with Google Analytics Increases Your Profits

If you are asking prospects to call you, how do you track which campaigns are driving those calls? AdWords includes tracking but there are other services available (including UK).

How to Gauge the Power and Value of Your Content Marketing

It is possible to measure the results you get from content marketing – you just have to work harder to systematically measure them. Informly looks like a very useful easy tool for this.

If you found these useful, you can also

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]]> http://smartsoftwaremarketing.co.uk/software-marketing-tweetables-27may2013/feed/ 4 http://smartsoftwaremarketing.co.uk/software-marketing-tweetables-27may2013/ Software Marketing Tweetables 20 May 2013 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SmartSoftwareMarketing/~3/4myJNi0Knys/ http://smartsoftwaremarketing.co.uk/software-marketing-tweetables-20may2013/#comments Mon, 20 May 2013 08:09:52 +0000 Giles Farrow http://smartsoftwaremarketing.co.uk/?p=2864

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


5 Articles on Product Marketing

Sell first, build later

It’s common sense to check whether anyone will buy your product before you invest time and money building it. But developers get excited and dive into coding. Yes, selling is hard work and much less fun – but having a succesful product is way cooler than failing. “Sell First, Build Later.”

The critical metrics for each stage of your SaaS business

Until you have traction, your focus should be on talking to customers – what problems they face and how they solve those problems now. Don’t worry about optimizing customer acquisition until you can actually solve their pains.

Improving sign ups by 125%

Simple changes reduce friction and increase conversions. Always be testing.

How Can I Make My PowerPoint Presentations Amazing?

Tips on simplifying for visual aids. Remember your slides should not contain your content – slides like that are called handouts.

How to Avoid the Destructive Power of Adjectives in Your Marketing Copy

One of the easiest way to tighten up your copy is to remove adjectives. Your sentences will be clearer. Corporate babble is stuffed with meaningless “hollow” adjectives – differentiate yourself.


5 Articles on Startups

What do we do about bad startup advice?

The halo effect: Just because someone has achieved success in one field does not mean they have the expertise to advise your startup in other industries / fields. Treat advise from “experts” as ideas.

Design thinking and startups: A good match?

Great design should hardly be noticed. Solving problems simply and elegantly is highly attractive but is often seen as a luxury “nice to have” by startups.

How A Non-Developer Bootstrapped A Profitable Software Company By Addressing His Own Frustration

You don’t need to be a developer to start a software business. Being able to understand your customers is more important e.g. fixing a real problem for your own business.

Should Startups Use Consultants?

Most startups can’t afford consultants, but once you have some revenue it can be a good way to bring in specific expertise without committing to the fixed costs of an employee.

4 Questions You Must Ask Yourself Before Raising Money

Don’t feel you have to raise money to be successful. Customers are the best way to raise cash. Only exceptional cases should turn to VCs where massive investment / growth is essential.


5 Articles on Software Marketing

31 Easy Ideas To Create Content Your Customers Want

Learn how to make the best use of your own company’s resources and reuse ideas and materials to keep stream of content flowing.

How to Fill Your Editorial Calendar Without Breaking the Bank

More tips on finding content for your content marketing – including a long list of content types.

Blogging Made Simple: How to Write a Good Blog Post in Less Time than You Think

When writing blog posts make things easy. Keep an idea list and set of templates ready.

10 Essential WordPress Plugins to Improve SEO & Usability

Recommendations for improving WordPress’ SEO features.

Your Design Sucks. And Copy. And Your Idea is Wrong (or Why You Need Continuous Optimization)

Your website should be continuously improved and grow organically. If you treat it as a one-off project, it will grow stale and wither.

If you found these useful, you can also

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]]> http://smartsoftwaremarketing.co.uk/software-marketing-tweetables-20may2013/feed/ 7 http://smartsoftwaremarketing.co.uk/software-marketing-tweetables-20may2013/ Software Marketing Tweetables 13 May 2013 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SmartSoftwareMarketing/~3/9MADWrLdARY/ http://smartsoftwaremarketing.co.uk/software-marketing-tweetables-13may2013/#comments Mon, 13 May 2013 08:24:01 +0000 Giles Farrow http://smartsoftwaremarketing.co.uk/?p=2858

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


5 Articles on Product Marketing

An Interview with Garrett Dimon

Garrett Dimon describe how his startup grew slowly. He built an initial audience through blogging. During this growth he has resisted adding complexity and focused on helping people get more value out of what is already there. He found that having a very cheap plan cost too much to support and has no regrets dropping that plan.

How Analytics Can Unveil the Hidden Treasures Your Freemium Product is Hiding

Changing your pricing page so that conversion % drops seems a bad idea. Not if you’re increasing % of premium signups. Another example where decreasing prices from left to right delivers better results than increasing.

The Four-Step Design Process for Building Product Customers Will Love

Spend more time watching how real customers actually use your product (not just listening to how they say they use it). And spend more time talking to your support team.

About Products – A few Things I Think I Think

Joshua Duncan has curated a list of recent article he found thought-provoking.


5 Articles on Startups

The Manual-First Startup

Don’t automate your solution / prcesses until you have scale. Providing a manual solution means: you will deeply understand each step; there is almost no friction to slow down changes as you test and improve; and it brings you closer to your first customers. Automation appeals to the perfectionist in us all. Resist automation until it becomes too painful too proceed without.

The Newest Lean Startup Tool: Kickstarter

Kickstarter is a great way to test demand, sign up early adopters, test incremental pricing and secure funding all in one go. Main downside is that you probably have to invest a lot of time in marketing your kickstarter launch over that time – hard to run it steadily as a side project.

Why You Should Do A Tiny Product First

Amy Hoy explains the value of starting with a really small product. It does not have to be software – creating and selling an eBook is an effective way to learn how to market to your audience.

Proven: Customer Interviews Save You Time and Money

Almost every entrepreneur seems scared to talk to real customers – they have 100 excuses why they need to perfect their product first. It is painful to hear that your brilliant idea sucks – but embrace that pain. Find out what their problems are. Time spent building a solution instead of interviewing customers is like burning your money.

The Pitch Deck We Used To Raise $500,000 For Our Startup

Simple, effective slide deck used to raise funding. Always much easier when you’re profitable and don’t really need funding.


5 Articles on Software Marketing

Killer Content Marketing

Slide deck from Hiten Shah’s excellent talk at MicroConf 2013. 5 strategies for B2B distribution (not paid advertising) 1) Integrations 2) Work Emails 3) Embeds 4) Powered by 5) Free Stuff.

Three Counterintuitive Points about SMB SaaS

1) medium sized businesses have ~65% employees within SMB sector (small medium businesses) despite only being ~15% numerically 2) small businesses are just as important 3) sales / marketing roles are very different between small & medium.

How to Build and Get Captivating Case Studies and Testimonials from Clients

Use LinkedIn to ask for recommendations. No need to ask clients to use logos. Format case studies as Goal > Solution > Results.

The 2013 LinkedIn Marketing Guide

Kristi Hines regularly produce simple straightforward guides that explain how to setup up your social media / content marketing… Here she explains how to get the most out of LinkedIn.

Some Simple Tips for Better Communication

Thoughts on communications: How writing things down makes your own thinking clearer, don’t just think about the information you’re communicating but who you are communicating to and what you want to achieve.

If you found these useful, you can also

  1. Follow SmartSoftMarket on Twitter
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  4. Receive blog updates like this one, via RSS or email
]]> http://smartsoftwaremarketing.co.uk/software-marketing-tweetables-13may2013/feed/ 3 http://smartsoftwaremarketing.co.uk/software-marketing-tweetables-13may2013/ Software Marketing Tweetables 6 May 2013 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SmartSoftwareMarketing/~3/VYRBUezkHYs/ http://smartsoftwaremarketing.co.uk/software-marketing-tweetables-6may2013/#comments Mon, 06 May 2013 08:00:41 +0000 Giles Farrow http://smartsoftwaremarketing.co.uk/?p=2851

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


5 Articles on Product Marketing

An introduction to Scrum.

Excellent animated explainer video shows the main elements of Scrum – the agile methodology that is widely used to “manage” software development.

When Should You Reveal Price?

If you lead with price you’re positioning your product as a commodity. So you should only discuss prices after the value is established. Well that’s the theory – but reality for many online product is that customers want to know price before even considering your solution.

The Few Sentences You Need to Dominate Your Market

People often struggle with value propositions. The formal definitions are not helpful. Value propositions are easier to understand by seeing examples and trying to write your own.

Three Simple Tricks To Turn Your Free Customers Into Paying Customers

The freemium model has fallen out of fashion lately. It was probably over-hyped like most “new” marketing tactics. Just like paid services, freemium depends on customers realizing benefits and value that outweigh the total costs.

7 Landing Page Tests You Can Run Tomorrow!

Quick reminder of the main elements to test on landing pages.


5 Articles on Startups

How to radically simplify your user interface

Simplify, simplify and simplify again. Don’t present complex interfaces to people – just because there is a complex data model behind the scenes. Strip elements away and make it easy for people.

Lean Product Testing with Angular.js by BRANDiD

Before building a new feature, test whether people will use it by making a fake button and counting who presses it.

An idea for non-technical co-founders: try a service-first business

In most businesses, technology is not required to serve your first customer – it only becomes essential as you scale. So prove your business first manually, then write code to automate the process.

Bootstrapped CPC rule of thumb: MRR/25

How much should you pay for a click? If you assume 1) an average customer pays for 20 months of your service 2) you don’t want to pay more than 20% of that to acquire a customer 3) a 1% click to signups conversion rate. That works out to a maximum cost per click of 4% of your monthly charge.

If You Don’t Like Drunk Frat Boys, Don’t Open an Irish Pub…

Great 45 mins. talk by Amy Hoy. Entertaining and educational. Do everything you can to really understand your customer.


5 Articles on Software Marketing

The “Above the Fold” Myth Debunked

In most cases you don’t need to keep your primary call to action at the top. People scroll and need to read before proceeding. Keeping the CTA visible wherever you scroll may work better – it’s worth testing.

Eight Silly Data Myths Marketing People Believe That Get Them Fired.

Web analytics data is complex. It can be worse to only understand part of the story. If you have heard some universal marketing “truth” about web metrics it is probably a myth.

Informly brings content marketing analytics to small business [PRESS RELEASE]

Informly just launched – it’s a new online service providing content marketing analytics for small businesses.

My 40 Best Email Marketing Resources

Email has always been an essential tool for marketers. April Dunford has collated a very useful colection of articles that cover segmentation, deliverability, design, content ideas, list building, metrics…

Legacy IT Vendors Shoot The Sales Messenger

When software vendors start blaming sales that’s an early warning. When that happens across the software industry – be warned major disruption is coming.

If you found these useful, you can also

  1. Follow SmartSoftMarket on Twitter
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]]> http://smartsoftwaremarketing.co.uk/software-marketing-tweetables-6may2013/feed/ 5 http://smartsoftwaremarketing.co.uk/software-marketing-tweetables-6may2013/ Software Marketing Tweetables 29 April 2013 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SmartSoftwareMarketing/~3/h_vVOLjUxco/ http://smartsoftwaremarketing.co.uk/software-marketing-tweetables-29april2013/#comments Mon, 29 Apr 2013 07:53:18 +0000 Giles Farrow http://smartsoftwaremarketing.co.uk/?p=2844

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


5 Articles on Product Marketing

Cognitive Overhead, Or Why Your Product Isn’t As Simple As You Think

Appearing “simple” used to be a disadvantage. 20 years ago we strived for technological sophistication. Now simple means elegant, easy, effective, excellent-design. Your customers will appreciate you making their life simpler.

Positioning: The Battle for Your Startup

Work out where you really stand in customer’s minds – don’t just trumpet out where you want to be. Understand why customers choose you and why they don’t. Then focus on the segments where you’ll win and emphasize your positioning in your marketing.

Product Management vs. Product Marketing: Who is Responsible for “In-Product” Messaging?

A product trial is an essential part of marketing a product. If you have both product marketing and product managers working together, product marketing should take the lead on the copy. But avoid this becoming a battleground – working together will always achieve more.

How to get Product Managers to listen to customer feedback

Product Managers want customer feedback – so don’t be so grumpy when you get it :) Tell your support team how you want to receive feedback, show them it’s valued and you’ll get an invaluable set of ears into your customer base.

Don’t Launch Your Product

What most people think of as a product launch is wrong. Forget big bang surprise. Instead, build slowly keep testing your marketing and improving your product to get product/market fit. Then scale.


5 Articles on Startups

Silicon Beach – Welcome to Brighton, the UK’s Thriving South-Coast Tech Haven

London completely dominates the UK startup “scene” – especially the South East. But Brighton has a great concentration of startup talent especially for design and gaming.

Startup Ideas: What are the best ways to think of ideas for a startup?

Free-form brainstorming and waiting for that brilliant startup idea to strike you in the shower – don’t work for most people. Focus on industries / markets where you have domain knowledge and look for pain points.

Habit Startups

Designing your startup to attach itself to users’ existing behaviours can make it habitual – driving usage through the roof.

Marketing Software, For People Who Would Rather Be Building It

Patrick McKenzie is a engineer turned phenomenal marketer. This is an excellent talk he gave in 2012 describing how he found his business idea and dispensing excellent marketing advice. The video is nearly an hour long but filled with humour it fles by.

Inside a Completely Transparent Company

Many startups share their experiences as they blog. Vowing to be different from the old-school, they promise transpacrency internally and externally. Buffer are taking this further than anyone – investing in their “culture” – even publishing salaries and equity splits internally.


5 Articles on Software Marketing

How And Why To Create Your Content Marketing Hub

Why marketing has switched to content marketing. How SAP is using content to earn (not buy) traffic, links, and leads.

How I increased conversions from LinkedIn by 866% in 2 months

How you can distribute your content using LinkedIn.

How to Effectively Build an SEO Campaign From The Ground Up

How to get started on SEO marketing. Beginning with AdWords may seem counterintuitive.

40 Marketing Superstars to Follow on Twitter

List of marketing folks Matt Anderson recommends following on Twitter.

Overthinking Things

Interesting anecdote to reinforce why you should avoid trying planning and calculating too much in advance.

If you found these useful, you can also

  1. Follow SmartSoftMarket on Twitter
  2. Receive the Software Marketing daily email
  3. View a summary of Smart Software Marketing tweets
  4. Receive blog updates like this one, via RSS or email
]]> http://smartsoftwaremarketing.co.uk/software-marketing-tweetables-29april2013/feed/ 0 http://smartsoftwaremarketing.co.uk/software-marketing-tweetables-29april2013/ Software Marketing Tweetables 22 April 2013 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SmartSoftwareMarketing/~3/UQZJU94rSNQ/ http://smartsoftwaremarketing.co.uk/software-marketing-tweetables-22april2013/#comments Mon, 22 Apr 2013 07:51:46 +0000 Giles Farrow http://smartsoftwaremarketing.co.uk/?p=2838

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


5 Articles on Product Marketing

How To Price and Sell Your Startup’s Product

Free trial is often the best way to sell complex software, assuming you don’t need the “full weight” of an enterprise sales force.

Reframing the problems with “Freemium” by charging the marketing department

Freemium is a great marketing method for simpler software – but it is not free for vendors. Remember to include the costs of supporting freemium when comparing marketing effectiveness.

5 Best-Kept Secrets About Enterprise Software

There are a lot of advantages right now for SaaS startups targetting the enterprise space. Established enterprise software vendors will all face a lot of disruption.

The Art of Product Management

Silicon Valley is a great place to be a product manager. There is so much talent to learn from. Notes on 3 recent events where product managers got together and shared expertise.

How to Build Great Products People Will Care About

Quick reminder – build products people really care about. Validate your assumptions by experimenting on real customers!


5 Articles on Startups

A KPI dashboard for early-stage SaaS startups

Every startup will want some sort of dashboard to track their progress. If you have investors then you will need to be particularly rigorous – a framework like this will help you focus on the monthly progress. Without being distracted by vanity metrics.

Fat startup: Learn the lessons of my failed Lean Startup

Lean startup is hard. You need to learn by doing. It is very easy to blame lean when things don’t work out – but people criticizing lean seem to misunderstand.

Crash Course: Design for Startups

Great set of practical design tips and tools for designing your website or app. Paul Stamatiou explains the core design principles, creative process, and tools he uses to help non-designers get off to a good start.

Anatomy of a Startup One Week After Launch

What do the numbers look like when you first expose your product to the outside world? They will probably look really low. Immediate success is very rare, of those that do succeed it nornally takes years.

The undervalued advantages of being a small startup

Don’t feel you have to grow your team quickly to succeed. Smaller is nimbler, closer to users and means less dilution and less time on internal topics. This has been very successful for Buffer.


5 Articles on Software Marketing

Why The Traditional Sales Model Can’t Sell Enterprise Software

The enterprise software industry emerged in the 1980s. Compared to modern software as a service, apps, consumerization, and self-service it seems stuck in the Jurassic age.

7 Websites That Will Help You Learn Online Marketing From Scratch

Great sites that explain online marketing. Skim through – they all have lots of articles, eBooks, and email series to introduce you to many marketing techniques.

17 Things You Should Stop Doing to Your Websites

Overall the standard of websites has dramatically improved over the last 5 years. But most websites are making one of these simple mistakes.

Designing a modern email

If you’re familiar with HTML you would think it’s easy to create your own HTML emails from scratch. It’s not. You have to consider ancient email systems written before HTML was established. See what’s involved if you want to do your own.

The Defining Characteristics of Successful SMB SaaS Startups

Marketing software to small and medium businesses is a very attractive space. There is a huge variety of firms and it is not well served by enterprise vendors or B2C apps. You will need to combine the best of both. Professional content / delivery combined with clean attractive marketing and self-service.

If you found these useful, you can also

  1. Follow SmartSoftMarket on Twitter
  2. Receive the Software Marketing daily email
  3. View a summary of Smart Software Marketing tweets
  4. Receive blog updates like this one, via RSS or email
]]> http://smartsoftwaremarketing.co.uk/software-marketing-tweetables-22april2013/feed/ 2 http://smartsoftwaremarketing.co.uk/software-marketing-tweetables-22april2013/ Software Marketing Tweetables 15 April 2013 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SmartSoftwareMarketing/~3/qXYDGQotf_I/ http://smartsoftwaremarketing.co.uk/software-marketing-tweetables-15april2013/#comments Mon, 15 Apr 2013 17:28:46 +0000 Giles Farrow http://smartsoftwaremarketing.co.uk/?p=2830

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


5 Articles on Product Marketing

Software Companies Can Gain Competitive Advantage By Making Their Pricing Value-Based

Pricing should be fair and simple. Forrester’s Duncan Jones advocates value-based pricing – which may be suitable if you can measure the business value.

Expensive is Better than Cheap When it Comes to Pricing

Charging more for your software has many advantages. You can afford to provide great support, spend more on customer acquisition and to send a signal that you are positioning your software as a premium product.

Is This Common Pricing Mistake Costing You Sales?

And don’t have just one price. Different prices means people buy more.

Get Over Yourself

Sure, product managers and product marketers want to talk up how great their software is. Stop. Look in from the outside if you want anyone to listen.

Voice & Tone

MailChimp are one of the best examples of setting a light-hearted tone throughout the entire user experience. This guide is given to anyone writing copy for MailChimp and shows how they cay carefully adjust the voice and tone to suit what the person is likely to be feeling at that time.


5 Articles on Startups

The *real* pivot

Trying something and failing then trying something else is not what Lean Startup means by a pivot. If you develop a hypothesis and then prove it’s true or prove it’s untrue and decide you have to change one part of your business model because of what you learned, then that is a pivot.

Why are we so bad at predicting startup success?

The percentage of genuinely successful startups is very small. So ignore VCs and “experts” who try to find patterns. Everyone’s expertise is limited to a small area and some anecdotes. The only reliable method is find a problem people care about and apply the build > measure > learn loop.

Quit Selling on What You Provide. Sell Based on What the Customer Gains.

“Your entire focus as a salesperson is in understanding what the customer’s needs are and finding a way for you to help them deal with their needs.”

How to Get Better Feedback

Unless you try, most feedback comes back as “well done. That’s great…”. For actionable, effective feedback you have to work at it. First tell them you want real feedback not bland compliments. You value their opinion and want their help. Ask them to be blunt and ask specific questions on how it could be better. Afterwards thank them – never argue / justify.

Running Marketing Experiments with Purpose

Modern marketing is all about running experiments. To do this properly you must document your experiment in advance. What your hypothesis is, how you will measure and when you will stop the experiment.


5 Articles on Software Marketing

Taurus.io

Easy way to set up a product tour for your web application in 15 minutes.

Why I Don’t Care About You: Common Errors With About Us Pages

Your “About Us” is probably the second most visited page on your website. But don’t be fooled they want to hear about you, your history, hobbies blah blah. They just want to know “why” – why should they trust you, why are you doing this…

6 Ways To Send Emails Your Customers Will Love

Chris Hexton is an email marketing expert. See how you can use segmentation, automation, activity, testing, simplification, and free knowledge to create emails people will really want.

20 Awesome Homepage Examples to Inspire Your Next Redesign

Great home page examples to draw inspiration from – spanning multiple industries and design styles.

Keeping your home page clean

Multiple stakeholders usually want their own piece of the prime real estate. Then compromise results in a crowded home page. You must avoid this, get buy-in for a crisp spacious home page in advance.

If you found these useful, you can also

  1. Follow SmartSoftMarket on Twitter
  2. Receive the Software Marketing daily email
  3. View a summary of Smart Software Marketing tweets
  4. Receive blog updates like this one, via RSS or email
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