IQ Website Launch - Results Exceed Expectations

About 6 months ago I hired a Marketing Production team in Bangalore (see June 1 2007 posting) to do website development, collateral creation, SEO, SEM, online advertising, etc. Their first main project was to develop a new "customer network" concept for IQ; very Web 2.0 and extremely promising. The team delivered the prototype with flying colors and the "project" is expected to be launched in 2008. Their next initiative has been the redesign of the IQ website as well as a completely new collateral package that includes new product positioning, customer case studies, Podcasts, recorded demos and more.

For a number of business and schedule reasons, the website launch has been split into 3 phases:

Phase 1 - Re platform the website so that marketing can make content changes without engineering input. This will accelerate content creation and increase efficiency / cut costs. We are migrating the aspx website to a CMS system (Joomla) with integrations to SugarCRM. Other items in scope include additional content, more detailed analytics and significantly more targeted landing pages (squeeze pages).

Phase 2 - Redesign the homepage and include new events, Call-To-Action options, PR and product information. This will coincide with the 3.0 launch of an IQ product in Q2 2008.

Phase 3 - Update the website to support on-going marketing activities.

Phase 1 has been completed and we launched on Nov 1st; the first two weeks of metrics have exceeded my expectations. When comparing the old site to the new site for the same period in the current and prior months (Oct 1 - 15 vs. Nov 1 -15) the results are very encouraging:

Avg Time on Site +199.95% (good)
Bounce Rate -13.89% (good)
Average Page Views: +31.04% (good)
Goals (new leads) +42.86% (good)
Absolutely unique new visitors -32.66% (not so good)

At first glance it is a negative that our number of absolutely unique new visitors has dropped by 32%. While I never want to see a drop in visitors, it is actually a good thing. When we launched the new site, I initiated an online advertising review that ended-up reducing the number of words that we are paying for - essentially cutting out the lower performing "garbage" words but paying more for the high-value words. The 32% reduction in visitors is a result of this......and so is the 42.86% increase in conversions. All in all a good trade off.

Marketing Organization Structure 2.0

For the last decade or so I have successfully used the same marketing organization structure. With all the changes going on in marketing (e.g. new mediums, metrics driven evaluation, etc.) and the internationalization of my team, I've decided to spend some time analyzing and validating the structure.

I organize based on the following work breakdown structure:

Corporate / Group Marketing:

• Strategy
• Positioning
• Branding
• Website [including SEO]
• Metrics & Analytics
• Tools

Marcom / Communications:

• Public Relations
• Analyst Relations
• Online Exposure / Digital Outreach [this is a new responsibility and includes coordinating online feedback, blogging, message boards postings, viral exposure, directories etc.]

Field Marketing:

• Lead Generation Campaigns
• Advertising (online & offline)
• Marketing Campaigns (nurturing and upsell)
• Sales Team Support
• Events

Product Marketing:*

• Product Positioning
• Collateral Development [brochures, cutsheets, whitepapers, case studies, etc.]
• Sales Tools Development [ROI calculators, positioning sheets, presentations, etc.]
• Competitive Monitoring & G2

Product Management:*

• Product Roadmap
• Business Case Development
• Requirements Gathering
• Solution Validation
• Sales Expertise

* (Note: Product Marketing and Product Management responsibilities can often blur. Depending on the organization and resource capabilities, Product Management can shift from marketing into engineering or its own stand-alone group. With IQ, the Product Roadmap, Requirements Gathering and Solution Validation lie in either the engineering team or marketing team depending on the product and resources.)

So, I started out this posting to validate if my tested Marketing Structure has held-up, and it has. There are a couple of newer responsibilities in PR (online based), and Field Marketing has additional mediums (e.g. SEM) that are evolving very quickly, but all-in-all the structure works. Also, depending on the company size, these activities and responsibilities can either be assigned to individuals, or in larger organizations, spread across different teams. Does this structure apply to all organizations and industries? Nope -one size does not fit all- but it does work well for on-premise Software companies, SaaS providers and online information based services. I am sure that at some point I will evolve and change the structure, just not yet.

The Grass Is Pretty Green ....

I recently helped a "Green" manufacturing company launch their website. It sure was fun to deal with marketing issues outside of the technology industry for a while.

Let me give some background here - his company is about a $20m manufacturer of on-site chemical generation machinery that has no full-time marketing staff, no full-time IT staff and a budget for marketing slightly more than zero. They had a website that was done about 3 years ago and had not been updated since then - it showed. Without a CRM tool, website lead capture, analytics, outbound marketing campaigns or advertising programs (they do some trade shows) it is an absolute testament to their product and sales abilities that they have gotten to the revenues that they have.

They recently won a number of major deals and had gotten a lot of interest in their products. The management team felt that the time had come to build-out their web-presence and marketing programs. That's where I come into the picture - as the "brother that runs marketing for a SW company" I was asked to help-out and provide guidance.

I agreed to coordinate the activities and took the project on as a "consulting hobby". In under 2 months (part-time) we accomplished:

1. Selecting the Content Management System (Joomla)
2. Contracting a joomla engineer to do the development
3. Coordinating flash and graphics work with a freelance designer
4. Selecting their new hosting site
5. Managing the process
6. Editing the content
7. Implementing an online advertising program (Google AdWords)
8. Implementing the analytics package (Google Analytics)
9. Selecting the CRM package for web-to-lead capture (Appitas CRM - http://www.appitas.com/)
10. Successfully launched the site

While it is always fun to get into the trenches (it helps me to better understand some of the tasks that my team does) the greatest reward is seeing the results.

Since launching the new site (with a rebranded domain name), a limited advertising budget and some guerrilla marketing, the traffic has gone from 10 users per day to hundreds per day [yes not a huge number but remember the segment and budget] with global visitors and leads being captured in their CRM system. They now have a platform for expanding their marketing activities with tracking and analysis.

Pretty cool to be able to help-out and see the results so quickly.

A Marketing Geek's Fantasy - the be all, do all Marketing Engine

Do a search on Google for "marketing software" and you will get about 385,000,000 results; "marketing saas" gets over 2,000,000. With all these results, I still can't find my ideal "Marketing Engine". Let me explain this be-all-does-all "application": put simply, it is an application that ties all of my team's strategic and tactical marketing information together in one place, across products, projects and processes. The underlying value proposition is that it can help repeatably drive our marketing activities from start to finish with lower costs and higher success rates.

The requirements list isn't that long or difficult to deliver on:

1. the engine must support the sequential steps of marketing strategy creation through tactical execution: Plan > Segment > Revise Plan > Create > Execute > Measure > Improve > Plan
   
   
   
   
2. it should be possible to manage individual segments, mediums and product lines - or roll them up for consolidated management
   
   
   
   
3. Processes (planning, budgeting, SEO, lead scoring, etc.) and Projects (product launches, events, individual campaigns, etc.) must both be supported
   
   
   
   
4. real-time with reporting, dashboards and decision support from 50,000 feet down to ground level
   
   
   
   
5. a pro-active recommendation and optimization capability that can statistically evaluate all campaigns, segments and outcomes to provide the optimal future spend structure with what-if decision making
   
   
   
   
6. Lead scoring before hand offs to sales
   
   
   
   
7. 
   
   100% web based
   
   
   
   
8. able to integrate with CRM tools (gotta bring the sales team to the party)
   
   
   

It's not asking too much is it? As a consumer it would be Nirvana. As a marketing team responsible for defining and rolling it out, it would be pretty awesome as well. You could create some really interesting UI, logos, collateral and revenue generation campaigns ? As far as I know there is nothing out there that does what I want my Marketing Engine to do. Until one comes to market, I will have to make do with the five or six stand-alone applications that I have come to rely on: IQ's project / process automation platform, planning spreadsheets, our CRM package (SugarCRM), website analytics reports, adword reports and finances budgeting reports. If anybody knows of something like the Marketing Engine that I have described, let me know - I would love to check it out.

Making Distributed Teams Work

I recently read an article by Matt Asay of Alfresco about their highly virtual organization and some of the fundamentals that make them successful. It is hard to question his credibility in this area - Alfresco is doing a superb job strategically and tactically so something is working. They have defined their market (Enterprise Content Management), structured their business model (commercial open source) and are hitting it out of the park in a number of important metrics (downloads, customers, etc.) Still, I am a bit sceptical about the "all is rosy" picture that he paints.

http://weblog.infoworld.com/openresource/archives/2007/05/building_an_onl.html#comments


Here is why I am sceptical. At IQ, our marketing team is split between Massachusetts, USA and Bangalore, India. I have experienced the cost benefits of offshore teams, but I have also had to overcome the downsides of virtual teams. There are a few main obstacles to making teams work: (1) team cohesion, (2) communication friction, and (3) specialized knowledge. Let's explore them:

(1) team cohesion - I believe that communication is a cornerstone of effective teams. When you are spread across the country or around the world, communication is very difficult. It is a challenge to build effective teams when they can only communicate for two or three hours each day via conference call or IM. On-site visits and get-together certainly help but can never really replace hallway conversations.


(2) communication friction - anytime that you have virtual teams, you will inevitably have communication friction. Just being in different timezones and needing to schedule calls around different team's schedules introduces friction. I typically have calls to my virtual team from 7:30am - 10:00am every day. It works, but I would definitely prefer to have them down the hall for ad hoc discussions.

(3) specialized knowledge - where specific market knowledge or market activities are required in a geographic area, virtual teams do not work. My team in India is focused on marketing production (e.g. website creation and management, Flash development, collateral creation, SEO) and campaign execution (e.g. direct mail, SEM, online advertising). Market specific activities such as collateral creation, webinars, etc. require specialized knowledge and have to be done by local (USA based) team members.

Virtual teams can work, but they come with a cost.

Off-shore marketing production - a new twist

I recently formed a "Marketing Production" team in Bangalore that includes a marketing manager, web-developer and graphics specialist. There are a number of reasons for starting the team but the main one is budget. Essentially this team is an alternative to a marketing agency but at a fraction of the cost.

The team in India is responsibile for web-site development, collateral creation, SEO, online advertising / SEM, Flash production, campaign execution and CRM administration. Activities like strategic planning, content creation, customer interations, event execution and PR will remain in the US.

While off-shore marketing and off-shore development are clearly different, I expect that the 5+ years of experience I have gained working with off-shore development teams will pay dividents. I feel that there will be a couple of critical success factors: diligent hiring, constant communication, well defined processes and clear objectives. Right now I have all of them in place.

It will be interesting to see if the issues of location, time-zone and a lack of industry expertise can be overcome. I am confident that they can. Time will tell.

Competence Party

Over the last few years I have enjoyed reading Bob Lewis' weekly article "IS Survivor". His advice and thoughts may be focused on IT, but they apply just as well to pretty much any other function. This week his article deals with competency and accountability. Some highlights of his tongue-in-cheek Competency Party Platform:

"We will know what we want to accomplish, be clear in how we describe it, and know why it's a good idea.

We will concentrate our efforts on a small number of important goals, recognizing that if we try to accomplish everything we'll end up accomplishing nothing.

We will be realistic. We will choose courses of action only from among those possibilities predicated on all physical objects obeying the laws of physics, human nature not somehow changing for the better, and what has gone wrong in the past having something useful to teach us.

Our decisions will always begin by examining the evidence. And we will recognize that when our cherished principles collide with the evidence, the evidence wins. Every time.

With new evidence we will reconsider old decisions. Without it, we won't.

We will never mistake our personal experience for hard evidence. Personal experience is the evidence we know best. It's also a biased sample.

We will think first, plan next, and only then act. The only exception is a true emergency, where making any decision in the next two minutes is better than making the right decision sometime in the next several days.

We will never mistake hope for a plan. A plan describes what everyone has to do, in what order, to achieve a goal. Vague intentions and platitudes don't.

We will sweat the details. Vague intentions and platitudes don't have any, which is why those who stop with them always fail.

We will put the most qualified person we can find in every position. We'll find some other way to reward high-dollar campaign contributors. Also, if we find someone is not able to succeed at what we've asked them to do, we'll replace them with someone who is.

We will never blame anything on the law of unintended consequences. Our job is to foresee consequences, which we can usually do if we think things through. "

Bob makes some very good points to manage by. A couple of additional ones that could be included:

We will implement repeatable processes and constantly improve them. Business success and scale depends on process success.

We will measure our progress and improve accordingly. Metrics and measurements let you know how you are performing and react accordingly.