Marketing Tips for Microsoft Dynamics ISV’s, Integrators and VAR’s
I am getting excited about the webcast I am doing next Wednesday (March 24 at 11 AM EST). The webcast is titled “Inside the Scribe Marketing Machine” and in it I will be covering the various marketing initiatives we’ve undertaken here at Scribe. We’ll go over everything from the re-branding to our social media strategy and our Pardot marketing automation implementation.
As I put together the content it has occurred to me that the material, while relevant for any high-tech marketer, will be especially relevant for Integrators, VAR’s and ISV’s in the Microsoft Dynamics channel.
I’m hoping that by doing the webcast we’ll add some value to our partners as well as begin a dialogue among marketing professionals in the Dynamics channel. I hope you can make it.
Impressive Product Evangelism via YouTube
This weekend I met Rob Cohee, a Product Evangelist for Autodesk. He mentioned he had a YouTube Product Evangelism channel so I checked it out. It is extremely impressive with great sense of humor and professional editing. I am sure there are many good videos there but check this one out to see that I mean. Good work Rob!
tgethr: Cool SaaS application for group email collaboration
I recently started a group of the top users of our product here at Scribe Software. Members of the group are referred to as Scribe MVP’s to mirror the model Microsoft created in recognizing their top users.
One of the minor challenges in moderating this group had to do with having an email list exclusively for MVP’s to communicate on common issues. We started with an Exchange alias but this required me to work with our IT guy every time we needed a change; people would join the group or change their email address and it was a hassle.
Enter tgethr, ‘an easy collaboration tool for your group; perfect for small businesses, entrepreneurs, and families’ as positioned on their web site. With this I can easily administer my email list and all members of the list can see past conversations. The site also allows file sharing, code collaboration and has integration to other services like Dropbox and Unfuddle. For now we just use the email list capability but that works well and solved our problem for a nominal $6/month fee.
Excellent Book: Behind the Cloud by Marc Benioff and Carlye Adler
John Gravely and Carlye Adler
“Behind the Cloud” by Marc Benioff and Carlye Adler is the story of the founding and growth of Salesforce.com, the world’s leading CRM and Software-as-a-Service/cloud computing company. On the cover the book is described as “the Salesforce.com playbook” because it is divided into 111 plays on a wide variety of topics including play 18 “Differentiate, Differentiate, Differentiate”, play 47 “Land and Expand” and play 78 “Box above your weight”. Each play tells and story and/or teaches a lesson that Marc and company learned as they built their impressive company. Although the book is broken into the 111 plays it flows very well and entertains as it educates.
Marketers will be especially interested in stories of audacious stunts pulled by Salesforce in the early days. For example, Salesforce personnel rented all the taxis at a Siebel convention so they could ride with Siebel customers and tell them why they should switch to Salesforce. In addition, the book includes great insights into the success of Salesforce’s City Tours and other event-based marketing which has proven very successful over the years.
Behind the Cloud is a great book and I highly recommend it. Visit Behind the Cloud on Facebook
Side Note: Back in 2007 I had the pleasure of working with Behind the Cloud co-author Carlye Adler when she did a story on the sale of my company for Fortune Small Business magazine. Carlye is an excellent writer who we’ll no doubt see authoring many more best sellers in the future.
SaaS Email: Microsoft Exchange in the Cloud
We’ve been on a tear in terms of using Software-as-a-Service applications at Scribe Software. The latest of which is Microsoft BPOS. BPOS stands for Business Productivity Online Suite and is a set of solutions hosted by Microsoft including Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Office Live Meeting, and Office Communications Online. After dealing with downtime issues from an on-premise Exchange server at our company we made the decision to move to Exchange online. After some minor kinks in getting going the system has proven to work very well. Some key points have been:
- Performance is good and so far there have been no service outages (~1 month in production)
- BPOS is inexpensive ($5/user/month for Exchange online)
- No more VPN for corporate email
- You can use Outlook on your home, office or Windows mobile devices with no differences in data or functionality
- There is a lightweight Microsoft Online Services sign-in application that must be installed on computers running BPOS. However, this is quick and easy to install
- Microsoft Outlook Web Access is available when using Exchange Online so you can get to your email from any browser
So far, so good for BPOS. For anyone managing an on-premise Exchange server BPOS is worth a look.
Cool Startup: JitterJam turns conversations into customers
I saw a really cool startup yesterday. A local, Bedford NH company called JitterJam that targets B2C companies by giving them a platform to:
- Listen to conversations about their products, brand and market
- Engage those talking in meaningful dialogue
- Develop intelligence about those people (very cool – it builds a contact database with intelligence about preferences, social media participation, etc.)
- Promote to those people in a targeted, tailored and permission based fashion
- Measure the effectiveness of those promotions
If I were running a consumer brand I would want this functionality to put structure, intelligence and action around how the community is interacting with my brand.
Is there a play for this in the B2B world whereby a B2B software company could use the tool to understand who its external advocates (and detractors) are and engage in dialogue with them? I think so but startups need focus and JitterJam is focused in the right place with a great idea. This is one to watch for sure.
Cool Marketing Tricks: Do you know who is surfing your site?
Do you like cool marketing tricks? Here is one that is free, easy and powerful. My company’s Marketing Automation vendor, Pardot, has come out with a free Visitor ID service that gives you reports, email notifications and web activity detail of visitors to your site. This differs from free analytics services like Google Analytics in that, while those services tell you about the amount and type of traffic you receive, they don’t tell you which companies and organizations are visiting your site and what pages they are viewing (and for how long).
 |
 |
 |
|
Who is visiting? |
What pages are they visiting? |
Notification Emails |
At Scribe we are heavy users of Marketing Automation. Our Marketing Automation package handles our email marketing, web forms, nurture programs, landing pages, visitor tracking, lead scoring, data de-de-duplication and more. This is fully integrated to our CRM package so we can keep our sales team spending time on the most promising leads that have displayed buying behavior based on their web activity. We have rules in place to notify sales when a silent prospect suddenly comes back to life on our site.
You can try out the free Visitor ID service at http://visitorid.pardot.com/.
Tech Marketing: Using your blog as a content source for your monthly newsletter
If you’ve ever run marketing for a company and tried to have a high-quality customer or partner newsletter you know that the having fresh content can be an issue. The way we’ve solved that problem at Scribe Software is by creating a blog and publishing a schedule by which team members have to create posts. We then use the posts as articles for the newsletter. Each newsletter article is a summary of a post and links to the post page. This strategy has worked great because our team has embraced creating their posts and because we have a big enough team that no one person has too many posts assigned to them.
Since implementing this strategy our issue seems to be which articles to run highest in the newsletter and, often, what to cut from the newsletter. With ~10 new items on our blog every month we find ourselves now with too much good content. Since each newsletter may also have other items (sales promotions, webinar announcements, etc.) to include in addition to content stories we now have to be choosy about what makes it into the newsletter. This is a good problem to have and ensures that our readers will not opt out of the newsletter. Since beginning this strategy in August we’ve steadily seen our newsletter opens and clicks increase which has resulted in increasing readership on our blog. We know this because we use Pardot Marketing Automation software which gives us deep insight into all of our email, web form and website visitor activity.
Our strategy of using our blog to feed our newsletter to keep our customers and partners engaged has been a winner for us.
