Posts Tagged ‘Genoo’
Review: Six Small Business CMS and Web Marketing Systems
Monday, August 29th, 2011What’s the best web content management system (CMS) for your small business? Should you look at something beyond a CMS—a web marketing system (WMS), that provides additional functions like customer relationship management (CRM) and email? There’s no shortage of options, and the decision is an important one: you’ll be “married” to the platform you choose for as long as your current site is up.
Content management systems are valuable tools for small businesses that 1) don’t want to make a big investment in IT infrastructure, 2) don’t have web development (HTML, CSS etc.) expertise on staff, and 3) want to be able to maintain their own web content (adding new pages, text and images) over time, without needing to learn web coding skills.
“Free” CMS options such as WordPress, Joomla and Drupal have an obvious appeal (price) to small businesses, but none are cost-free. All require some level of technical expertise, and Joomla and Drupal particularly have steep learning curves. Low-cost, fee-based tools are generally more user-friendly, provide more features, and most importantly come bundled with support. For businesses looking beyond “free” tools, here are six CMS and WMS options that can help you get more sales and marketing productivity out of your website, while being easy on your web content contributors.
Keep in mind that all of these tools impose some design limitations; if you need a truly custom look and feel like these sites, your only option is to hire a professional web design and development firm. But if you can live within a template (and most of these tools do offer a respectable array of options), you can save thousands of dollars on design and coding costs.
CMS Only
These platforms offer website building and content management tools with hosting, but no “extras.” If you are just looking to get a site up on the web and already have systems in place for CRM and marketing automation, these tools are worthy of consideration.
Pricing: $150-$600 per year ($12-$50 per month)
Squarespace is a generally well-regarded tool with reasonable design functionality for building natively search-optimized websites and blogs. It offers a solid set of features including site search, multiple permission levels for different types of contributors, a form-builder, and built-in analytics. The learning curve is far less daunting than most free CMS alternatives, and a strength of the tool is its mobile support. For anyone looking for an inexpensive, easy-to-use, basic website building and management tool, Squarespace is definitely worth consideration.
UPDATE: After closer examination, SquareSpace is not worthy of consideration, due to weaknesses in search engine optimization, specifically:
- • Custom meta title tags for high-level pages are limited to 50 characters (even the most conservative SEOs recommend 65 characters for the title tag).
- • Meta title tags inside a section (e.g., “blog”) will always begin with the section name. You can customize the section name, but you can’t override the fact the all-important first few characters of every page title in that section will contain it.
- • You can’t create custom meta description tags (!) which are essential in “selling the click.”
- • The people behind SquareSpace seem to lack understanding of how SEO works. True, manipulative tactics don’t work, but solid, white hat SEO is essential to getting a website ranked highly. Their information is both inaccurate and offensive to legitimate SEO professionals.
$240-$1200/year ($20-$100 per month)
Like the other tools listed here, LightCMS is low-cost, easy to use, search-optimized and provides tools like a forms builder. What sets it apart is better design flexibility than most of the alternatives, calendar tools and built-in ecommerce functionality. For developers and agencies, LightCMS also offers one of the most attractive partner programs. Considering all of its features, LightCMS is another shortlist-worthy tool for basic website creation, particularly for smaller B2C companies who want an easy-to-manage online store.
$300 per year ($25 per month)
Another website building option that includes extras like ecommerce functionality with credit card processing, and nightly backups. The site is a bit cheesy, but the functionality of the tool is solid. Solution Toolbox provides their own comparison of their system to Squarespace and LightCMS, but take it with a grain of salt; it’s biased in their favor of course and some of the specifics are out of date (for example, Squarespace now includes a forms-builder). Still, for smaller consumer marketers who want to run an online store in addition to their basic website, this is worth a look.
Web Marketing Platforms
These suites combine CMS functionality with additional web marketing applications to provide more than just a website, but a complete online marketing software system.
$480 per year ($40 per month)
Business Catalyst combines the features of the products above—a CMS, forms builder, and ecommerce tools—with email marketing functionality and a basic CRM system. It provides respectable design flexibility and support for mobile devices. Though the product had issues in its original incarnation, Adobe has fixed many of these issues since acquiring it in late 2009 and continues to invest in product development. The catch? Business Catalyst isn’t sold directly to users, only through web developers and agencies (though there are ways around this).
$2,400/year ($200 per month)
Genoo is a solid, easy to use tool, very strong on email marketing / marketing automation. It offers some of the best built-in SEO tools of any of these packages. Genoo doesn’t provide native CRM functionality, but does have a pre-built integration to Salesforce.com. This is ideal for midsized companies with at least moderately sophisticated internal marketing resources who are already using a separate CRM system and are ready to graduate from hosted email marketing services. Genoo’s offering includes training on how to use its lead-nurturing capabilities.
$1,800/year ($150 per month)
This is a complete web marketing package for smaller, non-ecommerce businesses. It provides a robust CMS for a website and blog along with native CRM, email marketing, and forms-building tools, as well as comprehensive strategy guidance for making all of the pieces work together. The ePROneur package uniquely combines hosting, software, services and strategy to help companies with limited resources effectively generate leads and revenue online. The web marketing resources section of the company’s website also offers a wealth of free strategic and tactical web marketing information.
Any of the alternatives above can help small to midsize companies cost-effectively build and manage their web presence with no IT infrastructure and limited technical expertise. The key from there is to choose a platform whose strengths match up with your business type and needs. And also to investigate multiple options to determine which tool, and company, you are most comfortable working with.
FTC Disclosure: Webbiquity has no affiliate relationships with any of the vendors in this review.
Eloqua, TopRank, Demandbase and More – OMS Minneapolis Wrapup
Tuesday, June 14th, 2011Last week’s Online Marketing Summit in Minneapolis drew an intense crowd of local agency and corporate attendees focused on learning the latest strategies for SEO and search, conversion rate optimization (CRO), QR codes, PPC, social video marketing, integrated analytics, social media measurement and more. It was three days of drinking from a firehose of expertise from an impressive lineup of speakers, but did the conference deliver the goods? Here’s a recap of a few of the key sessions and conversations from the summit.
Steve Woods, Eloqua
Steve is one of the most brilliant marketing strategists I know, and co-author of a new book, Revenue Engine
- • The buying process is now 1) online, 2) all about the buyer, and 3) complex (multiple stakeholders).
- • The sales “discovery” call, where a sales rep spent an hour learning about a prospect’s issues and pains, is extinct. 78% of executives report that they are spending less time with sales reps than ever before. Research, through social media, has to fill in much of this gap.
- • Social media killed newspapers; anyone can now publish to the world. The most important users of social media are Google and Bing, who are attempting to create “social filters” to identify the most relevant content.
- • QR codes marry social media with traditional direct marketing.
- • With marketing moving online, everything is measurable now. The days of not knowing which 50% of your marketing dollars you’re wasting are over.
- • ”Sales and marketing” has to be one budget, with dollars flowing back and forth based on measurable value. But few companies have sufficiently sophisticated analytics in place today to do this properly.
- • The trick in using social media monitoring tools is not to automate “fast, shi**y answers” as Steve put it, but rather to find the right person to respond. Even in fairly large organizations, the actual number of social media mentions that really require any kind of detailed response tends to be fairly small.
- • The best social media managers will work themselves out of their jobs by making their organizations social media proficient. Social media will ultimately be another tool, like email, but it will take some time to reach that stage.
- • Online buyers discover information in three ways, which require three different approaches to capitalize on: active search (use SEM), passive search (use content marketing and SEO), and influence (social media).
- • A common issue for B2B vendors: how do you sell “boring stuff” online? Don’t be boring! Find a tie between your “boring” product and something interesting and capitalize on it. For example, gaskets are boring. But they may be used in race cars, and race cars are not boring.
- • Tap your internal subject matter experts and help them create personal brands. Answer questions and establish expertise. Don’t explicitly sell products, rather solve problems. The revenue team is no longer just sales and marketing.
- • Facebook is better for B2B than many businesses realize (the one point of Steve’s on which I remain skeptical).
- • Don’t try to talk to everyone; this drives people away. Buyers are open to sales conversations when 1) they are the right buyer and 2) their “digital body language” indicates they are actively engaged in looking for a solution right now. Use data–intuition often leads down the wrong path.
- • Buy his new book
Lee Odden, TopRank Online Marketing
Lee presented a session on search and social media. Highlights:
- • SEO is dead, social media is sexy? No, SEO is still not dead yet. As technology and buying processes change, SEO evolves. The top priority in SEO this year should be search and social integration, as the search engines seek to incorporate more social signals into search results.
- • 92% of b2b buying cycles start with search. It’s not enough just to produce great content, it has to be made “findable.”
- • Every two days, we now (collectively) create as much information as was created from the dawn of time through 2003 (according to Eric Schmidt)–5 exabytes of data.
- • Make your customer service content searchable, and extend the customer relationship to build loyalty and recommendations. Google does a good job of this with the help information for their various tools.
- • To scale content creation, use of a mix of original content and content curation–select the good stuff and add value to it.
- • To optimize time spend on social networking, allocate about 15 minutes per day per network, with perhaps a bit more time spent on the 2-3 most important sites.
- • Use Knowem.com to claim your (and your company’s) profile across social networks; you don’t have to be active on all of them (only the ones where your customers and prospects are).
- • Use keyword research to coordinate content creation, SEO and social media efforts.
- • SEMrush is a valuable tool for analyzing your competition in SEO and SEM, search traffic, and keywords that work today.
- • Use knowledge gleaned from analytics to scale up what works and kill what doesn’t.
Angie did a phenomenal job of communicating a highly visual topic largely without the use of visuals, thanks to technical glitches with the hotel’s equipment.
- • When evaluating 2D barcode readers (mobile apps), look for support for multiple barcode types as well as autoscan capability. BeeTag is her favorite.
- • There are numerous free 2D barcode generators available online. Some also serve as management platforms, which is helpful. Delivr is a good option, particularly for local retail businesses, due to its mapping functionality.
- • Minimize the data stored in the barcode by using a shortened URL.
- • Brainstorm ways to add value to the user when using QR codes. Don’t just send them to your mobile site home page. Try to deliver exclusive content.
- • When it comes to QR codes, size matters. Bigger images are better (easier to scan with a wider range of phones). 1″ x 1″ is considered a reasonable minimum, but go a bit larger than that if possible. Also, always include a URL just in case someone’s phone can’t read your barcode.
- • Tell users what will happen when they scan! It’s okay to “tease” a little, but don’t try to be too mysterious; that will reduce scan rates. Make it a strong call to action.
- • Link to a smartphone-friendly destination (e.g. NOT just to a standard web page or to a high-definition video). Ideally, apps should take advantage of smartphone features.
- • B2C use of QR codes is about selling, B2B use is about branding: provide the visitor with some kind of value (e.g. tracking a shipment) or send to a (low resolution) video, for example.
Jennifer Kane, Kane Consulting
Jennifer braved a displaced neck disc (ouch!) and tag-teamed with Kary Delaria to deliver an excellent presentation on tools for measuring online media effectiveness. I have to say, I expected Jennifer to be smart (which she certainly is) but wasn’t expecting her to be funny, especially given the neck issue. But her presentation was the best of the day at combing humor with valuable information.
- • Start with what you think social media success looks like. Measurements must have meaning, or else they are just data.
- • To define the “return” on your social media efforts, ask people to do specific things (e.g. visit a link, download a report)–then measure how many people do it.
- • The “big three” KPIs for social media success are 1) increase brand awareness, 2) drive sales, and 3) build brand loyalty.
- • Basic metrics include reach (who reads your content and where), sentiment and conversion. When looking at sentiment in social media monitoring tools, always double check the results. To use Jennifer’s example, if someone writes that your product “kicks ass,” that is likely a positive, though many social media monitoring tools will tag this as a negative sentiment because “getting your ass kicked is generally a bad thing.”
- • It takes 10,000 brand mentions at a minimum to get statistically relevant sentiment tracking from a social media monitoring tool.
- • Social media ROI can’t be measured directly. But you can measure “tons of stuff” and find correlations. And correlations are good data.
- • The best social monitoring tools are “Excel and your own eyes.” Don’t overlook the value of native searches on LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube and Technorati.
- • Tools like Klout and PeerIndex are good for measuring your “cool factor” but not really business results or the quality of your content or interactions. They can be gamed. However, when paired with other data, results from these tools can be interesting.
- • Tools such as TwentyFeet, Trackur and Unilyzer don’t provide competitor data but are useful for showing all of your data in one place on a single dashboard.
- • HootSuite rocks.
- • Even the best paid tools only find, on average, about 65% of your global brand mentions.
Greg Ott, Demandbase
Greg presented on conversion rate optimization. Much of his presentation reflected, indirectly, the capabilities of the Demandbase tool. That’s not necessarily a bad thing as it’s a pretty cool product, though it is in my view grossly overpriced at $2,500 per month. I think there could be a huge marketing opportunity for the product in the $500-1,000 per month price range.
- • All marketing is now online marketing. Online sources provide 50% of all B2B leads now (sounds low to me) and that figure is projected to rise to 70% within two years.
- • Most b2b websites are still static and one-dimensional. Companies spend 9X as much on attracting visitors to their websites as they do on converting those visitors once they arrive.
- • Most websites are “leaky buckets.” They lose half of all visitors at each additional click.
- • Key is to determine who the visitor is as quickly as possible, then serve up relevant content and offers.
- • Think about visitors in terms of company size and industry, then optimize forms and offers for each.
- • To optimize conversions, keep forms as short as possible and test everything: content, offers, specific calls to action, etc.
Kim Albee, Genoo
Kim Albee is the fascinating, high energy leader of Genoo, a marketing automation system for small to midsize companies. Though both Genoo and Eloqua provide marketing automation software, they fit at opposite ends of the market in terms of company size, so they rarely compete. Genoo is more similar to something like ePROneur; both offer hosting, robust CMS capabilities and forms builders. Genoo is stronger in marketing email automation and suitable for smaller companies with reasonably sophisticated internal marketing capabilities. ePROneur on the other hand includes an integrated CRM application is ideal for sales-focused companies who outsource more of their marketing functions.
A few notes from our between-sessions conversation as well as the end-of-day panel session in which Kim participated (along with Greg Ott, Maria Lettman – Director of Social Media at Cargill, and others).
- • Employees need to understand the “rules of the game” for business social media participation; everything from etiquette and strategy to simple things like not including “#in” when posting something in LinkedIn.
- • Lots of agencies offer social media marketing services, but companies are having a hard time right now finding agencies with the bandwidth to do the work.
- • Data is important–but it won’t help you to be creative or “think outside the box.”
- • In social media, be a voice not an echo. Add value when you pass along information from others.
- • LinkedIn profiles should reflect personality; they should like they are written by individuals, not by the marketing department (though they should all contain some important keywords for consistency).
- • Infuse personality into social media efforts; don’t be afraid to “pi** people off.” Hmm, be careful with that one.
- • Balance value added vs. selling: help buyers solve problems or think about how to solve them. Share relevant content, even (or particularly) content that isn’t your own. Be interesting!
Got anything to add?
Is Salesforce.com a Player in Marketing Automation Software?
Thursday, January 27th, 2011Guest post by Lauren Carlson.
Salesforce.com is the cloud computing darling of customer relationship management (CRM) software. They have significant control of mind share in that space, and their legacy in customer service and sales force automation software is strong. However, CRM is a trifecta. It is made up of sales, service and—wait for it—marketing! So, where does Salesforce.com stand as a marketing automation solution?
Marketing Automation Software Guide decided to answer this question. Up front, Salesforce.com will garner appeal because the marketing app is bundled with the Sales Cloud 2 product. You can’t argue with a free app. However, there are several best-of-breed players in the market that have developed robust, feature-rich systems that can handle the most sophisticated marketing strategies. So, when should Salesforce.com make your marketing automation software shortlist? When should you look elsewhere?
To answer these questions, MASG evaluated the system by looking at product functionality. They assessed the seven high-level functions of a marketing automation, identifying capabilities and gaps. You can view the chart on their blog post here.
For a more in-depth analysis, you can visit the MASG blog. However, the verdict is that Salesforce.com is a great place to start with marketing automation. It has the necessary tools and capabilities for very basic marketing activities such as limited email marketing and campaign management. However, as your company grows, your marketing activities might need to scale as well. In this case, we suggest seeking out a best-of-breed vendor, such as Marketo, Eloqua, Genius, Manticore Technology, Genoo or the wide variety of other systems. These vendors have sophisticated features and processes that can meet the needs of marketing teams in any size organization.
Lauren Carlson is a CRM Market Analyst with Software Advice.
FTC Disclosure: Webbiquity has no financial relationship with any of the vendors mentioned in this post.
Social Media: Making Friends for Fun & Profit
Tuesday, June 8th, 2010Guest post by Kim Albee
With all of the hype surrounding social media, knowing how to dip your toe in the water without falling into the deep end of the social media pool can be challenging. Should you participate? What avenues will be most fruitful? And how do you optimize the time you spend with social media sites?
Excerpted from my new booklet, Effective Online Marketing In A Nutshell, here are some tips that will help:
1. Find 3-5 groups in your target market and join them. Follow the discussions, and when one comes up where you can add value (not just spout about yourself and your business), then participate – help people solve issues and think more effectively about whatever the subject is.
2. Subscribe to LinkedIn Answers for your segments and/or categories. Answer a question every day (be within the top 5 answers posted) until you are selected as the “Best Answer”. Then slow to 3 times per week until you get another “Best Answer” designation. Then slow to one per week (or keep it up if you’re having fun and have the time). The purpose is to build you up as an expert who adds value in your arena / subject matter.
1. Think carefully about your Twitter name. Use your name or a name that is memorable or says something relevant about what you do for your customers.
2. Tweet according to your content strategy. Push traffic to your available downloads. Use a URL shortener like bit.ly or su.pr to schedule tweets ahead of time.
3. Re-Tweet good posts and make friends.
The jury is still out on Facebook’s effectiveness for the B2B market. We’ve got some useful first steps in the booklet on Facebook specifically, as well as additional tips on both LinkedIn and Twitter.
Social media is in the press every day. Its impact on many industries is still murky, but how it is re-shaping marketing strategy and activities like market research and demand generation continues to get clearer and more understood.
Utilizing social media as part of your overall marketing strategy and understanding where it fits in your marketing mix are critical to effectively leveraging your participation and time.
Effective Online Marketing In A Nutshell covers the 10 essential items of Internet Marketing – the 10 critical factors to focus on to be as effective as possible. It offers more information on social media, where it fits, and ways to use it effectively in your online marketing strategy.
To your Internet Marketing Success!
Kim Albee is Founder and President of Genoo, a marketing automation and online marketing tools vendor for small and midsize businesses. She is a frequent speaker at marketing conferences, such as Marketing Sherpa’s B2B Summit, the Online Marketing Summit national, virtual and upcoming regional conferences, as well as the upcoming Niche Digital Conference in Chicago this September. She founded the B2B Online Marketing group on LinkedIn, and is committed to providing information and tools that allow businesses to compete and win in their online marketing activities.
FTC Disclosure Notice: I have absolutely no financial relationship with Genoo whatsoever, and have not been compensated for this post in any way—other than hopefully getting a few retweets.
Book Review: eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale
Monday, February 15th, 2010Marketing automation systems—from vendors like Eloqua, Marketo, Genoo, Manticore and others—are great tools for moving prospective buyers along the path from interest to desire to action. But they’re just that: tools. Without a solid content strategy to support that movement through the marketing and sales cycle, all you’ve got is a nice email system. The brilliant Ardath Albee provides the missing piece, a reliable recipe marketing automation, demand generation and content marketing success in her new book, eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale
Some business books are mere “information snacks,” but Ardath provides much more here, a substantial three-course meal of marketing strategy: she covers the “why,” “what” and “how” of using compelling content, email, social media and microsites to turn prospects into buyers.
Divided into six sections, as an appetizer the book starts off with eMarketing Essentials, the “why” of using content marketing for complex sales. Here she expounds on the shift in technology buying processes I outlined in a previous post, How Social Media Changed the Sales Cycle into the Buying Cycle. Buyers today expect to be able to gather the vast majority of the information they need to make a purchasing decision without ever talking to a sales rep. They begin in most cases with some basic online research, which is why web presence optimization has become so critical. From there, they will “raise their hands,” looking for more information from specific vendors, most commonly by downloading a white paper or registering for a webinar. What happens next is critical; prospects at this stage are not usually ready to be “sold,” but they are open to being convinced, through compelling thought-leadership content, that your company is uniquely capable of solving their problems. In this first section, Ardath explains this shift, what it means for marketing and selling complex products, and how the vendors who understand and capitalize on this shift will benefit in increased sales and a stronger competitive position.
Sections two and three, Customer Consensus and Natural Nurturing, begin getting into the meat of the strategy. Here the author outlines the crucial preparatory steps to a successful lead nurturing strategy. Begin by creating buyer personas—who are your buyers? What problems do they face? What keeps them awake at night? What information do they need to make a decision? Just as importantly, what information do they need to be your advocate within their organization? It’s critical at this stage to recognize the different personas you’ll need to appeal to in crafting a content creation strategy. The primary buyer for a complex b2b product or service is often someone in operations seeking to solve a problem or perform a process faster/cheaper/better. However, the purchasing committee will generally include someone from IT, the CFO, and in smaller firms possibly even the CEO. You’ll need different messages to appeal to all of these groups, based on their concerns (technical simplicity, financial impact, high-level business benefits, etc.).
Sections four and five, Contagious Content and Persistent Progression (gotta love the alliteration of these titles), are the main course. With an understanding of who your buyers are and what problems they are focused on solving in place, the chapters in these two sections walk through the creation, development and tuning of thought-leadership content to attract buyers and move them through the decision process. The section begins an explanation of the three types of content you’ll need to provide to buyers: education (what buyers need to know in order to think strategically about solving a problem or taking advantage of a new opportunity), expertise (showing why your product or service is uniquely capable of addressing their issues) and evidence (proving through case studies, customer stories and third-party endorsements that your offering provides real business benefits).
This is followed by a critical chapter (one of the best in the book) on “catch factors”—which are, in Ardath’s words, “the preferences and aversions that form a lead’s ‘gut reaction’ to your communication.” These include urgency (why you message is important to prospects, now), impact (what’s in it for the reader?), effort (how much energy is required to absorb the information—is it straightforward and easily digestible, or full of meaningless gobbledygook?), reputation (what’s known about your company, its image and brand?) and intent (do readers perceive that you are sincerely trying to help them, or merely doing a “hard sell”?).
The section continues with guidance on designing marketing stories, organizing content to move prospects through the buying process, scoring leads, and managing the interaction between marketing and sales, all illustrated with pertinent case studies.
The final section of the book—the “dessert,” if you will—is Meaningful Metrics, which provides a framework for what and how to measure results, for purposes of reporting and continual improvement.
The book is a bit repetitive in places, but it’s repetition with a purpose; this is important stuff! eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale
