Startup Marketing: The Land of Carnies and Rubes

As a marketer at a startup, I am always looking for ways to get our product in front of potential customers in a way that is repeatable, not annoying, scalable, and affordable. Along the way I’ve tried just about every kind of advertising, lead generation program, lead guarantee whitepaper syndication, webinar…..the list goes on. Because of that, I’ve found several insanely outdated, arcane practices that are just accepted by marketers. I hate that.

So this list includes things that need to die in startup marketing:

1. Lead Guarantee Programs That Refuse To Screen Leads Based On Qualifying Questions – Allow me to explain. I’ve done several lead guarantee programs with large technology vendors, and they typically will syndicate a whitepaper across their network, require a registration form, and will then give me the info from the registration forms. Many of them will allow us to add a qualifying question (in our case: “Do You Use Google Apps at Your Company?”). But rather than just paying for those leads that answer in the affirmative (which makes them qualified), some vendors make you pay regardless of the answer. They’re basically making you pay for leads that – by definition – are not what you want.This doesn’t apply to all lead generation vendors, as I’ve worked with a few that will only count those leads that pass qualification criteria. Just recently a large vendor pitched me on a program to get our whitepaper in front of our target market and the price was decent. I said “I only pay for the leads that answer yes to my qualification question.” There was a long pause on the line and I was told this is impossible. Okay. That’s fine. We can’t work together.
2. Overused Buzzwords and Meaningless Terms – “The leading provider of”, “a one-stop-shop for”, “disruptive PAAS as a service”, the list goes on. You’re not being paid by the word, and no one has ever bought a startup’s product based on the verbosity of its website.
3. Ridiculous Costs At trade shows – The cost of renting a chair at a major tradeshow? $150. The cost of buying that same chair? $100. It’s amazing how we just expect to be extorted at trade shows when we’ve already paid $10K to buy a booth. When renting a piece of equipment for 2 days costs more than buying, we have to ask why. This system is broken.
4. Unacceptable Minimums – This might come off as a whine, but as a startup, you have to account for every marketing dollar spent. Because of that, it’s nearly impossible to justify a gigantic spend the first time working with a vendor. Back to the lead guarantee example: jumping into a $30,000 program to deliver qualified leads just isn’t doable. And when I ask to do a $1,000 test spend, I’m told it isn’t worth the vendor’s time. To me, that’s a good way for a vendor to say they don’t stand behind their product. If you won’t do a small program where the program’s success would result in a large spend, you have no confidence that you can deliver what you’re selling.
5. The Kick-Back Threshold - My hand is shaking trying to write this. A while back I worked with a company that wanted to host our whitepapers, and deliver us 100 leads that sign up and read our whitepaper. Fine. As part of the contract, we specified that leads have to answer affirmatively on a qualifying question, and they had to be from companies with 500 or more employees. Sounds like a plan.When they started sending me a weekly spreadsheet with those that have signed up and read our stuff, I noticed something: 99% of the leads were garbage. A simple Google search showed that these leads were from either very small companies, companies that didn’t exist, or “ABC123″. Every week I’d send the garbage back, and the vendor was getting angry at me! They told me “Normally we have a 10% kick back threshold but we value your business so we will take these out.”

   A kickback threshold is the vendors way of saying “We know that at least 10% of the leads we send you are garbage. That’s not in your contract. In fact, we told you we’d only charge you for qualified leads. But because you aren’t blindly accepting these obviously worthless leads, I wanted to let you know that everyone else automatically assumes that 10% will be garbage. We’re really annoyed that you’re calling us on our bullshit, and just want you to know that you’re being a real pain in the ass by asking for what you paid for and not wanting to pay for junk.”

   To say I was steaming mad would be an understatement. It’s amazing to me that there are so many built-in processes to rip people off, and they’re not even questioned!

Okay, rant over. Feel free to add your own.

Just found this on Hacker News and it’s definitely worth sharing. In this video, Rand Fishkin from SEOMoz.org talks about how startups can get traction via inbound marketing.

In the presentation, Fishkin describes the difference between interruption marketing (when marketers distract you from what you want to do in order to sell you stuff) and inbound marketing (where marketers give you the information you need when you’re looking for it).

Here’s the slideshow:

At my current company, we do a lot of things to try to bring leads into the top of the funnel. We spend a lot of time on the inbound side, creating content that goes after search traffic. We do a few whitepaper campaigns with vendors, all with specific criteria (companies with over 500 employees, etc). Like just about any other company out there, we also run AdWords and facebook ads.

And then there’s banner ads. One of these things is not like the others.

I’ve never been a big fan of banner ads for a number of reasons, most dealing with trust.

When you do a banner campaign, you have to blindly trust that the vendor is actually showing your ads. Where you’re paying for clicks on an AdWords campaign, banner campaigns are based on impressions: the number of times the ads are shown.

And who is to say that your ads are being shown?

The inspiration for this post is an email I received this morning from a vendor that is making my blood boil. Though I’d like nothing more than to write the name of the company, I’ve decided to wait it out. Here’s what happened.

The Campaign Begins

We wanted to do a trial campaign with a nationally-known company with several web sites that hit our target market effectively: C-Level IT Execs in large companies using Google Apps.

We decided on a campaign that was half whitepaper leads, half banner ads. It took us a bit to get our ads together, and in the meantime we started running the whitepaper program.

Not surprisingly, the leads from our whitepaper program were highly qualified. I’d say that 70% of the leads we received were legit (when you subtract people using fake email addresses, fake company names, etc.). That’s not bad. And each time I’d send back a garbage lead, the company would give us another credit to replace the bad lead. So far so good.

When we sent over our banner ads and started the campaign, I immediately started seeing an uptick in registrations for a trial of our app. As we always do, we created a unique landing page for the ad campaign. This way, the only way someone can arrive at that landing page is by clicking the ad (we don’t link the page anywhere else on the site). Additionally, the form is unique to the campaign.

The only problem is that every signup we saw on that landing page was garbage. Literally 100% of signups were junk. That was a red flag. If the only people that came to this page were doing so after clicking a banner ad, then what percentage of our banner impressions were being showed to spam bots? 100%?

After a few days of running the banner ads, I asked the vendor to both pause our ads and give us metrics on our campaign performance. I also sent them the list of leads that had signed up on our site from the ad campaign (showing the garbage we received).

After a couple of weeks, the answer I got: “Nothing is wrong. Your ads were shown on our site, and we recommend that you add a captcha to your form. We use a 3rd party ad server, and they have confirmed that your ads were shown correctly.”

Rather than giving information on why 100% of the traffic coming to our site from the ad was spam, they instead give us tips on how to stop their spam traffic from signing up on our site? It’s the equivalent of saying “We’re going to show your ad to a bunch of spam bots. If you don’t want them to sign up, here’s how you can make it more difficult to fill out your form. We’re still going to waste your impressions on spam bots rather than people, but here’s how you can remedy that pesky junk signup problem.”

The Resolution

After a call on Friday where we asked for a full credit for what we paid on questionable impressions to be applied to new whitepaper leads, I received an email this morning. My sales rep told me that his boss agreed to a half credit, as our ads were served properly, and were seen by the right audience.

Again, my knee-jerk reaction is to bash the company, but that’s not for me. Instead, I want to shine a light on the bigger picture: the fact that there’s no accountability and no proof when it comes to banner ads. It’s all about trust, and there’s no transparency whatsoever.

Anyone can throw together a spreadsheet that shows xx,xxx impressions and xxx clicks, but how can you rely on those numbers?

There’s not much that I can do at this point other than accepting the offer and never doing business with the company again. While it would have been ridiculously easy for the company to give us a credit, knowing that we would continue working with them moving forward, they’ve decided to go the other way. It’s a good lesson to learn early.

After reading that Google has made it easier to use functions within Google Spreadsheets, I thought I’d try out some of the functions that may make my life easier. The first one I saw was GoogleLookup.

From the GoogleLookup help page:

Using the Web, the GoogleLookup function attempts to find the values for straightforward facts about specific things. Keep in mind that while the GoogleLookup function knows quite a bit, it doesn’t know everything. Although not all of the formulas you try will work, we encourage you to experiment.

Hmmm. Interesting.

Let’s say I want to find companies that have over 500 employees out of a list. For instance, here’s a random sample of company names from a list:

Now let’s say I want to get the number of employees from each of these companies. Using the GoogleLookup function, I can find the number of employees each of these companies has*

The function:

To use the GoogleLookup function, enter the following formula in the desired spreadsheet cell:

Syntax: =GoogleLookup(“entity”; “attribute”) where “entity” represents the name of the entity that you want to access, like Kuala Lumpur, Audrey Hepburn, or oxygen, and “attribute” is the type of information that you want to retrieve.

Some examples:

Here are some of the types of entities you can access using GoogleLookup, and a few popular attribute names (some entities won’t have all these attributes, and some will have more, so feel free to experiment):

• Countries and Territories (like “Burkina Faso”): population, capital, largest city, gdp
• U.S. States (like “Tennessee”): area, governor, nickname, flower
• Rivers (like “Amazon River”): origin, length
• Cities and Towns (like “Chicago”): state, mayor, elevation

So in this case, we’d want our formula to be something like: =GoogleLookup(“Company”;”employees”). Easy. And in this case, we want to use a formula to grab the contents of the cell and add “employees” as well:

In addition, when the list has loaded, Google Spreadsheets will show you the source of the information along with other sources:

Why is this a big deal?

If you’re in a company that has strict prospecting criteria, this can really save some time. For instance, when it comes to prospecting, I’m interested in identifying companies using Google Apps that have over 500 employees. While identifying whether a company is using Google Apps is much more manual, automating the company size fetching is a huge time saver.

Additionally, I run stats each week on leads that have signed up for a trial of our product, and want to see the size of their company as well. You can’t really trust user input from a form, and if you can remove one field, that’s excellent.

Data Quality

Looking quickly at one company, it looks like the data sources are pretty good. For instance:

Though the first link is dead, the second and third are live….if a little bit dated. So for my purpose the quality is enough, as I don’t really need something granular.

Summary

If you’re looking to automate finding company size while prospecting, Google Spreadsheets can really save you some time.

* at least what Google think they have.

Today I’m proud and excited to announce the launch of the Secure Cloud Bundle, the first bundle of products from the Google Apps Marketplace. This project has been my baby for the last 2 months, and it feels good to finally put it out there.

We (CloudLock) teamed up with Backupify and LTech to offer three top Google Apps Marketplace apps together for one price, and at a big discount. Buying each separately would be $27 per Google Apps user per year, but when purchased together in the bundle, the price is only $9 per Google Apps user per year.

Why A Bundle?

1. Real Estate – Since we are a company that sells a product that is only relevant to Google Apps customers, we’re somewhat limited as to where we can market to potential leads.

One venue is the Google Apps Marketplace, which is a great source of highly qualified leads. The issue here is that we have no control over whether we’re featured on the home page, and we don’t control Google’s search algorithm. Though we’re very highly rated within the security category, there’s not much more we can do there to promote ourselves more.

Aside from the Marketplace, we have our own site(s) which are completely under our control. And adding another site for the Secure Cloud Bundle gives all 3 companies yet another customer acquisition source. It’s another door to get interested people in our (virtual) door.

2. Promotion – This one is a no brainer. When you have three companies working together to promote something, you have three blogs, three twitter accounts, three…..you get it. You have three times the resources to promote the same initiative.

3. Coverage - Getting three companies together to pull off a project like this is getting us coverage, and that’s not something you can get every day as a startup. Unless you’re Google or Facebook, there’s a good chance that the media doesn’t care about the new feature you’ve added to your product. You really have to do something big to get good coverage, and this fit the bill.

4. Revenue - An important part of any business, we want to make money. And offering a deal like this makes it easier to justify the spend if you’re in a small company that is strapped for cash. Even before we “officially” launched the bundle, a handful of companies found the site and bought the bundle.

And now for an image representing the bundle:

What’s In The Bundle

From the press release:

The Secure Cloud Bundle includes the following:

• CloudLock - enterprise-class data protection, access controls and security for any organization looking to retain control of their data while gaining the collaboration and cost-savings benefits of the cloud
• Backupify – secure, automatic daily backups for Google Docs. Backupify provides the peace of mind IT administrators need knowing their data will always be available
• LTech – advanced IT management and end-user capabilities including macros, user templates and email monitoring

My latest column for Venture Fizz is now live. This month I talked with Springpad CEO Jeff Janer in First Look: Springpad.

Just about everyone has an idea that they’d love to turn into a startup. But how do you find the right co-founder(s) to get started?

Recently two new sites have launched (or have launched betas) with exactly that problem in mind.

The first one is called fowndr, which is currently in invite-only beta. From their site:

Fowndr brings together founders, co-founders and investors from all over the world to share ideas, thoughts, link, get feedback and even share files.

Once you become a part of the network you can start building relationships with like-minded entrepreneurs, form private networks, post comments, and share files with the wider network.

There’s a lively conversation thread on Hacker News about fownder, where commenters are debating the choice of the site’s name, the definition of a “founder”, and the development of cliques in the startup community.

The second is called StartupCrave, which is currently open for registration for early adopters. I spoke with StartupCrave’s founder, Dan Cote to see what his site is all about.

At its core, StartupCrave is a place for people to find co-founders, employees, funding, etc. to start an internet business. Dan Cote describes the site as “specifically focused on internet entrepreneurs that know they need someone else to get going.”

The Marketing Challenge

As is the case with any site that depends on a quantity of users and content to provide value, both fowndr and startupcrave face the “chicken and egg” problem. Since there are very few users to start with, there’s little value. Since there’s little value, there’s little incentive to sign up.

Fowndr and StartupCrave have taken different approaches to try to solve the chicken and egg problem and boost registration.

Fowndr has gone with the “request invite” method of pre-launch demand generation. They’ve decided to target sites like Hacker News and Reddit’s /startups subreddit to create initial demand.

StartupCrave instead is offering free registration for its (eventual) paid membership services:

Those that sign up for StartupCrave during the beta become “Pro-level members for life”.

StartupCrave was created to solve the problem Cote faced: as a marketing guy, he had plenty of startup ideas, but lacked the technical background to make those ideas happen. He met StartupCrave’s co-founder a year ago while working on another idea, and decided to create a site that helps would-be entrepreneurs share ideas and find a complimentary business partner.

If you came here hoping to learn something today, I apologize. This post is much more of a question than answer.

Testimonials, testimonials, testimonials. If you listed to conventional marketing wisdom, they’re good as gold. Testimonials:

• Establish credibility from a third party source
• Show the breadth of paying customers using your app
• Give prospects a relatable reference (“they have a hospital as a customer. I work for a hospital. This might work for me.”)

We spend a lot of time doing case studies, and I really am a convert. I used to have a jaded opinion, thinking that testimonials for a B2B company were the equivalent of the fake testimonials in the back of comic books in ads:

But, apparently they do work. So I’m trying an experiment: I’m adding testimonials at the bottom of my outgoing emails. Here’s what it looks like now:

So what do you think? Too much? Does it make me look like a snake oil salesman? Or Does it add legitimacy?

My monthly column for VentureFizz is now available. This week I talked with Muthu Arumugam, CEO and Founder of Cambridge-based mtiks, a company offering a platform for mobile app developers that helps curb piracy and converts users of pirated apps to paid customers.

I spend a lot of time trying to figure out the best ways to reach the largest number of qualified leads possible in an automated, easy-to-replicate method. But today I got something in the mail that really impressed and surprised me.

Coming back into the office from lunch I saw this envelope:

Definitely handwritten, and from an address unfamiliar to me. Of course, I open it, and here’s what was inside:

If you can’t see what it says, allow me:

Nathan, you’re invited

www.whatisthisfor.com/NathanBurke

This was written on a napkin with a logo for “Crescent Bluffs Hotel & Resort” along with a hotel door key card. You’ve got my attention.

Seconds later, I’m at the web site, which looks an awful lot like a real hotel’s web site. It’s a flash based site that asks you to join someone in the hotel’s restaurant. It then asks what you’d like to eat/drink before revealing to you that it’s not actually something from a hotel after all. Instead, it’s from an interactive marketing agency called VLG.

They then ask if you’d like to do a call to find out more about the agency’s offerings. Very, very clever.

I didn’t fill out the form to do a call, but minutes later I received a phone call and email asking to set up a call. Very aggressive. I love it.

Doing a call with them on Thursday.