Posts Tagged ‘google’

Why marketing is a lot like software development. By Peter Zaballos

March 14, 2018

Four reasons why marketing is as important as code for tech companies.

We’re living in the golden age of marketing right now. The mechanics of marketing and its impact on the business have changed dramatically in the past three years. Put another way, when I hire marketing talent, anything anyone has done more than 3-5 years ago I literally don’t care about or evaluate.

In the past few years I’ve seen marketing shift its focus from providing air cover to sales teams to now being the group within the company that’s determining the messaging and tactics that salespeople can best put into action. The data tells everyone what’s effective, impactful. Fewer opinions, more facts.

SW DEV STRIP

There are four reasons for this:

First. Marketing is a quant business. Everything is instrumented – you know who is responding to which offers, who is engaging with what content, what paths they take. Over time you can correlate engagement to value, and use data to find where and how prospects find you, and what signals the right time to present them with an offer or a call to action. This is a quant-jock’s delight. And data analysts are the new “must-have” role on a marketing team.

In today’s marketing you also have the advantage of short feedback loops which lend themselves naturally to an Agile approach to campaign management. Deploy a campaign, use data to validate assumptions, refine the campaign, repeat. My last marketing team collaborated with our DevOps agile coach to embrace the sprint/retrospective approach, and the team held daily stand-ups to ensure they were cohesive and focused on the most valuable activities.

Second. Google, whether we like it or not, is enforcing quality. What this means is that Google’s ability to interpret page intent is staggering. You genuinely need to be developing content paths that answer the questions your audience has, and legitimately guide them to a solution. If your bounce rate, or worse, your conversion rate is too high or too low, you’ll get penalized. It’s fundamentally obsoleted the marketing tactics that came before this.

It’s as structural a change as containers have been to DevOps. It’s creating a situation where I don’t care what you did three years ago – the search marketing tactics that worked back then no longer work today. Yes, we’re all still focused on the customer journey, but Google’s ability to assess whether that’s a productive journey you’ve created is what changed. This is a good thing. The companies with clear and differentiated positioning and value propositions, who create high quality content paths will win.

If you’re in marketing and you haven’t embraced this new world of content and data-driven optimization, you can still find a job, it just won’t be an interesting one. Just like in software, if you aren’t a full stack developer, if you aren’t learning new languages every year, you can still find a job, somewhere. It just won’t be an interesting one.

Third. Developing an effective marketing presence requires a system architecture. The category definition, positioning, awareness development, the demand generation – requires an architecture. Your category definition and positioning are that architecture, and inform how you will take your solution to your prospects and customers. Like with building software, you need this architecture to build the services that create the go-to-market “product” – the combination of campaigns and tactics you’ll put into motion.

One of my favorite marketing books is not about marketing at all, or rather, on the surface it’s not about marketing.

Building Microservices

The book is Building Microservices and while its purpose is to help the reader understand this new-ish phase of modern software development, it also describes how organizations can function efficiently. How “loosely coupled, trusted” relationships between organizations can produce resilient, agile performance.

Agility is important. There’s an abundance of data that modern marketing teams have access to today, and scrutinizing this data, and adapting campaigns and tactics are a critical success factor. Add to that just how much the mechanics of marketing have changed in the past three years (due to a large part on the above second point), and you have a landscape that looks a lot like…software development. Containers didn’t exist five years ago at scale. Serverless computing? Same thing.

 

Finally, the impact of marketing takes time to create. Just like any significant software development.  Assuming you have your category defined and your positioning solid, it will take 6-12 months to get scale from your demand gen. That means you’ll be iterating and iterating, refining, optimizing conversion rates, a lot.

It’s never been a better time to be in marketing. It’s never been a better time to be a CMO. You and your CTO will have a lot in common. And it’s likely your CTO will get jealous at some point, with more and more technology, and data, flowing into marketing, CMO budgets might just become bigger than CTO budgets.

 

 

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Posted in Business planning, digital marketing, machine-driven methods, SEO | Leave a Comment »

Why conversion rate optimization is the most important role in marketing. By Peter Zaballos

February 26, 2018

And it’s as important as your product

Why? because conversion rate optimization is the function that reveals the truth of your brand, your product, your business. Holistically.

It’s where you have to think deeply about the problem your customer or prospect has, and the information path they will follow to find a solution. But it doesn’t stop there.

Many marketing orgs look at “conversion” as the final step. But it’s really the beginning of the customer journey. It’s when all that carefully crafted terminology has to be aligned to what the customer experiences with the product you just sold them. The customer journey is about delivering value. And having a happy customer come back. And bring their friends and colleagues.

analytics-ss-1920

I was having a conversation with a senior exec at a successful cloud application provider last month, and they mentioned that they were having a hard time converting free trial users to paid subscribers. They were asking my opinion about what communications strategies I’d used in the past to boost these.

My first thought was, “you may be too late to do a whole lot about it.” If the content path that caused someone to find your solution – all those carefully crafted conversion junctures – did not line up with the first experience of the product, then you’re stuck.

No amount of in-app or email or chat communications will fix that. You might make the bad situation a bit better, but you really need to see this as a continuum of your brand promise. It’s what creates the words that draw a prospect in, and the experience they have with your product.

Like with almost everything today you get one shot at establishing trust and a relationship. Whether you’re a marketer or a product manager. And as a marketer you’re ultimately marketing a product experience. So there’s got to be tremendous coherence and alignment between what you market and what happens the very first time that former prospect becomes the user of your product.

Activation is different from retention. Retention looks past that first experience and presumes activation. Activation is converting the promise of a solution into…an actual solution to a problem. Retention is ensuring that the solution is durable, compelling, and lasting.

So if I were to pick one discipline that a marketing org should master it’s conversion rate optimization. Above any other. It’s the moment of truth for your business. It’s measurable. It quantifies your ability to deliver value to your customers.

And this is why it’s awesome to be a CMO and to be responsible for Product and Marketing. Because you are accountable to the business for ensuring the brand promise gets delivered. Everywhere. Every time.

CRO

 

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Posted in brand development, category creation, conversion rate optimization, digital marketing, fear of not succeeding, machine-driven methods | 2 Comments »

The vulnerability of a big idea

June 15, 2009

As Twitter approaches mainstream relevance, it’s also entering a period of strategic and operational vulnerability that startup companies with big ideas run into. 

By going mainstream it’s exposing the structural opportunity its founders saw years ago, but back then, only the founders and the investors were in on the secret.  There had to be a slide in the Series A deck that said  “Here’s the opportunity” and it wasn’t about building a small, derivative business.  It was about building a disruptive, billion dollar kind of company.

In Twitter’s case it’s the opportunity to redefine how people communicate, and shaping how the economics flow in and around this new communication.  It involves getting to scale, developing a third party “ecosystem” of other companies integrating with and depending on Twitter for their own success, and then monetizing all this in a compelling, huge way.  This is really hard, and the folks at Twitter are still struggling a bit with the exact business model that will do all this.

Eighteen months ago, only people in the echo chamber were exposed to the nature of the opportunity.  But today, with Twitter’s explosive growth and visibility, everyone can begin to comprehend the potential.  When Ashton Kutcher gets petulant about his million followers, when Dell trumpets that they’ve sold $3 million of products to their Twitter followers, the incumbent titans in the internet and advertising sectors, well they notice too, and they notice “threat” ahead of “opportunity.”

You saw this first with the Facebook redesign that provided a real-time status update feed a la Twitter.  A classic “fast follower” approach to someone else’s innovation. Facebook already owns a lot of people’s mindshare and time online, so the fact that they’re tracking Twitter tells you how significant the threat appears to them.  By the way, Facebook is also struggling with business model and opportunity vulnerability too, they just are further along the scale path.

How does Twitter keep eyeballs and session times growing if Facebook is just going to “fast follow” them, treating them like outsourced R&D?  This will be really hard, but let’s assume Twitter wins this round of the battle, gets to scale with a loyal and large audience for their new medium of tweets.  Do they jump out of the frying pan and into the fire?

What’s differentiated about tweets is that they flow in real-time, and finding out what’s interesting and relevant instantly has got to be worth something, and it’s so different from the problem Google solves.  Google crawls the web at a frequency measured at best in minutes, more frequently hours or days, so you could envision Twitter creating a new category Google can’t participate in. 

But what if “instant” isn’t in the end all that important.  The NY Times dug into this a bit, looking into  why Google isn’t Twitter.  And they observed that real-time search is hard and neither Twitter nor Google are currently architected to do this efficiently, or well. 

What became clear is that if you need anything other than instant, real-time search, Google can give you “close enough” search, and get closer and closer over time due to their scale.  We can all figure out who will reap the revenue rewards if all Twitter’s creates is another type of page Google can place ads on.

This kind of battle doesn’t result from incremental thinking, from safe bets.  Twitter’s vulnerabilities are proof of the significance of the idea, and what Twitter’s investors funded.  But it doesn’t mean it will have a happy ending. 

And there’s food for thought here for anyone running a startup.  Expect that you will become vulnerable to the incumbents just when you’re hitting your stride, just when people acknowledge your value and relevance.  The presence of that vulnerability is your ticket to the next round of the fight, validation that you’re headed in a worthy direction.

I dearly hope Twitter pulls this off.  I love to see the status quo up-ended, I love the mental image of apples spilling all through the marketplace as someone with a bold and compelling idea runs through, knocking the carts over along the way.

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Posted in Business planning, fundraising, meaningful failure, Strategy, Venture capital | Leave a Comment »

The next big thing

April 7, 2009

“What’s the next big thing?” I get asked this a lot, and a lot of VCs get asked the same question too about what’s the next big trend/device/web-service/… and that always makes for an awkward detour in whatever conversation preceded the question.  The truth is “I don’t know.” And it’s a great answer, because none of us do. 

The next big fill in the blank only becomes apparent in hindsight.  It’s not that I’m not smart nor anyone else who gets asked this question, it’s just that you can’t really tell.  Sure, I’ve got favorites (twitter is now at the top of my list, but I wouldn’t have said that a year ago). 

Remember when Google actually was in beta, in 2000?  It began appearing on people’s desktops where I worked at RealNetworks.  We thought it was cool and efficient, but there were ZERO people talking about it being the next big thing.

Last Thursday’s NY Times had an interesting article about the rising popularity of “netbook” computers, and how these are a big emerging phenomena enabled by a structural technology shift in the computing landscape: we no longer need Microsoft, and probably Intel.  The next big thing?  Maybe.  More on that in a second.  Let’s look at newspapers.

Clay Shirky did a phenomenal job explaining the collapse of the newspaper industry on his blog, pointing out it too results from a structural technology shift – the internet.  Clay references Elizabeth Eisenstein’s book, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, where she observes that during these technological transformations the only obvious effect in the moment is the destruction of the status quo.  What transcends the status quo takes time to emerge.  Clay sums this up well: “That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place.”

In the case of netbooks, we’re about to see a lot of old stuff get broken, but it’s not clear if netbooks are the transcendent replacement, or just one of the convulsions of the revolution.

But netbooks are significant because they’re exploiting the growing vulnerabilities of Intel (price, performance) and Microsoft (price, legacy support, integration) at the low end in the same way that Apple is (more elegantly) exploiting them at the high end.

Netbooks have traction because they focus on where people spend the majority of their computing time: web-based documents and services, and the consumption of digital media.  That’s it. 

Whether or not someone buys one, netbooks educate the average citizen that GoogleDocs and a browser are all you need, and that MS Office is both irrelevant and overpriced.  My belief is the impact of netbooks will not be felt so much in unit volumes, but as catalysts speeding the unraveling the Office franchise. 

But wait, there’s more.  How much distance will separate the Office franchise “unraveling” from prying MS’s grip off the operating system?  Apple can’t do it, and is smart enough to steer clear of this outcome.  Will Android and Linux be good enough at the low end?

We’ve already seen the indifference that’s greeted Windows7, and the reluctance to even adopt Vista, with people scrambling to stick with XP.  My family did exactly this in February when our five year-old XP home computer died, and we scrambled to find someone who could sell us a new XP machine (we succeeded).  It was an intelligence test.  XP or Vista…hmmm.

Maybe this reveals a nuance to Clay’s “revolution” observation.  Perhaps the path to destruction takes you through the terrain of irrelevance.  What netbooks show us is how irrelevant the once mighty Microsoft and Intel platforms are to the needs of people today.  They may be lucrative businesses but they just no longer point to the future like they used to.  They’ve become what’s broken in the revolution. 

It’ll be exciting to see the new stuff that’s put in place.  I’ll be sure to blog about it, after we all see what it is.

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Posted in Business planning, Failure, meaningful failure, Success | 1 Comment »

Google’s iPhone audio search – Newton redux?

March 11, 2009

Up in the attic of our home I have a small “Apple” museum, where I still keep the MacPlus I bought in 1987, the MacII si my wife and I bought in 1992, and most importantly, the Newton MessagePad 110 I bought in 1994.  For years and years, these just took up space, but this year they’ve come back to mind in interesting ways.

On the occasion of the Macintosh’s 25th anniversary, I brought the MacPlus downstairs and set it up.  I had splurged when I bought it, and got the external SCSI floppy drive.  The expression on my 14 year-old’s face was priceless when I turned it on, and he looked at that small screen and said “how did you ever get anything done on this thing?”.  When I explained there was no hard drive, and showed him the single floppy that contained Microsoft Excel, he looked at me as if I’d told him I did my homework as a kid on the back of a shovel with a piece of charcoal (as Abe Lincoln supposedly did).

But the Newton came to mind last weekend, when we were out at a restaurant with our kids along with three of my 15 year-old daughter’s friends.  Nine of us at a table in a bustling restaurant.  Boredom began to take over with the boys (outnumbered), so my 14 year-old son grabbed my iPhone, and downloaded the new Google app.  He discovered it contained “voice based search”, where you could speak a phrase into the phone, and Google would do the speech-to-text conversion, and provide search results.

Before long, this became quite a game.  The phone was passed around the table, and hilarity ensued when someone spoke one phrase, and Google came back with another.  Here are some examples I wrote down:

  • “Steyr A-U-G” (this is an Airsoft BB gun) = “cast iron tub”
  • “Martini, shaken not stirred” = “mikey ticketmaster”
  • “And if you need advice in PawPaw Michigan, there’s only one place to go” = “the wandering sons of anarchy, episode 13, full stream”

We thought that last one, ‘The wandering sons of anarchy” would make a great name for a band.  In defense of Google, the background noise in the restaurant probably didn’t help things.

But then I thought, I’d done the same thing in 1994 with my Newton.  We’d sit around in restaurants and pass it around, writing stuff on the screen and seeing what it came back with.  The tough part for Apple was that so were Gary Trudeau and Matt Groening.  The Newton was just ridiculed in Doonesbury and The Simpsons as a result, which was good sport, but unfortunate. 

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From Doonesbury http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/

All the rest of what made the Newton incredibly revolutionary got swept aside, and to a large degree pronounced a premature death sentence on the product line, and the whole category until Palm, and now the iPhone.

So, where are the comics ridiculing Google’s voice search for the iPhone?  A search on the following word salad “google audio search mistakes iphone” yielded a single reference to an article mocking its performance.  Revealing it not surprisingly struggles with accents, and illustrates how it does with various British/scotch/welsh accents speaking the word “iPhone.”  But then again, haven’t the British always been ahead of us in terms of humor?

It is notably ironic that it’s on another Apple handheld device that the limits of the human/machine interface are laid so bare.

But what has happened since 1994.  Have we all gotten more accepting of technology shortcomings?  Have we been just accepted being perpetual beta testers? 

Or are we just intimidated/enchanted with whatever it is that Google (or Apple for that matter) present to us? 

What do you think?

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Posted in Failure, Intellectual curiosity, meaningful failure, Success | 4 Comments »