Press On : A Work In Progress

The antivirus market is a very congested space, and getting your product recognized amongst all the noise is truly a marketing challenge.  In this battle, the vendors must often displace an embedded product, usually one that comes pre-installed with the computer.  AV vendors often find themselves fighting against powerful, entrenched companies such as Norton and McAfee, companies with multi-million dollar budgets.

In the battle for desktop space, these vendors have to be creative and willing to take chances to out flank the massive marketing budgets of their competitors.  One of the more interesting moves I've seen is Sunbelt Software's use of Twitter.  Today only (March 2nd) you can take advantage of their promotion and receive a free license to the new product, just click here.

Not only does this allow them to gain desktop share, but it also generates a list of customers and performs some serious web marketing.  Each Tweet increases web placement and the likely hood of the product being found, adds another follower to their fan base, and ultimately educates the market.

The overall cost of the promotion is based on the percentage of that base that WOULD have converted (not all free adopters would buy remember).  The return is desktop space and installs for a subscription product, SEO and a whole lot of free press.

Update on Tuesday, March 2, 2010 at 3:23PM by Casey S. Potenzone

If you are interested in seeing how well the promotion worked, and how many people took advantage, check out this real-time twitter search result.

This year I once again served as a judge for the SIIA CODiE awards, and I'm proud to say that all my favorites have made it to the finals!!!  For the first time I was given the opportunity to judge the "Best Solution by an Emerging Company" category, and I was truly impressed.  I also judged the "Best DRM Solution" and was able to reconnect with several friends from my previous space.

Before I give you a quick highlight, some advice for ANY software company competing in an awards: YOU HAVE SALES PEOPLE, USE THEM.  When you have a huge opportunity, who do you send?  This is who you should send to do your demos.  If you want to bore the judge to death, put your engineer and product managers together and rattle off a few thousand features.

At the end of the day, the process is really no different then a sales call.  Put your best sellers in front of the judges, not necessarily your smartest.  

Click to read more ...

I'm in the process of organizing and scrubbing my personal contact lists.  So far I've imported databases from Outlook, GMail, Facebook, Linked-In and a variety of other contact lists that I have connections to.  This lists includes people from just about every industry and professional level.  A brief sampling includes the likes of Michael Milken, the CIO of the FBI, various tech CEOs and CTOs, a mishmash of bankers, VCs, programmers, etc. etc. (and of course friends, I have at least a few of those).

Next, I cross referenced everything through Linked-in and updated the job profiles data.  After cleaning all the data I pulled out a subset of 5,000 people who I could actually identify from name, title or notation.   Of these 5,000 people, 327 of them are currently unemployed.  

This little exercise allowed me to determine that my personal network has an unemployment rate of nearly 6.5%, that's a full 3.5 points better than the US unemployment rate (below, courtesy of Google).  With the heavy focus I've had on startup companies in my career I honestly expected that to be MUCH higher... But then again, a bunch of them have sales and marketing in their blood, so maybe there's some "smoke and mirrors" being called into play.

Although you'd have to be basically be living in an Internet hole to be in this business and not aware of the problems MySpace has been suffering recently, their traffic and user base are clearly one to be taken seriously.  An analysis recently published by Venture Beat, available here, highlights the traffic in percentages of US Internet population.  With the US community numbering 205M, Facebook was able to capture 54% and MySpace 27%.

What I found to be truly interesting in this peace is the stickiness of the user base, proving that any organization invested in an online marketing campaign must invest in managing their social presence in order to be successful.

It also goes to the point that everyone we work with, in this little Internet world, is on the social sites, checking out our history, friends, postings, pictures, etc.  We must take steps to ensure our online reputations are the ones we want people reading and knowing.

There are any number of theories out there on how to dress a page, which elements to chose, the flow and process, etc., etc. to convert shoppers into customers.  Of course there are proven methods that work and those that don't.  Beyond the obvious and the best practices, the art of converting shoppers to customers is just that, an art.

And this art is one that Avangate does so well.  Not only does the team behind the scenes at Avangate have years of experience dialing up the conversion percentages, but we also have the tools to do it.

If you want to learn more about how the team drove IObit's revenues through these practices, and learn how you too can accomplish this goal, check out the latest case study here.

Turn shoppers into customers and win big smiles ;)

Recently I've been working with some big names in software on unique opportunities and out-of-the-box ideas that work within our existing infrastructures and capabilities.  In other words,, how can we take what we have and realize its maximum potential through additional productization... or said in plain English: do more with what we've got.

These meetings and projects are always fun.  We've all invested time, in many cases, years on these products / platforms / partnerships.  We know the space, and some brilliant ideas and left field thoughts are all being thrown against the wall.

Here's one that seems obvious, become a software affiliate and run your own ads to fill your ad inventory.  It doesn't matter if you sell used Beanie Babies, write a blog on fiber optic splicing or rant against the world.  One sale can make you $25.  What other ads offer that upside on the action conversion?

Here's how- Signup for Avangate's affiliate program by clicking this link.  Register for the top promotions, create little banner ads for the products or use the ones the affiliates provide, and put "Buy Now" links in your ad space.

Excess inventory put to good use.

If you're speaking to the press, pitching analysts or up for an award you've either got a killer product, spent money on PR, or both.  Chances are you have a very talented sales staff who is used to giving 5 minute pitches and responding to tough questions about your product.

USE THEM.  You have professionals dedicated to doing pitches on your payroll.  This doesn't mean you shouldn't have your product managers, development leads or other execs on the line.  Whom ever you depend on to close your big deals should be leading the pitch.  

It is after all a pitch.