Lecture 15: Product Marketing

Duke ECE 490L: How to Start New Ventures in Electrical and Computer Engineering

Poornima Vijayashankerpoornima@femgineer.com

Jeff Glass jeff.glass@duke.edu

Akshay Rautar118@duke.edu

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Review

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• Breaking down features into stories

• Prioritizing product development

• Process for shipping consistently

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Idea Summary

Review Session:Wednesday October 23, 2013

DUHatch

Sign up for a session here!

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Agenda

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• Scrapping Marketing

• SEO

• e-mail

• Social Media

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Case Study #1: Food on the Table

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• Creates weekly meal plans and grocery lists, and hooks into grocery stores to find best deals for ingredients

• Began with a single customer!• Interviewed customers are local super markets.• Signed up 1st customer and dropped off groceries weekly.

• Collected $9.95 on each visit!

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Not enough to build a product...

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We also need to build awareness amongst early adopters.

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Market Share v. Market Adoption

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We need scalable strategies.

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Strategies that will have a multiplying effect.

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Need strategies that will still work even as you grow.

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To Build Awareness

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• Marketing with a shoestring budget• Need to attract early adopters• Long term strategy

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Too many channels, too little time.

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Customers Channel

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Comes back to mental models.

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Experiment & measure to figure out best channel.

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Include investigation of channels in your customer interview.

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Channels will change!

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Social

e-mailSearch

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Content marketing.

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Storytelling.

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Storytelling

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• Relatable• Capture values• Repeatable• Solve a problem or Create an opportunity

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Capturing user’s experience.

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Landing PageOR

Blog Post

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• Why? Makes your financial life easier.• How? Putting all your financial information in one place.• What? Aggregating accounts, creating budgets, automatically sending alerts, capturing investments, and tracking loans.

Case Study #2: Mint.com

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Case Study #3: Evernote

Why?

How?

What?

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Once we’ve told the story we need to get technical.

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Social

e-mailSearch

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1. SEO

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Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine's "natural" or un-paid ("organic") search results. In general, the earlier (or higher ranked on the search results page), and more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine's users. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, video search, academic search, news search and industry-specific vertical search engines.

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Location. Location. Location.

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SEO is powerful.

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SEO Will Only Work If...

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• You are patient, it is a long term strategy.• You’re customers are searching for your product or services.

• You adhere to ALL the following strategies.

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SEO Has a Longer Shelf Life

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• Tweet: minutes maybe hours.• Email: 7 days max!• AdWords: turn it off and you’re history.

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Google Wants to be TOP Search Engine

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• It needs to provide clean content• Relevant• Timely• Accessible• Fast

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Make a crawler your BFF!

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Crawlers LOVE

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• Links• Clear site structure• Clear navigation (internal links to webpages)• HTML & CSS (JavaScript & AJAX is harder)• Categories• Short URLs

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DINGS

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• Keyword stuffing• Duplicate content

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Can only crawl public sites, no logins!

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Check if you’ve been indexed.

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How to Become Crawl Worthy

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• Optimize headlines and titles.• Title Tag <head>

<title>Example Title</title> </head>  

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How to Become Crawl Worthy Continued

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• URL• Good URL Structure: http://www.dmoz.org/Games/Video_Games/History/• Bad URL Structure: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0468569/

• Images are indexed too! Provide clear image tags and names.• <img src="http://www.example.com/example.png" alt="Keyword">

• Link traffic: guest blog posts and press pieces.

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Blogger’s block.

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Easy Methods to Create Content

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• Be observant• Turn conversations into posts.• Showcase: customers (case studies) and experts (interviews).

• Start linking to other sites! (People check their referral traffic sources.)

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Tools

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• OpenSite Explorer: search engine for links• Who is currently linking to you• Search for broken links• Who is linking to competitors

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Tools Continued

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• Google Keyword Tool• Search volume• Competition• Long tail keywords

• Google Analytics • track links• referral traffic• conversions• setup goals

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Improve Search Rankings

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• Do an SEO Audit of entire site• Long tail search terms• Consider location - submit to local directories

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Social

e-mailSearch

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Why We Think E-mail Sucks

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• Inbox clutter• Low open rate and/or high bounce rate• Lists & quality of content affect results

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Truth

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• The most targeted communication channel• $2.1B being spent on e-mail marketing• Everything matters in email: delivery timing, subject, sender, and message

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Still don’t believe me?

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Building Up Your List

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• Opt-in• Remind them that they opted in!• Segment your list e.g. paid v. non-paid, prospects v. customer• Frequently opened• Location• Characteristics

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Types of E-mails

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• Drip Campaign aka auto-responders, weekly emails• Sales• Newsletter

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Goals of a Drip Campaign

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• Provide valuable info: e.g. sign up workflow, share your expertise, countdown to an event

• Keep customers engaged and stay relevant!• Not to spam• Consistent frequency: weekly or monthly

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Create list.Automatically add or pull together contacts.

Create stages and frequency.

Week 1.Week 2.

Schedule it out.

Use an e-mail marketing tool.

Review stats.

Open rate.Bounce.

Links clicked on.

Figure out your

message.Value of product.

Drip Campaign Process

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Drip Campaign: 2 Week Trial

1. How to get setup.

First day.

4. Reiterate value proposition.Week 2.

3. Additionalresources e.g.customer support.Day 5.

2. Feature benefits to business.

Day 2 or 3.

5. Close

14th day.

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More personalized the message the better!

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Did they just sign up?

Follow up!

Keep it short.

Action Item! Compelling subject line.

Did they buy something?

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Why are we doing all of this again?

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Attract early adopters!

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Reuse content!

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Common Re-uses

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• Snippet of blog post in an e-mail• E-mail can also become a blog post• Tweet out blog post periodically

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Social

e-mailSearch

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Your audience must be social.

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Comes back to mental models.

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Social

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• User’s persona• User’s behavior• Awareness v. Intent (search)

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Need to build an audience.

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Building Up Followers

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• Follow a diverse set• Follow what they share• Follow their followers• Engage in conversations• Take conversations offline

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Understand audience.

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Test if you can sell to audience.

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Case Study #4: Femgineer

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• Content Marketing• Persona of Twitter Followers• Value Add + Sales

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Channel’s effectiveness comes down to analytics.

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May uncover more channels.

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KEY OBJECTIVE(S) AGENDA

RESOURCESDELIVERABLE

EXERCISE

Understand how to build a feature within the context of a business goal, and break it down into stories.

10 minutes

1.Choose a business goal from last week’s product roadmap exercise.

2.Pick one feature.3.Break the feature down into stories.4.Highlight scope creep!

Stories for one feature. Sprint.ly

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Review

Duke ECE 490L

• Scrapping Marketing

• SEO

• e-mail

• Social Media

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