Notes for sales managers in a web-studio or “Say a word about a poor marketer”

Preface:

Everything stated below is not the only correct point of view, but only some sort of crib for the author, who needed to conduct a series of seminars for the employees of the sales department in a software development company. Also, this article may be useful for managers of small outsourcing companies to which customers come with similar requests.

Many of these questions seem so obvious that they are rarely voiced by specialists who are the link between the company and the future client, but in practice these specialists often do not suspect that even at the stage of signing the contract it is possible to shield the future project from a host of problems.

GENERAL IDEA:

Increasingly, customers, coming to the company to develop any products or services, want to get not just a turnkey product, but also prepare everything for the subsequent marketing promotion of their offspring (Internet marketing: SEO, SMM, Email Marketing, etc. )
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However, very often the customer himself does not know or misunderstands what tasks he will have to solve later. And that they need to be solved together with marketers in order to achieve the promotion of their product or service.

Accordingly, the initial task of the seller (Sales Manager) in this situation will be to talk about the methods and tools of promotion. But it is worth pointing out that in order to make an informed choice of one or another method or a whole complex of measures, it is necessary to conduct a series of audits. These will be audits of the technical part of the project, the market of existing proposals and competition. After that, you can more consciously choose technology for the future product.

Quite often there are situations when the selected stack of technologies is suitable for the implementation of a business idea, but it is absolutely not suitable for its further promotion. A good example would be an online store written in Flash. Or the client comes for support and “dopilivaniem” a very old project. This is often easier to rewrite than to edit. Yes, and in terms of marketing is extremely difficult to implement support. At the same time, such projects are often very inert and any change in them affects the lowest levels of the architecture and can respond in the most unexpected place.

In this case, the success of any marketing task depends on the flexibility of technology. And the complexity / impossibility of marketing support for a “dinosaur” project can be one of the bricks that will help build the foundation for product development from scratch, which in turn is good for developers (it takes away the need to dig hundreds of thousands of lines of someone else’s outdated code with funny comments) .

At this stage it is better to “outbid than undercount”. If you initially outline the range of marketing tools that will form requirements for the project, it is much easier to take into account the requirements during the development process than to “finish” the finished product (deliver crutches and listen to hundreds of complaints about the dramatic increase in time and human resources costs).

WHAT A SELLER CAN OFFER TO A CUSTOMER:

All Internet marketing services by and large can be divided and classified according to the stages at which the project is located.

STAGE 1: Pre-release preparations and the launch stage of the Web product

• Market analysis: research on search engines, an approximate assessment of the target audience (CA), competition, traffic volumes in the subject area and trends;

On the side of the marketing department, you can implement the selection of the semantic core and conduct an indicative analysis of competitor traffic, on the basis of which it will be possible to judge the estimated cost and difficulty of promotion in this product.

• design of interfaces for landing pages, taking into account usability;

In order to get positive results in any commercial project, it is not enough just to bring traffic to a resource. In this case, conversion indicators (transactions, subscriptions, downloads) can serve as qualitative indicators. And in order for the user not only to read the information, but to make an action on the site (subscribed, ordered, bought), it is necessary to implement quality landing pages for traffic.

• making recommendations for SEO for implementation on the site during the development process;

The best option. The work on the internal optimization of the site according to the requirements of search engines is carried out in parallel with the development, therefore, after the release of the project, it is not necessary to make major changes to the architecture and logic of the product.

2 STAGE: Work with already launched product / service

• Audit of an existing site and making recommendations for internal optimization;

It will identify problem areas in the site architecture, non-compliance with the requirements of search engines and make recommendations for their elimination.

• Preparing the site for promotion in search engines (SEO);

A set of measures taken on the internal optimization of the site in accordance with the recommendations based on the requirements of search engines. Necessary in order to increase the visibility of the site in search engines, and, consequently, traffic to the site.

• contextual advertising (PPC)

Promoting a finished web product is easiest with contextual advertising. Even without a serious information base, it will work. In context advertising everything is transparent - the client pays a specific amount for a specific user. The user comes and does what they want from him or not.

If the project is a monster of the Mesozoic era, contextual advertising can be used without making changes on the site itself. It is enough to make some good adaptive static Landing Pages (landing pages) and from there build traffic to those corners of the site or service you need.

Also, this tool is just perfect for “probing” key requests and other types of testing user behavior.

STAGE 3: Work on Conversions

• Web analytics

The audit will identify problem areas on the site, identify key indicators by which you can monitor the effectiveness of certain activities, identify patterns of behavior and common features of the site’s audience.

• Site usability audit

It will help to find out at what stage users of the site may have problems with navigation, making a decision to complete a transaction and give recommendations for improving the interface in order to increase conversions.

4 STAGE: Work on brand loyalty

• social media marketing (SMM)

Creating, maintaining and maintaining company profiles in social networks. It will help the service / product / company to become closer and more “transparent” to users.

• direct marketing (e-mail marketing)

Creation of layouts, layout and content filling of various letters that will be sent to users (mailings with goods, newsletters, event mailings).

HOW AND WHEN TO OFFER:

1. The client came up with the idea, and our company will implement the website.

At the stage of discussing the draft of a future website / web service, you need to ask whether the client knows his future target audience (hereinafter referred to as CA) which competitors are in the project (there are some competitors).

If a client weakly imagines his target user, he needs to offer him a quick study of Central Asia. This will help determine the main sources of traffic, subscriptions, purchases that the website will have. In accordance with this data, the architecture and structure of the project may change.
Depending on the target audience and you can offer the client to initially optimize the site for macretzing needs:



You should also pay attention to the initial usability of all interface elements.

2. The client already has a ready site. He is interested in upgrading, expanding functionality, marketing support.

Along with the changes on the site to expand the functionality, you can offer the client an audit of the existing channels of visitors / buyers.

To do this, you need to have access to all analytics and marketing tools that are already used on the site (Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools, Bing Webmaster Tools, Google AdWords, etc), access to the admin panel of the site itself, as well as get the initial data by conversions, etc.

Further, on the basis of the data obtained, we can compile:

• or a short list of recommendations with a description of problem areas in the marketing of the client company, technical problems in the work of the site;
• or a complete list of recommendations describing problems in marketing and technical aspects of the site.

At the exit, the client receives information about where problems are found by:

• the technical part of the site in general (Technical Issues);
• website promotion in search engines (SEO);
• optimization of paid traffic campaigns (PPC);
• promotion of the company in social networks (SMM).

Conclusion

Of course, everything described above is far from a complete list of information that vendors of the services of development companies should familiarize themselves with, however, it may become a good basis for accumulating their internal knowledge base for small companies that are just starting to gain momentum.