Features for use, or features for PR
When launching a new product, such as Tactile CRM, I have found there are two main areas that you need to work on. The first is obviously writing the software itself and the second is marketing that product and getting people to use/pay for it.
Tactile CRM has been live for a couple of months now and we are really pleased with the number of people signing up (we are currently on target for our projections). The main push now is twofold - development and sales/marketing - and more around the sales/marketing side of the application than the development.
Don’t get me wrong, Tactile CRM is an awesome piece of software from a technical/engineering perspective - it is really well built, easy to expand and add to, and the feedback we get from users is excellent. Obviously as Senokian we are comfortable with the development of an application like this as we do it on a regular basis for customers.
The new and unknown area for us however is the sales/marketing side of things. Adwords, and exhibitions/trade shows are easy to cost/plan, the difficult part is getting the buzz around the product - people and sites talking and discussing your application.
So far we have had a reasonable amount of success with our marketing, the graph below shows two decent spikes. The first was getting mentioned in the Amazon AWS newsletter, the second appearing on the new Google Solutions Marketplace. Both of these obviously drove a decent amount of traffic and sign ups to the site, however we need more people to talk about Tactile CRM.
Currently I am working on getting coverage on ReadWriteWeb and TechCrunch. Which brings me on to my current dilemma. Do we add new features we think are useful, or go for the bigger ones that are likely to get more press coverage (and still be useful in the long run).
I’m thinking things like the Google Contacts API integration we did - we were doing import work that people had asked for and at the same time Google launched the new API. As a result we were the first CRM system to implement it and a few people picked it up. ReadWriteWeb included us in an article on Socialprise and helped to drive more traffic to the site. This wasn’t a feature people request but one we added for PR purposes.
So the dilemma I now face is should the next set of features we add be for PR/marketing purposes or customers. I know the answer to this question when a product has reached critical mass is to add features for users but as we are not there yet, the PR/marketing drives the users and is the most important thing at the moment.
Tracy Playle said the following at April 29th, 2008 at 6:51 pm :
Well, blogging about it isn’t a bad start for your PR! And I stumbled over this blog post through Twitter, so there’s another good example of how your online PR is actually working.
As a PR professional though, I did have a wry smile to myself at the ease with which you lump the words ‘PR’ and ‘marketing’ together. It’s worth remembering that PR (unlike marketing) is not just something that you do to get new customers. Indeed, the whole PR process should involve listening to existing customers, modifying the product in line with their feedback, and maintaining that 2-way conversation with them. So, even going for the smaller ‘useful features’ is a form of PR in its own right. If you can encourage them to say good things about Tactile CRM then better still.
Don’t forget the value of more traditional PR too - press releases to trade mags, for example. Who are your customers? Articles on ReadWriteWeb and TechCrunch will give you publicity but only to a niche audience. Will that publicity convert into business if the people who are most likely to become your customers don’t subscribe? Strikes me that your product has vast application for many sectors and a more targetted approach into media reaching those sectors could help too.
Great dilemma though - perhaps you should be approaching Marketing Week or PR Week with that dilemma as an idea for a features article!
Jake Stride said the following at April 29th, 2008 at 7:11 pm :
Sorry, that’s my fault marketing and PR aren’t the same as you rightly say! I think I tend to lump marketing and Press Releases together and then refer to PR/Press Releases as the same thing.
I also think that with the advent of things like Twitter and Facebook combined with news outlets like RRW and TechCrunch the line starts to blur a bit particularly with the speed these things move.
We do do a certain amount of traditional PR - press releases to news outlets, although many of these tend to be online - how do you go about finding trade press and talking to people like PR Week and Marketing Week to write an article. I have always heard editorial/articles are so much more effective than adverts/advertorials etc.
The product itself works across a number of markets, talking to people they really like it and the feedback is always great - its just getting in front of them. I think also that the US market has a bigger adoption of web apps and the sort of people that read RRW and TC tend to have a lot of clout in this space and help to drive targeted people - http://webworkerdaily.com/ is another good one - this is more targeted and they will write about us more readily.
Paul Cooper said the following at May 1st, 2008 at 1:41 pm :
@Tracy: weirdly I thought it was the other way round - that marketing was all about listening to customers and modifying the product based on their feedback, etc.
Personally, like everything, I think it’s a balance. Sure you want to listen to your customers, specifically about anything that is annoying or painful with a product.
You need to be careful listening to customers when it comes to missing features or additional functionality - often these ideas can be crackpot at worst, and at best things that sound good but when you do them no-one ever uses.
For feature additions I wouldn’t talk to customers about the Tactile per se, but more generally about their business, what are the issues their having, etc, and maybe what other software or systems they’re using, and what they like and dislike about those.
So I would ignore anything that isn’t smoothing the rough edges on the existing product and addressing the business concerns of current or potential customer markets.
I wouldn’t worry too much about coverage from TechCrunch - I doubt it’s driven by how many or what features you have, but more likely how much VC funding you have and how much traffic. Keep plugging away and telling your story and eventually you’ll get on their radar.