One of the things that is regularly discussed is, what is the value of blogging to a good marketing strategy orbusiness plan?

By way of a practical example, it is easy to go out on the web and find lots of articles and blog posts on how important blogging is to an inbound marketing strategy, companies such as Hubspot, whose product we use is a great example of the hows and whys, but most people probably prefer concrete examples, so here is one from our company.

We operate in the strategic plan implementation space, meaning that our software helps companies to easily implement a strategic plan. When we first started we knew the generic terms like “strategic plan” would have lots of competition in web search so we looked at other words that were very powerful and came up with terms such as; “strategic plan implementation” and “strategic plan execution”.

Now, when we first started our web site we only really had one or two pages where it was actually practical to use those terms as keywords or H1 tags so we needed a good strategy to drive search to our site and get more leads.

This is of course was where blogging came in.  Over several months we wrote blog posts on topics such as:

• 1 Simple Social CRM Implementation Strategy and Action
• How we created and implemented our CRM strategy
• Building a company on Strategic Plan Execution

In each of these cases we talked about ideas for implementing and executing on various aspects of a strategic plan.  The result of this work was that RapidInfluence became the number one search term on Google for “strategic plan implementation” and the number 4 search term for “strategic plan execution” and all of our competitors were found on the sidelines paying for those terms via Google Adwords.  Of course we need to keep writing and optimizing to keep our position in the search world but that is a whole different strategy.

In terms of web site content (content about the product or the company) versus blog content (content regularly written and distributed about strategic concepts) in our own case the top pages visited overall breakdown as follows:

• Blog content - 6 of the top 10 pages viewed
• Web site content - 4 of the top 10pages viewed

So you can imagine where we would be from a strategic point of view if we had only considered web content in our content and SEO strategy.  We would have missed numerous chances to interact with potential clients because we would have just had the standard web pages (probably only one or two) that would have covered strategy implementation.  This would have meant that we would not have been able to work our way up in the search realm, people would have not had a reason to link to our content and potential customers would not have had any sense of whether we really knew much about strategy implementation aside from the normal salesy drivel you see on most web sites.

So, bottom line, blogging needs to be part of your overall marketing strategy, it needs to take a big spot in the overall content strategy, and it will likely be your largest source of web page views when done correctly.

Thanks,

Ed

The following post focuses on our social networking strategy, which is an action item within the strategic element we called Develop/Implement Marketing Strategy.

Social networking is still a relatively new concept for many businesses and falls into two very wide oponions, that of being essential and that of being a waste of time. As a company we had previous experience as individuals using and participating in social networks so we were fairly clear as to what value they would bring to us and how they could improve our business. As you will note we have come down on the side of essential for business.

There are many sources of information on social networking (here is good article from HubSpot) and how to go about it. In our own experience and based on our own research we came to the view that there are 3 primary areas where social networking can be an important part of the business strategy for startup and emerging growth companies:

• Building Community of users and influencers – one of the big challenges for companies is how to gain awareness for your company with a range of people, from users, to partners to influencers. Social networking sites can be great sources of these types of contacts
• Establishing your agenda – for many emerging companies, you went into business to solve a problem or change an entire market. In order to do this you are going to have to find a way to change the norm and in order to change the norm you need to establish your agenda; how you think about things, how you think things can change for the better and all of the ideas that you have to make it happen, in other words your Manifesto
• Interacting with people already in the market and discovering the real contributors – one of the things that the Internet has brought is the ability to find out lots of information. The challenge with using search engines to find information and to connect with people is that it is very rare that a general search is going to display conversations on the 1st page of Google. If you want to know what is live and relevant to your market you need to be where the conversations are happenging and that is in the social networking sites and the tools that aggregate that information. Once you plug into those channels then you can find out what it is people are talking about and what is interesting at the present time to your market. Then and only then can you start to build new customers and begin pushing forward your agenda.

So, we had things pretty clear as far as what our strategy needed to be: build a community of users, establish our agenda and plug into the existing conversation.

We then translated this into several action items:

Seek out relevant business social networks that we could join

1. Establish accounts at those sites
2. Get involved in the communications process
3. Adopt tools to help us manage the interaction with the networks
4. As far as Action Item 1 was concerned we focused mostly on business oriented social networks such as Linkedin and Twitter because we already had individual presences there and it made it easy for us to get up and running quickly.

For Linkedin we established a RapidInfluence Company Page and a RapidInfluence Company Group and for the group we invited some people from our personal networks to seed things. As a strategy, having a Linkedin group is important because it provides a communication point for people where you can use both discussions and news submissions to spur conversations on your company’s area of business (create an agenda) it is also a way for people to find out about your product (build users and influencers).

Similarly we established a RapidInfluence Twitter account and we went the extra yard of spending $100 to have a nicer background created. We used several Twitter tools to find people who are speaking about strategy and strategic planning and we then followed those people and in turn many of them followed us.

Once various social networks were establised we had to set up a regular plan of interaction which included:

• Monitoring the conversation – keeping track of what is said and commenting on those conversations is important, if you have something important to say, say it and say it regularly
• Following new people – we regularly search for new people who are speaking about topics we are interested in and we subscribe to their groups and we follow them on Twitter
• Distributing our own content - one of the great things about social networking tools is that they allow for relatively easy distribution of the content that you are creating. This could include blog posts, white papers, news etc. all related to your company. The more people that are following or subscribing to your information the more points of contact you can create
• Distributing other’s content – the other great thing about joining the conversation is that you gain access to other people’s content and since social networks are all about sharing you can easily share relevant content that you discover with your following. Remember this is all about building a presence and supporting your agenda for change. The more information that you can distribute that supports your thoughts (real thoughts not fantasy) the stronger your position becomes.

For us we determined that 1-2 man hours per day was a good amount of time to put into our social networking strategy with a focus initially on gaining new sales leads. When viewed in this manner it was easy for us to say that of course we would spend 1-2 hours per day if not more in the pursuit of new customers.

Along the way, we realised that we needed tools to become efficient. While we checked out a number of tools for managing Twitter in particular (Cotweet, Seesmic) we settled on a product called HootSuite. This product essentially allows us to manage a number of Twitter accounts as well as people and topic searches and it saves us a tremendous amount of time (the other products work quite well also).

The Results - so, a few months into this what has been the result? Well, as you can see by our Web site traffic sources (a key measure for us in generating leads), we are receiving nearly 60% of our traffic from the social network Linkedin followed by Google and then by Twitter. Overall we are fairly pleased with the outcome of this work. We’ve used social networking as both a sales tool and an awareness tool and we have relatively quickly generated traffic to our Web site and Blog.

It is important to note that over time we would expect that the Google traffic percentage will increase but what you have to remember is that when you are a new company with a new Web site it takes a long time to rank effectively for keywords on Google, so the big advantage of the social networks for us has been lead traffic while we build out organic search capabiblities on the major search engines.

What next? – quite simply we will keep with the current strategy, building out the community and distributing our message. Early indications are positive and we are gaining traffic and leads 24/7 using this current strategy. We will constantly monitor and change our tactics and look for a major review in another 6 months.

For now though, we have knocked off another series of action items from our strategic plan!

Ed Loessi

For many early stage companies CRM activities can creep up on them simply because CRM is not only about the first sale, which is easy to recognize, CRM includes many firsts:

• First potential leads
• First potential partners
• First customers
• First customer service requests
• First customer feedback and suggestions
• First invoicing and payments

Of course it’s great when it happens but I have seen it catch many people off guard, causing them to rush around implementing bandaid solutions. I too have been quilty of implementing bandaid solutions in the past, which have included:

• Keeping track of customers in Outlook or Gmail only, unable to manage the lead to sale process with any degree of efficiency
• Keeping track of invoices on a spreadsheet and then having to back track months later applying payments and updating accounts
• Sending emails around when a customer has a service issue then trying to track down whether or not we solved their problem.

Determined not to invoke any of this stop-gap measures of the past, we added as part of our strategic plan a strategic element called “Define/Implement Operational Systems” and added a “Action Item” called “Trial and implement CRM solution”

The purpose of making the CRM a strategic process in our startup company was that we knew we had to get this correct sooner rather than later and opted for the sooner option. In effect reducing our own stress and creating the best customer experience possible even as a startup company.

Luckily we had experience with a range of CRM solutions over the years in other companies, everything from desktop contact managers of the early 90′s to the range of Software as a Service products such as Highrise and Salesforce.com that have grown popular over the last decade, so we felt fairly confident that we could get this sorted out pretty quickly.

The first step was establishing the overall strategy for what we wanted:

• We needed to do something that would work for at least a 1 year window so we wouldn’t have to revisit it again until we had some traction with the business and could determine just how successful we might become and how many features we really needed and were using
• We needed to make it very efficient all within the one system. We had experiences in the past of putting together 2-3 separate CRM components and while they were successful, the time and effort it takes when you really are looking for basic capabilities was just not what we wanted to do
• We knew it had to be online so we could all collaborate and we knew the system had to be low cost because we had very defined operational costs as we moved forward.

In the end these are some pretty standard criteria especially for a startup company so there are no surprises here. The point is that we wrote down the criteria and agreed to a set of actions that ensured that we didn’t spend any more time then necessary on this task but that we got what we wanted in advance of it becoming a critical need.

Our specific actions were as follows:

• The first thing we did was took a look at some systems that we were already familiar with just to see how they had advanced over the years
• Next we made a quick outline of what we thought the lead to sale process looked like as well as the long-term lead nuturing requirements so that we could test each product in a dry run
• Finally we tried 3 products out to see what it was like to run through the process

In the end we chose a product called Zoho CRM because it met our specific criteria; good enough to get started with and certainly enough capabilities to get us through the first year, low cost (3 users free, pay monthly at 4th user) and obviously online so it was easy to collaborate. I only plugged them in this post because it was what we chose but I would suggest that the others that we mentioned are also quite good and would work well for other people.

So, what will we do in 1 year? – Well, the first thing we have done is put in another Action Item to begin the CRM review process in about 10 months so that we don’t forget or let it slip our minds.

Further to that we will most likely look at some more intergrated capabilities including: connection to outside lead sources such as Zoominfo or Demandbase, and connections to mobile devices. We will also be looking at how we are using the CRM to our strategic advantage and whether or not we are making the most of CRM as a core operational activity.

For the moment though we have successfully knocked another action item off of our overall strategic plan!

Ed Loessi

Some products as you can imagine are difficult to use by their creators, such as a banking transaction solution developed by a group of programmers because, well they aren’t the bank but others such as content management, collaboration or business process tools are easily eaten by the companies that develop them because they are useful to almost any business.

RapidInfluence falls into this latter category, since we have developed strategic plan implementation software, which can in fact be used by any company. We were in an even more unique position because we were at the ultimate strategic point of starting a new company, so everything that we are doing was and is hyper-strategic.

Part 1- the strategic initiative and the plan elements:

Since we had no company to begin with we had it pretty easy when coming up with a strategic initiative, we called our first one “Launch Strategic Planning Product”. The work started when we had to come up with the plan elements, which ended up being the following:

• Market Research
• Define/Implement Operational Systems
• Develop/Implement Marketing Strategy
• Develop/Implement Sales Strategy
• Technology development

In a larger more established company you would probably find many of these as individual strategic initiatives but in our case they were all small segments of the first strategic initiative we had, which was get the strategic planning product and company up and running. In the coming months and years we will look at all of these items as points of improvement and new strategic plans.

While working on this firststrategic initiative we have essentially been able to create a master template of all of the things that are in fact involved in getting a startup going or a new product launched.

Some of the plan elements such as market research and technology development related specifically to building a good product and others such as the sales strategy and marketing plans were all about how would we represent and sell the product in the market. The nice thing about developing and then organizing the plan in an online product was that it gave a level of transparency to things and it made sure that we didn’t just focus on the one or two easier areas but that we really kept an eye on all the things that were required to launch the product and the company.

As many people would be familiar, sometimes strategic initiatives are derived and defined via a planning weekend or a series of in-office sessions, in our case it was many discussions some in person, some over the phone and even a few late night GTalk conversations. In the end though we were able to vett a number of key ideas and actions that were critical to getting the plan together and then entered into the system. As you will note from our Manifesto, for us it’s all about the action items so that was our real focus in the planning, getting to an action item.

One of the interesting things about our dogfood experience was that we were literally building the strategic planning product and then testing it on our own company in the ultimate real-time situation. There were several times during the process where we found that some of the product ideas that looked good on paper just made no sense when you actually had to do them in real-life:

• Initially we had cost and budget elements in nearly every business process – we thought that it would make sense to track the costs at every point but it turned out to be to unwieldly and so we created the idea of single cost or budget entries as their own process and you can either use them or not.
• Initially we had completion percentages for plan elements and action items thinking that it would be great to know exactly where everything was in the process!, wrong! – we quickly found out that having to determine whether things were half done, 70% done or 90% done drove us to distraction and we settled on a much simpler and useful set of measures; started, not started, behind, ahead and on schedule.

These were just two examples of things that would have made the product more complicated and not have added any real value to the system, so based on that we removed them from the system.

So, that is a bit on our dogfood experience to date. I think we have had a real advantage in using our product so early in our own business as it has really allowed us to feel the experience that our customers are having from the earliest point and to make changes to our own ideas and perceptions of the value we can provide.

In Eating Your Own Dogfood Part 2 I will cover in more detail some of the action items and things that we had to work through as we got the company started.

Thanks,

Ed loessi

Most likely, you have already looked at a market and said “something’s not right and we can do a better job”.  You have already vetted the idea to any number of people and hopefully, most think you are crazy and just enough are pushing you on, you’ve got your product out, at least as a first release, (release early and release often as Guy Kawasaki says) and you are actually ready to tell people what your idea is, what you stand for and how you are going to approach the market.

Well, that is where we are at this moment.  As you may have gathered from our Web site, we think there is something wrong with how strategic plans are implemented today.  What we see is the lack of a really simple action oriented on-line solution to help organizations implement strategic plans and we mean to solve that problem.

• We are solving this problem by using simplicity as a guiding principle, this is not going to be complicated, if you have a plan we can help you implement it quickly

• We want people to use our product to implement more strategic plans than ever before

• We are also going to do this by continuing to ask questions of our customers and others who are focused on strategic planning and who are driving strategic plans in their organizations

• We will ask those people to share those insights with our customers and we will build on those ideas creating the best product and customer experience for what is a critically important part of business success, the execution of your strategic plan.

We look forward to a continuous dialog and we hope to make all of our customers experts in the implementation of strategic plans, because if they do then we will be successful as well.