Share Your Expertise

One idea that I think can work well for many vendors is to more proactively share their expertise as content within their website. Every software company brings a unique perspective to the marketplace based on their experiences with their customers. These "lessons learned" are often invaluable to future prospects. Writing about these experiences and then publishing them online in the form of best practices, success stories, or even press releases can not only drive more web traffic, but can also help position your company as a thought leader on given topics and help you get more press. Savvy salespeople and customer service people are usually in the best position to share this sort of information. It's up to you as the marketer to coax it out of them.

The Importance of Landing Page Design

I recently spoke with a software company that wasn't seeing any of our clicks convert to leads. They were linking to their product page and their homepage. I asked them to switch their links to this page and low and behold they started generating leads right away. So what sets this page apart? Without doing any testing, my guess would be a combination of these four things:

1) clearer calls to action (free demo) highlighted right at the top
2) side by side comparisons are easier to read
3) features in an easier to read list
4) less text overall

Now it's still early for this switch so we'll have to collect some more data to be sure, but this is just a little more evidence that the right landing page can be the difference between failure and success.

Sandhill Conference Review

As I mentioned in my prior week's post, I attended the Sandhill Software 2007 Conference in Silicon Valley last week. It's easily the best software conference I've ever been to. It attracted some great keynotes such as Steve Ballmer and Ed Zander. The seminars were also very good. I particularly enjoyed Anil Gupta from The Applications Marketing Group as well as David Meerman Scott.

Congrats to the founder M.R. Rangaswami on a great show!

Sandhill Conference - Free Passes!

I'll be attending what appears to be a pretty big software conference produced by Sandhill in Santa Clara next week. The keynote speakers are Hasso Plattner of SAP and Steve Ballmer of Microsoft. Should be interesting. Please drop me a line at ortner@capterra.com if you plan to be there or if you are interesting in attending. I'm allowed to bring 3 customers at no charge to you. I'd love to meet up.

- Mike