Startup Marketing — east coast marketing consultant for technology companies

How do I calculate allowable customer acquisition cost?

October 22, 2009

This is actually quite simple and I am surprised how many companies don’t do it.
Knowing your allowable acquisition cost:
- Helps you determine how much you can spend to acquire customers
- Gives you an idea of what marketing channels you can use (some will be cost prohibitive)
- Prevents you from engaging in loss-making activities!
The formula if [...]

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lead generation satire

September 28, 2009

You want more leads so you grab your machine gun and start spraying bullets – that is your newsletter. You proudly announce the launch of your new product but the market for new product announcements is really not that large. You don’t know what you are getting from your Google Adwords but you let it [...]

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Actual data on marketing campaign incentives

September 18, 2009

All else being equal incentives are a tool often used to drive interactions. So how much response do you get for a given incentive? The below chart is built using data from select marketing campaigns and it shows a direct relationship between perceived value and response rate.

A few points related to this:
- I see these [...]

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The hidden power of customer development

September 2, 2009

Things are not always what they seem! For example many companies do not have the growth or lead generation capability that they would like. Usually the gut reaction is to throw more marketing spend, channels or tools at the problem. However, many times the root cause of the problem is actually that the product and [...]

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Marketing is a house

July 1, 2009

Building a competitive marketing capability is like building a house. The walls are your website. Email marketing is your heating system. Advertising is your windows. If you have a crappy old boiler you are wasting a ton of money and energy. A new boiler will take advantage of best-practice techniques like segmentation, pacing, and relevance. [...]

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How can you use surveys to get more for your marketing spend?

April 30, 2009

If you are spending on marketing assets you can use surveys to determine the priority of assets you may need to create based on actual market demand. This is a better way to allocate spend on these assets than “by the gut”.
Here are examples of real questions I use to determine priority.

Would you be interested [...]

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Using surveys to improve sales

April 28, 2009

These are actual questions that I used in a survey to assess what elements of the sales process needed improvement to improve the lead to deal conversion rate. I ask these types of questions on a weekly basis – this drives business decisions and by the next week I will be asking new questions.

The above [...]

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Common startup marketing mistake: Letting your Google adwords run………

April 13, 2009

Recently I have run across numerous companies that have a set level of spend per month on Google adwords which keeps running month after month with no clarity on what the company is getting for this spend. In my opinion there is a better way to allocate marketing dollars. I can see how this happens. [...]

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Startup marketing plan requires focus as opposed to large company portfolio strategy

April 13, 2009

Large companies often have a broad portfolio of marketing activities. Startup companies on the other hand, not only DO NOT need a broad portfolio of activities initially, but can actually suffer from too many marketing activities. 1 or 2 high-performance marketing activities can form a great foundation for a smaller company and then the trick [...]

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