General Consultant Discussion

I'm trying to improve Azamba marketing (web site, blogging, call to actions, etc.) and I'm having difficulty making sense of all the options out there. Can anyone recommend a good resource that you have personally used to help you out? I'm looking for help with a strategy at this time - not help with individual tactics (like writing blog articles). I'm wondering do I use HubSpot? MailChimp? Zift? LeadPages? Do these things work together or do you pick one or the other? What are the long-term strategies the work these days? Should I hire some telemarketers? I know there are companies out there like Leading Results and ERP Var but does anyone have real world experience with them? I'm not stuck on using either of them either so if you have someone else, I am open to exploring options. Any help in pointing me in the right direction would be greatly appreciated.

Your website is home base. All other roads must lead there. Do it yourself is cheaper than paying someone else. Most services are in the $50/user/mo and up category. I've never used Hubspot but don't believe it is any better or worse than your own blog with ""contact us"" type calls to action. Almost every prospect does a high degree of online research. The biggest issue I've had to deal with is that a very high percentage of people doing research (especially existing users) don't want to pay anything so I've had to develop a lot of pre-screening (fee scheduling, canned email replies, click to pay online). Believe me you can waste an incredible amount of time chasing people online who don't want to pay. TL;DR: An email newsletter would be my top vote, LinkedIn groups are working. Everything you do must feed back to your website - and be prepared to screen quickly for those looking for a free handout vs potential customers.

Also I see a lot of blog posts that are super generic - ""The benefit of ERP"" or ""Why use CRM"". Maybe these are effective in attracting complete morons but I would like to think most people searching online are looking for a little more specific help. Example: ""What's the best CRM To integrate to Sage 100 ERP"" or ""How to create customer self-help portals that integrate between Sage CRM and Sage 100 ERP"" - ""Integrating Amazon to Sage 100 ERP"". Takeaway: We may think that people are starting their searches on the web from square one - and that may be true for someone who today is using paper and pencil for accounting. But most people are using some accounting system or considering another one. I believe strongly they are performing keyword searches using product names and not generic ""Tell me why I should use ERP"" so I would not advise creating generic content. I think we are in an era of more targeted search and that's what you should be writing for (use product names, specifics, etc).

I am mid-way through planning on my renewed marketing. These are my impressions I'm working from. Unlike Wayne's mine are not battle-tested. You might find this resource helpful: http://www.marketingprofs.com/marketing/library/articles/57/web-sites They charge a fee for the good stuff. I wish I could come up with an appropriate scale of materials like Marketingprofs, but but for our business. Useful, consistent freebies, some inexpensive stuff above it to get comfortable with us, and then the real meat. Wayne is right about the website is the center; he has that down cold. The thing about Hubspot is that their services force you to consistently add content and activities to create visitors. The bad thing is that lots of it has ""hubspot.com"" in it, which bothers me greatly. Blogging to attract visitors is key. What you do with them after they land is the really hard part. You want them to sign up for the newsletter, which seems harder than it looks. Wayne's method for easily creating the newsletter is I think a key part of it: KISS so its creation/distribution takes very low-resources. Mailchimp seems to be very effective at the auto-newsletter part (Aweber seems good too). I've come to the conclusion that I've been over thinking it all with newsletters: just start, then change when you need to. My complaint with Zift is that it is so Sage-centric, and I don't know how far they feed responses to Sage. If you get serious about your marketing, and then Sage dumps Zift for another, how does that affect you? Mark Badran (Juice Marketing) seems to have a good perspective on what works and doesn't for Sage and MS partners. One of the harder things for me is figuring out just what I want a new site-lander to think. Wayne seems pretty much simply looking for ""Sage 100 users who need technical help and know that it definitely should not be free"". CRM seekers are more complicated, especially in your case, where you want new CRM prospects and Sage resellers who want a reliable Sage CRM partner. Getting them to go past the landing page, and then to sign up for your newsletter is the hard part. The technology now has a broad ""good enough"" range that if you know how to get them to sign up, you can find somebody to execute those details.

Thanks for the feedback Wayne and Jerry! Anyone else with stories or advice to share?

On rereading this thread, I want to expand on my accusation that Wayne is ""simply looking."" I lost a customer once over using ""simple"" to describe one of their internal programs; he confused ""simple"" with ""stupid"", where I meant the version of ""simple"" that goes with ""elegantly concise"". Same here. One of the keys to effective marketing is a meaningful and powerful USP (Unique Selling Proposition). One of the classics was Domino Pizza's original: ""fresh pizza delivered to your door in 30 minutes or your money back."" Fancy pizza lovers knew this was not for them, as did pizza connoisseurs or bottom feeders (it wasn't cheapest). But if you were hungry, you knew you found a solution to your problem when you found that line in the phone book (which were still used at the time ...). The really hard part to each of our firm's marketing is to define clearly a statement that ""speaks to"" our preferred prospect when they come across it in web surfing. When we come up with one it looks ""simple""; true, but it wasn't easy to get at it.

Peter - we use Karen McNeil from Spectrum Services Marketing Group and it's been a very good relationship. They have become our marketing department and super responsive with great ideas and even better THEY execute the marketing plan while we do what we do best! A real win/win situation for us, as we are marketing challenged.