My company recently faced a tough decision. Like most Internet startups, we wanted to get the word out about our product, but our marketing budget was tiny. We debated whether we should we hire a PR professional/social media guru to help us or if we should spend our money on an online ad campaign. Ultimately, it came down to this: Influence or data?

That’s not to say, of course, that it’s a clear-cut delineation. A lot of press releases, for example, have measurable SEO components, and even the most SEM-dependent company has a Twitter account these days.

But to slightly torture the already beleaguered baseball/business analogy, here’s the deal: very few startups can rely on the “Field of Dreams” method of marketing, and many of us can only afford to pursue one of these strategies effectively. So do we swing for the fences with PR or play small ball with SEM and affiliate marketing?

In the course of making the decision, we talked to a bunch of other folks who have faced a similar fork in the road, and we were surprised to find that even among companies that are in similar stages and have similar products and markets to one another, there’s not much of a consensus about what to do.

So let’s back up and break it down.

Traffic, traffic, traffic. That’s the name of the game isn’t it? Wrong.

Many businesses thrive on great traffic. Websites and blogs that rely on ad-revenue need lots of traffic. Newspapers and media outlets love traffic, but that’s not the end-all of their business. Pageviews is their Key Performance Indicator (KPI). What’s 1,000,000 unique visitors in traffic with an average of 1 pageview per unique? 1,000,000 impressions.

Sounds like a lot right? It is.

But when the KPI is pageviews, wouldn’t you rather have 500,000 unique visitors with an average of 3 pageviews each? That means you have 1,500,000 impressions. 50% more impressions! Which hopefully translates to 50% more ad-revenue.

My company  is an ecommerce site and loves lots of web traffic but our KPI isn’t unique visitors or pageviews though. At the end of the day, what is keeping us alive is sales, so we have to capitalize on the traffic we receive and convert as many visitors as we can into customers. So let’s say we have a 3% conversion rate and get 20,000 unique visitors in one month. That’s 600 customers we’ve acquired. Now what’s going to be harder, doubling traffic or doubling your conversion rate?

The smallest things can increase your conversion rate dramatically, but it takes a bit of work (even with a budget) to increase traffic by 20,000 unique visitors. By increasing your conversion rate, you can effectively double your sales without having to double your traffic.

Author: Shane Snow

Social networking has finally become something valuable for brick-and-mortar businesses. Smartphones and location-based social networks allow users to interact, share, meet up, and recommend places based on their physical coordinates. This real-world connection to social media can mean more foot traffic and profits for business owners.

I had an interesting conversation the other day with a colleague about the challenges he was having with his company’s leads pipeline. He had the contacts, but the opportunities weren’t growing fast enough.

I’ve actually seen this many times. The assumption is that once an initial outreach has been done to new contacts, the conversion has to happen fast. If it doesn’t, they’re considered a dead lead and the general thinking is that spending too much time on them is wasted effort. This can also apply to leads that convert to opportunities but get stuck in an early stage in the pipeline.

While a strong contact database can be a real asset to the company, tapping into its value depends upon having a good strategy for lead nurturing. The best way to do that is to think like an editor, not a marketer.

The key to success isn’t abandoning these highly valuable contacts, but rather spending time organizing them and building a relationship based on relevant, interesting content.

Think of your job as the publisher of a niche magazine of news, commentary and insights into your company’s technology domain and prospects industry. This allows you to connect to your audience and become their trusted source of information and solutions to address their problems.

Here are some good strategies for publishing your niche magazine and implementing a successful lead nurturing program.

•    Understand and group your audience – Don’t treat your audience all the same. Identify the most common characteristics among the companies in your leads database and group them accordingly. These groupings can be by industry, size of company, key problem they are solving and many other characteristics.

•    Identify an editorial content strategy - Don’t just send e-mail blasts with marketing promotional offers. Report and comment on relevant industry news and events. Understand what industry news is interesting to your audience. Some news merits an immediate, personal campaign vs. waiting to include it in a newsletter.

•    Blog to your content strategy - Blog about relevant news and topics that map to your content strategy. Most companies should be posting a minimum of 1-2 times per week (and, as you grow, even more). The trap companies often fall into with blogging is that they think every post has to be a deep thought leadership piece. If you have this attitude, your blog will die on the vine. Creating this content regularly with variety is too difficult. Blog about anything and everything that may be interesting to your audience. Blog about a new government regulation. Blog about the tradeshow you are attending. Blog about a customer problem that you discussed in a sales call (no names have to be mentioned). All of these things are interesting to your audience and they can learn from them.

•    Promote your content with social media - Use social media to connect in a variety of ways to your prospect list. Use Twitter to promote new blog postings and publish your corporate twitter accounts on your site, in your email and business cards. Create and use LinkedIn groups and have your employees update their status to reflect interesting posts. Whatever social media you are investing in should promote your content.

•    Your newsletter is your magazine – Highlight your top tracking blogs from the month and send a custom newsletter to each contact group. Make sure the content is relevant to them and coordinate any calls to action in the email appropriately. If you have blogged regularly, then your newsletter content is already written – meaning the hardest part of the job is already done.

•    Use marketing automation tools for distribution, lead scoring and follow up – Using marketing automation tools is an absolute must to get the most out of your lead nurturing programs. There are a number of tools that meet a wide variety of budgets and have a range of features. The key is that whether you use Eloqua, Loopfuse or another tool, you need to have the capability to easily manage your contact lists, publish regular targeted content to those contacts, and score and follow up with them appropriately based on their subsequent actions.

Too many companies have valid contact lists that go untapped. Today’s sales process takes time and relationship building. Thinking like an editor and delivering interesting, relevant content to your audience will establish a connection with them, create thought leadership and keep you at the top of mind when it comes to solving the problems you address and they are ready to buy.

Editor’s note: In the following guest post, Fliqz CEO Benjamin Wayne reveals some of the secrets of using video to help boost the search results rankings of your website. Fliqz is an online video platform.

As most search engine optimization (SEO) experts are aware, getting a first-page Google result is harder than ever. Not only do Google’s search and indexing algorithms continue to evolve in complexity, but Google has given over more and more of its search results real estate to “blended” search results, displaying videos and images towards the top of the first page, and pushing down—and sometimes off the page—traditional web results that would have otherwise competed for top rankings.

But where problems arise, so do opportunities. Although Google’s newfound enthusiasm for video has created more competition for fewer traditional search results, it has enabled sites with video assets—even sites that would otherwise score poorly in the Google index—to successfully achieve first-page rankings. In fact, Forrester Research found that videos were 53 times more likely than traditional web pages to receive an organic first-page ranking.

Here’s what a blended search result looks like for the search query “777 built in 4 minutes“:

Those images at the top of the search results are video thumbnails, and today, there’s only two ways to get there:

1. Upload your video to YouTube.

The advantage of this is that you are 100% certain to be indexed into Google’s search engine. This does not guarantee you’ll get a first-page result, but at least it ensures that Google knows your content exists.

The drawback, of course, is that anyone who clicks on a YouTube result will be taken to YouTube, which may be fine if your goal is branding (i.e., you only care that people watch your video). If your goal is driving traffic, as is typically the case with SEO, this won’t be a successful strategy.

Your other alternative is:

2. Video SEO

Video SEO is a set of techniques designed to make sure that:

• Google finds your video content
• Google successfully indexes your video content
• Google will display your video content when specific keywords are entered as search terms

Here’s how to make it work:

You Need Video Content

Google is fairly flexible in what it considers to be video content. You can use actual video footage, but screen captures, slide shows, animated PowerPoint slides, and other content will work just as well. Google can’t actually “see” what’s inside the video content, so it relies on title and other meta-data to determine what content your video actually contains.

Submission, Not Discovery

With traditional web pages, Google utilizes crawlers to discover and index web content. Unfortunately, Google can’t read Flash very well (although it is trying), and as a result, most video content is invisible to Google’s search crawlers. Therefore, the best way to appear in Google’s blended search results is to submit your video to Google using a Video Sitemap. This is similar to an XML sitemap, but is formatted specifically for video, and only contains information about your video content. It is submitted using Google’s Webmaster Tools.

The most common error in Video SEO is to assume that because you have submitted the web page on which a video resides, that the video content itself is being indexed.

You’ll also need to make sure that you have a robots.txt file on all video pages, to ensure that Google can easily verify that the locations on the Web you’ve submitted do in fact exist, and that they contain embed codes which indicate the presence of a video.

Title and Title Tags

When ranking videos, Google primarily considers the match between search keywords and the video title. Although Google allows you to submit other meta-data such as description and keywords, these currently don’t have much influence on your search ranking. Google likes it when the title tag of the page matches the title of the video, and will give a higher weighting for results where this is the case.

Video SEO is Long Tail

Like traditional SEO, you’re much more likely to see results with Video SEO if you target more specific, or longer tail, search terms. A video titled “Dog” is unlikely to produce a first-page ranking, while a video titled “German Shepherd Police Dog” will be more likely to score well in Google’s algorithm. Since Google can’t determine the actual content of the video, you might consider submitting the same video multiple times with different titles that match potential search terms.

New and Small Don’t Matter

With traditional SEO, the age of a website is an important consideration for Google in deciding its ranking. Google also considers things like the number of pages on the site, and the number of links to the site, along with the importance of the places those links originate.

In Video SEO, none of this matters. This means that even new sites and small sites can compete on equal footing with larger and more established players. Publishers who are too small or too new to even consider traditional SEO can still be taking advantage of Video SEO opportunities.

For the Foreseeable Future, Video SEO is a Winning Strategy

As time goes by, Google’s discovery and indexing of video content will no doubt become more sophisticated, and as competition for video results increases, it will become harder for sites to achieve these first-page rankings. However, the number of web pages still massively outnumbers indexed video assets, and for as long as that continues, publishers will have an opportunity to jump to the top of Google’s search results through Video SEO.

This guest post is by Ash Maurya, a lean entrepreneur who runs a bootstrapped startup called CloudFire. If you like it, check out Ash’s blog and his tweets @ashmaurya. – Nivi

 

What you charge for your product is simultaneously one of the most complicated and most important things to get right. Not only does your pricing model keep you in business, it also signals your branding and positioning. And it’s harder to iterate on pricing than other elements of your business. Once you set a price, coming down is usually easier than going up.

Should I charge for my MVP?

Most people choose to defer the “pricing question” because they don’t think they (or the product) are ready. Something I hear a lot is that a minimum viable product is by definition (embarrassingly) minimal. How can you possibly charge for it?

A minimal product is not synonymous with a half-baked or buggy product. If you’ve followed a customer development process, your MVP should address the top 3 problems customers have identified as important and it should do it well. You can ensure that by dedicating 80% of your efforts to improving existing features versus cranking out new ones.

Steve Blank bakes price exploration right into the initial customer interviews. Price, like everything else, is built on a set of hypotheses that needs to be tested early. Steve suggests you ask potential customers if they’d use the service for free. This is to gauge if the product’s value proposition is compelling at all. You then ask if they’d use the service for $X/yr. How do you come up X? You can simply roll the dice and adjust along the way, or use Neil Davidson’s excellent guide to software pricing to start with a more educated guess. Once your MVP is built, Steve asks you to sell it to your early customers. There is no clearer customer validation than a sale.

Sean Ellis, on the other hand, argues that achieving initial user gratification (product/market fit) is the first thing that matters and suggests keeping price out of the equation so as not to create unnecessary friction:

“I think that it is easier to evolve toward product/market fit without a business model in place (users are free to try everything without worrying about price). As soon as you have enough users saying they would be very disappointed without your product, then it is critical to quickly implement a business model. And it will be much easier to map the business model to user perceived value.”

Both Steve and Sean advocate removing price from the equation — but at different points. Steve removes price during the customer discovery process but suggests you charge for your MVP. Sean removes price from the MVP and suggests you charge after product/market fit. I can see the merits of both approaches and wondered which was right for my product: CloudFire: Photo and Video Sharing for Busy Parents.

Why not use freemium?

On the surface, freemium seems like the best of both worlds: Get users to try your service without worrying about price, then up-sell them into the right premium plan later. However, many people make the mistake of giving away too much under the free plan, which leads to low or no conversions. It’s human nature — we all want to be liked.

More important, we don’t yet have enough information to know how to price or segment the feature set. I made this mistake with my first product, BoxCloud: an early visionary customer called me up and said, “I really like your product and want to pay for it but your pricing doesn’t require it.” After a few more iterations of segmenting the feature set, I decided to forgo the free plan and simply offered premium plans with a trial period. Sales went up and so did the quality of feedback, which I attribute to the difference between feedback from customers versus users.

(Hiten Shah shared a similar story with me around his experience with Crazy Egg. Even 37signals has greatly deemphasized their free plans to almost being fine print on their pricing pages.)

Lincoln Murphy just published a timely white paper on “The Reality of Freemium in SaaS” which covers many important aspects to weigh when considering Freemium, such as the concept of quid pro quo where even free users have to give something back. In services with high network effects, participation is enough. But most businesses don’t have high enough network effects and wrongly chase users versus customers. What I particularly liked in this paper is Lincoln’s recongition that “Freemium is a marketing tactic, not a business model.”

I strongly feel that, especially for SaaS products, starting with free and figuring out premium later (all too common) is backwards. If you know you are going to be charging for your product, start by validating if anyone will pay first. There is no better success metric and it leads to less waste in the long run. Focusing on the premium part of freemium first lets you really learn about your unique value proposition — the stuff that will get you paid. You can then come back and intelligently offer a free plan (if you still want to) with more intelligence and the right success metrics clearly defined. Even if you think you have a one-dimensional pricing plan like I did (e.g. number of projects), you’d be better served testing it with paying users because pricing experiments take a much bigger toll than other types of experiments.

Testing price in interviews

How did I put all this to test? The biggest mind shift in following a lean startup process is going from thinking you know something to testing everything you think you know.

So I followed Steve Blank’s advice and built some pricing questions into my initial face-to-face customer interviews. Because CloudFire is a re-segmented product in an existing market, potential customers referred to competitor pricing. This had to be balanced against the perceived value of our unique value proposition – saving time with faster and easier sharing of lots of photos and videos. Through these interviews I determined that, like their sharing needs, my potential customers valued simple hassle-free pricing and $49/year for unlimited photo and video sharing was a fair price they were willing to pay. That is what I charged them once my MVP was ready.

Testing price on the web

I wanted to run the same set of pricing tests with web visitors that I did during my interviews. Short of split testing a free and paid version of the MVP, which is technically illegal and unfair to paying customers, I decided to split-test 3 different products with 3 different prices:

1. $49/yr for unlimited photo and video sharing
2. $24/yr for unlimited photo sharing
3. FREE for 500 photos

All plans have a 14-day free trial with the exception of the free plan which is free forever. Here are the variations I tested:

Original: Single unlimited plan

This is the simple option I discovered during customer discovery interviews. It served as the control.

Variation 2: Multiple plans

I segmented the product into 2 offerings: unlimited photos+video and unlimited photos only. I wanted to test price sensitivity and gauge interest in video sharing. Not many people I interviewed were currently taking lots of videos but they all wanted to be taking more.

Variation 3: Freemium

This has the 2 plans from above along with a limited free plan. Yes, this is a freemium plan. I wanted to measure if a limited free plan would disproportionately drive the right type of traffic (busy parents in my case).

Variation 4: No Price During Introductory Period

I added a fourth variation to test Sean Ellis’ advice on removing price till product/market fit, but I tested this differently. I was not comfortable offering the full product for a price and for free at the same time. So rather than including this page with my A/B tests, I instead tested it with new parents I interviewed.

The Results

First Place: The original single plan — second place in conversions and best overall performer. Surprisingly, the original page was the best overall performer.

Second Place: Variation 3: Freemium – most conversions but second place overall. Not surprisingly, the freemium variation drove the most conversions but only outperformed the original by 12% and had the lowest retention. Referral stats combined with random polling/emailing revealed a majority of the users that signed up were just curious (and not parents).

Third Place: Variation 2: Multiple plans – least conversions and worst overall performer. People reacted least favorably to the two paid plans.

Non-starter: Variation 4: No price during introductory period. Parents I interviewed did not understand the introductory period without explanation and were reluctant to try the service without knowing how much the service was going to cost. Probing further, they weren’t willing to invest the time building up web galleries and inviting others only to find that the service might be priced out of their expectation.

What I learned

It does pay to align pricing with your overall positioning. Our unique value proposition is built around being “hassle-free and simple” and people seemed to expect that in the pricing model as well. A lot of our existing customers were already paying for their existing sharing service so the leap from free to paid was not a big one. While Sean suggests removing price before fit for consumer facing products, he suggests always charging for enterprise customers to gain their commitment. This is another case where pricing needs to be explicit. Using Cindy Alvarez’s model, our customers appear to be Time-Poor, Cash-Rich. Offering no-hassle free trials was sufficient to remove the commitment risk. Money back guarantees might be another way to further lower this risk.

The biggest lesson learned, though, is how accurate my initial customer interview findings were, compared to all the hypotheses that followed. Pricing is more art than science and your mileage will vary, but whenever possible get out of the building, talk to a customer, and consider testing price sooner rather than later.

What do you think? Why do you think these variations finished the way they did? What other variations would you like to see us try? How else do you think we could increase conversions? I’m looking forward to discussing your responses in the comments.

The problem with hiring an arsenal of top sales and marketing executives when you don't have a proven customer model is that you're likely to burn through all that funding you worked so hard to get. Steve Blank's latest post entitled, It Must Be a Marketing Problem is a cautionary tale about a company that continued to scale up without knowing the needs of their customers.

Blank describes being called into a company for "a marketing problem" only to find that neither the company's marketing department nor sales team had left the building to find out the needs of consumers.

He writes, "Missing the sales numbers had nothing to do with marketing...Neither the CEO, VP of Sales or VP of Marketing had any idea what a repeatable sales model would look like before they scaled the sales force."

Between the 10 sales and marketing staff, the company had made decisions based only on site metrics and early audience research that consisted of feedback from friends and family. In other words, they were developing their strategy in a vacuum.

To ensure that you know the needs of your customer, Blank suggests you test your customer problem hypothesis through real world observations. Once you have real world observations, customer demographics and a firm knowledge of the competitive environment, then you're free to begin experimenting with new tactics. Tactics are validated through concrete sales. When you determine what is driving your growth and you make those new sales, the idea is to map the process and hire others to help you execute.

For a more complete look at Blank's model for customer development check out this article.

As for the idea of having a "marketing problem," sometimes the biggest question isn't how to position your product, but determining its value to the end-user.

via readwriteweb.com

In the fuzzy-wuzzy world of marketing ROI, SEO has long held a reputation as the most difficult, unpredictable, and potentially most lucrative areas of marketing spend.

Google’s search indexing algorithms are a closely-guarded secret, and their formulas for rewarding page content, meta-data, links, click-throughs and other cyber esoterica are complex and ever-changing, constantly reversing the fortunes of publishers competing for SEO supremacy.

SEO is a massive, multi-billion dollar industry with charlatans and snake oil salesmen aggressively peddling their services alongside more reputable professionals. While most publishers today feel that it is imperative that they have an SEO strategy, with a few relying completely on SEO for their traffic, very few are able to isolate the drivers of SEO success or to drive predictable and repeatable results, despite spending thousands, and sometimes tens of thousands, of dollars to optimize a single page or to target a single set of keywords.

Until now.

When Forrester Research noted in January of last year that Video SEO was 53 times more likely to drive a first page search result than traditional SEO, both media and marketers briefly took notice, and then moved on. Few sites implemented a Video SEO strategy, and publishers quietly went along doing the same things they had been doing for years.

Video content was in short supply. The methods for submitting it were complicated and poorly-documented. It was too hard, too new, too poorly understood.

But for those who made the effort, the rewards were nothing short of astonishing. On a regular basis, 1 in 8 videos produced first-page Google result, and some publishers saw results of 2 in 5 or better.

At these levels of efficacy, it’s not an understatement to say that in 2010, if you’re not pursuing Video SEO, you don’t really have an SEO strategy.

Here’s how it works:

• Videos need to reside on your site, ideally on a unique page whose Title tag matches the video title. It’s worth submitting other meta-data, such as descriptions and keywords, but for the moment, Google gives inordinate weight to title, and appears to ignore most other meta-data. Make sure that titles are specific: “2009 BMW 3 Series” is much more likely to produce a #1 ranking than “BMW”.

• You then need to create an XML video site map. This is similar to, but separate from, a traditional XML site map. (Do the XML site map also, but it’s really the video site map that’s crucial). It contains the location of all videos on your domain, and includes the video itself, meta-data, thumbnails, and other pertinent information. This video site map must then be submitted to Google via the Webmaster Tools, and validated by Google. The page will also need to contain a robots.txt file to assist Google in verifying the site map.

• Results should begin to appear in two weeks or less, and once the initial submission is approved by Google, new results should show up in 24 hours or less.

• If this all sounds complicated, the right partner can assist you in doing much of the heavy lifting for encoding, hosting, search engine submission, and tracking. If you do use a third-party, make certain that all traffic will be directed to your domain, rather than linking to a page hosted by the vendor.

Video SEO provides a predictable, affordable, and incredibly effective manner of garnering first-page and often #1 Google rankings. Results appear quickly, success is predictable, and at least for the moment, competition is light.

For marketers vying for a first page or #1 ranking, Video SEO is their shortest and surest path to success.

In the future, Google may reprioritize video, and increased competition may drive down the efficacy of Video SEO. But for now, and for the foreseeable future, Video SEO is the Google Goldmine.

Benjamin Wayne is CEO of Web video company Fliqz.

Article: Jason Cohen

Eric Sink says that tradeshows are like sex: When it's good it's really really good, but when it's bad...  it's still pretty good.

A lot of tradeshows have been cancelled due to low attendance (which in turn is probably due to slashed travel budgets), but those which remain are that much more interesting.

It's easy to waste time and money at tradeshows. It's not just the booth ($2k-$20k) and travel expenses ($1000/day including airline, hotel, rent car, shipping, and buying an extension cable at an outrageously overpriced convention center office supply center), it's the week of time spent at the show (including travel days) plus weeks of time spent preparing your strategy, crafting your sales pitches, organizing the booth crap, and chewing out the stoned guy at the print shop counter who claims to not see that the "red" in the color swatch is not the same as the "red" in your 6' x 6' banner.

Tradeshows are a combination of high-level strategy and low-level minutiae, so a checklist comes in handy.

3-6 months before the tradeshow

• Have a goal. Although there are many benefits of attending a show, you need a primary goal. A goal helps you make the decisions below and provides a yardstick for whether the tradeshow was "successful," and therefore whether you should do more. Examples:
  • Make a sale on the tradeshow floor
  • Get at least 20 genuine prospects
  • Talk with 10 industry leaders
  • Find 10 good recruiting prospects
  • Find 3 serious investors.
  • Ask potential customers 3 specific things (market research)

• Schedule a vendor presentation. Most shows allow vendors to give presentations, sometimes for a fee. Always do this. Even if just 20 people come to your talk, that's 20 people you get to talk to in depth for 45 minutes — far more valuable than talking to 100 of people at your booth for 5-60 seconds. I frequently get a few sales just from the presentation.

• Decide on your main message. Just like your home page, you get 3 seconds to convince someone to stop at your booth. You'll need this message elsewhere (e.g. banner) so you need to decide what it is early on. Remember the goal is to get people to stop, not to explain everything about who you are and what you do! Boil it down to a single, short sentence.

• Pick your booth. Booths go fast, and location does matter. Booths next to the bathroom are good even though they're "in the back" because everyone's going to hit the head. Booths near the front doors are good. Booths nearer to the center of the room are better than the ends. Booths at the ends of isles are good because you have a "corner" which means more traffic and your stuff can spill out over the edge.

• Design your banner and handouts. Printing takes longer than you think because you'll need to iterate. I've never gotten the result I wanted from a print shop on the first try. Never. The colors on your screen aren't the colors on their paper. The Pantone® colors you selected for your banner won't look the same as the samples. The sales guy you see at the counter screws things up. You need time to iterate and complain. And to find the right person:

• Find the techie in the back of the print shop. The first person you see at the sign shop is typically the sales guy, who knows nothing about Adobe InDesign, DPI, CMYK, vector vs. raster, or anything else important to making your stuff come out properly. Ask for the techie and talk to her directly.

• Finish all the travel arrangements. Airplane tickets, hotels, rent cars. Fares are cheaper and there's no last-minute surprises with things being full.

• Buy shirts and other swag. With customization (i.e. your logo on a shirt), it can sometimes take a while, so get this done early. At least have a "tradeshow shirt." It's the law.

1 month before the tradeshow

• Postcard mailers work! I know, you thought "print media" was dead. Well not before a tradeshow, and not if you do it right. Best is to offer something cool/expensive at your booth, but only if they bring the postcard to you. This means they keep the postcard handy starting now and even during the tradeshow, which means whatever else you put on there (marketing material) gets seen repeatedly. It also means they seek you out on the tradeshow floor. Then, because you collect the card, you have their contact info (their name, company, and address), so you get to follow up later. Don't forget to put your booth number on there!  (Another reason to pick the booth early.)

• Emails probably work. Because you can use the tradeshow's name in the subject of the email, people will probably read your email blast.

• Set up meetings. Yes meetings! Tradeshows are a rare chance to get face-time with:
  • Editors of on-line and off-line magazines. Often overlooked, editors are your key to real press. I've been published in every major programming magazine; almost all of that I can directly attribute to talking with editors at tradeshows! It works.
  • Bloggers you like, especially if you wish they'd write about you
  • Customers
  • Potential customers currently trialing your stuff
  • Your vendors
  • Your competition
  • Potential partners

  Proactively set meetings. Call/email everyone you can find. It's easy to use email titles which will be obviously non-spam such as "At [Tradeshow]: Can we chat for 5 minutes?" I try to get at least 5 meetings per day.

• Box of everything. I can't tell you how many times we've been saved by a box of stuff. A small, cheap plastic box from Walmart is fine. You won't use all the stuff every time, but I guarantee you will use an unpredictable subset every time. The box should contain:
  • pens (multiple, different colors)
  • Sharpie
  • Scotch tape
  • masking tape
  • extension cord
  • electric plug bar
  • post-it notes
  • rubber bands
  • tiny stapler
  • highlighter
  • paper clips
  • scissors
  • all-in-one tool (screwdriver, can opener)
  • medicine (Tylenol, Advil, Motrin, DayQuil)
  • zip-ties
  • Generic business cards (in case anyone runs out)

• Comfortable shoes. You'll be standing for much longer than you're used to; comfortable shoes are a must. Attendees can't see your shoes so sneakers or clogs might be OK; you can change into your pumps when you leave the booth. You can also bring floor pads designed for people who stand all day, or for a fee most venues can put padding under your booth's carpeting.

At the tradeshow

• A/B test your pick-up line. This is no different than your landing pages! A tradeshow is a wonderful place to test attention-grabbers. What gets people to stop? To laugh? To say "OK, fair enough, tell me more?" Test all show long. After the 100th pitch, you'll know exactly what gets people's attention — now put that on your home page!
• Ask questions instead of pitching. Everyone else "pitches at" people; be different and actually have a conversation.  Good conversationalists are genuinely interested in the other person — what do they do, what are they interested in.  If you start chatting they will actually ask you for a pitch as a form of reciprocation.  Then you've got permission to "sell," and they're truly listening.
• Don't ask how they're doing. Your opening line should engage them with something you specifically have to offer. "Hello, how's it going" is not interesting or unique. Even just a simple "Are you interested in [thing you do]" is better, although still weak.
• Ask questions, don't just transmit. Sure you want to pitch your stuff, but this is a fantastic opportunity for direct market research on your potential customers! Come up with 3-5 questions that you're going to ask of people who walk by the booth, then ask away. No need to carefully record the results — the big trends will be obvious and the rest is noise.
• Stand, don't sit. Sitting looks like you don't want to be there. It's uninviting. The head-height differential is psychologically off-putting. I know your feet hurt; stand.
• Get into the aisle. Just because there's a table there doesn't mean you have to stand behind it. Break out of your 10'x10' prison and engage people in the aisle. Best is to have someone inside the booth to talk to folks who walk up and another in the aisle getting attention and directing folks inward. Especially during high-traffic, just being a barrier in the middle forces people to squeeze by your booth, which gives you a chance to engage. Learn from the guy in the bear suit!
• Moving pictures rock. When you're sitting at a bar and there's a TV behind the person you're talking to, it's really hard not to look, right? We tend to look at moving images, especially when they're bright. So your booth should have a big monitor or better yet a bright projector. Don't just show a static screenshot or PowerPoint image, and don't leave it stuck wherever the last demo left off — get a demo movie going and catch some eyes. We did this at Smart Bear and I can't count the number of times another vendor said "OMG we have to do that next year."
• Always be able to demo. Nothing is more sticky than a live demo. Not swag, not brochures, not clever phrases, not raffles. That other stuff is good — both for getting traffic and as a reminder — but you need a demo to make the experience memorable. I prefer demoing on a projector so it's big and passers-by get hooked as well, but a large monitor works too. Large. Not your laptop screen.
• Make notes on business cards. You'll talk to hundreds of people; you'll never remember what one guy said or what he wants. Always write it down on their business card. If they have one of those silly cards where you can't make notes (why people, why?), use a post-it from your box-o-stuff to keep notes together with the card.
• Sales people aren't enough. Most attendees don't want to talk to sales people anyway; if they're interested at all they want to geek out with their peers. Air out some of those folks who typically don't get to go on sales calls.
• Don't depend on the Internet. Tradeshow Internet is spotty at best. Your demos and note-taking must operate without being online.
• Use LinkedIn every night. Most people will accept, especially if you add the contact the same day and reference the conference. Take advantage of this opportunity to significantly expand your online network.
• Walk the floor and talk to everyone. As a fellow vendor, you can commiserate about how the show is going and how it compares to other shows. Try to think of a way your two companies could work together; usually it doesn't work out but the discussion helps them remember who you are. Try to skip past their salespeople. Meet the founder if she's there.
• Note the jokes. People will make fun of you. Actually, if they don't, maybe that's a bad sign because they can't figure out what you do. Usually you get some wise-cracks. That's interesting, right? Could be a good thing, could be a bad thing.
• Free food. Works better than almost any other free thing. The more "real" the food is (i.e. not just candy) the better. Cookies are good. Put it at the center of your booth so it's harder for someone to take without talking.
• Raffle something. I'm not a fan of raffles as a way to get sales, but I do like them at tradeshows because it gets a crowd to appear at your booth. Crowds make other people think your booth is interesting. We've seen people stop by our booth a day after a big crowd saying "I didn't want to stop yesterday because you guys were swamped, but I guess whatever you're doing is interesting!" Make sure you have to provide contact info to enter (fill form, scan badge, drop business card). Those leads won't be particularly qualified but it's better than nothing.
• Take names instead of pushing brochures.  Attendees get dozens of pieces of paper pushed into their hands and pre-filled in their tote bags.  Even if yours is clever, funny, and useful, it's still going to be lost.  Instead of hand-outs, scan their badge or get a business card, and mail them something.  It will be waiting on their desk one morning without all the distraction of a tradeshow.
• Quality not quantity. It's cliché, but it's better to have six solid conversations with people who will buy your software than to give away 200 pieces of branded swag to people who can't remember who you are.

After the tradeshow

• Follow up! Attendees are saturated with presentations and vendor pitches, so there's a 99% chance they've forgotten about you. Yes, even if they took your oh-so-memorable swag or your fabulously-designed brochure. It's up to you to follow up and remind them who you were, and take them up on their offer to get a demo, trial the software, or look at a draft of an article you want published.

• Apply what you learned about selling. You talked to hundreds of people, pitching a hundred different ways, with mixed results. What did you learn? Some questions to get you started:
  • Which one-liners got people's attention, and what did people not relate to?
  • How can you incorporate the successful one-liners in your home page?
  • What new AdWords text do you want to try?
  • How should you change your 2-minute demo?
  • What were people saying about your competition? What were your best retorts?
• Apply what you learned about your software. Having to demo the product 50 times always churns up invaluable product information. Some questions to get your started:
  • What features did people ask about which you already have, but it wasn't obvious?
  • What features did people keep asking for which you don't have?
  • What part of your demo seemed to drag because your workflow wasn't easy enough?
  • What part confused viewers because the interface wasn't obvious?
  • What terminology made no sense to newbies?
  • What did people hate about your competitors, and how can you maintain that advantage?
  • What did people love about your competitors, and how can you close that gap?

via a smart bear

Brian Halligan is the founder and CEO of HubSpot, an Internet marketing software company that helps small and medium-sized businesses get found on the Internet and converts website visitors into leads and customers. He is also the author of Inbound Marketing: Get Found In Google, Blogs, and Social Media.

It used to be that you could efficiently grow your businesses by interrupting potential customers with outbound marketing methods like cold calls, email spam, and advertising. Today people and businesses are tired of being the targets of so much outbound marketing and they're getting better and better in blocking it out.

At the same time, people and businesses have fundamentally changed the way they shop and learn, turning more and more to Google, social media sites and blogs to find what they want. Inbound marketing helps companies take advantage of these shifts by helping them get found by customers in the natural way in which they shop and learn. The following are Brian’s five steps to help you get “get found.”

1. Be remarkable. Ten years ago you needed to spend gobs of money on PR and advertising to spread the word about your idea. Today the friction that marketing must overcome is very low for remarkable ideas such that they can spread on their own. Unremarkable ideas languish unfound regardless of how much PR and advertising you do. So make sure you have a unique, remarkable offering as it will spread like wildfire on the Internet if it's truly different.

2. Create content. Once you have your remarkable product or service, start creating lots of content about it—including blog articles, videos, podcasts, and tweets. Remarkable content about your remarkable product gets hyperlinked from other websites. Those links send you traffic, and they also tell Google that you should be higher in the rankings.

3. Optimize content. Before publishing your content, you need to “optimize” it for Google and for the people on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, etc who will spread it. For Google, you should include some of your “keywords” in the title of your content piece so it will be easier for Google to find it. For readers, you should make your titles as irresistible as possible. A good model for this is this blog that uses titles like “The Art of Schmoozing,” “MBA In A Page,” and “The Top 10 Lies of Venture Capitalists.”

4. Promote content. Once you have a remarkable piece of content that is optimized, start spreading it. Post it on your blog, email it to your newsletter subscribers, tweet it, update your Facebook fan page and LinkedIn profile with it. If the content is remarkable, others will spread it for you. As that content spreads, you will have more people follow you or subscribe to you, so that the next piece of content you publish will have a wider audience in the future.

5. Measure results. You need to measure your results for each channel. For example, you should compare your results for Google organic branded search, Google organic non-branded search, Google paid, blog, email, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn group, and tradeshow campaigns to each other. For each campaign, you need to track visitors, leads, opportunities, and customers over time. Then double down on the campaigns that are working and kill the ones that aren’t.

The fundamental way in which humans shop and learn has changed dramatically the last five years because of the increased power of word-of-mouth and search. Therefore, you need to change the way you market your products to match the way people learn and find out about them.

Five typical Guy Kawasaki hints on how to get found in the internet. Yes, you have to do something to be findable and address the right people. Enjoy!