The Value of Your Data
The lowest cost and most effective form of marketing is inbound internet marketing which is driven from existing information silos.
Inbound, means that it is effective because the people making the enquiries have reached out to you, rather than you having to spend time and money chasing them.
Plus, they are interested enough in what you are selling to have voluntarily made an enquiry - that always has to be a good thing! Internet marketing, means that it can be essentially an automated process, with very low costs, which targets exactly the right audience.
Don't forget, you can even see your ROI specifically and down to the individual click, because with internet marketing, all your efforts result in countable clicks and those countable clicks result in a certain volume of sales, so the eventual sales value can be divided by the (admittedly low) investment and bingo, you have an accurate cost per client acquisition figure.
So, how can a software company make use of internet marketing techniques to drive a torrent of highly targeted, ready to buy future clients to it's doorstep for a very low cost and what part do the existing information silos play a part in this process? First, lets look at the information silos that we are talking about here.
What information do you have locked up in your business, which is secret to the outside world, but that is actually a marketing asset waiting to be exploited? Your customer technical support incident recording system of course! Many software companies record details of their client's technical helpdesk enquiries in an incident management system of some sort.
The original queries are in there along with the conversations that took place between client and support analyst and even along with the final solution.
Some software companies make this information available to internal helpdesk staff, so that they can use past incidents to help solve future ones.
Some software companies even go as far as making this information available to the clients who originally placed the call.
But...
very few of them make all the information in this system available to other clients or even, heaven forbid, people who are not yet clients! Of course, there is a pretty good reason for this, the information that is tucked away in these systems is often a series of emails, hastily copied and pasted into the CRM system and often contains details of internal conversations and specifics about client systems which really, it would not do, to make publicly available.
So there it sits, a wealth of information that your future clients would find incredibly useful, locked away from prying eyes.
Inbound, means that it is effective because the people making the enquiries have reached out to you, rather than you having to spend time and money chasing them.
Plus, they are interested enough in what you are selling to have voluntarily made an enquiry - that always has to be a good thing! Internet marketing, means that it can be essentially an automated process, with very low costs, which targets exactly the right audience.
Don't forget, you can even see your ROI specifically and down to the individual click, because with internet marketing, all your efforts result in countable clicks and those countable clicks result in a certain volume of sales, so the eventual sales value can be divided by the (admittedly low) investment and bingo, you have an accurate cost per client acquisition figure.
So, how can a software company make use of internet marketing techniques to drive a torrent of highly targeted, ready to buy future clients to it's doorstep for a very low cost and what part do the existing information silos play a part in this process? First, lets look at the information silos that we are talking about here.
What information do you have locked up in your business, which is secret to the outside world, but that is actually a marketing asset waiting to be exploited? Your customer technical support incident recording system of course! Many software companies record details of their client's technical helpdesk enquiries in an incident management system of some sort.
The original queries are in there along with the conversations that took place between client and support analyst and even along with the final solution.
Some software companies make this information available to internal helpdesk staff, so that they can use past incidents to help solve future ones.
Some software companies even go as far as making this information available to the clients who originally placed the call.
But...
very few of them make all the information in this system available to other clients or even, heaven forbid, people who are not yet clients! Of course, there is a pretty good reason for this, the information that is tucked away in these systems is often a series of emails, hastily copied and pasted into the CRM system and often contains details of internal conversations and specifics about client systems which really, it would not do, to make publicly available.
So there it sits, a wealth of information that your future clients would find incredibly useful, locked away from prying eyes.