Step-by-step secrets of deciphering the digital world.
We are an ERP product company. Our ERP solution, Syscon Cronus is targeted for manufacturing industries. We have all along for the last 20 years were been following traditional marketing route, out-bound. Though being an IT company, may be due to my manufacturing background and our Customers are from the same segment, we never put our stake in digital marketing. We always believed in Outbound rather than Inbound marketing.
SaaS x3 has completely changed my perspective. It was such a power packed digital Sales event. But the real beauty was the way it was structured. Every step was explained in detail that a dummy like was able to understand and implement it.
I really would thank the great guys like Girish, Suresh Sambandam, Pallav Nadhani & Shekhar Kirani who had taken their time-out and make it a point to hand-hold the eco system. Also wish to put my learning as a gesture to them, though many of this information will be available in a much better way in public domain.
Basics of Digital Marketing
Google Adwords:
Efforts:
- It is all google Adwords, Analytics.
- If google does not have a category for your business better do not waste your time (or) you can still run your business a life style one.
- Having identified your business category, Google might provide its key words suggestion. Make sure that you pick the generic ones.
- Also spend time in identifying your own key words. After the key words are just the way you think that your customers are searching for your product or service.
- It may not be wise to use the competitors name / brand as your key words. It may fetch more as impressions and clicks but may not conversions.
- Make sure that you remove the negative key words at least once a week.
- You have to spend money on Adwords and but decide how much is feasible for you.
Results: In last 2 months we have generated close to 25 inbound enquiries and closed 4 orders
Website:
Efforts:
- The first day after completing the above the bounce rate of my website was 99.9%. I never scored good marks in my education and I was happy to see that at least my website was doing better.
- Later I came to know that it is real bad news for the bounce rate being high.
- What is bounce rate? Bounce rate is an indicator that shows as to how long the visitor spent time on your site.
- We then spent time in fine tuning the site performance of home page and other page information.
- We have recruited a full time digital marketing guy who worked on SEO. After 2 months you know now the bounce rate is between 2 – 6%
- Most important learning was, Call for Action (CFA). When a visitor comes to your site what you want them to do. So the first image in your site has to tell what you do and now what you want them to do. If this is not addresses well traffic will not lead to conversion.
Results: The bounce rate has reduced from 99% to 5 % which has resulted in 70% increase in organic traffic.
Content on Social media
Efforts:
- It is important that you need to write original interesting content about your product and business.
- Earlier I use to write articles in Linkedin. But I never thought that it was to be connected to my site. Now I post 3/4 of the article and for balance article it is linked to our site.
- Presence in Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin is important.
- We have been making at least 2 posts per week.
Results: This has created traffic from social media 40%.
Make the Customer as your marketing engine.
Effort:
Pallav’s presentation was so impressive. Soon after the event, we have implemented one small thing. In all outbound documents like Invoice, Purchase order, Offer etc., we have just added in the right bottom “Powered by Syscon Cronus” This was delivered with our latest patch.
Result: We have already received 4 enquiries through this.
The product tear down session by Suresh Sambandam was too good and very detail in highlighting the missing parts of our website from the visitor / prospective client perspective.
But the $1 million to $5 million was an ultimate-one by Girish – Freshdesk. In today’s dirty world, no one wish to give out so much of critical business information. I could also see the openness of the Investor – Shekhar Kirani, Accel Partners.
After this SaaS X3, our business dynamics has completely changed. All of us have developed detail eyes in the company. With so much of activity even our development and testing teams have become more agile. Every time when we make a new version release, there will be at least 1 or 2 critical bugs and 5 -6 non-critical bugs. But surprisingly, this time there were no bugs. Our team has become more conscious.
I wish to thank each and every one behind SaaSX, especially to Girish Mathrubootham, Suresh Sambandam, Pallav Nadhani & Shekhar Kirani for their self-less efforts in creating strong SaaS eco system.
Good karma by iSPIRT
Contributed By S.Vijay Venkatesh – CEO, Syscon Solutions Private limited, Hyderabad