Product Launch Marketing

Marketing Hot Target Demographics-#4

Thursday, March 11, 2010 by Caroline Moore

In my last three blogs, I have covered the more obvious target demographics of Soccer Moms, Boomers, and Tweeners. The next hot target demographic grabbing attention is the Hispanic population.

Part of Hispanics' appeal is their increasing spending power, experts say. "They make up 23% of the nation's purchasing power," says Peter Koeppel, president of Dallas-based Koeppel Direct, a direct response media company. "Their propensity to spend in cash rather than use credit is appealing to businesses as well," Koeppel adds.

This group is recognized as having diverse spending habits based on different geographical roots. Marketers are taking note however, and have discovered trends that are now being utilized with local advertising efforts as local marketing ideas take these trends into consideration.

Trade promotional marketing and product launch marketing are both using mobile marketing which is hot with hispanic consumers. They are also utilizing the fact that traditional mediums are dominated by this group boasting dozens of tv and radio stations in markets and more than 200 publication nationwide. With more than 40 million Americans making up this consumer group that is spending more than 700 billion on goods a year, we are sure to watch the demand for this audience grow as their population and impact on future commerce continues to grow.

Be sure to check out my next blog, Marketing Hot Target Demographics-#5, as I wrap up this top five.

Under the Covers of a Startup Software Product Launch

Monday, March 8, 2010 by Marcie Blagden-Ellison

This post, Under the Covers of a Startup Software Product Launch, was originally written by Kevin Donaldson and was posted on 6/18/09 on our old blog.

On the heels of our recent successful on-time launch of the next version of our Local Marketing Automation platform, I though I would go back and revisit what we have accomplished over the past few months and some of what lead up to this initiative.

From a macro perspective, it might actually be considered almost textbook SaaS (Software as a Service)development: Build and prototype quickly, get customers early, get feedback, drive to early revenue, continue iterating the product features and re-architect the technology in a just-in-time fashion. Then, of course add in your typical startup constraints - budget limitations, resource constraints, just to spice things up!

Let me first take you back to the dog days of summer in August 08 when we launch what might now be called the beta release of our Local Marketing Automation platform (although we resisted the convention of actually calling it a beta) with our first set of customers. The application showed immediate value, and our user base grew quickly. However, by December of 2008, it became obvious that from an operational and scale perspective we had a few issues that might get worse given our current trajectory. Additionally, aggregated customer support call data indicated a number of recurring themes, in addition to feedback from the field with potential clients showing some leading indicators of potential cracks that might become problematic when our growth track continued. All of these diverse data points were indicating a need for a larger revolutionary overhaul over the current evolutionary development model.

January 2009: In addition to our standard ongoing iterative development process, we began brainstorming ideas for how the application could be redesigned to make a revolutionary leap forward. We did this with a user-centric approach, starting at the user interface and worked backwards into more of the technical aspects of the design. Even though our product falls under the B2B application space, our focus was to designing it for a B2C user from a design and usability perspective. We wanted to make the application intuitive and usable, without the need for extensive training. We first looked at other sites that were popular on the web that had related functions and worked well in the consumer world. We then took these design concepts, mixed them with our domain expertise and applied them to our product. This first produced a few hand drawn mocks, followed with some more functional screen flows put together in PowerPoint.

Next, we shopped these around to our all teams internally - sales, marketing with a deep focused on the groups that interacted with the app and our customers directly (inside sales, account mgmt, support). They were our best window to our customers without the time or luxury for extensive market research. Along with this, we presented the conceptual flows to our current client base. From here, we moved forward by presenting the concepts to a select set of actual end-user customers identified by our account management team. Looking back at my files there were at least a dozen major revisions through these prototyping exercises with many many more minor tweaks.

Now that we had a good idea of where we were going, the next step was to engage our creative team, who then gave the life to our wire-frames as they would appear in the real application. This also served as an exercise in breaking down our interface into named visual components to support a common language when talking with our technical team. This turned out to be a critical factor in ensuring we could develop the solution at breakneck speed.

So, to give some perspective - we did all of the above over a 2.5 month timeframe through Mid-March as a side project, while we still continuing to do iterative development to enhance the existing product (being extremely careful not to develop things that would likely be thrown away with the upcoming redesign).

In March we started working with our technical team on design to see what the new concepts would mean to the underlying architecture (data and business logic). It indicated large changes - but for the better. We would be able to throw out a lot of things and build new structures that would support our customers more effectively. (In the end 80+% of our data structure and code base would be rebuilt).

In April we started the first of two formal development sprints with stabilization periods between each that would span a total of approximately 12 weeks. In that periods of time, the product and development teams (with the support of the rest of the company) carried out a Herculean effort of rapid design and development - making constant adjustments as new issues arose.

About 4 weeks into the effort we locked down our release date to June 15. This was critical to support ongoing sales efforts and work with clients to support their internal planning. Due to the large number of dependencies and the scope of the change, about 6 weeks in, we had to start managing the overall effort with more of a ‘traditional software project management’ technique to incorporate all of the other pieces required for a release of this magnitude (customer transition & training efforts, outbound communication, cross company testing etc.) However, at the core we continued to follow agile development principals, and the agile mind-set.

The cut-over was planned on a weekend, to give us the most time to react to any issues with the deployment. We used almost all of the hours in that weekend to upgrade, convert customer data and validate to ensure a successful go-live on Monday morning. On Monday June 15 the latest release of our Local Marketing Automation platform went live! … breath.

In retrospect, here is what I would consider to be our 5 key success factors for this redesign:

Relentless focus on the customer, and letting form drive function
Domain knowledge backed up with real world experience from the beta allowing us to design/build rapidly and make fast decisions
Fanatical focus on prioritization to time-box the effort
A passionate product and engineering team with a ‘lets getr done’ attitude
An all hands on deck mentality across the company to support the product release where and when needed

Within days of launch, feedback has started rolling in from the our support team and through our customer transition/training webinars being held. Here is a quote our support team received on day 2:

“I just wanted to say thank you for what you’ve done with the tool. I had a list of things that I wanted to see changed, and this new version has covered almost all of them. I really appreciate the changes you’ve made. It is a lot more user friendly.”

Of course you can never sit on your laurels for very long as constant improvement is a must to stay competitive, but at the end of the day this is really what product development is all about. A satisfied, excited customer.

Product Launch Marketing - Integrating Co-op and MDF

Friday, March 5, 2010 by Shane Vaughan

One of the products Balihoo delivers to our customers is a complete Co-op marketing solution.

As we've discussed this offering with multiple product manufacturers and how it fits into their overall trade promotion marketing efforts, one of the surprising things we've discovered is how often it's not integrated with their product launch marketing efforts.

The objectives are simple - when you launch a new product into the market, it's critically important that your dealer network is informed and prepared to effectively market that product at the local level. Many manufacturers do a great job of this from a product availability, training and sales perspective. However, we're discovering that this is often not the case when looking at their co-op marketing program.

Enabling your dealer network to effectively market your new product at the time of launch is one of the most overlooked areas we've discovered. Combining your national efforts with strong local efforts creates a product launch marketing effect that is highly effective.

The advice is simple: when launching a new product, integration with your co-op marketing solution should be near the top of your list. Effective co-op marketing can be the key differentiator between a lackluster product launch and a highly-successful one.

In fact, we believe so strongly in this that we've been offering our co-op marketing software to some manufacturers as a point-solution to support a single product launch. It's a great way for them to try it out while at the same time supporting their product launch marketing effort.

Interested? Check out our Integrated Co-op Marketing whitepaper or contact us to find out how we can help.

Cable Subscriber - to be or not to be?

Wednesday, February 10, 2010 by Meghann Splittgerber

Are you a cable subscriber? I am, but recently have been thinking about dropping the service to avoid the monthly bill. I can access most of the programming that I want online and watch it that way. Apparently, I am not alone here. According to the article, Thinking Outside the Box: Web TVs Skirt Cable Giant in Advertising Age, many others are on the same page, "while rates go up every year, the average amount consumers are paying for digital cable has dropped more from $79 a month in the third quarter of 2008 to $70 in the third quarter of 2009 as they drop additional channels and services". In today's mobile, Internet immersed lifestyles it seems a natural shift is occurring to move away from Cable altogether. Many device makers have realized this switch and are continuing to roll out products that circumvent the cable box and draw content from the Web. This presents a very ideal opportunity for the device makers to capitalize on this trend. Both in their product launch marketing and their local Internet marketing strategies alike.

Marketing Hot Target Demographics-#3

Thursday, January 28, 2010 by Caroline Moore

In my last two blogs I have covered both soccer moms and Boomers as currently being targeted with local marketing and media dollars? Fortunately, those heavily targeted boomers have nicely created an entire generation of consumers known as Echo Boomers or Tweeners.

These Tweeners are our third heavily sought after demographic. This group ranges from your 9 to 14 year old tween to your young adult, makes up nearly a third of the population, and forks over an estimated $170 billion a year in consumer spending.

To reference an article I recently read, Deep Pockets, this group, particularly younger consumers, is enthralled by the latest gadgets, personal products and trend apparel. For a group that bounces from wireless devices to television to blogs, movies and more, finding out how to target them is the key. An integrated marketing strategy is key and standing out with unique premiums and incentives is even more important than ever, experts say.

But their flexibility with various electronics makes them ideal targets for multiple marketing messages, says Chris Consorte, president and CEO of Integrated Direct LLC, a direct marketing company in New York. Echo Boomers "are very big into e-stuff," Consorte says.

Pick up a copy of any teen magazine and the number of free product giveaways dotted throughout is overwhelming - free skin care solutions, free T-shirts, purses, shoes, even a Charlie and the Chocolate Factory DVD - much of which is given away via Web sites, where visitors have to click to get freebies. Plenty of traditional media outlets in the form of magazines, television and video games exist for this age group as well. But marketers should be looking to this group for strong promotional product launch marketing through other means as well, says Million, including blogs, grassroots and viral campaigns, and other forms of guerrilla marketing.

The Echo Boomers come in at 80 million strong, but who else has the numbers and the influence to attract marketers? Check out my next blog, Marketing Hot Target Demographics-#4 to find out.

Twitter - Marketing Software Tools

Friday, January 22, 2010 by Meghann Splittgerber

Twitter is continuing to gain popularity and adoption rates are on the rise. So much in fact, that Twitter is now considered to be an integral part of local advertising and an Internet marketing campaign. In the article, Twitter With a Twist, the author Morrissey, points out many new ways brands have been hopping on the bandwagon, so to speak, of Twitters growing popularity. Brands such as Sweethearts Candies and Tasti D-lite are using Twitter in very different ways including product launch marketing and finding their own successes.

Balihoo Announces Integrated Co-op Marketing Solution

Tuesday, December 8, 2009 by Shane Vaughan

Note: This post originally appeared on the older Balihoo blog on 10/27/09.

JUST in case you missed our announcement on PRweb or our News section (we like to be thorough) I wanted to let everyone know that we have some pretty exciting news today - we’re announcing the wide availability of our Integrated Co-op Marketing Solution.

This is a big deal for us - we’ve had co-op functionality in our system for awhile, but for the first time we’re packaging it up nicely and making it widely available to all of our customers (and potential customers). I’ve seen firsthand the delight on a reseller/distributor/franchisee face the first time they log into this co-op marketing solution and realize that they can manage both the creative and financial ends of their co-op advertising spend through one easy system. The time savings and cost savings they realize are immediate and significant.

And for the national brand running the co-op advertising program - the biggest deal here is the visibility they have into what’s going on at a local level. Imagine being able to completely understand the local support of a product launch BEFORE it’s launched. Or, view marketing activities at a local level to understand what’s working for your affiliates. Invaluable.

If you want to learn more about using a centralized system to manage a co-op program, check out our Integrated Co-op Marketing Software whitepaper at: www.balihoo.com/icm

OK, enough about us, back to our regularly scheduled programming……

Tags: Channel Marketing Software, Co-op Advertising, Co-op Marketing Software, Co-op Marketing Solution, CRM Marketing Automation, Retail Marketing, Sales Promotion Marketing, Trade Promotion Marketing

It’s Called ‘Co-op Advertising’ Because it Requires Coordinated Cooperation

Thursday, December 3, 2009 by Shane Vaughan

Co-op marketing solutions and co-op advertising program can be incredibly valuable and effective; however, unless they are clearly executed by all involved parties they can be reduced to simply an additional headache that never seems to perform quite as desired.

Consider the following:

Do you really believe your co-op advertising budget is being well spent?
Can you guarantee coordination of timing and messages for product launch marketing efforts?
Are your resellers spending more time complaining about delayed reimbursements than working to achieve results in your upcoming key selling season?
Have your competitors started to outflank you with more effective co-op advertising program - even though they offer an inferior product?

Co-op Marketing Strategies: Building a Better Co-op/MDF Program
View more presentations from Balihoo.

Tags: Channel Marketing Software, Co-op Advertising, Co-op Marketing Software, Co-op Marketing Solution, CRM Marketing Automation, Retail Marketing, Sales Promotion Marketing, Trade Promotion Marketing