'Net Features : start-up

5 Tips for Startups: Approaching Agencies & Brands

Administrator — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 14:55:00 GMT

Are you trying to find a way in the door to compete for brand dollars? As you've probably learned, you have plenty of company.

Few digital startups have the relationships in place to generate instant clients from major brands or agencies. It's a Catch-22 situation because these business owners need to demonstrate examples and case studies to get in the door, but they can’t generate highly relevant examples and case studies without first getting in the door.

Here are five tips to help open the door and hopefully close some early stage deals.

1. Try a partner approach.

Different brands and agencies have different pain points. Research and network to find the brands that are suffering heavily from issues that your product can solve. Then, reach out to them and tell them you are currently screening for the right partner on a piece of technology that solves these issues and you’d love to briefly discuss the potential to work together on it. Be transparent and open, while maintaining a compelling offer.

A successful partnership like this generates ‘buy-in’ with the technology and you could find your solution shared among other members of the agency or brand team as a result of a successful initial test run.

2. Offer value in almost every exchange.

When you need to communicate with agency or brand contacts, do your best to offer a link to an article or resource that they would find informative and relevant to their day-to-day challenges and objectives. Be sure to include a brief statement about the content of the link and why you believe it’s something they would appreciate. This conditions your contacts to view you as a helpful part of their day and as a great resource. Your emails may be opened more often.

3. Avoid dry runs.

You should approach every potential target with the objective of disqualifying them. Too often, effort is wasted with parties that are not in the proper business cycle or have other critical conflicts that immediately disqualify them as a potential client. Be reasonably objective and make sure all signs point to a possible fit. Avoiding dry runs with these candidates helps you stay focused on the places were your efforts could produce results.

4. Lead your presentation with value, not credibility indicators.

Let me guess - after your title slide is your agenda, followed by the company credentials and background. There is a much better way to compose your presentation. Following your title slide, and yes – before the agenda, feature a single slide showing results. When the presentation begins, tell your audience you respect their time and want to get right to the point to demonstrate exactly why this meeting matters.

When you switch to the second slide, tell them that you like to lead with results, and here they are. As they look at the slide, tell them that these are the results you produce for clients. Obviously, depending on your offering you may have to be creative with the visuals and stats on this slide. But, hey, if you can’t do this concisely you have a bigger problem than creativity and should work on redefining your value proposition.

I’ve seen this approach energize the room and make people put down their smartphones.

Regarding any background information on your company – I recommend 10-20 seconds. Seriously. What you should do is briefly state two or three key points and acknowledge that you have a ‘leave-behind’ one-sheeter that provides all the details they need to validate your background.

What you’ve just done is wake them up with results, show them respect for their time and cleverly managed to assure them that they will get all the info they need to validate you at their leisure. Not a bad start for slide two.

5. Assume a 30-minute window.

If you are asking for more than 30 minutes, you are shrinking opportunities. In today’s world 30 minutes is about the maximum mental space most busy professionals can stomach when being asked to discuss something new, and possibly irrelevant to their work.

If your presentation is longer than 20 minutes – it’s too long. Shoot for 10-20 minutes and leave yourself time for questions and next steps at the end of the presentation. During the presentation, do your best to keep the discussion open. Engage your audiences with specific questions that show you’ve done your research on them, and get them to participate. This keeps them attentive and active.

Another great benefit to the short presentation is focus. If your platform or service offers multiple solutions, make sure you are aware of exactly which solutions match the client’s structure and scenario – don’t confuse them with a catalogue of overwhelming options to choose from. When you do, you open the door for the client to delay next steps. The barrage of options may confuse them, or they could just use the indecision as a stall tactic in the closing process.

Integrate some of these tips into your current efforts. If you’ve got the right product or service that genuinely performs, this should help improve the results you are getting for your time and effort.

About the Author: Jason Small is a digital marketer with more than 10 years of digital experience working with 20-plus brands via various agency roles. Small's expertise includes broad digital strategy, social media strategy, SEO, website design and development. He has led teams to produce results for brands online such as Peoples' Choice Awards, ChapStick, Centrum, Dial, Honeywell, Renuzit, Castrol, Sears, Hertz, CoverGirl, John Deere, Advil, ThermaCare and more.

The Best Web Tools for Businesses

Michael Garrity — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 17:00:00 GMT

Business advice start-up BestVendor released the data from a survey they implemented recently and it provides an interesting picture about the web tools that businesses are using.

Small businesses and start-ups can find it tricky to maneuver their way through the various Web-based tools available to them in areas like communication, productivity, finance, and IT. With new products constantly being launched in all of these areas, BestVendor wanted to aid these companies in their search through a seemingly endless amount of options to find those tools that will work best for them.

The survey was conducted by asking 550 start-up executives and managers (all of whom work in companies with 100 people or less) which tools they preferred for various business and business-related functions. Almost half (45 percent) of the respondents work in Tech companies. As BestVendor's own chart says, after compiling the data, "a few themes clearly emerge."

Google Apps, at only $5 a month, was considered one of the leading service providers when it comes to running a business.

More and more, small businesses seem to be moving away from on-premise software to on-demand Web applications that can be accessed directly from a browser.

Overall, the results weren't spectacularly alarming. Broken down by category, Google Apps was the most popular for company email, Quickbooks won out in accounting, Google Analytics was considered the best for Web analytics, Salesforce was the mostly highly accepted for customer relationship management, Adobe CSS was the best for website design, Dropbox triumphed in the storage/backup/virtualization category, and PayPal came out as the top tool for payment processing.

The chart also includes a few "hidden gems" to help the office run a bit more smoothly, such as IdeaPaint, HipChat, and Pandora or Turntable.

The study also breaks down some of the categories further. More detailed results from productivity, finance & accounting, development & IT, design, and Web operations can be found in BestVendor's offical chart below.

5 Cool Tools for Web Professionals (and Amateurs)

Administrator — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 19:00:00 GMT

As we prepare our next feature story for Website Magazine -- a guide to successful Web startups -- we have been doing some research for online tools that can help businesses get a good head start or keep tabs on the industry. Below are five resources you might not be familar with. From a Twitter tool to an innovative way to solicit user feedback, these should help any Web enterprise today and to plan for the future.

Do you have a favorite Web tool? Let everyone know by leaving a comment below!

	Tweet Nest - A browse-able, searchable, and customizable solution to backup/archive tweets is a useful way to turn back the Twitter clock. The best part might just be that the application is free and can be run from your own server (PHP 5.2 and MySQL required).

	Clue: A very interesting, free Web-based application that provides a way to ask people about what they remember about your website. Create a memory test with the Clue app and capture some valuable information on users' first impressions of your site.

	Huddler: A fully-supported SaaS platform, Huddler works with existing online discussion forum sites to integrate product reviews, wiki articles, image galleries and blogs to help increase community engagement and create a unified platform.

	iFeelGoods: Help retailers replace traditional promotions and incentives such as coupons and discounts with virtual goods and virtual currencies for a wide range of social games and networks.

	Klaggle: Offers retailers and online sellers a way to improve their businesses (engage visitors, keep them on site and drive revenue by accelerating user buying behavior) by providing access to online product review content.

comScore: Website Tracking Service is Now Free

Linc Wonham — Thu, 27 May 2010 22:45:00 GMT

Web analytics firm comScore has announced that its tagging service for Media Metrix 360 is now free for website publishers. Registration for the measurement platform is open immediately to U.S. websites and the free program will launch globally later this summer, comScore said in the announcement.

This means that publishers may now add a comScore tag to their sites and be included in the firm’s page-view measurement metrics without having to pay the previous $5,000 set-up fee. The announcement is understandably creating excitement throughout the industry, but the news gets even better for new Web businesses. Under its new Start-Up, Step-Up program, comScore is granting the following unprecedented privileges to start-ups:

•    Any website can tag for free
•    Sites with less than 1 million monthly unique visitors get free access to comScore’s basic reporting metrics
•    Sites that want to maintain that access after they’ve grown past 1 million can subscribe for $799 per month
•    Sites can keep their free tags and decline the basic reporting metrics after they’ve passed the 1 million monthly unique visitors mark
•    Sites with between 1 million and 2 million monthly unique visitors can purchase a full Media Metrix single-category subscription at a 50-percent reduced rate

Website owners can e-mail directbeta@comscore.com to receive a registration code for participation, and they can register at http://beta.comscoredirect.com.