After hours and hours of time invested in researching small business accounting programs, he felt like he wasn’t any better off.
Why? Because there are so many opposing opinions on the web it’s hard to get a sense of consensus.
“He” is another small business owner who just opened up shop as well and we were trading notes over coffee last week.
Ultimately it was the interface that sealed the deal for him. The interface and the fact the program felt like it was built from the ground up rather than cobbled together over the years.
He purchased Xero, an up and coming cloud-based accounting tool for small business. I’ve heard a lot about it recently as I weigh my own options.
His commentary resonated with me, because even though I think I’m a fairly sophisticated buyer, I’m agonizing over the selection. As such, I beginning to think I need to just stop analyzing it and make a decision.
Then it occurred to me…there’s a big marketing lesson in this experience.
To that end, here are three useful links to other marketing lessons from this past week:
1. The Top 10 Most Influential CMOs – Who are Also Moms
We’ll spend more than $20 billion dollars on Mother’s Day this year and Traackr, which develops influencer marketing software, took a look at its own data and named 10 CMOs who are also moms:
“The project contains 500 of the top CMOs and marketing executives. Out of those 500, the following women are the top 10 most influential CMOs or marketing leaders who also happen to be moms (reflected in their twitter profiles).”
2. Why We’re Throwing Out All Of Our Lead Forms
Marketing has started treating people like leads, not like people, according to Drift, a software developer that produces a product with an interesting twist on sales and support. The course correction requires the resignation of the lead form. If your marketing instincts reject this notion instinctively, then this is a great read because the entire web is engineered to feed us stuff we probably already agree with:
“I think marketing has kind of lost its way a little bit. We’ve lost the importance of a great story and truly connecting with people. We live in this world where it’s all about content, content and more content. And SEO. And ranking for this keyword and that keyword. And algorithms and conversion rate optimization. Pieces of that stuff are still important to marketing, but overall, I think we’ve lost our way.”
3. Who Said Long Form Was Dead?
In marketing, we’re always looking for the short answer: When is the best time to tweet? How many links should I include in the copy? How long should your blog post or article be? Shorter content is better content, right? Perhaps not, according to this piece in The Content Magazine:
“We received immediate evidence of its success online. It saw a 65% increase in open rates above our average cover story, and it received a 127% increase in page views and our users spent 126% more time engaging with the piece than average.”
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As I like to say, there are no experts in marketing, we are all forever students.
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Photo credit: Flickr, Mikel Garcia Idiakez, Oihan eta Edurne (CC BY 2.0)
