The new year brings a lot of opportunities for start-ups. Every start-up needs a great elevator pitch. It’s the quickest way to convey your company’s mission statement and start building rapport with potential customers. Many elevator pitches are too long, too confusing, or both. You need to make sure to keep them short, simple, and in terms that people who are unfamiliar with your business and industry can understand.
I’ve found a great framework for building elevator pitches. It’s just like Mad Libs in that you have specific blanks that you will fill out with the appropriate information. Here’s what the framework looks like:
“My company, (company name), is developing a (a defined offering) to help (a target audience) (solve a problem) (with secret sauce).”
What we want from your one-sentence pitch is to learn what your company name is, truly understand what it is that you’re building, who you’re going to sell or offer it to, what specific problem you’re trying to solve, and how your solution makes you unique.
To avoid at all times: vagueness (“we’re building a platform for SMBs who want to sell more stuff by using our software”), meaningless buzzwords (“we’re developing a post-PC, people-centric mobile app”) and empty, irrelevant words such as ‘innovative’, ‘revolutionary’, ‘award-winning’, ‘amazing’, ‘premier’, ‘fantastic’, ‘patent-pending’, ‘next-generation’ and the like.
Try it out! Post your elevator pitch using the guidelines above in the comments below!
Thanksgiving Day was last Thursday and traditionally a time for giving thanks. As busy as small business owners are, I hope you have time to stop and think about what you’re thankful for this year.
While the pundits and experts will tell us the recession ended back in 2009, 2010 was still a tough year for most entrepreneurs. If you are having trouble finding things to feel thankful for, here are some ideas:
Be thankful you’ve made it through. Though it may not feel like the recession is over, I think most of us would agree that things are (finally) looking up and that the light at the end of the tunnel is getting closer—and brighter. If your business has survived the past two years, you’ve got something to be proud of.
Be thankful for your employees. No business can survive without its employees—especially in the past few years. If your employees are like most, they’ve risen to the occasion, pulled together and done everything they can to help sustain your business in tough times.
Be thankful for your customers. Customers have more options than ever in this constantly connected world. It’s easy for them to seek out new solutions when you’re no longer meeting their needs. Don’t ever take them for granted.
Be thankful for the Internet. Innovations like cloud computing, social media, myriad free online tools to help start and grow businesses, content marketing platforms and the rise of virtual employees and remote workers—all powered by the Internet–have helped small businesses do more with less.
Be thankful for your support system. Whether it’s your family, your friends, your colleagues or some combination of all three, no small business owner can go it alone. Today, more than ever, we’re relying on each other for moral support, ideas and encouragement.
Be thankful for the lessons you’ve learned. You don’t make it through an economic landscape like today’s without being smart and savvy. Tough times teach us things, and the lessons we’ve learned in the past few years will help us run better, smarter, more profitable businesses in any economy.
We at Preation are extremely thankful for all of the items mentioned above and we’re looking forward to another successful year in 2012. What are you thankful for as a small business?
Redesigning your Eden website is a critical decision as it can have a strong impact on your visitors. Therefore, it is critical to evaluate the factors involved in website redesign and carefully plan it.
Before you redesign your Eden website, ensure that you really need it. Avoid redesigning your site just for the sake of it. You should consider redoing your website design only in case of the following situations:
An Unprofessional Look or Outdate Design
If your site has an unprofessional look, it can be safely said that the visitors will not give it a second glance. In such a situation, depending on your business, opting for a stylish design can be a great idea. Consider inclusion of high quality imagery to make your site more reputable.
Redesigning your site is also important when your site possesses an outdated look. The factors that make a design outdated can include distorted text, widgets, and broken images. In most cases, a design is considered outdated when it fails to support enhanced versions of plug-ins.
Remember that visitors avoid exploring a site that possesses an outdated design.
High Bounce Rate
Many sites get loads of traffic, but have a high bounce rate. The visitors explore the site for a short period and exit quickly. A poor website design could be responsible for the high bounce rate.
Consider the fact that a good website design highlights the main purposes of the site and the content. Additionally, it offers clear instructions, thus allowing visitors to navigate through it smoothly. If your site is experiencing a high bounce rate, you can consider revamping its overall look.
Low Traffic
A poor web design can be partly responsible for low traffic. If you find that people hardly visit your site, you should consider redesigning it. Pay attention to content and SEO issues as well; the reason for low traffic could be uninformative content or lack of proper Meta tags to attract search engines.
Considering these factors, and evaluating your current situation will help you to decide about website redesigning.
So what are your options?
Bring in your own web designer that you’ve worked with before. It could be a relative or a friend if you like. Just make sure they are familiar with XHTML and CSS. We have designer documentation we can provide along with phone/email support.
Hire one of Preation’s authorized design partners. Our designers are professional and competitively priced.
Do the design work yourself. Once again, if you’re familiarity with XHTML and CSS is strong, we will support you with the redesign endeavor.
Make sure that you are tracking your visitors and conversions before and after a redesign to make sure that you didn’t mess anything up! Remember, conversions are the reason for having a marketing site on Eden!
Today we’re highlighting a great resource for entrepreneurs here in our home state of North Carolina. If you’re starting a tech startup and you’re based in North Carolina then you should take a look at the NC IDEA grant programs. Together with their sister company IDEA Fund Partners, they provide much of the early stage cash funding that goes on in our state. And it’s not all about the cash, they provide mentoring and a rigorous application process that will require you think through your new idea to depths that you probably hadn’t before.
But, when you’re a new startup, a few extra bucks to build the right product the first time can go a long way and can increase your chance at success. NC IDEA’s charter is to produce more jobs in North Carolina. So if you’re going to be doing a lot of hiring as you grow, you’ll be able to quickly return the favor as you hire smart North Carolinians to fill those empty desks. A handful of great local companies have received NC IDEA technology grants including StatSheet and Argyle Social. And guess what, they’re hiring!
And to make it even more convenient, NC IDEA is actually right down the hall from the Eden Platform office in the American Underground in downtown Durham. So, come see us some time, and while you’re here you can head down the hall and meet the great folks at NC IDEA and take your new company to the next level.
Preation has been preaching the benefits of content marketing for quite some time now. After all, Eden is a content marketing software product designed to help you generate leads through your website.
A recent article on eMarketer has confirmed the importance of content marketing for B2B sales. There is a good number of larger businesses already doing it and it’s certainly a trend that’s here to stay.
It’s also great to see that Eden helps small businesses with the top three priorities that all marketers have according to this research. They are as follows:
Acquiring leads
Building awareness of their brand
Converting leads
Sign up for a free trial of Eden today and get started with your content marketing site. There isn’t another marketing tool out there today that provides you with a lower cost-per-lead.
After 3 weeks of running the new Offers feature on many of our users’ sites, we’re now in the process of reviewing the results. They are what we expected. Some of the offers are very high performing and some are not performing at all, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing!
The results range from 0- 16% conversion rate for all of the offers. This massive difference makes it obvious that different offers for the same thing actually can influence a visitor to reach out to you. It goes to show you that, as a marketer, you need to find out what voice speaks loudest to your target market. What specific messaging compels them into contacting you. After you find that voice, you can take it and run with it, creating more and more offers and offer groups in the same format.
These results proves that you can receive infinitely higher conversion numbers using Eden instead of any other web marketing tool. We’ll continue to monitor the results and share the success stories as we continue to compile them. Keep up the great work Eden users!
We want to make it as easy as possible for you to share your website’s content with anyone who finds it valuable. Over the last six months we’ve released enhancements to search engine sitemaps in Eden, we added Eden feeds (powered by RSS), and now we’ve added a Syndicate Pages Widget that you can use to build a steady flow of incoming clicks from your partners’ websites.
The Syndicate Pages widget is unlike simple text links because after it has been installed on your partners’ websites it will continue to automatically update with your freshest content when you Launch new pages in your Eden site.
You can even restrict the widget to only display content that you’re optimizing for a specific list of topics. With the topic restriction feature you can give partners your newest and most relevant content so that they will look like an expert authority on the topics you publish on your website. When your partners’ online visitors want to read more than just an article headline and description they click to visit your website to find the full page content.
We want to make it as easy as possible for you to share your website’s content with anyone who finds it valuable. Over the last six months we’ve released enhancements to search engine sitemaps in Eden, we added Eden feeds (powered by RSS), and now we’ve added a Syndicate Pages widget that you can use to build a steady flow of incoming clicks from your partners’ websites.
The Syndicate Pages widget is unlike simple text links because after it has been installed on your partners’ websites it will continue to automatically update with your freshest content when you Launch new pages in your Eden site.
You can even restrict the widget to only display content that you’re optimizing for a specific list of topics. With the topic restriction feature you can give partners your newest and most relevant content so that they will look like an expert authority on the topics you publish on your website. When your partners’ online visitors want to read more than just an article headline and description they click to visit your website to find the full page content.
The Syndicate Content widget is a great way to support your partners while at the same time building keyword rich incoming links to your website. Incoming links are one of the primary factors that the search engines use to rank your website as an authority in your industry.
The new Syndicate Pages widget is compatible with all major website publishing platforms so your partners don’t need to be using Eden in order for it to work. The widget is a short block of technical XHTML code that you can copy and paste from inside your Eden site and then email to your partners’ webmasters to be implemented on their websites wherever they’d like. The widget functions very similarly to the Twitter Stream widget that they might already be using from Twitter.
We’ve provided three simple default Syndicate Pages widget styles that you can select from before sending the widget code to your partners. Or, if your partner is a savvy web designer, you can send them the Advanced Configuration code that will allow them to reprogram how the widget displays and restyle it to meet their creative needs.
Preation‘s sister company, iContact, just announced yesterday that they’re now offering iContact Free Edition. It’s a no-cost edition of their email marketing and social marketing tool. This is great news to SMBs who need a free self-service email marketing program. Using email newsletters is a great way to keep your customers, partners, and other subscribers updated, involved, and engaged with your company. How cool is that?
The free edition service package includes:
24 email design templates
tools letting recipients share messages on Facebook and Twitter
On your Eden dashboard, you can see your Content Marketing Summary. In this summary, there is a column titled “Quality Score”. Technically your Visitor Quality Score is a measurement of the overlap between the behaviors of your current website visitors and the behaviors of previous website visitors who completed conversion actions on your website. We consider form submissions on your Eden site to be conversions.
This feature is unique to Eden and is extremely valuable when creating your content and optimizing it for the keywords your business is targeting. It can help you by letting you know what keywords to base your content on and will ensure that your target visitors are converting on your site.
If you think of dating as a metaphor for direct response marketing
If you work in my industry, online marketing, and specifically direct response marketing design, there is a mantra and even an acronym for elements being above the fold (ATF).
It is a term that has been carried over from the newspaper print world where the most important piece of information or an enticing image had to be above the line where a newspaper would naturally be folded in a newsstand; the purpose then was that if you enticed them enough, they would buy the whole paper.
This philosophy has carried over to the online world of direct response marketing and landing pages, and the mentality of having your call to action button on your form “Above the Fold.”
The reason given for this is that people have short attention spans and do not like to scroll.
I am not going to spend a lot of time on this but here are the basic facts: in Jan 2010, 76% of people have screen resolutions higher than 1024×768, and that is up from just 17% in 2006. The reason I am making this point is that we really don’t know where the fold is anyway. People are going to read websites with their browsers fully expanded or ¾ expanded to the height of their screen. My point here is that if you are so worried about something being above the fold, you are focusing on the wrong thing.
Not convinced? Well, how about the information that almost every website scrolls, pages are regularly taller than 3500px and on a popular blog, like TMZ, the most clicked-on link on these pages is the one at the very bottom asking to go the next page. I know what you are going to say about landing pages and yes, they are different then a content/media driven page, but nonetheless, it has made the behavior of scrolling a habit. In a nutshell, people know the world is not flat and that there is probably more content on a webpage to view if they use the scrollbar.
Also, the invention and domination of the blog-type layout for websites makes everyone used to scrolling. If you doubt this, then please look at the two charts below. Basically, we have no idea of where anyone’s fold is.
“Above the Fold” does have merits; you do not want to bury your lead. In newspaper articles, you usually have enticing copy at the beginning so that the reader wants to continue reading, but I would like to point out that this copy/content not forms or buttons and the same ethos should be used in landing pages.
So, Why is the “Above the Fold” Mentality Like a Bad First Date?
For a successful professional or personal relationship to work, you both have to be happy. As a business, you want to have the right type of client, as in the Goldilocks paradigm (not too hot and not too cold); your client obviously wants to have the best service to fit their needs.
Most people’s objective of a first date is to see if you enjoy the other person’s company. I like to think that good marketing is like the first date of a potentially great relationship.
Instead of ‘ATF,’ this is what you should be focusing on:
Do
Be Charming
Make them want to get to know you. This can be done effectively by a great headline and clear and concise copy. If you do this, they will want to listen to more of what you have to say.
It needs to be right for both of you – make sure you honesty and clearly detail who you are and how you can help before asking your potential client for a commitment.
Be Open
Make it easy for them to ask you out on another date, should you both be inclined. In other words, make it easy for them to sign up – or start along the registration path. Making it easy for them to sign up is not synonymous with having the form or the significant call to action above the fold.
Don’t
Don’t Seem Desperate
Adding the form before you have adequately explained your goods or services, and why you are the right solution for the job, is like asking the person on a first date if they want to be your girlfriend or boyfriend just after you order drinks. While this might work, do you want to date a person who would say yes (if so, awesome, but do not give that person a key to your house).
Don’t Over Promise
Don’t pretend to be something you are not. For example, do not tout yourself as an astronaut fireman. First of all, there are very few of these jobs left. Secondly, your date is eventually going to find out that you just live near a fire station. The fact that you lied will not only result in them not going on another date with you, they will also tell all their friends to stay away. This does not have to be the case. Even if you are not the right solution for this customer but present yourself legitimately, you might find that your potential date knows someone you would be a good fit for another customer.
For example, the purchasing manager at a large retailer might want to buy 90% of your goods. The COGS (Cost of Goods Sold) might mean that it makes sense for you to turn them down as a client, but this person might change jobs or work on the board for a non-profit, and then you could be the perfect fit.
Don’t Get in a Relationship That You Will Regret
Don’t use your best lines and over promise to start a relationship just to be in one. If this relationship turns out to be not very fulfilling (they are always returning your product, or just looking for a sale or the cheapest offer), this means you are a commodity. When that happens, there is no loyalty and the relationship is not mutually fulfilling. You can help weed these types of customers out by being true to your company’s mission and successfully communicating your true value proposition.
Although I used a silly metaphor in this article, the basic message is simple, if your marketing is simple honest and compelling, the right people are going to come to you and build a good business relationship with you.
For more info on the Myth of the Fold please read.
This blog post come courtesy of Matthew Barton of iContact. With more than 65,000 customers, iContact provides email marketing services for small to medium sized businesses and non-profits. iContact allows for easy creation of email newsletters, surveys and autoresponders. Market leaders like Vonage, International Paper, LG Electronics, and ReMax use iContact to build stronger customer and prospect relationships.
The new year brings a lot of opportunities for start-ups. Every start-up needs a great elevator pitch. It’s the quickest way to convey your company’s mission statement and start building rapport with potential customers. Many elevator pitches are too long, too confusing, or both. You need to make sure to keep them short, simple, and in terms that people who are unfamiliar with your business and industry can understand.
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