August 19th, 2010 by Duane Jackson
It amazes me how often I see websites with appallingly bad copy.
If you’re selling to a non-technical audience then pricing your product on gigabytes of data storage is a really bad idea. They don’t know or care how many documents they can store before they hit your 1GB freemium limit and then have to start paying.
The same applies to competitors selling online accounting software like ours. I see so many people saying in big text on their home page that they’re a “SaaS solution” – what does that actually mean to Steve the sparky or Sarah the pie maker?
I spotted a blog post at OpenView recently that linked to this readability calculator.
Essentially you give it a block of text and gives you an indication of the number of years of formal education that a person requires in order to easily understand the text on the first reading.
Useful for sanity checking your gobble-de-gook.
![[Post to Twitter]](http://blog.kashflow.com/wp-content/plugins/tweet-this/icons/tt-twitter-micro3.png){kind=icon}
![[Post to Delicious]](http://blog.kashflow.com/wp-content/plugins/tweet-this/icons/tt-delicious-micro3.png){kind=icon}
![[Post to Digg]](http://blog.kashflow.com/wp-content/plugins/tweet-this/icons/tt-digg-micro3.png){kind=icon}
![[Post to StumbleUpon]](http://blog.kashflow.com/wp-content/plugins/tweet-this/icons/tt-su-micro3.png){kind=icon}
Tags: Marketing, openview, pricing, SaaS, twaddle
Posted in Marketing, Technology | 3 Comments »
June 1st, 2010 by Duane Jackson
We need a marketing ninja to join our growing team at KashFlow in London, SE1
Our online accounting software business has grown from strength to strength over recent years and the team has grown significantly from 4 people not so long ago to close to 20 today.
We now want to hire a full-time in-house marketing person to promote our software to small businesses on- and off-line.
This is a great opportunity for a capable individual to join a young tech company at an exciting stage early in its growth, reporting directly to the Founder and CEO (that’s me!)
You’ll be responsible for developing and implementing plans to market our award-winning accounting software to very small businesses everywhere (but primarily in the UK). As it’s a web-based product this will be mainly online marketing but there should be an element of offline marketing too.
You’ll be responsible for all elements of marketing including:
In return we’ll give you:
You must be a seasoned marketing professional with at least 2 years experience in digital marketing
You must be familiar with Google Analytics or similar and be able to turn that data into useful business intelligence
You should also possess:
If this sounds like something you would be interested in then send a CV and covering letter to careers@kashflow.com
This is a full-time, in-house role, so no freelance offers please.
No agencies.
Our usual notice applies: If you are an agency and you call/email about this role anyway, then I reserve the right to include you in a future blog post about recruitment agencies who can’t read and can’t be any good anyway or they wouldn’t have to phone people who explicitly said “No Agencies”.
Tags: careers, jobs, Marketing
Posted in Marketing | 2 Comments »
April 15th, 2010 by Duane Jackson
I’ve blogged before about dodgy leaflets, but here’s another one.
This is a leaflet that was being given out on Tooley Street in London yesterday. Spot the obvious mistakes?
(click to enlarge)
Tags: leaflets, Marketing
Posted in Marketing, Ramblings, Small Business | 1 Comment »
February 24th, 2010 by Duane Jackson
I attended a shareholders meeting last night for a small start-up.
The marketing manager mentioned their “viral coefficient”.
I had to raise my hand and ask what a viral coefficient actually is. The embarrassment was only slightly lessened when the majority of other people in the room confessed they’d never heard of it either.
Embarrassment quickly turned to shame once it was explained to me. It’s such a simple concept and one I really should have known.
I’m operating on the assumption that some readers of this blog may not be familiar with the concept either. So to save you embarrassment , here it is:
A viral co-efficient of 1 means each of your customers in turn brings you one more customer. It’s as simple as that. So a coefficient of 0.5 means every other customer brings you a new one. 0.1 would mean one in ten customers bring you a new customer.
So the goal is to achieve as high a number as possible. I’m told Facebook has a viral coefficient of 12. So each user brings in 12 others. A nice position to be in as once you pass 1, your users/customers grow exponentially.
Tags: coefficient, facebook, Marketing, viral
Posted in Marketing, Ramblings, Small Business | 2 Comments »
November 23rd, 2009 by Duane Jackson
After the Global Entrepreneurship Week launch event last Monday I went along to the IoD for the final of The Pitch. Think Dragons Den without the TV cameras.
It was an entertaining afternoon with 6 businesses pitching for a prize package worth £50,000, Anthony Lau, Founder of Cyclehoop was crowned the winner.
One thing that did worry me was the finalists response when asked about their marketing plan. For some of them their entire marketing plan could be summed up in one word: Google. “If you search for x we’re number one on Google”.
It’s something I see way too often. Relying on natural traffic from Google for your sales is a very precarious position to be in. Google can change it’s algorithm overnight and you can drop from page 1 to page 100 – effectively putting you out of business.
Whilst free traffic (as opposed to paid-for Adwords) is highly desirable – and we certainly do well from it ourselves – you should never rely on it as your primary source of new business.
If you’re ranking well now then great – but make sure you use the revenue generated by that traffic to implement a marketing plan so that you’re not so dependent on one source for your livelihood.
What’s almost as worrying is the judges apparent willingness to accept “Google” as an acceptable response to “What’s your marketing plan?”.
It isn’t.
Tags: GEW, Marketing, seo, The Pitch
Posted in Ramblings, Small Business | 12 Comments »
July 15th, 2009 by Duane Jackson
It’d be fair to say we court controversy here at KashFlow when it comes to marketing and this blog. Setting fire to boxed software, implying the over 60’s are over the hill, saying designers are all crap at business, a public dumping letter to Vodafone, Being evangelical and preachy about business cards - the list goes on.
But it works for us. The marketing challenge for any small business is standing out from the crowd. Our approach has got us huge amounts of coverage in the trade, national and international press and has had a positive impact on our bottom line.
We sell accounting software – that’s “accounting” and “software” combined. Not exactly the source material for a sexy action-packed hollywood blockbuster starring Liv Tyler and Daniel Craig. So a little but of fun and humour brightens things up for all concerned and stops us all boring ourselves silly.
But sometimes controversy lurks where you least expect it.
We recently improved our Settings page to make it easier to use and introduced icons for all the different sub pages. The icon we used for “VAT Settings” is the icon used at the top of this blog post – that of a masked robber.
I posted a link to this on Twitter yesterday, just for something to say, and within minutes it was retweeted (to the uninitiated, that means other people on Twitter reposted the message to everyone that reads their posts) and was seen by tens of thousands of people. Over 5,000 other people saw it just because the Guardian computer Editor, Jack Schofield, retweeted it.
I thought that was the end of it, but then in came the cop mentioned in the title with a blog post about it. He’s essentially saying it’s a PR faux pas because VAT isn’t robbery. I’ll copy and paste my response:
I totally agree. It’s an inappropriate image for VAT for the reason you state above. The worst that can be said about VAT is that we’re unpaid tax collectors for HMRC.
I guess the reason for the image is tapping into the general feeling that people are being “robbed by the tax man” – not VAT specifically.
Regardless of how apt the image is, it got retweeted to a few tens of thousands of people on Twitter within minutes and got us free advert on AccManPro. So I can’t see it being a Bad Thing.
I only wish I’d linked to a blog post with it rather than just to the image so we could have converted more of that traffic into sales.
Inappropriate image? Yes
Harmful to anyone? No
Controversial? Perhaps
Useful free marketing? Yes!
Tags: Accmanpro, Marketing, Twitter
Posted in Ramblings | 6 Comments »
June 10th, 2009 by Duane Jackson
Business cards seem to be getting flashier and flashier. I’m seeing more and more cards that are covered in marketing messages, calls to action and sales pitches.
Your business card is NOT a sales brochure so don’t treat it like one.
Your business card should have your logo, web address and contact details – it doesn’t need much more than that.
It doesn’t need to fold out into an origami duck, it doesn’t need to be inserted into a CD drive, it doesn’t need to tell us about your 10% discount to new customers, it doesn’t need to play the national anthem whenever it’s picked up and it doesn’t need to taste of strawberries when you lick it.
Putting anything on the back of your card is a big no-no too.
At networking events and so on where I might meet a lot of people, I tend to make a note on the back of the card to remind me who it is and why I took their card, ie: “bald bloke from Manchester with the funny nose, interested in integrating their software with KashFlow”. I know I’m not alone in this.
I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve struggled to find a space to write anything on a card.
So please, keep your business cards simple. Don’t end up like this man:
Tags: business cards, Marketing
Posted in Ramblings, Small Business | 31 Comments »
June 1st, 2009 by Duane Jackson
Most books on marketing and branding will tell you that you need to “position” a product and you should avoid associating the product with anything that conflicts with that brand positioning. (At least, I’m assuming they do. I don’t think I’ve read any!).
For example, Pot Noodle position themselves as the irreverent antidote to all the healthy options. A marketing manager at Ikea would perhaps say they are all about affordable style.
I was hit over the head by a positioning contradiction this weekend whilst out with the family in sunny Southend.
We stopped for an ice-cream (Mint choc chip and black cherry if you must know – they didn’t have any Tutti Frutti) and we all had the obligatory flake stuck in the top. Because that’s what flakes are for – putting in an ice-cream that’s on a hot summer day. Right?
Well not if you remember the series of “crumbliest flakiest” adverts, like the one starring an attractive young lady in the bath. The word “phallic” springs to mind. These squarely positioned it as a sexy chocolate for grown ups. You can’t get much further away from it being a chocolate you plonk in an ice cream on family outings.
Are there any other products that successfully manage to position themselves in two such contrasting ways?
<gratuitous plug> John Stokdyk, Technology Editor at accountingweb, has commented in the past that KashFlow is the punk rocker of the accounting software world whilst also having the conservative respectability of having Lord Young as our Chairman</gratuitous plug>
Writing this blog post got me wondering where the name “99″ for a flake in an ice-cream came from. The Wikipedia page offers a number of entertaining possible explanations. But the highlight of the page for me was the quote from Eastenders: “get off my 99, you flake stealing nonce!”
I’m going to post this blog on Twitter first with the original title, and then again with the quote above as the title. I’m betting the second gets lots more clickthroughs. I’ll update this page with the results.
Update: When touted on Twitter with “Get Off My 99, You Flake Stealing Nonce” as the title, it got 20% more clicks than when using “The Chocolate With a Personality Disorder”
Tags: Marketing, Twitter
Posted in Ramblings | 2 Comments »
May 19th, 2009 by Duane Jackson
There’s no shortage of web pages telling you how Twitter can generate you thousands of sales leads while you sleep.
This isn’t one of them.
However, I do want to share an incident that opened my eyes to how Twitter can be used to help you close sales.
We sell easy to use accounting software direct to small businesses. As it’s relatively low-cost and there’s no tie in, it’s not cost effective to undertake any direct selling. We do however sell another product direct to accountants. There’s a free 30 day trial so it’s a relatively long sales cycle.
I think timing is important to closing a sale. If you can interact with a potential customer at a point where they’re feeling good about your product then it’ll increase your chances of closing that sale. If you can get them when they’re not rushed off their feet, then even better.
If you use Twitter and only access it via the Twitter website then you’re only seeing a fraction of what it can do for you.You should use a tool like Tweetdeck.
I have Tweetdeck set up to alert me whenever anyone in the Twitterverse mentions certain keywords, “KashFlow” being one of them.
So when accountant and fellow twitterer Will Farnell posted:
Another 2 Positive client meetings mean Kashflow Online Bookkeeping seems the way to go, another proactive service offering to our clients
I knew about it in seconds.
I ignored the effect on my blood pressure from the lower-case F in “Kashflow” and took a quick look at our CRM. I could see he’s currently trialing the accountants software and my colleague Michelle is looking after him. So I let her know what he’d just said, she picks up the phone, he picks up his credit card and everyone is happy.
Thanks to Twitter, Michelle got to speak to Will at a time when he was feeling positive about our offering (as the tweet shows) and when he wasn’t rushed off his feet (as he had time to post on Twitter).
I don’t doubt that Will would have bought our product of his own volition eventually anyway (most accountants do after taking the free trial), but from my perspective, the sooner leads can be converted into sales, the better.
And also the sooner Will can make Twitter posts like this:
Six clients switching to KashFlow from “Big Name” software, a good couple of days work, clients astonished by the simplicity
You’ll notice the correct capitalisation of the F.
So whilst admittedly this was a bit of a fluke, it came about because I was monitoring Twitter for certain keywords. You can do the same or, if you want to be a real stalker, you can monitor specific people you are working with to see what they’re up to to calculate when to call them to progress the sale.
If you’re a small business owner, perhaps one of our thousands of existing customers, and want a web-savvy, dynamic accountant then check out Farnell Clarke. Mention this blog and Will might even cut you a deal on the KashFlow subscription price : )
If you’re an accountant wanting to know more about Twitter from your perspective, then read Mark Lee’s Twitter for accountants blog posts.
If you’re an accountant wanting to be able to provide a web-based accounting application to your clients whist having greater control and oversight of ther books, request a demo.
Tags: Marketing, Twitter
Posted in Small Business, Technology | 2 Comments »
April 3rd, 2009 by Duane Jackson
It seems we have a new product integrated with KashFlow virtually every day.
The latest is easywebstore, a hosted ecommerce platform. To incentivise our existing customers to take up their software they are offering a 50% reduction on their setup cost.
And of course we want existing easywebstore customers to become KashFlow customers so we’ve also arranged an attractive offer for them.
This type of cross marketing works brilliantly for small companies like ours that don’t have huge marketing budgets to play with. There’s a fairly small time cost to get the products integrated via our API but other than that, there’s virtually no cost to either party. Certainly we’re not paying easywebstore to promote us, nor are they paying us to promote them.
It also makes both products more attractive. Potential easywebstore customers are now more likely to buy if they see it can do most if the accounting work for them. And likewise potential KashFlow customers may be more likely to buy if they see that they can also get an integrated (and discounted) ecommerce system.
Sure, sometimes it may not work as well as expected and the number of new customers picked up from the arrangement is relatively low. But no money has been wasted so it’s not a big deal.
Other times it can go the other way and end up generating many more cross-sales than expected. I’m sure the guys at WorkflowMax wont mind me telling you they were kept busy for days dealing with the huge influx of KashFlow customers who wanted to use their excellent project management software.
So you wont be surprised when I tell you we have loads more integration announcements on the horizon. Watch this space!
Tags: api, easywebstore, Marketing, workflowmax
Posted in Small Business, Technology, Uncategorized | No Comments »
