My last article talks about common misunderstandings towards good technical product website, and how to use simply 5 steps to assess yours. I do recommend you to go through it. You will have a better understanding of not only your website’s performance, but also your clients.

However if you are not that enthusiastic about the web design stuff, and just want to spot some to-do and not-to-do things, this post is a shortcut.

This simple image shows basic contents to add, and rules to consider for a business website. For technical product there are extra considerations, but let’s start from simple things.

<Image Credit: https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/6227215?hl=en&ref_topic=6231194>

1. YOUR PRODUCT – SOUL OF YOUR BUSINESS

Your product is the star of the website, not the company, not the stakeholders and definitely not the CEO himself. It will be different if your goal is to attract investors instead of selling products, but then it’s a better idea to have a separate corporation website. Trying to serve two bosses – investors and clients with the same website usually goes wrong.

Make sure your product is very prominent , and people can have a good impression of it in the first 10 seconds landing to your homepage. It means you need to briefly introduce your product and its unique benefits above the first scroll of the homepage.

Seeing the product helps too , so don’t hesitate to add a nicely taken (but still realistic) picture. If your product is very complex and conceptual, and you find difficulty to explain it within several words, adding a intro video can be a better option.

Many companies put company values, CEO motto or happy employee pictures on the homepage. Think it again before doing that, because your clients don’t know you yet, it probably isn’t the best moment to talk about your values. They come here with specific needs, show them how your product can fulfill their needs. Company morality can surely help to build trust, but it’s better to put them on a separate page called “About Company”.

2. CALL-TO-ACTION – CAPTURE VALUE AND CONVERT CLIENTS

Product website is not only about introducing products, after all it’s about making business. Make sure that your clients constantly understand what to do next , and make the the conversion process barrier free.

The idea is simple, but everything can go terribly wrong when it comes to technical companies, for whom sales lead time is exceptionally long, and closing the deal needs many human efforts. Companies know a “Buy Online” button might not work in this case, and they are driven to the opposite extreme – hiding everything behind a same contact us web form. This practice sounds lazy and inconsiderate, because it provides little information about when, from who, how the feedback will come, and gives client no way to preview or control the process.

There are simple ways to make your website looks welcoming without giving out too much purchasing details.

• Share as much inessential information as possible . If you don’t want to share the price, then just keep the price itself as secret. Let people know what packages and options they can choose; give them some anticipation about the price level in the market; use a customer comment to reassure them. There are many creative ways to do this. Don’t write “Contact for price” only, it scares off many clients.
• Give client control and anticipation . Tell your client what will happen after he fills the form – when will he receive the feedback? Should he anticipate a sales call? Will some technical engineer talk with him regarding his project? How the sales will proceed? Give client power to control the process – how does he want to be contacted? To whom he wants to talk to?
• Provide contact form alternatives . Not every client likes the idea of waiting the feedback passively. They might want to email or talk to you right away. Make sure leaving at least one email and telephone number on your website. There are many other options too, such as a LinkedIn account of client support, a live chat tool or a live demo request. People want to talk to people, not to web forms, so it won’t harm to be more human.

Selling is not the only Call-to-Action to have. You can use different types of Call-to-Action to capture leads at different stages of the purchase. White paper download can capture first time visitors who shows interest in the topic. Newsletter signup can capture leads who want to keep a long term engagement. Online demo request shows a client starts to consider your product. There are many signs that indicate a lead is evolving along your business process. Capture these moments using CTAs so you can generate many leads, as well as get enough information to make wise decisions.

3. CUSTOMER TESTIMONIALS – USE PEER APPROVAL TO BUILD TRUST

One thing that I’ve learnt in technical marketing is the importance of peer approval. Engineers, who may not be easily moved by advertising hypes or well polished demos, can usually be convinced by several words from peers or an authority figure .

There was once a prospect who had requested many efforts from us – customized technical demo, support on a project, benchmark comparison with several competitor products. We tried everything but the case was still no where to be closed. I almost gave up until someone decided to let one of our users talk to him instead, and the deal was closed the second week.

It was not an accident case. The same magic happens several times. It seems clients have their own way of communication which can not be replaced by efforts from vender side.

Adding customer testimonials to your website is a perfect way to gain trust. So how to get and use testimonials to achieve the best performance.

• Always ask for feedbacks . The best way to get effective testimonials is to accumulate them from usual communications. Deciding to put testimonials online next week, and asking your customers to write them for you is not a good idea. First, they might refuse to do this for you. Second, you might get very bad testimonials. When I say “bad”, I do’t mean customers will say bad words about your product. Oppositely, they will say too much good but general things about your product that the testimonial can’t touch anyone .

When you ask a customer write a testimonial under no particular circumstance, he really wants to help you, but the only thing he can make is something like “X company is a very good company – people are good; products are good; support is good; everything is good.” This testimonial is too general that it doesn’t answer any particular question, thus it won’t trigger any particular interest.

The feedbacks that you get everyday, however, are collected under specific circumstances. The customer might found a feature is particularly useful in one project, or a technical support is extremely helpful with the new installation. Collect these small pieces first, and ask for permission when you want to use them. You will finish with more effective customer testimonials.

• Avoid sales pitch like testimonials. The magic of testimonials lies in the objectivity of the comments. There is nothing worse than a testimonial that sounds like the customer took some advantage from the company, and try to sell the product. It sounds suspicious and usually evoke negative impression.

A product has its strength and weakness, a testimonial should focus on the strengths, giving a large amount of specific examples, but it shouldn’t avoid the obvious weakness, or even twist the facts. Yes, a good testimonial can also talk about weakness, as long as the customer can explain how he made made the tradeoff.

 

 

My last article talks about why companies of technically complex product should market online. I will use several articles to illustrate main blocks of online marketing, and explain how to start it with success.

A good point to start is your company’s homepage. Not only because it might be the only online channel for the moment, but also because it will be the kernel of your whole online marketing system.

When I tell companies to upgrade their websites, people often roll their eyes and say, “I see where this is going. I know those old website stuffs, and we have a pretty good one. Why don’t you just skip this one, and tell me more about the Facebook.” The truth is very little company have good enough homepages to back up their marketing activities on Facebook, or anywhere else.

Of course it’s easy to spot some obviously bad company websites. The ones that were developed 10 years ago when the companies were founded, featured with old fashioned graphical design and outdated information. I call this innocent mistake, because people can see it and make the upgrade as soon as they are ready.

Many more bad websites are in a less obvious but much more dangerous way. “Your website is the name card of your company and product, it should have an impeccably professional look.” that’s probably what your web design contractor told you when he updated your website to the modern standard. You are content with the professional look homepage, but it’s a huge trap here. Many companies fell here, and never go to the next level.

People don’t go to your homepage to admire the professional look; people go there to find useful information. The look is just a plus which gives your content more credit. Web designer can tell you the most popular colour trend, but he cannot tell you what to say about the product to convince the clients, nor he can tell you how to support clients technically on the website.

Company homepage is not a name card, it’s a operation system holding the business wisdom and logic of your company.

– For clients, the homepage is a store held by trustful owner, where he find product information, get trustable advice, try the product and get feedback from other clients.

– For general public, the homepage is like a library, where they search for industrial insights. They come and go freely, but they will come back to you when they need a product because they trust your advice.

– For your product users, the homepage is like a user club, where users get together, exchange ideas and find help from experts.

Company website holds so many business roles that it should be informational and flexible enough to satisfy different people’s needs. It should also have enough business value to help you capture prospects and facilitate sales.

Now, follow the steps below to check if your website is informational, flexible and has enough business value for online marketing.

Step 1. Don’t open your website yet. Take a pencil and a piece of blank paper. Now imagine yourself as a client – you need a similar product, but you are not sure if it’s the right one to buy.
– Note down the major steps you will take to investigate the and purchase the product.
– For each major step, list down the information needed to help you make purchase decision.

Step 2. Now open your website and walk through the steps on the paper. Can you find information needed? Is it easy to understand? Is it logically organized? What additional information can make the offer looks more favorable? What improvements can make the investigation smoother? Write down your discoveries.

The trick here is to think from the prospective of your clients. Focus on what they want instead of what you want to give them. It requires deep understanding of clients. If you feel difficulty with this exercise, try to talk with some real clients, or co-workers who have more opportunities communicating with clients.

Step 3. Repeat a similar process, but this time, pretend that you just bought the product. On a blank paper, write down major supports needed to start implementing the product. Visit the website again and check if you can easily find information and support.

Repeat this several times pretending you are different types of user, and thinking about their different needs for support.

Step 4. Pretend yourself as someone similar to your client’s profile, but has no immediate need for the product. Write down what information can nurture your trust towards the company. Don’t focus too much on the product itself, think about something interesting or educational. Check on the website if there’s something beneficial for you even though you don’t need the product.

Step 5. In this final step, you are not going to pretend to be someone else, just your normal self. Go through the website again and think how you can capture more business value. Is there anywhere your prospects can give you their contact information? Is there someway they can recommend your product to other people? Is the purchasing procedure clear enough? Is there any roadblock that discourage them to contact you?

After completing the 5 steps above, you will have a clear idea about your website’s performance. Reorganize your notes, and try to integrate them in future upgrading projects. Work together with your web design contractor (or in-house web designer), instead of giving your product website’s whole fate to someone who is professional for design, but really don’t understand or care about your product. Follow my advice, and I’m sure you will get much more benefit from this than any visual update.

Each industry sector has its own rule of doing business.

Telecom service relies heavily on selling new bundles to old clients. My mobile service sends me daily messages: proposing a discounted iPhone package, a faster connection, a 2-hour free call plan… I’m always amazed by their imagination to repackage old things and put it as a new product on the shelf. I call this method Lego marketing.

Online shopping malls are good at understanding client’s preference and make up-sells. I keep receiving emails from amazon since my last order, recommending all the best-sellers on technical sales.

However as the product becomes more technically complex, these fluffy tactics disappear, and we go back to the good old business way. No place for fancy promotions and hearty small talks. We meet the real persons and show them the real things – features and figures, the only things important in engineer’s mind. “Let the technique speaks for itself” is the motto of my engineer manager.

Marketers are considered tricky and technically weak by engineers, and we certainly don’t want to be associated with such low profile.

That’s why before I came to my good sense, the most audacious marketing move that I ever did was sending out an email to remind users about maintenance fees. I still remember this email. The main body was a long list of new features, and the bottom was “By the way, we have upgraded the 7/24 technical support exclusively for maintenance users”, which I thought was a diplomatic way to say “Pay your maintenance or we’ll stop your service”. Now you see how engineers tend to avoid marketing, or bring up the money talk generally.

I wanted to know why engineers hate marketing, and asked this question to several other engineers. The answers I got are very interesting.

“But we shouldn’t lie to clients, making promises that we cannot technically achieve”

“I’m here to create value, not to dance in party mascot”

These are two common misunderstandings of engineers towards marketers: cheater and clown. I cannot figure out why they think like that, properly they are victims of bad marketers or stereotyped Hollywood movies.

Good marketing is opposite of all these. Good Marketing is about building the real transparency of the product, helping clients make wiser choice and delivering the value that engineers have worked so hard to create. It is important for telecom service and bookstore, but it is even more important for companies who provide technically complex products. I’ll just mention 2 important reasons.

1) Technical clients need more information and longer time to purchase

If you are selling boiler equipment, or structural design software, you can hardly close a deal in weeks, even months is an optimistic estimate. Just because the product involves too many technical specificities and too much value that client cannot risk to take impulsive decisions. Client needs longer time to collect information, compare options and discuss involving multiple roles.

You might count on your product to shine through the proposal or technical demonstration, but the competition starts long before your sales rep pick up the first call.

With a simple search on google, product information that anyone can find is beyond imagination — specification, online manuals, product in action videos, reports comparing similar products, good and bad reviews from clients… All these contents contribute to client’s decision making.

Without enough marketing activities to create good rich contents and build that trust, you can imagine the product at unfair disadvantage in the competition.

2) Technical clients need more after-sale care

You might naturally think people who have bought your product know perfectly well how to implement and use it, but that is far from truth. It’s not rare case that only when calling for renew fee, we realised that the software has been somewhere to collect dust since the last engineer who could use it left the company. It’s sad to lose a life-time client, but it’s heart-broken to see the value that we’ve created is wasted.

If you’ve already created the product, why not take a further step to educate people how to use it properly? Why not build something to let your users find support and help from not just you but other users?

One excuse is it’s “good to have” but not “urgent”, and since there are tons of client queries to answer, let’s do it next time.

Another one is building this system seems effort and money taking, but we can’t easily measure its performance as counting the number of support tickets.

There’s certainly something to change in our habitual way of thinking client support. Solving more queries don’t necessarily means providing better service. It can also mean clients can’t find information themselves so they have to ask you for help. There are probably other clients who don’t bother to ask you, and switch to another product instead, just like the company which stopped using our software because new engineers don’t know how to start learning it.

Building a content system is not easy, but the benefits is huge.
– It provides natural marketing to both prospects and existing clients. People will trust you and your product, just because they get good advice from you.

– Your users start to support themselves instead of sending you all the questions, so you save your valuable time.

– Once the system is made and contents are created, they will stay and help more and more people, your influence will get an exponential growth.

That is what marketing looks like. It’s all about building trust and delivering value using knowledge.

But do I need a marketing specialist to take care of all that or can I do it by myself?

Ideally, yes, there should be a technical marketing specialist understanding both technique and business, leading a whole team to create content, to make marketing materials to build marketing channels and to run marketing campaigns. But let’s be realistic, unless you work in a top 500 company, or a start-up SaaS, it’s unlikely that you’ll have this privilege. More likely there is no such team, one person (probably you) occasionally takes some time to update the new feature descriptions to your company’s homepage.

In this case you, technical engineer, will be the only hope. Take the responsibility and be the hero for your product. I will show you in future posts that, after learning a little bit of marketing knowledge and skills, you can be the perfect marketing leader for your product.