Highly Competitive - software industry insights

Goals and Metrics – Measuring Customer Engagement on the Web

 

The notions of web presence and customer engagement aren’t new -- but are gaining in interest as web presence expands beyond the corporate website and as companies must know more about effective means of connecting to customers. Many questions swirl around understanding what engagement is, what defining characteristics should be measured and why, how to align metrics to goals, and which metrics matter the most. Context – or even hierarchies of context – plays a major role for selecting metrics, analyzing the data returned by metrics, and understanding what to do with the data. 

Engagement - like influence - is at heart an abstract. For purposes of customer engagement on the web, engagement can be thought of as the measurement of attention to something, which takes us to the ‘can of worms’ of what constitutes customer attention to a company’s web presence. For each company, what comprises engagement can be fairly unique, generally derived from a matrix of attributes, in turn leading to a matrix of metrics. As web presence becomes more far-flung and sophisticated, the metrics, tools, data, and analyses become more complex.

Which are the right attributes and metrics? For each company, they are the ones that measure actions and events that relate to key business context and goals. Many different domain experts offer many different kinds of metrics from which to choose, any of which could be relevant to individual companies. Once a matrix of metrics has been selected, it’s likely that each organization will need to constantly assess that set of metrics for validity and effectiveness – and that the change of metrics selection will be continuous, hopefully to reflect: actions taken in response to analysis, new markets explored and company innovations.

Jumping into an assessment of customer engagement is not a simple undertaking and will take a lot of work. Monitoring web presence on sites other than the corporate website is still a new undertaking, with the tech tools still evolving. Also in continuing evolution is the understanding of how to interpret data collected and how to use that data to make decisions for solution offerings, customer connections and communication, and business strategy. A company will need to define both the current status and the desired status for what constitutes an ‘engaged customer’, yet another definition set that should continuously evolve.

 

Why Understanding Engagement Matters

Most organizations have moved well beyond clocking the number of hits on a web page. Not only do these organizations have a tall order to provide personalized experiences as well as high quality content on the corporate website, but visitors to the site must be sufficiently engaged to take action. What sort of action is taken depends on the company’s strategy for web presence and customer engagement, further in support of overall business strategies and goals.

Forrester analyst Stephen Powers covers web content management solutions, and to a certain extent, web engagement.  In The Online Customer Engagement Software Ecosystem, 2010 Powers discusses engagement:

Customer Engagement Remains Top Of Mind For Companies

The uncertain economy has increased pressure on companies to engage customers more efficiently, especially via online channels that offer lower-cost ways to interact with customers, enable better lead generation, and increase customer retention rates. This is likely why investments in software to manage customer experiences has held up relatively well in the current economy. 

Our most recent data suggests this trend will continue into the next year. Consider that in 2010, 51% of organizations plan content management implementations, more than one-third will implement or upgrade customer relationship management tools, and one in four is planning marketing automation software investments. 

 

An article in Forbes brings up the tough part of measuring engagement – the highly qualitative nature of engagement, no matter the context:

For the past year or so, the conversation around how to "engage" consumers online has spiked among publishers, media companies, advertisers and agencies. As Michael Mendenhall, CMO of Hewlett-Packard said, "Marketers monitor the front end and the back end so they see click-streams and commerce. ... The difficult part is the qualitative part in between, which is the level of engagement."

The qualitative aspect of web engagement takes us into the messier world of sentiment analysis, which is still a work-in-process, and that of semantic/content analysis. Demarcations are likely to start blurring between what matters for customer engagement on the corporate website and what matters on social sites, also along qualitative lines.

Web analytics domain expert Avinash Kaushik wrote a blog post in 2007 entitled “Engagement" Is Not A Metric, It's An Excuse providing this view on qualitative versus quantitative aspects of engagement:

At the heart of it, engagement tries to measure something deeply qualitative.
Yet most efforts to measure it in our world tend to be hard core quantitative (translate that as: "we have clickstream, let's take our interpretations of what could possibly be happening, now find clicks that can carry the burden of our personal impositions, voila! here's engagement").

The reason engagement has not caught on like wild fire (except in white papers and analyst reports and pundit posts) is that it is a "heart" metric we are trying to measure with "head" data, and engagement is such a utterly unique feeling for each website that it will almost always have a unique definition for each and every website.

 

Since 2007, quite a bit more progress has been made in the how and why of web engagement metrics, but some of the problems remain. Distributed web presence outside the corporate website has added another dimension to the qualitative elusiveness of web/customer engagement. User-generated content in forums, blogs, microblogs, communities must be found, assessed for sentiment and key content. Processes for engaging the author of the UGC must be designed to try to open more communication channels for customers. And then we have to figure out how to measure all of this in meaningful ways.

 

 Choosing Effective Metrics

Not everything that counts can be measured. Not everything that can be measured counts.

-- Albert Einstein

 

So…there are an overwhelming number of individual metrics that relate to customer / web engagement, the customer experience on a particular website, both in qualitative and quantitative terms. Web engagement not only pertains to company-owned web assets but to the many social sites that continue to proliferate on the Internet. Companies must decide where and how they wish to monitor engagement, using metrics and the tools to do so. Before choosing metrics, a clear understanding of the company’s hierarchy of strategies, programs and objectives must be in place.

Not only do high level business strategies impact the selection of attributes to monitor and measure, but other levels of strategies and objectives matter too. Individual initiatives designed by product marketing, marketing and sales groups have specific achievable components and objectives. Web engagement metrics will align to levels of program objectives as well as to the company’s ‘big picture’, essentially a hierarchy of metrics building toward overall business strategies, and toward building future direction. Metrics only have meaning if proper analysis is conducted, results examined against objectives, and if processes for taking action are in place, with decisions and next steps activated. (And then repeat….)

I’m not going to provide an overview of the vast array of tech tools available to assist in monitoring and measuring web/customer engagement. The solution space is in early stages, so there is much still to do to ‘master’ the world of engagement metrics. Suffice it to say, that there is a lot of work going on to develop and refine tech offerings.

In the category of ‘not everything that counts can be measured”: Listening, understanding, acting on  what engaged customers/buyers have to say are among the most important corporate ‘to-dos’ regarding real engagement. Companies must also heed the contextual relevance of any customer-generated content, for real understanding; content cannot be yanked from its context and analyzed in a vacuum.

  

Different Strokes for Different Folks – The Many Faces of Engagement Metrics

I’m going to run through a number of metric matrices proposed by several sources to illustrate different approaches and ways of organizing engagement measurement.

  

>> Web Properties Owned by Organizations

In the Forrester report Marketing’s New Key Metric: Engagement, 2007, four main components are identified as attributes for customer engagement:

Involvement – Measurable aspects of an individual connection to an organization or brand

Interaction – Depth/breadth of an individual connection

Intimacy – Sentiment of an individual towards organization / brand

Influence – Indicators that an individual will encourage someone else to visit, consider, buy

 

 
 
Forrester: Marketing’s New Key Metric: Engagement, 2007

 

Eric Peterson, of Web Analytics Demystified and well-known in this field, published a multi-part blog series in 2006 on engagement (I recommend reading the entire series). Here are a couple of his notions regarding the selection of metrics:

Engagement goals:

(Example) - Based on my knowledge of my site visitors and their long-term usage patterns, my engagement goals are as follows:

• I would like that visitors would view and interact with certain content on my site;
• I would like visitors to subscribe to this weblog to stay connected;
• I would like visitors to maintain a low recency with my content, regardless of whether they’re reading blog posts or viewing pages on my site;
• When visitors are on my web site, I would like them to spend a reasonable amount of time interacting with my content;
• When visitors return to my site, I prefer they remember my domain name and return to my site directly, either via a bookmark or by directly entering my URL into their browser.

Key areas for metrics:

…we had been talking about how to measure engagement on their web site. We’d gone round-and-round on ideas about what constitutes an “engaged” visitor and narrowed it down to a few key areas:

• The visitor views “critical” content on the web site
• The visitor has returned to the web site recently
• The visitor returns directly to the web site some of the time
• Some high percentage of the visitor’s sessions are “long” sessions
• If available, the visitor is subscribed to at least one available site feed

  

More recently, Chris Meares, senior data analyst at philly.com, home of the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News, applied his understanding of Eric Peterson’s work in engagement by adapting a white paper called “Measuring the Unmeasurable: Visitor Engagement” by Peterson and Joseph Carrabis.  Meares collaborated with Ryan Davis, the president of Philly.com, and Wendy Warren, the vice president for content, on their formula for measuring visitor engagement. The result so far is:

 

C_i — Click Index: visits must have at least 6 pageviews, not counting photo galleries

D_i — Duration Index: visits must have spend a minimum of 5 minutes on the site

R_i — Recency Index: visits that return daily

L_i — Loyalty Index: visits that either are registered at the site or visit it at least three times a week

B_i — Brand Index: visits that come directly to the site by either bookmark or directly typing www.philly.com or come through search engines with keywords like “philly.com” or “inquirer”

I_i — Interaction Index: visits that interact with the site via commenting, forums, etc.

P_i — Participation Index: visits that participate on the site via sharing, uploading pics, stories, videos, etc.

 

Tracking site visits with this level of specificity is time-consuming - Meares says he devotes about a third of his full-time job to analysis of the engagement equation — but it has produced some interesting information. For instance: “We’re definitely seeing the impact of social media and how it provides engaged visitors.” While Google and Yahoo provide a lot of traffic, the visits that they send to Philly.com don’t tend to be engaged. Only 20.34 percent of visits that come through Google are engaged visits. In comparison, 33.64 percent of visits that come via Facebook are engaged.

 

  

>> Customer Engagement on Other Sites

Over in that other world of web presence and engagement, social media sites, many domain experts and proponents have been working through definitions and metrics for customer/visitor engagement as well. The discussion of attributes and metrics for engagement on social sites has great relevance to those monitoring engagement on corporate websites, since many companies have set up their own social sites for forums, communities, blogging and so on. And of course, these companies pursue monitoring the many sites that do not belong to them.

 

Jeremiah Owyang has written numerous posts in his blog on the topic of what constitutes engagement and what metrics are useful for participants in social media sites. Here’s one version from 2007:

My working definition:

“Engagement indicates the level of authentic involvement, intensity, contribution, and ownership”

 

It’s possible for me to shorten it to:

“Apparent Interest” (and later whittled down to “Interest”)

 

Engagement Formula: 

“Attention + Interaction + Velocity + Authority + Relevant Attributes (variable)”

 

 

  


http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/category/social-media-measurement/

 

 

Social / Customer Engagement – another view

 

 
 
http://emediavitals.com/article/37/emerging-web-metrics-focus-engagement-audience-quality

 

 

 

Related Links

Goodbye Corporate Website – Hello Web Presence Management Framework?

Moving beyond WCM - Web Experience Management software solutions & markets

Time Travel Required: Finding #WEM in the 2010 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management

SMB / Mid-Market B2B Software vendors - Findability + web presence + social: attracting the “customer as buyer”

B2B WEM / WCM Software Vendors Targeting Mid-Market customers: stay where you are!  

B2B Social CRM for Software Vendors and the Lifecycle of Customer Experience

Content Marketing Strategy for B2B Software Vendors: Starring the ‘New’ White Paper

The Ever-Expanding Importance of Analytics–True Intelligence for Business

 

About the author: Julie Hunt is an accomplished software industry analyst, providing strategic market and competitive insights. Her 20+ years as a software professional range from the very technical side to customer-centric work in solutions consulting, sales and marketing.  Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt   For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategic Product & Market Intelligence Services

Time Travel Required: Finding WEM in the 2010 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management

 

A few days ago while reading through various articles about the future of websites and web presence, I came across a post by Thomas Baekdal that started off with a look back to the beginnings of web design:

 Back in 1998 designing for the internet was all about 3 things:

Design for the desktop, where the vast majority was using 800x600, with their browser maximized.

Design a website, a place where people could come to you. With emphasize on getting traffic and have them stick around as long as possible.

Optimize for the many search engines, because that was the primary way people would get to you.

But if we fast-forward to today, none of these really matters anymore. You still need them, but they are no longer the best things to do.

  

The reference to 1998 immediately brought to mind the recent Gartner Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management: while the MQ does cover concepts newer than Baekdal’s 1998 list, the basic approach for this MQ is very 1998: it’s déjà vu all over again…

Then I recalled this passage in Jon Marks' post on the 2010 MQ:

Most of these little yellow dots haven’t drifted very far in a year – the report is pretty similar despite the M&A activity that has kept us bloggers busy. So pretty much a repeat of last year.

If I were a police officer, I would be repeating:  Move along, nothing to see here. No offense to most of the vendors in the benchmark, but this MQ does nothing to excite us about the future of websites / WEM / web presence nor does it do much to stimulate buyer interests for finding the right-fit solutions for business needs.  

  

Redux: Moving Beyond WCM - Web Experience Management Software Solutions and Markets

 So I decided to take a look at an article I wrote almost a year ago about understanding WEM (web experience management) markets and solutions: the article includes a reference to the 2009 Gartner MQ for WCM. I wanted to see how many of my reactions to the 2009 MQ would now be different >> answer: none. Which sadly means that not much has changed with this new 2010 Gartner benchmark for providing value to vendors and buyers: 

When it comes to how to select the best-fit Web Content Management (WCM) software, a great deal of confusion continues to haunt vendors and customers alike.  Industry analysts have done little to make this any easier by perpetuating these mistakes:

• Frequently lumping together disparate offerings that target clearly separate customer segments and customer needs
• Failing to segment WCM offerings into solution categories, such as:  Web Experience Management (WEM) for Enterprise, basic web publishing for internal business processes/intranet, mid-market solutions for e-commerce, and so on
• Persisting with the pointless notion that WCM is a functional subset of Enterprise Content Management (ECM), especially in light of the speciousness of the ECM platform; such a notion is even more off-target when considering WEM solutions
• While understanding that WEM solutions are directly tied to interactive/digital marketing initiatives, analyst reports and benchmarks fail to use this understanding as an essential tenet of such reports

  

Looking for WEM?

Web Experience Management has come together as a segment of WCM software solutions and reflects current directions for websites and web presence for certain companies and organizations:

It has been mainly customers who have helped to propel the WCM industry into providing the sorts of capabilities that are really needed for external-facing websites that are central to strategic business objectives.  So a significant segment of the overall WCM market has evolved into Web Experience Management (WEM), for which a much larger solution ecosystem has come together.  Most Web Experience Management platforms have little to do with basic content management or basic web publishing (à la WordPress and TypePad), and even less to do with the so-called ECM (enterprise content management) platform. 

A more complete WEM solution description includes:

• Understanding of solutions for B2B, B2C web/marketing initiatives
• Sophisticated digital / interactive marketing strategies
• External-facing web presence / multi-channel content delivery
• Website essential to corporate business strategy
• Ecosystem of ancillary tools to complete end-to-end solution for customer objectives
• Savvy use of social media, well-integrated into website and marketing plans
• Alignment with interactive/digital agencies

So a Web Experience Management solution is really a composite of several “markets”: 

• WCM solution suite, with usability both for business users and IT personnel (includes behind-the-scenes “content management”, workflow, design tools, and so on)
• Enterprise-quality portal / presentation management
• Recommendations-like technology for social search and personalization
• Web analytics / testing / content monetizing tools
• Rich media and video content management (monetizing components as appropriate)
• Social collaboration / social marketing capabilities
• Extensive integration / interoperability capabilities at several levels of the enterprise infrastructure

 

For buyers in search of WEM software solution vendors, it’s going to take some work to find them in the 2010 MQ. While the 2010 MQ dances around a number of the above capabilities, it never directly addresses WEM solutions, preferring to stick to more of a “classic” (1998?) description of WCM:

Gartner defines WCM as the process of controlling the content to be consumed over one or more online channels through the use of commercial, open-source or hosted management tools based on a core repository. We exclude products such as portals and e-commerce engines even though these technologies have overlapping functions in areas such as personalization, content management and content delivery.

 

 Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management 2010

 
Source: Gartner (August 2010)    subscription or purchase 

 Also available as pdf downloads from CoreMedia and Sitecore, as well as web “display” document on Oracle website

 

 

The Inside-Out Corporation

This particular MQ report for web content management seems to epitomize the work of a corporation more interested in its own goals, and one that is not operating from the customer POV, even though a lot of its revenue is customer-driven. And this particular MQ seems comprised of artificial parameters that only benefit a Gartner agenda. Drawing on my 1998 flashback, this benchmark also seems to be advocating “old school” decision-making processes for tech purchase decisions, focusing on IT rather than business/marketing decision-makers, and on recession scare tactics by primarily advocating big vendors to make the “safe” decision.

In a recession economy, for a company to effect growth, risks have to be taken, and business should be conducted in new ways with new technology paradigms. Companies must make tech purchases based on business goals and needs that contribute to success and competitive edge. Corporate websites and web presence are critical to the success of many businesses: to connect to potential customers wherever they are on the web; to engage buyers - whether B2C or B2B. How a company effectively uses the internet is constantly changing, so corporations need forward-looking solutions – unfortunately we aren’t finding guidance for such solutions in this Gartner MQ.

Evaluations of WEM / WCM solutions are somewhat unique in that they must consider two levels of customers: one is comprised of the buyers of the technology to build websites and manage web presence, and the other is comprised of the target customers that the original tech buyers want to attract/engage with their websites and web presence. Since WEM / WCM solutions impact two levels of buyers, we must look at the technology as a means to an end – it is the “end” that really matters and must be foremost in the minds of solution buyers. Unfortunately this Gartner MQ is not very focused on either the direct buyer of the technology or the customers that the WEM solution buyer hopes to attract.

  

Vendors Offerings Are Part of the Problem

WEM / WCM vendors also own responsibility for the failure of analyst benchmarks to provide clear guidance for buyers. Most vendors adhere to the vague domains of “WCM”, or worse, “CMS”, hedging their bets with offerings that are too horizontal to know if they truly align to the needs of buyers in search of specific WEM capabilities.  WEM is one of few truly segmented solutions in the larger mass of WCM. It’s time for vendors to shake off non-differentiated, broad offerings, to declare real solution segments and target markets (by working with specific industry scenarios and revenue segments). By doing so, vendor solutions will only get better at meeting the needs of specific markets and customers.

I’m frustrated by the continuation of terms like WCM / ECM / CMS – these vague terms just blur a “solution space” that is populated with scores of products from very basic to very complex. Lately there has been a superficial debate that WEM is yet another meaningless vendor buzzword. To the contrary, overly generalized terms like WCM and CMS are the buzzwords that have no real meaning anymore because they include everything and define nothing. WEM is an actual solution with clear purpose and defined capabilities. Whether or not a particular vendor provides an authentic WEM solution is another issue – but to assume none are providing WEM is ridiculous.

 

Back to the Future

Web presence and the various purposes of websites have changed dramatically and will continue to do so. In this MQ, Gartner seems to have overlooked the importance of distributed web presence and new approaches to marketing on the web. New solutions are evolving that are not necessarily based in “classic” WCM.

But what may be the most important factor for a lot of companies is a strong emphasis on the customer-focused web presence for the company. And this may mean that company web presence will show up on other websites, instead of on the corporate website. Additionally a WCM/WEM software platform may only be one of the components of a new management framework for all web presence (management of web content still matters but may not be tied to a specific website anymore).

Content is extremely important to a lot of web marketing plans and strategies, and content is the meat of most social sites, whether it is a conversation thread, a video, a blog post, and so on. So look for WEM solutions themselves to continue to evolve as the means of managing and delivering any kind of content for sites anywhere on the web, through any channel.

Web marketing and customer relationship strategies are changing (and improving) – companies need new solutions and practices to manage the new world. More companies have come to understand that first they must build the web marketing / presence strategy that will accomplish their goals. Then they have to figure out how to achieve the goals of the marketing strategy, which will involve preferred practices and processes, as well as technology.  With web presence evolution, marketing strategies should include orchestration of web presence via other sites, and how to integrate with conversations and content from those external sites.

 

To find significant forward-looking thinking regarding the future of web presence and websites, it may be best to look at the many talented writers and practitioners for website design and WEM solutions technology who understand the evolution taking place right now.  Many writers and practitioners for marketing technology, digital marketing and social media also contribute valuable insight for the future of web presence. Here are a few suggestions to get started:

Web Content, Website design:

A List Apart

Ian Truscott

Paul Boag

Stéphane Croisier

Aral Balkan

Aarron Walter

 

CMS Wire has been featuring many talented writers and recently added a WEM focus (in CMS Wire WEM is “web engagement management” but the capabilities and intent are the same)

 

Interactive Marketing – Social Media:

Jeremiah Owyang and Altimeter Group

Hubspot

Chris Brogan 

David Armano and Edelman Digital       

 

  

Related Articles:

Moving beyond WCM - Web Experience Management software solutions and markets

Goodbye Corporate Website – Hello Web Presence Management Framework?

The Effective Intranet – Engaging the Employee as Customer

B2B WEM / WCM Software Vendors Targeting Mid-Market customers: stay where you are!  

SMB / Mid-Market B2B Software vendors - Findability + web presence + social: attracting the “customer as buyer”

About the author: Julie Hunt is an accomplished software industry analyst, providing strategic market and competitive insights. Her 20+ years as a software professional range from the very technical side to customer-centric work in solutions consulting, sales and marketing.  Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt   For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Market & Competitive Intelligence Services

Disclaimer: Julie Hunt occasionally contributes articles to CMS Wire.

  

The Effective Intranet – Engaging the Employee as Customer

 WEM technology can make enterprise collaboration more effective

 

 

Enterprise intranets are usually created to act as the main conduits for internal collaboration, including content creation / acquisition. But, to-date, most are failing to engage their internal customers: the employees of corporations.  According to a 2009 report by Watson Wyatt, only 50% of employees accessed the intranet on a daily basis; 80% said their company’s system needed improvement; and 50% said searching on their intranet was too difficult. Instead of functioning as a framework to access self-service portals and the apps/tools needed to be more productive, intranets are often difficult to navigate, out-of-date, non-intuitive, and bulky.

 

Bill Ives notes in his review of the Global Intranet Trends 2010 Report:

The intranet is starting to become the entry point into the “workplace web” – the collection of resources and information needed by staff. This includes applications, intranet sites, specialized portals, team spaces, collaboration spaces and so on. This was the original vision for many intranets but rarely realized.

 

To improve intranets to act as effective “gateways” for collaboration, intranets would likely benefit from many capabilities incorporated into Web Experience Management (WEM) for external-facing websites, including the use of social apps. In this case, a company’s employees are the customers to be engaged and converted.

 

 

Processes, Tools, Interconnected Employees

Community and collaboration in business enterprises are about people working together more effectively, quickly, and proactively – to achieve the goals of the business in dynamic fashion. This definition of collaboration seems to be eluding many companies that have enterprise intranets and are adopting social media tools. It’s not about tools adoption, but about interconnected employees working together more often, reducing silos of knowledge and expertise, and sharing relevant insight as quickly as possible.

 

The intranet can utilize approaches “borrowed” from WEM-oriented external websites to improve usability and engagement, but intranets must also integrate with business processes that are part of individual employee workflows. The intranet can become a personalized focus for an employee’s essential information flow related to the business operations that the employee ties into. The context for collaboration on intranets is connectivity to business processes and work. To increase employee use of intranets requires that intranets embody the employee’s "way of working".

 

Sameer Patel makes this observation in his post on the Google Wave discontinuation:

Organizations still need to understand how to design work processes that blend optimal process and collaboration but its hell of a lot easier when the software plays nice…end users are still struggling to understand the basic applicability of these new tools to meeting their performance requirements better/faster/simpler. Organizations on the other hand often have a huge gap between declaring big picture strategic collaborative intent and tool selection.  

 

 

WEM for Intranets

For intranets built as “engaging” sites, several WEM capabilities work well:

· End-to-end software solution, with excellent usability both for business users and IT personnel (includes behind-the-scenes document and content management, workflow, design tools, and so on)

· Recommendations-like technology for social search and personalization (as well as enterprise search)

· Analytics – for usage and performance stats and improvements

· Rich media and video capabilities

· Social collaboration / communication capabilities

· Mobile access / multi-channel

· Extensive integration / interoperability capabilities at several levels of the enterprise infrastructure

 

Like external-facing websites, usable and relevant intranets must be designed from employee POVs, but with this difference: the larger the organization, the more diverse the employee perspectives and needs. External-facing websites usually have much more focused target markets. To deliver effective intranet experiences to all employees, it may take a composite of applications, not just one main platform, to achieve all of the necessary services. Beyond tools for overt collaboration, communication and user-generated content, there are needs for more “formal” services for document management, forms management, legal and HR processes, and so on.

 

Personalization and Customization

Personalization is one of the main keys for the engagement and enablement of employees using intranets more effectively, while also greatly aiding the work employees do each day. Personalization is becoming increasingly sophisticated, which helps the customization of intranets to have more impact. There are technologies available for social search, federated search results, self-adaptive UIs, recommendations, bookmarks, “my links”, “my sites”, and so on. Even basic customization can often lead to decent productivity gains for employees. Role-based personalization has great potential for connecting employees much more tightly to the content, social media and business apps that matter most for their jobs. Personalization / customization advances should lead to aligning intranet usage to the business processes of daily work.

 

Search and Relevance

Search is the other essential key; unfortunately intranet / enterprise search is still far from the Google-quality search employees would like for fast, efficient acquisition of relevant information. Intranet solutions will have to continue to focus on improving search, including highly customizable approaches to advanced search. For collaboration purposes, “people search” has become more important to locate experts and project resources. Recommendations technology can also play a part here.

 

Interactive Collaboration and Content-Creation Through Social Apps

Social media content resources include the usual roll call of blogs, wikis, forums, KB, etc. Ease of use, acquisition and curation for all social venues will make a big difference for aiding employees in work. Wikis in particular need excellent oversight to remain current, relevant and usable. Social media can also provide a wide range of communication venues between employees and teams. Intranets are becoming more real-time through chat, micro-blogging, and other tools, especially useful for the growing prevalence of virtual teams. As with all intranet capabilities, social apps require frequent and energetic tending.

 

Intranet Content Management / Document Management

Social apps can enhance how intranets are used, but do not cover all that the intranet should offer. Other services include sophisticated content management, document management, and access to more formal content from HR / legal departments. In the realm of content management, many different kinds of content live on intranets. Mark Morrell, in his post All intranet content is not the same lists four types: Formal, Team, Crowd, and Personal. “A fifth category covers services, which are online processes where people do tasks to fulfil their roles.”  In many cases, it will take composite technologies to meet all intranet content needs.

 

Multi-channel Management - Mobile Access to Intranets

With the wider distribution of employees and growth of virtual teams, mobile access to intranets must evolve and improve. The ever-improving sophistication of mobile devices is increasingly making it easier for employees to use mobile access to perform work tasks via intranets, especially with tablet devices now in the mix. It is likely that the intranet design for mobile users should be separate from the traditional enterprise network-based intranet, but should also include the WEM approach to provide better usability and engagement. In fact, with the proliferation of customer-centric apps for mobile, there are even greater expectations for what enterprise intranets should provide for the employee experience.

 

 

The Human Side of Intranets for Enterprise Collaboration

There are multiple obstacles to achieving effective intranets that engage and convert employees, including the failure to allocate sufficient money and permanent staffing to build and maintain high-quality sites. After the intranet is in place, enterprises must next create and sustain processes to continually improve and innovate intranet applications and services. But the biggest obstacle comes from the “human side” of intranets.

 

Ironically, for many companies, implementation efforts for collaboration technology, such as intranets and social apps, will be doomed to failure for one simple reason: most enterprises have failed to engender a “collaboration culture” based on real human interaction. Enterprise collaboration as a practice requires true top-down corporate commitment to a collaboration culture that is strategic to business goals and is an important component of internal business processes. While employing a WEM approach to create more effective intranets is an excellent idea, it is still essential that companies grow and nurture live collaboration cultures, where collaboration is a natural response for business activities, for any departments in the enterprise.  Planning a healthy collaboration culture also requires a dynamic plan for the role that WEM and social technology will play to bring the people in the company together for productive interaction and interconnectedness.

 

 

 

About the author: Julie Hunt is an accomplished software industry analyst, providing strategic market and competitive insights. Her 20+ years as a software professional range from the very technical side  to customer-centric work in solutions consulting, sales and marketing.  Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt   For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Market & Competitive Intelligence Services

 

B2B WEM/WCM Software Vendors Targeting Mid-Market customers: stay where you are!

 

Here’s a piece of advice that very few B2B software vendors of any sort ever follow: 

Vendors: If you have been targeting Mid-Market customers – then stay where you are!

Ignore the siren song of the high-end Enterprise.

 

This advice is especially meaningful for B2B vendors for Web Content Management (WCM) and Web Engagement Management (WEM).

 

From my experience, many of the WCM / WEM / CMS vendors seem to do very little market intelligence research and analysis to understand what exactly they are selling and to which customers/markets. Most WCM/WEM/CMS vendors seem to be milling around with no clear indication of how each vendor aligns to clearly defined solution, customer and market segments within a go-to-market matrix.  The main focus of most of these vendors is on feature sets, and not on delivering authentic solutions for specific industry scenarios and business problems.  When any sort of Mid-Market B2B software vendor persists with very horizontal solutions, it is in danger of “disappearing”.

 

The mid to upper tiers of the Mid-Market provide a fertile market for B2B vendors who are themselves SMB or Mid-Market companies. For the mid to upper tiers of the Mid-Market, annual revenue runs from $250M to just under $1B. Vendors will do better if they segregate this range into two segments ($250M-$499M and $500M-$999M respectively).  Within those two segments, vendors should then select and learn a lot about specific customers and various solution scenarios that matter to those customers.

 

I’m specifically calling out Mid-Market customers for WEM (rather than “classic SMB”), due to the higher cost of implementing digital marketing solutions based on WEM platforms, which are likely out of reach for classic SMB companies. Once a vendor is committed to targeting Mid-Market companies, the next phase is to very specifically target segments of customers for mid-market offerings. 

 

 

Drifting into the High-End Enterprise Usually Ends Badly for Smaller Vendors

I’ve seen too many SMB / Mid-Market software vendors lured by potential big money and big deals in the high-end enterprise; after taking the plunge, very few of these vendors do well or even survive. It is near-to-impossible for smaller software vendors to compete against large vendors when providing high-end solutions. When trying to compete with the “big boys”, sales engagements frequently deteriorate into pricing wars that can destroy the well-being and income of the smaller vendor. After crossing over, the smaller vendor spends all the time on “me too” development for what the high-end vendors are already doing. The smaller vendor becomes snarled up in feature bloat that leads to the bastardization of its original offering. And worse, the smaller vendor ends up alienating its original target markets of mid-market companies and loses their business.

 

The high-end enterprise is a very tough place for smaller software vendors: there is a much smaller field of potential customers, fierce competition for those customers, plus larger software vendors already have established extensive relationships in these enterprises. Large enterprise customers are also harder to please, bring on longer sales cycles that include more chances to fail. Even when a smaller vendor wins an initial deal with a large enterprise company, it is usually displaced by a larger vendor very quickly.

 

Conversely, when targeting the Mid-Market, very few high-end vendors go very deep into this overall segment (and rarely into SMB). For the most part, large enterprise software vendors still don’t really know how to win Mid-Market business or provide the right-fit solutions. And it’s not just about price but about understanding how Mid-Market buys software solutions . On the other hand, a Mid-Market vendor already has decent affinity for some of the concerns of its potential Mid-Market customers, simply by reflecting on what matters to the vendor’s own success.

 

 

Vendor-performed Segmentation Is Essential to Build WEM/WCM Solutions for Mid-Market

Mid-Market (and SMB) customers are overwhelmed by the large number of CMS offerings of all kinds and are not well prepared to figure out which ones are appropriate for WEM or even just WCM. WEM vendors targeting the Mid-Market have to do a much better job of marketing and engaging specific segments.

 

Vendors must take action to properly position themselves in segmentation to differentiate their solutions form the mass of WCM/WEM offerings. They must put focused thought and time into identifying and understanding specific customer segments in the Mid-Market. Then vendors must undertake further understanding of what the vendor solutions need to provide the best support for target customers. Vendors need to be clear on what the solutions are not, to avoid “market sprawl”. It will make a huge difference if vendors put good time into a conscious and rigorous go-to-market strategy that is continually fine-tuned. 

 

Take time to properly segment target customers and markets for solutions:

· Know the target customer size – usually based on revenue ranges

· Identify who should use your solution and why – what problem(s) does it address (be very specific) – stay far away from the massive horizontal pack of “CMS” offerings

· Research and select one or two industries you’d like to work with; then select a segment in the industry that is a good bet for WCM/WEM solutions

· Analyze and build out specific industry scenario solutions that really work – again focus on real target customers and real customer problems/needs

· Keep in touch with the customers who are using the scenario solutions: fine-tune, improve, evolve into other focused solutions

· Assess the success of the above to make decisions about new go-to-market strategies that will add growth to the company

· Truly support customers throughout the lifecycle of the customer experience

 

 

No Illusions – Price is #1 Criterion for Selling to Mid-Market

I’m just calling this out plain and simple:  for most Mid-Market customers, price is the first requirement to be met by prospective vendors. Most Mid-Market companies have very clear parameters for what they are willing to spend on software. But the Mid-Market also wants value for price. When I say price, I mean the total cost of the end-to-end solution that will be up and running and working properly – so price includes money, time and people.

 

Many Mid-Market companies have small IT groups, so the following capabilities are essential: ease of implementation, low maintenance, ease of use for non-techies, good to great performance, delivery on vendor promises. When selling to Mid-Market companies, publish honest prices on your corporate website. Revealing pricing is a part of marketing to and engaging the customer-as-buyer when dealing with the mid-market. Remember: Mid-market companies have no time or patience for long sales cycles and complicated pricing schemes.

 

 

Strategy for Providing and Selling WEM to Mid-Market Companies: keep it simple

Vendors must take the time to research, analyze and understand what comprises a WEM solution for target mid-market companies. They have to take a look at the overall WEM capabilities of their solutions, and then reconcile which capabilities matter to their Mid-Market target segments. CMSWire has had a recent series on WEM solutions that is a good starting point to help vendors with mapping a solution to the needs and requirements of desired customers.

 

Where WEM is heading for the Mid-Market:

· Product/solution capabilities that meet Mid-Market requirements

· Capabilities that support marketing strategies of most Mid-Market companies

· Inclusion of social media capabilities and/or integrations with social media and Social CRM apps

· Monitoring trends related to desires/needs of target markets and specific industry scenarios (identifying what Mid-Market segments need, not what big enterprise companies need)

· But continue to monitor Enterprise trends to watch for trickle-down effects – this is where vendor smarts and market intelligence must come into play

 

 

Innovate With Real Solutions for Real Markets

Smaller vendors for Mid-Market WEM solutions are frequently more agile (carrying less legacy and expensive baggage) when it comes to pursuing innovation that will benefit target customers. These vendors are better positioned to move quickly to embrace future trends that define where solution markets are heading.

 

Vendor success comes from continuous innovation that makes sense for its Mid-Market customers:

· Engage in continuous market intelligence processes to monitor target markets / customers, and what they want for future success – many sources for this information

· Innovate specifically for Mid-Market target customers – perform excellent research/analysis to understand which are the best markets/customers/solution scenarios

· Conduct continuous conversations with current customers, and with companies wanted as new customers – embrace Social CRM practices for better conversations, listening

· Keep an eye on what the marketing teams of Mid-Market companies’ will need from WEM solutions

· Monitor enterprise-level trends for WEM to determine if the trends are meaningful for Mid-Market companies; also follow WEM trends for consumer marketing for new ideas – but choose wisely for real market strengths

· Don’t follow in the footsteps of big WEM solutions just to land where they are now

o    Jump ahead to new trends that make sense for target Mid-Market segments

o    Pick innovation that is right for target customers and for the vendor: real differentiation will result

 

 

Jeremiah Owyang on Future of the Corporate Website

Recently at the Gilbane Conference 2010 in San Francisco, and on his blog, Jeremiah Owyang has set out some compelling predictions for the evolution of company websites and the potential new world of distributed web presence. He sees social sites driving far more customer connections and brand awareness than the traditional corporate website of past years.  This is the sort of innovative thinking that vendors for Mid-Market WEM/WCM solutions should be monitoring. 

 

 

A couple of Jeremiah’s slides from Gilbane Conference 2010 San Francisco:

 

http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2010/05/19/slides-roadmap-for-integration-of-social-into-your-corporate-website/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Related Posts:

Goodbye Corporate Website – Hello Web Presence Management Framework?

 

SMB / Mid-Market B2B Software vendors - Findability + web presence + social: attracting the “customer as buyer”

 

B2B Social CRM for Software Vendors and the Lifecycle of Customer Experience

 

Moving beyond WCM - Web Experience Management software solutions and markets

 

Selling Software Solutions to SMB Markets – Who and How To Target

 

 

 

 

About the author: Julie Hunt is an accomplished market intelligence analyst, providing strategic market and competitive insights for the software industry. Her 20+ years as a software professional range from the very technical side  to customer-centric work in solutions consulting, sales and marketing.  Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt   For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Market & Competitive Intelligence Services

 

 

Disclosure:  From time to time, I contribute articles to CMSWire.

 

 

Goodbye Corporate Website – Hello Web Presence Management Framework?

Future of tools for managing web content and web presence anywhere

 

 

Recently a colleague was exploring options for improving the web marketing capabilities of the company that he works for. He started his efforts by looking at “traditional” Web Content Management (WCM) software, with an eye to Web Experience (Engagement) Management platforms. But since his company is itself a mid-market-sized company, he was very uncomfortable with the options – and not just because of cost and time to implement. As conversations with his company management evolved, my colleague realized that he was not satisfied with a WCM / WEM solution because it didn’t seem to be the right platform for their web marketing strategy and business goals.

 

These days, companies of all sizes have tired of the expense and complexity of many WCM / WEM solutions, and would dearly love agile alternatives. And, yes, there are lesser expensive options. But what may be the most important factor for a lot of companies, is a strong emphasis on the customer-focused web presence for the company. And this may mean that company web presence will show up on other websites, instead of on the corporate website -- which leads to the notion of whether or not the “corporate website” is becoming obsolete for many types of companies.

 

Web marketing and customer relationship strategies are changing (and improving) – companies need new solutions and practices to manage the new world. More companies have come to understand that first they must build the web marketing / presence strategy that will accomplish their goals. Then they have to figure out how to achieve the goals of the marketing strategy, which will involve preferred practices and processes, as well as technology.  With web presence evolution, marketing strategies should include orchestration of web presence via other sites, and how to integrate with conversations and content from those external sites.

 

 

B2C or B2B – Which Organization Needs A Corporate Website?

Whether or not a company should have a corporate website can depend on many factors. For both B2C and B2B companies, content still matters and has to be located somewhere. The B2B company has the greater need for a corporate website, but must now evolve the corporate website to a social / customer hub. B2C sales and marketing goals might be less about content per se and much more about customer conversations and brand awareness that take place anywhere on the web. Jeremiah Owyang points out that the corporate website is less and less the most likely place to connect with customers.

 

 

B2C – Time to Get Rid of the Monolithic Corporate Website?

Is the corporate website obsolete? Most corporate websites do not work well for customers. The sites are designed from the corporate POV, with too much useless content that is hard to find anyway. Frequently corporate websites become money pits, requiring too many resources over time compared to the benefits received.

 

Particularly for B2C businesses, new thinking is that the corporate website might be completely unnecessary for customer interactions and brand promotion.  Going where the customers are, i.e. social sites, seems to be an effective way to better connect. Monitoring web presence and participating in conversations on other sites help companies reach out to current and new customers in ways that matter to these customers and can bring effective results to companies.

 

Current thinking is that social sites are taking sales endeavors to a new place since customers can now participate in spreading the word to potential customers through forums, communities, ratings, reviews. On the flip side, corporations have the responsibility of finding and responding to concerns, complaints, feedback, and requests posted on social sites, hopefully to resolve problems, to engage and attract customers through answers, and to learn from customer POVs.

 

 

B2B Companies Still Benefit from Corporate Websites, With Social Improvements

One approach to introducing more web presence into corporate websites is to add improved social capabilities that interact well with customers and potential buyers. This approach appeals to companies that want a measure of control over customer “conversations” and also makes sense if the company is using social capabilities as part of a customer relationship and support strategy. Content still matters for B2B websites – B2B are customers still looking for a lot of different kinds of content that they want to easily find on the corporate website.  However, many potential B2B customers are also influenced by interactions and content on external social sites – the savvy B2B company had better understand the importance of such sites.  Integration with and monitoring of social sites are key.

 

Hubspot - inbound marketing and social media advisors::

Your website may very well be the most powerful tool in your marketing kit. Not only is it the place prospects and clients go to learn more about you and your services, but it has a huge impact on their ultimate purchase decision.

The Hubspot post goes on to discuss a survey conducted by RainToday.com that looked at buyers of professional services and the amount of influence that corporate websites exerted on the purchase decision:

According to the survey, 74% of buyers report the service provider's website holds at least "some influence" over their ultimate decision to buy services from the provider. This is 23 percentage points higher than in 2005 and represents a significant increase in the importance of websites.

 

B2B corporate websites need web management solutions not only for creating and maintaining more social and interactive experiences for customers visiting the site, but to monitor and participate in the conversations that take place on other sites. Other sorts of off-site social-related analytics need to take place, such as sentiment analysis. The results of monitoring and analytics must be used to fine-tune product and marketing strategies, and to help corporations better serve customers.

 

 

Jeremiah Owyang on the Future of Corporate Web Presence

Owyang throws out some compelling assertions: In the not-so-distant future, he states that there will be no “old school” corporate sites. There will only be sites assembled on the fly based on social data, a sort of dynamic personalization mashup of content and social engagement.

 

 Today, I’m pleased to see that the thinking –and technology, has emerged, where we’re finding a variety of companies that are integrating social technologies right into the corporate website, bringing the trusted discussions closer to the corporate site.

 

Although the highest state of nirvana (seamless integration) doesn’t yet exist, we should expect there to be very little difference between social technologies and corporate websites as content will assemble on the fly.  I predict URLs won’t matter, as content will be dynamically assembled around the buyer and their context in a variety of devices.  Sure, that’s far out thinking now, but that’s why we have several other stage gates that companies must first go through.

 

Owyang continues on the new social web presence:

1. Although it’s a new and experimental medium, brands should plan a roadmap.

2. The future of web experiences will be based around people – not products. 

3. Take inventory of all corporate web assets and identify where they are in the framework.

4. Next, identify the desired state, and then build a plan against it. Start small and slow, and be sure to have a strategy.

5. Don’t arbitrarily jump into the social marketing space without measurable KPIs. Be deliberate in your actions.

 

Owyang’s thinking is important especially for vendors of WCM / WEM software solutions since he may be pointing the way to future web presence solutions (a future that is not that distant). 

 

 

Should WCM / WEM Software be The Hub -- or one of the components?

Some vendors of “traditional” web content management solutions have been transitioning their offerings to WEM platforms where managing and enhancing the web experience or engagement of the customer is the central purpose. The current WEM platforms focus mainly on customer and social capabilities existing in the corporate website, and are in very early stages of supporting integrations with external social sites.

 

Those supporting the notion that WCM/WEM Platforms should manage web presence and continuation of corporate websites include:

Brice Dunwoodie of CMSWire is What is Web Engagement Management:

It's how you create and manage content, including primary web content, multi-device content, blogs, forums and wikis. Your WCM platform is also the hub of your social media integrations and increasingly the dashboard by which you view your brand's conversational world.

 

Further expansion on the WEM platform from Barb Mosher, CMSWire: The 5 Pillars of Web Engagement Management

1. Content Optimization: analytics, content and experience personalization, multi-variate testing, optimization and SEO.

2. Multi-channel Management:  delivering same message/experience to customers across devices and channels both online and offline – new mobile web

3. Conversational Engagement:  corporate website-based communities, UGC, commenting, trackbacks, micro-blogging, social media integration, analytics, social media monitoring and sentiment analysis.

4. Demand Generation:  customer engagement/experience through targeted marketing - increasing the number and quality of relationships, through need recognition, relevancy enhancements and engagement triggers.

5. Sales Automation: two-way CRM integration, social CRM; e-mail or other campaign integration with the content platform.

 

As described by CMSWire, WEM platforms would provide capabilities and monitoring of brand and customer conversations on corporate websites, as well as bi-directional communication extensions to external social sites.

 

On the other hand:

If the customer experience of a particular brand is taking place on external social sites, then there is now a distributed model for managing a brand’s web presence; the web experience/engagement for the customer is now remote from the corporate website.  So there is even more need for tools/solutions to monitor, listen, act, engage…for customer-focused purposes, as well as for corporate business goals (which should lean heavily towards the customer).

 

A WCM/WEM platform may not be the hub for the overall solution, but instead one of the components of a new management framework for all web presence (management of web content is still important but may not be tied to a specific website anymore).  But content is also integral to a lot of web marketing plans and strategies, and content is the meat of most social sites, whether it is a conversation thread, a video, a blog post, and so on. So look for WCM/WEM solutions themselves to continue to evolve as the means of managing and delivering any kind of content for sites anywhere on the web, through any channel.

  

 

Future Web Presence Management Solutions – What Could They Look Like?

A Web Presence Management Framework may be the best approach for monitoring and supporting a distributed web presence. With an emphasis on Management: the orchestration of all pertinent activities on social sites external to a corporate site. And the management of: marketing to / connecting with customers, monitoring and listening, responding, acting, analyzing, more acting. The Management Framework would be agile, timely, dynamic, flexible, open.

 

A starter list (high level) of potential capabilities and attributes for a Distributed Web Presence Management Framework:

· Sophisticated, agile management / orchestration capabilities

· Web presence “mashups”: dynamically creating personalized sites for each customer

· An evolved WCM/WEM component: delivery to external sites, advanced support of corporate site if still in play, handling of relevant content/conversations published on external sites

· Support / interoperability for content curation as well as content management

· Management of all types of “conversations”: Auditing - Listening - Capturing - Integrating

· Multiple kinds of analytics, including convergence with “traditional” data analytics

· Dashboards for different internal roles

· Agile, context-sensitive Search / recommendations-like technology to contextually filter content/search

· Integration is big (lots of API support)

· Orchestration and Integration with multiple kinds of “external solutions” that are in play for distributed web presence

· Usability for business as well as tech teams

· Workflow and automated processes for WCM, CRM, SCRM practices, other corporate systems

 

· Company roles will also evolve:  we’ll see new marketing technology roles, product marketing and product management roles for “caretakers” of company web presence on external social sites, among the possibilities

 

· Segmented customer advisory groups will also play much more interactive roles with management of distributed web presence

 

· Eventual alignment with semantic web, link management – for reach throughout the web. Here is a current view of opening up content to anywhere on the web:

Forget the fancy names of "semantic web" or "linked data." Associating structured data with your content assets lets you take advantage of Open Graph, Google RichSnippets, Yahoo Search Monkey, and a new generation of agents such as Siri. Disseminating your content with metadata through APIs enables developers to spread the seeds of your brand in a variety of mash-ups and apps. Sharing your data sets in collaborative venues such as Factual and Infochimps helps build relationships with the world of analytic power users, improve your data quality, and turn those dusty data silos into tools for advocating ideas and brands. (from Chief Marketing Technologist blog)

 

 

 

OK, WCM / WEM vendors of all sizes: should your current plans for your solution for corporate websites go forward unchanged, or should you start now to create a Management Framework for distributed web presence?

 

 

 

Related Posts:

SMB / Mid-Market B2B Software vendors - Findability + web presence + social: attracting the “customer as buyer”

 

B2B Social CRM for Software Vendors and the Lifecycle of Customer Experience

 

Moving beyond WCM - Web Experience Management software solutions and markets

 

 

 

About the author: Julie Hunt is an accomplished market intelligence analyst, providing strategic market and competitive insights for the software industry. Her 20+ years as a software professional range from the very technical side  to customer-centric work in solutions consulting, sales and marketing.  Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt   For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Market & Competitive Intelligence Services

 

Disclosure: From time to time, I contribute articles to CMSWire.

 

SMB / Mid-Market B2B Software vendors - Findability + web presence + social: attracting the “customer as buyer”

 

For anyone selling software solutions, a strong and well-crafted web presence is de rigueur for connecting with potential customers or with the “customer as Buyer”. More and more purchasing of various software solutions is becoming an online event, fueled by the growing success of SaaS, cloud, and open source options. SMB / Mid-Market buyers, who don’t have a lot of time for purchase cycles, want to do business with vendors who make it much easier to reach a decision.

 

 

According to Forrester’s Megan Burns, Web Sites That Don't Support Customers' Goals Waste Millions:

 

“Results show that the vast majority of people switch to more expensive channels…Others give up and go to a competitor, while still others abandon their goals entirely. …for an average retailer the result is millions of dollars in lost revenue and unnecessary costs. Firms should use the data and models in this report to understand their own exposure to these failures and make a strong case for fixing usability problems that drive consumers away from the site.”

    (Forrester 2010)

 

While the Forrester study focuses on online retail, the implications are highly relevant to software vendors targeting SMB and Mid-Market companies, since these B2B buyers primarily use the internet as the gateway to software purchases.  These buyers also encounter similar difficulties trying to navigate software vendor websites to find relevant content and support to help them make buying decisions.  

 

With buyers focused on the web as a purchasing gateway, B2B software vendors are no longer the sole owners of influencing brand perception – many online venues now play significant roles for influencing buyers, and many of these online venues are not controlled by the vendor.  However, the vendor still has control of providing a high quality web presence through its corporate website and the power to increase findability for the right “customers as buyers”.  While buyers reference other influencer sites, software vendors can contribute greatly to attracting and persuading buyers if buyers can easily find well-crafted and useful content on the vendor website. 

 

Vendors should exercise all necessary resources to exceed the buyer expectations and needs when visiting the vendor website. Not being highly findable as a web presence for the right buyer content will put into motion the potential for buyers to turn to other sites, many of which lead to competitors.

 

 

Website Findablity, Usability, User Experience – They Really Matter

If buyers can’t find, via the internet, what a vendor has to offer, then the vendor is plain old losing real prospects and sales every day.  Findability addresses the importance of websites being quickly found, easily accessed and distinctly identifiable with the B2B software vendor’s offerings.  With the mercurial nature of the internet and individual vendor web presence, findability requires constant attention and fine-tuning.

 

Unfortunately many B2B software vendor websites are built from the vendor’s perspective to support its own processes for marketing and sales – instead of from the perspective of the “customer as buyer”.  And most of these vendor websites have failed to provide easy access to high quality content that helps buyers make purchase decisions about the vendor offerings. B2B software vendors have a great opportunity to establish a more integrated and interactive web presence that pulls together people, tools, services and content.

 

There are lots of methods and tools to increase website findability: SEO optimization, recommendations / social search, Google marketing offerings, Web Standards, and so on.  But the right kind of content, including social media, is key to attracting and keeping buyers on the software vendor website because these buyers have a list of items (and expectations) deemed necessary for deciding if the vendor’s software solutions are what they need.  As the quality and diversity of content on the vendor website increases, so does the findability – as well as potential buyer interest.

 

Social media venues (communities, forums, blogs, wikis, Twitter, Facebook, etc.), both on the vendor’s website and other well-visited sites, can be used with dual purpose:  first to provide quality content, user interaction, and collaboration experiences that draw buyers to the vendor; and then, to provide dynamic research sources for better understanding the SMB / Mid-Market buyers that the vendor is targeting. Ongoing vendor participation should take place on the vendor’s social sites and on external social sites that are strategic to connecting with target customers.

 

This post from Jeremiah Owyang (Altimeter Group) provides timely insight into creating a buyer/customer-centric web presence that integrates with social media and why this matters. There are two very useful charts: one covers feature/benefits of integrating social networking sites, and the other details the integrations available from popular social networking sites.

Roadmap: Make Your Corporate Websites Relevant: Integrate Social Network Features

 

 

OK – Buyers have found the software vendor’s website…  

Now -- are there content and user experience worth finding? – How easily can buyers tap into what the website offers?  Buyers come to a software vendor’s website with expectations. Creating and structuring the website from the usability perspective of the buyer (or buyers if targeting multiple buyer types) will greatly support ease of finding relevant content and will generate positive user experiences.

 

SMB / Mid-Market buyers of B2B software generally want a wide variety of information about the products and solutions, input from communities and forums, clear pricing, and other information that will guide them to making a buying decision.  They would like this content in easy-to-download formats - without having to answer lots of questions to enable the download. There is an increasing buyer sentiment that vendor websites should not require any information from the buyer for any content downloads.  After all, the sales engagement is buyer-driven, with the buyer deciding when and if next steps will be taken.

 

 

Content Sought Out by Software Solution Buyers

Anything provided on the vendor website should be authentic, high quality content that answers real buyer questions. “Real” content engages buyers, so invest in subject matter experts who can write relevant, sharp and interesting documents, articles and posts. Vendors should provide links to industry writers, influencer blogs and communities, and to analysts who contribute insight regarding the vendor’s solution space and the competitive landscape. When significant negative content is published about the vendor, it’s smart to deal with it head-on through a vendor blog, as well as through any external social sites that are relevant – be honest and focused, always responding with the buyer’s POV in mind.

 

Content that buyers would like to see on the vendor website:

 

à  Products and solutions information

· White papers providing orientations for both technical and business problems

· Product and solution datasheets  

· Technical specifications

· Best practices / company approach to solving problems with the vendor solutions (lots of details)

· Case studies with real meat

 

à  Social media

Incorporating social media in the vendor website further provides the opportunity to create a more personalized customer experience. The website should provide vendor-sponsored social media sites and links to external social sites. Buyer-friendly social media include: communities, blogs, wikis, forums, RSS, self-serve webcasts and podcasts, video sharing sites, social networking sites. As with findability and usability, social media requires real commitment, constant nurturing and responsiveness to anyone participating in the vendor’s social sites. Social media offers a fantastic venue for building relationships with “customers as buyers”, for collaborating with them on the future direction of the vendor’s offerings, and to respond quickly to questions and issues.   

 

à  External Content from Influencers – which include current customers

· Communities, forums, blogs – the ones external to vendor website

· Coverage, reviews by industry writers and influencer blogs

· Analyst coverage – especially from analysts that specialize in software for SMB / Mid-Market

 

à  Pricing

For SMB / Mid-Market buyers, pricing should be published on the website, should be straight-forward, and always up-to-date.  These buyers are not interested in drawn out sales cycles – they will simply move on to another vendor if the clock has been ticking too long.  Many buyers would like to make most software purchases via the website, whenever possible.  SaaS, cloud, OSS software options are changing how SMB / Mid-Market buyers expect to purchase software, or software services.

 

à  RFP Q&A – standardized answers

The more likely initiators of RFP requests are the upper tiers of the Mid-Market, rather than “classic SMB”. Most RFP/RFI documents follow a basic format widely used in software industry, with a large majority of questions repeating from buyer to buyer.  So it might be a good idea to build out an engaging presentation of RFP Q&A on the website, utilizing newer media including podcasts and video. If done well (findable-usable-engaging), buyers could find answers on their own, satisfying buyer desire for self-service. Also providing online RFP Q&A could eliminate the time-wasting situation of the vendor being used as “column fodder”.  Online publication of RFP Q&A demands constant updating and refinement to be useful to customers.

 

There are potential hazards for publishing online RFP’s:

· Relevance to buyer needs is not always supported by the usual RFP structure unless multiple RFPs are mapped to various buyer solution scenarios

· Validity of vendor strengths and weaknesses depends on how those strengths and weaknesses map to the most important requirements of each buyer project – generic RFP content may not be able to make a clear assessment and could have negative effect

· Competitors will now know more about how the vendor responds to certain questions while not providing corresponding data on their own websites

So it might be best to provide higher level, but meaty, content for unrestricted access, and then require buyer registration and validation before sharing access to deeper content, especially if a mutual NDA is necessary for more ‘sensitive” information.

 

à  Competitor Comparisons

Software solution buyers often list “competitor comparisons” as a content type that they’d like to find on a vendor website.  However, there are real issues that a vendor must consider before attempting competitor comparisons:

· Mainly, legal constraints related to claims made about what a competitor does or doesn’t do, as compared to the vendor – lawsuits could arise from buyers or competitors regarding claims made

· Even if an “objective” third-party is engaged to create competitor comparisons, such comparisons are frequently tedious and expensive to execute

· Relevance – points in competitor comparisons may not be of importance to all buyers or relate well to their needs

· Commoditization – software offerings in same solution space generally have many of the same feature/functions so competitor comparisons have reduced impact

 

 

Aligning “Findable Web Presence” with Social Selling and Social CRM

Focusing on the buyer-centricity of a vendor’s web presence by improving the findability and usability of the website and by building out proper social media connections to potential buyers also brings alignment with initiatives for social customer relationship management (the strategic practice, not just the technology) and with programs for social selling. This is especially important for SMB / Mid-Market software vendors who need to maximize existing resources for these important initiatives.

 

These three inter-related initiatives nurture quality buyer experiences. And these initiatives are dependent on the vendor being willing to continuously engage in real bi-directional “conversations” with buyers and to act on buyer feedback. Vendors will greatly enhance long-term loyalty, buyer success, and the ability to continuously understand what buyers need by building a composite of excellent web presence / findability / quality content, combined with lively support of social media and true buyer support through social CRM.

 

Social selling taps into social culture and makes use of social media to build relationships and hold conversations with potential buyers. Listening well, presenting compelling content, meeting buyer needs are important aspects of social selling. Likewise, social CRM strives to provide support for buyer success with the vendor’s software offerings, aligned with the “lifecycle of the customer support” (pre- and post-sale).  (More on social CRM for B2B vendors)

 

For social selling, social networking and collaborative sites help sales to connect with buyers on buyer terms:  in venues where buyers are looking for solutions to problems, asking about specific kinds of software solutions, exploring competitor solutions. Sales teams can tap into what matters to potential buyers in order to connect on a real basis. Monitoring social media sites can also help sales teams identify the key influencers for target buyers.

 

 

And Finally, Always Make Sure There’s a Software Solution Worth Buying

Software vendors sometimes forget that it is equally important to deliver quality solutions that are: relatively easy to implement, do the job they’re supposed to do, perform well, and provide clear benefits to the buyer. Quality solutions should be the main objective of any software vendor.

 

 

Related posts:   

B2B Social CRM for Software Vendors and the Lifecycle of Customer Experience

 

Social collaboration in the enterprise: The heart – and goal – of Community is “collaborating people”, not collaboration tools

 

Selling Software Solutions to SMB Markets – Who and How To Target

 

Moving beyond WCM - Web Experience Management software solutions and markets

 

 

 

About the author: Julie Hunt is an accomplished market intelligence analyst, providing strategic market and competitive insights for the software industry. Her 20+ years as a software professional range from the very technical side  to customer-centric work in solutions consulting, sales and marketing.  Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt   For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Market & Competitive Intelligence Services  

 

 

Moving beyond WCM - Web Experience Management software solutions and markets

When it comes to how to select the best-fit Web Content Management (WCM) software, a great deal of confusion continues to haunt vendors and customers alike.  Industry analysts have done little to make this any easier by perpetuating these mistakes:

· Frequently lumping together disparate offerings that target clearly separate customer segments and customer needs

· Failing to segment WCM offerings into solution categories, such as Web Experience Management (WEM) for Enterprise, basic web publishing for internal business processes/intranet, mid-market solutions for e-commerce, and so on

· Persisting with the pointless notion that WCM is a functional subset of Enterprise Content Management (ECM), especially in light of the speciousness of the ECM platform; such a notion is even more off-target when considering WEM solutions

· While understanding that WEM solutions are directly tied to interactive/digital marketing initiatives, analyst reports and benchmarks fail to use this understanding as an essential tenet of such reports

 

Analysts, writers, and bloggers have continued to produce a large body of work on various aspects of the “ECM platform”, as well as covering the questionable meaning of the term ECM and the many limitations of trying to shove a lot of capabilities into an “ECM container”.  There are a fair number of industry writers who agree that there is no such thing as a comprehensive single ECM platform. Within the debate of what belongs to ECM, WCM has been clumsily tacked on as a sub-component of ECM, with very little credible basis for doing so, especially in light of the evolution of WCM offerings in recent years.

 

Meanwhile it has been mainly customers who have helped to propel the WCM industry into providing the sorts of capabilities that are really needed for external-facing websites that are central to strategic business objectives.  So a significant segment of the overall WCM market has evolved into Web Experience Management (WEM), for which a much larger solution ecosystem has come together.  Most Web Experience Management platforms have little to do with basic content management or basic web publishing (à la WordPress and TypePad), and even less to do with the so-called ECM platform.  Understanding how to provide a platform for excellent web marketing initiatives has very little in common with understanding how to set up internal business processes for audit and governance requirements.  Metrics for successful web marketing initiatives have no meaning for ECM initiatives but are essential for determining best approaches to engaging and converting visitors into customers.

 

Social media / Web 2.0 have become important partners for WEM websites, for the purposes of drawing, engaging and re-calling customers. Inbound marketing is highly dependent on quality and interesting content that is provided through a variety of social media that lead back to a particular website.

A more complete WEM solution description includes:

· Understanding of solutions for B2B, B2C web/marketing initiatives

· Sophisticated digital / interactive marketing strategies

· External-facing web presence

· Website essential to corporate business strategy

· Ecosystem of ancillary tools to complete end-to-end solution for customer objectives

· Savvy use of social media, well-integrated into website and marketing plans

· Alignment with interactive/digital agencies

 

WEM Solution Ecosystem and Market Sizing

Another problem that has arisen is the seeming inability of major industry analysts to properly size the WCM, or WEM, market.  There is little evidence of analysts attempting to size the WEM ecosystem market potential in any tangible manner. To be able to compare and assess WEM vendors, it is essential to define the ecosystem with its corresponding market size composite.  Better market definition will result in better vendor benchmarks, instead of assessing a jumble of disparate vendors leading to disjointed “comparisons”.  More and more single vendors are offering most, if not all, of the components of the WEM ecosystem as the end-to-end solution.  Again, this solution segment has gone well beyond “web content management”.

 

So a Web Experience Management solution is really a composite of several “markets”: 

· WCM solution suite, with usability both for business users and IT personnel (includes behind-the-scenes “content management”, workflow, design tools, and so on)

· Enterprise-quality portal / presentation management

· Recommendations-like technology for social search and personalization

· Web analytics / testing / content monetizing tools

· Rich media and video content management (monetizing components as appropriate)

· Social collaboration / social marketing capabilities

· Extensive integration / interoperability capabilities at several levels of the enterprise infrastructure

 

When we consider WEM as a composite of the overall solution ecosystem, then we could arrive at a better understanding of the overall market size by tallying up the market forecasts for all or most of the components listed above to derive the comprehensive market potential. It’s not unreasonable to look at the overall ecosystem market size, since many WEM vendors supply most of the solution components, and have active partnerships with vendors that supply the remaining components.  The overall solution ecosystem becomes compellingly relevant when taking the customer’s point-of-view for the desired end-to-end solution.

 

Other approaches could be from the point of view of Interactive Marketing spend, or from looking at web site spend budgeted by companies with Global web presences: we could estimate the slice that the WEM ecosystem can command from these markets. For instance, Forrester data on web site spend for 2009 shows some very substantial budget forecasts for large companies with global web presences.

 

Interactive Marketing Spend

WCM seen as online marketing (WEM): by 2012, Forrester expects the US interactive market to grow to $59 billion with a recession, or $61 billion if there is no recession. 

Forrester, “US Interactive Marketing Forecast, 2007 To 2012”

 

Website spend

Of the overall budget for website spend in 2009:

· U.S. Large companies – domestic-only website average spend $2.2M  

· Global companies average $3.5M for international sites

Forrester, “2009 Web Site Spending Trends”, Feb. 2009

 

Passing Glances at WEM market recognition by Industry Analysts

Two industry analysts expressed clearer views of the transformation of WCM to WEM for external-facing websites:  Kathleen Reidy of 451 Group, and Mick MacComascaigh of Gartner.  Oddly, neither analyst has followed through on these better definitions in subsequent reports or benchmarks, and generally continue to perpetuate the misleading usage of WCM as a subset of ECM.

 

Kathleen Reidy, January 2009: ECM deconstructs to TCM, IG and WCM?

 “I think the “ECM” moniker may be nearing the end of its usefulness now (if it was ever apt or useful in the first place). 

“WCM has already splintered off as it became clear that web content is really not just another type of content to be managed by a central repository.  Today WCM is more about online marketing ….

 

Gartner’s Mick MacComascaigh, Marketscope for “Web Content Management 2008”:

The WCM market commands revenue of approximately $750 million (for 2007/2008).

But with analytics, social community and interactivity, personalization, media and digital asset management (DAM), and in some cases e-forms and localization, to be counted as part of the new "marketing machines," the worldwide WCM market is poised to grow substantially as customer engagement becomes an even greater priority.

 

Viewing WEM (WCM) as subset of ECM Market produces questionable benchmark reports

Gartner views WCM as a subset of the ECM market. In one of its most non-focused Magic Quadrants, the Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management 2009, the over-large team of analysts involved with creating this “benchmark” chose not to recognize that WCM is now mostly Web Experience Management as it relates to real world customer needs and use.  Instead the Gartner team chose to continue an agenda for maintaining ECM as the over-arching parent for WCM, relegating WCM to a minor role, while totally ignoring the WCM morph into WEM.

 

In terms of market size, Gartner persists in looking at a very limited definition of WCM to perform the calculation:

The WCM market commands revenue of approximately $750 million. With an estimated compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 15% between 2007 and 2012, it is growing faster than the overall ECM market. As a result, worldwide expenditure on WCM accounted for over a quarter of the ECM market in 2007 (it represented just over a fifth in 2004).

 

The Gartner Magic Quadrant for 2009 comes up with the dubious positioning of Oracle as the Leader of web content management – a company that does little in support of external-facing customer-oriented business websites, digital/interactive marketing, customer-facing social capabilities, and the conversion of visitors to customers.  If WEM had been used as the proper market segment, a more realistic and useful benchmark would have been produced (of which Oracle would not have been the Leader).

 

Comparing the Gartner WCM benchmark to the Forrester Wave of 2009, an even greater confusion arises:  Gartner’s Oracle Leader-designate is 6^th in line to the “throne” in the Forrester benchmark.  To make things even muddier, the top 3 leaders in the Gartner Magic Quadrant are big traditional ECM players, and are not leaders for WCM, and especially not for WEM.

 

 The Forrester Wave for WCM for External Websites 2009 gets top props for coming the closest to characterizing WCM as Web Experience Management for “online marketing”. Forrester’s better understanding of the WCM / WEM market undoubtedly derives from its practices for interactive/digital marketing and customer experience.  Forrester does not try to take a heavy-weight ECM vendor who is actually weak in WCM and fob off that vendor as a Leader in WCM/WEM. 

 

In general, IDC market reports (non-commissioned) stay very high level when considering web content management.  For instance, IDC produces an annual “content management” market report with sizing, vendor shares, and market forecasts, but it is a big container of “everything content management”. However, IDC is beginning to understand the importance of interactive marketing to corporate web presences, with added coverage of social media and digital marketing, although separate from coverage of content management and rich media management.

 

 

CMS Watch (Web CMS Report 2010) is at least segmenting WCM solutions relative to potential customer needs:

· Complex Enterprise Platforms

· Upper-Range Platforms

· Mid-Range Platforms

· Mid-Range Products

· Simpler Products

But even this segmentation can present ambiguities and overlaps, relative to the capabilities and requirements under consideration in the report.

  

The whole point is to take a real world approach to what is actually going on with WEM solutions to better help customers make purchase decisions and to better understand the total revenue potential for vendors with WEM offerings via an ecosystem perspective.  Most analysts have failed, to date, to do a better job for WEM definitions, market sizing, and more importantly, to produce meaningful benchmark reports with useful “apples to apples” comparisons, instead of the current comparisons of apples, oranges, walnuts, and elephants.  It is well past due for analysts to take WEM out of the “ECM platform” and recognize WEM as a separate and very different solution set that has little to do with the constructs of ECM.

 

Final Comment

Another questionable parameter of Gartner and Forrester in their respective benchmark reports is using a vendor’s overall market presence for all of the products that it sells (not just its market presence as related to the WCM segment) as a weighting factor.  This skews results against pure play vendors and inflates the actual success of larger corporate vendors regarding the specific market covered by the benchmark report.  None of the large vendors like Oracle or Microsoft sell tons of focused WCM/WEM solutions as suggested by the market presence shown by the Gartner and Forrester WCM benchmarks.  As such, the current offerings of Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, Open Text (pre-acquisition of Vignette) are not the stuff of Leader-quality solutions for WCM / WEM.

 

 

 

About the author: Julie Hunt is an accomplished market intelligence analyst, providing strategic market and competitive insights for the software industry. Her 20+ years as a software professional range from the very technical side  to customer-centric work in solutions consulting, sales and marketing.  Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt   For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Market & Competitive Intelligence Services