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引用第59楼吉娃娃于2009-04-29 21:03发表的 :
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Bad ISV Marketing Ideas from the Department of Stupid
A recent conversation on a local community forum about a software vendor who required the filling in of a 2 page form just to get in touch raised my irk and reminded me of key marketing errors that ISVs seem to make. I wanted to share these in the hope that budding entrepreneurs avoid these mistakes that can be very frustrating for customers.
1）Not publishing your contact details
Yes, you can have a Contact form that tries to collect structured data to allow you to respond to queries but not publishing your e-mail, telephone number, or address is a big no when it comes to selling products online.
Other than building trust in the customer that you are not a doubt-able business, it encourages customers to start a dialogue in a manner that they choose and at a time they choose.
2）Requiring sign-up to download your free/trial product. To be clear, there are niche sectors and products where it might well be required to capture a lot of customer information before you let them download a product (no examples I am afraid).
However, for most software products and especially in crowded marketplaces, it just doesn't make sense to force customers to go through a lengthy sign-up process and gather their auto-biography to let them download the product.
If the trial does not convince the customer to purchase a product, then I doubt any direct marketing gimmicks will.
3）Having a blog / news section that doesn't say much.
A blog is a powerful marketing tool, but I see this so often that I had to mention it. They usually fall into 1 of 2 categories,
Press Releases These blogs and news sections are nothing but press releases with a fancy picture added to make it look more personal. They usually talk about how awesome the company is, or how a new client has decided to choose their awesomeness, or how they are doing awesome things.
Don't get me wrong. There is nothing wrong with keeping readers up-to-date with your successes and promoting the good work you are doing. The problem is people will get frustrated with all the self promotion if you have nothing useful to say eventually.
Journal I know of a few companies (whose names I shall not mention), who excruciatingly detail every mundane activity from buying new desks to an employee being off sick. How is this useful to a customer, fan, or prospective employee? All it tells them is that you are dull and have nothing useful to say.
4）Having a blog but not allowing comments
Note that I am not saying that you should not moderate comments (we moderate all our comments). Moderation is fine as long as you allow some form of feedback and a way for people to engage with you and react to your blog post. Rejecting criticism and allowing only nice comments might sound prudent but people are bound to take their criticism elsewhere, where you have no control over the medium.
5）Lack of spam prevention on the blog
As a professional company, it reflects very badly if you do not moderate your blog or have spam prevention tools on it. This is a no-brainer given most popular blogging platforms allow this or it is fairly easy to implement in a custom blogging solution.
Our solution to this problem is to moderate all comments, whether it be for spam or inappropriate content. Even regular comments are not approved until someone manually approves it. This means that the quality of the comments and dialogue is fairly good.
6）Competitive comparisons
The biggest purchasing activity that a customer performs is to compare competing products to help make a decision on which one to purchase. It just seems obvious then that it is a great idea to include a matrix comparing your competitors to your product.
The practical flaw with comparisons is that they are never objective (unless they are on Wikipedia). Do you know anyone that actively lists factual weaknesses against their competitors? Most people I have spoken to say they immediately dismiss comparisons with competing products as they never trust them.
Your effort is better spent in highlighting the benefits of your product and why a customer should consider purchasing your product on it's own merits.
7）Putting valuable content in inaccessible documents
Lots of companies have excellent case studies and valuable marketing material but in a moment of uninspired genius, they decide to make them available in either PDF format, or worse, as Microsoft Word or Powerpoint files.
There is nothing wrong with a well-designed concise PDF that people can take away to read in their own time. We use them ourselves. The problem is that most of these PDFs were made for print (large sizes and unnecessary graphics) and just dumped in a download-able folder making it tedious for the customer to get information
