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A few days ago I told you about a WordPress plug-in called MailPoet. Or maybe I was talking about software marketing, or MailPoet partner Kim Gjerstad, or Kim’s ability to throw together a great presentation touching on an amazing array of business, software, customer service, and marketing concepts on very little notice.
Or maybe that doesn’t even begin to touch what I was talking about.
I also committed to Answer Guy Central becoming MailPoet/WordPress/Kim Gjerstad Central for a few weeks. Why? Because Kim Gjerstad’s WordPress Plug-In Marketing speech represents an almost-unbelievable-especially-considering-it-was-just-twenty-minutes-long example of the way 360 degree marketing works; while MailPoet is terrific, merely having a great product has become far less important than the way you bring it to and manage its place in the market. In other words, business process matters.
Watch Kim Gjerstad’s treatise on 360 degree marketing and you’ll see that I’ve annotated it with many seemingly-disparate thoughts. We’ll work through them in the coming weeks, starting now with a short examination of their shear breadth:
| NOTATED KIM GJERSTAD PRESENTATION ITEM | PURPOSE | |
|---|---|---|
| Open your presentation with a joke | Establishes rapport | |
| Give credit to your team | Sets a humble tone | |
| Provide speech-perspective background | Provides context from which to speak | |
| Add cultural background | More context to address as a sub-item | |
| Secondary joke | Relief point before the work starts | |
| Introduce your business | Shifts focus to your real subject—YOUR BUSINESS | |
| First Point: Software is never finished, so LAUNCH IT | (and this applies in many businesses) | |
| Marketing matters. Know and use your best marketing tool | CRITICALLY IMPORTANT—especially in the social marketing age | |
| Gives statistics | Re-establishes credibility, creates understandable talking point | |
| Describes design in a self-deprecating way | Know your expertise, and when “good enough” is good enough. | |
| Discuss pricing, market positioning (“we aren’t a plug-in”) | They ARE a plug-in, but selling that is impossible; they sell a solution | |
| Subscription vs one-off pricing model | An important topic, turned to their benefit by model | |
| Getting known in pertinent community(s) | In the add-on/plug-in world, social networking is everything | |
| Business models based on market penetration percentage are bad | They wouldn’t fool anyone, and besides: these statistics don’t matter | |
| MailPoet’s primary marketing tool provides no useful statistics! | Deal With it. Or build your own tool if you care (you needn’t) | |
| WordPress should care, but they don’t—or maybe just don’t understand | A sign of the non-maturity of even a market maker like WordPress | |
| You get product mass from community (aside: wordpresstraffic.com) | You can’t succeed in social marketing unless you’re socially responsible | |
| You need to do community sponsorship | … and to understand it’s about the community, not your marketing | |
| Customer support and service is a marketing strategy | … and needs to be treated as such, not an unwelcome cost center | |
| Customer service pays off both directly and indirectly | ||
| Frequent releases serve the purpose of the company | especially in the WordPress Repository; stats AND attention matter | |
| He Shares User Data! | Unheard of, right? Not in the social marketing/credibility world … | |
| And then shares financial success information and timing | … where transparency on almost everything is the right strategy | |
| A discussion of ‘Minimum Viable Product‘ | MVP is the on-line metric for critical mass of a business | |
| Side benefit of customer service as a cultural touch-point | customer service activity helps tell when you should scale up | |
| Promotions? Coupons? | Better for one-off/MVP-building sales than for subscriptions | |
| Second reference to conversion and revenue | this was probably TOO transparent/authentic | |
| Lesson on negotiating with entities larger than yourself | WordPress/Automattic is large. And yet also flexible! | |
| Media attention equals customers, and it occurs over time | This is slightly off; Gjerstad implies organic/social media attention is the only way to go | |
| Points out that his largest competitor has a very different approach | Reiterates that MailPoet isn’t pursuing business “as a WordPress Plug-in”. | |
| Presentation punchline | There always needs to be one. Gjerstad’s mixes Product Payload with addressing a myth. |
While the points I’ve extracted from Gjerstad’s talk at WordCamp Europe 2013 go in a lot of different directions, viewed as a whole this simple twenty-minute speech is practically a revelation in “everything you’ll ever need to know about starting and (beginning to) run a business”. It’s that good—and I encourage you to spend the time to watch Kim Gjerstad’s presentation.
As for my promise to make Answer Guy Central MailPoet/WordPress/Kim Gjerstad Central … get ready; we’ll be breaking down everything you see above. Talk about Business Process!
Seriously; I’m right here … let’s talk business process.
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