The GroupSwim Diving Board

We are gearing up to market more aggressively here at GroupSwim, and I’ve learned some valuable lessons over the past weeks that I thought I would share. These are in no particular order of importance:

• Marketing is hard!  In business school and in my professional life, I don’t think I ever appreciated how much work it really is.  There are so many details to track and manage.
• LinkedIn advertising is not a good option.  We’ve run a couple of ads and the click through rates have been horrible.  While I’m man enough to admit I may have written some crap ads, I don’t think they were that bad.  My guess is people are not paying attention to ads at all when on LinkedIn (or ever in my case), which is a shame because it could be a great resource.  The benefit is you can tune your ads to appear to very specific categories of people i.e. industry, role, etc., which on the surface is great and I was really hoping this would be a good marketing investment.  However, the ability to tune the message and impressions didn’t result in clicks, and that is the name of the game.
• SalesForce is a good tool but not great.  They withhold critical functionality at the lower subscription rates like Group and Professional, which limits some of the things I want to do.  The Enterprise license fees are expensive but they almost force you to upgrade at some point to do sophisticated marketing.  The other thing about SalesForce is it is hard to set-up.  For Joe Schmoe sales guy or whoever, logging in and using it isn’t a big deal.  However, automating the process for linking Leads to sources and other kinds of configuration are no easy feat.  You almost need to have a programmers mindset to do some of this stuff.  You add fields, set-up queues, configure rules, etc..  I must admit it is almost fun in a geeky kind of way, but takes time and practice.
• Based on the point above, there is a whole eco-system around Salesforce based on the pricing above and lack of functionality; they call this the AppExchange.  We are using Vertical Response for email campaigns.  It is a great tool and does one or two things really well.  I would have assumed/hoped that SalesForce would do some of this based on their market position and price, but this isn’t the case.  One thing that is lacking amazes me.  SalesForce gives you a flag on a Lead to indicate that person wants to opt out of emails, but it doesn’t integrate with their email capability.
• Trial and error is the key.  There is no one answer to marketing.  You need to constantly tinker and play with things like messaging and copy.  When you find something that works, build on it.  This will be key as we start to do Google ad words.

Let me know what you think of these learnings and if you have any to add.