Millenium Marketer

The advertising model can be quite fickle and some entrepreneurs report that this is the most frustrating challenge with their business. Twitter, and others, are guilty of expecting “lazy revenue” for high gains, because their focus is on increasing traffic numbers rather than developing a strong business plan. The same sentiment has been suggested by Aidan Henry’s contributing article on Read Write Web.

In short, highly talked about companies should get off their butts and brainstorm creative ways to bring in new revenues and still add value to their customers. Easy to say, but not easy to do, because it is a strategic task not suitable for the brilliant software engineer, but rather suited for the brilliant software engineer with a penchant for strategic, entrepreneurial thinking.

Just because your brand is highly valued, doesn’t mean your customers will show you love and add to your profits if you don’t ask
Even Google has admitted several times that they have a challenge developing B2B services and attempting to grow their revenues, despite their huge brand name. With all the free services that Google offers, it is sometimes a mystery as to how they are making so much money! It also helps to avoid being too enchanted by SaaS and democratization ideals. If a product has value, people will pay for it.

As a former mentor used to say, your accounting costs does not equal your sales revenue.

Web 2.0 is not a perfectionist’s era
Salesforce.com hosted a Tour de Force seminar in San Jose earlier this year, recommending that Internet platform providers do not rely on perfection to drive their business. Build a basic software that works and rely on customer feedback to improve future versions. Your efforts should be focused on customer retention and improving subsequent version releases of your product, since the web makes it easy to quickly make updates to your platform, service or media destination.

Four Revenue Ideas to Envy

1. Targeted Job Boards: There are specific niche blogs out there, such as Chris Heuer’s Insytes, which are well targeted to attract job seekers of a special type. In the case of Chris’s blog, it is job seekers interested in social media and software engineering jobs.
2. Gifting: WordPress has an interesting advantage of encouraging upgrades by way of either “gifting” credits to other users to help improve their blogs or gifting yourself. This is really smart in WordPress’s case because dedicated bloggers are willing to invest time and money to improve their blogs.
3. Small Business and Single User Segmentation: Although I don’t love it, I think it is a necessary evil. In some cases, if you have a workflow product, small businesses will be more willing to pay for your product at nominal subscription fee, such as is the case with 37Signals.
4. Reverse business development: Ideablob is social experiment to attract social entrepreneurs created by Advanta. Sometimes the investment in a hobby-like product, such as Ideablob can or may bring you further leads to generate more for your business. This is certainly the case where generating a high volume makes sense.

Other posts on revenue models:
The Long Tail: “What does the Media Business Model Mean?“

Continuing on my last post on marketing metrics, I discovered a very valuable post to add to my knowledge base called “The Real ROI of Blogging.”
Traditional Marketers typically ask, “How do you know if social media has a high ROI?”
Lewis Green suggests that ROI does not have to be measured in terms of revenue.

Well we all know that revenue is not the only driver of marketing success. Green lists the following as terms of measuring blogging ROI:
* Create great customer experiences as measured by the happiness levels of our customers?
* Result in loyal clients?
* Result in revenues and/or profits?
* Result in leads and referrals?
* Result in getting us noticed?

I imagine it would take some very tight processes and collaboration with your sales and support teams to identify loyal clients and recognize referrals. This is great for companies who have recognized that organizational process is important from the very start and have been able to maintain a work culture of collaboration. But what about companies that are growing from a traditional, commission-based sales model where secrecy is valued to protect the livelihood of the individual rather than the good of the entire company and customers?

As I understand it, it will take leaders who are driven and committed to start addressing the sales team as a unit, change the way the sales people are paid out and create a network of collaboration across the organization–not at all an easy task.

How have you handled metrics and organizational processes within your company? Feel free to comment and discuss!