Sage Blog

I’m not a big fan of discreetly planting marketing messages in social media so I’ll start with the main reason for this post which is our business app Sage 50 Accounts Mobile. The mobile service was originally launched the service in August 2011 and is compatible with our latest version of our accounts software,  Sage 50 Accounts 2012.

We’ve also just launched our new iPad optimised version and our mobile activity overall has been something really exciting to be part of. I therefore thought I’d use my experiences to share some thoughts around developing an app and how to go about… especially if you want to avoid it just being an expensive marketing tool.

What’s your mobile strategy?

Our increasing reliance and indeed personal attachment to mobile devices means I’m continuously met with instant interest and enthusiasm wherever I’ve been to talk about Sage 50 Accounts Mobile. I also heard a lot of interesting views and questions – one in particular that got me thinking was whether or not our new app was actually just a glorified marketing tool.

You can judge whether the answer was a yes or no from this post but it’s an interesting topic given that many businesses could be forgiven for being wooed by the perceived customer reach of certain app stores and the glamour of having a glossy app to your name.

There are a range of reasons why venturing into app space may benefit your business but in 99% of cases those reasons should be because it brings some form of benefit to your customers (or potential customers) in a way that outweighs the investment and on-going management involved.

What is your strategy and your objectives?

The web is littered with advice on having a clearly defined strategy if you’re considering mobile applications as a route to market. Indeed there are plenty of big brands who haven’t bothered developing applications because their strategies have been to instead focus on delivering other online experiences as priority.

Marks and Spencer is a great example. If you want to buy online from M&S, there isn’t an app for that. M&S have focused instead on delivering a great generic mobile commerce experience  (check out the M&S mobile site) – which of course is compatible cross platform via any mobile browser. It ensures they have the best range of tools in place to maximise sales conversion through whatever medium you decide to buy through (which is of course one of their key objectives).

Another good example is my preference to have a shortcut to the BBC News mobile site on my phone home page rather than the official Android BBC News app. The app looks nice but it’s a clear case of being able to get what I need quicker from an existing service (the mobile site) than an app.

So it’s worthwhile assessing as part of your potential solution whether or not you can actually provide something that adds value to your customers and provides something they can’t already get elsewhere.

Deloitte recently highlighted the pitfalls of big brands developing applications and how tough it is to actually make a success of your app – many of these challenges apply to anyone looking to develop an app in an already crowded market place.

Why introduce a Sage app?

From a Sage perspective we knew we could never recreate the rich experience of Sage 50 Accounts desktop software via a mobile device (particularly a smartphone). We also knew that:

• existing customers wanted remote access to something that was simple and quick to use
• they wanted access to key top line data and
• new users within the businesses we support wanted access to business data without the working knowledge of the full version of Sage 50 Accounts 2012.

Developing a mobile service that connected live with Sage 50 Accounts 2012 meant we could achieve many of these objectives.

Sage 50 Accounts mobile app

If you’ve got a clear strategy and business objectives then you should be able to relate any mobile based activity directly back to those plans – in the same way that any product, marketing or sales activity should be directly linked in whatever format it’s delivered.

Be brave

You shouldn’t be afraid to take brave decisions and either decide applications aren’t for you or even be willing to walk away from development mid-way through a project if it’s not clear where you’re going.

It’s very easy not to think clearly when there is so much clamour around mobile. This year’s tech predications continue to mention mobile http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-16288247

In terms of our own strategy, we are clear that we want to make desktop data more readily available to our customers wherever they are and whenever they want. We aim to make Sage products more relevant to a wider audience within our existing customers and in turn attract new users of Sage. This strategy is of course strongly supported by growing demand from customers and greater evidence that the way businesses work is changing.  Delivering access via Mobile helps us to achieve these objectives.

Geoff Philips, Mobile Apps Team

We’ve just sent out the latest edition of Exchange Magazine – the magazine for members of our Accountants’ Club. It’s packed with useful information to help our Accountants run their business, and we thought we’d give you a preview of one of their articles here on our blog.

If 2011 was the year the world woke up to ‘cloud computing’ then 2012 is set to be the year that mobile shopping becomes the norm. It’s the quiet revolution that’s changing the way we shop – and transforming the way businesses make and receive payments. A powerful combination of new technology, better wi-fi coverage and increasingly powerful handheld devices is now making it easier than ever to access, view, buy and sell goods online – wherever you are. And with mobile broadband services improving and extending their coverage, experts are predicting that connecting to the internet via a smartphone – rather than by using a laptop or PC – will become the main way of accessing web resources for the first time in 2012.

Research commissioned by magazine Retail Week found that UK customers are already spending a staggering £1.3 billion a year via mobile services – with that figure expected to rise to a massive £19.3 billion by 2021. Worldwide mobile phone transactions now account for £148 billion of e-commerce and experts say that figure will treble in the next five years. Food, groceries and electrical items are currently the most popular purchases being made by this new breed of ‘connected customers’ and analysts at Barclays Bank say mobile – or ‘m-commerce’ spending – is growing at the fastest rate of any retail channel.

A separate Google survey found that 79 per cent of UK shoppers now use smartphones for shopping, while 70 per cent use them to check details – including comparing prices – while in store. In September the company launched their Google Wallet in America, enabling users in key cities to download a secure application allowing them to make easy payments. And there are plans to make it available here and in mainland Europe later this year too.

What’s in it for you?

So what more do you need to know about this way of working – and what are the potential benefits for you and your clients? Using handhelds as the primary channel for viewing and consuming goods has huge implications for the way all businesses, and accountants, make and collect payments. As Angus McCarey, UK Retail Director for eBay in the UK says: “Mobile shopping represents a massive opportunity not just for retailers, but for the economy as a whole.” Subscribing to an online payments service like Sage Pay can offer a low cost, efficient way to sell goods and services. Recommending the solution to clients can cut their running costs and allow them to reach out to a new breed of customers – who will soon expect mobile payment systems as standard. In addition to quicker and more streamlined processing, you can also help clients integrate payment solutions with Sage 50 Accounts.

M-marketing

As well as selling and processing, mobile retailing brings huge potential for ‘m-marketing’ – sending marketing materials to clients via their mobile devices. As well as extending the online reach and profile of both your clients and your own practice, this can be a great way to show you are ‘ahead of the game’. It’s worth remembering that people access and view information differently via mobiles than they do when using a laptop or PC. Context is everything. People are often connecting to the web with a smartphone when they’re on the move so your offering needs to be more immediate and quick to use and navigate.

Agencies like the Mobile Marketing Association can offer more advice and tips on how to get started and the type of solutions that will work best for you.

Sheryl Thompson, Exchange Magazine Team

Here’s a tough nut to crack for all you social media aficionados, how many tweets are considered ‘too many’? Most twitter users will have followed (and probably subsequently unfollowed) users who have crossed the line from a reasonable numbers of tweets, to spamming your stream.

If you run a Twitter feed, you have to work hard to build a loyal follower base and ideally you don’t want to start losing followers purely because of the volume of tweets you post. From a strictly mathematical stance your ideal volume of tweets could be worked out something like this:

According to recent research, on average every twitter account has 126 followers*. The majority of Twitter users either have a 1:1 following to follower ratio, or worse. If you assume that each of the accounts they follow tweets once per day then you can assume that their stream will receive a minimum of 126 tweets per day.

* http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2009/jun/29/twitter-users-average-api-traffic

Using this method to prevent your tweet volumes appearing spammy, I would advocate aiming to avoid having two of your tweets appear in the most recent display on Twitter when a user logs on. i.e.:

I’ve created a diagram here to show how that mathematical principle would work:

Personally speaking, I think that this kind of approach is a bit too formulaic. We’re talking about human social interaction, not engineering! After all, the reason we all use twitter is to follow people who say or discuss interesting things. I’m not going to stop following them just because they throw out a couple of extra messages a day.

It’s when a Twitter user is no longer producing interesting content that I would start to consider my options. Overall I would suggest that good content planning is more conducive to retaining followers than concerning yourself too much about a ‘golden’ number of tweets to deliver.

Try to think about your end user’s experience, review your twitter profile and read your stream. Are you adding value to your users by providing them with important content, or are you just retweeting other news sources? More often than not, you will find followers will decide to take their content from the horse’s mouth if you aren’t adding value to it.

My advice would be add your insight and comment to stories you share, that way you aren’t just aggregating other people’s content, you are creating your own.

Which after all is kind of the point!

Alex Walker, Sage Accountants’ Team @alexatsage

QR Codes are something of an enigma, you may not have even noticed that they exist yet, but they are starting to become more and more prevalent in the print media spaces across the country.

Random garbles or brave new world?

To many they are random garbles of black and white, small boxes of nonsense adding another layer of complexity to an already challenging visual marketing space. To some they are gateways, portals to a brave new world of targeted content allowing you to effortlessly engage with specific adverts.

A QR Code is a new way of taking a potential customer from Above-The-Line, to Below-The-Line. In simple parlance, it allows someone with a smartphone to scan a type of barcode which takes them to a website URL of your choice. The QR Code can be on a poster, direct mailer, newspaper, magazine or even a TV advertisement (possible since the advent of pausing live TV).

QR codes and consumer behaviour

As marketing developments go, it sounds pretty small fry, after all URLs have been around for a while and any marketer worth their salt will have known how to set up tracking URLs for hyperlinks.

What has changed though is consumer behaviour, where previously on a smartphone you had to manually enter URLs, now you can use your camera to capture the data and send you straight into a web browser.

This ‘convenience factor’ has been central to the success of QR Codes, certainly in the B2C arena. Another contributing factor has been the creativity with which QR Codes are being applied, for instance:

• Chocolate Café QR Code: http://www.how-do.co.uk/node/10773
• Korean Virtual Tesco: http://youtu.be/nJVoYsBym88
• Mystery Gift: http://www.thebiggerexperience.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/QR3.jpg

The QR code key to success

The key to the success of using QR Codes is to ensure that you provide your user with an engaging destination, after all thy have taken the effort to go beyond the face of your campaign, so you need to ensure they feel suitably rewarded for their efforts.

In return you will record data so rich it is astonishing, are your users more likely to engage on the high street, or around the corner? On the 12:15 to Euston, or the 13:20? Do they prefer page 5 or page 7 and whether they preferred the mailer in pink or blue?

The measurement possibilities for this mechanism are very powerful, especially when you consider that in a lot of instances it would be very difficult (or even impossible) to measure engagement with these campaigns, you would either be relying on someone to quote a campaign code and for that to be properly recorded or for someone to use a campaign specific phone number.

At Sage we’re currently testing the possibilities for using this technology in the B2B arena, to see how and where we can use it to enrich our customers experiences and also to give us rich data feedback from our campaigns.

Keep your eyes open, you never know where you might see a QR Code waiting to be scanned!

Alex Walker, Sage Accountants’ Team

So firstly, why blog? Why not advertise your practice in the local Yellow Pages or Newspaper?

My answer to this is simple, think about the last time you needed to know something, not specifically a business query, but anything.

What did you do? Where did you go to find information?

I’d be amazed if more than five percent of you didn’t think ‘I Googled it’. Research is showing that our behaviour is changing; we are now much more inclined to trust internet search engine results ahead of paid-for directory listings, and we trust higher ranking websites ahead of those below them. This change is going to be reflected in the behaviours of your target audience, so you must consider search engines as integral to developing your business.

So the next question has to be, how do I rank higher on search engines?

Websites are regularly indexed by mathematical algorithms which calculate their ranking position, the precise indexing algorithm is kept top-secret but it considers factors such as Keyword Density, Meta Content, Age of Content, Inbound Links and Richness of Content.

High ranking websites will be rich in relevant keywords for the given search string, well built, updated regularly, referenced regularly and contains a healthy mixture of images, text and videos. These attributes are also typical of blogs, and so they can be invaluable to improving your website’s performance on search engines.

So, now you understand that having a blog can add value, we come to the crucial part, content. A lot of people are concerned about creating content; they assume that because they are not journalists or writers, that no-one will be interested in what they have to say. I argue to the contrary, regardless of whether you are a secretary, accountant or bookkeeper, what you are is an expert in your professional field and someone whose experience and insight has value to your peers.

Thought leadership

In Sage we refer to this as ‘Thought Leadership’, being seen by your industry as a reliable source of relevant information. Writing a blog isn’t easy, far from it. Your content needs to be accurate, relevant, engaging and most importantly original. Once you get into the habit of writing though, it becomes a lot less challenging and you will actually find that there are lots of topics out there for you to discuss.

What are the latest developments from HMRC, has using software helped your practice become more efficient, how will VAT changes impact upon your clients, how has working with your practice helped resolve problems for a client. There are a handful of topics ripe for blogging, which you can have on me!

Ideally I’d recommend keeping your blogs fairly short, something like 300 words is about right, and should only take you around half an hour to write. When you start, don’t overstretch yourself, try to write a blog once a fortnight, perhaps while you’re having a sandwich over your keyboard. Don’t expect instant results, but keep writing anyhow, the more relevant content you create, the better. The key part is that if you persevere, you will get results.

If you use other social media like Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin, then share your content there as well. Every click and inbound link will add to your blog’s authority and help to improve search engine performance.

Once you’re feeling confident in your blogging, you could even guest blog on Sage’s blog, we’re always interested in hosting content, which by linking back to your site will add to its authority. Just let us know if you fancy giving it a go!

Alex Walker, Sage Accountants’ Team @alexatsage

As providers of CRM software it felt like a natural step for us to headline sponsor the prestigious Chartered Institute of Marketing’s (CIM) Marketing Excellence Awards 2011. The Awards, now in their third year, recognise the importance of marketing excellence in the private and the public sector and celebrate the top talent and triumphs in marketing today.

In a crowded communication market place, getting the right message to the right people at the right time and in the right way is essential. Smart tools in the hands of smart Marketing people can make the difference between success and failure in a difficult economy. The cream of the Marketing community are spending and evaluating their budgets wisely to make the greatest impact. We’re delighted to support these awards that allow the very best from the world of Marketing to stand up and be applauded.

For us, this sponsorship demonstrates our commitment to empowering marketers with the best tools to do the best job for their organisations. Here at Sage, we see Customer Relationship Management (CRM) as more than just strategy or a piece of software – it’s about people, their attitudes and commitment to deliver outstanding service. And we pride ourselves on working in partnership with many talented marketers, enabling them to work smarter to find new customers and build profitable, long lasting relationships. Good luck to all those who have been shortlisted and we’ll see you on the 23rd February to celebrate your success.

Bob Anderson, Sage CRM Solutions

That’s right, ‘Memetic Marketing’. You heard it here first!

Part of my responsibility at Sage is to research potential new marketing opportunities and to assess their potential for our Accountants’ team. So of course, when I first encountered the phrase, my interest was piqued.

Memetic Marketing

Memetic Marketing sounds like something from a Mad Men episode; something which would have rolled out of an Ad agency in the 60’s and subsequently have slipped behind the cupboard to gather dust.

Yet this is a new piece of terminology, the retro vibe struck something of a chord and challenged me to dig a little deeper. My understanding of Memes came from reading ‘The Selfish Gene’ by Richard Dawkins, a great read, whatever your religious bent, where he describes the dissemination of ideas across a culture through mimicry in word, writing or action. A very succinct way to describe how early human cultures spread ideas and technology.

Then, after the passing of a considerable period of time and probably more than a few memes came the internet.

Internet Memes

On paper it is the world’s largest repository of information, an archive of indescribable vastness which hosts an immeasurable volume of data and content. In a way it is one of man’s greatest creations, a library of every achievement, scientific discovery and historical precedent since the dawn of mankind.

Yet for anyone who has spent any time perusing the internet, it is remarkable how the development of internet memes has impacted our culture and behaviours online. There are countless examples of internet memes which have flourished and are now virtually unavoidable on social media networks.

Run a google image search on ‘all your base’ and you’ll get a flavour of what I mean, it doesn’t take a lot for an internet meme to become something of a behemoth!

For those that aren’t familiar, here’s an example I knocked up of another popular internet meme, lolcats:

Upon further reading I came to understand that Memetic Marketing is a new definition for the adoption of internet memes, through viral and guerrilla marketing techniques to drive awareness of a brand.

Viral campaigns?

Personally I’m quite sceptical of this as an approach, for any marketer that has tried to run a viral campaign, you know that getting the initial momentum for the campaign is a virtually unassailable mountain to climb. Once you achieve that inertia, the campaign will roll along quite nicely of its own accord, but I would image that less than one in a hundred attempts to launch a Viral ever achieve anything more than lip service.

There have been some very notable successes, in particular Cadbury made a massive impact with their Gorilla youtube campaign, a short clip of a silverback gorilla drumming to ‘In the Air Tonight’ by Phil Collins.

Another fantastic example was the ‘Will It Blend’ clips, produced for a very low budget by blending company Blendtec. Originally they produced short clips to show the power of their blender by crushing ice and other difficult foodstuffs

In summary, I love internet memes, they enrich my online experience, but I don’t plan on trying to actively include them in our marketing plans just yet! I’m interested to know what other marketers think about the potential of using memes to promote your brand? I think as with any channel it has to be appropriate to your product, so I wouldn’t expect any Sage branded ROFLCOPTERs anytime soon, but for the right brand they could prove a real success.

Alex Walker, Sage Accountants’ Team @alexatsage

Content is king, or at least it is in the world of online marketing.

Without well written, engaging and optimised content, you are never going to produce successful campaigns in the digital world. That’s because in the digital world there are two kings, there’s content and then there’s Google. King of Kings.

When it comes to the world of digital marketing, Google is your master. Everything you do, every sentence you type, every blog, tweet, poke and +1 is a small sacrifice on the altar of the search engine, a prayer to the Great Google to bless you with kindness from the Indexing Spiders and deliver your page to the hallowed #1 spot!

Build it and they will come?

Creating content is hard work, it takes time to research, write, edit, approve and publish. So having done the hard part, you really shouldn’t get lazy when it comes to distribution. Don’t assume that just because you have built it, they will come. You need to operate on a broad range of channels to ensure you don’t miss your audience, and make sure your content is working far harder than you.

What this image shows is that your audiences may not overlap across various internet platforms, you need to ensure you have a broad content strategy in place to make sure your content covers all of the bases.

Firstly, you need to be aware that duplicating content can actually be detrimental to search engine performance, so there’s more to content management that just ‘spray and pray’. You need to think carefully about how you make your content work for you.

I would recommend starting by deciding where you want your content to originate; this is incredibly important as the website where the content originates from will receive all of the search engine benefit from the backlinks and references your content generates.  With that decision made, I would recommend looking at some automation, after all none of us are time rich are we?

If this then that

I was recently introduced to a fantastic content distribution tool called If This Then That, which enables you to bypass a lot of the more labourious steps you would encounter manually setting up RSS feeds. It enables you to simply, and quickly create a list of actions based upon input into social media platforms, websites, email etc. and replicates the content across additional platforms.

Tarpipe

An even better tool is Tarpipe, on paper looks very similar to IFTTT, but where it differs is that it allows a much greater range of control over your distribution, not only can you choose where the content is distributed, but which elements of it are transferred, and where to. This means you can set exactly which content is delivered to which platform; and it is this highly targeted approach to content delivery which gets the thumbs up from me.

So with a fresh approach to content management and a few more tools in the bag, make sure that from this day forward you are getting the most out of your content ! Lest the Great Google cast you into 4^th page obscurity!

Alex Walker, Accountants’ Team

Recently I organised a full day’s worth of focus groups, to meet with Sage Accountants’ Division customers. A chance to meet those who buy the products we write about, who receive the marketing material we send and (hopefully) read our flagship magazine – Sage exchange.

A 10-hour day. 5 individual sessions. Around 50 customers in total, all of whom would probably prefer to be on billable time. I must be mad!

Me and my colleagues on one side of the 1-way glass (a little twitchy, wondering whether we were going to like what we heard), the customers sat in the plusher room and comfier chairs on the other (presumably ready to sock it to us). One plus for us though: we had wine in our fridge!

We’d hired a mediator via a local agency, the discussion guides were approved and ready to go, the first group now all sat in their chairs, intros done, the lights dimmed on our side of the glass, the final True Lies impression done by one of my co-workers, so we hit ‘record’ on the video camera.

Turns out, the sessions were extremely insightful.

Not everyone waxed lyrical about us, that’s never going to happen; but we certainly had plenty of advocates and when they came up against the odd person who disagreed, it was genuinely interesting to see people argue over the pros and cons of our work.

It’s reassuring that the majority of people want to be nice, although you’ll always have to accept that not everyone is going to say what you want to hear. Expect to see someone literally jumping around on their seat, sprouting disgruntled feedback before the mediator has even done the intros round. And why not? They’ve given up their time to be there!

Still, I know I adopted a somewhat puckered posture when someone took a pop at my magazine (labelling it “just a piece of marketing!”); and just maybe I found myself approaching the glass, climbing up on the shelf below the viewing pane, ready to flip through it.

Okay maybe I exaggerated that last point, but it does rather force you on the defensive (or attack??) when you’re not hearing a ringing endorsement of what you currently offer.

Thankfully, I remember my über-defensive stance wasn’t needed for too long, as customers started to give examples of what they genuinely liked about our products, our marketing and, thankfully, our little magazine. My arms loosened, hands slipping casually into my pockets, I stepped back from window.

10 hours and 5 sessions seems like a heck of a long day when you think it’s going to be an endless upper and downer, between smiling serenely at warm praise one minute, and then curling up in a ball the next.

But once you’ve decided mentally that you’re just going to sit and listen, take the rough with the smooth to try and form an holistic and objective summary of what customers perceptions truly are, you really do get a lot out of them.  And of course you don’t have to do 5 sessions, but the more you hear and the more you see, the more solid your interpretation is, and you’re not allowing one or two people to skew your summary either way.

Okay they may be tough at times, but I say the more focus groups the better. Blissful ignorance gets you nowhere…

Steve Porter, Sage Accountants’ Team

MySpace, Bebo, Friendster, Google Wave, Google Buzz, Ping.

All brand names that meant something once, some of which had tens of millions of users in the online social space, all have something else in common; they tried to be David to Facebook’s Goliath and came off worse.

All of them brought something new to the online social space, a different way to interact with other members, a quirky feature or niche focus. All of them also went the way of the Dodo (barring a few clingy tumbleweeds), and most of those features have been aped by Facebook.

The reasons for their failures are varied, but the end result is the same. Facebook continues to dominate our online social interactions, and with the external feed integration changes Facebook announced at F8, it seems they want to become the landing page for your entire internet experience.

There have been contenders who have stuck it out though; Twitter is a great example of a social network which has managed to hold its own. Whether this is because of its success as a high speed news delivery platform, or the inherent simplicity of the user interface, Twitter for now, can stand alone.

Facebook fatigue?

Google + has come at an interesting time, there is research showing that we are experiencing ‘Facebook fatigue’ due to extensive media coverage, data ownership and regular security setting modifications. Facebook’s latest UI revision has also been met with significant criticism, though Facebook has weathered similar storms in the past. This has all come to the fore at the time that Google + has gone from ‘invitation beta’ to public launch.

What Google + has brought is an interesting way to controlling your content distribution and a smart UI, which allows you to very precisely control what is visible to whom when you post content. Another feature is a multi-user video chat function called Hangouts. Google have also cleverly integrated Google + into the menu bar of their main search engine page, thereby exposing it to users on over 90 million searches a day.

Whether neat functionality and high levels of exposure will be enough to keep Google + above water are questions that only time can tell the answer to. Google + has grown very quickly, in fact it is estimated to have over 20 million users already, which far outstrips the performance of any of Google’s previous attempts to enter the social space. The problem is that Facebook at current estimates has 800 million users, 50% of which will check their profile every day.

The new Facebook…

Personally I think Google + has an uphill challenge in front of it; Facebook has already integrated Subscriptions and Lists, which mimic Circles, so the question is does Google have anything else in the toolbox? To me the classic error of any new social media website is to try and ‘be the new Facebook’, not because the site itself might not be up to scratch, but because users are lazy and don’t like change.

Having been using Google + for a couple of months now, I’m still undecided. There are parts I’m really fond of, like the clutter free UI and parts I really dislike, such as the people finder. The latest figures show a thirteen-fold growth in traffic to Google + since their public launch, so there may be hope yet for the network’s survival.

What are your thoughts, does Google have the ammunition to take on Facebook and win, or do you think Google + will follow the footsteps of Wave and Buzz?

Alex Walker, Accountants’ Team