A blog about finding, buying and using business software

We’ve all heard it before— “Content is King”. But as Valentine’s Day approaches, I’ve concluded that he must really be the King of Hearts. After all, Content is not only winning over the hearts of marketers, but, in turn, he’s helping those marketers win over the hearts of their prospects – and at an ever increasing rate!

According to a recent study by MarketingProfs, 9 in 10 B2B marketing organizations employed some form of content marketing in 2011, and 60% of those marketers intend to increase their spend on content marketing in 2012.

However, in the enterprise software industry, we tend to focus most of our content on the cerebral needs of the prospect… not on pulling their heartstrings. We create feature lists and tutorials, case studies and buyer’s guides to educate them on why they should buy our products. And while these content pieces certainly help convert prospects at the bottom of the funnel – or those who are actively comparing products and on the verge of purchasing – they fail to drive any initial demand or interest in the brand (or, in other words, fill the top of the funnel).

That’s where the Content King comes in. Creating compelling content is one area where many B2B marketers could take a cue from our B2C counterparts. What B2C companies have known for decades is that in order to sell their product, their marketing needs to entertain audiences and tap into their emotions in order to win over their hearts (and wallets). Just take a look at this weekend’s Super Bowl ads if you don’t believe me.

Before you say that there’s no way for your software company to create fun, heartwarming content to help woo your prospects, take a look at these 5 tactics (with corresponding B2B examples): continue reading »

Does your website have a compelling call to action?

Does your website have a short form (and by short I mean less than 6 fields)?

Does your website have both?

If you answered no to any of these, stop what you’re doing and read this article because you’re losing a lot of money right now!

Over the last 12 years, we’ve seen websites that convert visitors into sales leads at phenomenal rates (15 – 25% +) and, on the other side of the spectrum, terrible conversion rates (less than 1%).  By analyzing what the software companies with the highest conversion rates had in common (and what the worst lacked), we were able to identify the two largest contributors to a software website’s conversion rate. continue reading »

Remember my January post about New Year’s resolutions and my vow to “take an interest in Pinterest?”  Well, I have. And I’m not just talking about my daughter’s Wizard of Oz themed birthday party board and my “I Would So Wear This” fashion board (although, those are pretty awesome and if I were you I’d go check them out). Capterra’s Marketing Department has also joined Pinterest and started pinning all kinds of cool stuff: everything from our own blog posts about finding software to infographics about social media and other things that we find interesting, and even “tech geek” stuff.

In my short time on Pinterest, I’ve made a few observations: it’s addictive, it works better for some industries than others (insurance: not so much, retail: most definitely), and, since it’s still so new, its value in the B2B world has not been proven.

So will Capterra keep pinning? Probably so because… continue reading »

Unlimited budget?!  That may sound crazy to some advertisers, but it is actually the norm among Capterra customers.  That’s because, if done properly, Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising pays for itself. Every time an advertiser says that they don’t have a budget to give us a try, we know they’re either blowing us off (understandable, since most ad channels are probably worth blowing off) or they don’t fundamentally understand PPC advertising and how closely it’s connected to revenue generation.

The PPC advertising novice thinks of a new channel opportunity this way:
“Some of my competitors advertise there, so maybe I should try it, too.”

When they do decide to try, they only want to spend a few hundred dollars a month.

Now compare that to the savvy PPC advertiser:
“I’ll spend as much as I possibly can to maximize my sales!”

Why are they able to do that? continue reading »

Last month, Capterra released our very first infographic, The Top 20 Most Popular Marketing Automation Solutions, to answer one of the most common questions software buyers ask us: “What are the most popular options?” The goal of the infographic was to highlight the big players (not necessarily the best fit for any particular business) while also directing marketers to our comprehensive Marketing Automation directory where they could see just how many diverse options are really available (187 to date).

So this month, we wanted to explore a different software industry for our second infographic— one that has gained a tremendous amount of buzz recently thanks to a few recent government declarations: Electronic Medical Records.

We know many medical practitioners have EMR on their minds because the U.S. government has laid out a goal that all medical facilities move over to electronic records by the end of 2014. Often referred to as “EHR” or electronic health records, these solutions allow physicians to track patient health information, including allergies, prescriptions, and charts, through a centrally-accessible system. The difference between the two terms is that EMR refers to a solution that can be used within one facility, whereas EHR refers to those that can be used across multiple facilities. (Several of the solutions listed on our infographic fall into both categories as demonstrated by their target audiences.)

The Data

Like last time, we started our data collection for the infographic by examining the software companies listed in Capterra’s EMR Software Directory. We strive to list every EMR solution on the market, and there are 325 currently included (if you see any missing though, please let us know!) From there, we narrowed down the list by looking at web data for each of the vendors, including Alexa rankings, Compete traffic, and Google searches. While none of these are perfect indicators of popularity (particularly for B2B websites), the data gave us a way of narrowing down the list from 325 to the top 50 most visited EMR sites on the web.

For those 50 vendors, we performed additional research to get a better sense of which were “Top 20 material.” Again, we searched their websites and press releases to identify their number of users, customers, and revenue (when listed). We also gathered the number of Twitter followers for each EMR company. continue reading »