It’s Boulder Startup Week and I’m feeling inspired.
You may have noticed the lack of an “Internlandia” in the title…I’m an official full-time employee now! I spent 3 months here as an intern making photocopies, washing cars, doing data entry, getting coffee, running errands…just kidding, this is Net-Results! I actually spent the last 3 months writing content, designing documents and presentations for our channel partners, developing a new social media strategy (send me a tweet!) and, well, a little bit of everything because we’re a start up and that’s the nature of the beast. 
As Matt (my new boss!) likes to say, “There’s one job description and that’s ‘whatever it takes'” And let me tell you, we live that every day over here.

Boulder Startup Week

Boulder Startup Week LogoThursday morning I went to a Boulder Startup Week presentation called “Marketing for Startups: As Easy As A, 3, Kumquat .” It was great to be surrounded by fellow startup founders and employees concerned with how to get the biggest marketing bang for their (lack of) buck. There is an incredibly supportive and established entrepreneurial community in the greater Denver, Colorado area and this week is one of the highlights for local entrepreneurs and startup companies.
Developing new skill sets and multitasking is a hallmark of the startup environment. Marketing for startups entails completely different forms of messaging and strategy which is a concept we embrace here at Net-Results. As our company evolves, so does our marketing strategy.

Pivot Time for Net-Results

One of my favorite quotes from Boulder Startup Week is “Startups pivot every day.”
The strength of startups lies in their ability to be agile and respond quickly to opportunities or crises, as the need arises. If someone Tweets us a question, we are able to respond without going through 3 departments and a legal analysis of the verbiage in our response. This gives us an advantage over larger companies with giant social media departments because social blow-ups and opportunities happen in a moment.  As one of the speakers at the Boulder Startup Week presentation put it (in reference to Sphero the iPhone controlled ball), “If Obama plays with your ball, you drop whatever else you’re doing and focus on that.”
As a software company, we realize that one challenge for us lies in being able to educate people about what we offer. Marketing Automation is not the same as marketing. When we say we’re “agency focused“, what does that mean? When we’re ranked the best marketing automation software by topseos.com for May 2013, what extra value are we providing to our partners and customers that makes us so great?

What Value Do We Add?

The value we add for agencies and other potential prospects who are looking for measurable results from marketing efforts for their clients is a key benefit we need to highlight. As one marketer from LinkSmart said at the presentation I attended, It’s important that you “don’t get caught up in the day-to-day. Get data to support what you’re working on regularly and don’t get lost in the daily stuff.” For agencies, Net-Results can measure how many people clicked on the new banner ad they designed, whether a green or yellow call-to-action button was more effective, what sources the traffic came from, if the visitor checked out any additional pages on the company site and how long they spent on each page. Those are powerful metrics.
Statistical support for marketing campaigns is one thing, but using software tools that are able to automatically identify and score leads is a whole other level of efficiency that fuses marketing and sales into an effective and unbeatable team. As I settle into my new position my goal is to really help people understand the value of marketing automation and the advantages of partnering with Net-Results. We’re a startup with stellar partner program options, partner-focused capabilities and a team of real people working hard to bring marketing and sales together.

We Understand Marketing Challenges

Students sitting next to lockers in a school hallwayTransitioning from a student to an intern to a full-time Design and Marketing Coordinator shifted my focus and gave me an opportunity to apply all the skill sets I’ve been busy developing since I first got my college acceptance letter. When I was first hired, I didn’t know what marketing automation was. Now, I’m using our software to segment our inbound traffic and analyze the effectiveness of recent social campaigns.
I’ve learned the difference between email marketing and marketing automation, learned about PII and eaten pie, read about social media faux paus where people got bitter on Twitter, and written a few too many puns into this blog post.
The bottom line is, as a startup we understand the challenges our partners and customers face with driving more revenue and as we continue to grow, the software tools we provide are an invaluable resource for our own sales and marketing team. This week that team grew a little bigger.

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Lucy