Coming Soon: Video Demo

Today, I recorded an overview demonstration of Marketing for Mavens showing how to edit a web page to display custom content based on how visitors interact with your web site. The demonstration goes through the account setup process and the getting started tutorial; the 5 steps to getting the application setup on your web site. It's a little rough around the edges but overall it came out pretty good. I'm going to do some editing to it and should have it up either later tonight or tomorrow.

Our Target Audience: Marketing Mavens

Often I'm asked who Marketing for Mavens' target audience is. Although there are many people in any size company that can benefit from this application, it is the marketing mavens, the people who thirsts for information and have a strong desire to use this information to connect with people, who have inspired us to build this product.

Most people use web analytics software to tell them what is going on with their site and a separate content management system or file system to deliver the content. What this application does is bridge the gap between these two systems. Marketing for Mavens only collects the information you need to make decisions on customizing content for your visitors. In turn, you use this information to create custom content and promotions and deliver it to each individual based on their past behavior on your web site. This ensure that the right content and promotions get the people who are most interested. Our focus is on providing an application that help you to deliver better results and a higher level of user satisfaction on your web site.

Screencast Software Recommendations Needed

I'm looking for recommendations for screencast software on the Mac. iShowU looks promising and I'm going to check it out but I was wondering if there are any other applications I should also try? I want to find something that is simple to use and flexible enough to edit and export to different formats after recording.

On a side note and related to this, I'm planning on recording the Marketing for Mavens demo on Tuesday so look for it later next week.

Coming Soon: Video Tutorial on Combing Web Analytics with Web Content Management

One of my goals for the next week or so is to put together a walk-through tutorial. This will show you how to setup a new account, develop custom content, and install a couple of lines of code to get everything up and running.

I also need to update the web site. The current site doesn't do justice for what this application is all about which is, taking advantage of the information you receive from how people interact with your web site and delivering custom content to them as they need it. For now, feel free to submit your email so you can be notified when important updates arrive including information on the limited beta going live in May.

Marketing for Mavens - Now running on our hosting server

Just a quick update to let you know that I have the application up and running at our hosting service. I'll be integrating it into marketingformavens.com so you can begin to see how it works from a "citizen" perspective. This should be ready in a few days. I'll keep you posted.

User Accounts Completed

I spent the better part of this week redesigning the user account system. It feels good to get this out of the way. You can now have multiple people accessing the same account. I still need to work out the final details on assigning roles. This should be resolved next week.

I also wanted to provide a sneak peak of the application. This screen shot is from the citizen profile page. The design still has a long way to go but all the pieces are coming together. A few features that we're added this week:

• Ability to link your account to your sites stylesheet so you can see what your promotions will look like before pushing them live to your web site.
• Added a quick start guide to walk you through the steps for adding code to your web site and creating new promotions. Usability is very important and I want to make sure new users don't sign-up and then wonder what to do next.
• Integrated TinyMCE into the promotion builder page to reduce the need to have in-depth knowledge of HTML.
  

Next week, I'll continue to work on the design and hopefully I can have the site live on the hosting server. I've had some issues with my hosting company which should now be resolved.

Also, if you're interested in getting on the mailing list please go to marketingformavens.com. You will only be notified when we have important news to share. You will not be spammed. Joining the list will also put you into the queue for the limited beta launching in May.

Quick Update

I decided on Friday to throw out the old user account system and start over. This is probably going to take me the rest of the week to complete. In the end, this will be a much better system which will allow you to have multiple people access the same account. You'll also be able to assign roles to each individual will allow access to different areas of the application.

This needed to be done at some point and it is much easier to address it now. The goal of Marketing for Mavens is to make it simple enough for non-html experts to update your web content. However, we recognize that this won't be the case in the beta release but there will still be a lot of valuable information you'll want to share. This can be done by assigning roles and limiting who can add content to the site.

Quick Update: Setting up Ruby on Rails

The plan for this evening is to have Ruby on Rails up and running so I can migrate everything from the local test environment over to the hosting company. If all goes well, the plan is to have Marketing for Mavens up and running in the wild next week. I'm really looking forward to fully testing this application in an environment where I can start to collect some real data.

There are still some issues that need to be addressed and some features to be added before the beta is launched. The some of these features are:

• Reporting: We're going to be collecting a lot of data which you'll find valuable to share with your colleagues. Of course, none of this is of any use to you unless there is some way to get it out of the database.
• Additional Tracking: There is almost an endless amount of information that we could track and store but you have other web analytics tools for this. We want to make sure we're only providing you with the data that you need to make quick business decisions and that we can use to distribute your content.
• Recording non-HTML Links: Right now, tracking is only occurring on page load. We need to add the ability to record clicks on PDF's, ZIP's, etc. These are very important assets that need to be tracked since you can gain more information about a person's needs based on data sheet download then you can from most web pages.
  

Development Ahead of Schedule

I'm very happy with how things have been coming together with the coding for Marketing for Mavens. I may even be a little ahead of my personal schedule but we'll see if that keeps up. Soon it will be moved out of the testing environment and I'll have it up and running on a site so you can get a "citizen" view of how the application works. I'm really looking forward to getting to this milestone as will give me a better perspective on how things are progressing.

Content Management Meets Web Analytics

Right now, our home page doesn't go into a lot of detail on the features provided by Marketing for Mavens, so I'd like to explain it in more detail. You can imagine Marketing for Mavens as the link between serving content and analyzing web traffic. Most companies do both but they tend to be used in a linear fashion and neither integrates well enough to make business decisions on-the-fly. Your typical setup looks something like this:

Content Management -> Web Site -> Web Analytics -> Analyze Data -> Make Content Changes

What Marketing for Mavens does is store promotions/content that you setup and track web analytics information. Then, based on how a person interacts with your web site, it distributes the most appropriate content or promotion to them. It looks more like this:

Marketing for Mavens <-> Web Site

As a person reads through your web content, we're learning more about this person and what they want. The close interaction between your web site and Marketing for Mavens ensures that you don't need to take the time to analyze the data before you can respond to the needs of your citizens (citizens = visitors; I prefer to use citizens as it gives a much better level of respect to the people who take the time to come to your site). Best of all, this is customized to each person meaning you no longer need to try to be all things to all people.

Some of the key features:

• Customize messages/promotions based on your site's visitor history.
• Analyze individual citizens so you can determine who is most interested in your products and services.
• Tag and assign points to your web site URL's to determine areas of interested and the level of interest.

Moving to Blogger

After starting at tumblr, I've decided to move to Blogger. I really love the simplicity of tumblr but I couldn't get past the inability for people to post comments. My goal is to build a community around Marketing for Mavens and comments are a great way to start to do that.

Coding

What amazes me most about coding, in this case Ruby on Rails, is how I can bang my head against a wall for hours trying to figure something out, only to take a break, come back, and figure it out right away. It’s unbelievable how clearing your head for an hour or so can make such a dramatic difference in how you approach a problem.

How do I find out more?

If you have any questions about Marketing for Mavens please feel free to contact me:

• Mobile: 978.234.7071
• Email: chris@marketingformavens.com
• Twitter: twitter.com/cwills
• Jabber: chris.marketingformavens
• Web Site: www.marketingformavens.com
  

Marketing for Mavens

Since February, I’ve been working on a new web application that allows marketers to easily customize web content for visitors based on how they interact with your web site. That’s a mouthful but basically it combines the usability of a content management system with the knowledge gathered by web analytics software to determine what visitors see on your site. The idea came about through my own frustrations and my guess is that I’m not the only one out that wishes it was easier to distribute custom content to only the people who want it.

Yesterday, I launched my new web site, marketingformavens.com. It’s a placeholder page for now but if you want to join the list for the limited beta, you should check it out.