visitsweden.com, who recently was announced the best website in Sweden, uses Headlight to optimize their online marketing.

The Swedish newspaper, Internetworld has just finished a large survey of Sweden’s largest websites. The purpose was to find the best website of them all. The winner was visitsweden.com. In the same survey webbanalys.nu wanted to find which online tools the best sites use to optimize their sites and online performance.
 
Besides the web based freeware Google Analytics, visitsweden.com uses Headlight from TraceWorks. Headlight helps Visit Sweden optimizing their online campaigns, so that they always receive the optimal amount of visitors to their site. With many different marketing activities it can be difficult to choose the right path and without the right tool it is almost impossible to optimize your online marketing activities. Tommy Sollén, Project manager from Visit Sweden says. ”When it comes to measuring and optimizing your online marketing activities, Headlight is by far the best solution on the market”.

With that in mind Headlight has been a significant factor in the announcement as Sweden’s best website.

TraceWorks will be attending IMC, Internet Marketing Conference, in Stockholm on the 27th of November. Here you will be able to meet up and see a presentation of Headlight.

You’ve read the papers – From The Wall Street Journal to our own local newspaper Børsen, everywhere you hear how the world economy is dipping, the finance crisis is now full-blown and many companies are cutting back. But is it actually the best solution simply to weather the storm?

In my opinion – no.  If you truly are a visionary marketer, you should see recession as an opportunity to conquer market shares and strengthen your business. Your competitors will most often reduce their marketing activities, so proactive companies have the opportunity to actually gain market shares.

The “International Journal of Research in Marketing” states that continual proactive, effective and cost-efficient marketing campaigns during an economic downturn can prove beneficial. In fact, when competitors drop the ball in terms of cutting back on marketing initiatives, companies able to reach out to customers and maintain brand awareness and loyalty are even able to improve marketplace positioning.

But why is that so? When your competitors cut back, it will result in a decrease in advertising “noise.” That makes your message reaching your customers even louder and clearer, improving the chances that your brand’s message will be heard.

The best way for you to step up your game and deliver strong ROI during a recession is to enhance your marketing through online media and -channels. It is by far your best way to quickly deliver targeted, relevant, revenue-producing communications to your customers. When the customer data available to you continues to grow, the opportunities for you to create better insights and improve revenue grow as well.

So when the economy makes it advisable to cut back on pricier traditional advertising and focus more on cost-effective online marketing, it’s important that you are ready to act quickly and decisively.

Good luck with your Recession Marketing.

The new MacBooks and displays are out. Once again Apple proves they have their customers in mind when they design products. The new MacBook and display combination is awesome. The display include a powercord for your MacBook and a small and easy to connect mini DVI plug. You don’t need the seperate adapter for your MacBook, and no more fiddling with that chunky old DVI plug every morning.

It would have been nice with more than three USB ports and Firewire on the display though. Apple calls it a USB hub, but how many USB hubs you buy today only have three ports?

The main problem with this new fantastic setup however, is that we just got new MacBook Pro’s and displays at the office less than 6 months ago. I’m afraid that it’s going to be a tough one convincing the economicly responsible parties at TraceWorks that we want new computers already. I wonder if apple provides an upgrade program?

Compare your effort to your industry

Our online marketing performance benchmarking service is complete and implemented in our product portfolio. If you would like to compare your online marketing effort to the rest of your industry, now is the chance to do it. Why settle with knowing whether or not you live up to your own goals when you can compare yourself with your competition?

We have just launched the initial data collection process and would of course like to invite you to participate. Simply fill out our online marketing performance benchmarking survey and find out for yourself where you should improve to become industry leader.

After our collection process is complete you will receive

a)TraceWorks online marketing benchmarking report including:
b)Your own online marketing company profile
c)Your own online marketing leaderboard
d)An invitation to join the e-market pioneers

You can learn much more about our online marketing benchmarking service right here

Mashable - one the world’s largest blogs on tech and social networks - have released a great and comprehensive list of effective online apps to help create and run awesome companies.

The list covers all the key areas like “accounting”, “communications”, “CRM” … and of of course the most wonderful and important discipline of them all: “marketing & communication”.

It got me thinking; what do we use at TraceWorks to run our business? Here’s our internal list, as I remember it:

1. For marketing we use Headlight (integrated with Carma, Google, Microsoft CRM)
2. For invoicing and accounting we use e-conomic
3. For online presentations we use GoToMeeting
4. For live-chat-support we use Liveperson
5. For bug tracking and project management we use Ontime2008
6. For relationship management we use Microsoft Dynamics CRM
7. For internal collaboration (WIKI) our design team use Google Sites
8. For managing ad hoc external projects our marketing team use Basecamp
9. For website CMS we use Umbraco

and perhaps a few more ..?

Check out this video, a perfect example of creative thinking. This guys project is coherent with two of three TraceWorks company values, or is it keywords, taglines; what ever. Anyway, it’s SIMPLICITY and INNOVATION.

He uses an old rock solid technique to make something new, and all of the sudden what was tugged away in dusty museums becomes entertaining again. = Innovation. Instead of using 3D or any holographic-multi-touch-I-can-spin-it-with-my-phone cutting edge technology he uses paper, which turns out, is what makes it remarkable i the first place. = Simplicity.

Solving the most complicated questions, problems, what ever you have. With the most simple solutions is and will always be the most remarkable. You have to make people go “why didn’t I think of that” or “I could have done that”. Fact is they didn’t, you did, and that’s why you’re a kick-ass software builder.

Get of your ass and start inventing, you can do it!!!!

Hmm…so you love marketing and poker – good to know…

Many people would argue that this thought experiment is too uninteresting as the two disciplines have nothing in common. But is that in fact so….?

If you wake me up at night, I’ll always claim that I’m pretty good at both. The process of being successful in either marketing or poker is actually not so different that you might think. Let’s think about it for a while…

What makes a good poker player? (Besides being lucky, which is taken out of the equation in this example). Well, before you sit down at the final table, you need to set up a clear strategy on how you’ll play the game.

First of all, you PLAN ahead - if you’re chip leader (have the highest budget) you’ll have to go the table with a clear goal to dominate it.

If you’re low-stacked, you must plan to focus on creativity and to do things your opponents will not expect. Then you’ll EXECUTE your plan at the table and react if your opponents suddenly change their game plan.

You learn after each hand and then you take a moment to analyze it; the obvious thing - did you win the hand? How did your opponents react to your strategy and could you do anything better? In short, you OPTIMIZE your performance….

Does that sound familiar working with marketing…?

You can only be good at marketing if you know your audience well. (Besides being lucky, which – again - is taken out of the equation in this example).

That’s why it’s so damn important that you do your homework right. Get to know your customers’ environment, find out what triggers them and PLAN how you can respond to their needs.

When you have a thorough understanding of your marketspace and you have your operational strategy ready, you EXECUTE your marketing campaigns. We all know that not all campaigns perform as good as the next.

So, always evaluate your campaigns and identify successful performance indicators. With this knowledge in mind, you’re ready to OPTIMIZE your overall results.

So in my world, you have to attack the challenges in both marketing and poker in the exact same way. At least that’s always worked for me (except when my opponents have luck on their sides….)

The other day we talked at the office about switching back to flip overs instead of all the slide show projector sci-fi bullocks. Honestly, the day they figure out how to embed youtube videos on marker paper; I’m switching.

Here’s a great example of information visualization and good flipover use.

In my previous post “History first” I talked about our transformation from “4 guys in an apartment” to “30  super talents”. TraceWorks is certainly growing bigger and hopefully a little wiser every day … and we have a new corporate identity to reflect who we are today:

A company is much like a human being. In many ways it always stays the same. But it also changes a little everyday. It has to, it’s important. Staying the same is equally important. At TraceWorks we fight that fight every day - very consciously. Creating progress and status quo simultaneously.

So what’s new? What’s old?

Well, we still cherish simplicity, curiosity, and playfulness. We still feel different from the the usual suspects out there. Done that always and we remind ourselves of that every day.

We also know that if we truly want to be a world-leading vendor in Marketing Software we have to grow up and be more. We need to be more focused, robust, and more responsible. And we need to be superior in mastering the most sophisticated technology around.

That combination is the new TraceWorks … and that is what we hope our new corporate identity (logo, website - the works) supports.

Enjoy it all here: www.traceworks.com.

TraceWorks is getting bigger. Many new partners and customers come aboard every month. Our average growth rate is around +50% aiming for 100% next year. We’re very happy about that because it allows us to invest in more intellectual capital. So today, we’re about 30 happy super talents (gaining 1 every month, I think).

Many of our new super talents often ask for a little history lecture: So how did you guys do this? You’ve got rich parents, right?

So here goes a brief walk down memory lane. Let’s call it “the making of a fast growing, still pretty small yet very beautiful software company”. Short, precise - I love it.

Well, we started the company back in 2002 – just 4 guys in an apartment with no money, lots of ideas, and lots of energy. All four of us invested 80-hour workweeks in creating an awesome software boutique. Sure, we worked incredibly hard … but it never really felt that hard, as I recall it (Advice no. 1: work hard).

The guys were:

Anders and myself as Co-CEOs.
Jesper mastering all UX / UI related stuff.
Jimmi working technical miracles.

We definitely didn’t want to create an invoice-by-the-hour consultancy! It’s simply too difficult to scale, we thought (ironically, today we’re building a lot of “professional services” supporting our software offering). It was a very conscious decision to build a business model that would “generate revenue and grow while we’re sleeping” (Advice no. 2: scalability is key).

Regarding sleep, we didn’t sleep much. Our purpose from day 1 was to build-up an international company. International back then meant trying to support maybe 10+ different time zones with just 4 people.

I remember Anders and myself drinking beers at a local bar just around the corner from the apartment. / office. Around 2am Anders had to split because he had a conference call with some guys from the US. 3am Anders joined the party again for more beers. That’s just how we did it. (Advice no. 3: be realistic and keep focus) (Advice no. 4: be crazy and try everything).

One of our biggest concerns were “appearing too small” and we tried hard to make TraceWorks appear BIG - thinking,”big is good”. As well-disciplined new media folks we of course now know that “small is the new big” (Advice no. 5: stay small-at-heart when growing bigger).

Our Kodak moments from the early years would probably include legendary calls from companies like Omniture and Yahoo (both awesome companies by the way – but nevertheless) asking us questions ranging from ”how do you know about which search terms people use?” to “what’s a conversion?”. That’s a little funny - somehow.

So TraceWorks gradually got older and after a year and a half we decided not only to focus on search marketing but to support more marketing channels. That decision was a big success and our company quickly grew to 8 or 9 or 10 people – all getting paid a (ridiculously low) salary (greatly subsidized through government funds). (Advice no. 6: only hire passionate super talents - be very thorough)

Time passed. We moved to new offices, hired a few more people, got catering, new computers, and we just loved Rackspace. Everything was dandy.

But then things got complicated. We saw inferior technology vendors move faster, we experienced limitations with StatLynx (our old product), due to market conditions it was increasingly difficult to find passionate super talents, and we were unhappy with our board (so we fired them). We still had OK growth rates but we weren’t happy because we could do 10x better “if just …”

We decided to do something about it investing all we owned (talent and money) in developing Headlight. After 8-10 months we realized that we didn’t have the muscle to design and develop Headlight just as we wanted it. Ambition is something we never lacked (and will never lack).

We had to do something to speed-up productivity and increase quality - so we partnered-up with Nordic Ventures Partners. They took one look at Headlight and more or less asked “kids, where do we sign!?”

With money in the bank we hired 15 super talents including our CEO, Christian Dam and our CTO, Mads Fink-Jensen. We became more focused and more responsible … and we’re certainly beginning to see the gains from those investments.

Headlight is now out there. It’s helping a lot of companies doing better marketing gaining better ROI%. But Headlight is very much still in development. The longer-term vision for Headlight is still a corporate hush hush very secret … but I can reveal this much:

In the next 12 months marketers and agencies around the world looking for means to increase productivity, maneuverability, and accountability will gradually see some amazing stuff happening on-top of probably the industry’s most sophisticated plug ‘n’ play marketing data warehouse.

The future is here – it’s just not evenly distributed yet.