RediDraft 2024 has been in development for over a year and is expected to be made generally available in the first quarter of 2024. The development effort for this upcoming release is internally funded.

Planning for this release is a little bit of a challenge because unlike the release in 2011 the goal is more than converting all existing RediDraft users to this new release. I want to increase the number of RediDraft users and that means marketing.

Traditional marketing isn’t going to do much good for RediDraft. It is a niche product and even if RediDraft showed up in the top spot for a keyphrase like Document Automation it isn’t likely to yield significant conversion numbers. The biggest reason for this is the ideal user of RediDraft is very unique. This means generic keyword SEO isn’t going to be a major factor for us because the chance of the ideal RediDraft user finding us from a Google or Bing search is pretty small. The exception being if they already knew about FastDraft or RediDraft from some past exposure. We want to rank high for searches of RediDraft, FastDraft, InterActive Professional Software, and Valeo Software. But someone searching for “document automation” is probably not looking for a very advanced tool like RediDraft.

If traditional marketing methods for a SaaS (Software as a Service) application won’t work, what will? What are the best lead generation options? And how much will a realistic marketing effort cost over the next year, two years, and five years?

To get the right eyes to this site we first have to identify them. Over ninety percent of the current RediDraft user base consists of small to medium law firms catering to higher end clients. The consensus is this should be a growth area considering the number of firms meeting that criteria currently using RediDraft. We are already working on identifying them and working out a plan to reach them through various channels. It’s very likely to be some combination of online and print advertising but the details are still being thrashed out.

Once we have their attention we plan a series of short but engaging videos showcasing RediDraft’s unique ability to improve their document generation. RediDraft can help them generate documents meeting their exacting standards faster and more consistent than any other known solution out there.

These planned videos can help but live demos are still important. If they are willing to share some examples of the content they use the demo will use their content showcasing how easy it is to create and manage libraries, form volumes, components and variables to assemble a completed document. Many will say this is very risky because what do you do if the demo goes poorly. This is not a boast but this has never happened. If it ever does, we will deal with it.

We are also exploring how best to offer a free trial and/or a permanently free offering for someone to get started. Over 30 years of user data has shown if a user gets their content setup to their liking they remain long term customers. If we can devise a free offering to let someone get stared and realize significant value on a smallish scale we are very confident they will want to expand their use of RediDraft.

We are also fleshing out a detailed on-boarding process to make sure a new client gets up and running and realizing the many benefits of RediDraft as fast as possible. This process must include personalized training using their content and ingestion of their content into their RediDraft instance to give them a jump start.

If you have ideas on how to market RediDraft and want to share them with us, feel free to leave them in the comments below!