Marketing Mindset

Uncle! We’re moving the blog

Sun, 16 Jan 2011 20:41:46 -0500

A blog must be timely, and therefore updated regularly/frequently. I just can’t do that in the existing tool, so I’m moving the blog to the WordPress platform.
From an SEO perspective, blogs are best hosted on the same domain as the main web site. From an ease-of-updating perspective, it’s tough to beat a blog hosted on wordpress.com. Guess which we went with? If you are in the marketing mindset, then the choice was a no-brainer.
You can check out the new blog at http://promarkconsulting.com/blog

Meet Max

Sat, 18 Dec 2010 23:09:55 -0500

I’ve been a little busy since August, but not with marketing or business consulting. My day job was put on hold when my son, Max, was born 5 weeks prematurely. My wife and son needed me more than my clients, so I took the next several months off to learn how to be a Dad. It’s the best thing I’ve ever done.
Late last month I started to ease back into the saddle, and have worked on a few interesting projects over the last 4 weeks or so. Check out the “Learnings from 2010” to see what stood out from those and other engagements.

Learnings from 2010

Sat, 18 Dec 2010 12:55:59 -0500

This isn’t going to be one of those 12-days-of-Festivus retrospectives, or a New Year’s resolution list. Nope. This is going to be the most important stuff I’ve learned all year. In fact, all of my most poignant teachable moments really all boil down to one thing: analytics are truth, or said differently, the numbers do not lie.
Two projects in particular really drove this home.
The first project was a complete “from scratch” start up of a digital strategy, including a web site with visitor tracking, email marketing and PR. Everything had tracking code built into it, so we were able to see how well (or not) each tactic performed pretty much as they happened. We pulled some great numbers in terms of web traffic, and we saw industry-leading open and click-through rates for our email campaigns.
Trouble was, this client didn’t sell anything directly to consumers, and at the time they didn’t even have a reseller channel in place, so it wasn’t really possible to calculate return on investment. We had to use industry benchmarks as our key performance indicators, and trust that our tactics would continue to pay off once the company built its downline.
The learning from this engagement was, if you’re going to use a “build it and they will come” approach, you’d better have a metrics dashboard that you can monitor on a very regular basis (we looked weekly) and adapt your tactics as they begin to bear fruit (or not). Content, tone and structure were all candidates to be modified, based upon what the stats showed. You can’t close your eyes, pull the trigger and hope you hit your target.
The second engagement was a bit more like our standard fare. We’re often called in when the VP or director of marketing has reached the end of their in-house or contracted capabilities and still needs to move the needle. We were asked to evaluate the existing SEM, web site and email marketing tactics, while another firm tackled social media. Right away it was obvious that the incumbents had laid some very good groundwork, they just needed to dig into their analytics to see where there room was to improve.
In the SEM case, it was clear from the analytics that many of their keywords/ads were driving the wrong kind of traffic (if they were driving any), and that SEM in general was underperforming; they were spending a lot of money on ads that were not well positioned and that drove traffic that didn’t convert. They needed to have more AdWords copy and landing page variations (A/B split testing), and needed to optimize their keyword bidding.
For the web site, the analytics also pointed to a home page and landing pages that needed to be more dynamic, and more useful/interesting to the target segment. Visitor recency was very low, as was time on page. Also, the existing site structure and page naming didn’t promote high search rankings. Most importantly, the primary call to action was buried on each page, and the secondary call to action was missing from several key pages. We recommended expanding the number of metrics they regularly monitored, and creating both macro and micro conversion funnels, in order to clearly track the impact of our changes.
Finally, for the email marketing, it again came down to metrics. The company wanted to increase the number of subscribers, and increase open rate. We noticed in the analytics that out of tens of thousands of subscribers and over a dozen emails sent this year, not a single email had been forwarded. So we recommended some changes to make sharing the email content easier over a variety of channels. We also noticed that many subscribers were using mobile devices to read the emails, so we recommended making changes to the email template to optimize it for mobile devices, to improve the open rate.
These are just some examples of how analytics pointed the way to making measurable improvements. If you’d like us to assess your existing tactics to see where you can squeeze out more/better results, give us a call at 410-238-1989.

Swimming with The Sales Lion

Wed, 26 May 2010 14:56:31 -0400

Those who know me know that I’m always on the lookout for new marketing resources, examples of folks “doing it right” as HubSpot likes to say, and “marketainment”.
I just caught the latest HubSpot TV podcast, courtesy of iTunes. Their guest, Marcus Sheridan from River Pools and Spas, was really great. He’s a self-proclaimed blue collar small business person who also runs The Sales Lion blog.
Marcus extolls the virtues of blogging, discusses how to get started blogging, and gives his one key piece of advice. I won’t steal his thunder; go check out the episode, it’s well worth the 28 minutes you’ll spend watching. I’d also recommend reading through his blog, as he imparts some very straightforward, practical knowledge regarding sales.
If Marcus gets you all fired up and you want some help starting your blog, just give us a call at 410-238-1989.

Flip the Funnel

Tue, 25 May 2010 11:21:33 -0400

If you’ve never heard of Joseph Jaffe, then you haven’t been spending enough time thinking and learning about how marketing is fundamentally changing thanks to online tools and social trends, among other things.
What I love about Jaffe is that he forces you to think differently, if only while reading his stuff. He provides just enough data and cognitive framework to make you realize you’re stuck in a mental rut, and that someone might be moving your cheese while you’ve got your head down.
Flip the Funnel is basically an admonishment of marketing for focusing too much on customer acquisition, and not enough on customer retention. If you’ve read my ACTION Plan posts, you’ll know that I agree that retention is at least as important, and should at least be considered, if not formally incorporated into your marketing planning.
To what degree do you need to consider customer retention in your planning? How much of your marketing budget should you allocate to customer retention? What marketing tools and tactics are well suited for customer retention?
First things first. The degree to which you need to consider retention initiatives depends upon the portion of your gross revenue that comes from repeat customers. Jaffe gives the example of Zappos, for whom ~75% of business comes from repeat customers. Yes, Zappos cares about customer retention. If you have a high percentage of business coming from repeat customers, then you absolutely need to consider adding or supplementing retention initiatives.
Aside: If 50% or less of your revenue comes from repeat customers, you should take a hard look at your business, because at that rate, it’s not sustainable. Every customer you lose, you’ll need to replace, and there just aren’t that many customers out there to keep up that pyramid scheme.
What percentage of your budget to allocate to customer retention is a more complex set of questions that I’ll save for another post. The short answer is, it depends. To get into the right marketing mindset, though, rather than % of budget, start thinking about % of effort. Budget will follow.
Some marketing tools and tactics are well suited for customer retention. Jaffe considers word of mouth, affiliate and loyalty programs. He also underscores the importance of customer service to customer retention.
For me, it boils down to a few key considerations: 1) What I call your “relative value proposition”, in other words, why your customers prefer doing business with you versus your competition, which includes things like price/value, ease of doing business, etc. (hint: if you don’t know, and I mean know based on real data, then do a survey); and 2) the likelihood that your customer would refer you to a colleague, friend or family member, which can be measured by things like Net Promoter Score. The first translates into “wallet share”, or the percentage of a given customer’s spending that goes to your business. The second translates directly into the likelihood that a given customer will buy from you again in the future.
I’ll reserve my comments on affiliate and loyalty programs, other than to say that affiliate programs are an attraction tool, not a retention tool. And most loyalty programs are poorly executed. I think Jaffe would agree with that last statement, since in a recent Marketing Over Coffee podcast, he gave the example of airlines who give loads of frequent flier miles to top customers (most have accelerators or multipliers built into their top tiers, so each mile flown is rewarded with more mile the higher you are in the program), and then often make it difficult to redeem those miles. And word of mouth will happen as a byproduct of your retention programs, since happy customers make great salespeople.
Lastly, a word about Twitter. Personally, I cannot agree more with Jaffe. I’m not a huge fan of using Twitter to acquire customers; rather, I try to steer customers toward using Twitter as a way to monitor brand sentiment and to augment (not replace) customer service. Please consider that each tool in your marketing tool chest has a primary purpose. Using Twitter to acquire customers is like using a wrench to pound in a nail — it’ll work, but there’s another tool far better suited to the task.
Bottom line, don’t overlook customer retention and customer loyalty in your marketing planning.
If you need help surveying your customers, measuring your Net Promoter Score, or integrating customer retention into your marketing plan, just give us a call at 410-238-1989.