Posts Tagged ‘marketing’
Does Your Website Make It Easy To Share?
Facebook has surpassed 800MM users. Google+ achieved 25MM users in one month and continues to grow at an exponential rate. Justin Timberlake is trying to revive MySpace. Pinterest is rapidly gaining traction as the place to share pictures of things you like.
Why, then, do so few websites have the tools to help people share more easily?
In today’s digital social realm, making it difficult for a user to share can put your business at a disadvantage.
If a customer likes a pair of shoes but wants to share the pair with her friends before she buys, she is going to post it on Facebook or Pinterest. If you make it easy for her to do this, she’ll share it directly from your site and then all of her friends will go to your site to learn about that pair of shoes. Voila: instant exposure.
Sites that make sharing easy:
They easily call out where you can share and are optimized to work with Pinterest’s browser tool as well as Facebook.
There is significant benefit to making your site sharing-friendly, whether your customer wants to share information or a potential favorite shirt. Believe it or not, it’s easier than you might think.
There are multiple widgets available to make your content shareable, including:
Your audience might not be looking for your business on Facebook or Twitter, but it’s still smart business to let them share your products and services via their own social media pages.
Google Tools You Should Be Using
While there is significant talk of Google + and its new brand pages, Google also has a terrific suite of tools you should also be aware of.
Here is what’s interesting and why.
- Google Ad Planner identifies websites your target audience is likely to visit to help you make decisions on where to advertise
- Google Alerts (I’ve talked about before) allows you to receive email updates when a topic or company in which you are interested is discussed
- Google Hot Trends helps you see what people are searching and see what is on their minds – this insight can help you write topical and relevant blog posts and drive traffic and awareness
- Google Insights for Search lets you compare search volume across brands, regions, time frames and more
- What Do You Love is a dashboard from multiple online channels on any topic you care to know about
- Think Insights is a library of case studies that Google has developed. The libraries are not that robust yet, but new information seems to be added regularly.
- Google Keyword Tool & Traffic Estimator helps you determine budgets and key words for your adwords campaigns
Qwikster – The Right Idea, Just Poorly Executed
Netflix knows its future is in video streaming, but its roots exist in DVDs. So how do you nudge consumers to wean themselves off of lower margin DVDs to the higher margin streaming videos?
Introducing Qwikster, a knee-jerk reaction to a disastrous price increase announcement that was met with even greater consumer disdain. Many people put Qwikster up there with New Coke – but it might have been the right idea – just poorly executed.
Creating a separate business for DVDs will allow Netflix to buffer itself from a business model that (over the long-haul) will most likely decline. In creating this new division, however, they didn’t connect the old Netflix to the new Qwikster, so a consumer had to set up their preferences, waitlists, cues and billing data all over again. It makes you wonder if they were following the online banking model, which makes it so cumbersome to switch banks, that they expected subscribers to begrudgingly switch to streaming Netflix over setting up a new DVD account…)
All Netflix had to do was allow customers to conduct a simple transfer for a limited period of time, and they would have been less likely bothered by the change. Furthermore, providing an incentive to try the new technology (following the lead of the airlines when they introduced online booking) would have helped ease the pain.
So what can you learn from Netflix?
- Think about all the ramifications of significant changes in your business
- If the initial reaction to a major change is negative, take time to let it sink in. Sometimes it just takes time for people to adjust to change.
- Limit the knee-jerk reactions – they never seem to work out as you’d like.
Great Targeting By T-Mobile or Waste of Money?
Read an online article regarding the new iPhone 4S and don’t be surprised if you see an ad for T-mobile. As you may know, T-Mobile is the only major cell-phone provider that doesn’t sell an iPhone.
So why advertise around content for a product you don’t have? Maybe it’s to get your attention about the benefits T-mobile has over AT&T, Verizon and, now, Sprint like unlimited data, text and talk on the “largest 4G network”.
On the one hand T-mobile is capitalizing on content in which people are interested. On the other hand, a large proportion of “iPhone news” readers are iPhone owners or plan on being one soon.
Is this a smart, targeted move by T-mobile or is it a waste of their marketing budget?
Does Anyone Remember The NBA?
There were two lockouts this year in professional sports, in the NFL and the NBA. In a lockout, owners lock out the players from any league-related activity, which means anything related to that season is stopped indefinitely until their contract negotiations are complete.
During these lockouts, the NFL and NBA have taken different approaches.
The NFL made sure they were in the media almost every day. If they weren’t a hot topic in the news, it seemed like they knew it, and some update or leak seemed to go out the next day. They stayed top of mind even if the news wasn’t what fans wanted to hear. Since their lockout ended in late July, their brand is stronger than ever, and the fans were rabid for opening day.
The NBA, still locked out, barely says a word. If it weren’t for their stars playing overseas, you might not hear anything at all. While the NBA may subscribe to the notion that “no news is good news”, their lack of presence in the media has left them with fans that just don’t care anymore.
The same thing happens in business. If you stop talking about your brand, it will quickly be forgotten.
Regardless of your marketing budget, make sure you do the little things to keep your company top of mind:
- Email marketing
- Search Engine Marketing
- Search Engine Optimization
- Social Marketing
- Networking
If the NBA doesn’t start changing how it communicates, it will take a long time to recover. Make sure your business keeps its fans happy.
P.S. Darren Everson – The Wall Street Journal – has the numbers behind my assertion. The NFL averaged 109.1 stories per day during its 4.5 month lockout. The NBA – now in month 4 of its lockout – is averaging 66.3. That number is below the 1992 NHL lockout, 1994-1995 MLB lockout, 1998-1999 NBA Lockout and the 2004-2005 NBA Lockout.
You can read the entire story here.
Do You Know How Much A Like Is Worth?
In this age of social media everything, companies are scrambling to find ways to measure and quantify their social media activity.
Likes, Followers, Shares and ReTweets have given way to a cottage industry of measurement tools, but, in lieu of traditional ROI, do any of these metrics, like Klout Scores and Peer Indexes, provide a key indicator for success?
I’m of the mind that they don’t. While they measure activity, they don’t translate this information into sales or at the very least learning.
Creating engagement through social channels is important. Here are a few ways to move your friends and followers into a more results oriented relationship:
- Incent people to opt-in for email communication. Doing so allows you track how they heard about you, and then you can actively market and test offers.
- Use microsites and unique URL promotions on social channels to measure interest of your fan base.
- Use coupon codes (or actual coupons if a CPG company) that are specific to a social channel to track activity to sales.
By knowing if people are coming to your site or store from social channels you can begin to measure the value of a Facebook Fan and the return on your marketing efforts. This will help you determine if it is worth growing your fan base or followers.
Social media can play an important role in your marketing communications plans, and just like any media, you need to put the tools in place to determine what its worth to your company.
Wells Fargo Is Betting You’re Lazy
Yesterday, Wells Fargo announced it was going to charge a $3 monthly convenience fee for the privilege of using your debit card. They are testing this potential revenue source in five states to determine the impact on their customer base.
Because inertia is a powerful thing, Wells is hoping most people will keep their accounts because they don’t want to make the effort to change banks.
In fact, inertia is what keeps most people buying a specific product, going to certain restaurants and using lackluster services.
So how, as a marketer, can you disrupt inertia to gain new customers? You do this by understanding their pain points and providing a solution.
Ways to learn these pain points:
- Social listening – using a social media monitoring tool to listen to what your audience is saying about products and services
- Review sites – look at city search, yelp, kudzu and the like to see what customers are saying, about your company and your competitors too
- Customer research – conduct primary research with your target audience to gain a deep understanding of the challenges in their lives
Does providing a disruptive solution work? When marketed properly – yes.
Look at banking. Bank of America encouraged people to switch with their Keep The Change program.
P&G learned consumers weren’t happy with how brooms cleaned a floor and created the Swiffer.
Zappos changed the way we buy shoes with their selection, fast shipping and free returns.
How have you disrupted inertia with your products or services? Let me know.
Nudge Nudge. Wink. Wink.
Every day we are nudged to make certain decisions. The U.S. Army and school cafeterias have started putting healthier foods at the front of the food line. Grocery stores design their stores to move you toward certain purchases. Company 401(k) plans are moving to opt-out (vs. opt-in) to encourage people to save for retirement. Even advertising agencies present their recommended concept last so it stands out as the strongest of the options.
When I was exploring upgrading my LinkedIn account, I was reminded of the book Nudge, by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, – an interesting study in how to push people towards certain actions based on how information is presented. And that sometimes the nudge is better than others.
That’s why I was impressed by LinkedIn and how they nudge you to select a specific upgrade.
Take a look at the upgrade page. Based on how it looks, you would assume that only the Business option is available since the other “upgrade” buttons are grayed out. In fact, they were available; LinkedIn is just trying to nudge me past the Personal Plus.
A few years ago, Bank of America launched their Keep the Change program, where they rounded up every debit purchase and transferred the difference into savings. By doing so, it nudged people to put money into savings when they wouldn’t have done it otherwise, and resulted in thousands of new checking and savings accounts at the bank.
How are you positioning information, products and services to encourage your desired outcome?
Why Your Business Should Be More Like Charlie Sheen
Charlie Sheen is everywhere right now, and your business can learn something from him.
You’re wondering: what on earth can he teach me about how to run my business when I find his actions, lifestyle and everything else about him deplorable?
Simply put, he is focused on one thing (himself) and driving that point home time and time again. And his stance never wavers.
Too many businesses try to be everything to everyone when, instead, they should find the one thing at which they are superior and leverage that position. The results are often a more loyal customer base and greater profitability.
For example:
- Starbucks was once all about coffee. They got too far afield and their business suffered. Now they are back to focusing on coffee.
- Southwest Airlines has always been about no-frills flying and remained profitable while most airlines suffered.
Take the time to understand your singular point of distinction and refocus your business around it. In the long run, it will make you a healthier, more memorable company.
This Is Only A Test
The March issue of the Harvard Business Review discusses using a testing strategy prior to rolling out a new program to help you measure the impact of the change.
Direct response marketers have been deploying testing for as long as direct response has been around, and so can you. The following breaks down the process into digestible parts that can be performed by almost every organization.
Start with what you want to learn
What is your improvement metric? Do you want to increase average spend per customer, increase closure rate, improve cross-selling? Decide this first, as it determines how you implement your test.
Know where you are now
Establish a baseline for your key metrics – especially around what you want to test -so you know where you are starting from. This is called your control position and defines what you want to improve upon with your test. Sample key metrics include:
- Average customer spend
- Number and spend amount for add-on services
- Closure rate
- Average cost per acquisition
- Email open rates
- Paid search click through rates
Develop a test
The key to developing a test is to make it easy to measure. Some easy tests are:
- Email marketing subject lines – test open rates
- Email marketing offers – test click-through rates all the way to sales
- Paid search copy – test different messages
- In-store offers made by the sales people at a specific location
- Call center tests – dedicate one line for test or every fourth call
- On location tests – especially opportune in service industries where employees go to customers’ homes – probably the toughest to conduct but start with isolating a specific service area
Account for variability
Conduct your test for a period of time to account for variability. For example: If most of your emails are open on Monday mornings, plan to test for 2-3 Mondays to ensure your results are consistent. Things like weather and holidays can inadvertently impact results.
Test
If you have the infrastructure to do so, conduct a head-to-head test by sending out your standard email against your new email and see how each performs. If you can’t do this, isolate a period of time to test and compare to prior results. During both test scenarios, ask for constant feedback from employees, to work out any kinks in the program or reaction by customers.
Measure
See how the test performed versus your control (baseline results). If it performs better than the control, do the benefits offset the costs for rolling out the plan company-wide?
If so, test again in a larger area or for a longer time to confirm your results are solid. If they are, develop a plan for a company-wide initiative.
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