Archive for the ‘Measurement’ Category

Why your website matters more than social media

February 28, 2013

Internet address, computer screen

With all the attention (and hang wringing) around social media, it’s far too easy to forget about the workhorse (and ideally, crown jewel) of your marketing plan: your website.

Social media is sexy…and fleeting

Everybody’s (still) talking about social media, at least to me:

  • “I need to get my head around social media.”
  • “I have a Facebook page, but I’m not doing anything with it.”
  • “How often do I really have to post to make it worthwhile?”

That last bullet tells the whole story.  Faced with increasing demands on their limited resources, many entrepreneurs are trying to hash out a rough calculus of social media:

“What’s the minimum amount of work I can do and still get a return on my investment?”

That’s like asking:

“What’s the minimum engagement I need to have with my children to prevent them from becoming serial killers?”

One of the reasons social media is so darn hard is that time marches on. Your little tweet is ancient history – within minutes.

Marketing is about consistency.  Always has been, always will be.  Sometimes you can cheat consistency with enough money. Not so with social media.

You’re either there or you aren’t.

Your virtual home

All of this makes improving your website a much more attractive use of your time and marketing dollar.  Your website allows you to:

  • Address multiple audiences
  • Present your entire message coherently
  • Observe and influence the order in which your message is consumed

That last bit we do with a little thing I like to call “science.”

Weirdly, so many people have a set it and forget it attitude with regard to their websites.

I don’t get it.  There’s SO much opportunity for continual improvement of your home on the interwebs.  Which, increasingly, is the only home that matters.

But wait…there’s more!

Using your website, you can also:

  • Measure the effectiveness of your other marketing campaigns (TV, radio, direct mail, email marketing – you name it!)
  • Conduct market research through surveying and A/B testing
  • Use your analytics to uncover what’s resonating with your target market
  • Discover how people search for companies like yours, which can inform other spends

I love social media.

I’m plugged in.  I dig it. And maybe that’s the point.  If you don’t love it, then get smart. Spend your time and money on improving your website: a marketing channel that has lasting value and provides ongoing intelligence to your organization.

Posted in Marketing, Measurement, Running Your Business, Strategy | 2 Comments »

Strategy & Execution: Why you need both

January 28, 2011

There are two distinct phases to any effective marketing plan: strategy and execution.

Many people don’t realize that developing a killer strategy and executing that strategy are two completely different skill sets.

ONE EXTREME: “idea people” who don’t ever seem to do anything.
THE OTHER: project managers with no imagination.

Because these skill sets are so different, they are often separated into different job functions.  You may or may not be aware of this.

If your point of contact is an account manager who seems to be repeating things that other people said, without much passion or substance, you deserve to know what’s going on behind the curtain.

What is strategy?

Developing an effective marketing strategy is about finding and exploiting the intersection of what you do well and what the world needs. We start with you:

•    Who are you?
•    What do you do better than anyone else?
•    What are your outcomes? What are you trying to accomplish?

With these answers in mind, we turn our attention to the world.  Thinking about the people in your target market:

•    What pain are they experiencing that you can alleviate?
•    What pleasures are they seeking that you can provide?
•    What are the values that drive them?

The answers to these questions help us understand what messaging will resonate with your target market and how and where to communicate that messaging so that they’ll notice and take action.

Your marketing strategy isn’t something you finish and relegate to a high shelf.  It’s a living, breathing framework, a way of thinking about your business, that evolves as we hypothesize, test, and make new distinctions about your offering and your market.

What is execution?

One thing’s for sure – your marketing strategy is going to spawn projects, and lots of them.

You don’t want to be in the trenches.  Skilled project managers are your corner, setting goals, developing schedules, and formulating budgets.  They manage the details, from contracting with the right vendors to measuring results.

You need both.

Remember those results we measured in the execution phase?  They need to be sent straight over to the strategy people, so they can revise your approach, rounding out a great big happy circle of marketing awesomeness.

When you’re working with a small company that doesn’t have the infrastructure to separate strategy and execution into different job functions, you need to make sure both parts are there.

A brilliant, but scatterbrained strategist won’t get the results you need any more than a button-pushing project manager.

When interviewing a marketing partner, make sure you’re getting both bold strategy and careful execution.

Posted in Marketing, Measurement, Strategy | 4 Comments »

7 Marketing Strategies You’ve Never Heard Of, Part 2

August 25, 2010

In part 1 of this post, I introduced four cutting edge marketing strategies that can help your company stand out against the 21st century landscape.  Here are three more:

05. Re-Engineering

Re-Engineering is a fancy name for a simple strategy that’s gaining in popularity. The idea is to reduce research and development costs by inviting the public to purchase your product unfinished. It sounds a little crazy, but your customers just might jump at the opportunity to participate in the development of your product.

As early adopters begin to interact with your product, they discuss and refine ways to make the product better. You listen, implement the best suggestions and release improved products. Easier said than done, since most of us aren’t really that great at the listening part.  But there’s no better way to build trust in your brand.

06. Strange Loop

A strange loop is the holy grail of modern marketing.

A strange loop is an infinite loop that gives you the impression that you’re actually moving forward. It’s like walking along the surface of a Möbius strip, psychologically speaking. At no point should it be clear you’re in a loop, even when you’re back at the start.

It’s not cheap or easy to do this, but it’s so profitable if you succeed. A good viral marketing campaign has built in strange loops to prevent the campaign from reaching critical mass. There is always forward motion.

In a practical sense, this means, not only creating content the recipient will want to pass on, but creating content he or she NEEDS to pass on. It means your content has some built-in element that compels the receiver to spread it.

To date, social networks are the biggest pioneers here. A social network is only good when the network is big enough. A viral network will attract users. a strange loop will force those users to bring more users.

07. Buzz Monitoring

Once you’ve implemented some of the six strategies I’ve described so far, you’ll be well on your way to seeing a serious return on your investment. But, don’t forget one vital, overarching strategy — buzz monitoring.

Buzz monitoring isn’t just about measuring results, although that’s important too.  Buzz monitoring allows you to track and respond to what people out there in the world are saying about your brand.  A failure to monitor and respond to chatter about your brand has lead to many fatal or near-fatal media catastrophes.

One key metric to consider in buzz marketing is influence. Every forum, social network or blog has a different level of influence.  If a tiny business blog in Mongolia mentions your website, that’s not worth as much as getting featured on Smashing Magazine’s site.  The concept of influence will help you prioritize your responses as people begin to notice and interact with your brand online.

So there you have it!  Seven marketing strategies you may not have thought of!

Which of these strategies have you put to work in your business?  Tell me in the comments…

Posted in Marketing, Measurement, Social Media, Strategy, Web 2.0 | 3 Comments »

Apologies if you really are a mind reader

August 20, 2010

You can’t know what other people will think or do.  The universe reminded me of this yesterday after I sent my email newsletter.

Guilty as charged

Back in the pre-blogging days, I had an email newsletter that got great results.  Every time I sent it, I got a slew of comments, and one or two folks would say, “I’ve been meaning to call you…” It was a great way to generate a few quick projects.

Long story short, the newsletter fell by the way-side.  I got busy, or bored, or distracted, or whatever – the same things that happen to you.

This time around, we did a soft launch to reintroduce the newsletter gently.  I intentionally sent it out in August, figuring some people would be on vacation, and indeed I got a good number of Out of Office auto-replies.  But I got a lot of great feedback too.

The thing that surprised me most was that so many of my contacts had not seen my new website!  I launched it back in March with little fanfare, and nobody knew about it!

Yeah, even I make the mistake of thinking that people will magically know when I do something interesting.  Guess what?  They don’t!

You’re (probably) not a mind reader

Many of my clients waste a lot of time trying to divine what’s going to happen after they initiate a new marketing campaign, or even a single activity.

For sure, a knowledgeable marketing strategist should be among your trusted advisors.  The primary value of such a person is that they know what questions to ask you – questions you might not think to ask yourself.  This will help you precisely target your messages and elevate the professionalism of all your communications.

That gets you a long way.  But ultimately, nobody can tell you how people will react to what you do.

It’s time to leave the mind reading to the mystics and psychics.  Think hard and plan well, but waste no time in pulling the trigger.  Feedback is the best teacher.

On Measurement

It’s critical to figure out how you’re going to measure results when you’re planning a marketing strategy. There are all sorts of ways to automate this, from web analytics to special contact phone numbers to coupon codes.  Sometimes you just have to ask people when they call.  Each of these approaches offers a different window into your response rate.

One caveat: test one thing at a time. If you try to measure more than one variable with the same metric, what happens?  You don’t know which variable caused the outcome your got.

Often, clients will ask me to make half a dozen changes to their websites, then stay glued to their analytics to see what happens.  But if your bounce rate goes down, how will you know which of those six changes caused this?  Could you have gotten a more favorable result by only changing three of those things?  There’s just no way to know.

Instead of winging it, get some help putting together a schedule of changes so results can be tracked over time.  Or better yet, do some split testing so you can compare how one version of your homepage performs against another.

Postscript

I am so, so proud of my newsletter.  I think you might like it too!

Newsletter content is exclusive to subscribers, so if you like my goofy spin on all things marketing, click here to sign up.  You don’t want to miss a thing!

Posted in Marketing, Measurement, Strategy | 4 Comments »

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