Break at Your Own Risk – 14 eMarketing Rules

Over recent years we have noticed things that work – and things that don’t with regard to emarketing. For what it’s worth, we thought we would share it with those who are committed to marketing that makes a real contribution to your Company.
1. Clarify the problem before rushing to solve it.
2. Show us a picture of your ideal buyer.
3. Speak plain English. You are dealing with real people. Drop the Corporate-Speak.
4. Be found. All the millions invested in advertising won’t come close to the results produced by a top 3 organic ranking for your relevant phrase or words.
5. Use video on your website – it communicates.
6. Never underestimate the damage an angry dissatisfied customer will create.
7. Never underestimate the power of a happy customer.
8. When designing your website – Pretty is great. Easy is better. Useful is wonderful.
9. You’re not your ideal customer. You don’t have to like the creative to approve it.
10. Treat people with respect, they’ll reciprocate.
11. Campaign analytics are a must. Test, Test, Roll.
12. IT is not Marketing. Don’t have them run the web site. It’s not fair to anyone, especially your prospects.
13. Plan, but be flexible. Listen. Make changes.
14. Don’t let your competition ambush you via the Internet.

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December 21, 2010|emarketing Strategy|Post Comment »

Social Media: Effective communication tool or just more noise?

We have seen clients just jump into social media marketing without a strategy.  They would never have thought to run a newspaper ad campaign without a clear objective, but for some reason they see social media in a different light. But if ever a sound strategy was needed, it is now (emarketing toronto services).

During the ‘mass marketing’ period when we spent a lot of money (advertising), hunted for customers (cold calling) and hoped they remembered us when it came time to purchase, we could “broad stroke” our mass media strategy and still affect enough people to cause the desired result. Many pundits have said for years “ half my ad dollars are wasted – I just don’t know which half.” We know now: it was more than half.

Then The Google Age arrived. Web 2.0. Social Media. It brought millions of people online for many hours at a time. But more important; it returned the buying power back to the consumer. It literally changed the way people buy. For almost anything we are thinking of purchasing, for business or personal, we usually Google it. We do our homework so we are a much more educated buyer.

This transformed process means we are less likely to “be sold” something today than we are “to buy” it. And that shift changes everything for marketers. Rather than ideas and promotions that sell people, we are seeing firms give away a tremendous amount of “inside information”. Information designed to help educate the public. An open and transparent way of doing business. We are educating them and allowing them to buy. Some might say the good marketers have always done that.

The transfer of power is simple: prospects can now “click a brand right out of their life”. If they are uncomfortable or annoyed – poof, they’re gone. And so are you.

So strategy has never been more important to marketers. You must:

1. Know (and speak to) a single primary target

2. Understand and articulate clearly, exactly what you are selling.

3. Understand the single, relevant issue that people need to know in order to buy.

Make sure that social media does not just become more noise. The consumer will just turn you off.

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May 2, 2010|emarketing Strategy|1 Comment

Let Plumbers Plumb

Never let your IT people build your website. It is one of your most valuable marketing initiatives.

We used to give it to IT because they could “speak geek” and communicate with the programmers. But for the most part we ended up with sites that were using the most advanced techie stuff and served little to no marketing purpose. In fact they often worked against us!

Web development has changed over the past 10 years. Programmers no longer have us in a corner. So do your IT folks a favour and move the website development and management to marketing. It’s where it belongs.

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March 20, 2010|emarketing Strategy|1 Comment

Social Media Marketing – No Quick Fixes

Time and time again we hear clients asking for the short-cut – the quick, cheap fix that will allow them to participate in social media marketing. Although some activities result in immediate results, overall, a sound digital strategy takes some time to bear fruit.

That does not mean your digital agency gets a 6 month pass. They should definitely be accountable for their actions even while they are laying a strong foundation for a long term online strategy. Buck Rogers said “It’s no good picking up speed if you’re on the wrong road” and we could not agree more. So to take time to think through your approach, test a few theories and do some A / B testing to see what works makes a lot of sense. But so too does setting clear objectives within a specific time frame.

Speaking of time – it is only going to get more expensive to get in this game. As competition increase, both for PPC and for organic search terms, it will take more time and effort or require more dollars to achieve your goals. So jump in now. It is far less expensive to defend a first page ranking for a keyword than to gain it.

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March 18, 2010|Inbound Marketing, emarketing Strategy|Post Comment »

Digital Strategy – Learn To Be Hunted

We have developed a smart process to generate qualified leads online. In essence we help clients make the shift from “hunting for customers” to “being hunted by customers”. And for almost all it makes perfect sense. They nod their heads and even engaged in good questions and they truly “get it”.

Yet they continue to buy newspaper and radio ads. They continue to use the expensive, mass media options we all grew up with (or at least most of us). The 2 most alarming or mind-boggling responses we get are:

“We have no budget for online lead generation this year – we will look at it next year” – well folks that may be one of the best examples of closing the barn doors after the horses are out” that I have seen. The consumer has already changed the way they buy. In fact, The Globe and Mail recently interviewed the CFO of Google who reported that more than 70% of all consumers do their research online before buying. In other words -  they come up with their short list. It’s really simple: if you are not there, you do not make the short list. This year, or next! We know change is often difficult, but stop wasting money on expensive mass media options. We now know they don’t work.

Target smart. Allow yourself to BFOUND when people are looking.

“Who are they?” – that’s the typical response when we show a “traditional marketer” the Google results of the term they think they should dominate online. You see they know their product inside out. They know that they are the best at X. Problem is: the rest of the world (and Google) does not know. They have not done the basics. The fundamentals of being found.

So what comes up on the search page elicits the response “Who are they?” as they point at the new competitors who are eating their lunch. They know business is off, but they blame it on the soft economy. They don’t realize it is never coming back. Like it or not, Google has changed the world. Now people know how to find you easily when they need you (or somebody else just like you). The consumer has become the hunter and the marketer must learn to be the hunted.

That’s a mind trip isn’t it?

Wake up while you can still influence the organic listings for certain productive search terms. In a few years the competition will be fierce and the cost to impact organic positioning for important keywords or phrases will be stiff.

Me thinks Google is in the cat-bird seat.

www.e10egency.com

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March 7, 2010|emarketing Strategy|Post Comment »

Does Our Advertising Work?

Now more than ever, marketers will be asked to defend their budget, demonstrate the value of their impact to sales and describe their unique value proposition to the business. It is truly ironic – businesses spent like drunken sailors trying climb over-top each other when results could not be measured. Now that promotional activity can be accurately tracked and measured, they do not want invest a nickel they don’t have to. Mass Media Executives liked that it could not be measured – it kept them in business.

How does marketing justify and account for all that investment? Sirius Decisions research has found that only 15 percent of b-to-b marketing functions use an automated marketing dashboard; another 62 percent are currently developing such a dashboard, suggesting there is still a significant amount of measurement work to do. While there are no shortcuts to properly deploying a marketing dashboard, we agree with Sirus that the greatest area of focus for 2010 must center on metrics that align with sales.

No client ever asked for website traffic or an increase in leads. They want more sales. Yet most Digital Agencies have little to no influence how those qualified leads are followed up. A measurement gap that every marketer must wrestle with. One clear solution is to have sales report to marketing. Then hold marketing accountable for performance. The tools exist to manage and measure all promotion activity designed to generate leads and sales.

Every marketer must know for certain where the leads are coming from. Measurement strategies are the key to Inbound marketing success in your organization. And the key to making your advertising dollars work.

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January 24, 2010|Inbound Marketing, emarketing Strategy|2 Comments

Facebook Beats Google!

According to All Facebook, Facebook was the most visited site on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, taking over the #1 visited site from Google. Impressive numbers for both.

Yet they are not competitors. So how can one beat the other in any truly meaningful way?

Google is the tool we use for SEARCH. When we want to look for something or someone. When we roughly know what we are looking for, and indeed when we are actually searching for something specific, Google is the go to site. They help us narrow it down until we find what we are looking for. So on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, it is not surprising that people were not searching for stuff.

On the other hand Facebook and most other social media sites are DISCOVER-based sites.  In other words when you want to be discovered, or you want people to trip across your message, social media is often the place. People are not really searching when on Facebook, they are being entertained by other people in their own communities. They are discovering what others in their community are up to. So again over Christmas, it is not surprising that people were checking in with family and friends. They were discovering rather than searching.

Being SEARCHABLE and being DISCOVERABLE are 2 completely different ideas, yet both allow you to BFOUND online. And being found online is a competitive edge that most businesses can no longer ignore. After years of learning to HUNT for customers, business is just now waking up to the opportunity of BEING HUNTED. Why try to sell people your product when you can simply allow them to buy?

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January 1, 2010|Inbound Marketing, emarketing Strategy|Post Comment »

Marketing in The Google Age

Once in awhile you read something that just hits the nail on the head. Here is a great explanation of what’s happening to marketing in The Google Age. As quoted from the HubSpot website:
The most interesting aspect of the internet’s impact on business from HubSpot’s perspective is in how it has changed the nature of shopping and subsequently the shape of every vendor’s sales funnel. Ten years ago, if a company was interested in buying a new product/service, it started by attending trade shows, reading industry journals, and going to seminars to learn more. Early in the shopping process, it would engage directly with the key vendors’ (sales) people who would feed them asymmetric information from the top of their sales funnel to the bottom of their funnel. Today, that same process looks very different. The potential customer starts in Google by searching on relevant keywords. The prospect would spend time on each vendor’s site, subscribe to the most interesting vendor blogs, subscribe to the vendor’s customers’ blogs, join an industry discussion forum, etc. Relatively late in the prospect’s decision cycle, it would engage the vendor’s (sales) people directly. That first vendor conversation today is much different from the one a decade ago because the prospect often knows as much about the vendor’s product as the sales rep does and the prospect is already much more “qualified.”

The result of this shift in shopping patterns is that the internet has tended to make every marketplace more “efficient.” Just as Ebay makes the niche market for Pez dispensers, WWI shovels, and 1975 World Series ticket stubs more efficient, the internet as a whole is making the niche markets for intellectual property law, system dynamics consulting, and food brokerage more efficient. It used to be that the size of your firm’s sales force was the key to finding the most new customers, but that is not necessarily always the case today. The good news for small businesses is that on the internet, no one can tell if you are a one person sole proprietorship or a 1000 person consultancy. It turns out that most small businesses (and startups) have relatively niche-y products that they generally sell to companies in their rolodex and companies two degrees away from their rolodex. The internet disproportionately favors small businesses since it enables them to position their niche goods to people shopping for that particular niche good regardless of the numbers of degrees of separation from their rolodex.

At the end of the day, the consumer has changed the way they buy goods. Have you changed the way you sell them?

BFOUND’s vision is to provide great advice to small businesses enabling them to leverage these disruptive effects of the internet to “get found” by more prospects shopping in their niche and to convert a higher percentage of prospects into customers. Most small businesses have a website that behaves like their old paper-based brochures, but just sitting online. It is rarely updated, is not given significant visibility by the search engines, has low traffic levels, does not encourage return visits, does not enable/track conversions, etc. What the new way of marketing does is transform that relatively static website into a modern marketing machine that produces the right leads and helps convert a higher percentage of them into qualified opportunities.

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November 9, 2009|Uncategorized|4 Comments

It’s the Consumer Stupid.

On October 21, 2009 in Advertising Age,  Judy Shapiro addressed the shift that is happening in the media world. With a good grasp of the issues she talks openly abou the opportunities and what it might take to benefit from all of this change. Einstein said ” The problem cannot be solved at the same level of thinking that created it”. In other words we need to make a shift of mindset in order to come up with a smart solution with regard to the changes in the marketplace. Fact is there is nothing usual about business today. Companies with little focus and who have relegated marketing to the basement office will most certainly pay a steep price in The Google Age.

The main issue – the single action at the core of all this change is the fact that the consumer has changed the way they make their buying decision. I did not say they changed the way they buy or where they buy, yet those can well be impacted when they change the way they make their buying decisions.

In the past they would remember ads & promotions, talk to relevant friends & family, seek advice at store level and make their choice. In studies, it was difficult to give any one of these a heavier weighting than the others. But today, although we may still seek opinions and counsel from freinds family and store clerks, by far and away, in Google we trust. Now we simply Google what we are looking for, assemble all the info we need and make our choice.

The problem is not that the consumer’s buying process has changed, it is that our marketing and sales process has not. Most businesses are no longer fishing where the fish are. The consumer has changed and we have not. Easily corrected indeed, BUT the mindset issue comes into play big time. If a marketer uses the same language, tactics and thinking when marketing online, they will likely have their hat handed to them by the communities they engage with. Go slow and LISTEN first. Act only when you have a feel for the community and the environment. This is like no medium you have ever used. Lose the corporate-speak. These are people you are talking to. In fact, we have a list of 21 marketing thoughts & ideas we live by that would serve most marketers when they go online.

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October 22, 2009|Inbound Marketing, emarketing Strategy|Post Comment »

Does Your Product Suck?

Using Social Media, SEO or any other form of Internet marketing cannot fix a product that sucks. But it can tell you whether or not the target market thinks it sucks. Of course, we must be talking about other products: yours couldn’t possibly suck with the numbers you sell. “The advertising investment and distribution channels are creating plenty of healthy sales. The economic downturn has affected us but it will pass.”

Is this just another economic downturn? What if this economic downturn is combined with a shift to a new age – a whole new mindset in business. At no other time in the history of our world have we seen a Company go from zero to the largest in the world within 10 years. Google is asking “What economic downturn?”. I was in awe when I recently read that Facebook had 200 Million users (April 14, 2009), absolutely shocked on July 10 when they announced 250 Million and scratching my head when on September 19,2009 they announced 300 million! They increased 50 Million users in 75 days, which means they added 670,000 users every single day! At a time when people were starting to speculate that they had peaked.

These numbers are unlike the numbers we have been used to dealing with in business. Google is indexing over a trillion URLs.  We have indeed entered The Google Age.

All this to say now that customers can HUNT for our product (as opposed to us spending millions in advertising & promotion HUNTING for customers and hoping they remember us when it comes time to buy), we might want to stop and think about who has the power in the current consumer-to-business relationship. In the past, the only feedback the consumer had access to was how he spent his dollar. And most felt it made no difference so apathy was the order of the day.  Big business dominated and big media profited.

In The Google Age they can vote with their dollar AND they can influence millions of their peers online. That is good news and bad. Now they know they can make a difference. Now, in order to do business a brand must learn a whole new marketing mindset: they must learn to be found – at the right time, saying the right thing. They must deal with individuals rather than demographic target groups. It is tempting to treat this medium (the web) like it is just another advertising medium, but early results have been, at best, all over the map. The Internet is dynamic so our marketing strategies and tactics must also be dynamic. They must be based on sound principles and objectives but we must talk with and listen to our customers. Joshua Porter makes a great point about expectations of online marketing in his blog, reinforcing the need to look at the Internet with fresh eyes.

So your brand does not end up with a bloody nose. The first step is LISTEN. Marketing people and Senior Management must pay attention to the communities that their potential consumer is engaged with. DO NOT jump in with offers and promotions grounded in the old mindset. These communities will send you home with your hat in your hand. Just LISTEN for now. When they trust you, they will always give you the keys to the kingdom.


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October 19, 2009|Uncategorized|Post Comment »
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