Results-Focused Online Marketing Strategies

Money’s tight right now. With this in mind, do you have the background information on your own company that will allow you to make smart marketing decisions?

If you’re serious about marketing in a responsible and cost effective manner then you should definitely read through these questions and make sure you have answers for each one.

Even many large companies don’t have this information all together, so don’t feel bad if you don’t have all the answers (although I guarantee your marketing program is not doing all it can be if you don’t).

Products:

• What is your flagship/most popular product or service?
• What is your guarantee/return policy?
• Best features – what makes this a great product or service?
• Competitive Products - what would your prospective customers buy if they didn’t buy this product?
• Why is this product better than competitive products (Answer this question in terms your customers would use)?
• What are the answers to the above questions for your other top products?

Target Groups

• What specific and definable groups (i.e. engineers, skiers, dentists, crane operators, homeowners) benefit greatly from your products and are currently using them?
• Which groups are using which products and why it is they are using them?
• What groups are currently NOT using your products but would benefit greatly from them? Please match the groups to the products and mention why it is they would benefit from them.
• Is there anything that would prevent these groups from buying your product (i.e. technical hurdles, no purchasing authority, not enough confidence in your brand, lack of awareness, etc)? Be specific according to each group.
• If these are corporate groups, are they in industries where they are likely to share information on great products with others in their industry, or are they likely to keep it a secret?
• What channels do these groups use to communicate with others in their industry (web groups, communities, trade associations, industry publications, etc, etc)? What are the top 3 for each group?

Communications

• Which online groups or communities do people within your company currently participate in (i.e. industry chat groups, bulletin boards, Google Groups, Linkedin, industry web sites, etc, etc.)? Are these groups also groups that prospective customers participate in?
• What groups might it be valuable to start participating in?
• Does anyone in your company blog? What is the goal of the blog and what do they blog about?
• Do you have a newsletter? What is its goal, who’s it about, who does it go to, and how do you get new subscribers?

Credibility

• Is there anyone within your company that is widely known as an expert within your field or your target industries?
• If not, is there anyone in your company that has an expert level of knowledge in your field who is not widely known in your field or your target industries?

Content

• What content is currently produced on a regular basis within your organization (white papers, support threads, articles, help documentation, newsletters, blog posts, community postings, etc)?
• Is this content being leveraged to optimize your site’s SEO? Is it being proactively distributed to those who would benefit from it?

Marketing, Market and ROI

• Do you currently have a marketing plan that describes the activities you want to undertake in the next 6-12 months and ties your various activities together in order to maximize their contribution value?
• What tracking do you currently have in place to measure the ROI of your various marketing activities.
• Do you know what the total value of your market is within regions that are accessible to you (i.e. How much does your total accessible market spend per year on products that offer the same features as your current products)?
• What is the typical sales cycle for buyers of your products (i.e. immediate impulse buy vs. careful analysis over a period of weeks or months)?
• Do your buyers typically approve the purchase of your product themselves or do they need to defer to higher-ups within their organizations? Do their higher ups have a technical understanding of products of your type?
• Is there an event that typically necessitates the purchase of your software (i.e. year end, launch of new website, holiday, etc)?
• Do you know what your “customer lifetime value” is (the amount one customer will spend over the period of time they are likely to be a customer)?
• How much do you estimate that you spend on marketing to gain a new customer? Is ROI-positive?
• If marketing were as simple as “buying” new customers, how much would you be comfortable paying for one?
• Which is currently more important: engaging in short term marketing efforts that will drive short term revenues or building longer term marketing programs that will take longer to result in revenues but which will ultimately be more profitable?

Of course, the real question is what to do with these answers. Sadly, I’ve got nothing for you in this post!

Watch for upcoming newsletter articles and blog posts that will help you identify the most strategic marketing opportunities for your company…

I have a confession to make: I’m always a little nervous when I book airline tickets online. I’ve done it many, many times, but for some reason I always feel like I’m going to screw up my reservation and get stuck with the wrong tickets.

I’m going to go out on a limb and bet that I’m not the only person who feels this way.

With this in mind, let’s look at a huge conversion mistake I just experienced while buying tickets online from United…

I got through the flight selection process no problem (double checking my flights/times at each step), entered my credit card info, hit “okay” to purchase the tickets when the following (click to see full size version) came up:

So, this screen comes up and the first thing I see is the big, bold 932.51 when I had just clicked “okay” to a $584 total. My first thought was that there’s a mistake - given the prominence and the positioning of this price, it definitely looks like the price I’m about to get charged. Feeling a bit flustered, I started to read through the text and still was not immediately sure what the deal was.

Also, upon reading it and figuring it out, I began to doubt whether I should click on the “Purchase original itinerary” button. Taken literally, I was worried that it might truly be my original itinerary (I changed it a couple times while looking up the flights). Combined with the fact that the text above refers to the “current” itinerary and the text below refers to the “original itinerary” I definitely was not feeling too good about hitting that button.

Next, I found myself wondering whether I needed to “check” the “offer and conditions” checkbox. It kind of looks like you don’t need to, but on any other site I buy from you usually need to check such a box.

Plus, the page refers to you having to “Decline” the offer if you don’t want it. I didn’t see a “Decline” button anywhere, leading to further discomfort.

It also says it will expire in 5 minutes. Does this mean I’ll have to “rebook” if I don’t make the decision right away.

Furthermore, it’s a horrible offer! They want to charge over 50% more to upgrade ONE WAY on my 2 hour flight!

So, basically, United has taken someone intent on finishing a transaction, thrown in an unexpected/overpriced/confusing offer, and tried to add a sense of urgency to the whole thing.

Yikes.

At this point, I slowed down, determined that I was probably being paranoid and… saved a screen shot of this page so I’d have something in my defense if the wrong purchase went through.

What’s the takeaway from this? In the words of a manager I once had, “Once you make the sale, shut up! You only create opportunities for the buyer to change their mind.” This is great advice in this case. I absolutely guarantee that United loses sales with their confusing upsell tactic.

The lost sales may be balanced by the fact that United occasionally upsells the odd passenger to this ugly offer, but there’s another way to approach this. Why not make this offer AFTER they have made the original booking? If they offered this immediately after confirmation of the transaction they would remove all the risk of someone abandoning and there’s no reason why they couldn’t get the same amount of upsells (they could even keep the cheesy “expires in 5 minutes” part if they so desired).

The bottom line is to not try to accomplish an upsell before you’ve made the original sale, unless you can do it without risking the sale. United fails in this regard and damages their brand in the process.

In recent weeks we’ve been gearing up to relaunch our website for the next “iteration” of our business. This involves doing things like registering domains for “client-branded” A/B testing, getting professional help to redesign our site, and implementing the tools we need to optimize our site.

Much like the “shoemaker’s children,” we’ve been going without a number of the things I tell clients they absolutely must have in place for effective website optimization. Well, we’re finally changing that, but as a young company we’ve still got to consider our budget (or lack thereof) for this effort.

This is where Google comes in. There are a couple of free Google tools that are mind-blowingly powerful if you leverage them well. Without further ado:

Google Analytics
While lacking the “Enterprise” power of major analytics providers (Omniture, WebSideStory, etc.), Google Analytics is incredibly robust for a free tool. Plus, it’s easy to install.

Even non-techy folk (like myself) can manage to implement it by themselves across their site and blog if they take the time to read through the instructions. I had it up and running correctly on our 50 page site and blog within 30 minutes.

Our implementation even included setting up specific conversion goals that we wanted to measure.

Interestingly, for some companies, Google Analytics is a better choice than some of the more robust offerings. The reason for this is that you’ll never get past the surface of what the Enterprise solutions offer unless you spend a LOT of time at it (trust me on this, I’ve spent days sifting through data in Omniture and WebSide Story).

Put it this way: unless you have a huge site or a large multi-channel effort (i.e. involving email conversion tracking and CRM), you’re likely just fine or possibly better off with Google Analytics.

Google Website Optimizer
Google Website Optimizer is a tool you’ll find within Adwords. It’s primary purpose is to quickly and efficiently conduct A/B testing on landing pages for clicks to your site from Adwords.

Put simply, you can create two dramatically different versions of the page that people land on when they click on an ad you have placed in Google Search or on a content site. Then, you track the results until you can determine a “winner” of the test.

For smaller companies, this saves an awful lot of hassle in setting up a script to randomly display the different pages in the test and having the web team manage the process. If you can edit your web page and put it online, you have all the skills you need to do it yourself if you’re willing to read the instructions.

Now, the beauty of this is that Google Website Optimizer works even if you’re not paying to run Adwords. The folks at Google are quite generous in these regards. All you need to do is sign up for an Adwords account (free) and you’ve got access to it.

Also, using the Website Optimizer is not limited to Adwords. For instance, assume you have two strong opinions on what headline should be on a product page. This usually involves an argument and possibly (50% likelihood) the wrong decision.

With Website Optimizer, you can quickly create a second version of the page (with the different headline). Simply drop a snippet of code on both pages, set your conversion goal in Analytics, and you’re off to the races. You can now run an A/B test on the page.

So, what are you waiting for?

For a while in my career I worked in a company where traffic was considered the main yardstick for success and growth. This became incredibly frustrating at times as, while there was always some more budget to grow traffic, getting budget for marketing optimization and conversion improvement was next to impossible.

While traffic is indeed a critical factor, it’s the wrong one to focus on if you haven’t invested in optimizing conversion on your web site.

Like George Kastanza figuring out a witty retort hours too late to use it, here I am some years later to present some pretty compelling math on why companies should focus first on conversion.

First, a couple assumptions:

• - The company in this example is selling a product (but the same principles work for ad revenues, B2B lead generation, etc.)
• - The company has not undergone extensive marketing optimization on their web site and/or promotions already.
• - There exists an opportunity to raise overall conversion rates by 5% or more (I have yet to work with a company where this is not possible).

In the first example below we have an example of a CPM banner ad where conversion is the only option as the ad is currently running at negative ROI (See previous post on Working the Math on Online Advertising).

As you can see, with the assumptions I put in, the ad campaign initial is returning only $.80 on each dollar spent on it. Despite the thought of “making it up in volume,” spending more on reach on this campaign will only drive it further and further into the red.

On the other hand, if the company takes the time to run some insightful a/b tests on the ad and the landing page, all of a sudden the campaign is making money (ads and landing pages present significant opportunities for conversion improvement). Best of all, the campaign is now scalable. In this case, the logical thing to do is to NOW increase the reach of the campaign until it hits a point of diminishing return.

In the second example, let’s have a look at web site conversion and the case for optimization versus spending on reach.

In this case we compare a 10% traffic improvement against a 5% conversion rate improvement (from 2% conversion to 2.1% conversion). “But Rob,” you might say, “we make more extra revenue by paying for traffic and we get 10% more people exposed to our brand.”

That argument would be true for the first month, but to truly understand the power of optimization, let’s look at the math over a year:

• - Buying 10% additional reach costs $50,000 per month, which equals $600,000 per year, for a 160% overall ROI in the example shown.
• - Paying a consultant or agency $10,000 a month for 4 months is a good guess for what it might take to get 5% better conversion on a site with these kind of revenues (hey, I never said this blog wouldn’t be self-serving sometimes). This assumes the site hasn’t already been optimized.In this case, let’s assume the 5% improvement kicks in 2 months into the process. What this math works out to is that a mere $40,000 spent on conversion will result in $400,000 in new revenues for a 10x or 1000% ROI.

That’s pretty compelling math, isn’t it? Better yet, you don’t have to choose one over the other. By doing the work of improving conversion FIRST, then adding the spend on reach, you now get an example that looks like this:
Wow. Keep in mind that no real life scenario is as simple as the case I’ve described. That said, these are incredibly powerful principles and I hope I’ve helped show you why it makes sense to focus on conversion before opening the wallet for reach.

BTW, despite my tongue in cheek reference to hiring a consultant or agency, conversion and marketing optimization is definitely an area where you should develop in-house skills if at all possible.