Category: Marketing

  • Start with a mobile browsing strategy

    Everyone and their cousin in marketing is panicking about your mobile strategy.

    • “We have to get our sites ready for mobile!”
    • “Mobile computing is the future of the Internet!”
    • “Mobile devices will be the #1 web browsers real soon!”

    Some of this is true. Before you rush headlong into deploying mobile everything and trying to convert every last bit of marketing collateral you’ve got into something mobile, think. Think for a few moments about mobile. What things do you like and not like about mobile?

    I’ll give you an easy one. Take a look at the FAFSA form, the financial aid form that I’ve spent the last 7 years studying, presenting, and guiding people through. This form is about 108 questions long.

    No matter how good your mobile platform is, no matter how awesome or shiny your mobile device is, you will not fill out the FAFSA on a keyboard – real or virtual – that’s the size of chicklets and retain your sanity after 108 form fields. Now, will there be one or two users among your many that will try? Of course. Is  the amount of time and effort needed to develop a pure mobile implementation of the FAFSA justified for those two users a year? I’d have to say probably not.

    Start with a mobile browsing strategy.

    1. Look at your content, look at what you have that people can look at but don’t necessarily have to interact with. That’s where your mobile work should start.
    2. Use plugins for your WordPress blog – I’m a fan of the free WPTouch plugin.
    3. If you have something location-based, make sure you’re set up with Google Local Business Center and have updated listings on all the major local services.
    4. Check your analytics to see what percentage of users are browsing using a mobile device – find this in the screen sizes section. Look for really small screen sizes.
    5. Create content with mobile in mind. Instead of giant blog posts, break topics up into sections, segments, or pieces so they can be consumed in snack size or all at once.

    It’s absolutely true that mobile will be an integral part of your online marketing strategy over this year and coming years. We haven’t even scratched the surface of what’s possible. That said, the desktop/laptop isn’t going anywhere either – so don’t throw everything away for a future promise that isn’t here just yet (though it’s arriving more every day).


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  • Intelligence in Analytics (beta)

    Find yourself overwhelmed with reporting options in Google Analytics? Not sure where to start your analysis on a regular basis? It does, after all, contain nearly everything and the kitchen sink.

    Here’s an easy way to get started and a great feature to show to your team. It’s Intelligence (beta). Go to your Google Analytics, click Intelligence, and select Weekly Reports. (daily’s not necessarily all that helpful)

    Weekly Alerts - Google Analytics

    Now you can see major changes in your analytics data from one screen, like a “what’s new” for your data. In the example below, I can see that referrals to this site were up, as were new visitors. That tells me that folks are coming here from links on other sites. If you look on the right hand side, Google even ranks the different pieces of information by what it thinks are events of greater or lesser significance.

    Weekly Alerts - Google Analytics

    Click the Group by switch to change from metric to dimension – this is more or less like a simple PivotTable for the intelligence. Now, I can see that my referrals, which were up in the previous statistics, had some interesting behaviors. Their bounce rate was lower and their time on site was higher. This tells me that whatever they were coming to this site for, they found it (bounce rate dropped) and it was compelling enough that they stuck around (time on site).

    Weekly Alerts - Google Analytics

    Armed with this information, I can take a look at the content I created that week and any links I might have shared on Twitter, Facebook, or other places I share.

    The Intelligence feature isn’t a replacement for hardcore analytics analysis by any means, but it’s a great way to start your day if you manage a web site. Intelligence will give you some initial areas to start digging into, some things to investigate as you prepare for your day.

    Try it out!


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  • More traffic is not the answer

    Over the past week, I’ve had the opportunity to have some great conversations with companies, individuals, and groups looking for my help growing their businesses (as I’ll be leaving Edvisors at the end of the month). There’s been a common question among all of them:

    How do we get more traffic to X?

    This is the wrong question to be asking, folks. Yes, absolutely, more feet in the door is critical to long term growth, but you don’t start fixing or improving your business at the top of the funnel.

    You start at the bottom.

    Which would you rather have? A web site with 1 million visitors a year that converts 0.5% of them, or a web site with 20,000 visitors a year that converts 30% of them? Everyone clamoring for more traffic says “I want the million visitors!” but the answer is the latter, in case you’re mathematically disinclined.

    Fix your funnel from the bottom up. Why? Two reasons – you make the conversion engine more efficient, so when it’s time to build traffic, you can make use of it, and the further down the funnel you go, the more control over its outcome you have.

    If you don’t know what your funnel is, now’s a good time to map it out. I suggest this order:

    • Awareness
    • Traffic
    • Leads
    • Customers
    • Evangelists

    Start at the bottom, which is evangelists, the people who love you so much that they spread your message for free on your behalf. If your product or service sucks, you won’t have evangelists. If your customer service sucks, you won’t have evangelists. Put time and energy into making a killer product and helping people make use of it, and every referral you get from your evangelists will bring gold to your doorstep.

    Making customers is a function of sales. If sales can’t take a qualified lead and turn it into a customer most of the time, your sales process is broken or your sales team sucks. Ask your leads why they didn’t become customers, and fix that. Sales force automation tools can give you more insights into aggregate info about who tends to convert or doesn’t convert, but nothing beats asking the folks who didn’t buy.

    Making traffic into leads is a function of marketing. You want as many qualified leads as possible – so if you’re not turning your traffic into leads, chances are marketing’s not doing its job demonstrating the value of what you have for sale, or the mechanism for conversion to a lead is broken. Are your web site forms working at all? Have you tested using things like Google Optimizer? If your lead quality is poor, are you asking the right questions and filtering out the garbage before your sales force has to handle it?

    Building awareness and getting traffic is what you handle last – as said earlier, the higher up the funnel, the less you have control over the outcome. This is where stuff like search engine optimization, social media, and the variety of traffic building mechanisms come into play, and this is where most folks think you should start, but it’s where you finish.

    Make sure the engine is working before you start blinging the shell of your car. More traffic without a conversion engine is just wasting your bandwidth, your resources, and your time.

    Photo credit: Chris Brogan


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  • In the absence of other metrics

    I had an interesting conversation last night with a photographer friend who said he faced a dichotomy in his work: on the one hand, he doesn’t overly care about others’ opinions, and on the other hand, he feels as though he should shoot for views as the best way of seeing how his work is being valued as he doesn’t sell his photos.

    To me, there’s no dichotomy here. We focus on things like views of a photo, followers, retweets, fans on a fan page, etc. because these are the measures and metrics we know about. This is the best we have to work with, for the most part, and so valuing them isn’t wrong or crass. In the absence of other, better metrics, we value what we know.

    To alleviate my friend’s dichotomy, I suggested he consider other metrics that would more accurately gauge his work – in essence, expanding what he knows about his work and how people perceive it. Sales, of course, is one such measure. It’s easy to click follow or subscribe or friend someone, but it’s much more of a commitment to open your wallet and purchase the work of an artist. You have to be much more invested in it to put up some money.

    If you’re in it for the love and not the money – which is perfectly okay and good – dig deeper into your analytics. Last night in my USF Advanced Social Media course, I talked a bit about using Google Analytics to measure inflows and outflows to social networks as a way of better gauging what people are doing with your stuff. Here’s two examples.

    1. Measuring outflows. Using Google Analytics’ virtual pageviews, you can tell whether that giant Twitter badge on your blog is worth keeping around. Set up links using an arbitrary virtual pageview, and every time someone clicks out to a social site or platform from your blog or destination site, you’ll know. That giant “BE MAH FRIEND” badge may be taking up valuable real estate for little value. Add a virtual page view to high value links or affiliate links as a sanity check for your affiliate reporting, too.

    Example code – no virtual page view:

    <a href=”https://twitter.com/cspenn”>My twitter account</a>

    Example code with virtual page view:

    <a onclick=”javascript: pageTracker._trackPageview (‘/vpv-twitter-text-link’);” href=”https://twitter.com/cspenn”>My twitter account</a>

    This will show up in your Google Analytics under Content. Filter for the virtual page name to see how popular it is. (/vpv-twitter-text-link in the example above, can be anything you want it to be, like /omg-im-linking-to-chris-brogan for example)

    2. Measuring inflows. Nearly everyone on Twitter uses bit.ly or another URL shortener to make stuff easier to share. Go the extra step and use the Analytics URL Builder so that you can see traffic from individual social links you’ve shared – and how well they convert.

    Take the link to your site, blog, or destination that you were going to share, feed it to the URL builder, append some useful data (did you share it on Twitter? Facebook? is it PPC? shared to a specific user? Customize as you like!), then feed the Google Analytics enhanced link to bit.ly.

    Now, when you share that link, you’ll see exactly where your traffic is coming from and more importantly, you’ll see how your traffic does on your site. You can isolate, for example, how many people from an individual tweet bought something or downloaded an eBook. It’s laborious to do this with every single thing you share, but for high value stuff, this is the way to go.

    For my photographer friend, every link he places to his photos (or embedded photo on his site) should have either an inflow or outflow, and if he had some engagement metric like a free eBook download, he’d begin to know more than just views about his photos. He could see how many people went from a tweet to his photo blog to subscribe to download, and if someday he chose to sell his photos, he’d need only add that to Google Analytics to deepen his understanding of his audience.

    Try out these tools and see if you can make them work for you.


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  • What World of Warcraft's Holidays Should Teach You About Power Blogging

    World of Warcraft has in-game holidays that closely mirror many real world holidays, such as Pilgrim’s Bounty (Thanksgiving), the Feast of Winter Veil (Christmas/Hanukkah), Noblegarden (Easter), Midsummer Fire Festival (Fourth of July), and so forth.

    Savvy auction house marketers know exactly what goods and commodities are needed for each holiday and have them up for auction the moment the holidays begin, often at ludicrous markups. For example, for the Feast of Winter Veil, small eggs used to cook gingerbread cookies and egg nog, normally for sale for 50 silver (think 50 cents), rocket up in price by crafty salesmen to 9-15 gold each (think 9-15) for a few days until the laggards in the market realize the holiday’s on and start undercutting prices.

    Here’s the funny thing: the in-game calendar is published months ahead of the actual events, in the game and on Blizzard Entertainment’s web site. Every player of the game is given in-game notices in major cities about the impending holiday. There’s plenty of time to stock up the goods you need to sell…

    … but few ever do. Few are willing to plan that far ahead, to farm the eggs or deeprock salt ahead of time and be ready for the doors to burst open the moment the holiday starts. As a result, those few who look at the calendar and plan accordingly reap huge profits.

    So what does this have to do with blogging? The same applies in the blogosphere as in Azeroth. Google Calendar has a holidays calendar for every nation in the world. It lets you see all the major holidays you could possibly want, for your country or others, for different religions, for just about anything that you can stick on a calendar and call a holiday.

    The power bloggers can look at the calendar and decide in advance, like an editorial calendar, what should happen in the lead up to the holidays on the calendar. Do you blog about marketing? You know when Valentine’s Day is – work out now what things you want to blog about as that holiday approaches. Do you blog about history? Seems like everyone’s got a holiday about them.

    Having your blog posts published in advance of the holidays ensures that search engines can index your content. Having a decent social network ensures that you can move the needle in real-time search on the day before and day of the holiday. Having time to plan ahead lets you come up with creative memes that can stick well ahead of time – you can even beta test memes and hashtags to your current followers to see who says “heh, that’s clever” or the equivalent reaction you’re looking for.

    You’ve got the calendar in front of you. The holidays on it are not a secret by any means, but know that most everyone in blogging and social media is probably going to wing it at best on the holiday. Farm your small eggs and deeprock salt now so that in 2010, you can profit handsomely when the times are right.

    Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go hit some rock elementals for deeprock salt. We sold out this year, so I’ve got a year to farm for next Winter Veil.


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  • Fresh starts

    So, a scant 11 days ago I blogged about making this year a year of playing to your strengths. Karma has a funny way of making you walk the talk, because a few days later Edvisors, the company I’ve been with for six and a half years, and I agreed to part ways. We each have different strengths, and we both want to take those strengths in different directions. For example, my love of things like public speaking, new marketing, social media, and the ever-evolving relationship between marketing and technology are areas I want to more fully explore, and those don’t always integrate with the world of financial aid as well as they should.

    If we’ve worked together in my work at Edvisors, you’ll likely get an update as to whom you’ll be working with next. If we’ve collaborated in the past, I hope to do so again, especially as there are several opportunities I’m looking at for my next move that promise increased collaboration and exploration. I’ll still remain connected to financial aid here and there; for example, I’ll still be presenting at College Goal Sunday at the end of the month.

    As this transition progresses, a few things are on my mind:

    • Six and a half years is a lot of unwinding. To the extent that your marketing or media product/service/system can make transitioning roles easier, faster, cleaner, and less painful, please always plan for those eventualities when you’re designing product or slinging code. I’m running into an issue now where Google Analytics does not let you transfer analytics from one account to another; the workaround is to remove access for a certain user on a site by site basis, but this is obviously much less than ideal.
    • Sorting out and separating personal from professional is harder than ever, because professional things can easily bleed over into personal and vice versa. Amber Naslund pointed this out recently in a post about boundaries. Where do you, the person, and your work begin and end? The catchphrase in social media last year was “be human”, but there’s also the quandary of when the human and the company need to part ways, who gets what in the divorce? I’m approaching by area of focus. Work I did that relates to Edvisors’ core mission is clearly theirs. I’m fairly certain they don’t want my Warcraft videos or coffee roasting techniques guides.
    • A corollary is to explore, but keep your home base strong, sage advice from Chris Brogan. Six and a half years ago, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and social media weren’t more than vague ideas in someone’s mind. Now, having a personal brand that incorporates what you do professionally but isn’t married to your professional life is more important than ever. Companies change. People change. Markets and economies change. Life changes. If you aren’t doing at least a little work to ensure that you exist outside of your work, then the day will come when your work will vanish – and you’ll have that much more trouble getting resettled. Invest at least a little time in yourself and your reputation now to provide for unforeseen contingencies later.

    I’m eager and excited about the fresh starts ahead. There’s so much opportunity, so many different ways we can make a difference together. I’m ever thankful and grateful for everyone who subscribes to this blog, who listens to Marketing Over Coffee, who has stayed in touch on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn over the years. I can’t wait to see what the rest of the year will bring.


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  • What RoboCop Can Teach You About the Dangers of Social Media

    Fans of the original RoboCop movie remember all too well the searing disappointment with its two sequels. The original RoboCop movie was bloody, intensely violent, dystopian, and wonderful to watch as we saw nearly-deceased police officer Alex Murphy wreak vengeance on his would-be killers and try to find his humanity again inside his robotic self.

    The first RoboCop movie was a box office success, which immediately activated the sequel machine. In the following movies, producers largely made the human story a subplot to lots of shooting, lots of gadgets, and even more gadgets. I can just hear the conversations in the executive suite now…

    “RoboCop needs more cool somehow… I know, to jazz up this franchise, let’s give him a jetpack! The kids will love it!”

    What made RoboCop successful wasn’t the gadgets. It was the stories, the fairly complicated subplots in the original that were abandoned for larger explosions and more gadgets in the sequels, which did increasingly poorly at the box office.

    Your social media efforts aren’t so different.

    Rather than looking for the next big thing, the next shiny object, the next bit of wizardry to spruce up your social media presence, stop for a moment and assess what has given you success so far. If you’ve achieved any level of success, a good bit of it is likely from your human efforts, from your story-based work and not the social media equivalent of rocket backpacks.

    As you assess your social media efforts for this year, put aside the platforms and technologies for a little bit and look at what stories you are currently telling, what stories you plan to tell, and how your audiences and communities will receive those stories. This year, I’m certain the platforms will change. Stuff that’s hot right now will be less so, and there will undoubtedly be newer, shinier things.

    Had the producers of RoboCop’s sequels left the gadgets behind and focused on the story of the human beneath the machine, they might have made even more box office gold. Don’t let the same fate happen to your social media efforts. Forget the gadgets. Bring out the human behind your social media machinery and tell those stories instead.


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  • A funny thing happened on the way to the future…

    …screens got really small and really big at the same time. Check out these two screen sizes from my blog’s analytics:

    Screen sizes

    In position #6 is a screen the size of an aircraft carrier.

    In position #9 is a screen the size of a postage stamp.

    One’s a large monitor, probably an LCD like a 24″ iMac. The other’s almost certainly a mobile screen.

    This presents a dilemma to content creators. How do you manage to create stuff that looks passable on both?

    For the big screens, don’t be afraid to go large with great art. If you have a staff member with a photographic penchant, feature their work (if they permit you to do so, or if their contract permits you to do so) in your creatives. If appropriate, offer freebies in your marketing promotions, like desktop wallpapers, downloadable screen savers and slideshows, and other high resolution, high impact ideas. When I do outreach to college financial aid administrators in the fall, very often I’ll pull photos from my portfolio of New England foliage and just send them as gifts to be used for desktop wallpaper. Costs me nothing, earns me goodwill, and makes use of that Nikon D90 I lug around all the time.

    Hopkinton State Park Autumn Foliage HDR Trail Photos

    For the really small screens, I recommend two things: first, install WordPress and then install the MobilePress plugin, which is what I run on this blog. It automatically reformats your blog on the fly in a lightweight format that looks good enough but loads instantly.

    Second, go install or use mobile phone emulators to see what your properties look like, if you don’t own every phone under the sun. You can download an iPhone emulator from Apple or use TestiPhone.com for the iPhone platform, and Google has Android emulators for the Android platform.

    iPhone

    This should help you make the most of the smallest screens coming to visit you.

    Small or large, get your content future-ready today. It’ll be here sooner than you think.


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  • What casino gambling should teach you about online marketing

    I recently had the opportunity to spend a few hours observing (not playing, I know the house odds!) people at a casino during a business conference. What a superb experience – not as a player, but as a marketer, to see how casinos manage the end user experience for maximum profit.

    Imagine for a minute that someone put a box in front of you that, on average, will give you 42 cents for every dollar you put in it. No one in their right, rational mind would ever use it. Imagine for a minute that someone built an ATM that gives you exactly 42% of whatever amount you request. That ATM would be torn out of the wall by riotous crowds.

    Yet thousands of people a year flock to casinos and use machines and games designed to do exactly that. Why? Because casinos have mastered the user experience.

    Let’s take a look at some of the tricks of the trade:

    1. No windows or clocks. Time is the enemy for casinos – they want you to spend as much time as possible in the venue (on the premise that you’re not a weirdo like me who just stares at people without spending money) and gamble as much as possible. No cues to show just how much time has elapsed ensure this.

    2. Low lighting and lots of ambient sound. Every machine in the room makes noise, and more often than not, even the demo modes have sounds that are pleasant to the ear and evoke video game-like feelings of winning. Why? Low light keeps you relaxed and slightly less aware than harsh, stark light, and lots of ambient amusement sound contributes to the idea that you’re playing games instead of spending money.

    3. Play money. I lost count of how many times players referred to their chips as play money, fake money, toy money, or some other proxy by which they completely forgot they were using real currency. At one blackjack table, I saw enough money cross the table back and forth in just a few minutes (table minimum 200, maximum50,000) to buy several cars. Casinos use proxies for money to get you to spend more, because the money doesn’t look or feel like money at all.

    4. Leave no dollar behind. Right outside the casino floor was… a Rolex shop. And an art gallery. And a Swarovski crystal shop hawking stocking stuffers starting at $40. Casinos know this above all else: you might win on the floor, but you’re not leaving with your money if at all possible. Every hook imaginable is available to get you to spend anything you didn’t lose to the house.

    Now, how does this apply to marketing online? Take a look at your web site. Does it evoke the feelings that you want to elicit from your customers? If your goal is to get customers to spend some time with your content, does the “atmosphere” of your web site – color palette, brightness, tonality, contrast – encourage your visitors to relax, to forget about whatever else they were doing? Look at the patterns of lights and textures in a casino and you see endless repeating patterns that are nearly hypnotic. I’m not saying you should turn your web site into a slot machine’s decor, but think about what decor you do have and what it’s conveying.

    Take a look at how you process transactions. Do you make it as easy as possible for visitors to transact with you? Do you use proxies for money like point systems or credits? In a casino, you can slap down a C note on the green velvet and have chips in hand, ready to gamble in less than 10 seconds. How fast can your visitors buy? Does your site let your visitors slap down the plastic and buy immediately? iTunes and Amazon figured this out long ago with 1-click.

    Are you leaving money on the table? Are you letting your visitors get away with their wallets intact? What other things can you sell to your visitors as they browse through and leave your site? I’m not saying be obnoxious and run a javascript that forces a visitor through an annoying series of ads, but think about all of the different products or services you have and that you sell via affiliate programs. Are you presenting them as powerfully as the Rolex shop in the casino next to the cashier’s cage?

    Casinos make good money because they’ve distilled the user experience for maximum profit. Are you doing the same?

    Photo credit: acaben


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  • Marketing with direct experience

    Something that’s been on my mind a great deal lately is how to integrate more direct experience into everything we do, from marketing to advertising to life itself. One of the most critical things to understand in business is the difference between exoteric and esoteric, or obvious and hidden.

    Exoteric is exactly what it is – surface details, things you can glean from stored knowledge alone. You can read, for example, about faraway places or follow Twitter streams from conferences and events and get a fairly hefty amount of data just from those sources. For example, if you followed a conference like the Inbound Marketing Summit on Twitter, you got a whole bunch of bite-sized ideas, some of which may have been immediately usable. There’s a lot of value in the exoteric, and it’s one of the things that makes social media shine, as a distilled representation of a reality in another place that you can’t be.

    Esoteric is another thing altogether. I like to call esoteric direct experience, because it’s only things that can be transmitted or learned through direct experience. I talked about this with lychee nuts, but here’s an even cruder, more obvious example. No matter how much you read about it, no matter how many videos you see on the Internet about it, no matter how many people you talk to about it, there is no substitute for actual sex, is there? That’s an experience that can only be direct. In fact, it’s so powerful a direct experience that it’s illegal to market the experience at all in many places!

    Where we can run dangerously off path is believing that new technologies can replicate direct experience. A lot of folks seriously believe Twitter is a replacement for real interaction (they tend to be folks who prepend tw- to every other word, like twebinar, tweetup, twestival, tweep, twevent, tweeple, etc., what I rather tactlessly label twasturbation) and as a result, despite being more “social”, they’re lonelier and more isolated than ever. A lot of folks in business and marketing believe that being social will cure their business of its ills. Social media is not a panacea for a failed business model. Never has been, never will be, except for the snake oil folks who make a quick buck off you (learn how to make $300 a day on Twitter!) before moving on to the next trending topic.

    If you want to get the most juice out of your marketing squeeze, look at direct experience. What direct experiences are your customers having with you and your products or services? What direct experiences can you give your customers that no other competitor is giving them right now? For example, one of the events I volunteer at every year is College Goal Sunday, when students get together to complete the FAFSA form. This isn’t charity for me – this is an important event that helps me to better understand and witness what my audience experiences when trying to fill out this form. No amount of surveying can replace actually watching someone try their best to fill out government paperwork, and that then helps me to make my products and services better.

    Do you own your products or services? Do you use them personally? Have you bought them in the store and tried to set them up in the same way your customers would? Have you used them for any amount of time and thought, gosh, this product really needs this or that feature? That’s the direct experience you’re looking for. When you share direct experiences with your customers, you understand implicitly what they’ve experienced with your products and services and can truly help them.

    There is no substitute for direct experience. Don’t get caught in that trap, especially in social media. A simple way to check if you’re too far down the rabbit hole? If your spell checker is flagging every other word in your communications as unknown, you might not be getting enough direct experience and might have too much social media Kool Aid in your diet.


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