Category: Marketing

  • What happened to the other 98%?

    Here’s a vital question I have from a recent discussion with my CEO at the Student Loan Network:

    What happened to the other 98%?

    We talk a lot, especially in marketing, about click through, conversion, and retention rates. Invariably, these rates are small fractions in all of the discussions I’ve had. 1% click through rate, 10% open rate, etc.

    When you turn these metrics around, they’re a little more depressing.

    90% did not open rate.
    99% did not click through rate.
    95% did not buy something rate.
    96% did not volunteer rate.
    94% did not complete the form rate.

    As a marketer, that looks appalling, so we state things in the positive – ooh, that cold calling campaign landed a 2% conversion rate.

    What the heck is happening to the other 98%? Didn’t open? Why not? Didn’t click? Why not?

    Often we talk in marketing about increasing market share or conversion by a few percentage points.

    Why don’t we ever talk about increasing conversion by an order of magnitude?

    If you were in charge of a marketing campaign, how would you get the did X/did not X rates to switch places?

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  • SEO more important than ever with Google Chrome

    Google’s announcement of Chrome, their new open-source browser, was greeted with a relatively lukewarm reception online today.

    Here’s the part that a lot of folks missed, from the Chrome comic book. (yes, a comic book)

    Google Chrome, Page 10

    Get it?

    If your SEO efforts aren’t up to par, Google’s ignoring you in the testing of their browser, too.

    If their browser achieves any level of success, Google will test against your site – if you rank.

    Now this part is the gem, the part that marketers NEED to pay attention to, or ignore at their peril.

    Google Chrome Page 19

    If users think your site is worth remembering, Chrome will do it for them.

    If your site ranks for your keywords, Chrome will suggest it – IN the browser itself. No need to be using Google suggest.

    Seth Godin is fond of saying that if you make your content remarkable, you win.

    Google Chrome now says if you make your content remarkable, they’ll market it for free to their users directly in the OmniBox.

    We’ll see how this new browser does, but marketers – pay heed.

    Google Chrome debuts September 2.

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  • What martial arts can teach us about marketing

    The martial art that I practice places an incredible amount of emphasis on the basics of the art. Basic footwork patterns, basic abilities to hit, grapple, throw, and otherwise put the kibosh on someone trying to hurt you.

    Winchendon Martial Arts CenterOne of the things that every senior instructor at my dojo, the Boston Martial Arts Center, constantly emphasizes is the refinement and polishing of our basics. If you punch someone, you want them to stay punched. If you throw someone, you want them to stay thrown. All the fancy moves and movie-like choreography will do you no good whatsoever if the bad guy gets back up and starts griefing you again; conversely, all the fancy moves are completely unnecessary if you get out of harm’s way and deck the guy so hard that his unconceived children feel it.

    What does this have to do with marketing? Simple. We forget the basics all too often. In our attention deficit society, in our 90 hour work week system, we’re so easily distracted by flashy toys and tricks that we forget to practice and refine our basics. The ability to send out an effective direct email campaign. The ability to optimize a web page for the basics of search engine optimization. The ability to design a usable interface to our information.

    This is a topic I’ll be talking about more at the MarketingProfs Digital Marketing Mixer in October. We’ll explore the levels of marketing basics just like a martial art, showing you what “white belt” skills will always pay off no matter how many grades of black belt you have.

    In the end, no matter how fancy your marketing or martial arts, chances are in any real encounter on the street or in your vertical, you’re going to get one shot that will decide whether you make it or don’t. There’s no second place prize. The only way to be confident in that one shot is to have solid basics that you can rely on.

    Ask yourself this as a marketer: what are your basics? How reliable are they? How confident are you in the results you can generate with them?

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  • If marketing designed stop signs…

    More truth than comedy.

    [youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVb8EC1Y2xM[/youtube]

    Hat tip to Rachel Timmerman for this one.

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  • The evolution of marketing after search

    On the homepage for Facebook, a login form is ...

    Image via Wikipedia

    The evolution of marketing after search

    Search changed everything.

    In the world of advertising, before there was search, there was only interruption. Put as many ads as possible in as many places as possible in the hopes that when a consumer needed something, your ad would be there and they’d think of you first. Spend a fortune on brand so that when a consumer had a problem that your brand could solve, they’d choose you. During the pre-search age, this strategy worked, largely because there was no opportunity for anything better.

    Enter search. Search allowed consumers to indicate what they were interested in. Search allowed advertisers to know when a consumer was in the mood to buy, or at least in the mood to shop. Suddenly, instead of paying millions of dollars for impressions, advertisers could pay thousands of dollars for clicks, and the quality of the leads was better because the consumers had self-selected themselves as interested parties.

    So here we stand. Search rules the roost. Google’s fortunes are built on it, and everyone is trying to improve search or improve placement in search.

    Here’s the fundamental question: what comes next? Does search just get better, or is there a quantum leap that changes the game as much as search changed the game?

    I believe there is a change ahead, and we can already see it in various threads. It hasn’t come together yet, but it’s there and happening faster than you think.

    Predictive placement.

    You see, we know a lot of information. TONS of information. Consumers self-publish information in volumes that marketers could never accomplish. All of MySpace, all of Facebook, all of Twitter – all of this is self-published data, most of it public.

    Right now, we don’t yet have the computational capacity to do massive data correlation on an economical scale, though if I had to place a bet, I’d put my money on Google to do it first. Think about what that future might look like, though. We know products and services have seasonality, and we already have some data segmentation capabilities. Massive data correlation will let us aggregate all the consumer self-published data and slice it a billion different ways to determine what customers want, and when.

    Consider what massive data correlation might mean – a 19 year old female customer logs into, say, a superstore online, and signs in with their Facebook key (just as you do now with Facebook apps). Instantly, the superstore correlates the data in their Facebook profile with the megadatabase and knows that this consumer, who likes Phish, Liz Phair, CSI, and Lost, and is from the North Shore of Massachusetts is statistically likely, based on thousands of similar customer records, to want and need a student loan in three months’ time. Based on their demographic and psychographic data, the megadatabase knows that statistically, this consumer will probably need to borrow between 12,500 and14,300 in two increments, and based on previous purchase data, they’re likely to need their loan disbursements in the first week of September and the fourth week of January.

    The megadatabase makes these notations in a customer profile, sets reminders, and on the first Tuesday of September, Facebook, in concert with the superstore, sends the consumer a message offering them a student loan for $13,000 that can be disbursed by the Friday of that same week – because in the background, the megadatabase has already secured pre-approvals. The consumer is amazed and delighted that Facebook and the superstore knew exactly what they needed, exactly when they needed it, and instead of having to choose a lender, they just go with the lender that was there at precisely the right time with precisely the right offering. The advertisement will not seem out of place, either – because it’s precisely timed, it will appear to be content, just as now, an ad for a service that you need is content, not an ad.

    Sound farfetched? In the age of Google, in the age of social networking profiles with copious data, that day is much closer than you realize.

    Welcome to the future, where marketing is there for exactly what your wallet can bear, with exactly what you want, to take advantage of the buying impulse the moment you have it – all backed up by massive databases.

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  • The Most Effective Marketing A Non-Profit Can Do Is Build The Database

    The Most Effective Marketing A Non-Profit Can Do Is Build The Database

    AwarenessI’ve been seeing more and more “brand awareness” campaigns, especially for non-profits and social good organizations lately, and I genuinely have to ask – what’s the value of that? From tweets on Twitter saying “Raise awareness of the plight of…” to advertisements on MySpace like the one to the right, awareness campaigns seem to be everywhere.

    What’s the value of awareness?

    What’s the return on investment of awareness?

    If I were a marketer for a non-profit, a social justice cause, or just about anything like this, I’d have to think long and hard about the value of my limited marketing dollars going towards headshare versus more actionable marketing.

    ZimbabweLet’s take this Zimbabwe campaign, for example. Ask the average American to locate Zimbabwe on a map and you’ll have an appallingly low success rate. Heck, ask them to locate the continent Zimbabwe is on and you won’t do much better. Why advertise an awareness campaign on a predominantly US-centric web site to an audience that likely can’t even find the target, and advertise in a way that has no action?

    If I were trying to market this campaign, here’s how I’d approach it. If MySpace is the venue where in fact the audience for this campaign exists, fine. I’d put up a simple widget, maybe some scrolling scary pictures of what Mugabe does to his people, and have a “sign the petition” form with slots for name, address, email, etc. right below it, and the requisite opt-in to the mailing list checkbox, pre-checked for your convenience. Maybe make it a Flash widget that scrolled and displayed the last 50 petitioners’ names and locations.

    This widget would in turn feed a nice SQL database that would aggregate the petitioners’ data and dump it into a mass mailer like Blue Sky Factory (disclosure: BSF is a sponsor of one of my podcasts, Marketing Over Coffee) and start soliciting donations. Sure, we could print out a list of petitioners and drop it on a politician’s desk, but I’d bet it would be far more effective, once a huge house list was amassed, to offer a politician’s PAC an email to the constituency on their behalf in exchange for their vote/support/introduction of legislation.

    Forget spending money on awareness. We live or die on our database. The database is a tangible asset that has real, stored value which we can use for barter, trade, or sale (assuming you have the permission of the audience to do so). If you have scarce marketing dollars, if you have scarce resources, building up a marketing database is one of the fastest ways to add value to your non-profit, stay in touch with your constituency, drive donations and funding campaigns, and make real change in the world.

    Yes, you have to use your database wisely, perhaps sparingly, always with the privacy and security of your constituency top of mind, but having an effective database is an incomparable value.

    In the information economy, the non-profit with the most information, effectively used, wins.

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  • The Online Marketer's Web Strategy

    The Online Marketer’s Web Strategy

    The Online Marketer's Web Strategy 19I had the privilege of attending and presenting at the MarketingProfs conference over the past two days, and it was a phenomenal conference, full of lots of good ideas. However, one thing stood out among the various discussions that I wanted to make a point about. There is a definite structure and strategy to online marketing that you need to follow to improve your likelihood of success.

    During a number of sessions, folks were talking about all the social media stuff available to marketers, about how to choose and how to get started. Social media was the buzzword at the conference.. Social media is sexy. Social media is the hot new thing.

    Social media comes LAST, gang.

    That’s right, last.

    What comes first?

    You first must have CONTENT. Something worth talking about. If you want to be in social media, the social part is conversation and discussion. If you have nothing worth talking about – and nothing worth others talking about you – then any effort you put into social media will largely be a waste of time.

    Once you’ve got content, USER INTERFACE comes next. Make a web site that’s attractive, easy to navigate, easy to find stuff on. Hire a professional designer or information architect to help you with this if you’re not so good at it, or use a proven templating system. Whatever you do, focus on putting your content into an easily managed format that is a pleasure to use. Make sure you have at least one way of converting a visitor into a database entry somehow, whether it’s a simple mailing list, or a complex lead generation system.

    If you’re marketing online, you’re marketing with a web site. Do your SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION next. Make sure your web sites validate with W3C standards, at least minimally. Make sure you optimize your sites, build some links, do all the basics. Check out Hubspot’s Web Site Grader for a great starter tool. When you set up profiles on other social networks, make sure you link back to your web site, always. SEO is all about capturing passive traffic, capturing people who are looking for your content.

    Only after you’ve completed the steps of great content, user interface, and search engine optimization are you ready to dive into social media. There’s no way you can win the road race if your car is lacking tires and an engine. Content, UI, and SEO are the basics you MUST have in place prior to diving into social media, or else you’ll be wasting time, energy, and the limited slice of attention your audience is giving you – and they won’t give you again.

    Photo credit: CC Chapman

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  • Ask, ask, ask

    I’ve been looking again at MySpace, as a recent blog post detailed. One of the things I’ve been looking at is the depth of engagement. Is a friend relationship enough to market on? What is the value of a MySpace friendship?

    Over the last five days, I’ve been sending out 200 messages a day or so to my MySpace friends, advertising the Financial Aid Podcast. It’s themed pretty basically:

    • Thanks for being a friend of mine and of my show.
    • Here’s three links to iTunes, Google Reader, and the site.
    • Please subscribe.

    Financial Aid Podcast StatsHow’s it been going?

    I started with a Feedburner number of about 1,000. The show had been static around that number for a while, a couple of months at least. Today? Hit a new record – the last four out of five days.

    Ask. Ask those in your network to get connected, ask them to take action, ask them to be more involved in your community efforts. If you don’t ask, you definitely won’t receive.

  • A picture is worth 10,000 words – or a marketing meeting

    Funny – here at work at the Student Loan Network, I just had a meeting with our marketing director about a press release. The topic of the press release was to emphasize how we’re still open for business despite all the credit market turmoil, how not everyone is going out of business, etc. What was funny was that the entire press release and discussion could easily be summed up in one picture, but it’s difficult to make that fit the press release format.

    Instead of four dense paragraphs, what if I put this graphic up on the Student Loan Network homepage?

    A picture is worth 10,000 words - or a marketing meeting 23

    I think that would have about the same meaning as the press release, but it would convey that meaning almost instantly. Here we are. Open. Even late at night.

    Hat tip to Chip Griffin for the photo under Creative Commons.

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  • New media has gotten marketing confused

    I had an epiphany of sorts in the shower.

    What a lot of new media folks talk about – audience building, impressions, and the dreaded M word, monetization – is not marketing.

    Marketing is the sharing of ideas.

    So what is all the stuff we in new media talk about? Sales. Whether it’s pay per click ads, podcast subscriptions, blog readers, speaking gigs, whatever your metric is around getting someone to take action, that’s sales.

    Marketing is the sharing of ideas.

    Sales is the conversion of ideas into actions.

    It’s the job of marketing to share ideas with the audience, to help them to understand what they’re missing out on, what value is awaiting them. It’s all about the content. Content is king, so the cliche goes.

    It’s the job of sales to turn those ideas into actions. Create the path for people to take. Make it easy for people to do what you want them to do. Tell them what you want them to do. Click here. Subscribe now. Call the comment line. Leave a comment on the blog. Upload your webmail contacts. That’s all sales – do, do, do.

    Once the sale is over, it’s back to marketing, back to sharing. Marketing takes over and reinforces to the audience that the action they took was the right one. Marketing continues to provide value upon value until the customer is so enamored of what you’re doing that they are compelled to share with their friends – and they become your salesforce and marketing team.

    Share. Act. Share. Repeat.

    This is especially relevant because in many ways, I think we’re reading the wrong books.

    Most of my friends in new media are brilliant people. Smart, insightful, good at creating ideas and sharing them. Most of them also wish to be more, do more, achieve more, and this is where the disconnect is. There’s a gap between sharing and acting. Go to any blog and figure out what the action the blogger wants you to take is, and how easy it is to find. Get out your stopwatch, go to any podcaster’s web site, start the clock, and see how long it takes you to subscribe.

    Folks like Seth Godin, Chris Anderson, and the marketing folks are perfectly okay. They’re sharing the ideas, and they’re a source for our own inspiration.

    Note, however, when you ask any prominent blogger, podcaster, networker, etc. about their bookshelves, they never mention Tom Hopkins, Zig Ziglar, Ira Hayes, Dan Kennedy, Brian Tracy, etc. They never mention the sales books, the sales guys who can help get you from idea to action. Once the customer knows who you are and is willing to make a commitment, you as the new media outlet have to change gears and guide your customer, your audience, into action.

    If you want people to do more with your new media outlet, complement your marketing knowledge with sales knowledge, and you’ll blow past the competition in a heartbeat.

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