Tag Archives: better marketing

What are your company’s value propositions and differentiators?

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Just re-reading a great article from Jeffrey Gitomer in the local business journal. It resonated with me because we preach this to all of our clients when talking strategy for their marketing and sales efforts. Everyone needs to know their value propositions & differentiators because if you don’t then you are just another product or service that you will market as a “commodity”. A better question is do you know what your value proposition is?

Everybody has their set of products and/or services. Most have spent some time coming up with “differentiators” so they can tell why they are different. But true value combines what the client or prospect perceives to be in favor of them combined with what you perceive is in favor of them – hence the value proposition.

Are your Brand and marketing strategy reaching beyond the product or service itself to a relationship with your clients? Where are the areas where the most value you provide is perceived by your clients? Whether you consult Fortune 500 clients or sell shoes, you need to craft, create, and control the perception of value your product or service. Social media is exploding because it helps create this value and gives businesses more access to each customer relationship and therefore the ability add more value and integrate themselves with a client. In the case of services, your presence out in the web channels can add to building trust, in the case of shoes – how many people they can see are talking about them will add “perceived value” to your shoe or Brand of shoes.

Perceived value can also far outweigh the actual price paid. That value can actually help justify the price in a client’s mind. Everything you do needs to drive the prospect/customer to perceive value and the value you give provide to them. Price objections are typically more about them not perceiving enough value – it also you just need to change their perception and your content, messaging, and social media strategy can all help you change that perception.

Work on developing these propositions and you will see your revenue grow. Here are some helpful marketing toolsto help you craft your marketing and web strategies.

Emotional Marketing Messaging vs. Facts Based Rational Messaging

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I was just re-reading an Article from earlier this year in Advertising Age that talked about why emotional marketing messages beat the rational ones. They looked at 880 case studies, covering two recessions to see if there was any difference between the “good and bad times”. What was determined was emotional advertising was twice as likely to generate profit gains than the rational ones, with the campaigns that use both, splitting the difference right in between.

The biggest difference was the emotional marketing reduced price sensitivity, which helped companies to be able to hold more firm on their pricing (with a better economy, it would allow you to probably charge a premium). Emotional advertising allows one to create a sense of differentiation for your brand and helps it appear to be worth “more” to the customer. However, a person that would respond to more data driven advertising or rational messaging, is typically more analytical so it is expected that they are more price sensitive because they would be one that “does their homework” first.

Balancing this in the Internet age takes some effort because of how Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, Websites, and everything can spread more quickly – especially through industry trade channels. If you combine that with the fact that 80%+ people research what they want to buy online (especially if it is not a standard consumable good) then you have to make sure your message reaches across all mediums.

If you ask most business owners, “Would you like to be able to keep 1% more through your price or increase your volume 1%?”, holding that price would be more to the bottom line that the equivalent increase in sales volume. Your marketing needs to help you achieve that.

Success in Local Business SEO

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1.Non-Business Name Searches: It’s great if people searching the internet are discovering your website without typing in the name of your business. Probably most of these visitors were previously unaware of your business. This signifies that your website is ranking well for phrase that describe its location and the type of products or services.

2. Specific Service or Product Searches: If your company offers a exclusive product or service you will definitely want to be found for it. These keywords will point to your website because you have a search engine friendly website well optimized even for its more unique services.

3. Searches by Zip, Street, & City: An important component of Local Business SEO if having your address in the footer or on every page of your website. Your company can even gather online traffic for searches by multiple zip codes across your region. This is also a result of having a well optimized map listing. For example, in your Google Local Business Listing, make use of targeted keyword phrases in your list of services or products.

4. Synonyms for Products or Services: If your website is well optimized, it will be able to draw traffic from multiple keywords describing its services. Optimize for multiple phrases to describe your business’s services and products on pages within your website.

Have you locked up your Brand Identity for Social Media?

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There are several sites out there that people use for sharing information and more social media aspects that you should consider registering your name. Even if you don’t plan to use Facebook or Twitter, we would advise you at least lock up your name so someone else cannot steal it – which is known as “squatting”. Besides, just because you don’t plan to use either of them does not mean there isn’t the next hottest one around the corner that you should lock up.

This happened with domain names in the mid 90′s as websites were coming into popularity. Several Fortune 500 companies ended up in court trying to get their trademarked names back. There has not been any precedence set for Social Media and if and how companies can get control of their Brand once it has been registered by someone else who is not them. As reference, here is an article from Adage that shows you some of the big Brands that don’t own their Twitter identity.

You can see if anyone has squatted you out and potentially avoid that by visiting UserNameCheck.com. There are 68 different sites that someone could “squat” you on. Some of them you have never heard of, several are familiar and you can find all the different sites people could squat your identity on. You never know what might be the next big fad or emerge so it is best to lock them up and as new “fads” come out, register those as well, even if you don’t ever use them – you can at least know you are protecting your Brand when it comes to Internet & Web Marketing and Social Media.

Using Twitter in your Marketing Mix for Businesses

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Twitter is a good idea for your business if you believe in Social Media as a way for humans to connect and engage in conversation. Twitter can bring great minds together, and gives you daily opportunities to learn and grow as a company. Twitter is like blogging except you only have 140 short characters to communicate your message. It is like instant messaging except it is public and can attract traffic to your website. A Tweet is not directed to just one person because it is visible to anyone.

Twitter is a way to drive real traffic to your site. The way to use it is to build a network of “followers” and people/companies you are “following.” Following people shows that you are not just talking about yourself but also listening to what your potential customers and industry leaders are saying. By interacting with others you are giving people reason to listen to you as well. Think of Twitter as an intercom, not a megaphone.

When setting up your company’s Twitter profile, create your company image that lets your brand stand out. Put up a picture… make it your company logo. Make sure you fill out your profile bio/info. This authenticates your Twitter profile.

Follow your brand and industry in Twitter conversations. Use Twitter Search to look for conversations about topics that are of interest to your company. Look for conversations about your brand, competitors, and words about your industry. This is a great way to build and improve your network. Engage with your potential customers. Try talking about their interest too, not just yourself… you need to show that you are a human. If you are going to bother Tweeting, it means that you want humans to connect.

When sharing content, it is very important to only share information that is useful/fun/interesting. Otherwise, you might sound like you are “preaching” a sales pitch about your company or products to people and they might tune you out. Twitter is not a one-way conversation.

Share content that spreads rapidly such as:

  • New Content/data
  • Links to cool/relevant sites
  • Industry articles
  • Interesting blog posts
  • Videos (funny ones get spread the most)
  • Slides and presentations
  • News releases
  • Podcasts

Information that rarely gets shared:

  • Product info
  • Free trials

After you have wrote some “tweets,” added profiles to follow, and gained followers, you can check out how your profile ranks. Here is a cool free tool to grade your Twitter account: www.twitter.grader.com.

Tips to make Tweeting easier:

  • Use tools like “TwitterFox,” “TweetDeck,” or “Twhirl” to make managing Twitter easier and faster
  • Use services like Twitter Search to make sure you see if someone’s talking about your company. Try to participate where it makes sense.
  • Use tools like TinyURL http://www.tiny.cc/ or http://bit.ly/ to shorten long URLs (because you only get 140 characters)

Twitter can be a great way to attract customers, network, and interact with your current customers, but you have to understand the Twitter culture or you could actually turn these people away. Time to Tweet! Feel free to contact us at Bevelwise if you have questions or need some help.

References:

http://www.hubspot.com/marketing-webinars
http://www.chrisbrogan.com/50-ideas-on-using-twitter-for-business/

http://mashable.com/2009/01/21/best-twitter-brands/

Advertising of the future is interactive and location sensitive

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Dockers has an interactive ad which displays while an iPhone game (or possibly other apps) is loading. The ad, called “Shake down to Get Down”, asks the person to shake the phone in order to make the person on the screen dance. The screen focuses on the dancers shoes which of course are Dockers.

This serves as an increasing trend for organizations wanting people to interact with and be entertained by their brand. One of the first examples I can think of this new type of advertising is Burger King’s subservient chicken which launched in 2004. What makes the Dockers ad unique is how it is embedded as a part of another application and it is mobile.

The ad was built specifically for the iPhone which offer much more functionality than TV, paper, radio or websites. One of the more exciting features of using a mobile platform is location based ads.

Imagine this scenario: you are shopping in a store and you scan/take a picture of a bar code to lookup the price of the item on amazon.com to see if the price you are looking at in the store really is a good deal (available now with the iPhone and Google’s Adroid phones). Soon there after, you might receive a text message informing you that the store down the road has the same item for 10% less then prompts you for turn-by-turn directions on how to get to that store. I would expect to see this scenario take place very soon.

Other new opportunities are available with location and motion based ads such as…

    • A electronics company could display a new rebate enticing users to scan a barcode at a nearby store, then give you directions to that store.
    • A cruise line could offer deals for users in Miami and New Orleans due to proximity to their ships.
    • A soda company may create an interactive bottle of pop that is motion sensitive. The user can shake up the bottle and it splashes all over the screen.
    • A car rental company can determine that a user is outside their typical geography and serve an ad for extra insurance or a CPA ad for a discounted rate.

This is just the beginning as newer technologies become available that we carry around in our pockets. I can think of the new summer baseball movie may offer discounted ticket if you can swing your phone faster than 45 MPH (measured by an accelerometer like what is currently in the iPhone). Then after you try, show the next available show times of the movie for the 5 closest theaters near you.

Mobile is the advertising platform of the future as the viewers are more engaged. It is easy to walk out of a room or skip over a TV commercial with a DVR. Most people skip the first 15 pages of a magazine. Mobile offers tracking for easy ROI measurements, unlike print. And most importantly mobile users are not usually doing any thing else – their attention is focused solely on the device. It is coming soon and it will come fast.

via ReadWriteWeb

Print or SEO?

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The Grand Rapids Press announced in yesterday’s edition that they are making employee cuts and possibly future cuts to delivery in the coming months due to the “current economic climate.” Publisher Day Gaydou had been keeping this under wraps but had to come clean with readers after the Ann Arbor News and other Booth Newspapers announced their cutbacks yesterday. The Ann Arbor Press is shuttering it’s entire print organization just weeks after the Seattle Post-Intelligencer did the same.

What does this mean? Further evidence that newspaper readership is declining, and if you are a marketer still using print advertisements as your primary marketing channel while ignoring local search, then you are missing the boat.

Take this opportunity to reassess the ROI from all your marketing channels. Ask yourself if traditional media is achieving the objectives needed to be profitable.

Internet Marketing, be it Paid Search, Organic Search, Social Media (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc) and web portal advertising should be a key part if not the cornerstone of your marketing mix.

SEO (search engine optimzation) is most important though. There are endless reasons why search engine optimization must be implemented into your marketing strategy before you are left in the dust of your competition. Here are the top 5:

  1. Absence of risk. In many cases, paid advertising is subject to click fraud risk and competitor’s black techniques (such as using software that would click your ads thousands of times without any real profit to your site; however, you pay for each click to the search engine). High-tech pay-for-performance programs (such as Google AdWords) claim to have advanced protection against such behavior (and they do have), however the risk can never be reduced to zero. SEO is free of any risk. Unless you spam or make obvious mistakes, it cannot damage your business.
  2. Reliability. Banner ads or paid search engine placement work until the marketing budget depletes. Then, the site disappears from the listings, and your returning customers cannot find you any more (new visitors cannot find you either). SEO helps buffer this process, so you can gradually reduce the advertising budget as you’re increasing your results obtained from organic search engine listings. Also consumers are more likely to purchase from a site ranked high in the search engine results than from an evidently placed advertisement
  3. Brand awareness. A web site having a high ranking means more people see the name of the company and become familiar with the company and its products, even if they haven’t made a purchase. A surveys show that consumers are twice as likely to recognize businesses ranked in the top three in search engine results than those appearing in banner ads.
  4. Targeted traffic. Search engine optimization brings paying customers to your door step. The customers that SEO bring you are long for your products/services as they have entered your websites keywords/phrases into the search engines. SEO will further help you transform visitors into buyers by analyzing their behavior once they find your site. You will learn how to transform these visitors into buyers by utilizing the content of your website in the most effective manner possible.
  5. Affordability. In comparison to banner ads, which cost between $2500 to $35000 a month and outsourced SEO plan costs as little as $1000.

These are only 5 of the reasons which substantiate why SEO is the single best investment for all marketers.

Think about it. And don’t forget to recycle!!

Question and Answer Sites are exploding

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As reported by web monitor Hitwise, this sites have been growing faster than the web itself. Between 2006-2008, use of these types of sites has increased 889%. The report was based on data from eight leading Q&A; sites, and of course due to the growth, there are new Q&A; sites popping up regularly now on a global scale.

Top sites according to the report: (note this is growing older)

Yahoo! Answers 74.05%
Wiki Answers 18.35%
Answerbag 4.51%
Ask Metafilter 1.8%
Askville 0.85%

Now, this can be a great way to generate back links and get people to bookmark you and really increase your inbound links and exposure on the web. If you have subject matter expertise, you can post to these sites and increase your exposure for your company and website.

Demarketing is what the ecomony demands…

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What is demarketing you ask? It is the concept of determining what customer or industry segments are your most profitable and focusing all of your marketing dollars in a segment you know will bring you profit. Don’t spend money on segments or products that already have low margins when you sell them, it makes it that much more difficult to make profit. If you have a solid segment that makes good margin, focus your dollars there so then every marketing dollar you spend will have a better chance of being profitable.

Sure, people have to be buying, but when you know you are making money from that product or segment, you are already a head of the game. What if you don’t know what your profitable segments are? Through some smart marketing and accountablity principles incorporated with your marketing/advertising efforts, we can help you get a picture of those segments in a 90-180 period of time if you are interested.