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In this post – 5 Steps to Restart, Recharge and Revive Your Marketing Right Now! – I introduced an aggressive initiative to help any business owner struggling to stay on plan with their marketing for the year. The idea is to take the mid-point of the year and get a fresh restart. While the previous post kicked off the idea today’s post 1 of 5 Summer Restart is meant to get us down to business. Ready to cover the five steps to restart your marketing plan for the year? QOh, side note – I love summer – I embrace the heat and here in the Midwest the humidity – so since we are talking about restarting your plan as Summer kicks in I thought I would give this entire series a Summer motif. Thus the watermelon in the image above....
If you’ve been in marketing for more than a hot second, you’ve no doubt heard of the Buyer’s Journey. What you might not know is that this journey has dramatically changed in the last decade. 67% of the buyer’s journey is now digital. Today’s buyer is up to 90% of the way through their buying journey before they reach out to the vendor.Interactive content is front and center in this digital shift in the Buyer’s Journey. As companies produce more and more content in order to satisfy today’s self-guided buyer, only the most engaging content will stand out and get noticed. Why does interactive content stand out in the sea of content online today? Because it doesn’t talk at buyers – it talks with them. There are interactive content types for every stage in the Buyer’s Journey: Awareness, Evaluation, and Decision-making. However, it plays an especially important role for both the buyer and the business in the Awareness stage....
When a book telling people to throw away almost everything they own becomes a best seller and the start of a spiritual movement, it’s a good indication we’re consuming too much. But it’s hard to reconcile this idea when so many families, even in some of the world’s most durable economies, feel like they are barely getting by. Households have never had so many material goods, yet we hear constant reports of economic anxiety and feelings of hopelessness. The problem is livings standards. Our expectations of what we should own have increased—but incomes, for many of us, haven’t kept up. The disconnect leaves households vulnerable and struggling. There is no doubt living standards are rising. People around the world, of all income levels, are living longer, finding more leisure time, and enjoying more luxuries than at any time in history. Remember, only 30 years ago, air-conditioning was a luxury. Now it’s practically seen as a necessity....
Subscription services have become popular among online shoppers, but those same shoppers are also abandoning these services.
Through these subscriptions, customers make recurring payments and receive order shipments at regular intervals, and they have become popular because they let consumers refill products they need to replenish often, such as health and beauty products.
These services typically personalize orders based on a shopper's interests and style, which the companies often learn through connected social media accounts and quizzes. This experience mirrors the personalized service customers would get inside brick-and-mortar stores from sales associates.
So interest in these services has remained high, as 10% of U.S. shoppers have enrolled in one, and another 33% would consider doing so, according to the latest UPS Pulse of the Online Shopper report.
But satisfaction in these services is dropping, as 61% of those who have signed up have since canceled. And there are four main reasons why....
Harry Brignull, a user-experience consultant in Britain who helps websites and apps develop consumer-friendly features, has a professional bone to pick with sites that seem to maneuver people into signing up for services they might not actually want.
He even has a name for the exploitative techniques: “dark patterns.” To him, these are debased versions of the typical sign-up, sharing, shopping, checkout and download processes that are standard practice online.
“It’s a term for patterns that are manipulative, that you are doing on purpose to get one over on users,” Mr. Brignull said when I recently called him.
A few years ago, Mr. Brignull started a site called darkpatterns.org to call attention to the practices....
Social strategy. Digital strategy. Mobile strategy. Content strategy. Everyday we’re being urged to create a new strategy. But with all the chatter about new channels, it seems we may have lost sight of the concept of an overall Marketing Strategy. And this gap has huge implications for marketing effectiveness. The tactical programs we create need to rest on a single foundation, otherwise we’re just sending dollars out the door. Case in point, the biannual CMO Survey just released by Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, the American Marketing Association and Deloitte revealed that “marketers are expected to nearly double their social media spending in the next five years even though most can't show the impact of social on their business.”
Ya’ll as we say here in Texas, social media, direct marketing, public relations, advertising, etc., are not strategies -- these are tactics, and each of these tactics can potentially be deployed to support any number of strategic options. Marketers, I issue you a call to arms, it’s time to get serious about marketing strategy.
Marketing strategy, not a channel or touchpoint or tactic, is how your organization will achieve its mission. It is the critical link between marketing objectives and marketing programs and tactics. Your strategy selection (and just as importantly what is not selected) provides focus and enables your organization to concentrate limited resources on building core competencies that in turn create the sustainable competitive advantage needed to pursue and secure the best revenue opportunities....
In this post, I’m going to show you 5 marketing tactics that are effective for most businesses.
The only catch is they can be difficult or scary to do.
I’m going to break them down as much as possible so that you can determine why they might scare you and what you could do to overcome that fear.
This is going to take a lot of honesty on your part, but if you’re willing to give me that, it could have a huge impact on the success of your marketing....
Marketers are constantly looking to better understand consumers and ultimately deliver an engaging experience. According to Q4 2015 research, many executives are using revenue metrics to quantify the success of customer efforts.
CMO Council looked at how marketing executives in North America quantify customer engagement success. More than a third of respondents said that revenue metrics, like customer lifetime value, revenues per customer and overall revenue increases, were the primary type of metric they used to measure consumer engagement.
Additionally, 30% of respondents said that campaign metrics, such as clicks, conversions, shares, traffic and web analytics, were the primary type of metrics they used. Fewer marketing executives said they relied on sales enablement metrics, service metrics and finance metrics to measure overall customer engagement success....
If last year taught marketers one thing, it’s that digital marketing is moving beyond cookies and browsers to deliver the seamless, personalised experiences customers have come to expect.
To help cut through the noise in 2016, Neil Joyce, MD EMEA from marketing technology gorup Signal, zooms in on four problem areas of 2015 and the solutions that will make all the difference in 2016....
While psychology and marketing are two very different fields, that doesn’t mean that learning psychology can’t help you.
In fact, I think it’s one of the most important things a marketer can study.
In this post, I’m going to show you eight different psychological principles and the ways they can affect your sales.
To take it even further, I’m going to show you how you can apply each principle to your business....
What do a newly married couple, a recent college graduate, and an expectant mom all have in common? Yes, this sounds like the beginning of a bad joke, but in actuality, each of these consumers are experiencing life event changes. And when consumers make important life decisions or are in a state of change, these milestones tend to define spending habits.
A newly married couple may be ready to furnish their new home. Or a recent college graduate may be in market for a new vehicle. Whatever the circumstance, marketers can take advantage by sending offers to coincide with these moments.
Life event marketing isn’t new, but if you aren’t implementing this strategy into your marketing plans, it is time to reconsider. Historically, businesses understood the value of marketing based on life events but the most common challenge tended to be finding the data and acting on it while it was still fresh.
After all, if you learn about a newly married couple 3 months after the fact, many of the opportunities will have long passed you by. The world is now faster and data is created and collected instantly. Just as important, data solution providers have become more sophisticated in how they source these life defining moments, allowing marketers to target consumers before the opportunity is lost.
Take a look at some of the ways marketers use life event data to target consumers based on life-changing events....
The business world is a numbers game. How much of a profit can your business turn while still paying employees and covering expenses? That’s just one example of the numbers game.
Numbers also apply to your marketing campaigns. Pay Per Call campaigns work best when you fully understand the customer journey, from the moment a thought pops into their mind through to the final purchase. Here are five stats that will help you better understand the customer journey.
Over the past 10 years, consumers have increasingly purchased brands from socially aware organizations. With this shift, a huge emphasis has been placed on company procedures and sustainable practices. “Social responsibility has migrated from soft line to hard law,” says Paula Luff, Vice President of Corporate Social Responsibility at Hess Corporation.
She is right. It’s no longer an added bonus for a business to be socially responsible; it is what’s expected from society. Companies must understand consumer demand for CSR-related information and develop an appropriateCSR strategy based on company branding and values.
The Better Business Bureau recently held their annual forum, “Transformers: How Corporate Responsibility Trends Are Changing Business Now” in downtown Manhattan. This session featured top corporate responsibility professionals sharing best practices and tactics to develop socially responsible programs based on the increased demand for this information from today’s consumers.
While the discussion was related to many elements of CSR programming and reporting, there were five key takeaways that every company should understand:...
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The "hub and spoke" model is not a new concept in marketing, either: I'm not the genius who came up with it. I'm just the dude trying to illustrate it and advocate for it using this comparison with the Disney theme parks. The idea has been around for so long because it works: it is a fantastic way to envision our overall marketing strategies and how each component works together to reinforce the central ideas of our businesses. It can help us to ensure we aren't leaving out or neglecting one or more of those components so that we always know that our marketing machine is working at its most efficient....
Marketers spend a lot of time trying to nail down abstract concepts. They're tasked with turning brainstorming sessions and comments sourced during focus groups into campaigns that sum up everything about a brand's identity in a neat, tidy, and most importantly, interesting way.
But what if a consumer could walk into a room and fully experience your brand with all their senses? Pop-up events offer just that -- the chance for consumers to get up close and personal with their favorite companies in a truly immersive setting.
In their simplest form, pop-up events are temporary retail spaces that give companies the opportunity to sell their products in an environment completely designed and controlled by them. Since they're temporary, they offer a relatively low-cost and low-commitment way for companies to take creative risks, generate buzz, and introduce their brands to new audiences.
Consumers love the lure of exclusivity, and brands love the unmatched opportunity for experimentation. To inspire your next branded experience, we've curated a list of 15 innovative and visually stunning pop-up events....
... because fake reviews are not only immoral -- but also illegal
It's never been easy to earn customer's favor, especially in terms of explicit public appraisal like an online review. As responsible business owners we all strive (or at least we should) to encourage our clientele to share their experience with our service and product. Unfortunately, waiting for a natural regular inflow of customer reviews is a "plan" that will often bring rather disappointing results.
The thing is You Need a Strategy. A strategy that is better than the one already adopted by your strong competitors. A strategy that will turn your customers into your private brand advocates. It will not take overnight to plan it and execute it but it will make a difference in the long run.
Having your own Review Gathering Strategy is important. So, if you are clueless of how your business could benefit from it, you've finally found out the reason why you suck at securing customer reviews, now you only need to work your way around it....
BRANDED CONTENT: A SHORTSIGHTED CON
But branded content isn't a long game. There are several reasons why. The first issue is intent. The essence of branded content is deliberately blurring the line between editorial content and advertising. Hiding your true colors is never a good idea. Another issue is the logic behind branded content itself. It’s misleading to use a totally different set of qualities—good stories—to sell a product that has intrinsically nothing to do with these qualities. Hiring a top filmmaker won’t improve the quality of your energy drink. Brands cannot deliver what they advertise. Shoes or coffee can never live up to their brands’ promises—they are just shoes and coffee. You could even say that the better the stories, the more dishonest the companies are being.
A camouflage strategy also complicates an already too complex world driven by hidden agendas. Even well-informed people who are able to both enjoy branded content and take it with a grain of salt will subliminally become accustomed to the new branded content standard—not to mention more vulnerable groups such as kids and adolescents. And what about the stories no one wants to hear, stories incapable of selling something? People are more likely to follow a happy, undemanding brand instead of bonding with real people and real-world problems. A brand will never ask you for help. It won’t confront you with difficulties or opposing views....
Most inbound marketers spend a lot of time creating content, and it can be a struggle to constantly come up with fresh content ideas. However, the key to creating effective inbound content is to know what you have already in your content inventory. Creating an inventory of effective content means mapping your content to the appropriate stage in The Buyer’s Journey. Once you know what content you already have, you can analyze the entire library to identify opportunities and holes, and then create a new content offer that fills out the gaps in your content library. For those of you up to the task of doing a content mapping yourself, read on! This blog post will cover a three-step process to help you create the content you need to align with The Buyer’s Journey. Let’s get started!...
Retention marketing, the mysterious form of marketing that seems to be popping into your favorite ecommerce blogs, podcasts, and even into conversations with your other merchant friends. The whisperings have started, but do you really know what retention marketing is?
What is Retention Marketing?
Retention marketing is a new form of marketing that is becoming more and more prevalent in the ecommerce world. The focus of this school of marketing is to create engaged customers that return to your store to shop again. It is a shift in focusing only on the acquisition of countless new customers, to also focusing on the profitability of those you already have!...
There was flash sales, which, with a few exceptions, are dead as a model that can sustain a huge, profitable standalone business. There was the daily-deal phase, which is also essentially dead as a standalone business, outside of Groupon. The rise and fall of LivingSocial is a good cautionary tale.
And then there is subscription commerce: Products delivered in a box to you on a regular basis. This model has experienced a bit of a renaissance in recent years, with companies like Honest Company, JustFab and Blue Apron landing valuations of $1 billion or more. But there have been flameouts, too, and I think there is the potential for many more.
It’s been fun, but the party could be over
Together, these categories have been responsible for a significant portion of breakout commerce companies during this time. The first two categories are built on the back of impulse-driven purchases, with the help of a time-sensitive offer that seems too good to...
A massive 89% of companies plan to compete primarily on the basis of the customer experience by 2016, which is a dramatic increase since 2014 (36%) and 2015 (58%).
It’s clear that companies are making customer interaction experiences a priority, and the trends we’ve identified will be critical if businesses want to stay competitive. Of note is that all these trends rely heavily on the cloud, analytics and big data. These now form the underpinnings of nearly all things customer experience-related and will continue to be key components of any successful customer engagement strategy....
Complacency is not an option in today's marketplace. Changeable buying behavior, channel and technology proliferation, data profusion—these are just a few of the realities marketers face today that necessitate transformation. Whether it's improving on marketing strategies that work or taking an entirely new approach, marketers must shake up their practices in 2016.
Knowing where to start or what's most essential to improve on can seem overwhelming with so many possibilities. So, DMN asked 15 marketing leaders to provide insight into what they think should marketers do differently in 2016 to attract, convert, and retain more customers. Here, their advice....
Marketers are ramping up their technology investments to better understand consumer needs and behaviors. Technologies to power social marketing, digital commerce and marketing analytics are the highest priorities, per July 2015 research.
Gartner surveyed more than 330 organizations in the UK and North America on their 2015 marketing budgets and 2016 expectations. Almost two-thirds of respondents said that social marketing and digital commerce were leading technology investment priorities.
Additionally, 61% of marketers said that marketing analytics were a priority and more than half of respondents were prioritizing tech for customer experience and advertising operations.
Customers’ desire for deals has become an obsession. Established companies have responded by slashing prices—and, for many, their brand value. With profit margins squeezed, and new providers popping up to offer low cost products and services, companies have reduced quality and, in some cases, even product safety to make the all-important sale. Risks to consumers, workers and the environment have become very real.
It’s time for companies to re-examine their pricing strategies. They need to understand what their customers notice, value and are willing to pay for and educate customers on the trade-offs of low-cost offerings....
Customers want to feel how a product fits in their hand as well as how it fits into their lives. In short, they want to experience a human connection. Every step from the initial introduction of a product to the walk-through of its final setup needs to be engaging and (ideally) enjoyable both in-store and online.
Within the next five years, any vendor with a large offering of premium products will have to provide this immersive experience or risk being put out of business by companies that do....
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Cold...!!
John Jantsch says a mid-year restart can revive your marketing.