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A few years ago, two marketing professors conducted a study involving jams. It’s since become a landmark. The researchers set up a tasting booth in a supermarket and offered jams to customers. On one Saturday, they offered 24 flavors. On the next Saturday, they offered 6 flavors.
What happened? The results are nuanced, so pay attention.
When 24 jams were available, 60% of the customers stopped for a taste. When 6 jams were available, 40% of the customers stopped for a taste. So it’s better to offer more options, right?
Not really. Of the 60% who tasted one of 24 jams, 3% made a purchase; of the 40% who tasted one of 6 jams, 30% made a purchase. Here’s the key takeaway: 31 people purchased jams when they had 6 options, and 4 people purchased jams when they had 24 options. That’s nearly an 8X difference.
In other words, when you offer more products for sale, more people will visit your store, but fewer people will make a purchase. And as great as it is to get lots of visitors, your sales are what matters.The researchers suggest that when there are too many options, customers get into a state of “choice overload,” or “analysis paralysis.” Sometimes when choices are too great, people choose nothing at all....
Building marketing personas can help improve the way you solve problems for your customers. Here is a blueprint and beginner's guide to getting started.
I am writing this post to Dan, Mary, Steven, and Rachel—one of whom is likely you.
You see, Dan, Mary, Steven, and Rachel are personas, created with a combination of raw data and educated guesses, representing slices of this blog’s readership. Dan could be you, and Mary could be your coworker. What these sketches provide is a touchstone forcreating content: When I can put a name and a background to the people reading what I write, I can hopefully meet their needs even better.
The same holds for marketing and sales. Building personas for your core audience can help improve the way you solve problems for your customers. The process of creating personas is well worth the time. Here is a blueprint and beginner’s guide to getting started...
People are moving to mobile in droves, but market researchers haven't followed. GetFeedback and SurveyMonkey want to change that.
The days of lengthy online surveys are numbered, and the startup GetFeedback and online survey leader SurveyMonkey are both poised to benefit.
Countless millions of dollars are spent validating the mobile revolution with adoption statistics and usage metrics. Ironically, the field of market research itself appears to have overlooked this shift, relying on outdated technology and techniques that are increasingly at odds with mobile attention spans.
According to Forrester Research, just 17% of researchers had taken their survey processes mobile as of December 2012. The most obvious side effect is falling response rates. But businesses also risk alienating existing or prospective customers by seeming out-of-step with their communications preferences. There's a lot of money at stake: A staggering $18.9 billion on a global basis is spent annually on telephone polls, online surveys, questionnaires, and other market research, says the Council of American Survey Research Organizations. Roughly $2 billion is spent on online surveys in the United States alone, according to the market research firm IBISWorld....
Working on a kick-butt marketing plan? Be sure you don't forget these five critical elements. Otherwise, your efforts might fall flat!
What’s that you say? You don’t have a marketing plan? Oh, I see. It’s worse than that. You’re not even sure what a marketing plan is, much less how to implement one.
Well, that’s okay. We can help you with that. Before we get started, you need to answer a couple questions.
Who is your target audience? How do they receive information?
Once you have these answers, you’re ready to start building your marketing plan. Remember as you move through the different components that flexibility is good. Making some changes to fit your particular products, corporate culture, and target audience is welcome.
Now, what the heck is a marketing plan? It starts like this...
Learn how understanding psychology of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs can help you in marketing on social media. When you’re running marketing campaigns on social media platforms or trying to better understand the consumer decision making process, knowing Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and a little bit of psychology definitely helps you get into the minds of your customers. Don’t forget that to learn is to earn!
Here is a great infographic depicting Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and social media by Lombok Design and SMTT:
Holiday sales metrics are in for Cyber Monday, and social media made a poor showing. Is social just not as important as ecommerce businesses think, or is something else keeping social from getting the credit it deserves?For a few years now, social media has been the darling of ecommerce. Experts for inbound marketing suggest a well-rounded marketing plan that doesn’t include social is bound to fail. Reports regularly share how Pinterest and Facebook convert visitors to customers, or how Twitter builds a brand audience. So, what does it mean when the latest reports say social had no bearing on holiday sales?...
Are you looking for rich and insightful blog posts to boost your social media marketing?
We asked our writers to share their favorite social media blog posts.
What follows is a gold mine of content you can apply to your marketing in 2014...
It was management consultant, Peter Drucker, who advised the best way to predict the future was to create it. Creating new things being difficult, the next best way is to have access to validated and prediCctive loyalty and emotional engagement metrics to help point the way.
Happily, we do. And after examining over 100,000 consumer assessments, we’ve identified 14 critical trends to help marketers create their own, successful futures next year..
Marketing strategy is sorting out who your audience actually is, and then finding out what has meaning for them. What do they care about, and how does this relate to your offer? What message can you deliver that is both true and meets your consumer squarely at the level of their needs? Marketing strategy is the process of uncovering messages that can be heard. Marketing strategy allows you to answer the crucial question your offer must address: “Why should I care?” To paraphrase Peter Drucker: Consumers do not buy what you sell. They buy what has value to them.
Have you ever wondered what goes into choosing the perfect domain name for your website? We've compiled a list of some tips to help.
Domains are the real estate of the internet. A great domain name can be the foundation for an empire. A bad one can be exceptionally forgettable. There are a variety of factors that go into choosing the perfect domain name for your website, but at the end of the day it comes down to one thing: you have an important decision to make.
Choosing your domain comes down to the message you want to present to your visitors. What do you want people to think when they see your domain? What is the impression you want them to walk away with? The words you choose will help create the message you are going after....
To be truly successful in marketing and advertising, we need to understand human motivation and behaviour at a deep level so that we are more able to influence it. Yet the marketing industry has clung to the same frameworks for modelling the ways that people evaluate information and make decisions for decades.
That picture is changing quickly as thinking from the worlds of economics and psychology creep into marketing. A discipline called behavioural economics, in particular, is challenging many of our old assumptions and helping us to think about how our customers behave in totally new ways...
Strategic marketing: When should you offer a product or service discount?Some of you will say never to discount price. Getting your pricing right is an important element of marketing. And to get the extra sales boost you may want to consider price promotions. One of these is offer a price discount that can be an effective tactic to get more customers. This article is not about reducing your price to get a one off sales and hope extra business will someday follow. It is about using discounting in a smart and simple way to get your business new customers and increased sales in short term....
These small businesses use ingenuity, creativity and no budget to get results. They don't have an "ad agency" or even an "ad budget" — but they do the best with what they got....
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A central problem for marketers is how to convince consumers of their products’ value. How long will customers listen to all the benefits of starting their day with Cheerios before they dismiss everything as manipulative bunk?
According to the 2 professors, Suzanne Shu of UCLA and Kurt Carlson of Georgetown, the answer is the rule of 3: Making up to 3 claims about a product’s value is effective advertising -- any more than that, and people’s cynical defenses kick in....
Native advertising, when used intelligently, can work incredibly well -- which is exactly why it's so controversial.
This is the first post in a series on native advertising. An introduction, if you will.
One that states from the start that there is controversy.
Why approach a series this way?
Simple: Native advertising is probably one of the least-known scalding-hot topics in the business world.
In fact, few business people can even define native advertising. And those outside of it are clueless it even exists (we’ve got the data to prove this — will share later).Yet media research group BIA/Kelsey predicts that by 2017, brands will spend $4.57 billion on social native ads....
Read what top marketing analysts and experts have to say about the future of marketing.
...With attention spans dwindling and Polar Vortex induced cabin fever setting in, we tried to brainstorm a way that we could make use of the projections and thought leadership of pioneers in our field without an encyclopedia full of content.
Hence, the birth of Marketing Mad Libs: Expert Edition, in which we gave some of our favorite analysts, authors, and all-around awesome marketers the task of finishing a sentence with a prediction or insight. (The shorter and pithier, the better.) Take a look....
The ever-evolving media landscape presents significant challenges to marketers.
... To find out how marketers are adapting to deal with the change in the way that people engage with media channels, Econsultancy and Mediaocean have today published a new report entitled Managing Media Convergence. The report is based on a survey of 124 agencies as well as in-depth interviews with 18 executives from agencies and brands, all with significant interest and experience in managing media.
It covers how to define the convergent environment, identifies pain points in managing new workflows and examines how the measurement of media is evolving as a result....
OK, I admit that the Journeys v Touchpoints doesn't have the same ring as Great Taste v Less Filling. But if you're running a business, it's a lot more important. We talk a lot about the "customer decision journey." But the "journey" concept can be applied much more broadly.
What do I mean by that? It's the series of interactions a customer has with the brand to get something done. And in a multi-channel, increasingly mobile world, those journeys have more interactions embedded within them. Getting the smoothness across those interactions -- continuity of information about a customer, consistency of content -- is critical. Even more so might be eliminating the need for a touchpoint in the first place during the journey (why do I need to sign something in person?). When it comes to keeping your customers satisfied, getting those journeys right is much more important than getting each individual interaction right.
What's really fascinating though is that when we look across industries, getting journeys right brings about an important set of wins ("stacked wins" as my colleague, Dorian Stone says.)...
It used to be a difficult task to find examples of B2B companies achieving success in social, however as the channel has matured more businesses have been able to drive awareness and sales using various social platforms.
A survey published this time last year found that a majority of businesses (64%) were using social media as a marketing tool, so it’s likely that this number has increased today.
That research found that the most popular reasons for using social were for brand awareness (83%), encouraging social sharing (56%) and gaining trust and followers (55%).I’ve previously highlighted five B2B companies that were achieving success in social marketing, but here are five new case studies to give further insight into social platforms for B2B marketing...
See what lies ahead for content marketing in 2014.... With so many companies now giving their marketers license to invest in content marketing, part of what a marketer needs to excel at is showing the ROI from that initial investment. How is it helping your business achieve their goals? If you're going to aim for scale in 2014, you need to show that what you're doing now is working, and will continue to work and warrant equal or more investment....
Want to make 2014 a great year for your brand and business? Here are the 10 trends we at Jack Morton believe will make a difference for brands in the year to come.
Interactive marketing has proven itself to be one of the most disruptive and powerful marketing approaches of the past few decades, managing to turn centuries-old and established media and agency models completely upside down, and showing an ability to grow digital properties into some of the largest businesses in the globe. Currently, interactive marketing makes up for 15% of all advertising spending in the world....
While most of the impact of technology on marketing has been tactical so far, over the next decade or so there will be a major strategic transformation.
Today, however, digital technology has enabled us to retarget consumers when they respond to a message and that has changed marketing forever. In effect, we must make the shift from grabbing attention to holding attention.
That means that brands will have to learn to be more like publishers and develop content skills. It also means that marketers will have to create a genuine value exchange rather than just coming up with catchy ad slogans and price promotions. Like it or not, we’ve entered a post-promotional paradigm....
So much is made of the whole online marketing thing these days that it’s hard for small business owners, like you, to find useful information that pertains to offline marketing, which is marketing performed strictly in the offline world.
The idea of offline marketing can definitely be a misnomer in this day and age, due to the fact that social media and other web-based marketing channels are always beneficial to offline business. But that doesn’t mean you have to go that route every time you’re developing a marketing plan for your latest customer-acquisition project.
You can, in fact, cross-promote your online and offline marketing.
The five following offline marketing channels can pertain to both new and established businesses. Granted, there’s nothing particularly ground-breaking, but perhaps you’ll see something that has been long forgotten and consider adding it to your bag of tricks once again....
The 70:20:10 ruleTo borrow another popular concept, I would suggest thinking 70:20:10 makes sense. 70% of your marketing is the planned ‘marketing as usual’ activity. 20% of your marketing should be programmatic.I described this in more depth in a previous article but it is marketing that is more rules-driven and automated in response to various stimuli; so it is not planned, but it is responsive, and, typically, machine-driven and executed.10% of your marketing is purely responsive Oreo-style. For this you typically need people resource available....
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![Marketing Mad Libs: Expert Edition [SlideShare] | Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight | Scoop.it](https://img.scoop.it/0vqpmTA5XoTdEd0LoRv-Ajl72eJkfbmt4t8yenImKBVvK0kTmF0xjctABnaLJIm9)
Valuable research into retail. Recommended reading 9/10