Marketing needs come in all sorts of flavors:
- I'm a chiropractor working 12 hour days. When do I have time for marketing?
- I'm a CPA and I can only take on clients within an X-radius driving distance.
- I'm a licensed psychologist looking to get new customers in the [region] area.
- I'm a writer for the entertainment industry and I have a script to pitch.
- I'm a wellness health professional with a small retail storefront, what's the best way to attract new and retain old customers?
The way marketing has evolved with the digital landscape has made it easier than ever for small businesses and sole proprietorships to market their products or services to new, undefined customer segments.
Budget has always been a factor for the type(s) of marketing programs used to acquire or retain customers. The deeper the pockets, the better the program? Not necessarily so. You can always use a "no-frills", open source application to handle some of the marketing. You could use Microsoft Word to design a sales brochure in-house and either print it yourself or at a local printshop. A marketer can help you craft the right message and what to say that sells your services to a new customer.
People have to make the time to seek out marketing best practices for their industry and to utilize that knowledge that separates them from the competitors who attended the same seminar on how to market their business.
No one knows a business like the owner of a company. This is why effort is a key factor for marketing success. If you're not working with an outside marketing consultant or have one in-house, you'll be doing all the marketing yourself in addition to everything else your company does. It takes an active understanding of what marketing tools are best for your line of business. The days of flat advertising in the "yellow book" are no longer relevant.
Here's a tip on competitive intelligence:
Find a company that's similar to your own and search for them with all the methods you know. Telephone book ad, online listing, local flyer/message board ad, or where they appear in a search query on your favorite search engine. What is it about their marketing message that caught your attention? If you were their customer, would you respond?
The Pareto principle (a.k.a the 80-20 rule, Haddad's Theorem) states that 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. In the business world, this has come to mean that 80% of your revenues typically comes from 20% of your customers. Businesses have long sought after more customers who are akin to the 20% that generates the most revenues. How is it done? One method is to use customer segmentation.
Is this scenario familiar to you?
You're putting together list acquisition specs for business unit of your company (or your client's). The BU manager wants to launch a customer acquisition campaign that targets all small and medium sized businesses which have 100-500 employees, have $XX+ millions in revenues, and are geographically located in southern California. Their best repeat business customers comes from professional offices such as engineering, architectural, CPA, and law firms.
Do the specs and requirements match?
Traditional segmentation used to mean that you'd take a database (or list) of customers and carve them out into customer groups based on demographics or socio-psychographic data (e.g., Claritas). Value-based segmentation looks at groups of customers in terms of the revenue they generate and the costs of establishing and maintaining relationships with them. ROI is not just a financial statement hot item, it is a typical key performance indicator (KPI) to gauge how useful customer acquisition strategy is by comparing what measures it took to get that customer's business, how many units of X they purchased, and how many more units of X they intend to purchase.
Just who are your customers anyways?
The basics of customer segmentation answers the following parameters of any industry its applied to: Who, What, Where, Why, and How.
Who
Consumers? Businesses?
What
Your products or services.
Where
Not just for postal recipients. Did they respond to web or email advertisements? Attend a webinar? Buy directly from you or from an affiliate merchant?
Why
The reasons(s) why your products or services won the sale. Is your product or service better than that of the next best substitution product/service? Cheaper? Easier to use? A simple followup with a customer survey usually answers this and keeps the feedback door open.
How
How was it purchased? online? at a physical storefront? at the company store? at a tradeshow/seminar event?
For the first time, my other blog has received organic traffic from AOL. This is both interesting and significant because I don't advertise at all through any of AOL's networks. I don't get a whole lot of traffic, but it's steady and worthy of consideration to monetize the blog. I haven't done so in the past because it doesn't cost me anything to keep the site up.
I really don't see why people are so obsessed about keyword ad buys and bidding on short- and long-tails for that 15% or so paid search traffic that will get them placed higher up on the food chain. SEO is a concept, a lot like modern day IT practices, where the concept has to adapt so rapidly to changing technologies that you have to have employ specialists to cope with such trends to stay ahead of competitors. I don't feel that it adds any value to a company's business model and it detracts from the resources necessary to generate positive net income. I can have this opinion because of the 89 visits (83 absolute unique visitors) to the food blog in the last 30 days (May 10 - June 9), 72 visits (80% of total traffic) were Google organic.
This means that people got to my site through natural means. Either because they saw a recipe I posted to a large recipe swapping/journalling community, or they had typed in keywords that match the keyword tagging that I use on my food site. I might have mentioned in a previous post that I dislike tags; it is only because people mistag articles, blogs, and RSS feeds all the time to redirect traffic to a misrepresentation of a tag's keywords.
For all the sites that I manage (2 blogs, 1 personal site, 1 game info site), I use Google Analytics, but I also have Stat Counter and ClusterMap on the ones where I know I will have international traffic. ClusterMap provides a wonderful display of frequency by location, representing website hit population by a visitor's IP address but at a bird's eye view.
This is where my international visitors came from (June '07 - May '08):
My two largest visitor populations are located in Florida and California. I have two recipes that generate consistent monthly traffic. Can you guess which ones? I'll give you a hint. One is a Cuban dessert recipe (majority of hits) that I was inspired to make from scratch after tasting it from Portos Bakery; the other is a Chinese appetizer (2nd most frequently visited posting) that is probably one of the priciest items you could order at a restaurant that has it. Both of these are made from basic (to that food culture) ingredients.
So, why do you suppose I have so much traffic from these two US states for that one Cuban recipe?
I had originally thought about writing about nifty web tools that would be useful to small business owners, but in my research I had discovered that there were a lot of tools that people could use to make their day more efficient and a lot more that is a waste of time. I looked at these tools from two perspectives, one from my own, a marketing perspective -- how effectively the vendor generated buzz about the product and the second, from a clients' perspective in how they might perceive use of the tools and integrate it into their daily business practices.
1. LinkedIn - for business networking, pick one and stick with it. Having multiple profiles across different business networking sites just means that you have to update them all whenever a change occurs. It's better than Plaxo in maintaining current information on networked contacts. Plus, your personalize LinkedIn url is search engine indexed, so that's like free bio advertising without having to do anything other than create a basic profile. Users can easily import/export, add or remove contacts. It has a clean, easy-to-use interface that turns click-throughs into converts very quickly. It's good for creating rapport and building a reputation online through recommendations.
2. LuLu.com - a self-publishing site for hardcover or paperback books, calendars, etc. Haven't used this site yet, but they essentially remove all the barriers to entry for the publishing industry. Anyone can self-publish now, with their service offering.
3. Walk Score - originally developed for the real estate industry, this tool helps users find local-to-an-address businesses, schools, parks, libraries, etc. It's not just for people in town or the recently relocated, any traveling businessperson can find a local restaurant wherever their company sends them. The site programmatically ranks sites based on how far it is for a person to walk, point to point. All the locations feed directly from the Google Maps API, and adding a location fairly easy too. (Update: 2018-04-02, WalkScore acquired by Redfin)
4. Any blogging site like Blogger, TypePad, or WordPress - use for personal or business or both, promote products, introduce new services, keep an open window with your customers. Blogger.com allows you to manage multiple blogs under one master account. This is the "new" corporate newsletter. Many blogging sites have their own built-in RSS feeds, so your viewers can subscribe and be updated whenever you publish a new post.
5. Podcasting - MP3s for on-the-go listeners. Podcast Alley has both a genre directory and how-to resources for setting up podcasts. This is one media area where format standards have not been an issue. Podcasts can often be downloaded to one's iPod, Zune, desktop, or other MP3 player. Businesses are catching on and publishing seminars, tech conferences, and interviews using this web enhancement for distribution and delivery.
Professionals don't have a lot of excess time on their hands. This next short list are tools that didn't make the cut because they add more micromanagement steps, they're hard to use, are not the right advertising medium, or they simply don't make sense in blended media business marketing strategy.
Twitter - A dispatch service for micronets, if you really wanted people to know what you were up to 24/7. It's not just for people. The service can be hooked up to plants (water me), tamagochis (pet me), and vending machines (feed me).
Facebook - This site is slow to change to capture the benefit of having business tools available; also their site policies regarding privacy and user-generated content aren't all that great. It's very limited, and speedwise rather slow. There are plenty of competitors of similar flavor, e.g., Bebo, Hi5, Friendster, etc.
MySpace - purely for personal use unless you work in the entertainment industry; the on-site tools just aren't up to spec for professionals. Sure it's free, but in this case, having a blog or your own web domain would be better than a MySpace account.
SecondLife - a virtual "3D" world environment that allows users to create their own virtual content (clothing, furniture, cars) of various themes, buy virtual real estate (with real US dollars), offers a currency in Linden (game) money. B2C ads from real-world businesses are flat, two-dimensional billboards that are gaudy and distasteful to look at. Slow pixelated movement may give some users vertigo when traveling throughout the SecondLife world.
This was once known as customer behavioral profiling, although some I/O psychologists would probably have you believe otherwise that there are far deeper sentiments that consumers attach to the everyday and ordinary that surprisingly have monetary value. The most common example of predictive modeling in the financial services is credit scoring.
In the USA, credit scoring is a basic data analysis of a person's (or business') ability to maintain good credit standings and pay off debt. The higher the rating, the lower risk the person is to taking on more debt, or so the working practices go. Such factors like how many lines of credit a person has, what the revolving balances are, how much is paid off at the end of each billing cycle, are there any missed or late payments, current balance on your primary savings account, etc. Oddly enough, you actually have to take on more debt and faithfully pay it off to raise your credit score. The top major credit bureaus that amass credit data on individuals are Equifax (ScorePower), Experian (PLUS score), and TransUnion. If you are responding to an online ad about getting your free credit report, it's very likely that it's a consumer program managed by one of these companies.
So who uses this scoring methodology? Banks, of course, so they can lend you money for a home loan or extend credit to you for a HELOC; Utility companies (Gas, Electric, and Water services often require $25 deposits for customers who have poor credit); Apartment managers; Cable service providers; Private and public companies who look at a job applicants' credit history.. the list goes on.
Consumers are kind of screwed to begin with since each "hit" on their credit report influences their scoring as well. There isn't enough transparency with how scores are calculated to see if the report was accessed for financial reasons (buying a new house or car, applying for a platinum credit card) or for living reasons (relocation to a new city, getting gas service hooked up to a new apartment). And, there are hardly any resources for consumers to realistically "fight the system" when bad credit history is slapped onto their virtual account. I digress.
Predictive modeling helps companies identify their prime target for new or existing products and services based on current or historical purchase behavior the customer has exhibited. Looking at aggregate data (multiple consumers, multiple purchase points), you'll start to see trending in what products or website areas are more popular with consumers who bought X and are considering the purchase of Y. Amazon.com
already does this and their metrics are a value-add for everyone looking at it. The consumer is given a feed of popular products purchased by other registered site users. The company's marketing team has a lot of supporting data statistics to provide to affiliate merchants and advertisers, and guest users can see where else on the site to look for things most similar to their search.
Let's say that you already have a website because if you didn't, I'd have to write a series of blog posts explaining how to do it or refer you to one of several tutorial sites that can help you build one from scratch. At some point you'll be pitched by an SEO vendor to improve your website's rankings with various search engines. WhiteHatSEO.org offers some guidance for "ethical" SEO practices in its member codex. Here are a few of their tips.
- Don't use shadow domains.
- Don't use doorway pages.
- Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase clients site's ranking or page rank.
- Don't use hidden text or hidden links.
- Don't employ cloaking or sneaky redirects, which is used to deceive users or present different content to search engines than it display to users.
- Don't send automated queries to search engines.
- Don't load pages with irrelevant words and phrases.
- Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
This all good, but if you're a sole proprietor or a company looking at SEO for the first time, how would you know who was legit and who wasn't? And, given how diverse SEO methods are these days, which ones are the right ones to use? Is this a task that can be handled in-house or does it need to be outsourced?
Key SEO goals are intended to make sure that:
* Pages are indexed and a good site map exists
* Pages are well-structured with headers and subheaders, content-appropriate meta tags, etc.
* Descriptive page titles are used
* Keyword-rich inbound links are used
It looks a lot like a new spin on basic webmaster duties.
The easier you make it for a user who knows almost nothing about your business to find your website in the myriad of millions of sites, the better. Unlike the big yellow book from the telecom company that shows up every year to unreceptive household doorsteps, SEO allows you, the web domain owner, to be in control of advertising, product or service positioning relative to next best complements, and manage who visits and how. In that respect, SEO is more cost-effective than print advertisements. Opting for paid SEO is entirely up to your company's customer acquisition strategy.
At some point I'll follow-up with a post about black hat SEO and why ethics has nothing to do with whatever technique is used but how it is used that can get sites delisted from search engine indexes.
Remember: The only good SPAM is when its fried up with rice.
Related links:
White Hat SEO tips for bloggers
Questions to Ask a Paid Search Vendor
Questions to Ask SEO Consultants
Glossary:
White Hat
Shadow domains
Doorway pages
Link Farms
Here's a cheer for all the consumers out there. *Yay!* Finally, it seems that someone has been reading all the FTC complaints and companies will have to comply if they are to stay compliant with these new proposed operating rules with regard to how a customer unsubscribes from a list. I'm sure at least one of these scenarios has happened to you when you tried to subscribe from that bacn list.
The new rule provisions address four topics:
(1) an e-mail recipient cannot be required to pay a fee, provide information other than his or her e-mail address and opt-out preferences, or take any steps other than sending a reply e-mail message or visiting a single Internet Web page to opt out of receiving future e-mail from a sender;
(2) the definition of “sender” was modified to make it easier to determine which of multiple parties advertising in a single e-mail message is responsible for complying with the Act’s opt-out requirements;
(3) a “sender” of commercial e-mail can include an accurately-registered post office box or private mailbox established under United States Postal Service regulations to satisfy the Act’s requirement that a commercial e-mail display a “valid physical postal address”; and
(4) a definition of the term “person” was added to clarify that CAN-SPAM’s obligations are not limited to natural persons.
More details - http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2008/05/canspam.shtm
