Tag: Marketing

The 7 Question Marketing Effectiveness Quiz

On By Joe DeRosaIn MarketingLeave a comment

Marketing

Whether a start-up or mature, large or small, restaurant or manufacturer, Marketing plays a vital role in the success of every business.  And while specific tactics may look different depending on your product or service, it’s important to have a clear understanding of the return on your marketing investment.  Setting up a Marketing dashboard is critical to providing you with this insight.  To get started you will need to have a thorough understanding of your business, your customers, competition, overall marketplace economics and trends.  Getting started requires time, focus, commitment and most importantly a complete acceptance of reality.   Take the 7 Question Marketing Effectiveness Quiz below to see how informed and prepared you are to lead your team to victory.

  1. Do you have a written definition of what a lead is?  Many companies have no clear definition of a lead.  In many cases a name alone represents a lead.  Marketing may generate a name and provide it to the Sales organization to contact leading to a false sense of demand creation.  A name is NOT a lead.  However, YOU need to decide what a lead is for your company and obtain the agreement to that definition from others on the executive team most importantly the leader of the Sales team.
  2. How many channels are you working to generate leads?  Is it just a sales team?  Do you use your website?  What about strategic partnerships?  A multi-channel marketing strategy provides greater possibilities to expanding your company’s reach and distribution.  Additionally you will find that certain channels present higher close ratios or stronger average sales prices.  While managing multiple channels requires resources, and subject matter expertise, you will find this approach yields better results as opposed to a single channel approach.
  3. What is your ROL by channel?  Do you know what your return-on-leads are by channel?  For example, you have a direct sales force, a website, and a strong accountant referral channel.  Each day, week, month, you generate leads through all 3 of these channels.  What are the close ratios per channel?  What is the average selling price of your product by channel?  What channel coverts the highest rate of leads to presentations, and how many of those presentations result in a sale?  Having insight into your ROL will help you focus on making the improvements necessary to grow your business.
  4. Does your website have lead-conversion capabilities?  Is your website static or dynamic?  Is it set up using responsive web design (RWD)? Do you have a mechanism in place to track the incoming visitors to your site and follow-up with the appropriate messaging and content?
  5. How much content do you have on your site and how fresh is it?  Do you have a content management strategy?  Do you provide free content to those that visit your site?  How do you decide what content to produce?  Who writes it?  How often is it refreshed?  What do you do with the feedback you get from prospects or customers that download your content?
  6. Do you have a blog?  Many businesses feel they don’t need to blog because their product or service is in a class of its own and doesn’t require blogging.  That’s simply not true.  Every company can and should blog.  There are always topics relevant to your potential buyers for you to be blogging about.  Whether you sell party supplies, automotive repair, or chimney cleaning, your target market is looking for content.  Blogs are a great way to increase your internet search results and get you found faster.
  7. Who is responsible for Marketing?  If you can’t answer this questions with a name, find one quickly…even if it’s you.  Think of it this way…if you pay the bills for your business and keep your own books, you may not have the title of CFO but you know who’s responsible for the finances of your business.  Likewise, if you’re the one doing the marketing, you’re the one responsible for the growth of your business too.  Someone has to be accountable for Marketing otherwise it simply will not get done.

Your answers to these questions provide the insight necessary to begin to develop your marketing dashboard.  Let me know if this was helpful.

3 Quick Ways To Understand Your Buyer

On By Joe DeRosaIn MarketingLeave a comment

stopwatch

What’s better, simple or easy?  If you buy a product that is easy to use is it better than if it were simple to use?  Is there a difference?  Or does simple sound insulting.  We had to make it simple because we didn’t think you could figure it out on your own.  And so the dilemma arises for marketers around which word to use.  Select the right one and buyers respond, chose the wrong word and you can find yourself on a path to nowhere.

Understanding your buyer is the first step to learning what words or phrases will resonate the best.  Once you have the words down you can design and develop content, or campaigns, that speak the words that buyers find most engaging.  Here a few quick tips for identifying the best words or messages that will drive a positive (lead generating) response from your prospects:

  1. Survey.  Do a quick survey of your existing clients using e-mail, SurveyMonkey, or phone.  Ask them to provide you with words, or a description, of what comes to mind when they think of your company.  Leave it general.  The more parameters you place around the survey the more constrained their responses will be.  Allow them to think freely and simply react to your question.  Remember playing word association when you were a kid?  I say blue, you say sky.
  2. Key Word Test.  If you have a company blog, focus on testing key words in your titles and then throughout the blog piece.  You’ll find that the view and/or response rates will provide good insight into the words, topics, phrases that are most engaging to your audience.  Of course you should keep records to track responses when using certain words as this data will allow you to adjust future topics, titles, etc.
  3. Councils.  Both b-to-b and b-to-c companies use councils.  Customer Advisory Councils are mechanisms or tools you can use to gain quick and direct insight into your buyer.  Depending on the size of your company and the type of offering you are selling I would recommend no more than 11 Council members, always having an odd number.  Why?  The most effective and productive Councils I have been a part of, involve their members.  Council members are engaged under an NDA and have access and input into new ideas, strategies, and tactics the company is considering.  Often times a vote is involved, hence the odd number requirement.

Once you have deployed some or all of these ideas you must document and record your findings.  The data set you will create is your road map for developing your messaging.  If your customers refer to you as “easy”, you now know that there’s a good chance easy will resonate.  Likewise if the feedback you receive suggests “you are the simplest X,Y, Z to work with”, then your message should revolve around simple.

The fact is it’s up to you to find out what the right and wrong words, or phrases, are when marketing your product or service.  And the only one that truly knows what will work and what won’t is your customer…so ask them…involve them.    Once you do you will be on the road to creating a value proposition with supporting messaging that will engage the audience and generate lead response.

Buyer Personas. The Key To Sustained Growth.

On By Joe DeRosaIn Business, Marketing, SalesLeave a comment

Who

In my prior blog, 3 Philosophies of a Great Company, I wrote about the importance of knowing your customer.  We’ve all heard this expression before but many companies still struggle with the essence and simplicity of its meaning.  Knowing your customer involves having a thirst for knowledge, the ability to confront reality, and dedicated resources including time and dollars.  Those that embrace this strategic component are those that excel and succeed.

Using a buyer persona process is a great way to get to know your customer.   Companies like Sirius Decisions and HubSpot have invested countless resources in the development of creating a buyer persona process that drives new customer growth while improving the retention rate of existing customers.  When used effectively, buyer personas can become a powerful P&L management tool.  How?  Buyer Personas help to:

  1. Improve target marketing by aligning your product or service to the right audience.  If your product is geared toward SMB (Small-Medium-Business) or enterprise-size companies, your buyer personas will provide critical insights into the buyer behaviors of these specific segments.  Having a deep confidence in knowing your customer helps to avoid wasting precious time, and money, spent marketing to the wrong prospect group.
  2. Provide granular detail around how your prospective buyer thinks and gathers information.  How do they make their buying decision?  This information helps improve your ROI on marketing investments by knowing what to say, where to say it, how often to communicate your message, etc.  Keep in mind that each business could have more than one buyer persona.  A CEO, CFO, Office Manager, General Manager, all make decisions differently.  Why?  Because each have their own perspective from which they process information.  This becomes extremely important when determining where each of these individuals go to find information.  Sirius Decisions concept of “watering holes” illustrates the importance of knowing where to place your message – where your customers and prospects spend their time.
  3. Convert your value proposition into a high-impact message.  The strength of your value proposition is dependent upon how well your message aligns to the needs of your customer or prospective buyer.  You cannot succeed if your value proposition is disconnected from the buyers needs.  Therefore, having a completed buyer persona allows you to take your value proposition and craft it into a specific message that addresses the needs or pain points of that buyer.  Being able to demonstrate to the buyer your understanding of their needs, builds their confidence and, ultimately leads to their conviction to select you as their provider of service.

Think about the companies that really seem to know what the customer wants.  Companies like Apple, Toyota, Cadillac, Samsung, Proctor & Gamble, and Victoria’s Secret are all companies that have taken a buyer persona approach to growing their market share.  They invest heavily in knowing their customer.  They understand that what worked yesterday may not work today given internal or external influences to their market.  The key is change.  Seek it, drive it, embrace it, demand it.  Change is what drives innovation and innovation, if done correctly, drives growth.

3 Philosophies of a Great Company

On By Joe DeRosaIn BusinessLeave a comment

Greatness-vs.-Mediocrity

You work for a great company, right?  You know what your customers want.  Your product, your service, your company has got it.  You’re the best out there and you know it.  You’ve built things from the ground up or possibly revamped an existing infrastructure to improve your sales effectiveness and efficiency.  You installed a sales CRM tool, you’re looking at a marketing automation system, and you just bought a prospect list that will help you focus on where to fish.  You’re ready.  You’re set…and off you go!

But wait.  You’ve spent months focused only on the internal aspects of your company.  You’ve developed plans based upon a certain set of assumptions, all of which, are best guesses based upon what you know.  But herein lies the problem, it’s not what you know that presents the risk of failure…it’s what you don’t know.  And  right now you’re missing the biggest piece of your success equation – what does the customer want and how do they want it?

Most companies still operate from an inside-out viewpoint.  What do we sell?  Why are we the best?  What makes us different?  Why is our product or process better?  This is why we’re special.  This is why you’ll love our solution.  And on, and on it goes.

So what separates average companies from star performers?  While there are many things that go into creating a great company I’d offer the following three philosophies as perhaps the most critical:

  1. Outside-in view.   Placing the buyers needs first is crucial to a company’s growth and success.  This requires dedicating time and resources to studying and understanding your prospective buyer.   Sirius Decisions, an expert in the integration of sales and marketing, developed a proven process that companies can use to identify and define their various buyer personas.  These personas provide deep insight into the buyer, who they are, how they operate, where they go to gather information, and their preferred methods of absorbing information.  Without this deep understanding of your prospective buyer, your sales and marketing efforts will continue to produce disappointing results.
  2. Thirst for knowledge.  Great companies are also learning companies.  They apply different techniques to deepen their awareness and familiarity of the marketplace.  Leadership gurus like Noel Tichy have introduced various methods for gaining and using this knowledge, inside of large organizations, that can also be applied to small businesses.  Tichy’s Virtuous Teaching Cycle, introduced in his book The Leadership Cycle, provides clear steps for how to gather, assimilate, and cascade knowledge throughout an organization.  Companies that commit to this quest for knowledge are better prepared to take the lead when the opportunity arises.
  3. Commitment to talent.  It’s no wonder that the companies on the list of Fortune’s Great Places to Work have some of the strongest performance results around.  For years, we have read the studies and seen the data that prove a direct correlation between employee satisfaction and high performance.  Today, we see companies like HubSpot, Zappos, and Square2Marketing providing benefits to employees ranging from “unlimited vacation time” to “pet friendly work places”.  Companies are beginning to see the benefits of providing more control and accountability to their employees.  Brian Halligan, HubSpot’s CEO said, “we hire very smart people who focus on the growth of our company and we expect them to use common sense”, and they have done just that since this HubSpot’s unlimited vacation policy was introduced in January 2010.

8 simple steps to creating a strong brand promise

On By Joe DeRosaIn MarketingLeave a comment

In my prior blog, How Difficult is it to Change Your Brand Promise, I talked about some companies that did an excellent job of delivering on their brand promise, as well as one company in particular that didn’t deliver on their promise.  A visible disconnect between your promise and what is actually delivered, many times is the fatal flaw that brings down a company.  Even companies who are considered “Great” by today’s standards can fall prey to a faulty brand promise.  Therefore it is crucial that you ensure your promise is aligned, and able to connect to your delivery.

Developing a strong brand promise requires attention to detail.  Having a process to follow as you build or revamp your promise is necessary to maximize your success.  Here are 8 simple steps to creating or modifying a brand promise:

  1. Involve key stakeholders – having the right people involved from the onset of this journey will help with alignment at the end when implementation is critical.  People are most likely to support something they had a hand in developing.
  2. Talk to your customers.  Not just your favorites, or the customers you know will say good things.  Test the waters using VOC tactics to obtain a broad and random voice.
  3. Understand your competitors.  One of the most commonly missed steps of the process.  Why?  Because most people/companies think they already know everything about their competitors.  Wrong!
  4. Size your market opportunity to justify a change in your promise.  Think Amazon Prime.  Amazon changed how merchandise was shipped.  They strengthened their promise but not before researching and understanding the potential takers for this service.  Earlier this year the Business Insider indicated Amazon had reached 10 million Prime members.  At $79 a year that’s not a bad addition to the top line!  All from taking the time to understand the market opportunity.
  5. Develop your core brand attributes and identify statement – value proposition.  If a core attribute of your business is “easy” then you need to make sure that everything you do checks back and balances to easy.  If you market an “easy set-up” and set-up is actually time and labor intensive you’re already disconnected from your promise.
  6. Establish an Advisory Group.  Create a Council or Group of 9 to 11 members…always an odd number to ensure voting efficiency on topics and items that require decisions.  Use this group to test attributes, messaging, and most importantly experience.
  7. Talk to your employees.  Too often companies exclude the “rank and file” from this work believing it is an executive function only.  The problem with this mentality is that it’s all wrong.  I have witnessed countless times when an employee reviews branding work and raises a topic or issue that no other executive caught because the employee is closer to the action.  Involve your employees and you’ll see results in improved morale, better processes, and overall better performance.
  8. Communicate, Communicate, Communicate.  Once you’ve locked into your brand promise share it.  Tell your story.  And most importantly monitory your results.  Is our promise connecting?  How are our customers and prospects reacting?

I will post future blogs diving deeper into each of the above 8 steps.  Until then remember:  “Do what you say, and say what you do”.  That’s your promise.