Oct 13, 2014 | Branding, Marketing, Sales, Small business, Social Media
When looked at from the “helicopter perspective ” there seems to be three points of threshold competitive activity that you simply have to get right, or all else is irrelevant. Having a few meaningful measures at those three points is essential to understanding the effectiveness of a marketing investment, and testing ways to improve.
- Share of attention of your target market
- Share of engagement from your target market
- Share of wallet from your target market.
Traffic to a site is a useful measure, but really is not all that important, it is what happens then that is important. Just counting traffic is like counting people walking past a pet shop, they may even see the dog in the window, but that does not mean they are in any way likely to buy one. Your conversion rate to sale of this casual traffic would be miniscule. The challenge is to get the attention of those who for some reason are in thinking about how nice it would be to have a dog. When those people walk past, and see your doggies, you have a chance of getting their attention, which is why there are always some cute pups in the window, to grab the attention.
Having seen your doggies, those who walk into the shop for a closer look have given you a share of their engagement, you have the opportunity to talk to them, find out what sort of dog they may like, a pet for the kids, companion for an older relative, or something to keep the bikies away. Whatever it is, you need to know in order to be able to make an offer that meets their needs. They may also be looking elsewhere, so the share of engagement is important, are they serious buyers, or just filling in 5 minutes to look at some cute pups?
To get a share of their wallet, you need to be able to make an offer that persuades them to buy from you. There are many alternatives to a pet shop, breeders can deliver a very specific dog that will fill a purpose, with all the vetinary stuff done, or you can go to the kid down the road whose dog is just about to have a litter after a night of indiscriminate passion with some unknown stray, and comes with all the risks of the unknown. Alternatively, you could just go to the pound and find something that takes your fancy and needs a home. Share of wallet can also include the share of the ongoing costs of having the dog, food, accessories medicines, vet services, even in time a replacement. Measuring each of these situations delivers knowledge you can use not just for this sale, but on an ongoing basis.
Back to our e-marketing challenges from the doggie shop. Following are some simple metrics that you could consider.
Share of attention.
- Social shares, from any social platform
- Bounce rate and visit time. These two go together, how long the landing page hold attention, and what did the visitor do then, leave, or go to another page, followed by another…
- Pages per visit. Clearly if just one page was visited, there is less attention given than if the visitor had gone to 3 or 4.
Share of engagement
- Click through rates for your call to action tags.
- Comments made, on the blog, and/or in conjunction with the social shares. It is easy for someone to click the twitter share button on a website, but it takes a greater level of engagement to click the button, then take the time to add an endorsing comment, and this social proof can be marketing gold.
- Downloads of information from your site
- Questions that come back seeking information and clarification
Share of wallet.
SOW is one of the most powerful measures on the success of revenue generation efforts, and almost always requires qualitative input. How you define the wallet shapes the numbers that will be generated. Our pet shop owner may choose to define his wallet simply as the share of sales of pets he generates, in his area, or he may include the accessories and food after the initial sale, and if he has a vetinary surgery service as part of the enterprise, he may or may not include that, depending on what is important to his understanding of the returns coming from the investments made.
- revenue per customer, or “basket” size
- Purchase “basket” contents,
- Customer return visits that deliver a transaction
E-marketing is the shiny new thing, different and potentially seductive, but in the end it is only the set of tools that is new, the principals of marketing still apply, the toolbox is just bigger and more complex. When you need help sorting the complexity, the experience of the StrategyAudit team is at your disposal.
Oct 7, 2014 | Communication, Marketing, Small business
Over the weekend, my sister, a writer, called me a “blogging machine”, recognising the challenge of producing 3 or 4 worthwhile posts a week. Caught me a bit by surprise, because I just blog, write about what seems important to me, and that I think will be of interest to those that pay me the huge compliment of following and commenting.
However, her comment got me thinking, and I recall the mindset when I wrote the first post, back in March 2009, as reflected in the 1,000th post in August 2013. While I wondered how this would evolve, I tackled in that first stumbling post a thread that has been consistent throughout, the nature of the major challenges facing SME’s, as they set out to compete in an increasingly complicated world.
My sisters comment also follows a casual conversation at a recent SME networking meeting, where I had previously advised the bloke to whom I was speaking to add a blog to his website as a part of a strategy to establish his credibility amongst those who had found their way to the site. He was doubting the value of the advice, lamenting that there had been no result from the major effort he had made to blog.
More from curiosity that anything else, I checked his site and realised why there has been no impact, no business flowing .
3 posts only.
Pretty good posts, well thought out and presented well, but three? What did he really expect?
Reflecting on my experience with this arm of social marketing, here are the things my networking friend has to address, and the simple guidelines you should all at least acknowledge:
- Be prepared for the long haul, there is unlikely to be any impact quickly. I am reminded of a conversation I had years ago as I paid my way through university by slaving on building sites. An old brickie, someone who these days would probably be a professor of philosophy, described the difference between builders for whom he subcontracted as: “some can just see plan, and with luck follow it, the good ones understand the plan, can clearly imagine the completed building, and act with the completed building in mind”.
- Have a “tone” that is consistent, and reflects the person you are. Being yourself makes it much easier to be consistent at least.
- Have a clear purpose for the blog. This pretty much follows for any commercial activity, but is really important here. If you cannot meet the discipline of twitter, 140 characters, in articulating your purpose, you need to do more on distilling your thoughts. It is way harder than it appears, and I always refer people back to Simon Sinek’s wonderful TED talk for inspiration.
- Knowledge is attractive. The more you know about a topic, the better you will be able to write about it, and be relevant, entertaining, and add some value to readers. Fail here by being unoriginal, unclear, unattractive or unfocused, and the bounce rate on your site will be high, a factor Googles algorithms now take into account and punish.
- Follow your passion. Passion is to my mind the real competitive discriminator in this world of commodities, but is widely misused to the point of becoming a cliche. However, life without passion is pretty boring, and the last thing you want your blog to be is boring.
Call me if I can help get the ducks in line.
Oct 6, 2014 | Communication, Governance, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy
Seeking a simple metaphor to explain how SEO fits into a digital strategy to a “digitally challenged” client running a successful small business, I struck upon the map of the London Underground.
If you look at the map, there are stations on single lines, stations with several lines running through, and stations with multiple intersections, some to other networks outside the underground, busses and British rail.
At any time, there are people in various stages of a journey. Some are waiting on a platform, some travelling towards the underground entry and exit points, and some on a train going to some predetermined end point of their journey.
Imagine now that every person had a descriptive tag attached, which was stored waiting for a request about that person, that could be read, and communicated to anyone asking.
SEO calls this process of asking for a location and description as “Crawling” and “Indexing”.
Each piece of information, if it has been appropriately tagged, or described by the person putting it onto a site, is “indexed” by the search engines, and when someone types a search request into a box, the engine crawls through the indexed material and returns a link to the location and description of the item to the searcher.
Back too the metaphor.
Each person with the tag on the underground, can be found, and returns the requested information to the enquirer. Location, what they are wearing, who they are, what they look like, with links to others who may be with them, and where they are going.
There are just two dimensions to having an effective SEO strategy.
- Get the technical stuff right, and this can be really complicated, and to the novice, even many professionals, is challenging. Find someone you trust to get it done for you.
- Have a strategy and action plan, without which you will be lost irrespective of the quality of the SEO.
Back to the underground metaphor. You never (perhaps rarely, a late night can make a difference) climb onto an underground train without knowing where you are going, and what the best route is under the circumstances that prevail.
Why should it be any different for an SEO strategy?
Sep 30, 2014 | Communication, Marketing
www.hughmcleod.com
Many put forward the notion of “Engagement” as the objective of Social Media and web based activity, it crops up with the regularity of a hot dog seller at a big football game.
However, I have yet to see a definition of “engagement” that I am comfortable with. Sticking it in Google is no help, 374 million responses, most, probably predictably, about the lead in to marriage from rings to places to blow the house deposit on a reception.
Wether you are setting out to “engage” a potential customer on social media, have employees contribute some of their ideas and brainpower to the enterprise, or just having a casual conversation with someone, if “engagement” is what you are seeking, it will only evolve after one or more of several other things are in line:
- What you have to say is interesting to the other party.
- The other party or audience has a need or desire for information you can deliver
- There is something your audience wants from you
- There is a specific problem you can solve.
- There is the opportunity and desire for a two way flow of conversation
- You have met “the one”. This has nothing to do with this blog and its contents, but good luck to you.
“Engagement” has many meanings, and I suspect most would define it in the context of what they are seeking. For me, as a marketing professional, it means there is mutual value in some activity, from a simple conversation, to someone reading and commenting on this blog, to a collaborative effort with a colleague, to adding value to one of my clients. Whatever “engagement” means you, it is certain that there is a lot of other stuff to do first to build the foundations that make the interaction worthwhile, and offer the chance of becoming an “engagement”.
Engagement is an outcome, not a strategy, and successful strategies are always about doing something that matters, that makes a difference.
Sep 29, 2014 | Branding, Customers, Marketing, Small business
Share of wallet, share of attention
Share of Wallet is, very simply, your share of an existing customers total purchases in a domain you service. You can fiddle at the edges in the way you define the domain, but it remains that better servicing an existing customer to get a greater share of their wallet is almost always more productive than going hunting for a new customer.
Share of attention as a measure can be as simple or complicated as you like. Definitions vary widely, but usually include measures of aided and unaided brand awareness, and the awareness of a specific marketing activity amongst the target market of that activity.
Share of wallet is the measure to be applied at the bottom of the sales funnel, share of attention the measure at the top. It is unlikely that a marketer will ever get to have a share of wallet until there has been a share of attention established.
Share of wallet always has been, and still is, a simple measure of great power. Share of attention used to be pretty simple when the communication mediums were limited to the few TV and radio stations, magazines and newspapers people consumed, but has become remarkably more complicated since the fragmentation of media.
Attention is the thing that those with whom we wish to communicate allow us to have from them, it is a gift of their time and intellect, and we so often undervalue or even abuse it.
We have 8 hours sleeping, 8 hours working, that leaves 8 discretionary hours to be spent, broken up into social time family time, entertainment, and all the other things we do with our lives.
Gaining peoples attention amongst all the competition, the first and necessary task in a marketing program is a huge task, but the benefit delivered by digital media is the huge palette we now have where creativity, innovation and an intimate understanding of the market and customers inhabiting the market pays dividends.
Sep 25, 2014 | Management, Marketing, Social Media
There are lots of so called “measures” that get touted as being able to deliver useful insights into the effectiveness and productivity of investments made in Social Media. Many tell you nothing of value, and are often misleading, but because they are easy and obvious, are often the ones used. Measures such as friends, followers, number of posts, even quasi mathematical ones that measure nonsense like the ratio of followers to followed are touted, but really tell you nothing of value, nothing that assists the process of building the returns from your investments.
However, there are three measures that will give a very good view of the productivity of your investments, the first two are easy, the third takes more work and understanding, but nevertheless can be accessible to even a small business without great technical and financial depth.
- Conversion rate. Not necessarily to a sale, but to something that you are asking visitors to do. Download a whitepaper, enter a contest, comment, offer a suggestion, etc. This requires the receiver of the message to actively participate, and take an action, to be converted in some way. The word “engagement” is often used in this context, and is a reasonable simile, but can mean different things to different people, so is more “fluffy”
- Amplification rate. This is just the number of shares, retweets, reposts, and embeds, and backlinks that an individual piece of content generates, and the rates overall of what you achieve. If your first level contacts amplify for you, over time, their contacts become yours, and evolve into your sales funnel.
- Financial value. This is obviously the holy grail, and there is no way I know to measure easily, but it is the reason most of us invest out time and resources in Social Media. Setting out to create a measure requires that you build a picture of your sales funnel, and have sufficient sensitivity in your data to be able to follow a prospect from the lead generation stage through to a transaction. This can be done with the integration of CRM and web analytic tools, but is generally pretty challenging for small businesses. However, if you know your average sales cycle times, sales numbers, and track the investments made in Social Media, you can get a reasonable picture using excel.
Being without a simple, and consistent way of measuring the impact of your investments when the tools are available and easily deployed should never be tolerated. The days of “black box” marketing are well and truly over.
