Apr 23, 2014 | Branding, Marketing, Strategy
My early days of marketing were as a minor part of the team that created Meadow Lea, the brand that completely changed then dominated the margarine markets for the following 25 years. I was really just a young gopher, but the lessons that came with those successes, and the trials in between, were scorched onto my brain.
10 years later I joined a major dairy company as marketing manager, and the first thing on my list was to do to ourselves in the milk business what Meadow Lea had done to the butter market.
Shock, horror, Sacrilege!!.
It was even illegal.
Pulling the dairy fat out of milk and replacing it with vegetable fat had been enshrined as illegal in legislation, which was not about to change because some marketing bloke thought it was stupid, and could see a commercial opportunity.
Even the technical staff of the business thought I had gone stark mad, or at least drunk too much at lunch with the agency (it was the eighties after all) and refused point blank to do any development.
It took eight years, but eventually Farmers Best was launched, and whilst not becoming anything like the Meadow Lea blockbuster I had envisaged, certainly prevented anyone else having a go.
My point, not all the good ideas come from the domain you inhabit, from your people, or even your branch of technology.
Looking outside for ideas, technology, and innovation in all its forms, is not just sensible, but in these days of homogeneity and rapid dispersion of ideas and techniques, it is essential.
And the law? well, it was quietly changed as it had became obvious that consumers did not give a fig what sort of fat it was, they wanted the benefit of lower cholesterol and resulting longer life.
Apr 22, 2014 | Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales, Small business, Social Media
These days with the ubiquity of mobile and social, almost everyone is a media channel.
Recognising this simple fact changes the formula for media success. In the old days, the formula used so successfully by mass marketers was:
Money X mass media = Sales.
This used to work, no longer, now that media has fragmented into thousands of pieces, and individuals have a personal menu of media consumption based on their interests, time, and competing priorities in their lives. The formula marketers now have to use is something like:
Time X tailored and personalised media = a chance for a sale.
Much more uncertain.
In this context, spending some time considering the productivity of the investment being made in social media, and you are making them, even if it is just the employee who spends some of your time checking their facebook timeline, would be useful.
Following is a framework you might like to think about. The reality is that it is little different from a normal Marketing Audit, is it just that we are focussing on social and the content that fuels engagement.
Social media competitive analysis.
- What are we doing?
- What are direct competitors doing?
- What are the successful Social media attention grabbers doing?
- What kind of content are our competitors producing and distributing?
- How, where and when are they distributing?
- How are competitive strategies performing? A. In keeping their customers engaged, and, B. In attracting other customers, including ours
- Where do we have opportunities?
- Where are we under-performing?
- What can we do to restructure our activities within existing capabilities?
- What capabilities do we need/should be developed?
Content plan
- Determine the behavioural and “tone” of the intended audience
- Indentify what type of content should be developed
- Source and develop the content
- Create a content calendar
- Develop a set of performance metrics
- Build in the expectation of continuous A/B testing, tweaking testing, tweaking….
- Build a list of users, and track their use of and engagement with your content, being prepared to personalise
- Leverage the list, but ensure that the communication is always personal, and appropriate to the current situation of the prospect.
Repeat all above, again.
Content marketing has become all the rage, there are so called gurus out there selling new brands of snake-oil, and many are extraordinarily good at parting you with your money. However, the simple and fundamental truth of marketing remains: you must add value to your customers lives. Failure to do that results in just having a big bag of fancy hot air, not much use to anyone, no matter how fancy the plan.
Oh, and one last thing about plans that I bang on relentlessly to my clients: You get only 1 point out of 10 for the plan, the other 9 are reserved for implementation.
For a “How to” of an audit of the technical detail on your site, this post of Neil Patels is a terrific start.
I would value your feedback on how you undertake a content audit, so let me know.
Apr 17, 2014 | Change, Collaboration, Innovation, Leadership, Marketing
The most successful people I have seen over 40 years of business share one crucial characteristic.
Curiosity.
The successful are insatiably curious, it spans all aspects of their lives, not just the parts that are spent working at what pays the mortgage, but across all aspects of their private and social lives as well as their commercial ones.
Curiosity also in independent of the size of the enterprise, and often happens in clusters, as one curious person infect those around them. The Medici effect.
Supporting the curiosity are a number of specific behaviours I have observed, that to a greater of lesser extend are exhibited by all, they are in effect the enabling behaviours of their curiosity.
- They are always asking questions, some whilst knowing that the receiver has no idea of the answer, or even if one exists.
- They seek alternative views everywhere, encouraging others to play devils advocate
- They network relentlessly, seeking a diversity of views, not just on their areas of specific interest, but across the span of human activity
- They read widely, then test what they have read against their own experience
- They are curious about advances and ideas outside their area of immediate focus
- They observe, play “fly on the wall” looking for “jobs to be done” by all the products being used in the environment they are observing.
- They experiment relentlessly, often in very small ways, and explicitly set out to understand what worked, what did not, and why.
- They record everything, by making notes, using a Dictaphone, and more recently using the plethora of mobile devices to great benefit.
Perhaps you can add some more, but at least ask yourself how many of these you display, and are they displayed by those around you.
Apr 14, 2014 | Branding, Customers, Marketing, retail, Sales
Walking into chain retailers these days you are inevitably confronted by displays of product, usually at a discount.
Most people seem to think that it is the retailer doing the promotion as a means to attract added sales, which is true, but the reality is that the promotion is funded by the suppliers, and it is a competition for the retail space that is generally won by those suppliers with the deepest pockets, and best information.
Retailers are in two businesses, selling stuff to consumers, and renting retail space to suppliers. Chain retailers business model relies on a formula that accommodates volume, revenue, and total margin over the space allocated. This can get very complicated, as the number of variables is enormous.
For a supplier to a chain retailer, the challenge is to balance the complex and competing demands of enterprise profitability and investment in the future against the need to meet retailer margin demands necessary to retain access to the consumer via the distribution controlled by the retailer.
Of real significance is the difference between sales that would have been made irrespective of promotional activity the “base sales rate” and sales made in a period as a result of promotional activity, “incremental sales”.
The need to fund retailer margin via promotional allowances is universal, but the sales that occur as a result of the activity may not be there when there is no activity, and are therefore” rented” sales. The effectiveness of the activity has many measures, but to the supplier two measures only are of any real use.
- The real cost of the promotional activity including all discounts on deal volumes and associated co-operative advertising.
- The number of consumers who convert over time from being a rented consumer to one who becomes a part of the base sales volume.
If you are not making these calculations, and adjusting the mix of your expenditure programs accordingly, and are prepared to make some very tough choices on the basis of the information gathered, chances are you are going broke being successful, a very common complaint in the Australian FMCG market.
Apr 8, 2014 | Leadership, Marketing, Strategy
Often I find myself engaged in conversations with those running small businesses who believe they have discovered the next big thing, the idea that will change the world, or at least their business.
It can be as simple as a tweak to an existing product that enables it to be used in an adjacent market, to a patented idea that they believe will change the world, the 3 questions I always ask remain the same:
- To whom will it add value?
- How will it add value?
- By what means can you unlock that value and make a return as a result?
Whilst answering those questions can be time consuming, and sometimes confronting, and is often an evolutionary process, they constitute the core of strategy development,
So often I see a solution in search of a problem posing as strategy that it makes me shake my head in frustration, when a bit of discipline in the way tasks are identified and managed can go such a long way. These are 11 tasks you can set yourself to help the process of answering the “big three” along.
Apr 4, 2014 | Communication, Marketing, Social Media
A friend of mine has a very successful small business selling high value services to a small group of clients from diverse backgrounds. He does not want to be the next IPO, or employ hundreds, or even tens of people, just a couple to keep the business growing manageably, by delivering a superior and personal service to his clients, and a resulting comfortable living for him and his family.
Sensible aspirations.
However, the market he is in is very competitive, highly regulated, and subject to forces outside his control, so how does he grow in these circumstances?.
It is a classic case of needing a pipeline of prospects that convert to clients over time as a purchase looms, but having a limited key resource, his time, prospects need to be pre-qualified in some way, before they consume much of his time.
There is lots of advice around, free on the web and from all sorts of program managers and consultants that can cost a lot of money. By its nature, this generic advice can be conflicting, confusing, and presenting management challenges beyond the scope of capability for SME’s, so the opportunities are missed.
The standard advice generally includes a menu of :
Get a website
Get onto social media
Use mobile
Use SEO
Purchase ads on various Social media platforms
Employ analytics to A/B test various approaches.
Actively manage your landing page
There is a lot more, but those are the common bits in the mix, and as far as it goes, is reasonably on the money, but the generic advice pays no account of the specific circumstances of any business, and the commercial and private objectives of those who own it.
A pretty common failing of generic advice.
Over a coffee, I suggested a simple, and easily managed program which he is implementing, with early success:
- He got himself a website, but rather than paying a someone he does not know a motza to do it, he used one of the free site builders, Squarespace, and had a very creditable site up in about 8 hours. He could have used weebly which is my preference, and the one I use and supply to my clients, but the point is that it is relatively easy for anyone with some level of digital awareness and familiarity to do themselves at minimal cost.
- Continue the efforts to build lasting relationships with existing customers. The program he has used to date is fairly simple, but innovative in his market. To date this appears to have been successful, so he needs to build on it.
- Given his existing customers are all very happy with the service provided, he needs to be marketing to them as a source of referrals, rather than going out onto various digital platforms trying to conjure up leads. Any one referral from a current satisfied client of somebody who could use his services, is worth a thousand hits on a social media platform.” Market to current clients for leads” was my advice to him. The service he has given to existing clients implicitly enables him to ask them, and perhaps reward them in some way for leads they qualify as people he should be talking to.
- Write a list of the 20 most asked questions ,and then answer them, in detail, from several perspectives, in blog posts over a period of a couple of months. Do a series that engages, perhaps “Most often asked question by those buying……” Followed by the “Second most asked question…… And so on, with links back to previous questions. This is a technique made prominent by Marcus Sheridan and it works. As an aside, I am a little annoyed with Marcus, as he has very successfully put a strategy that has worked for me in the past out into the public domain, and made a business of it, although answering client questions seems a pretty obvious strategy to me.
- Ensure there is a data capture capability enabled. This can be a simple as a “cut & paste” of information from a contact form to highly sophisticated and automated CRM systems. At a simple level, there are free and low cost tools like Mailchimp and Aweber that can work well as email marketing platforms.
- Measure and refine his efforts using the free analytics, and tools from Google. The range of tools Google offers to assist is amazing, but so long as you recognise that they are serving their best interests by maximising your effectiveness, and they track and use everything you do, you can become very effective relatively easily. This can become data intensive, but at a simple level there is vital and actionable information available. If you track nothing else, track the level and type of “conversions” of visitors, and returning visitors to your various platforms, and build on them. A conversion is simply a step taken along a path you have laid out that can lead to a transaction.
- Recognise that digital effectiveness is these days, is just a cost of doing business. The challenge is to mould the myriad of possibilities and opportunities available to your own objectives, circumstances, capabilities, and capacity to manage change, avoiding the snake-oil on the way through. Sounds a bit like any other management task to me.
It took eight years, but eventually Farmers Best was launched, and whilst not becoming anything like the Meadow Lea blockbuster I had envisaged, certainly prevented anyone else having a go.
