Tag Archives: Marketing and Advertising

July 15, 2015 · 10:50 am

Getting Found

Perhaps the biggest challenge in business is “discoverability.”  That’s just a fancy term for your business getting found.  If you’re a bricks and mortar operation, it might mean an eye-catching sign.  If you’re a digital business or a business that has a digital presence (are there any businesses that don’t?), it means doing the work needed so that when customers are using the web they can find your site.

That concern is something I get asked about by clients all the time.  They hear about Search Engine Optimization but don’t understand what it is or how to do it.  I’ll preface this by saying I don’t profess to be an SEO expert.  I can, however, get clients through the rudiments, take care of the technical basics, and, if our work shows results, bring in a resource to do the advanced stuff.  So with that in mind, let’s spend a minute on how your business can be more discoverable.

You might find this odd, but the answer is simpler now than it was a few years ago.  Many of the technical parts of SEO are no longer as important as they once were.  What’s important is a recurring theme here in the screed: focus on your customers or prospects.  Making your site content useful to a shopper will have the effect, in most cases, of being great SEO.  What do I mean?

People search either to buy something, to find a place and get there, or to find information.  The latter is why you do informational content (like this blog), the former are product pages, etc.  Making every page of your site clear with respect to what question you’re answering or problem you’re solving with probably mean you’re using the words people (not robots) use to find answers.  That’s good SEO because it is focused on user experience.

Yes, there are a couple of technical things you should do (good title tags is the main one) and you need to hope that people build links to your content (they will if it’s great!).  But the most important thing you can do in order to enhance discoverability is to be useful and clear.  For those of you who are hearing from SEO experts that want to charge you a fortune, you’re welcome (mail me – I’ll tell you where to send the check).  For all of you, I hope that helped.  Did it?

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July 7, 2015 · 9:18 am

Not Actionable Or Not Able?

Marketing Executives Network Group

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

We discuss the need to measure the results of what you’re doing here on the screed fairly often.  As you’ve probably figured out by now, I’m a big believer in applying data to decision-making, especially after decisions are taken and tactics are deployed.  As it turns out, my views about that part are fairly typical within the marketing community.

In a survey of marketing executives, The Conference Board and the Marketing Executives Networking Group found 75% of the respondents in agreement with the statement that “A primary responsibility of marketing professionals is to generate data-driven insights about prospects and customers, and then create a brand or sales story based on those insights.”   I especially like that language because it is inherently customer focused.

Two other findings, however, disturbed me quite a bit.  Only 39% agreed with the statement that “Most information available from monitoring social media is not actionable” 56% agreed that “Most of the members of my marketing team are not as skilled in the use of digital marketing as they need to be.”   Those two statements are probably related and let’s think about why.

First, if you’re having trouble taking action on your social analytics, maybe you’re measuring the wrong thing.  I totally agree that “likes” is a useless number, but using conversion pixels to measure assisted conversions from social media can provide a wealth of information about how your customers come to buy.  Maybe you’re not doing sentiment analysis (that’s not baked into the standard analytics packages but readily available). You should be. Putting aside sentiment, we can focus on trending topics among your user base as well as feedback on your brands and those of your competitor.  Those are all highly actionable data points.

With respect to the second point.  If your team is lacking in some critical skill, whether it’s digital marketing, writing, or sandbox, your job as a leader is to help them improve that skill until it meets the organization’s needs.  If not getting them training is a “resource issue”, think about what it’s costing you in missed opportunities.  Flip that to the positive:  if you’re getting good results now, how much better would they be if you could agree with the statement on your team’s abilities?  Maybe that’s why the data doesn’t seem to be actionable.  Is it “not actionable” or are you just not able?

If the results of the survey resonate with you, get some help to improve your results.  I’d love to be that help but there are lots of qualified people who understand how to help your company live up to the promise that digital holds. I don’t think that dismissing it as “not actionable” is the answer.  Do you?

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July 3, 2015 · 9:09 am

Fake

Small tomatoes in Korea

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This Foodie Friday Fourth of July, let’s get real about fakes.  I was shopping for tomatoes the other day.  They had some beautiful looking specimens at the market and I knew from a lot of sad experience that they would be tasteless.  They probably came out of a hothouse hundreds of miles from where they were being sold. Unfortunately, they were typical of a lot of modern foods but they make a broader business point.

Our industrialized food production system has managed to remove a lot of the natural flavors of things.  Why?  Because we want things like tomatoes year-round, we have to transport them further, and in many cases, we have completely “fake” foods to which flavors n=must be added for them to taste like anything remotely worth eating.  This is from a talk by a UPenn doctoral candidate:

Berenstein began by narrating synthetic flavors’ earliest and biggest coup: turning vanilla from a coveted luxury good into a synonym for the bland and everyday. For two hundred years after its introduction to the West, vanilla was a precious commodity. Artificial pollination helped increase the global supply by allowing the plant to grow outside its native Mexico, but the real turning came in the 1870s, when scientists cracked the molecular structure of vanillin—and opened the floodgates for the manufacturing of synthetic vanilla flavor.

I think fake foods and flavors have peaked because consumers want the real thing and it’s not just in their food choices.  The desire for authenticity is now a constant in most businesses. Customers quickly recognize when we brands are faking it.  I like this explanation from someone writing in Ad Age:

Authenticity involves an emotional connection with an audience, and that connection is forged over years through consistency. Consistency builds trust and integrity. Ignoring the reality of your audience’s world, trying to be something you’re not, or telling customers what you think they want to hear quickly deteriorates trust and erodes integrity.

When we make our businesses more efficient for us, we might just be removing the flavor the customers crave.  It’s no longer real. Something that sort of tastes like what you took out what do.  Like that hothouse tomato, I’m not buying.  Would you?

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