Tag Archives: marketing

November 2, 2016 · 10:13 am

Don’t Better Deal

Have you ever been to a business function or a cocktail party where the person with whom you’re speaking is constantly searching the room with his eyes? They’re better dealing you. They’re trying to find someone more important (or interesting) who is a better deal than you. In a business setting, it’s usually a higher-up they’d like to impress but it’s generally someone who they think can make their life better than you can. I think that sort of thing is rude. Sure, you should have a general awareness of who is in the room but I think it’s important to be “present” in any conversation you’re having. If you want to end it gracefully and move on, so be it, but don’t nod your head and mumble “uh-huh” while scanning the room.

I can hear you thinking that you’d never do that, at least not unless someone was a boring, raging drunk. As it turns out, there is evidence to suggest that many marketers are better-dealing their customers all the time instead of focusing on what the customer is saying. How do I know? This from eMarketer:

HubSpot examined marketing priorities of marketers worldwide practicing inbound strategies (next-generation techniques that foster a two-way interaction and relationship with prospects and that aim for customers to come to the brand) and outbound strategies (more traditional marketing, in which customers are sought out and reached with general, one-way messaging such as TV, print ads or cold calls). Converting contacts and leads into customers was a marketing priority for 77% of inbound marketers and 68% of outbound marketers.

Increasing revenue from current customers , on the other hand, was only a priority for 46%. This despite the fact that it’s about 5x more efficient to retain a customer than it is to acquire a new one. Thinking of it another way, you would have to find five new customers to gain the same profitability as you would from retaining one. You have a 60%-70% chance of selling something to an existing customer and only a 5%-20% chance to sell to a new one. Which odds are more appealing?

You might think you’re giving yourself a better deal by focusing on the next conversation (finding new customers) but as it turns out you’re way better off devoting resources and staying focused on the current chat (your current customers). The odds are the “better deal” will still be at the party when your current conversation moves on. Make sense?

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August 23, 2016 · 10:59 am

Measuring What Matters

English: A business ideally is continually see...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I read an interesting report from the Forrester folks this morning. It is about business-to-business marketing but I think it’s instructive to any of us who are in marketing. It’s called “Metrics That Matter For B2B Marketers” and you can read it here. I’m a big fan of the premise:

B2B marketers must do more than measure activities like click-through rates and event attendees; they need to show how their activity directly affects business results. This report shows marketers how to provide insight on the things that matter most to their executive peers and the board — growth in revenue, profit, and customers. While marketers need to capture a wide range of metrics, this report focuses on measuring marketing’s contribution to revenue as a function of customer acquisition and installed base growth.

When I was in TV and marketing (which probably should have been called business development) was a relatively new concept (as opposed to sales which was there from day one), I always felt that part of my role as “the marketing guy” was to demonstrate that marketing was part of the revenue-generating part of the team. The only way to do that was to quantify how what I was doing was driving sustainable business.

Fast forward a lot of years. All of us in marketing are deluged with data. The problem, as the report points out, is that many folks take the easy way out and measure the easy to find stuff while ignoring the pieces of information that may be more impactful to the business but harder to discern. As the report says:

Marketers need to measure a lot of things to understand what is working and what isn’t. Unfortunately, most get stuck measuring activity, not value: More than half (61%) of the marketers we surveyed admitted that most of their data work went into reporting on how they did, not showing how marketing drives better business results.

Measure what matters. Measure quality over quantity. Don’t “manage to metrics rather than performance.” OK?

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August 17, 2016 · 11:18 am

Throwing Back The Small Fish

You’re probably a user of one free Google service or another. Odds are that you’ve used the search engine (probably at least once already today!). Maybe you get your email via a free Gmail account or watch videos on YouTube. It’s no secret that each of those services is provided to attract eyeballs (and usage data) for the ads Google sells.

Let’s think for a moment about the other side of that equation. How do those ads get there? Glad you asked! Google also provides a number of other free services to support marketers as well as other free services such as Google Analytics that provide data (to Google and others) about what’s going on in the web world. Lately, Google has been doing some things with those services that are instructive to the rest of us for our businesses.

What they’re doing is making those services less useful to marketers who don’t spend money with them. You might remember the outcry a couple of years back when Google stopped providing search term information in the free version of Analytics. At the time they said it would affect only a small minority of the data. The truth is that today nearly all of the search terms are (not provided), which is where Google lumps them when they don’t want to show them to you.

A few days ago, Google did it again. There is something called Keyword Planner which is used to plan search advertising. Google announced that “advertisers with lower monthly spend may see a limited data view in the Keyword Planner.” How much lower? No one knows.

How does this relate to your business? As you might expect, the response from the search marketing community has been outrage. This comment (and there are pages and pages of them on Google’s Advertising Community page) is typical:

First Google took your organic keyword data away. Now they are intent on impoverishing those without enough budget for the data.

There are many times more small accounts using Google for search than there are large accounts. Is it a good idea to favor the big spenders? Yes, it is, actually. Any good business rewards its best customers with perks. Those perks, however, shouldn’t diminish the ability of a small customer (or a new customer) to become one of the bigger ones. That’s what this change has done. Do I think it will drive marketers to another search engine? Maybe, but I’m guessing your business sector doesn’t have anyone who is as dominant in it as Google is in the search realm so you probably don’t have the luxury of not caring a whole lot.

The Boss wrote, “from small things, baby, big things one day come.” The only way to foster that growth is to provide support and tools, no matter what business we’re in. I think Google has taken a step in the wrong direction. You?

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