The Science of Marketing

In a recent post on Bizmark Tech, Deb calls our attention to some pointers by Suzie Gardner on what makes good material for a company blog.  One common thread that runs through most of the content areas she lists is information, and I couldn’t agree more.  If you want your company blog to become a resource for your customers, partners or anyone in your ecosystem, you have to give them something that’s useful, something that’s relevant, something they can’t get anywhere else.  You have to inform them.

What types of information should you provide?  Well…whatta you got?  I’ve seen high tech companies that are sitting on top of mounds of data about performance and security create blogs around this information - becoming authorities in their respective industries and generating massive media coverage because of it.  I’ve seen a building safety equipment vendor centralize publicly available research and legal information on its blog, providing a resource for its audience and creating awareness for its solution.  And I’ve seen an executive at a storage hardware vendor use his blog to discuss trends in data management and backup strategies, using his unique viewpoint to promote his company’s differentiation.

The point is, the people you want to communicate with are just outside your door, and they’re looking for useful information.  Chances are your company has some inventory of information that nobody else can provide to them.  By sharing this information with them, you can open the door to new conversations that position your company as an expert, as a resource, as a partner. 

The only question remaining are - what useful information does your company posess, and how can you leverage it on your blog?

In January, we wrote a post, "Getting The Brand Together: Consistency", which discussed brand promises - that what you say better be what you do.   Well, to do this you need to sit down and think hard about what it is you do and how to reflect that in your brand.  Consumer product companies have institutionalized this process.  High tech B2B companies to a less extent and high tech B2B start-ups not so much.

In the beginning, the usual process with a high tech start-up is: start a company, get a creative designer to design a logo, pick some colors and fonts.  Sometime later, messaging is developed.  So, the look and feel (visual brand) and the language (verbal brand) of the company are disjoint and possibly out of sync.  With so many companies vying for your audience’s attention these days, consistency is critical - so it is critical that the visual and verbal brand act as one.

There are three main concepts to think about when architecting an integrated brand.

1. The Word - Think about what your company does.  What word does it bring to mind?  Now, how can you get your brand to look like this word?
2. The Core Values - Think about how your company does what it does.  What values does it bring to the market.  Now, how can you add flavor to your brand that reflects these core values?
3. The Market - Think about your competitors, partners and customers.  What do their brands look and sound like?  Now, how can your brand stand out while fitting in?

By approaching your brand development in this structured way, you are more likely to have a tighter bond between what you say and what you look like.

Ask any author and I’m sure he’ll tell you - it’s not easy giving birth to a book.  Now multiply that by 237 and you’ve got The Age of Conversation 2: Why Don’t They Get It.  Throughout the monumental task of finding all these authors, getting their releases signed, chasing down their chapters, editing their work and weaving it all together; Gavin Heaton and Drew McLellan have made it look easy.  And now, about nine months after kicking off this project, I’m told that Gavin and Drew are going into ‘ahem’ labor and putting the finishing touches on the book.  We even have a due date - October 25!

Goofy puns aside, this effort really is about the children, with proceeds from the book benefitting Variety: The Children’s Charity- an international organization dedicated to improving the lives of children around the world.  The first edition of The Age Of Conversation raised well over $11,000 for this worthwhile cause.  This year, we’ll look to do even better.

I know this process is a ton of work for Gavin and Drew, but it’s a labor of love and they’re doing a great job.  Hats off to them for all their hard work.  I’m really rooking forward to the special delivery (from Amazon) next month.  In the meantime - would someone please go get some ice chips - stat?

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I love looking at Google Analytics.  I do it every day for both this blog and our corporate web site looking for patterns, insights and clues to help increase eyeballs and hopefully business. One of the areas that I focus on is referring sites - how visitors got to our web site.  For each referring site (including direct links), Google Analytics lists visits, pages/visit, average time on site and bounce rate (percentage of visitors that exit on the same page they enter). Here’s some statistics and observations for our corporate web site from the beginning of the year until now.

Visits

• 39% - direct link (someone typed our URL into the browser)
• 35% - search engines
• 26% - other referring sites
• Of the other referring sites, 9% were from this blog and 5% were from LinkedIn.

Pages Per Visit

• 6 - direct link
• 4 - this blog and LinkedIn
• 3 - search engines

Average Time on Site

• 7:45 - direct link
• 3:01 - this blog
• 2:33 - LinkedIn
• 1:47 - search engines

Bounce Rate

• 23% - LinkedIn
• 38% - direct link
• 44% - this blog
• 53% - search engines

The conclusion is that social networking sites:

• Generate additional visitors
• Produce quality visits (more time on the site, more pages per visit, lower bounce rate) as compared to search engines

So, why not beef up your social networking efforts?

Here’s a follow-up to a post I wrote in late August.  You remember - the one about marketing communications activities that happen in sequential stages to be most effective.  Since then, I’ve been talking to peers and keeping an eye on the blogosphere to get a feel for how others feel about a phased approach to marketing communications.  The result: it seems that the days of trying to do too much with a single tool or program are quickly coming to an end. 

Most marketers are no longer swinging for the fences with marketing communications - they are thinking through their marketing goals and mapping out phased communications strategies that get them there over time.  They are walking before they run, dating before they marry, and establishing a dialogue  before they sell.  Here are a few examples of progressive thinking in the area of marketing phases:

Marketing Experiments Blog: Writing Headlines that Don’t Sell — But Get Much Higher Conversions

Startup Hustle: Acquiring, Engaging, Retaining and Monetizing Your Customers

Marketing Interactions: B2B Websites Need to Focus on the Long Term

Drew’s Marketing Minute: Are You Expecting too Much From your Marketing?

I’m a big believer in marketing programs that don’t sell or try to do too much, but instead happen in phases and focus on long-term success.  I’m glad to see that others agree.  What do you think?

If you haven’t added the StumbleUpon toolbar to Firefox (or, God forbid, Explorer), you gotta do it - now.  StumbleUpon is the web’s equivalent to channel surfing, a "lean back" experience that  - with a click of a button - delivers interesting content to you without searching.  You never know what you’re going to get, but 99% of the time you’ll like it.

StumbleUpon is simple to use, just go to their web site, register and choose categories of interest (e.g., hiking, cooking, pets), and download the tool bar.  You’ll then see a button on your browser that says "Stumble!".  Click it and a random page is served up based on your interests and its popularity with users.  You can then rate the page with the thumbs up and thumbs down buttons on the toolbar.   I can Stumble for hours.

So, what does this have to do with your blog?  Well, just like other rating sites, you can take the pedestrian approach as in the eHow.com article "How to Use the Stumbleupon Toolbar to Increase Website Traffic.", which basically says vote for your blog and blog posts. And that’s OK, but it takes time.

I stumbled upon another method that resulted in periodic order-of-magnitude increases in traffic to this blog. One day, while I was Stumbling, I found a great blog on pricing anchors and wrote a blog post about it.  One day that week, the visits to this blog increased 10X and have continued to jump up to that level for few days every month.    I will continue to note any relevant content that I StumbleUpon to see if I can recreate the increase in visits.

Has anyone had a similar experience?

One Wednesday, not long ago, I was golfing with a friend who owns a local contracting business, and we got talking about advertising and promotions.  As a marketer, I’m amazed at the visibility he’s created for his small company.  Everywhere I drive, I see one of his trucks.  Every neighborhood I pass through, there’s a sign on somebody’s lawn with his company’s logo on it.  Every time those coupon packs show up in my mailbox, he’s offering a discount on window installations or free deck design services. I wanted to know his secret, so I asked how he can afford to be seemingly everywhere.

His answer: localize.  "I’m not everywhere," he said, "I focus on a very small area, and try to appear everywhere to the people who live there. Anything else would be a waste."

I know…it’s a pretty simple concept, but it’s a good reminder to all of us marketers, who often have to make a big splash on a little budget.  While we all want to do as much as possible to create visibility for our brand, we also want to remain as focused as possible to avoid wasteful activities.  The better we can understand who our targets are and where they get their information, the better our advertising and promotional plans will be.  This means:

• Segmenting your audience into multiple groups and building a profile for each segment
• Thinking about a day in the life of an individual in each segment, where she goes, what she does, who she interacts with, what she reads
• Finding the promotional opportunities others haven’t
• Going big where it matters most

With a local approach, we may not be everywhere, but to the people that matter, we’ll appear to be.  Do you localize your advertising and promotions?

One of my favorite marketing books is The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing: Violate Them at Your Own Risk (Al Ries, Jack Trout).  Each chapter is a few pages, gets right to the point and gives a real-life example.  It’s easy to pick up and put down without forgetting what you’ve read before. My favorite law is #13: The Law of Sacrifice.

You have to give up something in order to get something.

Ries and Trout point out that there are three things you can sacrifice: product line, target market and constant change.  They give several examples of companies (Fedex, Smucker’s, Staples and others) that sacrificed one of these three things to increase revenue, improve margin and gain market share.

I think there is something to be learned here for high tech start-ups.

High tech companies are almost always started by engineers; and engineers can do anything - and often do.  Most of the technology that high techs introduce to the world could be applied to a number of problems.  And, it probably can.  So, what usually happens is the it-can-do anything technology is thrown at the wall like spaghetti to see what sticks.  The spaghetti approach, while perfectly understandable, can cause problems:  lack of focus, unfinished products and features, employee chaos and market confusion.  While the first three are internal challenges that can be sorted internally, once the market is confused it is hard to unconfuse it. So, while it’s OK to have long term vision and a five year road map; make some sacrifices in your outbound communications and make sure your messaging is simple, consistent and focused on one (or a small set of) problems and markets.   If you tell the world that you do it all, you probably won’t be believed. What have you sacrificed lately?

Every time I prepare a client to launch a company or product, I put together a timeline that centralizes all the important tasks that need to be completed by launch day.  There’s no magic to it, I simply start at the end points and work backwards to break down the major milestones for each deliverable.  The spreadsheet typically includes columns for the name of the task, the program it is a part of, a start date, due date, owner and status.  At the very top of the page, in big, bold letters, is the launch date and the number of business days remaining until launch.  Like I said, it’s not rocket science.

For me, the timeline has become an invaluable part of the launch planning process, especially when multiple people and external agencies are involved.  I sort it by start date and due date to drive the agenda for weekly status meetings.  I carve it up by owner to provide stakeholders with his or her to-do list.  I organize it by program to see what’s happening in the worlds of public relations, web development, collateral and trade shows.  And I use it as a planning guide to quickly reference when a brochure will go out to print, or when web copy will be approved and ready for layout.  As the countdown to launch marches on, there’s no better resource for keeping everyone on the same page and everything on track.

However, despite its usefulness and simplicity, some marketers still don’t work from a timeline.  I’m sure there are a million other ways to track what needs to be done and who needs to do it.  Some buy expensive tracking software, others create e-mail folders and file everything under the sun and one or two keep it all in their head.  But when it comes to simple, effective launch planning, I have yet to find an approach that beats my timeline.  Have you?

There are two granite compasses in my backyard.  One is aligned with true north; the other is aligned with magnetic north: 15° west of true north.  This summer someone asked me "why? who cares?"  Well, someone using a map to hike from here to there would care about the magnetic north compass and someone drawing a map would care about the true north compass.  Same thing, positioned two different ways for two different audiences.  This concept holds true for B2B marketing: the same companies, products and services must be positioned differently for different audiences.  This is especially true in the high tech B2B world where there are multiple audiences with diverse issues in the middle of the buying cycle.

Positioning and differentiation (more on this next week) are the two foundations on which messaging is built.  But, many high tech B2B companies often rush to develop messaging without mapping out positioning and, as a result, may ignore key audiences.  To avoid this, start positioning by identifying the key audiences involved in the buying decision.  In the high tech B2B, these audiences can be broken down into four broad categories:

• Technology evaluation - what does this do better than what we have?
• Operations management - how will it fit into my current environment?
• Business decision - will this help me make or save money?
• Risk assessment - will this company be around in a year?

Positioning should be thought of in terms of these audiences.  Remember many of these audiences have the same concerns, although their level of interest may vary for each issue.

The best way to pull the positioning together and document it is to map out a  positioning matrix as below.

This matrix gives a quick and easy read of three positioning statements, their supporting benefits and enabling product or service features correlated with the level of interest for each audience (H = High Interest, M = Medium Interest, L = Low Interest).  Beyond developing messaging, the matrix can be used by a company’s entire ecosystem for a basis of relevant and consistent outbound communications, whether it’s a piece of collateral or a personal conversation.

Could a little thought and a positioning matrix help your communications efforts?