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?

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?

I miss driving stick.  Revving the engine at a stoplight, dropping into gear and hearing the tires chirp, downshifting into a sharp curve.  Exciting stuff, especially with the right car.  But beyond the thrill of it all, there’s also something rewarding about working through the progression of gears that reminds me of well oiled marketing communications machine.

Much like a 5-speed transmission, marketing communications activities need to work in sequential stages to be effective, especially with more strategic sales.  Take, for example, a developer of enterprise-wide security solutions, where there are many stages in the buying cycle and several stakeholders involved in the purchase decision.  Customers for this type of solution aren’t going to a website, downloading a free trial and installing it.  They’re writing RFPs, kicking tires, calling in technical experts and getting their finance department involved.  Marketing communications for these high touch sales doesn’t begin in 5th gear - you can’t post a web site and expect a thousand people to click "Buy it Now".

It all comes down to understanding the buying cycle in a given market, looking at the stakeholders and learning about their chief concerns.  Think about first gear - where prospective customers begin the process of evaluating new products - and implement programs that position your solution as a viable option.  In second gear, when technology evaluators begin putting competitive products to the test, be sure your communications activities differentiate you.  Rolling into third gear, a business level audience may get involved, so you must be able to demonstrate how your product can improve the bottom line.  Fourth gear may target an operational team tasked with figuring out how your solution will impact existing systems and processes; so build some tools that demonstrate simplicity and integration.  And in fifth, when last minute considerations can derail a sale, be sure you have the information and materials you need to manage objections.

While audiences, tactics, and messages will vary, the approach holds up to any complex sale.  Phase your communications efforts to mesh with what’s going on in the buying cycle.  Those who try to close a strategic sale in first gear will find themselves spinning their wheels. 

Drew McLellan recently wrote about expecting too much from your marketing, concluding that "marketing takes time, repetition, and patience."  So true, and to that, I’d add a progression that jibes with the buying cycle.  What would you add?

The marketing consulting firm I work for sends out an e-newsletter, Foundations, every month or so to a list of prospects, customers, partners - the usual. A couple of months ago we started a lead feature called "The 1-Second Survey". The idea is to gather market information quickly and painlessly - we ask one question and give four or five possible answers, one of which the reader clicks on (see below). That’s it - done in (less than) one second. No more taking ten or twenty minutes of someone’s valuable time.

We’ve gotten great response, but we also got something that we didn’t expect. Several people have asked us: how do we do it? what tools do we use? Well, it’s really pretty simple and I’ll let everyone in on the "secret".

Start With an E-Mail Marketing Service

We use MailChimp for all our e-mail campaigns. (We’ve tried a few different services and like MC’s ease-of-use and campaign reporting.) Like most e-mail marketing services, MC allows you to embed links and track click-throughs.

Create Landing Pages

Each of the links above goes to a different landing page on our web site. These pages say "thanks for participating" and have links to other pages for more information.

Count the Clicks

MC reports on a wide range of statistics for each campaign (in this case a newsletter). One of these statistics is the number of click-throughs for each link embedded in the e-newsletter. Just tally up the clicks for each link and you have your survey results.

So, that’s the secret of the 1-second survey. It’s just that easy.

Have fun.

Last week, I wrote about some basics of marketing strategy, and how segmentation, positioning and differentiation can improve the sales effort.  The comment that followed that post, from Ardath Albee of Marketing Interactions, got me thinking that I should be writing a bit more on the implementation of marketing strategy, especially in the tools and tactics we use most.  Since there are so many combinations of strategies and tactics, the Strategy in Action theme will probably take awhile to cover, so watch for the series to continue in future posts.  For now I’ll begin with segmentation on the web - how understanding and playing to our key audiences can make for more effective web marketing. 

In the B2B world, segmentation is a two-step process.  The first step is understanding the types of companies to which you are selling.  Are they large corporations or small businesses, what industries are they in, where are they located?  Once you come up with a profile (or more likely, several profiles) of the types of companies you are targeting, it is also important to segment the people inside of these companies who represent your audience.  This is often done by job title alone, but it is important to remember that we’re talking about people here, so it’s not a bad idea to note their age group, gender, education level and other personal details to the best of your ability.  We cover market segmentation in several other posts, so feel free to check them out here.  It’s also important to note that the other facets of marketing strategy - particularly positioning and differentiation - must also come into play on the web, but for now we’ll look at segmentation in a vacuum.

Self Identification

To me, the most important way that segmentation influences web marketing lies in how you structure your web site.  Companies such as Dell address different segments through self identification on their home page - asking users to specify whether they are looking for products for their home, office or data center.  Once a visitor selects a category, Dell’s web site presents only the products and promotions that appeal to their particular segment.  Pretty straightforward.  But this type of self identification breaks down as more and more visitors skip the home page and navigate directly to their content using a search engine.  For example, Google searches for "Dell laptop" and "Dell desktop" led me to product pages that offer home computers and back to school specials.  Not exactly what an enterprise IT manager is looking for.

Landing Page Optimization

To ensure that visitors can easily find the content that is right for their segment - even when entering through a search engine - try combining self identification with landing page optimization - creating "mini home pages" called landing pages for different segments, and owning the most popular search terms to funnel users to the content they seek.  Cisco has become a master of this technique, as a recent search for "Cisco router" shows.  By clicking the top result for that search, I was brought to a Cisco landing page that included the company’s top line message for their router line, a section on router basics, and simple, well organized product links for their branch, WAN, and service provider routers.  There is a bit of segmentation in each of these categories, and the rest is handled through tailored messages on the individual product pages.  Cisco’s approach allows the company to talk to each segment individually, while quickly getting users to the right content.

Content Creation

Beyond structure, segmentation comes into play on the web through the content itself.  By understanding who you’re writing for, you can improve the relevance of your content and tailor calls to action for different audiences.  Once a web site is structured to bring each segment to its own unique place, you can organize and present content that engages each audience on their own terms.  This is where it helps to understand not only the types of companies, but the types of people to whom you’re talking.

As I type and type, I realize I could probably go on all day about segmentation on the web.  But there’s work to do, and golf balls to lose, so for now, I’ll toss it back to you to tell me what I left out.

Any good web developer will tell you that search engine optimization (SEO) is priority #1 for your web site.  As one web specialist put it so eloquently for me, "SEO is all about making your site a destination for Google."  But assuming you don’t have an SEO expert on hand to evaluate your site, how do you know if you’ve done everything you can to help search engines find you?  Thanks to Website Grader, a new tool from Hubspot, a Cambridge, MA-based Internet Marketing company, you can now get a fast and free SEO evaluation of your web site, complete with plain English recommendations that can move your site up in the search rankings.  Many thanks to Drew McLellan, whose blog (Drew’s Marketing Minute) was the first to turn me on to this cool tool.

Website Grader is easy to use, just feed it your url, any competitive web sites you’d like it to look at, and your e-mail address, and it starts evaluating your site based on many facets of good SEO- metadata, heading usage, image usage, readability, Google Pagerank, inbound links and so on.  Once complete, Website Grader gives your site a grade on a scale of 1 to 100.  This site received a 91 (not too shabby, right?).  Each category of the report provides a quantitative evaluation, a bit on why each tactic is important, and any recommendations that can improve your site’s score.  Pretty handy for a free tool.

But does Website Grader go far enough to help you formulate a comprehensive SEO strategy, or just far enough to send you running to an SEO expert? 

As I was surfing the YouTube the other day, I decided to tune in to the Politician Channel and was surprised at what I saw.

Barack Obama: 1,150 videos and 55M views

John McCain: 219 videos and 4M views

That’s a 5-to-1 difference in number of videos posted and close to a 14-to-1 difference in views.

I’m not trying to wax political (something I would never do in a blog) and I know the whole John-McCain-is-old-doesn’t-use-the-computer-and-hates-bloggers thing, but, with all due respect, what the fig?

There are something like 60M broadband subscribers in the US. Now, knowing that, if you

1.) Needed to get the word out to a large audience

2.) Had a communications tool that hit that audience and was (practically) free

Wouldn’t you take advantage?

Something for us B2B marketers to think hard about. If social networking tools could change the outcome - why not?

Every now and then, it’s fun to take a walk down memory lane.  So today, I logged into Google Analytics and punched up the content page to find out what our ten most popular posts are.  I was surprised at how diverse the list is, ranging from the very tactical to the very strategic, and covering just about every topic we’ve ever written about.  I’m glad to see that our readers enjoy variety, so we’ll continue to mix things up.  If there’s anything you’d like us to write about, please comment below or send us an e-mail - we’d love to hear from you.

With that, Our Ten Most Popular Posts: 

1. Internal Communications: Own It
2. The Blogosphere: You Don’t Have to Blog to Belong
3. Mission Statement: Make it Possible
4. Slogans: Say What You Do
5. Market Segmentation: How to Prioritize Targets
6. High Tech Blogging: Why?
7. Lead Generation: The Bell Curve
8. Communications Part II: To the Right People
9. Age of Conversation 2: The Deadline
10. The SEO Triple Play: Message, Mechanics, Maintenance