8 questions to review your acquisition strategy in 2012
This is a new deck with some new examples for a keynote presentation at the Fusion Marketing Experience in Belgium on 2nd December 2011 programmed by the excellent J-P De Clerck.
I talk about how to find new customers, especially at a time when there's pressure on budgets. As always, my ideas are informed by the latest data and show practical examples of implementing the ideas.
It's structured around these questions to ask about acquisition:
Q1. Does your brand have personality + OVP?
Q2. Mix = are you investing your time/money wisely?
Q3. Is our publishing process effective?
Q4. How do we make online campaigns moreengaging?
Q5. Is your business “social by design?
Q6. Are your practicing “deep SEO”?
Q7. Are we siloed or multichannel?
Q8. Are you “competing on analytics?”
Attracting quality traffic…
The latest conversion, mobile and referrals benchmarks
Value/Importance: [rating=4]
Recommended link: IBM Coremetrics 2011 Benchmarks
We’ve featured the Coremetrics benchmarks in our average conversion rate roundup for some time. Today, it’s much more useful than what’s provided by Google since it looks at conversion rates and referrers together. It’s based on Coremetric’s (now IBM) clients who tend to be larger organisations, so can be used for larger organisations to benchmark against and give smaller companies and idea of the conversion rates you can achieve if you’re a large trusted brand.
In the past, we’ve featured UK and US data, but the latest data is just for the US - it’s around the Black Friday - Thanksgiving - Cybermonday weekend. Thanks to my friend Geno Prussakov to alerting us to it - Geno’s post features some of the time-related sales volumes.
Here are the three…
Are you cultivating the leads who are not ready to buy today?
80% of the leads who don't buy from you will go to buy from someone else according to Eloqua, or more specifically Steve Woods, their CTO, in his excellent book Digital Body Language. It's shocking in one sense, since it means there's a big missed opportunity. The potential customer was interested enough to give us their details, but not enough to buy. But it's not surprising in another sense in that we (as marketers) are not inspiring the lead to buy, and many have a need which will be met by another company.
So what's the answer? Lead nurturing, part of the marketing automation software process. I read this great post by Baxter Denney on the Marketing Automation Guide last month and wanted to give you my take on it. It starts with the classic conversion funnel which shows…
A testing service and resources on testing for mobile apps
Value/Importance: [rating=4]
Recommended link: uTtest.com - mobile app testing
I was tipped off about uTest.com by a marketer who is currently involved with launching a mobile app. It wasn’t a service that I was aware of, so thought we would share here. We have mentioned tools like WhatUsersDo before, but this new tool caters specifically for mobile app and software testing with crowdsourced testing for mobile apps.
Utest.com is a US focused, but internationally acting innovative way of connecting businesses that want to launch software applications of all sorts of industry sectors with freelance testers around the world. They support Google, Amazon, Groupon with user testing for web or mobile.
They also have a useful introductory ebooks on Mobile Testing and whitepapers on agile mobile testing.…
Key features and three ideas for effective winback subject lines
Last week I was presenting at the DMA Email Customer Lifecycle Win-back breakfast seminar and I also enjoyed the related discussion on Smart Insights around Dela Quist's post on how to treat inactive email subscribers. I wrote up the seminar on the Email Vision blog, but here I thought it may interesting for Smart Insights readers to see a summary, since it relates to the inactives issue we were discussing.
What makes for an effective winback subject line?
In a moment, I'll share examples from the seminar, but first it's worth thinking through the key features to make these subject lines. The rules are different for inactives. Incentive and benefit based subject lines maybe just right for active customers. However the tone and voice must reflect the current state of relationship to the person you are communicating. So for disengaged customers, a…
Understanding who shares what and why?
In 2011, we've heard a lot about the power of social media for "amplification" of messages, i.e. social sharing. Amplification will happen naturally if you can create the right type of content that is valueable and shareable for your audience - whether that's infographics, video or a whitepaper. I think many companies use their blog, Facebook or Twitter to test which types of content and formats are most shareable and then refine their approach based on what's shared and what's not.
Here's a different approach based on understanding the psychology of sharing within your audience. It's about understanding the motivations for sharing amongst different groups and then developing the right content and seeding that works for this group. Next Fifteen has a useful whitepaper that expands on this, but I found this chart most useful as a summary of the motivations; prompting ideas on how…
Facebook releases new marketing advice for businesses
Value: [rating=4]
Recommended link: http://www.facebook.com/business
Our commentary: In the first week of August, Facebook announced "Facebook for Business". While this sounds like an attempt to compete with LinkedIn or Google+, in fact it’s just an update to their guidance notes which had been lacking for quite a while.
The most useful guide is this practical download that works for small and large business.
Download "Building your Business with Facebook Pages"
24/11/2011 update - New Facebook Insights features and learning course
Facebook have announced a microsite, www.learnpageinsights.com which steps you through how to use the new features. If you're short on time and who isn't I recommend the "Quick Reference" feature, where you can hover over and see what's what:
Alternatively, Hubspot has a step-by-step guide that's worth a scan if you're a Facebook Admin.
10/10/2011…
Changing social engagement from an afterthought to a first thought
I really like the “social by design” expression as a way to guide marketing thinking in a company today. It’s like the “digital by default” or “Digital First” mantra we’ve heard for a while now which can communicate a new vision for marketing. Simple summaries to colleagues can help get the message across.
You may have seen the quote recently, which is from Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg reported in Advertising Age. She went on to say that:
“Facebook shouldn’t be the only thing marketers do online, or in marketing. It should just be part of everything they do”.
That’s probably overstating it for many companies, but certainly a form of “social engagement” should be built in to campaigns whether that’s offline or in the most suitable online channels, which could be your site rather…
A reminder of the latest changes to Google Analytics for non-specialists
This update page is intended to help anyone who uses Google Analytics, but not day-in day-out! It's also a reminder for me when giving training courses to highlight what's new.
I subscribe to the Google Analytics Blog feed to keep up-to-date and other related ones like Webmaster Tools. There are quite a few detailed posts from Google about Analytics that won't make so much difference to most users and are more for interest of GA specialists working on it all the time.
So in this summary we alert you to what we see as the major changes that every marketer using Google Analytics to review their digital marketing needs to know about - there's been a lot of them in 2011. Many thanks to the analysts like Dan Barker, Helen Birch and Tim Leighton Boyce who have written tutorials on how…
Six post ideas which work for any business blog
Following on from the recent Smart Insights post on 30 ideas to get more visitors to your blog, I thought I'd follow-up with some more specific ideas for B2B blogs. I believe blogs are the foundation of any respectable BB content marketing strategy and the place where issues can be explored, trends discussed, communities created and prospects identified. So in the first in a series of posts on business blogging, I'll discuss how to avoid a common challenge - what to write about!
A company blog can, over time, significantly increase a website’s presence in search engine results and be a valuable source of inbound inquiries for a business. It is crucial that to be successful, your business has to tap into the needs of your target audience, and provides useful, usable and relevant content.
For me, the trick to effective business blog…
