MarketingSherpa Blog

Whether we’re entering an official recession or just an economic lull, it’s clear that most US marketers are in for at least a slightly rough ride for the next 24 months. That’s OK, when the going gets tough, it gets my blood up. I hope you are the same way!

Over the next few weeks I’ll discuss tactics you can use to ride out the storm. First up: establish two current customer benchmarks.

During a recession happy, loyal customers are incredibly important. During good times, you can market your heart out to land new accounts. Pluck that new fruit. In bad times, the branches raise themselves up. Landing new customers is harder – more expensive — just at the time when your CEO holds that “How can we cut marketing costs?” discussion with your department.

Your company’s profitability for the next two years nearly certainly rests in the hands of people who are current customers. They are more likely to buy than anyone else. The cost of selling to them is likely to be lower than to anyone else. They are also far more likely to refer prospects who are likely to become new accounts than any other media you can market through.

If you have not already established benchmarks, measuring your current customer base, now is the time to do so. At the very least, you’ll have data to benchmark your own performance against in future months when hoards of new clients may not come knocking at the gate. You can say your marketing has helped current profitable accounts stay alive longer, refer more prospects, buy more products or services.

Measurement can be as complex as you like it, but the basics are:

-> Step #1. Segment your customer base
Chances are certain customer segments perform far differently than others. You may chose to segment by your most and least profitable accounts. Or by accounts in certain countries, or by industry, or by total units sold, or by lifetime. You may want to study multiple types of segments at the same time. The key is, it must be a segment you readily identify and sort your database — or spreadsheet — by on an ongoing basis. It must also be a segment you think you could affect with a campaign of some type if you want to make an impact on that one segment.

-> Step #2. Lifetime length and value
Next, for each segment, you’ll want to measure median account lifetime length and value — in terms of profitability as well as overall sales. (Median is always better than average which can skew too easily.) These are the benchmarks you’ll continue to re-assess over the next 24 months to see if anything has changed. They are also values you can use to decide which segments to continue marketing aggressively in for new accounts and which to cut back on for the time being.

-> Step #3. Satisfaction and likelihood to refer and/or continue
Finally, ask customers directly to rate their account satisfaction, if they are likely to continue being customers, if not can you change anything that would make then stay on, and if they would be likey to refer you.

I strongly suggest that you don’t ask customers directly unless your brand has a very high reputation for trust and honesty. Most customers do not want to tell you bad news directly. They’ll lie with blandness or they’ll say, “Sorry but my budget was cut,” instead of telling you they really resigned the account. However, they are often willing to tell a third-party researcher the cold hard truth in vivid detail. So, hire a third party.

Now you know what product or service changes must be made to save current accounts, and who you can count on for the long haul. You will almost certainly be surprised by some of your top customer’s answers.

By the way … never ever allow anyone to contact accounts without getting buy-in from the sales department or accounts services department beforehand. And warn customer service to boot. Now is not the time to ruffle internal feathers!

As a young copywriter, I used to pop bullet points into the middle of long direct mail letters to break up the prose on the page, catch and re-engage the eye.

These days — especially in email and online — bullet points are the most-read copy on the page. Bullet points are doing the heavy lifting, and ours eyes skip over prose nearly entirely. I’ve learned two rules from years of eyetracking tests, search marketing, landing page construction and email copywriting that you may find useful. 

Bullet point success is all about putting your most powerful copy where the human eye is most likely to see it as it scans the page (or screen.)  You’re not controlling the eye so much as you are letting the eye’s known habits control where you place copy. Two ways to do this:

#1. Reorganize your list

Copywriters write numbered or bulleted lists in order of importance. The first is usually the most important and the last is the least important. The problem is that the eye doesn’t see importance that way. The eye sees the top two bullets. Then it often skips down to the very last bullet. And then it skips merrily on its way to someplace else on the page. Middle bullets are often ignored completely.

So, organize your bullet lists like this:
o Most important point
o Second most important point
o Less important point
o Less important point
o Third most important point

#2. Put the keywords first

When people scan lists they are not reading prose, so you cannot write a list as if it were prose. You also can’t (heaven forbid) start each bullet with the exact same word or even words starting with the first same letter of the alphabet, unless you want the rest of the bullet content to be ignored or all swim together into an unidentified blur.

Here are the words that the eye tends to read on a bulleted list (I put the words it doesn’t read as “blah blah blah”)

o Word word word word blah
o Word word word blah blah
o Word blah blah blah blah
o Blah blah blah blah blah
o Word word blah blah blah

If you put your best words — especially ones that look physically different from each other by starting with different first letters (again, catch attention by breaking patterns) — in the spots I marked as “Word,” your copy is immediately more powerful.

In practical terms, I usually find it’s easiest to write a bullet point list as I would normally do it, to get it out on paper for my own working needs.  Then I re-craft and edit it, moving words, positions and tweaking verbiage until I get it right for the reading eye.

Got any copywriting tips that work for you that you would like to share with Sherpa readers? Comment below!

When you operate a publishing site like MarketingSherpa, you want to be clear to your subscribers about the content available to them. Articles published in our nine weekly newsletters are open access to our hundreds of thousands of readers for seven days before they go into a members-only archive. The barrier date is stated in each email.

Still, results from a survey conducted earlier this year showed that 68% of our readers don’t know how long articles are available before going behind the membership wall. We decided our limited-access policy needed to be clarified. We also wanted to see if adding an expiration date to newsletter subject lines might create a sense of urgency that would boost open and clickthrough rates. Read more…

I just received an email from a good friend in Massachusetts. A girlfriend of hers, a 20+ year marketing professional was “let go” from her position as head of a technology firm’s marketing … right before Christmas.

Crazy but true, the CEO in question tried to paint the layoff as a compliment. “You’ve done such a fine job putting a team in place here and training them. We really don’t need you anymore.” he apparently said.

Now, when was the last time you heard of a CFO being laid off like that? “Bob, you’ve done such a fine job training bookkeeping and hiring that accounting firm. We’ve decided to do without you this year.”

Or how about the CIO? “Jerry, those technicians of yours are fantastic geeks. Our tech has never been in better shape. Thanks and have a nice life.”

Yet, somehow on a planet where it’s nearly inconceivable to lay off your most critical leaders when a company needs them most, during a crisis, it’s all too easy to lay off the head of marketing.

Back during the downturn of 2001-02, marketing got socked in the stomach. We were money wasters; we weren’t accountable enough; we were “suits”; we were bad. In fact, when in reaction to the then-common marketplace feelings, an ad agency in Massachusetts did a joke song CD titled, ‘Let’s All Blame the Marketing Director!’ It was so true to life that it was hard for some of us to laugh.

We’ve come a very long way since those dark days. The profession as a whole has nearly reinvented itself — especially in terms of accountability and measurement. Now, we all measure everything (and now CEOs complain our reports are too detailed; if it’s not one thing, it’s another.)

But, I think we still have one profound challenge to address as a profession. We have raised our reputations as tacticians, but we are not seen as mission-critical strategic leaders.

Strategic leaders keep their jobs during recessions. Tacticians can be downsized. You can always get a cheaper tactician or make one tactician do the work of two. Heck, you can even outsource tacticians to other, cheaper countries.

How can marketing as a profession seize the day and get upper management to (a) give us a seat at the table, and (b) see us as the strategic leaders that we are?

I don’t have the answers — but I hope you do. Write me. Share your insights and ideas. I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

I think nearly all CEOs share two fantasies. The first being that they could appear on the front page of The Wall Street Journal or cover of Business 2.0 … if only a PR person gave a bit more effort. The second is that they could save a heck of a lot of money if they slashed the ad budget and got more PR coverage instead. Because, PR is “free,” right?

(Anyway every CEO is convinced that 50% of the ad budget is wasted as things are.)

This explains why PR always gains in popularity during a recession, even an incipient one like what we’re undergoing these days. Unfortunately, this doesn’t help the PR profession all that much. Scads of PR pros were laid off or barely survived in downsized firms during the economic downturn of 2001-02.

It’s due to the “PR is free” thing that your CEO can’t seem to shake from his or her head.

PR is, in fact, a heck of a lot like search engine optimization. A skilled practitioner comes in, redoes your site’s messaging, builds inbound link relationships with hundreds of influential sources and then everyone waits six months to begin to see significant impact. In the meantime, the fiscal quarter is ending and your CEO is getting nervous. “Where are the ’free results’ already?!” “Where’s my No. 1 ranking?” “Where’s my WSJ cover mention?”

Then, your CEO asks, “Hey, if it’s free, why are we paying for this? How hard can this PR (or SEO) thing be? Let’s bring it in-house and save even more money. It’s a recession after all, we all have to work a little harder and tighten our budgetary belts.”

Which is how even the best PR firms get fired. And the best marketers start looking a little hollow-eyed and permanently exhausted. PR is people-work after all. It’s relationship building — not something a typically introverted marketer tends to be fabulous at. When well done, PR also takes an extraordinary number of man-hours … something you may not have on hand when the CEO just cut your staffing budget again.

PR is invaluable — especially when you get strong mentions in niche media that your prospects read passionately. But, it’s not free.

OK, so what’s my advice this week? If you are trying to get more glowing press coverage in this down market, one factor can help you. Trade journalists like exclusive case studies in any economy, but when the going gets tough, they utterly adore them. In 2008, it’s going to be easier to get case study coverage than ever before.

As Micky Long at Aberdeen Group once told me, “In a recession, reporting coverage moves. It’s not about vision or the next greatest thing; it’s about show-me-the-money. Show me the ROI. Reporters say ‘Let me talk to a customer.’ ”

So, there’s your hook. Go forth and build media relationships. Good luck!

Many journalists will agree to a quick informational phone call with new marketing leaders, if you respectfully request it. Let them know the conversation will not run longer than 15 minutes and will be at a time of their convenience, and promise you will not pitch them during that time. You’re seeking information so you can serve them better as a possible source and advertiser.

If you can’t get through, but you already sponsor the publication in question, a gentle nudge from your ad sales rep can help, too.

Here are the best questions to ask during those 15 minutes:

– Is there a particular PR person or firm you respect the most in their field? Whose email or calls would you be most likely to respond to because you know they’ll bring you good stuff? (Never hire a PR firm that’s not vouched for by the press they pitch routinely.)

– Do you or does any member of your team ever freelance for vendors to write white papers or articles for email newsletters? Are any of you ever available as speakers or moderators for vendor user conferences? Obviously, we understand this possible relationship would not affect your other coverage.

– How far out do you begin working on major stories for issues? What are your biggest deadlines? If we wanted to be considered for a quote or as background for a story, by when would we need to contact you if we see something in your editorial calendar coming up?

– What do you see as the hot button stories or areas of coverage that your readership is deeply interested in over the next six months? What’s over, done, dead?

– Do you study which search terms are very popular on your site’s search engine? How about which types of articles get the most clicks and views from your email newsletter? Is that information I could get routinely, say every month or quarter, from my ad sales rep if I’m a client?

– Which bloggers do you pay the most attention to? If you blog, what sorts of items, gossip and otherwise, make useful snippets for you? Do you mind being pitched on possible blog snippets?

– What sort of story or data would you love to get from a source as an exclusive? How about a case study? A tip sheet? Statistical results from a new industry survey? An interview with one of our top clients? Product launch previews? A sample of the product to review?

– What sort of story or information should I just never bother you with?

– Who on the staff should we contact? Should we just send information to one beat reporter in particular?

Note: You may also want to check MarketingSherpa’s extensive library of PR interviews, ranging from BusinessWeek to Women’s Wear Daily. Top journalists reveal exactly how they wish you would pitch them stories. This Members-only resource is available on free trial at:
https://www.marketingsherpa.com/memberhome.html

I used to call it the “X Factor.” No matter how intelligent, talented and hardworking you are, you’ll only get so far in your career without the X Factor.

As a young marketer, I thought of it as brownnosing. You know, the guy who gets the promotion because the boss loves him, even though other people may have worked harder and better. Now, I know it was office politics. He was better at building alliances, negotiating power and presenting himself in a golden light.

Marketers as a race are not particularly adept at office politics. We’re not good at selling ourselves.

Consider how normal it is for companies to have a CFO but not a CMO on the top management team. Consider how few Fortune 500s have a marketing guru on their board of directors. Consider how hard you have to fight for your budget, for your strategy, for new hires, even often for technical support.

I’ve been spending a great deal of time this past month reading transcript after transcript from past MarketingSherpa Summits, trying to determine what the most useful lessons were. Frankly, although we concentrated a great deal of attention on campaign tactical nuts and bolts, what made our Case Study presenters so successful was that extra X Factor.

They had mastered office politics.

“How did you get the CEO to agree to that?” an audience member invariably would ask. “I marketed it internally” would be the answer. “You need to market yourself inside your organization.”

Personally, I used to find office politics nearly incomprehensible. But, now, I realize it’s just another form of marketing.

-> Step #1. Market research

Target the most influential and powerful people in your organization who could help the cause of marketing if they were so moved. (Note: Influencers are not always the same as the official power structure on paper.)

Treat them like any other marketplace — research their pain points, fears, goals and aspirations. And, of course, their taxonomy, precise wording choices can be such powerful marketing tools. Lastly, discover how they like to obtain information: Informal conversations? Formal presentations? Detailed reports? One-page memos with a chart in the middle as eye candy? Which media do they most pay attention to and trust: The Wall Street Journal? The blogosphere? Best-selling business books? Talk radio?

Study to know your CFO or CIO or head of sales so well that you could write up a formal persona profile on him or her. (In fact, why not do it? It would be a good exercise.)

-> Step #2. Create a marketing plan

As with any other campaign, set a measurable goal of some sort. It might range from getting more feedback from the sales force to signing off on the new hire you’re seeking.
And, then, start educating, nurturing and cultivating your marketplace.

You might start an internal email newsletter — marketing factoid of the week, including quotes from media your prospect trusts. Or by adding a mini-marketing report card to the homepage of the company intranet. Or by changing the way you report on your success.

The latter is often the most powerful. Instead of reporting on marketing-centric measurements, tie your data to your target market’s pain points and goals. Rather than talking about click rates, or prospect list size, or even campaign ROI, you might discuss shorter sales cycles or higher purchase per order.

Consider – which would your CEO be most impressed by? The overall open rate of your email newsletter or the percent of top accounts who routinely read articles in it?

-> Step #3. Give your potential allies power

The biggest step in seeking power is to allow others around you to feel powerful and appreciated themselves. Professionals are more stressed out by a lack of control in their working conditions than they are by hard work itself.

You can gain power by giving power to others — by asking for other department’s input and decisions at fairly early stages in the marketing process. Key — only allow brainstorming if you have data in your pocket to fight off a potentially disastrous decision. Best idea: Ask others for what they think problems are … and then return with two or three equally good strategies for them to vote on as solutions.

So, you’re not saying: “What should we do with our marketing budget this year?” Instead you’re saying: “What’s the biggest problem we need to solve with marketing this year?” And then a few weeks later, you’re saying: “I’ve researched your problem and here are the two best possible solutions. Which do you prefer?”

As one top marketing consultant told me privately last month: “Management often doesn’t know good marketing from bad. They’re convinced 50% of their budget is wasted, and they’re not sure who to trust to fix it. Probably not marketing.”

For 2008, your toughest marketing challenge may be internal politics. Now is the time to acknowledge this reality and focus your skills to win.

If you’re in a services or B-to-B marketplace — enterprise software, for example — the last thing you’re probably doing is posting your prices on the company website.

Study after study reveals, however, that pricing information is precisely what prospects visiting your site are looking for:

– A June 2007 MarketingSherpa Study in partnership with Enquiro showed that pricing information was the No. 1 thing executives researching IT solutions in price ranges above $50,000 wanted online during every stage of their decision — from early awareness and research on.

– CMP Electronics Group’s Global Media Usage Study in 2006 showed similar results. 61% of surveyed engineers said the top reason they went to company websites was to research pricing. Prices were second only in popularity to downloadable data sheets.

– A 2006 ThomasNet study revealed 74% of prospects researching on their site wanted to see manufacturers pricing information there. However, only 23% of manufacturers made their pricing public online.

I understand why you may not put pricing online. Perhaps your sales reps want as much flexibility as possible in negotiations. Maybe you’re concerned making price wars and/or commoditization. Or, perhaps your product managers are convinced pricing is far too complex even for an online calculator to reflect accurately.

Whatever the reason, you need to keep two human factors in mind:

#1. Your competition already knows your pricing because they have to sell against it. There is no secrecy. Frankly, if they don’t, they are so inept at their jobs that you have nothing to fear from them.

#2. Your prospects will find pricing information even without your help. They’ll ask friends at other companies, post queries to industry email discussion groups and boards, ping analysts or surf the Web researching.

The only problem is, you’ve now lost control of your pricing messaging. You can’t surround the conversation with value and branding. You can’t be sure that the correct information is even getting to prospects.

And they’re making those decisions before they agree (or not) to meet with your sales reps. Because pricing information is now sought much higher up in the sales funnel than most marketers suspect.

The good news is that most of your competitors face the same problem. Revealing your pricing — with all appropriate branding and lead generation flourishes — can become a competitive advantage for you in 2008.

Happy Holidays!

While studying guidebooks about Nepal yesterday, I was appalled to see one of them blithely suggest shopping for cheap, pirated CDs and DVDs here.

I immediately turned on my laptop to dash off an email to the publisher.

I planned to say, “As a company *completely* financially dependent on the sanctity of your copyright, how can you recommend supporting breaking other people’s? Everyone who creates or publishes content — every blogger, writer, video maker, etc. — has an ethical obligation to defend copyright. That means not just your own copyright but the copyright of others.”

Many Americans, in particular, don’t realize the true damage of copyright pirating. What’s the big deal? Hollywood studios and music stars make gazillions anyway, don’t they?

The fact is, routine copyright pirating has devastated the local music and movie industries of many second- and third-world countries, including places such as Madagascar and Morocco where talented and beloved artists can’t make a living because they are ripped off so much.

Copyright pirating also strikes closer to home — hundreds of millions of Google AdSense dollars are at risk in the legitimate blogging community. Nearly every single independent blogger I know who makes significant income from their content has had to fight at least one, more often many, plagiarizers who scrape their content for AdSense profit.

Sherpa has had its share of problems, most notably when one marketer, who shall remain nameless, posted illicit PDF copies of our Guides on a private website that he charged a $1,000 month subscription fee to. In the publishing world, this is not an unusual occurrence.

Anyhow, when I turned on my brand new laptop to register my righteous indignation to the publishers of that travel guide, I noticed something horrible. When the IT department back at the main office set up my new PC for me, they forgot to transition over my music files. My iTunes folder was empty.

I’m supposed to be writing a new 300-page Sherpa Handbook this winter. I can’t write a Handbook without my music playing! And, trust me, there’s no place I’ve found to purchase legit CDs here. Plus, at 128k max speeds, local “broadband” won’t support purchased iTunes downloads.

So I, the great defender of the American copyright, slunk into a local music store to buy some pirated CDs. At first, I pledged to buy only CDs that I already owned copies of. It’s sort of an ethically grayer area than buying content you didn’t already pay for legitimately.

But then Jack Johnson’s ‘In Between Dreams’ CD was playing on one of the shop’s sidewalk speakers … and it sounded so good. I had meant to buy it in the past — the real thing, I mean. I couldn’t help myself. I stepped up to the counter and said, ‘Give me that one” and, $5 later, owned it illegally.

Then I went straight to my local cybercafe and logged onto to my account at Amazon.com (one-click ordering is a godsend when you’re dealing with slow Internet speed) to buy a legit copy of Jack’s album. It’s en route to my home in the US right now, then my step-son will forward it to me here. I’ll throw out this copy as soon as I get the real thing in my hands. So, Jack and New Age Records, you have my money.

And, now, you have my apology as well.

Approximately 27 million Americans traveled over this past Thanksgiving holiday; and, all that time everyone spent standing in various lines (check-in, security, coffee, baggage claim) was pretty much a wasted marketing opportunity.

Aside from airline magazines and airport wall posters, very little marketing targets this captive audience, many of whom would be more than happy to seek a momentary mental escape. Here are my top three ideas based on my recent trip via India to Nepal, where I’m now living for the winter:

#1. Wi-Fi — Although TradeinIndia.com sponsors all the baggage carts in the New Delhi airport and The Times of India’s email opt-in offers are promoted on huge billboards in the departure lounge, frustratingly, there’s no Wi-Fi, sponsored or otherwise, at that airport.

This may change soon. When Delhi officials invited potential sponsors to submit proposals to sponsor free Wi-Fi in several downtown locations, they were stunned at the deluge of more than two dozen would-be advertisers.

#2. Video monitors — I didn’t mind long visa lines when we landed at Kathmandu’s International Airport because the gorgeous ads that played on oversized Samsung LCD monitors positioned around the room were a delight to watch … and even hear. The ads, presented on a continuous five-minute loop, featured tasteful local background music and glowing shots of regional crafts, scenery, restaurants and retailers. It was all put together by a local advertising entrepreneur.

#3. DVDs — Two of the airlines I took en route to Nepal offered free newspapers as you boarded the plane. Frankly, after sitting in waiting rooms for several hours beforehand, the last thing I wanted was yet another newspaper to read. But I would have been thrilled to get a free DVD.

Are you already sponsoring or creating compelling video content or an interactive game as a brand-building exercise? (For example: Grey Goose vodka’s ‘Iconoclasts’ TV series or Lunesta’s ‘The Art of the Story’ events.) Why not offer free DVDs to airline movie-weary travelers with PCs?

The point for all three of these ideas is not to bombard travelers with ads but, rather, to build a warmer relationship during a time when they are likely bored and a little exhausted. If you’ve already invested in entertaining content for your website, microsite, viral game or online video, why not repurpose this to make people’s trips a little more pleasant?

Like many women my age with a job and a family, I’m too busy in my regular life to pay attention to most sponsored websites or even regular TV shows. But when I’m traveling, I’m a captive and grateful audience. Reach me — I’ll thank you for it.