MarketingSherpa Blog

Marketing in highly competitive environments can be difficult as pressure mounts to stand out amongst fierce competitors in a space that feels like its constantly shrinking.

So, in today’s MarketingSherpa blog post, you will hear three ideas to inspire you from a MarketingExperiments Web clinic – “Discovering Your Value Proposition: 6 ways to stand out in a crowded marketplace.” Our goal is to share a few simple techniques to differentiate your offers in highly competitive environments and avoid “me too” marketing.

But first, let’s clarify what a value proposition is.

According to the MECLABS Value Proposition Development Online Course, a value proposition is defined as the answer to the question – “If I am your ideal prospect, why should I buy from you rather than your competitors?”

So, how would you answer this question about your offer?

Take a few minutes to brainstorm on how you would answer this question.

Now if what you wrote down read like any of these …

• “We empower you with software solutions.”
• “I don’t sell products and services; I sell results — my guarantee.”
• “We help people find their passion and purpose.”
• “We are the leading [insert your service here] provider.”
• “Get found online.”
• “This site has what the person is looking to find.”

Then, it’s likely your campaigns are underperforming. Here are some techniques you can use to plug some of the leaks in your sales funnel.

Technique #1: Craft offers that focus on your “only factor”

Your value proposition must include one aspect that differentiates you from your competitors. This one singularity is your “only factor.” If your value proposition doesn’t do this, you’re already at a disadvantage.

The goal here is to craft offers with a powerful only factor that will ideally have the right amount of appeal and exclusivity. Offers that are short on either of these elements can result in the following:

• Offers with appeal but not much exclusivity lose appeal in a crowded marketplace with lots of competitors, and choices, for your ideal customer.

• Offers that are exclusive but lack appeal quickly lose their leverage because not enough of those ideal customers will likely be motivated to act on your offer.

Technique #2: Support value propositions with clear evidentials

Evidentials are supporting claims in your offer that can be quantified and verified. To illustrate this point, let’s revisit the hypothetical car dealership owned by our Director of Editorial Content, Daniel Burstein.

Suppose Daniel decides to make a commercial for his dealership and in the ad he says:

“Please visit us at Burstein Auto; we have Florida’s best selection of cars for you to choose from!”

That statement is not very quantifiable because almost anyone can make the claim that they have the “best” of something.

Now if he were to instead say something like this …

“Please visit us at Burstein Auto; our dealership spans across five acres of land with over 1,500 new cars for you to choose from.”

The claims made in the second statement are quantified and have greater credibility because they can be verified. An overall goal for evidentials is to use them as bulleted points of information that support your claims strategically.

Here are a few key questions to ask yourself or your team about your evidentials:

• Is our claim quantifiable?
• Can our claim be verified?

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E-commerce on Facebook was a horrible flop. That is to say, many brands found over the course of several years of experimentation the return on investment in terms of dollars spent developing their online storefronts didn’t measure up, so many of the most popular retail brands – such as The Gap, JC Penney and Nordstrom – were subsequently forced to close their Facebook shops. A recent study by W3B suggested just 2% of people with a Facebook account have made a purchase on the social network.

Yet, simultaneously, e-commerce sites in general (Amazon, Fab.com, etc.) have posted impressive growth figures.  For example, holiday e-commerce sales were up 13% to $34 billion in 2012.

Why is it that some sites sell, and others don’t? In particular, why are social media sites so horrible at conversion? I believe it’s a phenomenon related to (what I refer to as) the locus of conversion.

Facebook is a pub crawl

The environment on Facebook yields similarities to the dynamic of a pub crawl. Surrounded by acquaintances and, yes, a few old friends, we dive into topics of various levels of seriousness ranging from the patently absurd, to the politically charged before wandering aimlessly from topic to topic.

We do so without expecting to be inundated with marketing messaging, much the same as we would expect to not be rudely interrupted by an insurance salesman while we were in the middle of telling our best frat house story from college at the local bar.

However, if you are able to be interesting enough to become the topic of our buzzed conversation, I might be willing, in that instant, to purchase your product. I don’t want to leave the bar, mind you. I just want a magical product genie to appear and offer your purple widget to me at a reasonable price. If I don’t have to leave my bar stool, you just might have a sale.

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When I was a kid fresh out of high school, I was a little socially awkward. I didn’t exactly understand the various types of social gatherings to which I was invited to, and I consequentially always showed up dressed incorrectly, saying the wrong things and bearing the wrong gifts. We all know the guy who shows up to the baby shower with a bottle of tequila, right?

Unfortunately, a similar situation exists in marketing circles when advertisers crash the proverbial wedding of social media platforms wearing board shorts and flip flops. That metaphor may be a little dense, so follow me…

For all of the analysis currently existing about how to best leverage social networks for marketing success, we actually understand comparatively little about how the various platforms work. Frequently, despite best efforts to the contrary, marketers end up looking like the odd man out simply by taking the wrong platform-specific tones with their campaigns.

Companies simply can’t expect to behave the same at different social functions and receive an overwhelmingly good response. Since we’re on the analogy train today, I’ll try to keep the theme going.

Facebook is a pub crawl

People spend most of their Facebook time interacting with their “friends.” In truth, most of the “friends” with whom we interact with on Facebook are merely acquaintances.

Nevertheless, the environment yields similarities to the dynamics of a pub crawl. Surrounded by acquaintances and, yes, a few old friends, we dive into topics of various levels of seriousness ranging from the patently absurd, to the politically charged before wandering aimlessly from topic to topic for a spell.

We do so without expecting to be inundated with marketing messaging, much the same as we would expect to not be rudely interrupted by an insurance salesman while we were in the middle of telling our best frat house story from college at the local bar.

In order to market effectively on Facebook, you first have to win a seat at the table, or be interesting enough to be the topic of our slightly buzzed conversation.

Twitter is a speed date

You’ve got 140 characters to impress me, so you’d better make it work for you.

I might spend a few extra minutes after the last round of speed dating with a particularly interesting person (company, product, etc.), but if I do, it will be because you have done or said something particularly compelling in your allotted time slot.  Equally as fun as interviewing potential dates, I can wander sneakily around the room to see what other people are saying about me …

“That guy has impeccable taste in clothing,” says one. “He’s stunningly good looking,” says another.

Brands can do the same with Twitter, getting a better idea of how the market is responding to their product offerings. In order to market on Twitter, you have to learn how to answer the question of what you’re into right now, and answer it in a compelling enough fashion for me to care when you’re done talking.

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Last November, we published a how-to article in the MarketingSherpa B2B Newsletter titled, “CRM How-to: Tactics on Marketing/IT alignment, database strategy and integrating social media data.” As you might guess from the title, the article covered a range of customer relationship marketing concepts. To get the insights presented in the piece, I spoke with six industry experts.

With all of this great information at hand, I faced a common “problem” that crops up when researching multi-source MarketingSherpa articles – after writing a thorough how-to article, I still had a huge amount of great material that just didn’t make it into the piece. The solution? Offer those insights in a couple of additional blog posts.

Here on the MarketingSherpa Blog, we published, “Defining CRM: Thoughts from three experts,” a deeper look into how different industry experts actually define the term “customer relationship management” (and a fascinating group of opinions that might change the way you think of CRM), and another on the B2B Lead Blog, “Sales and Marketing: The technology behind CRM.”

Today, I’d like to offer more insights into CRM, and also add another industry expert to the entire mix, Lou Guercia, President and CEO, Scribe Software, a data integration and migration software company.

4 doors into the company

One key distinction covered in the post on defining customer relationship management was between CRM as simply a technology piece of software that might be as narrowly defined as the software utilized by Sales, or CRM technology embracing marketing automation and email technology as well, compared against CRM as a holistic customer lifetime experience that takes into account marketing activity, sales actions and customer service.

Even though he is coming from a very data-centric perspective, Lou said he sees CRM from the customer lifetime perspective.

He explained the four touch points, or “doors,” for customers interacting with your company:

• Marketing
• Sales
• Support (customer service)
• Finance

“What can we do to do support customers better?” Lou asked. “Think through what would be the data requirements and the workflows that would allow our business to service those customers through those four doors to the company in a way that would make those customers happy and more likely to continue to use our product or service.”

In the list of “doors,” I found it very interesting Lou added finance. Customer service is often mentioned in the holistic view of CRM, but from a customer touch point perspective, and maybe even more importantly from customer data perspective, how that person interacts with the finance department is a very important piece of the customer lifecycle.

The largest section of the original how-to article we published was on the database, and whether companies should keep separate databases for Marketing and Sales.

The opinion was mixed, with one expert, Brian Vellmure, Founder, Initium LLC/Innovantage International, splitting the difference suggesting one, or two, databases should be determined on a case-by-case basis, even though he did suggest there needed to be some way to merge all data for the ability to perform end-to-end data analysis.

Lou said a CRM implementation strategy should include integrating the Marketing and Sales databases if those are not already in sync, but the next stage would be to integrate the accounting and financial data into that overarching database as well.

With this total insight into the individual customer, if a database record changes for any reason at any point in the customer lifecycle – as a database prospect, after the handoff to Sales as a qualified lead, or at the account level post-conversion to a customer – the database everyone is using contains the correct information.

This means Marketing and Sales continuing efforts in up-selling, cross-selling and ongoing brand awareness understand, and can react to, changes in that customer’s status – maybe their phone number, job title or possibly even company changed over time.

The cloud and big data

As a marketer you might be thinking, “Oh man, first I have to get aligned with Sales and get all of us playing in the same data sandbox, and now I have to think about adding Finance to the mix?”

Lou suggested any CRM implementation strategy should be handled incrementally, and there’s no need to “boil the ocean” and try to do everything at once. At the same time, there needs to be an overall plan for the implementation.

He said, “If you think it through from a process level:

• What are we trying to do?
• What can we improve on?
• What feedback have we heard from these customers?
• How can improve the way we work with those customers and prospects?
• What are the data elements that we are going to need to do that and then have an actionable, prioritized plan?”

The implementation should be based on an overarching plan, and he said to avoid being so tactical that urgent problems get fixed without a framework in place for the entire process.

From a data perspective, one relatively new technological solution is out there.

“One factor that is impacting the market for adopting this kind of strategy is the rampant growth of cloud services,” Lou said.

He added the cloud provides the ability to link data from sources ranging from sales and marketing automation technology, call center systems and even accounting and finance.

Lou said one school of thought regarding another hot term right now – big data – is the idea of “give me every bleeping piece of data under the sun, and I will have smart algorithms that will figure out where to get some patterns.”

“I think that’s great for IBM,” he explained. “What I am about is relevant data sets. What are the types of data that you would want that can be reasonably well parsed through and used by organizations.”

He added big data is about finding patterns in unstructured data that will be helpful to the business, and marketers probably know what data they want for better access into customer insights. The challenge is managing big data in a coordinated way.

“Maybe I am not about ‘big data’ in the classic sense, but more [about] relevant use of bigger data, not vast data,” Lou explained.

Brian Vellmure, the advocate of allowing corporate culture to determine the database strategy, provided another perspective on actually handling big data for marketers:

Big data will allow us to obviously understand our customers better.

If we can understand who they are, who they are interacting with, where they go, what they are interested in beyond our products and service offering, and what their normal day in a life is, then obviously, we have a potential to bring them the right message at the right time.

It is not intrusive. It is not annoying, and it also allows us to find patterns that we didn’t even know to look for before.

Read more…

With a new upscale product line, Michaels Stores decided to look toward harnessing the considerable power of its 150,000 followers on Pinterest, where the marketing team fosters “tremendous engagement,” according to Robert Freeman, Director, Digital & Social Marketing, Michaels.

This was the challenge for Michaels – to use those followers to build awareness on the platform for its new upscale line of frames, the “Platinum Collection from Studio Décor,” as well as driving engagement within their Pinterest audience.

Michaels decided to capitalize on its social media audience by launching a contest on Pinterest to users in both the United States and Canada – the “Pin It to Win It” campaign.

Freeman said Michaels chose Pinterest as the platform for launching this contest because it made sense on three levels:

1. The new frame collection seemed like the right type of product to bring to this audience because, “First, Michaels has seen = Pinterest users are looking for project inspiration and are highly engaged with inspirational content on Pinterest,” he said.
2. Michaels found Pinterest users enjoy engaging in promotions, especially those that are compelling and easy to enter.
3. Pinterest provided an environment in which Michaels could showcase its products “both contextually and visually, to increase interest in the product,” he concluded.

With simplicity as one of the main objectives for the campaign, there were only a few key steps for users to participate in the contest.

The prize chosen were two $500 gift cards to Michaels to “to build your own display wall!” and the process for entering was threefold:

• Follow Michaels Stores on Pinterest
• Fill out a form asking for name, email address and postal code
• Pin the image of “our new Studio Décor Platinum Collection”

At MarketingSherpa, we are often asked:

• Are my open rates low?
• What is the ideal conversion rate?
• Why do I have a high unsubscribe rate and how can I improve it?

Unfortunately, these are the marketing equivalents of “What’s the meaning of life?” While some blogs might have a pithy response with the perfect solution usually involving the product they sell, much like the meaning of life question, the answer likely varies based on your unique situation.

But … I can help you answer these types of questions for yourself, by answering this question we received from Jim on a recent email marketing webinar …

• What is the biggest mistake people are making in today’s environment?

To me, every marketing campaign (and really, everything we do in life) can be improved by taking these three steps …

1. Learn
2. Test
3. Iterate

In today’s MarketingSherpa blog post, I’m going to focus on the “learn” step, because I sometimes feel marketers don’t cast a wide enough net during this crucial step. And, that’s what we do here at MarketingSherpa – we help you learn.

Of course, once you have new ideas about what might work for your company, test them. In this way, you can try some really radical ideas to drastically improve results while mitigating risk. Our sister site, MarketingExperiments, can teach you more about testing.

And, of course, iterate. Or as the shampoo marketers like to say – repeat. What works now will not necessarily work in the future. The marketplace is not static. You must constantly learn new ideas, and try them out.

Learn

Here’s where MarketingSherpa can help. We can give you examples of what other marketers have learned through case studies and how-to articles, webinars, Benchmark Reports and blog posts such as this one.

When we look for case studies to write, we cast our net far and wide. This is where some marketers struggle. Unless the case study subject is from the same exact niche they serve, sometimes they struggle in finding the transferable principles.

On the flip side, when the case study is about a subject from the same exact niche, sometimes marketers overemphasize whether these lessons will work for them. Even if they are in the same niche, after all, they may have a very different value proposition.

So, as you try to address these challenges, ask yourself:

• How are you learning from other marketers?
• What biases are holding you back from learning from other marketers?
• Are you overvaluing marketing tactics your competitors are doing simply because you’re in the same space?
• On the flip side, do you undervalue tactics your competitor is doing because they “play for a different team?”
• Do you look outside of your particular industry to bring new marketing ideas to your space?
• What biases do you hold against tactics other marketers use outside your industry (B2B vs. B2C, for-profit vs. nonprofit vs. political)?
• What biases do you hold against tactics other marketers use based on your personal opinion of their product, service or cause?

So, let me give you some examples …

In Thursday’s MarketingSherpa Inbound Marketing Newsletter, we distributed a case study called “Search Engine Marketing: E-commerce site turns an 82% bounce rate around for a 400% conversion increase.” I really like this case study because it covers one of those common, all-encompassing questions we often receive:

• Why does my landing page have a high bounce rate?

Learn from marketers in any industry

This case study is about how Tops Products answered that question, and the resulting improvement in conversion rate. If a marketer saw the case study was about an office supply company, and they were perhaps a B2B service provider or a brick-and-mortar store, they might overlook the key transferable principles.

Tops Products was getting a huge bounce rate because the great inbound link it was sending people to the wrong page. After using a 301 redirect, Tops Products reduced bounce rate 39% and increased conversion 400%. That lesson is helpful to marketers in any industry.

Read more…

Game on! There are 120 million people enrolled in travel rewards programs and more than 200 million play reward-based online games, according to Bunchball.

To help you get started with your own gamification app, here are three tips. Since gamification apps are such a new and emerging tactic, we would love to hear your thoughts in the comments section of this MarketingSherpa blog post, as well.

Tip #1: Provide value in game form

For a gamification app to help your content marketing, it should tie into the value your paid products or services offer. All paid products or services do one of two things:

• Help a customer alleviate a pain point
• Help a customer achieve a goal

In content marketing, you translate the value your products have in these two areas into some form of content, like a video or blog post.

With a gamification app, you take that value one step further by making pain point removal or customer goal achievement fun, and add a reward.

There may be many obvious ways to do this if you have a consumer brand. However, B2B marketers often tell me they find it challenging to produce engaging, or dare I say, fun, content.

Let’s take an example. Imagine if you sold manufacturing solutions. To engineers and plant managers. Sounds boring, right?

Well, Siemens turned that combination into an engaging game called Plantville. To learn more about it, and get ideas for your own games, read “Gamification: How Siemens got 23,000 engineers to learn about its brand.”

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At MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2013, I grabbed Manny Ju, Director of Product Management, BlueHornet, and asked him about mobile email marketing for our latest episode of Marketing Research in Action …

Here is a closer look at some research Manny shared. First, Manny discussed research from the MarketingSherpa 2012 Mobile Marketing Benchmark Report (Full discolosure: BlueHornet is the sponsor of this Benchmark Report, and was a sponsor at Email Summit 2013). As you can see, increasing sales conversion/revenue is the top business objective for mobile marketing.

Q: What are your TOP BUSINESS OBJECTIVES for mobile marketing in the next 12 months?

In the MarketingSherpa 2012 Email Marketing Benchmark Report, financial return on investment (quantitative return on email investment) was the most important objective as well …

Q. As CMO or the senior marketing executive in your organization, how important are the following factors in helping you determine and communicate the value of email marketing programs?

  Read more…

Despite Super Bowl ads promoting the misconception that social media marketing is full of clueless hipsters, the social media marketing channel provides a wealth of data marketers can use for analytics to optimize and improve campaigns.

Jay Baer, President, Convince & Convert, in his keynote presentation at the recently held MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2013 in Las Vegas, even made the case that email marketing and social media marketing are similar in three main areas:

• Operations and measurement
• Channel and audience
• Message and content

Jay went on to describe social media as email “with a fresh coat of paint.”

So, if you accept Jay’s analysis – and he makes a very sound point on the topic – email, the elder statesman of digital marketing, and social, the new kid on the block, are more similar than different.

When you take “measurement” from the first bullet point in mind, email metrics are likely fairly ingrained for most marketers – open rates, clickthrough rates, unsubscribe rates, list building, etc.

To take a closer look at social media marketing metrics, I turned to the recently published MarketingSherpa 2013 Marketing Analytics Benchmark Report and found this chart:

And, here is commentary from Brad Bortone, Senior Research Editor, MECLABS, and editor of the report:

HOW ARE MARKETERS TRACKING SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING METRICS?

Despite the fact that only 48% of surveyed marketers tracked social media marketing metrics, those who did were tracking a wide breadth of social tactics, with social reach (e.g., total followers, “likes,” etc.) being the most reported at 61%. This is likely the highest performer because these metrics are obtainable directly from the social media outlet in question.

This immediacy was beneficial to Mary Morel, Director, The M Factor Pty Ltd, who said social media enabled her the ability to, “concentrate most on regularly providing valuable information to build brand and watch Facebook stats, Twitter followers, Google Analytics, e-newsletter opens, subscribes and unsubscribes, and blog stats.”

Likewise, traffic referral data (49%) is information available from the social media outlet, and from link-tracking tools.

Read more…

When your customer uses your product to sell a service, helping that customer sell their service provides both a co-marketing opportunity and a way to offer an additional level of customer service.

Toshiba America Medical Systems’ customers are medical imaging centers buying large medical devices such as MRI, CT and ultrasound scanners, and use those products to provide medical services.

Toshiba combines a co-marketing opportunity with a customer service element through Image Maker, an online portal. With this program, the team provides Toshiba Medical customers with some basic marketing advice along with a wide range of marketing materials – brochures, press releases, videos and more – for each of the company’s main product areas:

• Cardiovascular x-ray
• Computed tomography
• Magnetic resonance
• Ultrasound
• X-ray

These products are expensive, ranging from $50,000 for an ultrasound system to more than $1 million for a MR scanner.

I had the opportunity to interview Catherine Wolfe, Senior Director of Corporate and Strategic Communications, Toshiba America Medical Systems, for more details about the Image Maker portal.

Why create this online resource for marketing materials?

Catherine said Image Maker was created for two basic reasons – increase customer satisfaction, and brand building as a co-marketing program.

“The issue for our customers is how can they get information that helps them differentiate themselves in their particular market about the equipment and the benefits that it provides,” Catherine explained.

She added, “The other issue for us is how can we build our brand to the greatest extent possible, and by providing this added support to our customers, we are able to get our message out there to a much greater extent than we would otherwise be able to.”

Who is the marketing material for?

The marketing material found on the Image Maker is extensive enough a Toshiba Medical customer with limited staff or time could easily pull the creative pieces,  review some marketing advice and execute campaigns.

At the same time, Catherine said many of Toshiba Medical’s customers do have marketing staff and the material helps those marketers with ready-made art and messaging.

The online resource also alleviates a particular pain point for marketers in the healthcare industry.

Catherine explained, “The healthcare industry overall— it’s more difficult. Costs are being constrained more and more. Marketing tends to be one of those budgets that gets cut, so we are able to step in and help folks that may have experienced that.”

Beyond the actual materials and other online resources, the marketing team at Toshiba Medical has a dedicated staff member who provides support directly to its customers with marketing recommendations based on other customer’s experiences on meeting various marketing challenges.

What is in the resource center?

Catherine outlined some of different types of marketing content in the Image Maker portal:

• The most basic includes press releases or letters for referring physicians to help with local marketing
• Radio spots
• Videos for embedding on websites or even for broadcast advertising
• Brochures and promotional material

She added the brochures have areas where the marketer can customize the material by adding their own branding and information.

Read more…