MarketingSherpa Blog

“We try to have fun with everything we do, and our audience seems to respond to it pretty well,” Gregg Barclay, Senior Videographer, SparkFun Electronics, told me in an interview at last year’s MarketingSherpa Media Center at IRCE.

What it takes to produce online video marketing

YouTube, Vimeo and other online video sites have lowered the bar on what it takes to use video to promote your product to consumers. They no longer expect a slick commercial with a massive production staff and budget. The DIY feel can resonate with customers, as well (and for the right product, feel more authentic).

But, as with any business initiative, video still requires a resource investment. For a company with relatively limited revenue ($30 million in sales), SparkFun has nonetheless chosen to make a significant investment in video with seven or 130 employees dedicated to this purpose.

Only two (including Gregg) are involved in the actual shooting and editing of the video. Additionally, there are three full-time creative technologists building products. The team invests a few days in preproduction while the shooting and editing is complete in just a few hours.

This may be a reason SparkFun’s videos have been successful. After all, no matter how slickly a video is produced, it is just a container. You must fill that container with entertaining, helpful content.

“I never wanted our videos to feel like commercials,” Gregg said. “I wanted them to feel like these are projects that we would build whether we were working there or not, and I think that that’s what our audience really responds to because they’re doing the same things that we are.”

The electronics retailer introduces 10-15 products per week, and its team is able to produce two to five videos per week that shows customers how they can use them.

Video content driven by fun online tutorials

While the site also includes more traditional tutorials, along with informational product and how-to clips, fun is a key component in many of the videos, such as in the LIDAR Lite Module video or SparkFun Claw Machine! video.

“We always think of fun first. It’s in our name — SparkFun Electronics,” Gregg said. “There might be more conventional uses for these products, but we try to think out of the box a little bit and really get people thinking of other ways to use this kind of stuff.”

As a result, 1.75% of people who view a video on SparkFun Electronics buy a product within that session. This doesn’t include people who watch a video and come back later to purchase, or those who watch a video on YouTube, so the real impact might be even higher.

 We’ll be heading to Chicago in a few weeks to bring you more stories of marketing, ecommerce and fun from the MarketingSherpa Media Center at IRCE 2016.

 You can follow Daniel Burstein, Director of Editorial Content, MECLABS Institute, @DanielBurstein.

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MarketingSherpa Summit 2017 in Las Vegas Call for Speakers — Tell us your story for a chance to speak and, as a bonus, win a trip to Summit in the MarketingSherpa Awards

In the article from today’s MarketingSherpa Chart of the Week newsletter, we share data produced exclusively for MarketingSherpa by Adestra and Econsultancy, which identified the mobile email marketing optimization techniques that most commonly produce excellent email marketing ROI.

You can take a closer look at the data in the article – Email Marketing Chart: ROI from optimizing email for mobile devices – but here’s the punchline: Optimizing emails for mobile is more than three times as likely to generate ROI.

If you need data to help justify the budget, resources, and buy-in you need from business leaders or clients for optimized mobile email marketing (or if you’re already optimizing your mobile email marketing but need resources to move to the next level), the chart is an excellent asset.

So now what? Let’s say you get the resources … where do you begin? Or perhaps you’re already several years down the road, but are running out of ideas on what to do next.

To help with your mobile email marketing, we interviewed four experts who gave us invaluable tips for both beginner and advanced mobile email marketers. We’re including all the tips in one blog post to allow you to easily scan because, let’s face it, one marketer’s “beginner tactic” is another marketer’s “advanced idea.”

Let’s get started …

Tip #1. Start simple

No matter your budget or resources, adding tasks to your department’s already overflowing plate is no easy feat. This is especially true when you consider the proliferation of mobile device types, screen sizes, operating systems, email readers, and download speeds.

(You can multiply that complexity several times over if you have an international customer base.)

But the experts we interviewed encouraged marketers to simply get started on the changes you’re capable of making right away, and not trying to swallow all that complexity with one bite.

“Most of those just starting on the mobile optimization journey feel overwhelmed, so they should keep in mind that simplicity is often the best route,” said Monica Savut, Senior Research Manager, Econsultancy. “Focusing on the core components is key, from using a single-column design and hiding content that might not be essential in a mobile view, to including a mobile-friendly pre-header and designing for ‘fingers and thumbs.’”

“For companies just starting to put a mobile strategy together, simplifying is key,” agreed Aaron Pearson, Product Manager, Listrak. “Simplify you template and layout; simplify your content such as copy, buttons, and images. A mobile-optimized template doesn’t necessarily have to be responsive, so don’t worry about spending time developing a hugely complex system to deliver content to your subscribers. Instead, focus on iterating your content strategy and begin to improve the conversation with your audience.”

Read more…

Every Friday leading up to June 7, when IRCE begins in Chicago, MarketingSherpa will be diving into the lessons learned from last year’s Media Center interviews with speakers and attendees, such as Eoin Comerford, CEO, Moosejaw. He and I spoke last year about taking risks in campaigns in order to reap the rewards of customer loyalty.

“What it comes down to is, do you want a brand that people will care about? If you try to be all things to all people, you’re really nothing to nobody,” he said.

Read more…

Editor’s Note: This interview was edited for length and grammar only.

Marketers by the very nature of what they do are constantly trying to predict what’s going to happen next. That could include answering questions like: What’s our next big campaign? How will this new channel perform at generating leads? Will this strategy work?

But marketers seldom — if at all — get to sit back to wonder about or predict the broader future of marketing.

In my role as chief evangelist, I often get to talk to influencers about what they’re seeing in the marketing community. When I read about Nick Johnson, Brand Director, Incite Group, and the research he did to understand the future of marketing, and later writing a book about it, I wanted to talk to him about what he learned and how marketers can get ready for the future of marketing.

Brian Carroll: What inspired you to research and write about the Future of Marketing?

Nick Johnson: A variety of things really, so I’ve been fortunate enough to be in a position to speak with senior marketing executives on a daily basis for five years now in my position of running Incite.

I spend a lot of my time doing research, working out what priorities, challenges and shifting opportunities there are for marketers — which get into white papers and reports we put together. It became apparent there was an unprecedented level of turbulence in the space. The changes in marketing were happening at a pace that was unprecedented and shift in terms of the marketer’s role and their ability to influence the fortunes of their company were absolutely enormous. I remember speaking to several marketers that have been in their positions for decades and they say things like, “I used to know what I was doing and now it’s all changed.”

  Read more…

U.S. media ad spending will hit $200 billion in 2016, according to eMarketer. And yet, when we asked 2,021 customers how they discover new products, advertising was the fifth most popular response with offline and online advertising tied for fifth with 27% of responses.

“In-store browsing” was the most popular (59%), and the focus of today’s MarketingSherpa Blog post — “word of mouth from friends, family, colleagues” — was a close second at 57%.

However, when we asked marketers how they actually helped customers learn about products, there was a bit of a disconnect from customer preferences. Online advertising was the most frequently used tactic (60%), while “encouraging word of mouth” was only the fifth most popular tactic (chosen by 45% of marketers).

How can you increase word of mouth for your products and services?

Be awesome.

This will generate organic referrals at the highest rate.

But a deeper question is more applicable to marketers — how can you leverage word of mouth in your marketing to increase conversion?

Here are three ideas for your campaigns.

Idea #1. Help, not hype

“My experience with Summit has just been seamless. I got the opportunity to submit some different proud moments for marketing and my team’s successes. And then having the opportunity to be selected and the opportunity to be with such a prestigious organization was very flattering. Then I was very, very prepared every step of the way. I had a dedicated team that was sending me updates, giving me clear deadlines, supporting me along the way — just made it incredibly professional and certainly best in class.”

That quote is from Cambria Jacobs, Vice President of Marketing and Customer Service, Door to Door Organics, from a video promoting the MarketingSherpa Summit 2017 Call for Speakers.

Now, we didn’t need to have Cambria in the video. I could have told you how amazing it is to be a speaker at MarketingSherpa Summit 2017 at the Aria Resort in Las Vegas. How you’ll have your name up in lights. You will be fawned over by an adoring crowd of marketers. And, most importantly, you may even get the distinct honor and privilege of working directly with me for several months — a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that you will never forget — as I help you shape your story before we discuss it on stage.

Read more…

Recently, I wrote about our need to guard against company logic. I argued that it is very easy for us as marketers to slip into a mindset that ignores the ultimate desires of the customer. This is a struggle experienced by all companies, big or small, new or old, well-known or unknown.

Ironically, as one commenter posted, perhaps even my blog post suffered from a little company logic as it seemed to focus on what I wanted to say rather than what would have most served the audience: more application. Knowing myself, and the tendency that I have just like anyone else, it may very well be true. I can also relate to wanting to know not just the “what” of a thing but also the “how.”

So, in the spirit of taking my own medicine, I would like to attempt being a little more customer centric and suggest four ways in which we can practically guard against company logic and become more customer-centric marketers. These are not the only four ways, but they are a good place to start.

#1. Listen

Learning the discipline of listening to your customer is essential for all marketers. This is where a marketer should always start. Listening to customers was once much more difficult, but today there is so much feedback our customer is giving to us. With the prevailing social dynamic of the Internet, our customers are constantly talking to us (directly or indirectly). We just have to make sure we are listening.

Many marketers are tempted to fear social feedback. I mean, who really wants to hear someone else critique you? However, if we are really doing our job, we will embrace both pleasant and painful insights that we gain from hearing from the customer. It is so easy to become insular and solicit feedback only from our peers, but we must force ourselves to hear the customer’s feedback. Sometimes that comes in the form of them talking directly to us, and other times it comes in the form of customers talking to one another. Nonetheless, our customers are talking, and we must learn to listen.

Read more…

With spring now upon us, are you ready to “spring clean” your email lists?

It’s a hard task to take on. No one likes to see their list decline. However, list hygiene is an important part of any email strategy.

“Blasting your emails to an unqualified list could result in account suspensions from your email platform, penalties, or even fines, not to mention dismal marketing results,” according to the Salesforce article “How to Keep Your Email Lists Sparkling Clean.”

If many of your email addresses are undeliverable or people are marking you as spam, your email reputation suffers. You could be causing yourself to be flagged as spam in your customer’s inboxes — and that won’t get your campaigns very far.

To get your list back to a healthy state and stay that way, we’ve outline six steps for your team to take.

Step #1. Delete fake, role-based and misspelled email addresses

To start your email spring cleaning, examine your list for the addresses you won’t hope to win-back. This includes those that don’t actually make it to someone (and probably never have).

For various reasons, consumers don’t always provide the correct information online. As an initial step into cleaning your list, you’ll want to delete all the bogus email addresses. These could include emails like:

• test@gmail.com
• 123@company.com
• asdf@asdf.com (This address even has a fake website to go with it.)

You’ll probably want to eliminate role email address as well. These are typically groups, not individuals, where no one will actually open, read or click your emails. A few examples include:

• admin@example.com
• info@example.com
• media@example.com

Read more…

Let’s say you’re an intrepid marketer at a company. You’ve read about the power of inbound marketing, have started your company’s blog, and … now what? How do you get these subject matter experts (SMEs) to blog? And what should they blog about?

Or perhaps you have an established content marketing blog — you’ve been going for years. But your SMEs are running out of ideas for blog topics. What should you do?

Keep reading (and then send your SMEs this blog post).

The analogy

Photo: Cirofono

Now that we’ve established the problem, let’s look to an analogy laced with a pop reference to help give you an approach to solve it.

When George and Jerry are pitching the idea of the “show about nothing” to NBC executives on “Seinfeld,” George asks …

George: What did you do today?
NBC Exec: I got up and came to work.
George: There’s a show! That’s a show.
NBC Exec: How is that a show?

The Seinfeld Method

If your SMEs don’t think they have anything helpful to blog about for your audience, ask them, “What did you do today?”

Their day-to-day role likely spurs many topics that would benefit your ideal customer but are hidden in the four walls of your company. In fact, are you read this blog post, your SMEs are probably:

• Helping Sales on a customer call
• Assisting customer service answer a customer’s question
• Learning something key about the industry themselves
• Following an established process they’ve created to complete a key task in your industry
• Having their own unique take on how a piece of general news applies to your industry
• Learning how your product or service is helping a customer
• Teaching a new employee key skills
• Making a discovery as a customer themselves

Almost everything done in their job is content.

Read more…

How do you turn a name on a list into a loyal and engaged subscriber?

Ecommerce site NakedWines.com has accomplished this by establishing a community of customers and “Angel” members. These customers fund independent wine makers in return for access to hand-crafted wine at a lower cost.

At the MarketingSherpa Summit 2016 Media Center, Julia Fox, Marketing Manager, NakedWines.com, spoke about how her team wanted to maximize member lifetime value during the early phases of the customer journey.

“Since we’re all ecommerce, email is obviously a huge part of our success,” Julia said, adding that most of the company’s revenue comes from these “Angel” members, which means nurturing new customers into Angels through this channel is especially important.

Read more…

Assuming you don’t live in a shell, you have probably seen or heard of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. They’re the immensely popular superhero group that began as a comic in the 80s, and reached peak popularity in the 90s, and to this day, maintains a cult following with children and adults alike.

Even as fun and interesting as the premise is, we can still ask the question: Why have they stayed so popular over the years?

My take is it’s because of the characters.

The dynamic brothers, consisting of Leonardo, Raphael, Donatello and Michelangelo, have so much variety in their personalities, which allows them to approach problem-solving situations in any multitude of ways. This also allows for a lot of creative freedom on the creators’ end.

Personality is what captures an audience, as well as builds a brand.

Your landing page has, or can have, just as much personality as a character, whether you realize it or not. Below are four different characteristics of landing pages, named after the four different turtles:

• Leo:  clear, simple, collected, peaceful
• Raph:  aggressive, loud, attention-grabbing, urgent
• Donnie:  calm, intelligent, factual, to-the-point
• Mikey: fun, silly, lighthearted, nonchalant, social

Read more…