MarketingSherpa Blog

Originally published on B2B LeadBlog

This week, I’ve joined marketers from around the world in Athens Americana — Boston, Mass. for MarketingSherpa and MarketingExperiments Optimization Summit 2013. After a short (and rather scenic) water taxi ride from the airport, I’ve settled into one of the Value Proposition Development Course sessions being led by Austin McCraw, Senior Editorial Analyst, MECLABS, as he teaches marketers how to craft and express value propositions.

“I want to take the theory that we have put in place so far, and bring it down to a ground floor level of application,” Austin said.

So, today’s B2B Lead Roundtable Blog will highlight that ground floor application from Austin’s session by showing you how you can craft a value proposition in five simple steps. Our goal is to give marketers a frameworkthey can use to identify and express a value proposition using the MECLABS value proposition worksheet.

However, before we get started, take moment to download this worksheet to aid your value proposition efforts and let’s get clear on what a value proposition is exactly…

What is a value proposition?

According to Austin, there’s a fundamental question every customer wants answered that directly impacts your ability to capture and convert — “If I’m your ideal prospect, why should I buy from you rather than any of your competitors?”

“Your value proposition is the ultimate reason why your prospects should do business with you,” Austin explained.

To put this further into perspective, take a moment to ask yourself, “Can I clearly and succinctly state the core value proposition of the product or service that I am marketing?” and write down you answer.

If what you wrote down resembles any of these …

• “We empower your software decisions.”
• “I don’t sell products and services; I sell results — my guarantee.”
• “We help companies find their passion and purpose.”
• “We are the leading [insert your service here] provider.”
• “We give XX% off for new clients.”
• “This site has the solution your company is looking for.”

Then it’s very likely your marketing campaigns are underperforming from poorly-crafted value propositions that are also likely leaving some serious leads and revenue on the table.

Step #1: Identify the value proposition question

Austin explained the first step in crafting a value proposition is to identify the type of value proposition you need to answer.

“Once you have identified the value proposition question you want to answer, you have already won half of the battle,” Austin said.

And so, you first have to choose which question you want to answer; be it the primary question of “If I’m your ideal prospect, why should I buy from you rather than any of your competitors?” or a derivative value proposition that has a much more granular focus on your products or process.

Step #2: Identify potential claims of value

The next step is to list some potential claims of value that answer the primary value proposition question we identified in step one.

To illustrate this, I created a hypothetical email service provider and listed some potential claims of value.

Step #3: Rate the appeal and exclusivity for each claim

After you’ve listed some possible claims, rank them from one through five according to their appeal and exclusivity, of which:

• Appeal — “How much is this offer desired by the market?“
• Exclusivity — “Is this offer available anywhere else in the market?“

In keeping with our example, let’s take a deeper look at appeal and exclusivity of our highest-ranking example claim.

“We can integrate into any social media platform”

• Appeal: 4.5 — The ability to conduct multichannel marketing with your emails is going to have a reasonably high amount of appeal to our hypothetical ideal prospect.
• Exclusivity: 5.0 — While there may be other players in our market; our business intelligence has determined that we are the only ESP currently capable of integration into every social media platform.

Step #4: Identify evidentials for your highest-ranked claims

Evidentials are the backbone of your potential claim because they make your claim quantifiable, or as Austin explained, “Once you understand your appeal and exclusivity, you want to begin building supporting credibility with your evidentials.”

To help intensify the credibility of potential claims, Austin shared three key principles for selecting evidentials:

1. Specification — Substitute general descriptions with specific facts.
2. Quantification — Quantify your claims.
3. Verification — Let someone else do your bragging.

Step #5: Combine the highest-ranked claims with supporting evidentials

This is where you bring it all together — by taking your highest-ranked claims and their supporting evidentials and turning them into what Austin described as “the ultimate conclusion as to why prospects should buy from you.”

Related Resources:

Value Proposition: Congress has a value exchange problem … do your marketing offers?

Value Prop: Is there true value in your marketing proposition?

Customer Value: The 4 essential levels of value propositions

Through testing with our Research Partners, I’ve discovered a few common mistakes marketers make when crafting paid search campaigns using Google AdWords.

So, in today’s MarketingSherpa blog post, my goal is to provide you with a few fundamentals  to aid  paid search marketing efforts and, hopefully, help you avoid a few pitfalls along the way.

Mistake #1: Grouping all keywords into one ad group

Keywords are the heart of your ads and relevance is their soul.

So, if you lump all of your keywords into one ad group, the impact will be some keywords become highly relevant to the ad group while others are not.

This is a common mistake marketers make under the guise that the tactic will boost impressions. It will – but this approach is more expensive and those less relevant keywords that boost impressions are also likely to underperform.

Think of it this way … would you run an ad for plumbing fixtures in People magazine with the expectations that it will perform like an ad for the latest celebrity perfume line?

Mistake #2: Not testing ads

Another common mistake marketers make is not testing their ads.

Although testing is something we live and breathe every day at MECLABS, it’s important to understand in digital marketing, there are no sacred cows. Speculation on campaign performance is for the birds – unless you test, you’ll never discover what really works.

So, my suggestion is that you test. With AdWords, having two or more tests running is ideal as there is no other way to effectively benchmark an ad’s performance efficiently.

Read more…

Far too often, marketers become so ingrained within their own industry they fail to look elsewhere for valuable insights. My goal for this post is to challenge you to broaden your horizons and escape the confines of your industry.

I’m willing to bet you’ll find something worthwhile.

First, a definition …

Cross-industry competitive analysis is a study of company behavior and performance, outside of one specific industry, comparing several significant competitors. Using appropriate tools and tactics, researchers use analytic data to determine paradigm shifts within similar industries, and make predictions about possible cross-industry trends.

(MECLABS has a series of free competitive analysis templates for you to download, in case you need a little help getting started.)

Where to begin?

Now, one of the most difficult aspects of cross-industry competitive analysis is trying to figure out where to begin. Are you supposed to arbitrarily select a different industry from which to begin pulling valuable insights? The answer is found in one key aspect of every company – from the brand-new startup, to corporate giants like Apple, every company has one thing in common that they cannot survive without …

The customer.

It doesn’t matter if you have the greatest product in the world – without an interested customer, it really has no more value than the old shoe on the side of the road. I cannot stress this enough: the key to finding valuable insights in other industries is putting yourself in the shoes of your customer.

Read more…

When I was growing up, I remember a phrase my dad would use as a delay tactic on making big ticket purchase decisions that often frustrated my mother.

“I’ll ask the boys at work,“ he would reply.

My dad’s insistence on consulting people he perceived as experts before making a purchase is telling of human behavior – customers prefer to make decisions based on information, not persuasion.

I mention this because a shift to information over persuasion is coming to social media, driven by Facebook’s new Graph Search tool.

The way Graph Search works is simple … it filters our search results by what our friends and neighbors have previously liked and shared with us.

From a business intelligence perspective, the implications of this new function could be far reaching, given Graph Search allows users to formulate their perceptions of goods and services based on reviews from people they know and trust, potentially sidestepping most marketing efforts.

Here’s an example of Graph Search in action using the surroundings of our office here in Jacksonville Beach to put this into further perspective …

With Graph Search, relevance is king

Imagine you’ve just bought a beach cruiser and you’re searching Facebook to find the best spots for fun and entertainment in Jacksonville Beach.

Now, let’s say you search for “fun places to bike in Jacksonville Beach.”

Graph Search will present options your friends or other bicycle enthusiasts in a given geographical proximity have liked and shared.

From a customer’s perspective, this makes total sense.

Would you prefer to sift through a laundry list of options presented at random, or evaluate choices your friends and other biking enthusiasts are recommending?

Read more…

MarketingSherpa and MarketingExperiments Optimization Summit 2013 is rapidly approaching, and today’s video excerpt offers an exciting preview for one of the sessions, “Boston Globe: Discovering and optimizing a value proposition,” featuring Peter Doucette, Executive Director of Circulation Sales & Marketing, The Boston Globe.

At last year’s Summit, Peter’s presentation was titled, “The Boston Globe: Managing a transition from free to paid product,” covering an ongoing and relatively early-stage testing and optimization program. This year’s presentation will discuss part two of that process.

In this excerpt, Peter and Pamela Markey, Senior Director of Marketing, MECLABS, talk about how tablets became an important digital form factor for The Boston Globe’s new online subscriber strategy, some of the customer insight that began informing the strategy and the new direction insight created at The Boston Globe.

Also, if you would like to hear the entire process Peter and his team at The Boston Globe undertook to transform the way it approached both its online and offline audience, watch the full presentation from last year’s Optimization Summit from the MarketingSherpa Video Archive.

Read more…

Technology is fantastic. But, it’s not magic.

Marketing analytics can be extremely powerful. However, just like any other tool or technology, it takes hard (and smart) work to turn data into knowledge.

So, in the MarketingSherpa 2013 Marketing Analytics Benchmark Report (sponsored by Paramore), we asked marketers …

Q: What were your organization’s most frustrating challenges with marketing analytics in 2012?

Then, we asked your peers what they thought about this marketing research. Here’s what they had to say …

Interpretation of data

What is interesting is that the top two challenges are related to the interpretation of data, not the collection of data.

We have finally turned the corner on the basic blocking and tackling of data consolidation through technology and processes, and now the most important challenges are focused on how to effectively use the analytics for improved decision making.

It has taken a long time to get to this point, but it is encouraging to see that 42% of respondents stated that acting on data to improve marketing performance was their #1 challenge, followed by combining data from multiple sources to draw correlations and make predictions (41%).

Integrating systems and siloed data finally has fallen to the bottom as most marketers have the technology and tools to do this process. Now we have to do the hard part and make the data talk to us, guide us, and give us insights.

– Cyndi Greenglass, Senior Vice President, Strategic Solutions, Diamond Marketing Solutions

Read more…

One of my responsibilities as a Research Analyst is to manage ongoing test planning with our Research Partners and at times, keeping tests running smoothly can be a challenge.

This is especially true when you consider testing is not a static event – it’s more like a living, breathing continuous cycle of motion.

But even with so many moving parts, effectively managing test plans can be made a little easier with two proven key factors for success – planning and preparation.

Today’s MarketingSherpa blog post is three tips for test planning management. Our goal is to give marketers a few simple best practices to help keep their testing queue in good order.

Step #1. Create

Creating a universal test planner everyone on your team can access is a great place to start.

For our research team, we created a universal test planner including:

• Results from prior testing with our Research Partner
• Current active tests
• Any future testing planned
• A list of test statuses definitions that everyone on the team understands – (test active, test complete, inconclusive, etc.)
• A brief description of what is being tested (call-to-action button test, value copy test, etc.)
• A list of who is responsible for each task in the test plan

Step#2. Organize

As I mentioned in the previous step, the status of a test can change and, based on the results, so will the ideas and priorities for future testing.

Some tests will move forward in the queue, and others will be pushed back to a later time.

So, to help keep our team informed of changes in the testing environment, we update the planner throughout the day and in real time during brainstorming sessions based on results and Partner feedback.

This allows us to focus our research and testing strategy efforts on expanding on discoveries versus chasing our tails to keep up-to-date.

Read more…

For today’s MarketingSherpa blog post, we have an infographic from Kentico, “Customer Experience in the Digital Age.”

The research behind the infographic was an eight-question survey of 200 Internet users via SurveyMonkey in February 2013, and the survey was open to both consumer and B2B brand interactions.

Here are few data points on the surveyed Internet users:

The gender breakdown was 54% male and 46% female, and the age breakdown included …

• 18-24 – 10%
• 25-34 – 20%
• 35-44 – 24%
• 45-54 – 19%
• 55-64 – 15%
• 65-74 – 10%
• Over 74 – 2%

To help put this infographic – and the research that went into the content – into context, I had the chance to interview Thom Robbins, Chief Evangelist, Kentico Software.

MarketingSherpa: What were some of the key findings?

Thom Robbins: Company websites were second (25%) behind word of mouth (28%) in weighing most heavily on impacting brand affinity. In-store experiences factored [at] 18%.

Perhaps most surprising was the discovery that only 7% of respondents felt their brand experience was affected by social networks such as Facebook or Twitter, but I think this may be misleading. People may be influenced by social media a lot more than they think they are, through both direct and indirect interactions.

MS: Did any results come as a surprise?

TR: Other than the small role social media seemed to have, which I think merely shows us it’s a channel still on the rise, I was most surprised to see that 69% of those surveyed said they were willing to give up personal data in exchange for more customized service.

MS: Were there any results that might inform future research, or uncovered data points that deserve/require a deeper dive into customer insights?

TR: Well, I thought it was very telling that 97% were ready to forgive poor service as long as the company offers up a quick response or correction.

It’s important for businesses to know that while mistakes will be made, in the age of social media, every single customer experience counts. You can’t afford [to have] anyone to walk away unhappy, and there’s really no excuse given how forgiving customers are as long as you respond quickly to complaints.

Read more…

“What gets measured is what gets done.” So says the old business maxim, at least.

We wanted to know what marketers get done, so to speak, so in the 2013 Marketing Analytics Benchmark Report, we asked…

Q: Which of the following are you involved with tracking, analyzing or reporting on for your organization?

We asked the MarketingSherpa community about these results, and here’s what they had to say …

Managing through measurement

These results highlight the indifference, or perhaps lack of experience, when it comes to tracking marketing, especially social media marketing.

As these channels can be tracked offline (via call tracking) and online, via dynamic numbers and email tracking, it still seems as though there are trackers and non-trackers in terms of marketing specialists.

Even with a nudge effect of marketing across several channels, the ROI of these nudges is important and should be tracked.

The old adage of “managing through measurement” is still important and not having accurate measurement to call upon leaves marketing specialists arguing based on their opinions rather than facts. (And, that’s a sure way to the exit door).

– Boyd Butler, Consultant

Read more…

One of the most common questions and debates we have here at MECLABS is, “How radical do we go?”

Let me explain – for every test, we have an objective we’re trying to accomplish and a set of metrics we’ll use to judge the performance and success of the test. If we “go radical” and change lots of different elements on the page, we might hit it big, or we might tank. But, either way, we wouldn’t know the true impact of any specific change.

If we “go conservative,” we’ll be able to directly tell what the impact of changing a specific element was, ensuring we learn something, but might never be able to hit that lofty conversion goal our team has set.

So, which approach is right? Well, the short answer is they both are. The long answer is the rest of this post.

The right blend between radical and conservative tests

That may sound like a cop out, but a successful test strategy needs to find the right blend between radical and conservative tests. Let’s try an analogy …

Let’s say you just started playing baseball. You’ve had batting practice with your coach and just can’t seem to connect on any pitches. So, your coach starts tweaking. Widen your stance. Lift your elbow. Tilt your head. Tweak, tweak, tweak. But you’re still not hitting anything.

Then, you try something radical. You walk to the other side of the plate and take the first pitch into the outfield. Turns out you bat lefty. That would have been good to know an hour ago. Chances are, you were never going to succeed with small tweaks, because there was something fundamentally wrong with your approach.

The same goes for testing. If you’re making progress with small tweaks, a headline here, button color there, you may never reach your true potential.

We always want to get a solid learning from every test we perform, but looking back through the archives, a lot of the largest wins we’ve ever achieved don’t come from single factorial tests, or variable clusters where we try to focus in on specific elements of the MECLABS Conversion Sequence heuristic like friction or value.

Instead, they come from radical redesigns, where we test a totally new approach or simultaneously improve numerous elements we identified as issues with the page.

Read more…