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Posts Tagged ‘B2C’

Marketing 101: What are grids (design)?

June 12th, 2020

Marketing has a language all its own. This is our latest in a series of posts aimed at helping new marketers learn that language. What term do you find yourself explaining most often to new hires during onboarding? Let us know.

This article was originally published in the MarketingSherpa email newsletter.

In a previous Marketing 101 post on MarketingSherpa, you might have read about the rule of thirds, “… a basic guideline for framing and image composition that results in the viewer seeing a balanced, more naturally flattering image.” (Check out the blog post here if you haven’t read it yet.)

The rule of thirds is an example of a grid, specifically a 3 x 3 grid that’s used primarily for images, photographs, paintings, and possibly other mediums, such as landing pages. While it may be the most well-known grid, there are a whole lot of other grids out there that can help structure the layout of your landing page, approved by web designers everywhere.

A grid is a framework of intersecting vertical and horizontal (or angular) lines that are used to subdivide a page into margins, columns and modules (boxes) to structure content on a layout. Basically, it’s a visible guide for placing images, text and graphic elements onto a page with purpose or rational logic.

Why should you use grids?

  • It saves a lot time.

After some practice, it becomes easier and faster for you to see where text and images could perfectly align. You also don’t have to design the grid yourself (unless you want to) as there are many popular grids used in web design layouts that are one Google search away (and mentioned below.)

  • It makes collaborations run smoother.

Grids can become part of a guideline that each member of a  design team must follow, making it easier to collaborate on a project. It keeps the layout design consistent.

  • Webpages look organized and balanced overall.

Using the same grid or similar grids for multiple pages will help unify them, making these pages predictable for visitors and easy to navigate — alth­­­ough be careful not to make it so predictable that the layout becomes boring.

How do you use grids?

Grids have basic elements; here’s an overview:

Read more…

Landing Page Optimization: 11 questions to ask about your landing pages to increase conversion

March 12th, 2020

We frequently receive questions from our email subscribers asking marketing advice. Instead of hiding those answers in a one-to-one email communication, we occasionally publish edited excerpts of some of these conversations here on the MarketingSherpa blog so they can help other readers as well. If you have any questions, let us know.

While most of those questions are to a general MarketingSherpa customer service inbox, this email was sent directly to Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director and CEO, MECLABS Institute (parent organization of MarketingSherpa). The email has been stripped of any identifying information but includes general information that will likely be helpful to many of our readers.

 

 

Dear Flint McGlaughlin: I have been watching your videos, including:

Based on these videos, I’ve been putting together a treatment on our current landing page. We did not change much design-wise, but the main points I’ve tried to address are:

  • Changing the personality of the page … i.e., toning down the direct-marketing “hype” voice on the page and presenting information more objectively
  • Communicating the value proposition in a way that hopefully is more credible
  • Using short testimonials to make specific claims instead of just bullets by an anonymous copywriter
  • Trying to increase the overall credibility of the page with more evidence spread throughout —not just in the form of testimonials but also data on the underlying science, quantitative evidence, customer satisfaction and awards.

I am wondering if you might be willing to look at it and give me your immediate feedback and perhaps refer me to anything in your videos or book which I might not be understanding or using correctly.

I am not looking for free copy editing, more just feedback whether it looks like I am applying these principles correctly or not. Obviously testing is going to help determine if we have the right value proposition and appeal.

If you have a chance to do this, I would be extremely grateful 🙂 Thank you!

 

And here is Flint’s (generalized) response, which I thought would be helpful for many marketers, especially anyone focused on conversion rate optimization or landing page optimization…

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Emotional Marketing: How to be a killer marketer and have a clean conscience

October 5th, 2018

 

I want to be a good person. Chances are, you do too. So sometimes it bothers me when people stigmatize marketers as spammers and manipulators for money. (This happened to one of my colleagues here at MarketingSherpa, Daniel Burstein, recently.)

But marketing is a neutral term. It is simply the way we speak to customers. How we use marketing is up to us. We can be ethical, or not. We can influence people for good, or bad. We can choose to appeal to the best in us or instead, appeal to the beast in us. Actually, when you think of it, marketers wield a lot of power.

It’s true that there are marketers who choose to sell a product by appealing to our baser instincts of greed, selfishness, pride and lust, but you and I don’t have to, and we can still be successful. We can understand our customers as people and tap into their emotions, become a part of the story they want for their lives, not just pushing the goals we have for our business.

That’s why I was really encouraged when I listened to some major insights gleaned from the databank of The Institute of Practitioners in Advertising UK. IPA has nearly 1,400 case studies showcasing the most successful advertising campaigns across 30 years, and discovered the most successful marketing campaigns were utilizing emotional marketing that brings out the best in people as opposed to those that simply focus on the surface-level, material desires we may have.

What really drives consumer decisions

The IPA is one of the world’s pre-eminent trade bodies for marketing communications agencies. Marie Oldham, Chief Strategy Officer, Havas Media, stated that the evidence suggests deeper, meaningful need states are driving consumer decisions.

The strongest ones [campaigns] were the ones [that] fully understood how the world has changed since 2008 and the whole credit crunch, how it destroyed some of the things that we thought were the dominant things in life, having a bigger car, getting a bigger job, getting on in life … [instead, customers said] ‘time spent with families and friends or reconnecting with our passions in our communities is really important.’ 

The winning entry for 2012 and also for 2016 IPA effectiveness awards was a TV ad from John Lewis. This chain of high-end department stores has repeatedly created extremely successful advertising campaigns.

The company traditionally used product-focused advertising but decided to shift to an emotional strategy, focusing on the consumers’ higher motivations for buying. It’s not about furnishing a house but building a home. It’s about creating a safe, inspiring and stimulating environment for their children; it’s about realizing their dreams for their family, their health and wealth. It’s not about getting rich, but about living a richer life.

The following advertisement was an immediate success going viral throughout television and social media platforms and catapulting their business forward as a leader in their industry in the UK.

 

Read more…

Value Gulfs: Making sure there is differentiated product value when marketing upgrades and upsells

May 31st, 2018

unique value proposition in the marketplace is essential for sustainable marketing success. You must differentiate the value your product offers from what competitors offer. That is Marketing 101 (which certainly doesn’t always mean it’s done well or at all).

However, when you offer product tiers, it is important to differentiate value as well. In this case, you are differentiating value between product offerings from your own company.

This is a concept I call “value gulfs” and introduced recently in the article Marketing Chart: Biggest challenges to growing membership. Since that article was already 2,070 words, it wasn’t the right place to expand on the concept. So let’s do so know in this MarketingSherpa blog post.

When value gulfs are necessary

You need to leverage value gulfs in your product offers when you are selling products using a tiered cost structure. Some examples include:

  • A freemium business model
  • Free trial marketing strategy
  • Premium membership offering(s)
  • Good, better, best products
  • Economy paired with luxury offerings
  • Tiered pricing

The customer psychology of value gulfs

MECLABS Institute web designer Chelsea Schulman helped me put together a visual illustration of the value gulf concept:

Allow me to call out a few key points:

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Customer-First Marketing: What every entrepreneur and SMB marketer can learn from successful Etsy sellers

May 4th, 2018

Whenever I’m looking for an original, handcrafted gift, I go to Etsy.com. In case you aren’t in the loop yet, it’s a worldwide digital marketplace for artisan entrepreneurs. Recently, I’ve spent a lot of time there because my daughter is getting married, and I need to find some unique gifts for the wedding party.

But it’s also a laboratory of capitalism that any marketers — especially small businesses, entrepreneurs, and startups — can learn from. Smaller companies might not have the giant budgets for media, perfect photography and SEO, but they can find an advantage with more human customer service and customer interactions in general.

I’ve found that each seller has their own communication style and shop policies. Some of these artisans are wildly successful with thousands of sales and loyal customers.

And some, well, not so much.

It’s clear that many of the top-grossing ones stand out because they not only have a great product, but also excellent customer service. No, not even that. Their service is A-M-A-Z-I-N-G. They’ve obviously learned a thing or two about customer-first marketing.

Here are just a few of their practices that can help other marketers who are trying to succeed in an already saturated marketplace.

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Five Questions to Ask to Understand Customer Motivation

September 21st, 2017

This article was partially informed by The MECLABS Guide for Optimizing Your Webpages and Better Serving Your Customers. For more information, you may download the full, free guide here.

Motivation is a powerful tool in any marketer’s belt. If used correctly, it can maximize the effectiveness of your marketing message and move customers toward conversion.

After all, motivation is the key reason why any of us do anything — it’s just a matter of identifying what your customer’s motivations are and helping them understand how your product or service fits into that.

Question #1. Where is your customer in the thought sequence?

Looking at the MECLABS Institute (our parent company) Conversion Heuristic, you can see motivation (m) placed right at the beginning. However, as you can see by the number “4” placed in front of it, not all these elements hold equal weight.

Motivation is the single most important factor when it comes to affecting conversion. You can’t change something as intrinsic to your customers as motivation. You can, however, gain an understanding of it.

By learning where your customer is in this thought sequence and mapping out the other elements (value, incentive, friction and anxiety), you can craft your marketing message in such a way that it is optimized to speak to all four, leading to conversion.

Read more…

Promotional Marketing: How to use promotional marketing to build brand awareness

July 5th, 2016

I’ve gotten the nickname “Coupon Queen,” because I love a good deal. It’s hard for anyone to turn down a 50% off sale from their favorite company. Promotional marketing uses special offers to raise a customers’ interest, to influence a purchase and to even stand out among competitors. As marketers, our main goal is to use tactics like this to boost awareness in order to build the community for our brand.

A few months ago, I wrote a post on building customer experience by looking at event marketing while we prepared for MarketingSherpa Summit. Before getting started with the event marketing process or the launch of your content, the truth is there is a whole production that begins before that. You have to start with your promotional work. As we are now gearing up for MarketingSherpa Summit 2017, I interviewed Erin Fagin, Senior Marketing Manager, MarketingSherpa, on her role with promotional marketing.

Promotional marketing includes advertising, public relations and sales promotion. Whether you want to inform the market, increase demand or differentiate a product, here is an introduction to promotional marketing that can help you drive the traffic that you need for your product.

 

Phase 1. Establish your objective

Erin is responsible for the MarketingSherpa brand, with majority of her focus being on MarketingSherpa Summit. She said this includes the “entire brand perception, experience and voice, and how we are positioning ourselves to our followers and customers.”

As a marketer, the first question you want to ask yourself is, “What are we trying to achieve?”

Everyone’s goals are going to be unique to the company; for example, our main objective is to grow our community. This is where your past can become handy in the future planning process. Take a look at past campaigns and data collected to analyze what previously worked and areas where improvements can afford to be made.

Erin has built a portfolio of ideas that were inspired from past campaigns. However, she strives to involve her team in as much as the process as she can. A collaboration session is key in this step.

 

Phase 2. Build your strategy

Research is the most important asset in your strategy, whether formal or informal. Using that available data on your current or past audience engagement is going to benefit your campaign heavily. Organizing your route to the end goal while showing the value is going to be challenging yet rewarding in the end.

Marketing with internal stakeholders provides the beginning foundation, and external stakeholders can also provide a valuable perspective to the strategy. Here is where the buy-in from those involved comes into play. Your team and leadership has to be convinced to change the nature of the existing or previous strategy to be on-board from the very beginning, because as you move on to the next step, that buy-in is going to be to be crucial.

Budget is a piece to always take into consideration at this stage. If you have the flexibility to share a budget with other departments, utilize the resources to combine efforts to cut costs. With the remaining funds, you may have room to experiment with your strategy.

 

Phase 3. Execute your plan

Three core components in creating this plan to execute are:

  • Clearly defined goals
  • Establishing resources
  • A realistic project plan

Identifying the milestones needed to achieve your goals is going to be the first step. In this marketing optimization post, I walked through steps that similarly tie into building a promotional strategy when improving marketing efforts.

The content messaging is one of the core pieces in your promotional plan. Think about, what you want to say to your customers and how you want them to interpret your content. At the end of the marketing asset, put yourself in the audience’s shoes. How likely are you to be motivated to take action by clicking on the CTA or sharing the information?

In a Buzzstream article, “How to Create a Winning Content Promotion Plan,” Stephanie Beadell presented a well-developed framework to building a successful campaign. What I found thoroughly valuable were the starter questions for marketers to ask during the crafting section:

content-promotion-plan

 

Erin added that she begins by taking a crack at developing the content needed for her promotions and then solicits feedback from her colleagues on the marketing team. The content team is brought in the process as well to copy edit and ensure that the voice of the brand remains consistent. Utilize as many departments as your company has available. You also want to change your copy to reflect where it will be shared, she said, whether with a segmented audience and of course for unique social media channels.

Determining when and where your content is distributed is the final step.

Ensure that you aren’t overwhelming the audience with multiple sends, and map out your promotional periods in advance if you can. Understand your audience and where their motivations are, whether it is through direct mail or email. But don’t be afraid to take risks and test new mediums. Establish how technology can be of assistance as well – can paid search, print ads and retargeting help in your marketing efforts?

When your team comes within reach of the objective or achieves the overall goal, celebrate with your colleagues because your hard work has paid off. Communicate the success with your entire company and internally share the information. And don’t forget to use this promotional marketing strategy you’ve created as a baseline for the next one.

 

You may also like:

How Companies Fail, and Why the Customer Always Wins in the End

Email Marketing: Ideas and inspiration from 11 years of award-winning campaigns

MarketingSherpa Summit 2017

How Integrating Customer Service and Marketing Can Build Successful Consumer Marketing

June 7th, 2016

This week, the MarketingSherpa team is running the official Media Center at the world’s largest ecommerce event – IRCE 2016. We’re interviewing speakers, industry experts and brand-side marketers to bring back ecommerce lessons for you. To get notification when this year’s interviews will be available visit our IRCE 2016 Media Page. Until the videos are up, here’s an interview from last year’s event. 

When you go to a restaurant and your customer experience before the meal arrives is terrible, you’ll most likely refer to that restaurant as being terrible, even if the meal was amazing. Customer service has the power of leaving a bad taste in your mouth.

Customer service and marketing now work together more than ever. At the MarketingSherpa Media Center at IRCE 2015, Courtney Eckerle, Managing Editor, MarketingSherpa, interviewed Katie Laird, Director of Social Marketing, Blinds.com, on how her team was making amazing strides with their customer experience.

Here are a few components to transforming customer service feedback internally to build success in your company.

Read more…

How maurices Increased ROI by the Strategic Use of Omni-channel Marketing

May 27th, 2016

“The real challenge is that the path to purchase isn’t just a single step anymore,” said Ali Wing, Chief Marketing Officer, maurices.

The clothing retailer has addressed this in two ways, Ali said.

  • Putting in place attributions in order to organize which channels receive credit
  • Transitioning analysis of those attributions from a transactional approach to that which includes well-rounded customer data

“We’re attaching customer data so we get a long-term value in understanding the customer we’ve acquired, versus the transaction we just acquired,” said Eric Bibelnieks, Vice President of Enterprise Analytics, maurices.

 

Many marketers struggle in a transition of this nature with understanding which data points are important when it comes to understanding your customers, and Ali has a specific approach that helps her and her team.

“I don’t care as much about absolute precision in any one of the channels. I care about a criterion that I consistently apply and then watch for patterns, because patterns tell us more than the nominal amounts in any one of the channels right now,” she said.

Read more…

Maximizing Multiple Marketing Platforms for Success

May 20th, 2016

After 35 years in the industry, Chinese Laundry, a privately held women’s footwear company, continues to expand its influence season after season.

During Internet Retailer Conference Exhibition (IRCE) 2015, MarketingSherpa’s Courtney Eckerle spoke at the MarketingSherpa Media Center with Scott Cohn, Vice President of Ecommerce, Chinese Laundry.

Scott spoke about how marketers tend to establish processes or utilize platforms that work for specific projects or campaigns, but don’t always think about how it affects our customers.

“The biggest challenge we had is that they [platforms] were perpetually out of sync. So our inventory, pricing and a whole variety of other things that a customer expects to be consistent across channels, just weren’t consistent,” he said.

Whether you are looking to condense your blog platforms to update your content strategy or want to build product awareness, Cohn shared two key takeaways on maximizing multiple marketing platforms:

 

Be on the lookout

When undertaking a technology innovation, how do you begin to think about where you pain points lie?

Read more…