MindEcology Blog

Marketers in charge of creating marketing plans, setting campaign budgets and executing on all of it certainly have good reason to feel frustrated at work on a regular basis.

From our experience as marketers – and as consultants who use data to support other marketers – we believe that three big sources of marketing frustration are:

1. Facing unnecessary difficulty in “selling” their marketing ideas internally to other company stakeholders.

2. Not knowing how and where to spend their marketing budget in a way that yields the best return on investment, leaving a nagging sense of uncertainty.

3. Being unsure about how to best track campaign effectiveness.

Our advice for overcoming these frustrations: to learn to talk like your CFO.

You see, any good CFO worth his or her salt is ultimately concerned with the bottom line. To do so, CFOs spend their time minimizing risk, freeing up capital for future investments, and keeping costs as low as possible.

As a marketer, you already know that your job goes well beyond thinking of a clever brand positioning strategy, creating a new logo, or putting together a viral video. You are increasingly being held accountable for your decisions in measurable ways. Just like a CFO. That is why it is helpful to learn to talk and think like a CFO. Rather than making ill-defined claims or opinions about your hopes for marketing success, the secret is to put numbers around everything. Why? Everybody likes numbers, and numbers are hard to argue with.

Whether you are trying to sell ideas internally, make marketing budget allocation decisions, or giving others reports on campaign effectiveness, try using the following types of CFO-inspired phrases the next time you reach out to others with your ideas:

“The expected return on investment for this campaign is 50%. We will have the actual ROI results in 3 weeks.”

“Based upon the assumptions stated below, we estimate the value of social media-driven visits to our site at $0.50/visit.” Read the rest of this entry »

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If you have ever served a marketing role within your company, you have no doubt felt the heat from sales on more than one occasion. In fact, that feeling is palpable on a daily basis for many marketers. For members of a marketing department, it is easy to feel like the “also ran” group as compared to those spotlight-stealing salespeople.

However, sales teams have their own challenges, issues and concerns. They need marketing’s strategic guidance and tactical knowledge. So do the CEO, CFO and other “C”-level execs.

There is going to be a lively discussion on this very topic coming up on Wednesday, June 12th in Austin. If you are an American Marketing Association member, you are heartily encouraged to join. MindEcology’s Jed Jones will be moderating a 3-member expert panel. Click here for more info.

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Are you interested in getting up to speed on Google+? If so, and you live in the greater Austin, TX area, we encourage you to check out this RISE event coming up on Wednesday, May 15th:

How to Use Google+ to Grow Your Business.

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At MindEcology, the clients that come to us for marketing guidance usually find themselves in one of two boats:

1. Business is strong and they want to make it even stronger by egaging in data-driven, customer-centric marketing

or

2. Business has been tanking for some time and they are looking for a last-ditch effort to pull themselves back from the brink

Trust us – you would rather be in the first group. It’s much less painful.

After all, companies who are already knocking on the door of defeat generally have less time and fewer resources to spend on turning things around through better marketing. They are in panic mode and looking for something to save them. Of course, it is much, much better to be in the position to build on success by spending wisely on marketing – and then to spin that investment into a healthy ROI.

The Inherent Risks of Inaction When Times are Good

Unfortunately, most companies belonging to the first group do not feel motivated to “go to the next level” in their marketing efforts. This is especially true for companies who have more or less stumbled upon their marketing success. They have an often-misplaced sense of confidence in their current customer targeting, positioning and messaging methods (or lack thereof).

Business owners and executives who have chosen to forgo taking an analytics-driven, best customer-centric approach to their marketing activities are putting themselves at risk in two ways:

1. they are burning money on “spray-and-pray” marketing techniques, wasting markeing dollars that they could be socking away for future expansion or for making it through a rough patch

and

2. they are putting themselves at risk by relying too much on current success drivers without thoroughly examining the methods necessary to expand their business opportunities with a hyper-targeted approach.

Inaction during times of success is risky indeed.

A Prescription for Extending Your Current Business Success into the Future

We all know that people and companies who can maintain high levels of success not just for months or a few years – but for a decade or more – have one thing in common: they make their own success. From a marketing perspective, this must necessarily boil down to taking a proactive, data-driven approach to marketing. Specificially, it means leveraging their knowledge about existing customers, geographies and revenue trends to not only predict – but to create – their own future success by targeting and messaging to the right customers.

What is the best time to invest in data-driven marketing? Whether your business is just starting out, has already met some success, or has hit a sales brick wall – the time to get serious about your marketing is right now.

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So, you are creating some new banner ads in order to increase traffic to your website. You may be setting up your new banner ad campaign as a remarketing campaign or just a standard “spray and pray” campaign targeting everybody. Similarly, it could be set up as pay-per-click or as pay-per-impression. Regardless of these decisions, you will have to at some point face the question of the creative design of the ads themselves. In other words: what are your banner ads going to look like?

Whether or not you personally are the artist who will create your ads, before the design process even starts you need to ask yourself a fundamental question: what do I want my ads to achieve?

There are two primary goals you can accomplish with your banner ads: either to build your brand or to drive traffic to your website. However, unless you are a Fortune 500 company, you probably do not have the budget to spend on just building general brand awareness. The return on investment for building general awareness in the marketplace for your band usually fairly low. It’s probably not even worth doing for most companies.

That leaves you with the other reasonable goal of executing a banner ad campaign: to drive traffic to your website. In other words, you want people to click on your banner ads, visit your website and, hopefully, to take an additional action like making a purchase or contacting you about your services.

Even with this clear goal in mind, this point is precisely where many interactive marketing managers and designers alike can get tripped up a bit. Here’s the mistake they often make: they try too hard to make the banner ad look like their website.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with keep a consistent look and feel between your banner ads and your website. The trouble with trying too hard to do so, however, is that you risk taking your eye off the ball. In this case, that is: you want your banner ads to drive action. This is worth repeating, in all caps:

YOUR BANNER ADS SHOULD BE DESIGNED TO DRIVE ACTION.

If you have the choice between trying to make your banner ads look like your website or to drive action, by all means, choose the latter. Remember, once your prospects visit your website, you will have every opportunity to stun (or seduce) them with your brand message and look. But, if your ad doesn’t drive behavior, then the chance to tell your story will never even present itself.

Your banner ads should be designed to grab attention, call out whom you are targeting, explain the value you provide, and – most importantly – get them to click through to your website. All other design concerns should be secondary, at best.

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Retargeting – a.k.a. remarketing – is one of the best-kept secrets in the online world. It’s actually no secret, but since it is still under-utilized by most companies, it might as well be a secret.

What is retargeting, anyway? It is a way for you to show banner ads on third-party websites to people who have visited your site at least once. That’s it. Simple, right?

How Retargeting Works

The process starts with your adding a piece of code to your website. This code tags visitors to your site. Then, as those visitors visit one of thousands of other websites out on the Internet, those sites will show YOUR banner ad to those same visitors. And, as the advertiser, you can set certain limits, such as: only retarget people up to 5 times. Or: only retarget people if they have visited your website within the past 60 days. You can even set up hyper-targeting rules in order to show certain banner ads to the visitors to certain pages of your site, but not to those who visited other pages.

5 Reasons You Should Use Retargeting Now

Here are 5 reasons you should get on board with retargeting tout suite:

1. You only pay for the clicks that lead people back to your site

2. Conversion rates – defined as the percentage of visitors who take a desirable action on your site (such as filling out a web form or calling you) – are almost as a rule much higher for people who have clicked on your retargeting banner ad. And, as a corollary: cost per conversion is almost always much lower.

3. People coming back to your site for a second (or third or fourth) time are more likely to take action once they get there. Reason: they have already seen your site, so it feels familiar to them.

4. Retargeting makes your site famous (at least in the eyes of your target audience). That’s because your banner ads show up on all kinds of other websites – giving the appearance that you have a presence just about everywhere. This can add credibility to your brand.

5. You can launch your campaign within days. Unlike with SEO, blogging, article marketing, and other traffic-driving methods that take weeks or months to show effect – retargeting can start driving traffic almost instantly.

Take these 5 reasons into account and consider allocating some of your marketing budget toward this exciting new traffic-driving technique.

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“How can I increase my sales revenue?” This is a question that any good business owner, manager or sales professional asks themselves on a regular basis.

A time-tested approach to finding the right answer for your company is to make sure you have covered 4 Ps of marketing: product, price, place and promotion. Getting each of these right is essential to sales success. But, together, they don’t paint a complete picture. You also need to make sure you are going after the right prospective customers.

The target customer factor is too often overlooked, since most companies believe that “pretty much anybody” might want to buy their product or service. But, research tells a very different story: even among relatively niche markets like spray-on truck beds, business-to-business enterprise planning software, or tofu ice cream, two competing brands likely have different “best customer” profiles. This is even more true when you are comparing customer bases of two completely different products or services.

Targeting those prospects most likely to convert to paying customers – as opposed to taking a shotgun or “spray and pray” approach – translates to a markedly higher return on investment for your marketing dollars.

When it comes to taking action on answering the question of who your best customers are, you are engaging in customer profiling.

In brief, there are two types of customer profiling:

1. Characteristics profiling: information about the customer in terms of how they think, demographic information (like age, income, owns vs. rents, etc.), and their opinions and attitudes. Characteristics also refers to habits and customs undertaken their daily life. This type of information can be gleaned from third-party databases of data compiled by research organizations. In most cases, customers’ characteristics are “modeled,” meaning, only a small sample of each type of customer was asked survey questions or observed directly. Then, those findings were applied to other people like them.

2. Behavioral profiling: information about how the customer behaves vis-a-is your company. For example, for hotels, it could relate to how often the person uses the pool, whether they typically visit the hotel lobby bar, or whether they tend to check out on time or late. This information is almost always gathered by the company (or a hired gun, such as a market or customer experience research firm). It is not available – or made available – in third-party databases.

Both types of profiling have huge advantages. For example, characteristics profiling’s biggest selling point is that you don’t have to gather any special data on your customers yourself. Rather, with information such as home address (or, for companies: name and address), you can acquire volumes of information about them and then put them into segments, or clusters. Most importantly, the characteristics-based model is generalizable and therefore can be applied to finding prospects that most resemble your best customers. This is key and is something that behavioral profiling cannot accomplish.

Meanwhile, the advantage of behavioral profiling is that you can tailor and customize your services to the needs of individual customers in a way that modeled (i.e., characteristics) data cannot achieve.

In summary, to increase sales once you have the 4 Ps in place, you need to profile your best customers. Then, to find more prospects who resemble your best customers, engage in characteristics-based best customer profiling. And, to squeeze more revenue out of existing customers, engage in behavioral profiling. Together, the combination cannot be beat for improving sales and increasing your marketing return on investment.

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Do you know your own customers? Probably so. In fact, you probably know them quite well. For example, you may know your best customers by name. You may even know their kids’ names. You may know their favorite (color, size, style, flavor) of products you sell to them.

But however well you know them, it is likely that the types of things you know about your best customers is limited in its range. In other words: your knowledge about your best customers is more than likely “a mile deep but only inches wide.”

One of the most important types of information that you probably don’t have a handle on is what their emotional buy buttons are. What are emotional buy buttons? These are the underlying emotion-based motivations that, when triggered, make the difference between “sale” and “no sale.”

Your own customer data is the missing link between finding out your best customers’ emotional buy buttons and fine-tuning your marketing strategy to acquire more customers just like them.

The most direct path toward revealing your best customers’ emotional buy buttons is to engage in a three-step analytical process.

1. Find out what type(s) of people your best customers are (i.e., assign each one to one of a finite set of general segments, or customer types); these will often be rolled up into one or more “personas”
2. Find out the psychographic profiles associated with these top personas. Psychographic profiles give insights into the motivations, opinions, interests and habits of a given segment.
3. From these, you can extract what makes your customers buy what they buy, and why.

Examples of the hundreds of the available psychographic data points that can be learned about your best customers and prospects include:

With this type of information, no matter what types of products or services you sell, you will be able to tie these emotional buy buttons to specific messages, ad channels, and tactics. In other words: you can create a more fine-tuned, better-converting marketing strategy.

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Those charged with selecting a new location for their store, restaurant, or other type of retail company have a big job in front of them. After all, the stakes are high when making a decision like this. Making the wrong choice could mean the loss of hundreds of thousands of dollars or more over the course of the next 5-10 years.

Unfortunately, in an all-too-typical scenario, the decision for a new site is based on a limited view of the relevant factors. That is, most or all of the emphasis can get placed on “on-site” factors such as the attractiveness of the building, the types and number of nearby stores, and ease of accessibility from major roads. While these on-site factors no doubt play an important role in determining future location success, focusing solely on them is a huge mistake because it leaves out the most important criterion: the neighborhood. Meaning: analyzing WHO lives or works nearby your proposed location.

After all, the success of a retail or restaurant venture must rely on the local population as a large portion of its customer base in order to survive and thrive. Being near to a major highway or freeway is almost never enough to make the business a success.

The challenge is that most businesses who take into account neighborhood factors limit their analysis to single-dimensional factors, such as total population count or average income of nearby households. Using these variables is a start, but it still falls short of the mark. For, it is not just how many people live in the area that matters – it is the types of people who live within a reasonable radius (e.g., 2-5 miles) from your proposed location that determines success or failure.

The analysis of the “type” of people in the area can and should go well beyond simple demographic variables and should take into account factors such as:

* psychographics: attitudes, opinion and perceptions
* behaviors: the things they typically spend their time doing
* life stage: how old they are and whether they have kids living at home
* education, ethnicity
* own vs. rent a home
* etc.

When engaging in site selection, it is important to compare variables like these across several candidate locations within your target trade area. Once you have combined the resulting variables together with the proper relative weighting, you can develop a scoring system for each location. Finally, you can rank them from most-to-least desirable.

With a scored and ranked list of potential locations in hand, start by choosing the top 5-10 locations. Now, all you have to do is drive those locations to analyze on-site factors (see above) in order to make your final decision.

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“Information, that is imperfectly acquired, is generally as imperfectly retained.” - William Playfair, Scottish political economist and inventor of the time-series graph, 1786

Every day, your business is generating data. Data about itself. Data about your customers and your prospects. If you are like 99% of existing small and large companies alike, you are not using that data even close to the fullest extent possible to benefit your business.

To illuminate the path a bit for you, MindEcology has put together 5 steps to properly care for and feed your customer and transactional data:

1. Be sure you know which data you should be collecting. This means ANY customer or order data to which you currently – or could easily – have access. This includes customer names and addresses, products sold, transaction ($) amounts, web pages visited, web form inquiries received . . . anything that describes either the supply or the demand side of your business in data terms is fair game.

2. Taking Mr. Playfair’s lead, be sure that you are actively storing and organizing your data properly. This means storing your data in the right way such that it can later be accessed with relative ease. You also need to make sure that your data is error-free – or as error-free as possible. This can involve deleting bad records, correcting formatting issues, filling in missing values from individual records, and appending entire data fields.

3. Make your well-organized data easily accessible to the decision-makers in your company so that they can analyze and make use of it. Your marketing and operations teams alike can reap the benefits of access to good, clean data. Leverage a database program, MS Excel, a dashboard application, or any software that you feel comfortable using.

4. Ask hard-hitting business questions of your data. Start by deciding what you want to know more about. Which business decisions keep you up at night? Chances are, your data has some very powerful things to tell you about decisions, large and small. And, it will, if you faithfully follow each of these steps.

5. Finally, with the business questions you have asked in mind, it’s time to analyze your data and to apply the results to your decision-making process. After all, raw data just sitting in a database, ignored day in and day out, might as well not be there at all. Be sure to consider the different analytical techniques that you have available to you. The results of the analysis itself can and should feed back into #1 above.

If you properly care for and feed your data, you will be giving yourself a leg up on the majority of your competitors who continue to make daily, crucial decisions while ignoring the mountain of data right underneath their cubicles.

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