Tag: Marketing

Marketing Super Heros

You’re charged with being the “marketing super hero.”

Exhibiting at events and your sales staff are great 1:1 engagement tools. When you can’t meet or draw all of your potential customers to your website or meet them in-person, engagement marketing casts a net to capture your prospects as they are forming opinions and drawing purchase conclusions well before they start to interact with your company.

Today’s digital access gives buyers and prospects more opportunities to do their background product comparison and all the purchase funnel activities they perform before they reveal themselves and their interest to you. How do you intercept these buyers and prospects and beat the competition to their wallet? Demographics aren’t the total solution in this marketing plot, this strategy calls for engagement marketing (EM).

Captain E to the Rescue
Data is a factor in EM, but it’s behavioral data. You are identifying buyers and prospects by who they are and what they are doing to indicate interest in the type of product you market. EM tactics are about you identifying and creating personalized, meaningful interactions with these interested buyers and prospects. Many of these tactics are real-time web interactions with your targeted prospects – and you are subsequently using personalized communications via email, web, mobile and more channels to establish your product or brand with them.

Your goal with this type of marketing helps you intercept prospects early in their purchase funnel cycle and helps you shorten the time between prospects’ interest and sales. Over time, by listening and responding to your buyers and prospects, and establishing your company as trusted experts with them, you earn the right to tell buyers about your products.

Once potential customers became actual customers, the conversation changes. Your goal is to get to this tipping point and EM tactics can get you there.

Learn more about EM from Marketo’s “The 5 Principles of Engagement Marketing” presentation, download it here.

Food marketing transformation: It affects the entire supply chain

Mark Williams, senior vice president, administration at Bader Rutter, presents key perspectives on the urgency and rapid marketing transformation throughout the food supply chain. Consumers are more connected and have access to more information about what’s behind the products in the grocery stores, presenting food industry decision-makers with great marketing opportunities and perils.

Here’s an excerpt from Mark’s blog:

Build a story around what your brand stands for.

In today’s social media-driven world, telling a story has become a key way, and often the preferred way, to communicate. From individuals to companies, everyone has a unique story to tell. What’s yours? For insights, explore your competitive advantages, aspirational goals and company values, as these will lay foundation for the chapters in your story. Keep your key customer audiences in mind. How do they value the products and service you provide? What is expected of your company at different points along the customer’s buyer’s journey? Keep your story positive and focus on what your company stands for and not what it’s against. Get employees involved by contributing and providing input. Vet the story internally and gain acceptance so everyone in the company believes in the story.

Delivering the story: It’s everyone’s responsibility.

From the front-line sales contact to the CEO and among the many individuals who sit in the cubicles and customer service desks throughout the office, everyone should be trained to effectively deliver your unique story. Key messages are not useful if people are not trained properly in how to deliver them. Your brand story won’t mean much if it just turns into a game of telephone.

The entire article is a must read and reminds us all to make sure all levels of personnel in our companies can be brand ambassadors. Read the entire blog here.

ag marketing brand ambassadors food chain marketing Marketing

THE MARKETING JUNGLE

“Tarzan doesn’t know where Tarzan go,” Jane’s mocking line from the Geico commercial comes to mind when discussing A/B testing for email subject lines. Without the test you can just be swinging your emails in the marketing jungle and not get where you need to go. Geico’s Tarzan had confidence, but no results.

A/B testing ups opens

Who would think that a pithy, on point four-word email subject line would produce fewer opens than a longer more detailed subject? Of course this can vary by topic and word choice, that’s the point of A/B testing. A/B testing gives you confidence and results.

Don’t hide the response mode

I’ve so often written (and reminded myself) about getting into the mind of our customers or prospects – and I will bring it here, too. When we understand our customers, we can anticipate their needs and questions, then we can help them and when we help them they buy or opt-in. Think of how this applies to CTA buttons in your emails and websites (CTA=call to action). What message is on your button? “Click here” or “Save $100 on My Order” – which do you think will work better? If you’ve brought your customer to the point of serving the next step, think about their immediate next step, use a button with copy that anticipates their next step. And what else can be done to bump-up click-throughs? Add an arrow that leads the eye to the button. Your page designer may not appreciate the request, but BounceExchange has hard data to support the outcome of “wrecking” the page design a bit. Remember you are the marketer, stick to your click-through guns.

Test, test, test

We conduct a lot of testing, research and interviews; this process leads us in the direction our customers’ and prospects’ thinking. BounceExchange published a summary of 10 points of inspiration (and blunders to avoid) to improve conversations with customers and prospects along the lines mentioned above. Again, it’s not an endorsement of their services, use the info for inspiration for your next email message or landing page.

Check out more ways to improve your digital game:

Opt-in testing, graphics vs. type
Opt-in, 1-step vs. 2-step
Opt-in distractions to avoid
Bounce rate reduction
A/B testing
Directional cues
CTA buttons
Consistent messaging across methods
Testimonials

Enjoy the entire BounceExchange report, download it here.

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PERSONA GRATA

Customer profiles, buyer personas — how many of these do you formally create and informally contemplate for a marketing or product campaign? As marketers, we are always modeling to “keep it real” when we talk about a product to a target audience or develop a new product.

Increase understanding
Interviews and other research of your past customers and reviewing customer profile data help you develop personas on your current products. The interviews give you an opportunity to get a deeper understanding of your buyers’ motivations to help you model your next customer targets.

And a extra benefit: Interviews can give you new product ideas and product improvement perspectives. Don’t be afraid to ask the hard questions, you may find the answers you are looking for to fix or improve a product.

Here’s a whitepaper from IBM that provides a clean process to remind us of persona development best practices and a great primer if you are just starting to use personas.