10 Marketing Musts For 2008
How to enhance your marketing results in the New Year
By Brian Offenberger
The turn of the calendar for most of us signals a fresh start unencumbered by past actions. It signifies a new beginning, one filled with many wonderful opportunities.
As you analyze your business for 2008, what do you want to do better or differently? That’s a question many of you are asking. Here are our tips to make this year’s marketing results better than ever:
1. Focus on conversions - Too many businesses focus on lead generation without measuring and improving how these leads convert to income. For many of you, your key conversion measurements to track are ad click through rates, percentage of website visitors that take your desired business action, percentage of inquiries that lead to selling opportunities and percentage of sales opportunities that convert into actual revenue. Make just slight improvements in any or all of these areas and watch your bottom line soar!
2. Simplify – Many companies want their web page or marketing promotional piece to appeal to as many people as possible and promote as much of their business as possible. This results in confusion in the minds of prospective customers. Consumers are bombarded with thousands of promotional messages each day. They have literally thousand of choices for most products and services. These facts make it imperative that marketers simplify their offerings and make them highly relevant to an intended audience. Less is more.
3. Attend a trade show or conference about online marketing - Many of you have had no formal training in online marketing (after all, the internet as we know it didn’t even exist when I was in college) and yet online is where you’ll find prospects and customers. Failure to learn more about how to effectively market through this channel means that you are dependent upon others for even the most elementary of understandings and advice. Quit artificially taxing your profits and learn more about online marketing best practices.
4. Implement a multi-channel lead generation system – The more lead generation channels you successfully utilize, the more sales you will make. Too many businesses rely on one or two methods of lead generation. You can always spot them by the cyclical pattern of incoming lead and sales activity. Today’s savvy marketer is richly rewarded when using multiple channels for lead generation. They make more sales and give themselves better opportunities for higher organic search engine rankings. Make it a goal this year to successfully implement and utilize another channel for lead generation.
5. Talk about solving customer problems or needs, not about products or services – Take a look at most web pages and promotional material. You’ll note that 99% of the time the elements of the marketing focus on products or company features. Prospects will view your marketing from a “what’s in it for me perspective.” They don’t really care about your friendly personnel (doesn’t every company have friendly people?), 15 years in business, family owned and operated, etc. They do care about how you will solve their need or problem better than the other guy. Make solving needs or problems the focal point of your marketing messages and you will see conversion rate improvements. I promise.
6. Test – I’ve yet to meet any marketer who achieved maximum results in their first attempt at something, whether it is an ad, a webpage, an email or any other type of marketing collateral. The internet offers historically unprecedented low cost testing opportunities, many of which are low cost/no cost to use. Not sure what headline to use? Unsure of what pricing to put on a product? Want to know which web page concept works better? Test it and find out.
7. Measure – I talk to many companies involved with online marketing that simply rave about the growth they have seen. Yet many of them are not looking at the analytical data surrounding their marketing efforts to find out what really works. Do you know where most of your website visitors come from and how they behave on your website? How can you maximize results without analyzing activities along the way? If there were a “10 Commandments for Online Marketing Success”, measuring actions and outcomes would definitely be on the list. Google offers a free analytics services (Google Analytics). Check it out, learn what’s happening with visitors on your site and in your marketing, take corrective action and be prepared to make more deposits in the bank.
8. Better understand your customers – People go through stages that lead them to buy from you. Strive to understand clearly the needs, problems, thoughts and emotions they are feeling at each stage. Gear your marketing with messages that are relevant to your prospects at each stage of their buying cycle and work to reach prospects as early in the cycle as possible (it costs you less, if you do it right and generally results in higher margin sales for you). Take every opportunity to learn about customers. Use surveys and provide them with feedback email addresses that encourage them to leave comments. Ask what’s important to them.
9. Define your profit pathways –You sell multiple products or services. You add to your customer base each time you sell any one of these products or services. Your intention is to cross-sell other products and services to customers. Do you have a formal plan in place to make this happen? Every company wants to sell more to existing customers yet few have plans in place as to how to make that happen. If a person becomes a customer of your company because they buy widget model A, do you have formal plans (and communication messages) in place to sell them a maintenance agreement for widget model A, then the add-ons to widget model A, then widget model B, etc? Failure to define how you want to move customers through cross selling is a sure recipe for less than stellar results.
10. Specific offers and calls to action statements – Are customers clear as to what you want them to do? Does your ad or web page contain a specific offer from which they can make a decision? Have you concisely communicated to the customer what you want them to do? Much like a salesperson that never asks for an order, most marketing messages today fail in this regard as well. They don’t ask the prospect to take a specific action. They don’t make a specific offer to the customer. They don’t ask the customer to make a decision. Is it any wonder results are less than desired? People need to be told what you offer and what they need to do to capitalize on your offering. Don’t create marketing materials that fail to contain a specific offer and a specific call to action.
I am curious to learn your ideas. Click on this link and leave me a message. Share what you are doing to improve the impact of your marketing in 2008.
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