Sunday, June 27, 2010

Planning marketing success -- stick with your budget, diversify your investments in order to learn, add your business vision -- then execute and measure, track performance, adjust and re-load

Sometimes it's tough to read the subtlies in the tea leaves -- at other times, the object lesson is drop dead obvious: consider the comparison between [comfy bricks and mortar] Barnes & Noble and [online visionary] Amazon in the last three years, i.e. the frugality and comparability of online commerce are things that are here to stay.  If you are not already part of the stampede, you should consider aggressively moving the majority of your marketing, lead generation, lead conversion, client fulfillment activities,.customer service and customer support activities online.  Beyond simply moving activities online, these services should move in the direction of being accessible from smartphones using apps and wireless internet, i.e. consider the object lesson provided by Apple/Google  [who've been more aggressive in wireless] vs Microsoft [who is dependent upon desktop customers].

Beyond making your business mobile-ready, you need to develop a strategy that allows you to USE and OPTIMIZE the management of your data [which does NOT mean hiding, protecting, refusing to share and just sitting on your data hoping that noboby else uses it].  This means moving assets the cloud, thinking about providing data APIs to developers and exploiting the technologies available now for BIG DATA.  Of course, the most robust strategy is always infrastructure independent, so it's best to evaluate cloud service providers with an eye toward retaining flexibility and control (i.e. don't be seduced by "private cloud" arguments; be ready to move if a better opportunity comes along).  If we want to look in more detail how to prepare to market online, do some studying and take your own "Web Marketing 101" set of classes ... the basic outline looks something like the bullet points in this blog posting, but you should do your own reading and, of course, look to the experts for more guidance.

Before you get too excited, go back and look at your MBA texts on marketing fundamentals again.  You'll hear about the new rules or PR and how marketing has changed more in the last five years than it has in the previous 100, the FUNDAMENTALS have NOT changed.  If you look at the fundamentals will make you focus on what gotten better with new web marketing alternatives, rather than being distracted by hype or extra features.  It will always be best to think like a customer; now it is particularly essential to think how your customers will be using web-based, mobile-based marketing -- there is no substitute for being familiar with how customers accesses the channel ... the pioneers have already started to settle this territory, you should try to learn lessons from their successes.  A web and online marketing should include various channels:

  • an Web 2.0 website, content management framework with community forums or similarly active form of online presence ... make sure it's current, updated frequently ... keep it simple, spare and FAST [for impatient users, for mobile users, for users with old computers or slow connections] ... unless you are in some form of the "artistic" business, resist your "inner artist" ... be extremely wary of technology especially animations or similar gadgety things that require a long time to load and are the likely first point of failure -- do not imagine that you are building anticipation in your audience with some form of grand intro, save the drum rolls for live performances
  • reinforce your web presence in ways that drive people to the site ... use a continuously updated blog (better yet a vlog since blogs are going by the wayside, especially without an accompanying vlog), daily RSS news feed, Twitter updates and updates to various communities through Ping.fm ... actively participate in a real, genuine, authentic way in social communities -- comment on postings, follow blogs, use the "Like" button WHEN YOU LIKE SOMETHING on Facebook, become familiar with tools and apps on the keys sites you use [beyond just Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Ning]
  • try to incorporate a social commerce utility with special draws, promotions, reasons for people visit ... this can start with a simple web storefront with a shopping cart OR maybe an electronic online auction  ... the next phase is incorporates some form of collaborative/interactive activity such as online designer (e.g. CafePress custom t-shirts for events/special occasions) ... you will want to tie it in with "inside" special limited-time deals from either Twitter or your email campaign -- the important thing is to find a way to "interact" with your customers, provoke their interest ... finally, you will want to explore ways to involve them in discussion, perhaps with a user forum, perhaps support the storefront with online chat, seek product ratings or reactions from your customers, give them tool to "shop together" to communicate and sustain their relationships with their friends AND with you.
  • public relations campaigns / community events / live auctions / "real world" entertainment ... you have to have a "real world" presence, you have to prove that you are GENUINE, you have find ways to help people enjoy life and have fun, find ways for them to make news [with you], to generate enjoyable, memorable activity OFFLINE ... the reason to LEAD volunteer efforts and PR campaigns in your communities [in campaigns that mesh with your expertise, business mission] is people don't care how much you know until they know how much you care ... the REASON that companies like Goldman Sachs became as successful and as powerful as they are, is that their leadership recognized the importance of being entirely altruistic and providing helpful leadership in the short-term without charge, so that they could establish the good will and relationships necessary to capture long-term opportunities.  You must be careful, because if you act in a way that shows you aren't really interested in helping, but just doing the PR campaign for immediate returns (i.e. a way that shows you are greedy in the short-term), you will not get either the immediate returns or the long-term good will. 
  • videos / photos / podcasts and other forms of multimedia data appropriate to your business ... a picture is worth a thousand words, a video is worth more IF THEY ARE DONE WELL -- save the shaky, unedited videos and out-of-focus, poorly composed images for your friends and family [to joke about your lack of skils] ... much of the content on YouTube or Flickr is substandard -- not all of it is, some of it is really well done by professionals -- before you embark on a multimedia campaign that embarrasses you, you really should look at a professional workflow for video and photo -- if you watch this video and maybe some of the others posted on Chase Jarvis's blog, I think you'll agree that Chase and his crew have a lot of fun AND they have a really solid workflow with a lot of elements that you can adapt
  • search engine optimization with website analytics for understanding usage ... it is not only important for you to understand how search engines work and how to optimize your site (e.g. HTML tags, keywords, inbound links, sitemaps, SEO tools, vs. competitors, etc), it also important for you to understand how to get information from the data you pull from analytics tools.  You need to know how all of your visitors [including searching engine spiders/bots/scrapers] to your websites,  your social commerce tools, your blogs, your videos and every element in your web strategy navigate and use the things that you provide them ... if don't understand how to track performance, you're GUESSING about what your guessing about, i.e. you're screwed, you just don't know it yet.    
  • Google AdWords/AdSense, similar online advertising, affiliate programs ... it's important to spend time understanding how these programs ... maybe more important than any of the other bullet points ... you should also understand how you are going to use a CRM tool like Salesforce, Zoho CRM, SugarCRM, Microsoft Dynamics or Oracle OnDemand to convert leads from these ads into opportunities/proposals/closed sales.
  • tracked opt-in email marketing  ... send ONLY to people who have opt-ed in ... NEVER,EVER do anything perceived as unsolicited spam ...NEVER,EVER, EVER do anything perceived as unsolicited spam ...  realize, also, that email is dying ... younger generation users already find email passe and do not use it ... tracked email might still work for an older audience -- but be very careful
  • mobile apps, data APIs and other ways to share continuously updated data with developers of mobile and social community apps ...beyond just developing your own apps, look for ways to get developers involved in building tools that will make them successful (a la the communities of developers for Facebook apps, Twitter apps or Android phones) ... everything you do on this front will ensure your long-term web marketing success ... you will need to develop a different sort of metrics to measure your progress on this front, i.e. it is necessary to realize the strategic, long-term nature of this sort of effort ... you should also try to envision that what the population of 5 billion mobile web users will look like, try to envision where your segment of this market is going.

The bottom line in marketing is will always be about developing a budget and using a quantifiable, but diversified plan, measuring effectiveness, tracking performance and adjusting the plan.  Realize your plans will always be out-of-date artifacts and largely incorrect -- it is tempting to conclude that plans are useless, but the continual cyclical process of planning, doing, checking, acting, revising and repeating is vital and essential.  The plan is the script that you are working from ... but you will always be tracking, revising, improving the script.  Tracking performance, looking at the analytics, discerning patterns and measuring effectiveness of all of the elements in your entire mix of all marketing activities will allow to do two things: 1) executed in a more coordinated fashion, and 2) budget more wisely to target your investment in those activities with a clearly positive ROI.  Without measurements, analytics and tracking, you are completely guessing at where you should invest more heavily and which activities to eliminate -- a quantitative data-driven approach will not eliminate all uncertainty, but it should improve your ability to guess correctly when it is coupled with a qualitative approach.