Josh Kerbel

From the “Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus department”……   Sales and marketing don’t play well together

Forrester finds most b2b organizations not aligned

Cambridge, Mass.—Only 8% of b2b companies surveyed by Forrester Research said they have tight alignment between sales and marketing, according to a new report.

Who hasn’t heard this story?

I think the Old Spice guy may have fallen off his horse after seeing his year over year sales numbers:

But sales of the featured product—Red Zone After Hours Body Wash—aren’t necessarily tracking with that consumer appeal: In the 52 weeks ended June 13, sales of the brand have dropped 7 percent according to SymphonyIRI. (That amount excludes those rung up at Walmart.) P&G execs were not available to comment.” This, from Brandweek via Stephen Denny

Social media types across the Internet must be plotzing at this news………..you mean someone is holding social media accountable?  Ack you can’t!?!  You don’t get it!!!  It’s all about the brand!!!!

This isn’t the first “Oh wait, maybe this isn’t doing what we thought it was doing for the whole social media thingy?”  Even media types are starting to wake up to this fact –   B to B marketers still looking for return on tweets

I’m not saying that social media promotion is a waste of time if it drives a company’s bottom line, but throwing money at a social media campaign for the sake of throwing money at a social media campaign is kinda like banging your head against the wall because it feels good.

But I guess this all part of human nature, after all, how much money did companies invest in the Internet to find out that direct marketing actually works?

Ask anyone in business which task is easier (and cheaper for that matter) selling more product to existing customers or finding new customers to sell to.  Here are 6 quick tips so you can do more of the former to support you while focusing on the latter:

1. Discount,  but don’t discount. What’s the difference between promoting ” Buy 2 and Get 1 Free” and “Save 33% on your purchase?  Well, from a purely mathematical point of view nothing, but from a business and psychological view they are a world apart.  First off you can increase sales volumes by dangling a carrot in front of you customer to increase their units purchased.  Secondly, you haven’t really impacted your value proposition with the first phrase as people are not quick to do the math.  Start outright discounting your product and you start eroding the value of your product in people’s minds.
2. Figure out how much your customers are worth to you.  Segment your customers – spend time and money promoting yourself to big spenders.
3. Let customers customize their orders.  Sell in smaller lot sizes.
4. Increase your value proposition.  Rather than discounting a product, throw in an additional free product with purchase that costs you less than the discount you would have taken in the first place.
5. Tell your customer to buy more.  Yes, that’s right, You.  You need another one of my widgets.
6. Ask your customer to buy more. If step 5 doesn’t work, try this.

Motivation…….

That’s the whole point of this marketing thing isn’t it? Put something in front of your readers and then get them to engage in some activity? Email you? Buy you? Subscribe you?

Or did i miss that class?

Anyways, enough with the smart ass routine from me, it’s time to get down to something useful.

1. Think positive – Not in a Tony Robbins sort of way.  It’s as easy to be positive as negative, so when you are trying to influence your reader, try to keep it framed using positive language. Think of reward rather than punishment.

2. Be Direct – Put some meaning into your phrases. No one wants a slogan for the sake of a slogan.  Chances are no one cares about your cute attempt at Cockney rhyming slang.

3. Build it and they will come – If your product requires assembly, use streaming video to demonstrate how to assemble or use the product (can you say Youtube).  Don’t believe me, look at this little video tutorial on makeup that has over 1.6 million views.

4. Don’t waste time -  Get to the benefits at the beginning of your pitch.  You have about 10, 9, 8, 7 6 seconds to catch someone’s attention……….wait, you lost them.

5. Be memorable – Not in a Bill Buckner 1986 World Series Error Sort of Way, but figure out how to stand out from your competition in a good way.

6. Reward the customer – Get your customer to pay attention to your message by rewarding them. You can do this by sending them a bonus gift if they give you information that you need.  Something like, If you
click here to email me, I’ll send you a copy of my White Paper – Why Your Search Engine Marketing Sucks.

7. Focus on product benefits – How does what ever you sell make me a better person.  Yes, I am a selfish son of bitch and so are your customers.

8. Make your messages mesh together -  I also happen to be an idiot, so make sure each part of your message builds on the previous part. Gradually introduce new concepts by gradually weaving them together with ones that are already known and accepted.  I have trouble understanding surprises.

9. Repeat Yourself – If you have trouble doing this, find the nearest 6 year old boy and take them to a toy store.  They will show you how it is done.

10. Keep Saying The Same Thing Over and Over – But do it differently. Did I say that already.  Try taking a 7 year old girl to a toy store.  I am sure you will get a good refresher lesson in repetition.

11. Make It Simple – Keep your message simple and make it simple for your users to respond to you, like
“Click here to send Josh an email and tell him you love him”.

AKA You need to know how much a customer is worth in order to determine how much to spend to acquire them……

As mentioned by both Jim Novo and Seth Godin in there posts regarding the lifetime value of a customer, you need to know how much cash the average customer generates for your business over a set duration of time.

SG then goes on to suggest that:

Instead of comparing what you invest to the benefit you receive from the first bill, the first visit, the first transaction, it’s important to not only recognize but embrace the true lifetime value of one more customer.

Write it down. Post it on the wall. What would happen if you spent 100% of that amount on each of your next ten new customers? That’s more money than you have to spend right now, I know that, but what would happen? Imagine how fast you would grow, how quickly the word would spread.

The problem with Seth’s approach is that it ignores some fundamental basics like “That’s more money than you have to spend right now, I know that, but what would happen?” What would happen is that most companies would probably go broke because they haven’t figured out their marketing formula first.

Even ignoring the fact that most companies/businesses don’t have the resources for that sort of upfront spending (Ignoring that fact is kinda like saying, Let’s pretend gravity doesn’t exist when I jump of this cliff – regardless of whether or not you think gravity exists, it seems to be a pretty real phenomenon) or the consequences of spending huge amounts to acquire some customers vs others (Don’t you get annoyed when your bank offers free computers or ipods to people who open a new account when you have been with the bank for 20 years), most companies and by most, I don’t mean Fortune 500 companies, I mean Fortune 500,000 companies (you might even be a Fortune 2,000,000  company)…..don’t know their customer acquisition costs or have a systematic marketing plan, so suggesting that you just go out and spend the LTV of a customer on the next 10 prospects that walk in your door is a little Utopian.

So what’s the moral of the story here……..

Before you go out and spend big bucks to acquire a customer, you should actually have an idea of what sort of bucks you should be spending in the first place

Jim does a much better job of operationalizing this concept into a usable form for business………..3 cheers for Jim!!!!

This is where the rubber meets the road and if you don’t know what you is going on, you waste a lot of money and come to the erroneous conclusion that you can’t market your product on the Internet

Search Engine Optimization Vs Search Engine Marketing

Even if you are not an Internet expert and you are going to pay for someone to market your business on line, you need to know the difference between Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM), otherwise someone is going to take you for a lot of money, that is if they haven’t already

To make it simple, SEO is when you pay someone to use various techniques to make sure your website shows up well in the organic or unpaid search results. Although you still paid for someone to do the work, this is still considered unpaid as you are not paying the search engines (GOOGLE, BING, YAHOO) to show your site.   These results are highlighted in yellow in the image below. SEM is when you pay the search engines directly to show an ad related to your site.   This is paid search and the results are circled in red in the image below.  If you remember one thing from this post, it should be that SEO and SEM do not accomplish the same task.  THEY ARE NOT INTERCHANGEABLE.

SEO results are circled in yellow - SEM results are circled in red

It is important that SEO and SEM work together, rather than against one another.

If you have a effective search engine optimization (SEO) strategy then you should show up with a high rank when people search for brand keywords and phrases that are related to your products.  But in the big scheme of things, if you are going to cut costs, cut them here.  This is because prospects looking for YOU will go to a little bit of trouble to find you.  Additionally, for the most part, as we already discussed, this is not how you find new prospects.

DO  NOT  use  search engine marketing (SEM) as  substitute  for poor search engine optimization (SEO) as this is like using a hammer to put a screw in the wall, yes it can be done, but will be messy and inefficient.  Use the right tool for the right problem.

If you are going to pay someone to optimize your site, make sure they do it for your brand related keywords and phrases.  These are the  terms that are in the head of your users’ searches.

Now the SEM Part

Your SEM (search engine marketing) gets people who are in the beginning of the product research portion of their purchasing process to find YOU!!!!  Your SEM should focus on the generic category terms that prospects use to search for information about solving their problem.   Done properly this allows you to catch the attention of prospects early on in their search, build a relationship with them and do so at a very low cost.

Update:  If you want to read more on this subject, this post by Jonathan Mendez might be of use to you.

Chances are that if you have tried search engine marketing and been burned (I.E. – not made any money after spending a lot of your own) it was because whoever ran your program went out and spent a pile of YOUR money advertising your head key words and key phrases, the words that are already closely associated with the company and probably driving a lot of organic traffic anyway.

On top of this they probably focused on getting the top positions on the sponsored listing. This means that all you are doing is promoting your business to people who already know your name and are already looking for your company and its products. The end result being is that you are not getting new prospects to your site and any money you spend in this manner is being wasted.

Your marketing should have been set up so that you were paying to get PROSPECTS to your website, not people who already know your products offerings and know how to find you.

You do this by optimizing your SEO and SEM strategies….We will cover this in Part IV

So the fact that there are two ways for an Internet user to find your website (HEAD vs. TAIL searches) lets you know that there are two different types of prospects out there searching for you and once you know that you can:

• Determine the best way to reach out to them; and,
• Once you reach them, you can devise a strategy to convert them to customers

Most of your visitors will find you using your BRAND keywords. They have a specific problem and know that you or your products can solve that problem for you. These people know what they are looking for, have probably done a good chunk of research already (which, if you know what you are doing, you have helped them with they were searching for CATEGORY keywords) and are now coming to buy. They are looking to find your site in the organic search results. This is the domain of search engine optimization. This is not where you should be sending your PPC search budget. Additionally, once you find these people, or rather they find your website, the focus should be on selling. Talk about prices, product options, payment methods, delivery, etc.

The focus of your PPC search budget should be spent on targeting the CATEGORY keywords that make up your TAIL. These people search using generic key phrases because although they have identified a problem, they don’t know enough about potential solutions. THEY ARE STILL EARLY IN THE PURCHASING CYCLE. THESE ARE THE PEOPLE YOU NEED TO TARGET. While you can optimize your site to show up for these keywords, it is often faster and more cost effective to use PPC ads for these keywords to attract the attention of people looking for a solution to a problem. These are your true PROSPECTS. Once they get to your website, your goal is two fold – educate them in a way that gently pushes them to buying from you and CAPTURE THEIR CONTACT INFORMATION

I’ll go out on a limb here and state the obvious. If you want to grow a business, you need new customer which means you need new prospects, so you obviously need a way of attracting new prospects who are still undecided in their purchase decision.

So what does this mean for you and your ad budget……more on this in PART III

of why competing on price alone is going to send your business into the shitter, consider this
In Faulty-Computer Suit, Window to Dell Decline – NYTIMES
By ASHLEE VANCE
Published: June 28, 2010

After the math department at the University of Texas noticed some of its Dell computers failing, Dell examined the machines. The company came up with an unusual reason for the computers’ demise: the school had overtaxed the machines by making them perform difficult math calculations.

“The funny thing was that every one of them went bad at the same time,” said Greg Barry, the president of PointSolve, a technology services company near Philadelphia that had bought dozens. “It’s unheard-of, but Dell didn’t seem to recognize this as a problem at the time.”

Documents recently unsealed in a three-year-old lawsuit against Dell show that the company’s employees were actually aware that the computers were likely to break.
…..
Its “Dell model” became synonymous with efficiency, outsourcing and tight inventories, and was taught at the Harvard Business School and other top-notch management schools as a paragon of business smarts and outthinking the competition.

“Dell, as a company, was the model everyone focused on 10 years ago,” said David B. Yoffie, a professor of international business administration at Harvard. “But when you combine missing a variety of shifts in the industry with management turmoil, it’s hard not to have the shine come off your reputation.”

For the last seven years, the company has been plagued by serious problems, including misreading the desires of its customers, poor customer service, suspect product quality and improper accounting.

…..
Dell’s supply chain had always stood out as one of its important assets. The company kept costs low by limiting its inventory and squeezing suppliers. If prices for components changed, Dell could react more quickly than its competitors, offering customers the latest parts at the lowest cost.

But the hundreds of Dell internal documents produced in the lawsuit show a company whose supply chain had collapsed as it failed to find working motherboards for its customers, including the firm representing Dell in the lawsuit, Alston & Bird.

Do you think this was a fun ride to the bottom?

What’s the moral of the story here…….

Realize that you are not the solution to everyone’s problem…………Don’t compete on price alone……

everyone who looks at your website wants to buy from you

Think of all the large ticket purchases you made in the last 5 years. When was the last time you made one:

• Without doing any research
• The first time you see a product that vaguely meets some of your purchase criteria

So now with this context in mind, look at your website. How do you think it performs given the two aforementioned ideas. Now take it a bit further. Imagine if your website was a showroom or store. Do you think everyone who walks into a store is there to buy on the spot?

Does that require an answer?

So how is your website set up? How does it separate the buyers vs the researchers? Are you even set up to help the researchers? Do you even measure researcher performance? Do you even know how? Do you have an objective with regards to researchers? Do researchers convert to buyers?

The one thing you should take away from this is that not everyone who comes to your site will ever buy/convert for you. Think of these people who bounce off your site in 10 seconds or less (Dealing with these people is a whole other topic/challenge) and remove them from your conversion calculations.

What you are left is are people you have a reasonable shot at selling too or at least engaging in the sales/research process. This should be your starting point for your conversion calculations.