What is marketing strategy?

Let’s have 30 seconds of silence.

That was your marketing message without a strategy.

That 30 seconds of silence is what people effectively get out of your communications if your message does not directly address their needs. As Howard Gossage has so aptly pointed out, people see or hear only what interests them. The rest is, well, nothing.

We are exposed to hundreds, if not thousands, of marketing messages every day. Why would we be receptive to all of them? This would be mental chaos. So, in response, we tune out all but the most relevant ones. Our brain is actually very good at tuning out stuff that it does not want or need. We do this automatically. This prevents us from going insane.

You probably remember the experience of learning a new word—as a child or even as an adult—and all of a sudden you see and hear that word everywhere. This is an example of how our brains smooth over the parts of our environment that are not relevant to us. That word was always there, of course, but it was effectively invisible to our mind until learning its meaning gave it relevance. As a result, pop! like magic that word is now there where seemingly it never was before. A marketing message operates exactly the same way.

What does marketing strategy have to do with this materialization out of nothing?

Marketing strategy is sorting out who your audience actually is, and then finding out what has meaning for them. What do they care about, and how does this relate to your offer? What message can you deliver that is both true and meets your consumer squarely at the level of their needs? Marketing strategy is the process of uncovering messages that can be heard. Marketing strategy allows you to answer the crucial question your offer must address: “Why should I care?” To paraphrase Peter Drucker: Consumers do not buy what you sell. They buy what has value to them. 

Why does marketing strategy matter?

Shortest answer: Because it saves you money.

In marketing, there is strategy and there are tactics. A lot of marketing, in practice, is preoccupied with what I call tactical experimentation. This is the act of  throwing all kinds of things out at the world or at broad demographic targets to see what works. As you do this you are spending money, potentially lots of it. The idea in this method is to do this until you find some marketing actions that work, and when you find them you can then do more of those.

This process often results in the classic Wanamaker dilemma—”Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” He was speaking of advertising, but the principle applies.

Marketing strategy allows you to use pathways and footholds that apply your limited marketing budget more effectively (everyone’s marketing budget is limited). Marketing strategy facilitates your ability to apply marketing money to the correct half of the Wanamaker equation—the half you are not wasting on audiences who do not value your message.

To illustrate this principal with one of our own rather straight forward examples, when we looked at the South Bronx as a marketplace for the Bronx Museum, the situation we saw is reflected by the first competitive advantage diagram below: here there is nothing in their offer, as understood by the consumer, that is of any perceived value. The strategy, therefore, could not be to simply support the institutional desire to communicate about all the great art that was on exhibit (see Drucker above).

We had to find factors that could legitimately be moved into the competitive advantage, things that were perceived as valuable to the desired audience, that were not perceived to be offered by the competition. In this case, there was no required product change, just an adjustment of the marketing message communicated through the website and advertising. By effectively marketing on the basis of the factors that reflected what was of value to the target consumer we cost-effectively supported the achievement of their desired objective: to increase attendance from local audiences in the South Bronx. This is marketing strategy applied, and it brought results. (You can read more about this campaign in The Marketing of the Bronx Museum.)

So, for the sake of your own institution or product, please spend the time and energy to really get inside the head of your consumer. Find the intersection between your offer and their needs. Answer Drucker’s Questions #2 and #3: Who is your customer? What do they value? Isolate those specific factors that actually drive behavior for them. Realize they are not buying what you are selling, they are only buying what is of value to them. And, by all means, use THAT in your marketing communications.

You’ll be very glad you did.

If what I’m describing makes sense, if you understand that strategy saves you money, and you need help sorting out the situation for your particular marketplace, please consider one of our Branding and Marketing Discovery Workshops.

by James Heaton

Content marketing is one of the biggest challenges and opportunities for both business and consumer brands today. As brands look to expand their reach online and engage audiences beyond ‘interruptive’ advertising, they’re increasingly looking to cultivate shareable content that is informative, entertaining and interesting.

Marketers regularly cite challenges around producing enough engaging content. A lot of the content out there today simply doesn’t move a brand forward. Content should always map back to a broader brand story that is aligned to a brand’s fundamental story.

Social engagement apps are shareable digital experiences that invite consumers (and their friends) into a social relationship with a brand. Done right, engagement apps can also create snackable, sharable content that is perfect for kicking off a content engagement relationship between brand and consumer, as well as for filling out the content calendar to keep the drumbeat going. They provide the mechanisms that encourage consumers to both create content themselves, and share that content among their own network. The value of marketing on social platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn is not only the size of the audience, but also the networked graph of connected consumers. So that sharing of content from person-to-person is a critical opportunity to tap ‘earned’ reach.

Here are 5 ways engagement apps invite consumers to create shareable brand-themed content.

1. Let Your Fans and Followers Vote

Voting allows fans to have a say in the brand’s direction, whether it’s helping choose something as light-hearted as a t-shirt design, or as important as a magazine cover photo. With engagement apps, fans can vote for their favorite destination, product, design — or marketing theme — and share their vote. Those voting results, enriched by commentary and insights, can provide content that fuels other branded channels and provides wider audience insights into how the crowd thinks and feels about your brand. Vitamin Water successfully deployed this idea with its social ‘favor creator’ campaign back in 2009. More recently, Outside Magazine tapped social fans to pick the ‘Best Town of the Year’ in 2011, 2012 and again in 2013 — campaigns that also fed valuable content for both the print and online magazine.

2. Give Your Fans and Followers a Personalized Brand Experience

A brand experience tailored to a user’s profile provides fans with something unique that keeps them exploring. Engagement apps can deliver a personalized experience, such as a set of product and service choices, white papers and case studies, or even fashion outfits, and reflect the identity revealed in their profile data. The clothing brand Jones NY is currently leveraging followers’ LinkedIn profiles this fall with their Style Creator campaign, allowing executive women to have outfits suggested based on their professional LinkedIn profile.

3. Ask Fans and Followers to Contribute Brand-Related Content

Contributions from fans don’t just make the community feel like a more essential part of a brand, they also help brand marketers delegate content creation. Social engagement apps can ask fans to submit photos, videos, or other stories on a brand-related theme. That fan-submitted content can then enrich a brand’s own marketing channels. For example, Dressy.com is reporting engagement success by asking fans to submit photos based on themes such as weddings, to their brand website. Virgin Mobile recently created a TV spot entirely from consumer contest videos.

4. Challenge the Knowledge of Your Social Audience

Challenge your fans, to get their attention and their engagement. Challenges can take the form of quizzes or polls that test a fan’s knowledge. They can pose questions for which the answers are informative and useful, and themselves become shareable results. Earlier this year, Air New Zealand launched a “Kiwi IQ” quiz that challenged fans’ knowledge of New Zealand sights by asking them to decide whether a photo or fact was about Auckland or about San Francisco. On a similar travel-related note, Visit Norway USA challenged their fans earlier this year to answer questions about Norway facts--a question a day for a month.

5. Help Fans and Followers Uncover Profile Insights

Fans will be more likely to come back to a brand if they learn something about themselves by interacting with your brand or branded content. With engagement apps, access to a user’s profile can yield valuable personal insights that the user may not have noticed. By logging in with social credentials, a fan or follower might be able to see patterns or relationships in their profile they hadn’t seen before, or might see how they become ‘matched’ to some brand-related identity or product. For example, Microsoft launched a “Nametag Analyzer” powered by LinkedIn’s professional graph that gave followers a new look at their job title, while at the same time was introducing them to Microsoft products.

Success on social means finding a brand voice that resonates with fans and followers. Having audiences contribute content, discuss content, and talk about wider themes that relate to a brand is a way to cultivate a more prominent voice.

Marketing on social shouldn’t involve just talking about a brand’s products and services endlessly. Delivering informative and entertaining content is essential. When social audiences participate in the creation of the content, brands can reach a new level of success and authenticity, unparalleled to what a brand could deliver on its own.

By Roger Katz

What marketing trend has taken off like conversion rate optimization? Growth hacking? Targeted email drip campaigns? Even with those efforts, often the goal is to optimize getting more people to take more actions (a/k/a convert).

With the practice of CRO rising to prominence, conversion rate optimization experts and advice have, as well. Every day there seem to be new ideas for testing, new tips on how to write better copy, new best practices for creating high converting landing pages, and even advice on understanding the psychology of conversion and behavioral economics.

Almost all of the advice you see today is focused on driving marketing results by altering copy and visual web elements, but there is a whole lot more to the web these days than static websites designed to capture leads and convert sales. We now have robust consumer web applications, the mobile web, and Software-as-a-Service products that need optimizing as well.

In the internet age of the signed-in user, it’s time we start thinking of conversion rate optimization more holistically.

Here are a few major points about conversion rate optimization that haven’t been widely addressed by CRO experts, along with what you can do today to get ahead of the curve.

1. Conversions Happen throughout the Customer Journey

You could be using every tactic known and have awesome top-of-funnel conversion rates to show for it, but that won’t necessarily get you happy, recurring customers.

The visitors you do convert could be low quality customers that buy only once or stay with your service for just a few months.

While optimizing your conversions throughout the buying cycle is important, you shouldn’t stop there. You need to focus on the larger picture – the customer lifecycle.

By optimizing each lifecycle stage your customers go through for conversion, you will start seeing increased user engagement and flow from one stage to the next: more free trial and freemium users converting to paying customers, more paying customers converting on upsell opportunities and renewing, and more happy customers becoming vocal brand advocates.

If you have not already reviewed Dave McClure’s Startup Metrics for Pirates, I advise you to do so and get a quick understanding of the customer lifecycle for most web businesses: Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Revenue, and Referral.

Here are some ways you can optimize each lifecycle stage for better conversion:

I. Acquisition

At the top of the funnel, the goal is clear. Drive people to your website and get them to convert into a subscriber, lead, or customer.

Most people are not going to convert right away, though, at least not on any action that will cost them much money or resources.

As with the overall customer journey, usually various steps are taken beforehand as your visitors investigate how you will help them with their specific needs in the moment.

This is why it is important to take a step back from thinking only about optimization of individual pages and think about how you can create stronger conversion funnels.

People are coming to your site with specific needs in mind. It’s your job to make it easy for them to quickly learn how you can meet those needs and guide them toward converting on your most relevant solution.

Examples of common user flows. Thanks to Morgan Brown for the image.

For instance, if people search for “how to grow organic tomatoes” and land on a blog post you wrote on the subject for your farmers’ market website, then prominently promoting your organic tomato seeds for sale or a free ebook on organic gardening (two different conversion funnels) on that blog post page could be a good idea. Whereas, simply showing a non-specific ad for your farmers’ market website likely wouldn’t be as effective.

A great example of focused conversion funnels in action is evident on Odesk’s website.

Odesk needs both freelancers and people posting freelancer jobs, but going through their site, it’s obvious that the core conversion they focus on is new job postings. They understand that freelancers often have outsourcing needs as well and that they won’t sign up or stay engaged with the platform if there isn’t demand for their services.

Because Odesk understands their visitors in this way, they are able to focus their core message (“Get the right freelancer. Get the job done.”) and free up valuable homepage real estate for promoting different conversion funnels that make it easy for people to take the path that is most relevant to them.

If a user clicks on one of the freelancer types on the homepage, Odesk immediately takes them to a list of freelancers to evaluate. If the list looks good enough for their standards, Odesk makes it very easy to convert. If they are not ready yet, Odesk makes it easy to continue investigating (continue down the conversion funnel).

If the user clicks through to a freelancer’s full profile page, Odesk gives them options. Odesk learned that visitors may not be ready to convert and post a job listing right away. So, on the freelancer profile, they give them the option to “Contact” the freelancer.

If the user clicks on “Contact,” they are taken to a page to create an account. For visitors that go this far down the conversion funnel, without converting, requiring account creation gives Odesk the opportunity to showcase new conversion funnels (through email marketing, retargeting ads, or web personalization) based on the steps they have taken so far.

Get to know the different types of visitors that come to your site, how they enter your site, and what solutions of yours would be most valuable to them. Then, design specific user flows from their entry points to guide them toward the conversion that is most relevant to them in the moment.

If you serve your visitor’s needs effectively, you’ll have plenty of opportunities to convert them on your core conversion metric over time.

II. Activation

Website visitors move into the Activation lifecycle stage as soon as they convert into a customer of your product or service, but the stage doesn’t end there. A customer is “Activated” as soon as they find value in your product, and that often requires the customer to convert on multiple actions.

Twitter, for instance, figured out that if they were able to get users to follow a certain number of people on the platform, those users would be more likely to find value and remain engaged users.

So, Twitter implemented a new user experience specifically designed to get more users to that magic number as soon as they could.

Right after creating a new Twitter account, visitors are placed into an onboarding flow that politely requires them to follow 5 Twitter users before moving on to the next step.

Once they follow 5 people, then Twitter asks them to follow 5 more.

Rather than asking users to follow all 10 people up front, they separate the process into two steps. They either assumed or learned through a conversion test that people were more likely to continue the process if they broke it up into steps.

Regardless of what Activation means for your business, there likely are steps you need customers to take for them to get there, which means calls-to-action and whole user experiences that can be optimized for better conversion.

After all, what good is a top-of-funnel free trial conversion when the user does not become fully activated, and then churns before discovering how valuable your product could be for them?

III. Retention

So now you have a fully activated customer. The next objective is to keep that customer engaged in your product or service so they continue to gain value from you and remain a customer.

Driving customer engagement is pivotal to preventing customer churn and increasing customer retention. A study conducted by the Aberdeen Group linked increased engagement to retention rates that were 3.5 times higher than the norm.

But, what is customer engagement exactly? It’s a bunch of conversion points prime for conversion optimization.

The process of driving customer engagement is the process of converting more users on more valuable actions specific to them.

So, your goal in the retention lifecycle stage should be to optimize calls-to-action and user flows to help users have a more successful and enjoyable experience and keep them wanting to stay aboard.

IV. Revenue

According to Gartner Group, 80% of your company’s future revenue will come from just 20% of your existing customers. This comes from customers that have grown their customer lifetime value (LTV) over time.

Your business model may include automatically charging customers more based on increased engagement and usage of your product, but customers may want to take advantage of a pricier plan or more products from you sooner, rather than later.

If you do not do this already, be sure to present calls-to-action for any upgrade or upsell opportunity within your customer experience whenever relevant. Making the option to take advantage of such offers readily available and optimizing those calls-to-action for better conversion could be one of your biggest opportunities for business growth.

CrazyEgg does this very well with many upgrade related calls-to-action on their dashboard.

You may think “Wow that is a lot of ads to upgrade!” They get away with this because of smart placement and wording. In some cases, they even pose calls-to-action as a value to the user. “Visits Used this Month” and “Stored Snapshots” metrics really are just reminders of how much room users have in their account before they need to upgrade (putting them in that frame of mind every time they visit the dashboard).

CrazyEgg promotes account upgrade in smart ways throughout their product, with the “Change Plan” call-to-action staying in the top navigation on most pages, and by promoting features that are available in an upgraded plan.

“Compare Mobile vs Desktop” and “Filter” are features that are not available in their basic plan, but they show them as options in their web app, anyway. When someone clicks on one of those options, they are shown a relevant drop down message that shares the benefits of those features that are available only upon upgrading.

With such a big chunk of your future revenue riding on how well you can nurture and convert your customers on paying you more, testing and optimization are key.

V. Referral

The meteoric rise of startups like Airbnb and Dropbox launched the growth hacker movement and interest in discovering new ways to make web products more “viral.”

Besides usually having a great product, companies that have success at driving social sharing and word of mouth not only understand how to connect with complementary networks that will give them reach (in the case of Airbnb integrating into Craigslist), they also understand very well how to position and promote sharing.

If a visitor clicks on “Get free space!” in Dropbox, they are presented with numerous ways they can earn more Dropbox storage space simply by sharing Dropbox with others or completing additional engagement tasks. Dropbox follows multiple conversion rate optimization best practices by using “free” in the copy, describing the value of clicking, and prominently placing the call-to-action as the first link in the top navigation.

A social media share button, an email invitation, or simply asking customers to talk about you are all points at which you have to convince your customers to convert on an action (sharing). That convincing can be tested and optimized.

2. All Conversions Are Not Created Equal

Considering only one conversion action as the key metric in a conversion test could be costing your business increased revenue.

For any conversion test, keep track of the users that convert and their engagement further down the line to determine which variation actually results in more business value.

You may get more conversions to your subscriber list with one variation, but the other variation may provide more customers in the long run or customers with a higher customer lifetime value.

Any time you can tie a conversion test back to revenue, you should do it, and that often will require digging deeper into your customer data than your typical A/B testing software can provide.

3. Customer Data Could Hold Your Best Conversion Wins

At every touch point throughout the customer lifecycle, you’re collecting customer information and learning more about how customers behave. You learn things like how they discover and travel through your site and the features they visit most frequently.

The data you collect by watching users progress through your site/product will help you discover the paths users take that result in your desired conversions.

For instance, if you have an e-commerce business, you might find that if your visitors view at least four products, they are more likely to make a purchase. After discovering this correlation, you should run tests to find the causation behind the pattern.

Maybe it isn’t just any four products. After testing, you may discover it is four specific products that are assisting in the purchase of another product.

By digging into customer data, you will start to see patterns that you can test. Then, you’ll likely uncover new methods to increase your conversion rates backed by the proven behavior of your customers.

4. Segmentation and Targeting Should Not Be Ignored

We all know how important relevancy is in marketing. Advertisements convert better when they are targeted to relevant audiences. The same goes for email marketing. Also, if your landing pages are not relevant to your marketing campaigns, then conversion rates will suffer there as well.

The common theme driving positive results in these marketing channels is segmentation.

You segment your target audiences, and then deliver targeted messaging that each segment is more likely to resonate with, take action on, and convert. As marketers, we have gotten used to this idea because it works.

The same strategy should be applied to conversion rate optimization on websites and web applications as well.

Calls-to-action, value propositions, design, and even entire features can be optimized to be more relevant to your users based on many different factors: referring traffic source, geography, demographics, the device being used, on site and in-app user behavior, purchase history, customer lifecycle stage, and the list goes on.

Rather than having Pinterest traffic arrive at the same site experience everyone else does, Gardener’s Supply Company instead welcomes Pinterest visitors with a relevant popup message and offer.

By aptly addressing incoming Pinterest traffic, they saw a 3x increase in revenue from the Pinterest channel.

Follow Gardener’s lead and take the first step in using segmentation as part of your conversion rate optimization efforts by simply targeting specific messages and content to specific referring source traffic. After that, experiment with personalizing your user’s entire web experience, based on the actions they take on your site and the lifecycle stage they are in, to uncover even better results throughout the customer journey.

In Conclusion, Look at the Big Picture

There is a ton of great advice out there, and a near endless number of ways you can test and optimize for better conversion rates. But, as you think about your next split test, take a step back and think of these big picture CRO points:

• Don’t stop optimizing at the top of the funnel. You have plenty more conversion points to optimize in order to get more customers engaged, retained, paying you more money over time, and sharing your product or service with others.
• Look deeper into conversion tests to understand the real impact. Don’t say I didn’t warn you when what you thought was a big conversion win becomes a cause of lower revenue.
• Discover potential conversion wins in your customer data. People could be going down unexpected paths for conversion. Identify them, and then test ways to improve the flow.
• Add segmentation to the conversion rate optimization mix. Conversion rate optimization without segmentation is the same as sending bulk email blasts without segmentation. Either way, you are missing out on higher conversion rates.

Have any thoughts on these points? Completely disagree or have other ideas to share? Say so in the comments below and let’s get the discussion flowing on the study of conversion rate optimization.

About This Author: Rob Carpenter is the Director of Marketing at Evergage, a point-and-click, real-time web personalization platform. He writes on real-time marketing, conversion rate optimization, and customer success on the Evergage Blog. Follow Evergage on Twitter to stay up to date and say hello!


Learn How an onsite Social Community can be a perfect tool in Customer Retention

Instagram is the fastest growing social network with 150 million users and 40 million photos being uploaded each day according to social analytics company Simply Measured.  A new report from Simply Measured shows that brand engagement and interaction is also thriving on the photo-based social network with 71% of top brands now participating. Brand adoption of Instagram is now rivaling Google+ and Pinterest that have 73% adoption and 74% adoption respectively.

One of the exciting stats from the report is the fact that the number of active brands  is growing (55% more brands using the network than last year) as well as the overall engagement. The entanglement metrics (likes and comments) have jumped 350% since last year. Currently 99% of the engagement is currently coming from image likes.

The focus on brands engaging their audience has grown as well over the past year. Top brands are posting more content each month with 47% posting 11-50+ times a month:

An interesting fact is that many users are liking brand images for the content – not the filter/creative treatment. Only  30% of brand posts were filtered, a number that was down 12% from last year.

Additionally hashtags are widely used by brands. 83% of brand posts post include hashtags, and 97% of active brands now are using hashtags.

Want the free full report? Head over to Simply Measured to download.
6 Best Practices for Influencer Marketing

S P O N S O R E D Influencer or word-of-mouth marketing is a key piece of any good marketing plan. The trick is to adapt it to social media, which has made word-of-mouth global and immediate. Learn 6 best practices marketers use to influence the influencers. Download now
 

I joined a Twitter chat about the value of social this week and during the course of the conversation, was surprised to learn that for some people, the idea of enabling employee advocates was a novel concept. So many people recognize the power of social media for marketing and external evangelism, yet they neglect the power within their own organization!

We all know that social technology enables human connections. But the thing is, there are no boundaries between consumers or employees, because most of us are both. Technology has also amplified the speed and reach of every type of communication. This evolution in how we share information and knowledge goes far beyond just social "media." It's a complete transformation in the way we interact. When businesses fail to take advantage of the valuable assets in their organization, they miss out on an excellent way to create both customer engagement and employee empowerment.

Social strategist Ted Rubin was featured recently in a great article by Cheryl Connor, in Forbes. He said, "When someone asks, ‘What is the ROI of Social?' I ask back...‘What's the ROI of Loyalty, what's the ROI of Trust?' In order to sell the concept, you've got to talk in a language they'll understand."

I'd take this a step further, to ask employers, "What's the ROI of employee engagement and effective communication with consumers?" When employees are empowered to make direct connections with the customers they serve, it fuels productivity and loyalty from within. In addition to having satisfied employees, an organization can create an internal army of brand ambassadors and influencers who can help promote the business.

So often in marketing conferences, we hear about an employee who has gone above and beyond for the sake of a customer. In this social and connected world we live in, this single experience can spread like wildfire, promoting the organization in an organic, authentic way. Giving your employees the power to speak out on behalf of your organization (with some guidelines in place) can only help broaden the voice of your brand voice and increase the level of visibility in the marketplace.

What does it take to develop a following of employee brand ambassadors? Start with these guiding principles:

• Make your organizational knowledge accessible to all employees through the use of social technology within the business.
• Empower employees to participate in social media on behalf of the brand. 
• Put clear, easy-to-follow guidelines in place and have a plan for dealing with potential mistakes. 
• Facilitate innovation by listening and encouraging feedback around processes, services and products. 

Over the next few years, it's going to become clear that businesses will need to give employees a social experience just like the ones they get in their personal lives. This will not only help businesses retain valuable employees, but it will also be a benefit to the bottom line--and a significant competitive advantage for those that do it right. It will improve employee engagement, productivity and innovation. It will help employees deliver exemplary customer experiences to consumers. It will allow organizations to rally their largest group of brand advocates: the employees themselves.

One thing is absolutely true in this new world of free-flowing information: everyone has a voice and the platform to use it. If you're not using it, someone else will.

Michelle Killebrew


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