Sales

Are you ready to go native?

October 19, 2016

One of the things I both love and hate about the marketing industry is the constant quest for creating the hot new thing. Sometimes, there really is something that is so new and innovative, like the topic for last week’s column – retargeting – that it can legitimately make the claim “hot new thing.”

But there are other times when the hot new thing is really more of an updated or revised thing. That’s my take on this whole “native advertising” hype that is surging through marketing circles right now.

Native advertising is paid advertising that is camouflaged in some way to look like it’s just helpful content or natively belongs in the setting that it’s placed in. It’s usually clearly marked in some way, but the whole goal is for it to be less “ad like” so the audience will not ignore it.

I know the definition itself is as clear as mud, so let me give you a couple examples. The advertorial is a form of native advertising. An advertorial looks like editorial content but is actually an ad that a company bought. Many “special sections” of a newspaper or magazine are in truth, advertorials. But because they are written and designed to look like a story rather than an ad – they are hiding in plain view.

Another example of native advertising is product placement. Watch a couple hours of HGTV on Saturday morning and you will begin to spot all the different products being used. When you see a label or the host mentions a product by name, odds are very good that someone paid good money (or donated product) for that.

I’m not suggesting that native advertising isn’t a good idea. It can be a great way to expose an audience to your offerings. What I am saying is that you shouldn’t believe all the hype about it being something new.

What is “newish” bout native advertising are the digital options. For example, you can now marry online ads to relevant online content. Have you noticed that at the bottom of many online news stories you can find a “what’s trending now” area with links to other, related stories? If you click on one of those stories, what you’ll often discover is that you’ve been taken to a landing page that is selling a product that is tangentially connected to the topic of the first story.

Another way you can digitally go native is to pay someone to publish your content or write content for you and build calls to action within that content. You can drive traffic to your website, a product page, an event or whatever you’d like. Many times this sort of purchased content is appearing in online magazines and authoritative websites on specific topics. These native ad articles are usually marked with the word sponsored to indicate that they were paid for. But they look just like the rest of the “pure” content on the site. Another advantage to you, the advertiser, is the SEO value of the backlinks.

Native ads within videos is a very popular option right now as well. You can run your ads on YouTube videos that contain relevant content. You can also produce a video and like the sponsored story on a website, you can actually embed your ads right into the video itself. You can just create brand awareness or you can actually have calls to action within your message.

Native advertising begins with content. Whether the content is created by the brand, by the publisher for compensation or the ads is just aligning itself with topically relevant content – the goal is look and feel more editorial to avoid the audience’s aversion to traditionally intrusive ads.

There’s nothing new about that idea.

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How is showcasing changing your business?

October 5, 2016

Showcasing is yet another new wrinkle that the internet and mobile technology has brought to our culture. If you’re not familiar with the term, it’s when someone goes to a brick and mortar store to look at an item but fully intends to make their purchase online. This isn’t a new behavior but it’s certainly been on the increase for the past decade.

Smartphones have really contributed to the increase of this practice. Now shoppers can compare prices on the go, right there in the store. In fact, “showroomers” as they’re called, use their phones in retail establishments 50-60% of the time.

They might be comparing prices, checking product reviews or even creating a shopping list for later.

Whether you own a retail establishment or not, you can see the rub. The retailer goes to the expense and time to stock the item, the person actually is in their store and yet – they still don’t buy it there. There’s no reward to the retailer at all for helping the shopper get exactly what they want.

When asked, the number one reason cited for showcasing is price. Almost 3/4ths of showroomers checked and discovered that they could get a better price online. Interestingly – very few of them had ever asked the retailer to match the lower price.

Almost 50% of the time, the shopper walked into the store fully intending to actually purchase it later but they wanted to see the item before they made the purchase or do a little legwork before they went home and made the buy.

One of the main reasons for not making the purchase? They did not want to carry the item home. Many showroomers have gotten very used to the convenience of home delivery and as we know – in most cases, they are not paying extra for that service.

Interestingly – these shoppers are different from the “I like to shop at 2 am shoppers” who rate the 24/7 access as the primary reason they shop online.

The retailers own some of this trend too. If 50% of the showroomers walked into the store intending to buy online, that means the other 50% intended to make their purchase right there in the store. So why didn’t they?

About half of them discovered that the store didn’t actually have the product they were interested in on their shelves. The store was out of stock or didn’t offer some of the conveniences (like free home delivery) that could swing the decision.

But this isn’t all gloomy news for retailers. There are also plenty of shoppers who are reverse showroomers. They do their research online but want to buy locally, for a variety of reasons.

So what should a retailer do, to encourage the showroomers to buy immediately rather than going online to shop and at the same time, to keep the reverse showroomers happy?

Increase the caliber of your sales staff: Make sure they know the merchandise and also have the tools in the store to get an answer if they don’t know. They also need more sales training so they can be genuinely helpful.

Over service to keep selling: Try a mix of price matching, free home delivery, extended warranties, tech support and checking in on customers after the sale. An online store can’t offer that level of service.

Leverage their phone time: Why not send time sensitive coupons and offers to their phone using geo-targeting to get them to buy right now? Invite them to use your in store wifi and help them comparison shop.

This connection between our mobile devices and shopping isn’t going away. This is the new normal and if anything – it’s going to get more pervasive. Retailers have to find a way to leverage showcasing to their advantage.

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Sales Funnel – When are they going to buy?

August 4, 2016

For the last few weeks, we’ve been exploring how you can use your website to move prospects into and through your sales funnel. In this week’s post, we’ll examine what needs to happen once someone has been in your sales funnel for a while and is continuing to show interest.

Having the right timing matters. You don’t get to this part of the funnel after the first couple interactions. If I see one consistent mistake, it’s that people shift into these sorts of strategies way too early. It’s like meeting someone in a bar and proposing the same night. Odds are you aren’t going to get too many yeses.

I totally get it from a business’ point of view and have often felt that frustration myself. You’ve shared your expertise. You’ve answered their questions. Surely they should be ready to buy by now. They obviously like what you do enough to keep coming back. So why aren’t they buying?

In my thirty years of being in business, I’ve rarely met a buyer who is as anxious to make the sale as the seller. Sure, there are those customers who come to us in crisis, and we scramble to put out their fire but they’re not the norm. So what do we do? We hang in there, and we keep being helpful and we work to stay top of mind until they’re ready to move forward.

The other factor to remember is that while we are the ones who build the sales funnel, it’s the prospect that moves through it and they control the pace and direction. So while one prospect may linger in the getting to know you (remember our know • like • trust = sales model) or growing to like you section for years, another may whip through both of those and be willing to trust you enough for a trial purchase in a matter of a couple visits.

For your website to truly be an effective sales funnel, you need to offer different levels of engagement, so the prospects can move themselves through at their own speed. As we talked about in the last couple posts, that means free content (text and video if possible) and content that you’ll give them for an email trade. But what kinds of things should you have available for those who are ready to consider a purchase?

Believe it or not – one that many companies miss is having contact information on the site. Don’t make me look for your phone number or email address. If you have the capacity, live chat is great. But make sure I can contact you and give me more than one method. If you have a brick and mortar presence, be sure you list your street addresses as well, with a link to one of the mapping sites.

You can also offer the ability to schedule a call, demo or take an assessment that will require you contact them (usually by email) with the results.

Remember that most buyers want to be pretty sure they’re going to buy before they speak to a salesperson or company representative. When they do reach out, they may have some final questions but they’re very close to making a buying decision. Which means you need to be ready to respond quickly once they do trigger that next level of readiness. Test your site and all your internal systems to verify that nothing is going to get in the way of you finally connecting with this potential buyer.

Today’s consumers want to be able to shop us on the web. How well that works for you is completely in your control. Is your site ready?

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First stage of the funnel – Know

July 20, 2016

Last week we explored how your website should be thought of as a selling tool and with some planning and vision – you can use it to move a prospect through the know • like • trust = sales funnel and earn their business.

This week, I’d like to dig in a little deeper and look at the first stage of the funnel – know and what you can do to catch the interest of your web visitors and encourage them to get to know you a little.

At the top of the funnel we have people who’ve never heard of you and may have no idea they need or want what you sell. They might discover you by clicking on a link in a blog post or after reading about you in the newspaper. They might have a problem and be Googling to find a solution and your site is listed in their search results. They may see a Facebook ad or type in your URL off your business card that they picked up at a trade show. But at this point, you’re a stranger. They don’t know, like or trust you. And we know we have to earn their trust before we can earn their money.

At that moment, your website has to be helpful or relevant enough in some way that they spend a little time on it so they begin to get a sense of you and how you might matter to them.

This is a do or die moment. If the visitor pokes around the site and then leaves, they might never return and you’ll never know who they were or if you could have served them. That’s how it works on most websites. If I asked you to show me a list of people who were on your website in the last six months, could you do it?

One of the appealing aspects of using the web to pre-shop is the anonymity of it. To get someone to introduce themselves to you — you have to either give them a compelling reason to keep coming back or better yet, you have to create the opportunity for an information exchange. You have to offer them something that is valuable enough that they’ll give you their email address in return. While it sounds simple – think of how many websites you visit and how few capture your contact information.

What does that look like? You want to offer something that’s a low barrier to entry. It doesn’t feel too intrusive. It could be any of these:

• Sign up for our Enewsletter or regular tips
• Get a copy of a how-to report, whitepaper or cheat sheet
• Take an online course via email
• Get access to unique content behind a firewall
• Join a discussion group/closed forum
• Be notified when new content/information is available
• Download an eBook or watch a short video series
• Sign up for a webinar or phone conference

Once you’ve made that initial connection and you have a way to stay in touch – you can continue to be helpful which will keep the conversation going. At that point, one of two things is going to happen. As they get to know you/your company – they’re either going to decide they like you or they don’t. Both are great outcomes.

If they like you, they’ll stay in the conversation and get to know you even better. If they don’t like you, they’ll go away. Now you don’t have to waste any energy on someone who was going to be a bad fit.  That’s when you know the first stage of the funnel – know is working.

Next week, we’ll explore how to move an identified prospect into the like part of the equation.

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Is your website funnel-shaped?

July 13, 2016

For the next couple weeks, we’re going to focus our attention on your website. There’s always a lot of buzz about SEO (search engine optimization), SEM (search engine marketing) and of course, Google rankings. Rightly so – each of those plays a role in how effectively your website can serve you from a marketing and sales perspective.

But I think most companies approach the web a little like the fable about the five blind men who were asked to describe the elephant that stood before them. The man who was near the elephant’s leg reached out, touched the elephant and announced that an elephant was like a huge tree trunk. The man who was by the tail, after feeling it, described an elephant like a bullwhip and so on.

While none of them were wrong – none of them were right either. That’s exactly where many companies are when they think about how to leverage their website. They’re not wrong but they haven’t got it quite right either.

Lets step back and take a more holistic view of the website’s purpose for being. You might have a website because it:

• Gives you credibility – it proves that you’re real
• Tells the visitor what your company is all about and why you exist
• Lists/shows what you sell/do
• Educates your prospect on how you are different from your competitors and helps them make an more informed buying decision
• Helps your customers and prospects by making them smarter/better in some way
• Is an information repository so your customers can access things like user manuals, support forums, case studies, testimonials or other forms of thought leadership
• Provides ways to start a conversation, ask a question or give you feedback
• May serve as a shopping portal and people can buy right there

But if we step back even a little further and take a look from the 30,000 foot level, we can see through all those functionalities that your website is the entry point to your sales funnel. For most organizations today — your website is the initial point of entry that could lead to a sale today or five years from today.

That doesn’t happen by accident. Getting them to your site isn’t the end of the game; it’s just the beginning. Now your goal is to move them into and through your sales funnel. You have to build your site and everything that happens on it with that intention.

Whenever I think of a sales funnel, I picture one of those plastic funnels people use when they do an oil change. The top of it is really wide and the bottom is a very skinny hole. The funnel coincides with the know • like • trust equation.

The top of the funnel is for catching all those people who have no idea you exist or that you sell anything they might need or want. This is where you are hoping they’ll get to know you.

The middle of the funnel is filled with all the ways you either keep them on your site or get them to come back. With repeated exposure, you’re hoping they’ll come to like you.

The smallest section of the funnel is where you’re hoping they come to trust you through repeated interactions, you continuing to be helpful and demonstrating a consistency in how you talk, behave and perform.

Once they’ve willingly squeezed themselves through that tiny little section of the funnel, they’ll be ready to buy. But not before.

Next week, we’ll do a deeper dive into each section of the funnel and talk about how you can improve your website’s performance in each.

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Your 80/20 marketing plan

November 5, 2015

One of the age-old rules in business is that 80% of your revenue is generated through 20% of your customer base. While the numbers may not align perfectly – the axiom is accurate. Your best customers generate the lion’s share of your earnings.

In fact, over the lifetime of your relationship, your most loyal customers will spend 10x what the average customer will spend. They’re also responsible for over 70% of the total visits to your business.

Even if you didn’t know the numbers – you know how important your best customers are. Yet – 63% of marketers believe that new customer acquisition is the most important advertising goal.

A recent study of over one retail million customers looking at both their behavior and their attitudes revealed some very compelling data.

• VIP and loyalty program members are 70% more likely to spread the word about your business
• 65% actually want their favorite stores to frequently email them coupons and promotions
• The probability of making an additional sale or up selling a loyal customer is 60-70%

I’m not suggesting you stop chasing new customers but based on what we know in our gut and the data in this study, we sure need to focus a little more attention on those best customers too. Keep in mind that the average conversion rate (a new sale) from efforts aimed at new customers is less than 1%. The new ones are more price conscious, less likely to come back and pay full price and are going to require a lot of wooing to earn their return.

On the flip side, you have this group of people who has already made it clear that they choose you. They’re already in the habit of spending money with you and like how you conduct business. These are people worth investing in.

Whether you call it a loyalty program or just put together a marketing plan aimed at making your best customers feel your appreciation and love – it will pay off. This shouldn’t be a generic effort. You need to do a little homework so you actually create something of value.

First, identify who your best customers are: This sounds silly. Of course you know, right? Actually, I’ll bet there will be some surprises. Crunch the numbers to identify your best customers.

Spend some time thinking about them: Don’t just assume you know what perks or added value would mean the most to your loyal clients. Or better yet – ask them. Come up with a list of options and find out which would really put their buying into overdrive and make you their only choice of vendors.

Keep it simple: Don’t make them carry a card, memorize a customer number or jump through hoops to take advantage of your program. The average American belongs to 18 rewards programs, so your goal is to make yours the best in terms of value and the easiest in terms of use.

Do some testing and tracking: Don’t assume you’ll get it exactly right the first go around. You absolutely need to track which aspects of your effort are gaining traction and which are falling flat. Adjust accordingly.

Spread the word: Once you have it working well, you want to invite others to join. A loyalty program has two core benefits. First, it rewards your best customers and encourages them to spend more. The other benefit is that it can entice your average customer to increase their activity level.

One of the biggest marketing mistakes most businesses make is they don’t pay enough attention to their best customers because they’re too busy chasing new ones. Don’t make that mistake – it could cost you more than you want to spend.

 

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Are you minding your packaging?

June 21, 2015

The smartest brands know that having an awesome product/service is important but how you present that awesome product or service matters too.  Yes, it probably costs more. And yes, it means you have to keep upping your game. So there’s risk and cost in making that choice. But it’s what separates the premium brands from their competitors.

Here are two of the world’s best brands and example of how seriously they take the simple presentation of their product.  Check out how Disney presents their MagicBands and Apple is sending out its new Apple Watch.

 

 

 

 

In every case — the anticipation of actually getting to the product (and keep in mind with the Disney MagicBands — the bands are simply the access point to getting into Disney) heightens the experience of getting the actual item.

They don’t have to go to the extra lengths — but they do. Which triggers even more buzz and loyalty for their brand.

So — how can you, no matter what you sell, use anticipation and packaging to elevate your brand and create more buzz?

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