Strategy Archives - Page 4 of 53 - McLellan Marketing Group

Put your best Facebook forward

July 18, 2018

With over two billion monthly active users, it’s clear that Facebook is a vibrant marketplace. Whether you only serve clients who live within a couple of miles of your brick and mortar location or you can sell to anyone on the globe – Facebook is a viable advertising option that you should consider in your marketing plan and budget.

Beyond the sheer size and engagement level of the audience, one of the most appealing features of Facebook advertising campaigns is the ability to create a custom target audience. With the Facebook Custom Audience Tool, you can upload a list of contacts (emails, phone numbers, etc.) and create a lookalike audience that will allow you to target others who fit the same profile.

Don’t have a list? No worries. You can segment your target audience by elements like zip code, interests, demographic information or a combination of them.

The ability to hyper-target to a finite audience also allows you to manage your budget more effectively. There’s very little waste when you do it well. Every ad is going to be seen by the audience you want to reach.

Before you start to create your ad campaign, you need to decide how success is defined. Do you just want to put your business on the audience’s radar screen? Do you want them to click on the ad to get more information? Do you want to drive them to a landing page where you could offer them a digital asset (ebook, audio file, checklist, etc.) in exchange for their email address?

Once you’ve decided on the desired outcome, you need to follow some best practices to help you get there.

Remember that the ads will be appearing on Facebook and Instagram, mingled with your audience’s newsfeed. You want your ads to be a part of their social stream, so pick visuals that are personal and engaging. Make sure your photos are crisp and a high enough resolution that it creates the right impression.

You can use a combination of photos, text, videos, sounds, and a slideshow to create your ads. Like any advertising channel, your success is going to depend on your ability to capture your audience’s attention.

Think about your own social network habits. We scroll through the news feed pretty quickly. Your headline needs to grab their attention, and you don’t want to create a blur of text. Focus your message on the essentials and remember, the ad’s job is to get the viewer to click to learn more. You don’t have to tell them every detail within the ad.

Video ads are quickly becoming one of the most popular ad formats on Facebook. Over 100 million hours of video is consumed on Facebook every day. Remember the 2015 ALS ice bucket challenge? That’s what the experts point to as the tipping point for social video. It’s only going to become more mainstream and popular.

One fact you need to keep in mind as you build out your video ad campaigns. You should upload and host your videos on Facebook as opposed to using a video that you’ve uploaded to YouTube, Vimeo or any other platform. According to a study by Search Engine Journal, Facebook favors native video uploads, and those videos reach at least twice as many people and because of that additional exposure, will earn more likes, shares, and comments.

Next time, we’ll dive a little deeper into some more nuanced best practices so that every dollar you spend on Facebook yields the results you want. In the meantime, start paying attention to the ads that catch your eye and how you interact with them as a consumer.

Could marketing be a revenue source?

July 11, 2018

Previously, I told you about the book, Killing Marketing, by Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose. Their premise is that marketing has evolved to the stage where it needs to be completely re-invented, and we need to think of our organization’s marketing departments as media companies, that is to say, as a revenue source.

On the surface, it sounds like quite the stretch.

The book quotes Peter Drucker who said: “the purpose of marketing is to create and keep a customer.” In this case, the authors are emphasizing the word create. They believe that marketing has moved from just persuading someone who is already interested in buying what you sell to literally creating the audience in the first place, via your own generated media.

This is where the book risks losing readers. If you run an architectural firm or serve your clients by moving their goods across the country in your truck, the idea of launching a magazine or creating a YouTube show probably holds very little appeal. But when you start considering the broadest definition of media, it gets a little more interesting and might be better aligned with what you are already doing.

The big shift in thinking here is that rather than marketing to sell a product, you market to create an audience. Once you understand that audience and earn their trust, you can monetize that relationship by knowing exactly what they need/want, offering it to them and build revenue in the process.

Instead of saying, “I want to talk about stuff we sell, and hopefully that will catch the attention of people who might want to buy our stuff” you could say, “I will talk about the topics and issues that matter to the people who typically buy our stuff. After we’ve earned their trust and continued attention, it will be easier to sell our stuff to them.”

The truth is – we’ve all been consumers of this sort of strategy. Walt Disney launched his empire by creating cartoons and movies. He then moved into TV. From there, he started creating products and experiences to serve the audience he created.

It would be easy to dismiss this idea as being reasonable for consumer-focused companies but not for the business-to-business model. But it actually works even better for the B2B organization because your audience is naturally more defined and niched.

By now you’re probably wondering what kind of media are we talking about? Here’s a partial list.

A content-rich website that provides information and opinion pieces
A forum or message board/group chat engages your core audience
A weekly podcast or YouTube video
Monthly educational webinars
Regional events to create networking and learning opportunities
A national event with speakers and CEU courses
Research (you can sell the report/results) that informs your business decisions and offers insight to your audience

That list is daunting, isn’t it? It looks expensive from both a money and time resources perspective. How does that become a revenue stream rather than an ever-growing drain on your company’s budget?

Sell sponsorships and advertising spots on many of the items above
Charge a fee for the events and courses you offer
Create premium content that you put behind a payment firewall
Sell subscriptions for access to ongoing research or other media
Build/rent out your mailing list to other companies who are interested in the same audience

I’m barely scratching the surface of what’s possible. I don’t believe this is an all or nothing strategy. Every business could bake some of this thinking into their marketing, or should we say revenue plan. It’s an interesting premise and just imagine what you could do if your marketing was self-funding!

Is marketing dead?

July 3, 2018

I just finished a fascinating book, Killing Marketing: How Innovative Businesses are Turning Marketing Cost into Profit, by Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose. Joe and Robert are the creators of the mega-conference Content Marketing World, and Joe has written other books like Content Inc, Epic Content Marketing, and Managing Content Marketing.

Catching a theme?

The core message of their book is acknowledging that the marketing world, as we have known it since the dawn of the big three (print, radio, and TV), is our past and that marketing doesn’t have to be just a cost center anymore. When done well – brands can actually create a profit center from their marketing efforts. Instead of your marketing requiring additional financial resources – what if it generated new dollars? We’ve all heard the idea that brands should become media companies. You may not want to take your company quite that far. But wouldn’t you like to make money with your marketing efforts?

Let’s take a step back before we look at the future. Traditional marketing has been primarily advertising – the renting of space on someone else’s channel to earn attention, brand awareness and alter the consumer’s behavior. Even PR falls under that description. Instead of buying an ad, the brand or their agency would pitch their story to the editorial side of the advertising channels. Their goal was to have a story written about them or their offerings that would create the same results as paid advertising would have generated.

Along came the Internet and suddenly consumers found their voice. Until that shift, they’d been our silent audience. But as it became easier to share opinions on message boards, forums, social media channels, websites and review outlets, they got louder and louder.

Initially, as a defensive mechanism, brands began using the Internet too – creating content to fight for search engine position and to balance the consumers’ voice. But the brands discovered what probably seems to you as a very simple marketing truth – that when the brands provided valuable content and helpful information, the consumers would create a connection and magnify the brand’s reach by sharing the content and inviting others in.

On a mega-level, this is what Johnson & Johnson has done with BabyCenter.com. What started as a simple extension of their core website, it now reaches more than 45 million parents a month across the globe and offers their content in nine different languages. Eight of every ten U.S. mothers use BabyCenter.com.

Odds are your goals aren’t quite so lofty. Which is awesome because that means you can replicate your version of the results faster and with a smaller level of investment. The Internet and digital content have leveled the playing field. It’s why small brands like BigPoppaSmokers.com have crushed their competition, stolen the market share of much bigger companies and have created a brand that garners incredible amplification of their value from the consumers who love them.

The book isn’t suggesting that you abandon your core business model and become an organization that generates revenue the way a traditional media company does. Nor is it suggesting that you should abandon your paid and earned media efforts. For most organizations, there will always be a benefit to those channels.

But what the authors are suggesting is that businesses today also need a profit-generating, owned media strategy that will give you an unfair competitive advantage.

Next week, we’ll explore some of the suggestions the book offers that seem reasonable for small to mid-sized organizations to experiment with as they build out a marketing strategy and budget. Based on the book, you just may want to shift some of your dollars to some new avenues.

Marketing automation doesn’t mean autopilot

June 27, 2018

Marketing automation is nothing new, but it is enjoying a renewed focus in conversations about how to stay connected to your prospects and customers. As brands get better about creating content and understanding that our potential customers watch and interact with us for a long time before they’re ready to buy – we have to be prepared to stay in touch in a meaningful, useful way for a lot longer than just the active sales cycle.

Just to make sure we’re all talking apples to apples — marketing automation is the tactic of using software to automate repetitive marketing actions like emails, enewsletters, responses to web inquiries, social media, and other website-driven actions.

We’re all the recipient of marketing automation every day. When we download a checklist off of someone’s website and over time, we start receiving emails related to that topic – that’s marketing automation. When we take a quiz and then are directed to a landing page where we can learn more about our results/possible solutions – that’s marketing automation. When we get a shipping update email in real time – that’s marketing automation. When we sign up for an email-based course, you guessed it. That’s marketing automation.

If you’re a B2B company, don’t think this is only a consumer-facing tool. In fact, it’s the B2B marketers that are really leveraging all of the nuances of this tool.

As you’ve heard me preach many times before – it’s about having the right strategy. Don’t fool yourself into thinking that once you pick the right tool, you’re all set.

Marketing automation is most often used as a lead generation tactic, and it’s a very good one. But it can also serve your current customers from a customer service point of view. Your clients often feel silence after the sale. You chased and wooed them before they bought but after the transaction, they sometimes get less attention. Marketing automation is a way to make sure that never happens.

A sizable part of the marketing process can be automated. Yet many companies and marketers tend to focus on specific tools or features they’re missing rather than on how their marketing automation platforms fit within their marketing strategies.

Today, only 10% of marketers are confident in their ability to execute comprehensive marketing automation programs as part of a larger marketing strategy, according to a recent a Forrester study. That’s not because they picked the wrong software; it’s because of the strategy. A sound marketing strategy should be anchored by clear goals. Those could include thought leadership, lead generation, gaining website traffic or something else. Without establishing these goals, you won’t be able to get anywhere — even with the best marketing automation software.

Remember that marketing automation isn’t a tactic in and of itself. It’s a mechanism to help you amplify the effectiveness of your marketing tactics, and you should be clear about what those tactics are. Are you going to be sending out newsletters or an email nurture campaign, or are you going to focus on collecting inbound leads by providing access to gated content? Be clear from the beginning, because all of your subsequent decisions will be based on maximizing these tactics.

Once you sort out all of that, you’re finally ready to find the right tool. But don’t even start looking until you’ve thought through how you want to use it.

If you implement marketing automation correctly, you can expect to see positive results relatively quickly. Don’t rush into it, though, especially if you don’t have any previous marketing automation experience. Take the time to build a sound strategy, and then invest the time and resources to really learn the platform you invest in. The results will follow if you stick with it.

Gated content

May 23, 2018

Whether you recognize the term or not – you’ve all seen and many of you have created gated content. That term refers to putting something on your website or landing page that people want and asking them for information in exchange for that information.

In most cases, you are asking people for their email address and allowing them to pass through the “gate” to a hidden web page where they can download the information that you’re offering. An alternative is that you would email them the information once you have their email address.

The challenge with gated content is that you need to offer something that has great value if you want people to actually trade you information about them in exchange. The question is how many fields should you require. Studies show that the more information fields required, the fewer people you will get to actually complete the transaction. The best practice rule of thumb is no more than three fields if you want a higher conversation rate.

Every field is another barrier you are asking the person to knock down to get to your content. You are asking them to work harder and risk their anonymity with every field. They assume, for example, that if they include a phone number – you’re going to call. They have to decide if what you’re offering is worth that intrusion.

It makes sense that you would want to build a database of people who genuinely have some interest in your company or offerings. And on the surface, it makes sense that you would reduce the number of fields so more people actually finish the task and get the item you are offering in exchange.

But there’s a weird inverse relationship in this kind of marketing. As the number of people who complete the form increases, the amount of information you have on them and the more you can confidently say they are a qualified lead diminishes. Why? More hurdles to leap mean you are in essence, testing the audience to see how badly they want what you’re offering.

Remember, the more you ask them in the form, the fewer completions you will get. But the fewer things you ask, the less you know about your leads.

So when considering whether or not you should create gated content, the first question you need to ask yourself is “why are we doing this?” If you are looking for qualified sales leads then you should actually use more fields. You will get a smaller group of people who actually complete the form and access your information, but you’ll know they really want it. You will also have gathered enough information about them to get a sense of how strong a lead they are.

On the flip side, if you are just trying to build up your database so you can keep marketing to the audience, then reduce the number of fields to increase participation. But you have to accept that many of the people, especially if you just require an email address and nothing more, may not have much actual interest in your product or service.

The length of your form not only reflects the value of what you’re offering but it also reflects the genuine interest of the prospect. A shorter form will get you a larger database that you can market to down the road. But there will be a lot of tire kickers on that list. A longer form that tells you more about the prospect and what they’re interested in. The additional questions will reduce the size of the database but will increase the likelihood of a genuine potential sale being among them.

So as always with marketing – start with why.

Convenience is in the eye of the beholder

May 16, 2018

I have a message for you from your customers. This is something they want you to know: “I don’t really care how you would like me to communicate with you. I want you to offer me the choice so we can communicate according to my needs. Don’t make me call you. Don’t make me visit your website. Don’t make me send a carrier pigeon. Don’t ask me to make it easy for you. I’m giving you my business so I need you to tailor your communication channels to the way I want to work with you.” Seems simple enough, doesn’t it? And yet most businesses still define how their clients can access them. We create convenience but the truth is – it’s based on what is convenient for us.

I have a friend who was communicating with his bank through the bank app’s chat function. As he was wrapping up the chat, the representative told him that he would need to call the toll free number to accomplish his task. He asked the person he was already dealing with “Can’t you just call me so that I don’t have to start all over again with someone new?” The bank’s rep told him he could not because their chat application is on a different system than their voice system. Bottom line – the customer had to be inconvenienced and frustrated because the bank’s system was dictating how he had to communicate.

A new era of consumer expectations is here and we need to be ready for them. They are more informed and connected. They fully expect to be in complete control when making purchase decisions. How many times do you see people walking through the aisles of a store with a hand-held device so they can comparison shop, check out product reviews and reach out to their social media connections for recommendations in real time?

Having multiple ways for people to contact you (multi-channel) isn’t enough anymore. What your consumers want is the ability to shift seamlessly from channel to channel (omni-channel) without having to repeat themselves at every turn.

Even if you don’t sell a single thing online and don’t list any of your prices on your website – understand how this impacts you. The retail experience is defining what is possible and very soon, B-to-B consumers are going to expect the same seamless transition from channel to channel. Convenience is king.

Don’t think this is something you can ignore based on how you sell. Omni-channel is much more than sales. It is also about delighting your customers in person, connecting seamlessly between in-person conversations via social, mobile and the web on how they want to communicate.

While price will always be a factor, the currency you really need to be mindful of is your client’s time and convenience. If it’s a hassle to communicate with you, it’s just too easy to take for them to take their business elsewhere. According to a recent report from Oracle, customers aren’t giving us much of a grace period before they go to our competitor. The report said that as many as 89% of consumers will begin doing business with a competitor after one poor customer experience and even worse – they will not grant the offending business an opportunity to redeem themselves.

Your first step – ask. Ask your customers how they want to communicate with you. For many businesses, just evolving to a multi-channel solution that allows your clients to define how and when they want to talk to you is a good first step. As you develop your multi-channel solutions, be mindful of the evolution to omni-channel so you can build in the functionality as you take those first baby steps.

A delicate balance

May 9, 2018

In the Mad Men days of advertising, it was all about mass media, reach and frequency. How many people can you reach and how often can you get your message in front of them? Today’s marketing is a little more complicated than that. The channels have shifted from print, radio, and TV to more than we can count and within each medium, there are more individual channels than our forefathers in the business could have ever imagined. Today, it is all about balance.

Back in the day, the advertisers controlled not only the message but also the distribution channels. The formula used to be simple – it took 8-12 exposures to a marketing message for the audience to take notice.

Today, as marketers who also serve as publishing organizations, you aren’t bound by those constraints. When you own the enewsletter or Twitter account or control your direct mail schedule – you aren’t beholden to just a budget dictating how often you communicate. It’s still just as important, but now you have other elements (like the fact that your audience is also creating content about your brand) to factor in.

Frequency is a delicate balance. You have to communicate often enough that you stay relevant but not so often that you’re annoying. Here are some best practices for you to consider as you map out your communications.

Enewsletters: If it is packed with breaking news or super current content, then your audience will be okay with a weekly publication. On the flip side, if it’s bite-sized (300 words or less) then once a week is probably okay too. If it’s a mix of helpful information and a smidgeon about you, monthly is plenty. But anything less frequent than that is probably not enough to be something your audience counts on.

Email marketing: These are the emails you send when you are hosting an event, have a sale or are promoting something new. You can send the same (or similar) content out 3-5 times over the course of a couple weeks. But then you need to give your audience a rest. You shouldn’t bombard them with a flight of emails every month or your open rates will plummet.

Social posts (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc): Once or twice a day is good as long as it’s about them and not about you. These are not channels where repeating the same thing over and over again is advised.

Twitter: Twitter is a unique animal. Because the feed moves so quickly, if someone doesn’t see it real time, odds are they are not seeing it at all. So it’s okay to re-tweet the same message multiple times during the day. If you want a global audience, don’t forget to schedule your tweets on a full 24-hour cycle.

Blog posts: If you’re not adding new content aimed at being helpful every week, odds are you are not growing your audience. But for most organizations, blogging is more about influencing the search engines. If you’re blogging more for SEO purposes, every two weeks is a reasonable rhythm.

Traditional media: Odds are, your budget is going to control this one and you’ll have to be choosy about where you appear to get enough frequency. Having a greater presence in one or two channels (a print pub and a radio station for example) is much smarter than being a mile wide and an inch deep. Media mix is very valuable if you can afford it. But if it simply dilutes your exposure, it’s hurting more than it is helping.

Every audience is unique. While these are helpful guidelines, you’re going to want to experiment with your specific audience to see what the optimum frequency balance is for them.

Don’t Cut Yourself Short – Go Long Form

December 13, 2017

In a world where 140-character tweets, Facebook posts, and USA Today style graphics are the range, it’s easy to assume that brevity is the key to great content creation. Add to that the reality that more and more of us are accessing our online news, social networks and other content via our smartphones and it would be easy to make the leap that people don’t want to read long form stories anymore.

That’s the danger in marketing. We observe and assume. There’s a place for that in the mix but we need to check those assumptions against something a bit more objective and with a broader lens than our own experience.

That’s why I was so fascinated by a study out of the Pew Research Center that found that long-form news articles are actually more effective than shorter pieces for audiences viewing the content on their smartphones.

According to Pew, the total engaged time (which they defined as time spent scrolling, clicking or tapping) with news stories that were 1,000 words or longer averaged about twice the amount of time spent with stories of under 1,000 words. The longer articles earned 123 seconds versus the shorter articles being consumed in 57 seconds on average.

Another conclusion we might jump to is that well sure, the longer articles were longer, so of course, people spent more time reading them. But other bits of evidence suggest it was more than that.

Some people dismiss writing longer articles because they think if a browser lands on something that long, they’ll abandon the story without reading it. But the study showed that the long-form stories attracted visitors at nearly the same rate as short-form stories.

Not only did people not shy away from these longer pieces but the truth is, they really dug in.

36 percent of interactions with long-form news lasted more than two minutes, compared with 10 percent for short-form news.
66 percent of complete interactions with short-form stories were one minute or shorter, compared with 42 percent for long-form news.

How the reader got to the article mattered as well. If the long form reader was served up the piece via an internal link, they spent an average of 148 seconds with the piece. If they got to the piece directly or via a link in an email, their time investment dropped to 132 seconds. Social media links got the shortest time span – 111 seconds.

While social links might have delivered the shortest attention span, it was responsible for the most traffic overall, with over 40% of both the short and long form stories coming from one of the social networks.

Here are some other noteworthy observations from the study:

Facebook drove the largest volume of social network sourced readers (80%) but those readers are not as engaged, on average, as Twitter users. If someone clicked on a link from Facebook, they spent an average of 107 seconds in longer-form stories, but the amount of time rose to 133 seconds when they came from Twitter.
Late night and morning are the times of the day with the highest engagement.
Only a very small percentage of readers (long form – 4%, short form – 3%) return to those stories via their smartphones, but when they did, they really invested some time. Return visitors to long-form articles spend an average of 277 seconds, compared with 123 seconds for overall visitors, and those figures for short-form stories are 110 seconds and 57 seconds, respectively.

There are several takeaways from this study but I think the biggest one is that we need to be very careful about assuming that short form copy is the only option in this smartphone driven world.

What does your pricing say about you?

November 29, 2017

Last week, we explored some of the key considerations that a business should take into account as they set their prices. But this week, I want to take a look at what your pricing strategy says about your offerings.

I believe that pricing is a part of positioning and branding that is often overlooked. How you think about pricing may depend on whether or not you’re introducing a new product or service or just rethinking how an existing product or service is brought to market.

Here are some of the most common pricing strategies and what they say about your brand:

Penetration pricing is typically an entry strategy. This is usually used when you’re bringing something new to an existing marketplace or you’re trying to lure people from an existing provider. Think of the types of offers that DISH and Direct offer to get you to switch. This kind of pricing can’t be profitably sustained.

What does it say about you? It says that you are willing to buy your customers and that you’re confident that if they give you a try, they’ll stick around long enough to be profitable. Or it says that they know switching is a big pain, so they need to make it worth your while, hoping you won’t decide to go through the pain again and switch back.

Premium pricing is exactly what it suggests — your product or service is at the high end of the range.

What does it say about you? When you have premium prices, it implies a level of quality and service that the lower priced options can’t match. There’s also an exclusivity to your offer if there are plenty of lower priced options available. To maintain this brand position, you’ll need to work hard to meet your customer’s high expectations.

Economy pricing is being the bargain in the bunch. Think Wal-Mart or generic products. If you can buy and sell in volume, this might be a decent option to consider.

What does it say about you? Depending on how you position it, it can either say you are very committed to helping your customers save money or the items you sell are of low quality. To reassure your customers that you’re watching their pennies, you’ll want to make sure you explain how you can offer such bargains.

Bundling pricing is when you combine items you sell at a special price. It might be a 99 cent dessert with dinner or send one person to a workshop and you get the pre-workshop session for free or at a discounted price. You just need to be careful you don’t give away the farm with this strategy. It’s ideal for recurring revenue where the profits rise after the first couple months of sales.

What does it say about you? This is a great strategy for businesses with long-term customers that might be in the market to buy even more from you. You can bundle complimentary items to tie that customer even tighter to your organization. That gives you more time to sell them even more.

Bracket pricing is the idea of always offering three different options, with the middle priced option being the one you want your customer to select. Research shows that if you offer only one choice – people object to the price. If you offer two choices, the buyer will choose the lower priced option most of the time. But if you offer three price points, the vast majority of buyers will choose the middle option.

What does it say about you? This pricing strategy is all about giving your customers control and choices. By letting them decide which bells and whistles they want, they feel like you’re not trying to force them in a particular direction.

As you can see, there’s a lot more to the underlying messages that come from how you set your prices.

How does your business shape your pricing?

November 15, 2017

As we head towards the end of the year, we’re going to kick off a series of conversations about money. One of the most overlooked aspects of marketing is your pricing strategy. Over the next couple weeks, we’re going to talk about how you price and sell your services and what that says to your audiences.

Let’s first think about how you determine your pricing and what that says about your value proposition. You have lots of options, and while we might assume it’s always smarter to be more expensive, that actually may not be the best decision for your business.

When thinking about your pricing strategy, you need to consider:

Positioning: How are you positioned in the marketplace, relative to your competitors? Does one of them own the discount or premium position so strongly that it would be difficult to unseat them?

Differentiation: This is related to positioning. The more you can demonstrate a unique value proposition to your potential customers, the more valuable you are and the more of a premium price you can charge.

Your costs: Obviously your prices have to take into account what it costs you to deliver what you sell. Depending on the work you do, the kinds of people you employ, and the materials you need – some pricing strategies may not be an option.

Demand: The more people need/want what you sell, the more they’re willing to pay for it. But demand is also finite. Is this something they will always need/want or is it fleeting like Cabbage Patch dolls or a particular style of clothes.

Time/effort to deliver: Some companies make a widget that they can mass produce and sell at a relatively low cost because there is no customization or manual labor involved. On the flip side, a guy who designs and builds custom furniture by hand has a huge time investment and the value is in the individuality of what he delivers. That’s a very different reality.

Harsh reality: Sometimes you have no choice. Economic conditions, market saturation, inventory issues or some other element of your business may force you to modify your prices, either temporarily or in rare cases, permanently. There is no such thing as forever when it comes to business strategy. We must all evolve or die, and pricing is certainly one aspect of your business that may change over time.

Revenue goals: We often assume that there’s only one reason to be in business, which is to make money. But there are many shades of grey within that. Are you trying to make the most money possible in the short term? Or would you rather make less money every day but have the sale live on for longer? Are you trying to maximize profits or are you reinvesting in something else – be it your company or your community or some population of people that you serve?

Static or elastic: For some organizations, it makes sense that once you set your pricing, it remains the same for an extended period, until inflation, demand or some other combination of influences triggers a one-time price shift. On the flip side, you may sell a product or service that has a lot of elasticity in its pricing. You might run sales or promotions on a regular basis to drive traffic to your location or site. You may have a seasonality factor. If you sell Christmas trees, they’re at a premium price the day after Thanksgiving and at a deep discount price on December 24th.

These elements are the business realities that have to be factored in as you think about your pricing model. Next week we’ll dig into how to think about pricing through your marketing lens.

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