Facebook recently announced they are jumping into the all-so-important online realm of search. Frankly, I’ve been dismayed that they haven’t leveraged the search box on their site AT ALL. But now Facebook is announcing a specialized search feature (apparently separate from the general search box) called Graph Search.

Graph Search is a terrible name since 90% of Facebook users are unlikely to get the reference to ”Social Graph,” a reference to a person’s online social footprint and how it interconnects with everyone else’s. But there it is.

Facebook is positioned to be a very useful search resource given the great number of people, companies and products already maintaining elaborate positions. If somehow a tipping point is achieved and Facebook can become a high-volume search resource for a specific demographic or a searchers in general, this could create a new opportunity for marketers seeking visibility. Keep your eye on it.

I seem to keep having this conversation so hang in there while I engage in a little blogging therapy as I think aloud in this article trying to align my messaging with my thought processes.

Fact: The people who come to your business with a coupon in hand are less likely than even your children to return any time soon, that is unless you bribe them with another coupon offer.

This means you are giving away product to the people who are the least likely to come back and do profitable business with you. And a lot of these coupon redeemers would have come in with or without the coupon. I know in my household, we will decide to purchase something and on the way out the door someone will say, “Wait, I think I saw a coupon for that.” So with these facts on the table, why would a business owner ever want to use coupons?

I’ve heard all the rationales. They include:

• They do come back. I have been tracking and know of X people who did (out of several hundred coupon redemptions).
• I need to keep my name out in the community and this is the only way to get prospects to pay attention.
• Direct mail marketing requires I include a coupon, right?
• I have to use coupons if I am going to track my marketing, right?
• My competition has been doing this for years.
• Big national companies are doing it and they have higher priced marketing advisers than I do.

 

There are two cures for this line of reasoning.

1. Knowing what is an acceptable maximum for acquiring a new customer
2. Knowing why some customers are doing repeat business with you

Know Your Maximum Customer Acquisition Cost

National companies spend a lot of money mailing coupons to areas where they have a presence. For them, it’s the only thing they have outside of street visibility to affect market behavior. They lack the ability to tune in to specific area needs let alone knowing where and what the best communication channels are for each area. But even they know to calculate how many customers they expect to gain from their effort and keep their budget to a reasonable “per person” level based on that.

What’s your tolerable maximum customer acquisition cost (and I mean that in “per customer” terms)? Often it can work best to come at this backwards and figure out the average profit per customer visit and how many visits an average customer makes in a year. That will tell you the value of a new customer over a year’s time. Hopefully your acquisition costs are not going to eat all that up. It’s up to you what percentage of the value of a customer you are comfortable allocating to getting that customer.

 

New Repeat Customers Are the Goal

The measurable goal for accepting coupons is new repeat business that you wouldn’t get otherwise. Right? So instead of tracking how many free key cuttings or pops you gave away, you need to track who came back. How are you going to do that? You are going to somehow pull off the equivalent of putting a stamp on their forehead you will know when they return. Customer loyalty programs are great for this. Unfortunately, they also require more discounting to reward participation in the program. The smartest implementation of a customer loyalty program that I’ve ever encountered occurred while the store boosted it’s prices by 10% across the board. People participating in the loyalty program were told they would enjoy discounts off of the marked prices. Brilliant.

Other than implementing a full-scale customer loyalty program, I’m at a loss as to how you will know if someone who took advantage of a coupon offer ever came back. As such and since you are spending of money without any visible return on investment, I cannot recommend doing it.

And if anyone suggests giving them another coupon to use upon their return, I will probably say something unprofessional. We’re trying to create a mutually beneficial relationship with our customers. Being required to always give something away isn’t going to accomplish that. The pizza delivery industry knows that all two well.

So just how does a business go about getting more business, more door clicks, more quotes, etc.? Frankly by being awesome at providing the market with what it needs and wants, exceeding their expectations while doing so and not being shy in sharing your ability to do this. This will provide all sorts of opportunities to provide success stories to prospects, interesting tidbits to the local business editor in your town’s newspaper, and of course your happy customers should be developed into a very effective referral source. And I haven’t event mentioned the opportunities to publish content, host events and establish your position as a leading business in very visible ways. All without having to bribe people who are probably not your best prospects anyway.

There. I feel better already. How about you? Do you agree? Disagree? Let’s continue the therapy in the comments.

 

It’s one thing to do the right things.
It’s another to do them right.

As a marketer, this saying holds great value for me. It was the same for my father, a lawyer. I recall asking him about a do-it-yourself lawyer-in-a-box kit being advertised while he and I were watching TV. “Does that hurt your business?” I asked. He chuckled and said, “No, but I’ll end up dealing with a stressed out client later and have to charge more to fix the mess than I would have if they’d come to me in the first place.” That has stuck with me for decades.

Now as I set out to guide businesses to their optimum marketing positions, I too am seeing far too many do-it-yourself attempts that are messy and often do more damage than good. By the time I get the call, the first things to do are to undo things, to get back to center. Afterwards discovery can be done and then new initiatives designed and implemented.

So in the hope I can spare at least one person from making a mess, here are my truths about marketing (these are for today, who knows what’s going to work tomorrow):

Some painful truths about marketing:

Marketing is more than being noisy and saying nice things about your company and products. There was a time when that’s really all you had to do and whoever was noisiest (bought the most advertising) would win.

Marketing is more than “getting the word out” and “being visible.” Often misrepresented as “branding,” this is the epitome of checklist marketing. Doing something just for the sake of saying you’re doing something.

Marketing is more than building a web site, having a Facebook page or publishing monthly newsletters. None of these items, by themselves, is going to move the needle for your company. If you build it, they won’t necessarily come.

Some painless truths about marketing:

Marketing involves taking time to understand who wants your offerings and why. Knowing this means being able to bundle, price and explain your offerings with extreme accuracy for your best prospects.

Marketing involves knowing you’re not going to be able to tell people what to buy but they are looking for solutions to what pains them. Offering solutions (free and paid) is key to developing relationships with your best prospects today.

Marketing involves learning who your best prospects trust and listen to and then build a relationship with those people so they can know about and share your solutions with their audiences.

Marketing involves measuring everything. You need to then know how to read the data in order to make make changes to do more of what works and quit doing what doesn’t. For instance, low numbers may indicate an incorrect or misdirected strategy. You need to be able to tell the difference.

 

Did I miss any?

During the past decade, successful marketing strategies have been rewritten and dramatically so. With audiences moving away from traditional media to ‘new’ media channels, the inexpensiveness of online content creation and the ability to attract qualified leads via search engine optimization it was possible to create ones own marketing ‘gravity’ to attract prospects without relying on the media or anyone else to push them. But, that too, is beginning to change.

Back in the day (yeah, I’m that old), all a company had to do was spend a bunch of money saying the right thing via TV, radio and print advertising to ensure people were aware of and would want their product/service offerings. It was also important to reinforce that effort with a strong coordinated outreach (public relations) to get mentioned in all the right places by all the right people (the content producers on TV, radio and print) to generate trust and legitimacy in addition to overall increased visibility.

Fast forward to today as the dust begins to settle around all the new strategies and successes found with online marketing. We are beginning to see something very familiar evolve. Outreach (aka public relations) is returning as a major element of content marketing.

So we are now all creating wonderfully engaging and informative content for our target markets. We are publishing it on company blogs and web sites with optimized landing pages standing at the ready to convert suspects to prospects. But wait, that flow of suspects is falling off. How come? This is all the more distressing as we watch our social media friend, Facebook, start to tank.

As a result of the rampant pace at which companies have been pushing out marketing content, the market has become numb with information and misinformation overload. Searching for information now requires culling through the multitude of important-sounding titles and descriptions that may lead to poorly or partially assembled information or a misguided sales pitch instead of something useful.

So what to do to rise above the noise? How can you make it easier for your prospective customers to find out about your offerings?

Google is struggling with the same question. It’s their goal to provide high-quality and relevant search results. And to pass their evaluations is an ever-changing process which has recently been dumbed down to “be interesting to your audience and high rankings will happen.” But, wait, there are those who already have large audiences and are also ranking high in search results. Maybe we can leverage that.

Let me introduce you to an old friend, “public relations,” except today we are calling him, “outreach.”

Outreach is the process of communicating with anyone who has a large audience (assumedly containing those from your target audience) and providing these influencers with valuable content they will want to pass on to their audiences. An outreach target could be a blogger who may be interested in sharing a video you have published on your web site or a blog post explaining how your industry can be doing better to serve your customers or ??. It could be a trade show or conference in search of speakers who will happily provide you with a podium at their event and a bio on their web site. And it could even be an editor or reporter in need of your insights for an upcoming article to be syndicated across the internet on several high-quality article sites. It’s deja vu all over again.

So while the targets of public relations have changed some along with the means of reaching them (not so much using press releases any more as using informal personable email, twitter or direct messaging communication), the intended end result has not. We want to leverage these large audiences to generate trust and legitimacy in addition to increase visibility of our offerings. Sound familiar?

Have you identified the influencers in your space? Have you followed them to learn what they see as important so that you can offer something they will deem worthy to forward to their audiences? Have you begun participating in the conversation (comments) with them? If not, it’s time to start building those outreach relationships (pka media relations).

 

 

We knew it would happen eventually. They are taking away that which Facebook business page owners have been taking for granted for years. For some marketers it will require no change in execution but a great deal of change in expectation. For others, it will be a crushing blow of the uncontrollable loss of their singular or at least most effective marketing presence.

It has been taken for granted that content posted by a Facebook business page will be seen by all of its fans who visit Facebook within the few hours following and some even later. But that’s all about to changed.

For several months (since the IPO was announced), Facebook has been trying to come up with revenue streams to make their stockholders happy. They not only must start showing more profits but also demonstrate a trend of doing so. So Facebook has (starting about two weeks ago by my measurements) begun to prevent free content published by business fan pages from reaching as many fans as was easily accomplished before, a lot fewer. This conveniently follows months of launching different tools for business pages to pay Facebook to “promote” their content to fans and fan prospects.

How this will play out over time has yet to be seen. Maybe they have another offering for business pages seeking to engage fans on Facebook. It’s possible that Facebook may reinvent or even forego the current business pages setup. We may be left to simply purchase advertising  pumped directly into personal news feeds. But any way it works out, rest assured, there will be a cost associated with it. This will be (or is) very upsetting for small businesses who have been spoiled with very effective direct access to a voluntary fan base for very little expense.

There will be those looking for ways to get around this new set of rules. The first strategy will obviously be to move their business page and followers to a personal profile page in the hope of bypassing the business page filter. Unfortunately, it Facebook has foreseen that happening. Recently FB has begun offering the promoted (paid) posts feature to personal profiles. Although there are no metrics available for personal profiles, there is sufficient anecdotal evidence to believe Facebook has already reduced the reach of personal profile posts as they have with commercial fan page posts and if you need your posts to reach all your friends, you will need to pay for that to happen.

Facebook is loudly promoting the paid opportunities to promote business page posts to a greater audience (paying for what we used to take for granted supposedly). For example, in addition to the Promote a Post and Facebook Ads, there now is Facebook Offers (discounts that can be claimed and shared with friends), Sponsored Stories (Facebook ads linked to page posts or events) and I’m sure other opportunities to drop some coin with Facebook are already here and more are to come. The value dropping that coin? That’s yet to be seen.

My recent experience using the “Promote a Post” feature left a lot to be desired. It generated a flurry of new “Likes” overnight. Sadly these were almost exclusively people from Indonesia and not likely to be interested in my client’s retail business in the States. This meant, they were unlikely to be engaged with future content which would in turn hurt my client’s EdgeRank. I couldn’t stop that promotion fast enough.  So much for increasing views with your own fans. Not cool.

So what to do? For one, a return to basics is needed during such events. I have always advised my clients involved in interactive marketing to not allow themselves to become completely reliant on services outside their control. In short, they need to “own” their customers. This means building an online presence that you own (aka web site). It also means building and making use of email and postal mailing lists you can reach out to when you want and under your own terms.

A website provides a dependable hub of your online presence, enabling you to place your content where you can completely own it and then promote it via social media or other online venues relevant to your intended audience. This enables absorbing the loss or diminished value of a venue (as in this case, Facebook) and adoption of additional or new venues (e.g. Google Plus) quickly and easily.

People rarely change email and postal addresses, so capturing your fans addresses provides a long-life potential to retain customers, garner repeat business and promote friend-of-friend referrals.

As they say, “what works today may not tomorrow” and “nothing is certain except change.” You must always include being prepared for change in your planning.

 

[Editor's note: I'm excited to share this guest post from John W. Ellis of Crescent Interactive, a Nashville, Tennessee PPC and SEO consultancy. A successful hands-on practioner of SEO and PPC for more than a decade, John is a frequent blogger, article contributor, speaker and consultant able to empower companies seeking to improve and expand their online marketing efforts.]

For over 10 years, I have been managing PPC (per-per-click) advertising. By far the most utilized PPC resource has been Google AdWords. At Crescent Interactive, although we are familiar with multiple channels and platforms, we spend the vast majority of our time in Google Adwords.

For those not familiar with AdWords, these are the sponsored ads that show up in Google search results. Yes, searchers do click those ads. In fact, that’s where Google makes the volume of its revenue. 

There have been a lot of changes to Google AdWords over the past 10 years, but for the most part it’s essentially been an active advertising strategy. PPC via AdWords works extremely well when targeting the correct keywords. Google AdWords does not necessarily create demand for products or services, it captures it. AdWords captures consumers in the buying cycle.

Facebook advertising is a different approach. It allows advertisers to tap into users’ demographics and interest. We’ve all see these ads. Often times they tap into something we have Liked. This type of advertising captures users at the early staged of the buying cycle. It’s creates awareness. Like Google, Facebook ads are also a PPC format. Advertisers pay for every click an ad receives.

We have different approaches when comparing Facebook and Google. Both are effective and have a role in a complete online marketing strategy. For the most part these are separate entities, but using Google’s Remarketing these efforts can now be combined.

“Remarketing can help you reach people who have previously visited specific pages on your website as they visit other sites on the Google Display Network.” – http://support.google.com/adwords/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2454000

Using this tool as it’s designed allows advertisers to “re-target” prior visitors. As it is it’s a great tool. However, it’s dependent on getting the right users to visit your site. That’s where Facebook targeting comes in handy.

Of course, remarketing does have a “creepy” factor to it. Intrusive marketing can be avoided and it’s usually just a sign of lazy marketers, not bad technology. However, using Facebook data helps with more targeted approach.

By creating ads using Facebook’s ad platform, marketers can target specific interest. In turn, they can send those consumers to a unique landing page. This is where Google comes into play. Google Remarketing allows advertisers to tag these visitors and essentially create an audience. That audience can then be retargeted later.

Confusing?  Let’s walk through some examples

In the above Facebook targeting group, we can see options for targeting women’s shoes. Creating ads for this audience would lead to a landing page on a website. Now, that the audience has been created. From there, very-targeted ads can be shown through out the Google Display Network. Why show ads for women’s shoes to anyone else, other than this audience?

This is just touching the surface on how to combine these two great tools. Google audience creation is the heart and soul of this type of type of campaign. For details setting those up, I recommend reading http://support.google.com/adwords/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2454064

At Crescent Interactive, we work with clients on combing social and search together in various ways, including Remarketing. I’d love to hear your opinion on how these two channels can be used together. Leave your comments below and let’s discuss.

Boomer’s Drive-In is a single location restaurant located in Bellingham, Washington, a small town with a university population nearby. Boomers had enjoyed consistent revenue growth for over a decade but never fully utilized online marketing nor social media. Boomer’s Drive-In had three social media goals: 1) to capitalize on their ever growing sales and market share; 2) to be positioned for the future with regard to the ever-increasing role technology plays in marketing and 3) to offer existing and new customers new ways to become more connected with and part of Boomer’s continued success.

Boomers turned to a new marketing service, Whatcom Marketing, who was providing social media management services. Whatcom Marketing assessed the situation and advised not to expect any significant benefit from a social media effort for about three to four months.

Whatcom Marketing began managing Boomer’s presence on Facebook, Twitter and Google+ as well as building out their profiles in online directories and on customer review sites. The Boomer’s Drive-In web site was also optimized for better search engine performance. Initially, Boomers did not expect many people were searching online for “burgers” or even for “boomers.” But once traffic monitoring had been put in place, they discovered two-thirds of their web site visitors were coming from search engines.

In just the second month, Boomers reported sales up more than 13% from the same month the previous year. This also beat the record for that month for all years prior by 8%.

After five months, Boomer’s Drive-In realized a return on their investment with Whatcom Marketing of more than 6000%. Their fan bases on Facebook and Twitter have more than quadrupled and are engaging (commenting, sharing, etc.) with the content being published. Boomers made no other changes to their marketing efforts during this time.

Knowing online marketing channels tend to be quickly replaced by others in the future, Whatcom Marketing is currently working with Boomers to capture customer contact information and implement a strategic email marketing strategy.

 

Whatcom Marketing was able to create real results for Boomer’s Drive-In and other businesses in other industries. We would welcome the opportunity to help you take your business to the next level. Contact us today.

 

(360) 312-7372
info@WhatcomMarketing.com

On Water Designs of Bellingham, Washington, led by Tim Niemier of Ocean Kayak fame, came up with a high-quality and high-performance yet low-cost solution for paddle board enthusiasts limited by the portability and storage requirements of paddle boards that are typically longer than ten feet. The Origami Paddler is a solid board uniquely designed to fold when not in use. When folded, it is easy to ship (conforms to UPS and FedEx shipping requirements), transport (take in your car, not on it), carry and store. When unfolded, it outperforms inflatable boards, its only real competition.

Since the folding boards could be shipped directly to the customer, there was no need to create a reseller network. That meant Niemier needed to be able to market and sell the Origami Paddler direct to the marketplace. Something he had never done before.

Niemier came to Whatcom Marketing seeking marketing ideas to directly reach his best prospects and generate awareness of and interest in this new product. It also needed to be accomplished with the least amount of cost. Whatcom Marketing developed a strategy utilizing online marketing channels in order to garner a sufficient number of “pre-orders” to fund the initial production run. In essence, a self-funding bootstrap product launch was planned.

In anticipation of the expected attention this campaign would receive, a marketing and sales support infrastructure was created across multiple social media platforms and a web site was built. This provided the means for prospects to learn about the Origami Paddler, discover its unique benefits and start sharing and discussing it.

A press release launched via PRWeb’s online distribution platform marked the launch of this campaign. News outlets worldwide covering sports, water sports, gadgets and inventions were attracted to the press release and began writing about this game-changing new product. A 2-minute product video produced by Whatcom Marketing received over 2000 views within the first month and over 6000 views after only four months.

Email addresses of interested prospects were collected via social media channels and the product web site. Monitoring the online chatter and making contributions to discussions about the Origami Paddler in online forums worldwide fostered additional interest, ensured accurate information was exchanged and enabled immediate collection of market feedback about product messaging and design.

After creating pent-up interest and demand for a product no one knew to even ask for previously, emails and social media announcements were sent out announcing orders were being accepted. No one had actually seen the product, outside of the videos and a pictures. But enough interest had been created that the orders submitted were enough to cover the expense of the initial production run and product delivery. The product was successfully launched with minimal expense and time and the sport of stand-up paddle boarding revolutionized.

 

Whatcom Marketing was able to create real results for On Water Designs. We welcome the opportunity to help you take your business to the next level too. Contact us today.

(360) 312-7372
info@WhatcomMarketing.com

Have you ever heard that someone was unhappy about your service but you didn’t hear it from them? That’s because people are more likely to walk away vowing not to repeat the behavior than to seek a fix. But that doesn’t stop them from grousing about it to whoever will listen. Do I hear an “Amen!”?

Enter blogging, Twitter and Facebook and all the other ways that people can share their stories with dozens, hundred or even thousands. The realization of this is likely to send chills down most small business owners’ spines. But, this also presents a big customer service and support opportunity.

Remember those unhappy customers that don’t say anything to you? If you monitor the Internet for mentions of your company’s name, product names, nicknames, etc., you can tap into what people are saying about you. This then presents a new opportunity to reach out when there are problems and offer resolutions.

This was done by Comcast on a national scale when they manned a Twitter account named, ComcastCares, and from it started replying to people unhappy with their service. They offered to contact service staff on the customers’ behalf, do a little triage over Twitter and advise about outages and such. It created another layer of customer service and showed a company who wanted to be responsive and not simply ignore complaints.

More recently and locally, this played out in the following dialog between a new WWU student who had just gone through registering for her classes for the first time.

WWU staff let Madi know they were listening and included an alert to the staff at WWU Advising in their reply so they could help if needed.

Madi is apparently a smart gal and put everyone at ease with her reply.

The above is a great example of how social media channels, in this case Twitter, can be monitored for opportunities to engage your customers and to help improve their experience with your products and services.

In reality, even though their age group are heavy users of social media, only a small portion of students at WWU are using Twitter. But, as we see above, it is very worthwhile for WWU to be monitoring and offering assistance via Twitter.

But your company may not be able to afford to have staff monitoring the Interwebs like WWU does. It’s for companies like yours that Whatcom Marketing is equipped to monitor and professionally respond on your behalf while keeping you informed of what is being said online. Use the form above or call us to learn more about how we can help protect your reputation and improve your customers’ experience with your products and services.

What experiences with people complaining about (or praising) your company online have you encountered?

 

I have been one of those cobblers whose kids have no shoes. The Whatcom Marketing blog has been sorely neglected while I have been busy creating content for others. I need to take my own advice (“eat my own dog food” as some people say) and fix this.

But in the mean time, I have been graciously invited to provide a guest post on John W. Ellis’s company’s blog. So wander over to the Crescent Interactive blog and check out my latest along with John’s gems of online marketing wisdom.