Being a firm believer in the role of content in social media, I took Altimeters’ hourglass and mapped out what content would look like against the Social [...]]]> In a recent post Altimeter, the social media strategy folks, posted a great graphic on the Social Media Hour Glass. It documents the buying cycle through social media interaction.

Being a firm believer in the role of content in social media, I took Altimeters’ hourglass and mapped out what content would look like against the Social Media Hourglass.

This model only looks at the role of content while fully aware of the place all the other on and off-line marketing has on happy customer and a sale.

Rinse & Repeat

Awareness- Advocacy & friends can play a big part in creating awareness of your products and services. For large companies with a  monstrous base, advocacy plays an important part in managing social media, but it also plays a part in companies of all size.

Consideration – Once aware, you relay on your website, customer reviews, social content, blogs, and other content to further more a customer toward your product.

The most interested customers will want as much detail as they can get, so landing pages, videos and other more detailed content becomes more important.

Intent – Once close to a decision, customers need supporting information on purchase specifics; when will my product arrive, is shipping really free, will your support team be available 24/7,  what are your terms?

Support – After the purchase your support content needs to be consistent with pre-purchase and be available across multiple platforms.

Loyalty – Building loyalty through email, rewards programs, recognition requires content geared toward the budding Advocate.

Advocacy – Advocates need more information and content to share than the average fan. In order to help you grow and support your social base this group needs specific and detailed content not available to your average customer

In the end your advocates support your awareness and the cycle starts all over again.

What is your social content strategy?

9 Week Holiday Planner

QR Codes are quickly gaining popularity. Because of this many companeis are putting them everywhere, often without thought as to what they want to accomplish.

How to have a Bad Customer Experinece with QR Codes

In a recent Sunday newspaper (yes, I do still get a paper) ad section, a large local retailer [...]]]>  

9 Week Holiday Planner

QR Codes are quickly gaining popularity. Because of this many companeis are putting them everywhere, often without thought as to what they want to accomplish.

How to have a Bad Customer Experinece with QR Codes

In a recent Sunday newspaper (yes, I do still get a paper) ad section, a large local retailer had QR Codes on almost half the products in their circular. All touted the refrain, “Get a Lower Price”, leading you to believe that if you used the QR code, you’d be rewarded with a lower price on that product. Very cool. Three problems;

1. Many of the QR codes would not scan because they were too small to be read
2.  Once scanned, they took me to a non-mobile ready web page
3. The pages were also very generic with multiple products on the page, I could not find the one I wanted!

 At least not easily. I simply gave up and went on to the sports section.

This was a total waste of effort for this retailer.

A Better QR User Experience

What should have happened once the I took the shot of the QR Code?

1. Above all, make sure the QR codes are big enough to be scanable.
2. The user should always be taken to a mobile friendly web site. With a big chance they are coming from a mobile device this is your best alternative.
3. You should always take the user to the product they were interested in. If they have to search for it you’ll loose them quickly

What other things could you do?

• The QR Code could have been a game. Randomly generated pages with different discount code. This would prompt use of the QR and get more folks into the store.
• The landing page should be highly sharable

QR Codes are a great new asset for off-line retailers if used properly. If not, they are a waste of time and will create customer frustration.

I like the NetElixer Calendar. Below I’ve added [...]]]> We’re almost in October and the leaves in the Northeast are already starting to change. That means the holiday season is upon us. My friends at NetElixer, one of my favorite Paid Search partners, sent out this great email with a 9 week holiday planning calendar in it. 

I like the NetElixer Calendar. Below I’ve added chart covering the key items you should consider for your holiday digital marketing plans

Have you built your holiday calendar yet?

With a very [...]]]> From late 2007 to 2010 I started and ran The Speaker Company, a new brand for the Denon & Marantz group of home audio products. The challenge was to build a brand as quickly as possible for this direct to consumer company, in a coporate structure that was primarily a two-tier sales organization.

With a very small marketing budget and few resources, we set about to get brand recognization and sales in a crowded field, consumer audio speakers, during the begining of the recession.

Many companies face the same problems with new brands whether inside a larger company or a under-funded start-up.

Below is an outline of the approach we took to build a solid brand presence for The Speaker Company.

1. Start with Adwords - It’s quick, easy to budget, easy to measure. We used a modest budget to kick-start sales.
2. Content creation - This is the hub of most on and off line success, no matter what problem your company solves. People want an answer to a problem. Supply it. We hired a great writer, supplied the voice we wanted, and made our case.
3. Share your answers to the problems in as many places as possible. Yes Facebook and Twitter, but more importantly in appropriate forums. Be part of discussions. We spent many hours in forums and other industry related sites.
4. Identify and engage with key influential people; bloggers and forum experts. Give product/service away for review purposes. This works wonders but don’t expect it to happen overnight. Most people are cautious of new brands. We had dozens of reviews in influential forums and quickly gained recognition from key blogs and forum posters.
5. Continue to develop “creative & sharable” content to help boost SEO. Continue this on an ongoing basis. Start a blog that addresses not only your product/service, but other issues related to your customers lifestyle and problem set. Post at least twice a week or more. We also hired a social/SEO company to help us develop relevant content that greatly boosted SEO. (in 8 months we ranked for 100′s of top level keywords)
6. Affiliate Marketing - If appropriate for your product or service, launch an affiliate program, it’s a cost per sale model, is highly measurable and does wonders for branding for a very low cost. This eventually made up 20% of our sales.
7. Customer Service -Last but not least give “off the charts” customer service. Keep customers insanely happy, especially the ones that complain, they will tell their friends.

There of course is more to it than what I outlined above, and there are many deeper details to each of the bullet points. But overall this was it. In the end the company built a reputation for building and selling quality speakers at half the price. After 2 and a half years, The Speaker Company was closed for reasons unrelated to sales or brand awareness, but the success we had lived on for Boston Acoustics which garnered a 21% boost in organic traffic with the 301 redirect transfers we put in place.  

Want to find out more on how to build your brand online? Visit the contact page and click on the call me button.

Which Digital Marketing Channel Should You Lead With?

It may be painfully obvious but you will surely want to go with the channel that gets the [...]]]> In a recent post I discussed the difficulty in picking a digital marketing strategy without having first looked at your analytics.  But once you know the numbers, what do you do?

Which Digital Marketing Channel Should You Lead With?

It may be painfully obvious but you will surely want to go with the channel that gets the most conversions, right? This would seem the logical choice on the surface but let’s dig deeper. Let’s look at the data below and see if we can make some clear choice as to direction.

• PPC – Say your PPC campaign is closing sales at 1.5%,  with an acquisition cost of $6, and your average sale is $150. That gives you a pretty good ROI.
• Affiliate – Your affiliate program is closing sales at a rate of 2% of visits and is costing  you 6% of your cart, with an average order size of $135.
• SEO – You’ve spent on average $2,000 a month on content and SEO efforts and you’re getting about 500 customers from your organic results each month, and growing, with an average order size of $155.

There are of course many more numbers you could look at, but you’ve got some basic details in the above numbers. However the numbers don’t tell you the entire story. In fact, all of these channels, depending on your cost structure are performing pretty well.

Where would you put your money?

Where you put your money would depend on looking at the bigger picture. Here are some questions you’d want to ask about each channel:

PPC

• How much further can you optimize your acquisition cost?
• How much can you increase sales with better landing pages?
• Are there additional keywords you can expand into?
• Do you have the funds to experiment considering that some of the new keywords may not pan out?
• What would your competitors do if you increased your budget to garner the #1 PPC position?

Affiliate

• Are  you putting as much effort into your affiliate channel as you can to maximize exposure withyour top affiliates?
• What woud your competition do if you increased  your comission structure?
• Are you out of affiliates that can effectively sell your product?

SEO

• How well are you holding up for older keywords  you ranked highly for last year?
• How much budget do you have for additional research to determine what new content to create?
• Have you identified new areas of increasing  your SEO position through Social marketing?

In addition to these questions you need to consider the following pros and cons of each:

Pros

• PPC is easy to budget and measure results
• Affiliate channels only cost you money when you make a sale
• SEO results can give you sales for months or years even after stopping all efforts

Cons

• PPC campaings will stop producing revenue the minute you stop spending money.
• Affiliate channels are built on a other peoples sites continuing to rank where they are today. If their rank drops so does their traffic and likely your sales.
• SEO can be a roller coaster ride going from 14th to 4th in a matter of hours.

Risk and Reward

The point is you need to consider all apparent and external forces when considering which channel to increase investment in. All of the 3 channels mentioned can produce great results, depending on your resources, competitors and market position. All have up and down sides that need to be considered. I only scratched the surface on the questions for each channel, you could easily come up with 5-10 more levers to look at in you decision making process for which one to pull.

The Best First Step

Building a comprehensive digital [...]]]> This is the question I get on consulting and job interviews for digital marketing or ecommerce. “What is the first thing you’ll do” to fix my problems. In 90% of the cases, until you sign and NDA or they offer you the job, there is only ONE honest answer.

The Best First Step

Building a comprehensive digital strategy is difficult.  Unless someone tells  you what their most pressing problem is, it’s pretty darn tough to tell them what the first step should be in to solve it. But one thing remains true, when you’re trying to increase traffic, conversions, social media conversations, a PPC campaign’s click through or start and affiliate program that works, looking at a companies analytics is always the best first step. Even then you don’t have the full picture.

Understanding the Analytics

It’s said that numbers don’t lie, and looking at the numbers is always the best first step. There are two types of problems a company faces when it comes to analytics; the problem they think they have and the problem they actually have.

1. The problem they think they have
   Many companies either half igonre their analytics or don’t look at them at all. When they do look at them, they too often look at just a few metrics without considering how other metrics and off-line activities are doing that are giving them these results.
2. The problem they actually have
   Here is where you actually have to have enough of real world experience to not only look at the analytics, but to ask the right questions on what the company is doing to cause the numbers they are getting.

Numbers + Actions = Insights

Once you do have a chance to look at the analytics you can see “WHAT” is happening.  The problem is without going further into all the activities that have happened to date, it is still very difficult to tell “WHY” they are happening.  Understanding why is critical to building your plan, and your first step.

Which Lever to Pull

Deciding on which lever to pull when building and adjusting an Internet strategy is not difficult, but it does require a holistic approach to understanding all available data. It also helps if you have previous knowledge of what might and might not work. Once you know your insights as to how a business got to where they are, discovering “what you would do first” becomes a whole lot easier.

If you’d like to know “what to do first”. email me at nickv[at] nickvalente[dot]com

Many of the problems your eCommerce site has are longer term projects that may take major projects to fix. But making incremental but substantial improvements to your site, that will increase conversions and reduce cart [...]]]> There are 173 days till Christmas & the holidays. What have you done to fix nagging problems with your eCommerce website?

Many of the problems your eCommerce site has are longer term projects that may take major projects to fix. But making incremental but substantial improvements to your site, that will increase conversions and reduce cart abandonment may take little effort.

Here are 4 relatively easy to fix problems that can be addressed without writing detailed specs for your IT group.

1. Make sure you have a SSL, security certificate in plain sight for visitors to see. Better yet, use an EV SSL, which turns the visitors address bar green with a lock indicating a trusted site. Verisign has a study stating an average increase in conversions of greater than 17% for sites using an EV SSL. There are of course many other trusted names in online security including Comodo, GeoTrust to name a few.

2. Upgrade Your Product Descriptions. Do your product descriptions follow common sense usability guidelines? Your headlines and copy should immediately let the visitor know they are on the right page! Your product descriptions should:

• Have a headline that says they’ve found what they are looking for
• Be easy to scan
• Be increasingly more informative as you go do the page
• Reflect answers to the most common concerns about a product category
• Have the best photography you can afford
• Have an easy way to get more information via Chat, Email, Forum or Reviews

3. Get Rid of Rabbit Holes. Rabbit hole refers to reaching the end of a product page description and giving the visitor nowhere to go next. Most eCommerce software or services give you the ability to put “like products” or “more in category” links or images at the bottom of the product description page. If yours does not, add them manually to the description. It may not be the easiest thing to do, but it will help keep visitors engaged and on the site, increasing your chance of a sale.

4.  Text Size. Don’t make your text so difficult to read that visitors give up and leave your site. Too many web sites use text that is too small to read or has inadequate contrast, medium gray text on a light gray background. Don’t give visitors a reason to find your product, or your competitors on another site.

5.  Social Media integration. Reviews are great to have on your site, but may take a long time to integrate and can be costly to manage. Integration of Social Media is inexpensive and relativley easier to manage. If you are a B2C site use the Facebook Like button. If your site is B2B use the LinkedIn share button. These add an incredible amount of trust to your site that will increase online sales, and decrease abandonment.

There are of course other changes you can make. What you do depends on your overall  The key is to identify the low-hanging, high impact items and check them off your list before the holidiay arrive.

This is a great video from SEOMOZ. It addresses the holistic approach to SEO I’ve been preaching for the past two years. Hat off to my friend Nick Musica for calling this out two years ago in his book, When Search Meets Usability.

Too many people think just regular everyday good content is [...]]]>

Image via CrunchBase

This is a great video from SEOMOZ. It addresses the holistic approach to SEO I’ve been preaching for the past two years. Hat off to my friend Nick Musica for calling this out two years ago in his book, When Search Meets Usability.

Too many people think just regular everyday good content is going to get them found. Nope. There are too many people working the system today for that alone to get you on page one. Remember, there are only 10 spots on page one.

You need to go well beyond good content with:

• Great site usability
• Great looking site
• Multiple forms of media to engage the user including maybe games?
• Easily Shared content that is worth sharing
• Content Continuity and Flow. (content should feed off of and support other content)
• An overall strategy that ties everything together

Intangibles

I know this all still sound like just great content but it’s not. There is an intangible when it all comes together that makes people want to click on your links, share them and browse through your site. In other words, your writing about things and presenting things your passionate about.

What do you think?