Disclaimer Nick Valente is fully responsible for the content of this site. The opinons expressed are that of Nick Valente and do not represent his employeer or any of it's associated companies.
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 This was a question asked by my 10 year old daughter this summer while swimming in our pool. Believe it or not this prompted a two week long conversation among folks who were at our house that weekend. (there are also 37M results when you search for this)
To say that consumers are bombarded with input on a daily basis is an understatement. To stand out amidst the noise is difficult and challenging. Even business consumers want to be entertained when reading about your product or service. So what can you do to get above the noise, get noticed, and start conversations?
4 ways to keep your content and message interesting during the upcoming holiday season.
- Bold images or Daring headlines – Support plain headlines with bold images and plain images with daring headlines. Everyone knows you have seconds to catch someones attention.
- Address your market with a sense of humor – We live in tough times and people need to laugh. I recently wrote a blog post for an enterprise messaging company in which we portrayed a real customer success story in a humorous and overly dramatic fashion. The client and the readers loved it.
- Steal from today’s headlines – “Congress Actually Did Something, Celebrate with Us”. By capitalizing on what’s fresh in peoples minds you increase your chances of engaging with them. Be careful not to pick a side but support the conversation!
- A Better Social Media Strategy – Build a Social Media strategy that meets the bigger picture of your customers lives. Don’t just address your product or service. Create conversations that are topical, controversial and worthy of being shared.
As for the headline question of this article, we finally came to a conclusion.
 Much attention is paid to Facebook and Twitter as a communications method with external customers. Rightly so, since between them they have quite a few subscribers. Often missing from the conversation is how social media tools can help companies develop better prodcuts and improve internal communications.
Product Development and Social Media
Corporations have spent a great deal of the past century creating products that meet a criteria that fits the companies business model. Beyond that companies spend millions of dollars in customer research and feedback. What’s still mostly missing is the use of crowdsourcing for product development. Bringing customers in to be part of the product development cycle by capturing, conversing and sharing their ideas to help build better products and services. Sure, many companies have customer advisery panels, but social media gives you the opportunity to create a larger and more diverse set of resources to the mix.
Although this scares the daylights out of most companies for a number of reasons, those who miss out on this may miss out on game changing advances.
Social Media and Internal Communications
In a large enterprise many organizations exist in a vacuum, duplicating efforts and going outside the enterprise for services that are available in-house. Using an internal social platform to share ideas, information on projects and day to day activities and discovery can save you millions of dollars in prodcutivity.
A new book on these subjects, The Social Organization: How to Use Social Media to Tap the Collective Genius of Your Customers and Employees, is due out in October. Check it out here.
Also see
What’s Your Social Strategy in HBR
Related articles
 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.
 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.
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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.
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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
 Optimizing your site for users (SEO, or what I call UOC) should be one of your main goals because with a few exceptions, it offers one of the highest converting channels for many industries. For some ecommerce businesses a good email marketing will trump SEO for conversions, but outside of that an organic search will usually get a very high conversion rate.
What is Your Site Being Found For?
Companies spend endless hours pouring over their analytics (or hopefully they do) in an effort to understand who’s coming to their site and from what keywords. There are a few keyword quesitons business and marketing managers should be asking themselves when they look at analytics.
- What am I being found for?
- Are my keywords I’m found for in line with my goals?
- What keywords are converting?
What are my competitors being found for?
Knowing what your top competitors site is optimized for is good way to help build your content strategy. You can either choose to mimic them exactly, pick off phrases or keywords they lack, or go after the places where you both fall in the 11 -30 in the results, and work to increase your ranking.
How to Determine Your Current Optimization
One way to get a view of your sites current optimization is to use Google Adwords Keyword Discovery tool. If you type in a site name it will deliver a list of Keywords that show up on the site along wtih additional suggestions, the level of Adwords competition, and the number of times it is searched for globally and locally. Next try the top keywords in your favorite search engine and see where your site ranks for them.
Why is this important?
Knowing what keywords you’re being found for can tell you if your content is hitting the mark, or missing by a mile. Remember, your goal is not to satisfy serach engines, but the site visitor. If they see the keywords they want in your content, and your content matches their expectations, they are more likely to stay, and convert.
Coming soon: Choosing Keywords to Target
With all the noise out there and the pending automated infographic services about to come on online I thought I’d get a head start and try my hand at creating a infographic resume. It is still a work in progress as I’ve thought of a few more things to add, but I hope it gets its point across. The next version will have embeded links to site content.
Let me know what you think. Click to Enlarge
 Are you marketing to your entire customer or just to the part that wants your specific product?
Holistic Digital Marketing & eCommerce
Like you, your customer is multi-dimensional. Customers have different interests and reasons for buying and remaining loyal to a brand or website. Knowing those interests is key to successfully marketing and selling to your customer.
Make an effort to understand what really moves your customer, especially in relation to your products. Without this knowledge you’re running a one-dimensional marketing campaign and eCommerce business. Armed with this information you can build our your marketing and content directions in a way that is meaningful for your customers.
Specific Action Plans
Start with a MindMap – Start with your product at the center. Here is an example:
- Related Products
- Events
- Emotional Triggers & Health
- Trends
Let’s take the home entertainment electronics industry as an example:
Related Product (depending on your main product)
- Gaming
- Audio
- Video
- Connectors
- Seating
- Wall treatments
- Content (movies and music)
- Snacks
Events
- This week in Movie, Music history
- Technology history
- Current Events
Emotional Triggers & Health
- Holidays
- Seasonal
- Photography, Video
- Family time
- Vision & Hearing information
Trends & Technology
- New technology – educational
- Future technology
- Related technologies
Content
- Latest Movies, Music & Games
- Can tie into Emotional, Technology & History
Can you can see the possibilities? You also need to do things like surveys and carefully watch your analytics to see where your specific customer base is most interested. Between their on-site reactions and analytics will tell you want percentage you should feature AC/DC or Pink in your music mentions.
Email & Social Media (including your blogs)
Now that you’ve got the information you want, it’s time to integrate this into your marketing message and web properties. Write blog posts and social media content based around your discoveries. Mix informational items in with your emails. Now it’s time to start looking at your results.
- Monitor your analytics for trends and interests
- Read comments on blogs and social media outlets
- Look at survey results
- Look at which content types create the most conversions
- Add information to your product descriptions that reflect your customers total needs
This information will give you more information about your customers that you can use to further target your them with more detailed content. Engaging customers in a broader segment of their life makes your a valuable partner, not just a vendor trying to sell them something. It’s really simple, customers that are more engaged with your brand or site are more likely to stay customers then those who are not.
Additional Benefits
- Possible Higher Email Open Rate
- More Social Engagement and Sharing
Related Articles
Mind Maps from Website Magazine
 Bed Bath & Beyond is the lone home goods retailer since Linen’s and Thing’s folded a while back. They have a great selection of products, sometimes at fantastic prices. I’ve always thought the stores were a bit crowded in an old fashioned hardware store kind of way. Not that this is a bad thing. Just an observation.
Their Web Site somewhat reminds me of the stores. Crowded, lots of messages and stimulus. Here are my thoughts.
Overview
Overall the basic navigation is good. Things are where you would expect them to be.
- Left Product Navigation
- Nice Big Search.
- Key Seasonal Menu up Top.
- Featured Section in the Middle. Though I’d like to see a little more interactivity in this space if they are going to squeeze this many products into it.
Suggested Improvements
- After many minutes of playing, I’m still not sure what “Turn Menu’s On/Off” does.
- Free shipping is sort of squeezed in there at the top It could be better located, expecially if it is a big conversion factor.
- The dark blue bands as a design element make the search bar look crowded.
- There is no white space on this page at all. The secondary feature items look squashed in and nothing stands out.
- Not putting the footer links like customer service and help in the footer makes them hoard to find. In fact I’d prefer to see the help button in the upper right hand corner where consumers are used to looking for it.
- After this section everything just starts to just get plain messy. Nothing catches your eye here.
I fully understand the challenges of having multiple departments pushing to be on the home page. At AT&T we had over 200 web sites all wanting to be featured. With an updated design, secondary landing pages and some agreed upon publishing calendars BedBathandBeyond.com could look better, and be easier for consumers to use.
What do you think?
 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.
 It was 10 years ago in March of 2001 that famed business strategist Michael Porter wrote an article for the Harvard Business Review titled Strategy & the Internet. In this article he got a few things wrong, like reverse auctions like Priceline would not continue to work & Internet advertising revenues would drop. Overall however Porter’s basic business strategies held true for the Internet as they did for the pre-digital world. It is a great article and worth the read.
In this article there is a section from an even older article that still holds great value today no matter how you do business.
The Six Principles of Strategic Positioning
- Start with the right goal - Economic value is created when customers are willing to pay a price for a product or service that exceeds the cost of producing it. If you’re simply going after value or market share, poor strategies often result.
- Be Different than Your Competition - You need to deliver a unique value in a particular set of uses for a particular set of customers. Simply copying what worked for someone else will mean compromises in price in market share.
- Have a Distinctive Value Chain - You must provide your service or product in a different way than your competitors. Adopting best practices means you’ll end up doing most things like your competitors, and have no advantage.
- You Need a Trade-Off - In order to be different you may need to abandon some features or service in order to be unique. These trade-offs need to be painful for your competition to copy. Trying to be all things to all customers will guarantee a lack of any advantage.
- Entire Value Chain Should be Interdependent - All elements of your company must fit together. Your product or service design should be uniquely fitted to your entire value chain. Copying a product feature is easy, copying an entire value chain is not.
- Continuity – Pick a direction and value proposition and stick with it. Develop continuous improvement along your strategic direction, but stay the course. Frequent corporate “reinvention” is usually a sign of poor strategic thinking.
Too many companies today can’t or won’t change to meet new business models or customer desires. How do the current successful Intenet business models mark up against Porter’s principals?
- GroupOn – Easily copied technically, but who will match their 6,000 sales people?
- FourSquare – Too easy to copy?
- Facebook – Are they loosing focus? Will they last? 6M less US memebers in recent months.
- Amazon – Difficult value chain to reproduce, yet all things to all people?
Does your business practice Porter’s Strategy for Success?
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