Patience in Marketing: The Addiction of Instant Gratification

It's so very easy to get distracted by all that's going on in social media these days, just on a personal level or as a consumer. But this dangerous distraction is also something that can afflict marketers too.

With tweeting and other social media updates to keep on top of for today's marketer, it's very easy to lose touch with your longer term plans and even to plan campaigns and marketing initiatives that have a life of more than a few days (or hours!).

That's why I think it's always a good idea to be patient and set aside sometime for planning your marketing objectives. Set reasonable milestones that can be measured at regular intervals - months rather than days down the line.

But even more important than that is to main consistency between the everyday marketing frenzy of communicating directly with customers by email, Twitter or Facebook, and your core visions and values. Each time you use a short-term communication method, I think you need to consider whether this fits into the overall vision for the company and the brand that you are promoting. Be wary of getting too excited about short term gains, such as Twitter followers or click-throughs, and actually look at how your marketing activity is creating value for your customers and your brand.

If it's not is time to get some help for your social media addiction?

Is Google Caffeine a Threat or an Opportunity for Small Businesses?

Caffeine is the new technology Google have created to produce faster search results of more current content for its search engine. It's an important part of Google's strategy to stay on top of faster real-time social media and news content. Caffeine is also an attempt to claw back traffic from those social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, which are threatening to take a large share of Google's market. Internet users now often start their internet experience in a social media site.

So why is Caffeine of importance to small businesses? Well it could fundamentally change the search results that users of Google see. It's very likely that small businesses keep pace with Google's changes they may find their websites attracting less traffic from Google.

I am not going to explain the in-depth technicalities of what Caffeine does, but it might be useful to briefly go over some simple points about how Google's search engine works, and how Caffeine has enhanced it. Here are a few principles of how Google search operates:

• When you do a search in Google you are not searching the web, you are searching Google's index of the web. What Caffeine has done is to improve the currency of this index.
• Google works out what is on the internet by sending out what are called bots to crawl through websites which they are allowed to access (you can code you website to refuse access if you want to).
• These bots will crawl a site depending on a number of factors, but if the website is more popular and regularly updated it will get crawled more often.
• Once the bots come back with all the website info, this data is uploaded to Google's search engine index. And this is where Caffeine is going to change things big time.
• Instead of updating the index on a regular, but fairly infrequent basis, the Caffeine system enables Google to update the index on a much more frequent basis, which means there will be a lot more current content in there. 

Here's a quote from the Google blogpost about Caffeine, which explains this:

"With Caffeine, we analyze the web in small portions and update our search index on a continuous basis, globally. As we find new pages, or new information on existing pages, we can add these straight to the index. That means you can find fresher information than ever before — no matter when or where it was published."

Now what this actually implies is that Google are likely to be a lot more selective about what they prioritize when crawling and updating their index. If you do a search now you will see a lot more hits that are from news sites, video sites, images, respected sources and social media - so results from Twitter for instance. In the past the ranking of results would depend more simply on relevance and PageRank. But now Google want to make their content as current as possible, so if you have content that is on a slower refresh cycle you could suffer.

This quotation from PC World is informative on the subject:

"Not every change on every site will appear immediately, though. Google looks at factors such as page rank to determine which sites to crawl faster, Cutts said. It also checks news sites and blogs more often than other sites, he said."

Some feedback on the web from SEO gurus suggests that Caffeine is preferring content that is updated very regularly - i.e. at least daily, so a clear preference for news and social media sites. Blogs are also favoured, but I suspect only if they are very regularly updated, for instance a blog like Boing Boing which is updated several times a day. But many individual and business are updated weekly at best.

So what should small businesses do about it? Here's a quick action plan based on common sense and the advice of SEO gurus (although as with snake oil merchants everywhere it's sometimes best to take their advice with a pinch of salt!)

1. Engage with social media - link to your content from a variety of social media platforms as this will increase the chance of your content being in the search results and also improve the PageRank of your main site.
2. Update more regularly - perhaps staggering rather than batching content updates if possible to keep your site as fresh as possible.
3. Engage with multi-media content, if possible on your main site, but also from sites such as YouTube and then link back to your main site.
4. If you blog, blog more often!

Even Apple is Guilty on Mass Un-targeted Marketing

Thanks very much Apple for your offer, but I'm not a student and you're wasting my time!

I even checked their website in the hope that I could get the discount anyway even if I wasn't a student but the TOCs are quite specific that you have to be. And if you delve further you find out that actually getting your rebate is moderately complex:

To redeem under this offer Qualifying Education Customers must:

1. Submit the claim online at www.apple.com/uk/promo ; AND
2. Mail the printed online claim output with a proof-of-purchase consisting of a copy of an Apple Retail Receipt or Online Apple Store Invoice or Shipping Confirmation (order acknowledgments, packing slips or purchase orders will not be accepted); AND
3. Return the EAN Bar Code labels from the Apple product boxes with (i) and (ii) above.

Key Sales and Marketing Metrics for Every Business

I wrote before about the fallacy of measuring Marketing ROI.

So what should all businesses be measuring?

Well that partly depends on your business. But here are some key metrics that should be relevant for nearly every business that also relate closely to your business finances.

Sales Metrics

• Volume and Value % compared with plan and prior year
• Volume and Value % compared with competition

Marketing Investment Metrics

• Marketing budget % expenditure compared with plan and prior year
• Share of Voice % compared with competitors: could be in actual advertising spend or equivalents if PR coverage. One could also measure Social Media coverage as well here?

Bottom Line

• Profit by business/marketing unit or brand % compared with plan and prior year
• Share of market profit % compared with competitors

Getting marketing metrics for competitors

If you are a big business  then there will be whole teams, agencies and market research companies dedicated to this kind of analysis. But if you are small, perhaps with just a handful of marketing staff, what do you do?

Rather than ignoring competitors altogether there are some quick and easy ways to get the above data:

Competitor Sales Data:

Do a survey of mutual or prospective customers to establish their purchasing of competitor products. You don't have to survey the whole market - a reasonable sample of between 50 and 100 will do if you compare with your own products.

Competitor Share of Voice:

You probably know which outlets will act as advertising or PR mediums for your product. Simply survey these for a period (depending on publication frequency) and note details of your competitors adverts and editorial copy. If you can also monitor social media and channels such as events as well. By spending a bit of little bit of effort you should be able to get a good snapshot of your competitors' marketing activity and how much they are spending. It's probably worth maintaining this ongoing to see what they change. For instance it would be useful to see if they are investing more in marketing a product that directly competes with yours.

Competitor Share of Profit:

A really difficult one to do, but in the UK you can get copies of accounts from Companies House and these will give broad brushstroke data on profitability for any Ltd company.

Make the Most of Google News Search RSS to Get Ideas for Blog Posts

With Google's new search engine getting more appropriate search results is even easier, and you can also easily choose what type of content you want to view. So rather than doing a general search for the topic you want to blog about, now you can actually choose different medium, whether they be News, Videos, Books, Blogs, Images etc.

Particularly good for blogging ideas are the News and Blogs categories. I slightly prefer News as this really gives you the most up-to-date developments in your subject area. What is more you can also generate an RSS feed from your specified News search, which means you can keep up to date easily with the latest stories and then turn these into ideas for blog posts.

Here's how you can generate News search results and turn them into an RSS Feed:

1. Do your search in Google - get as specific as possible if you can - you might want to set-up a number of RSS feeds to get better coverage.

2. Specify the Medium, in this case News websites.

3. Right click the RSS link and copy the link address

4. Copy it into your chosen RSS Reader and Hey Presto you can get the latest news for your topic area updated right in your RSS Reader

If you choose Blogs you can only get an email alert at the moment - not sure why, but probably worth seeing what the blogosphere are saying about Paperclips as well!

How Over Selling Can Lead to Customer Disappointment

Good example of this for me personally from the CIM. I get an email from them everytime they publish their magazine online, and this month's came with an email subject line of Top Tips for Persuasive Marketers.

A good subject line as obviously one thinks of oneself as a persuasive marketer, and it's always good fun to read a list of top tips, so I eagerly opened the email hoping to see the main story as a list of top tips for people like me, but instead I got this rather less than inspiring CIM email about the articles appearing in the magazine, none of which seems to be Top Tips for Persuasive Marketers.

Needless to say I decided to not read any further!

Using Twitter Trending Topics to Drive Blog Post Ideas

Sometimes it can seem you just don't have anything to write a blog post about, but there are lots of ways to get ideas and one of these is to see what's popular at the moment on social media sites. The concept is pretty simple really and is all about ridding buzz and connecting it to whatever your blog or company is about.

So for instance if you have a blog about movies look at the movies that are trending on Twitter. If you have a B2B product such as insurance see if there are trending topic related to crime or weather warnings. A bit cynical. but if you pitch it right you can get some good traffic and actually be informative to potential prospects too.

So how do you see what's trending in Twitter? Well it's very easy. Just pick a region that you want to target - could be global, country or even a city and see what people are tweeting about - see to the right for today's trending topics in the UK.

As you can see as well as the usual celeb gossip, there are topics such as GCSE Results or the BBC Micro that may well be relevant to your business.

You won't always get good inspiration from these, but it's worth checking regularly to see what's hot and make the most of it.

Right off to right a blog post now about Sean Connery use of paperclips to improve his GCSE results!

Fallacy of the ROI Marketing Metric

In the world of marketing metrics ROI (Return on Investment) is the corporate speak holy grail. Job adverts and marketing plans talk about measuring ROI or maximising ROI in an effort to track the effectiveness of marketing. A lot of this is an effort to make marketing more financially accountable and show the worth of all that marketing budget to senior management.

Yet the ROI metric itself is fundamentally flawed and should not be used. 

Here's why:

Marketing ROI is measured by dividing the return (profit before marketing) by the marketing investment (marketing budget invested in a particular brand or campaign). So for instance if the profit gained on a launch of a new paperclip is £1,000,000 and we spent £200,000 on our marketing campaign to launch that paperclip, the ROI is £1,000,000 divided by £200,000 or a factor of 5.

If we could achieve the same return of £1,000,000 and spend only £160,000 then our ROI would be higher at 6.25.

So far so good - you can see how marketing managers, campaigns and methodologies could usefully be compared and measured using such a metric and benchmarking carried out between industries and competitors.

But ROI doesn't actually make your business more profitable - it's a statistic not a measure of actual net return, the actual profit that is so important.

Here's why ROI doesn't work as a metric: 

Say with our first example we could have spent £250,000 on marketing instead of £200,000, and that this then yielded returns of £1,200,000 instead of £1,000,000. Our ROI is now only 4.8 rather than 5, so obviously the campaign is doing worse? Well no actually because the net return has gone up from £800,000 to £950,000, we are now making £150,000 more profit, so this campaign is actually performing better, although the ROI metric would tell us that it isn't.

It is surprising that ROI is bandied about so much as a holy grail of marketing metrics when it is so obviously and fundamentally flawed. I am indebted to Tim Ambler's book Marketing and the Bottom Line for opening my eyes to this fallacy. If you want a more robust way of benchmarking then you need to look at other metrics such as DCF (Discounted Cash Flow).

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Why a CRM System is Essential Even for Small Businesses

A CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system may seem like a big investment for many small businesses, but I think it really is essential to maximise your opportunities of survival and success. Why is this?

From a Sales Perspective, an effective CRM system can:

• Help you track all the potential sales opportunities you have outstanding and tag a reminder for your next follow-up action.
• Automatically add any new prospect contact information to your mailing list for marketing communication.
• Act as your corporate memory to target repeat or upsell business in the future - it's amazing how many small businesses provide quotes or do work for clients, but never ever contact them again. Make the most of potentially interested prospects and contact them again!
• Help you be clever about the decision making unit if your customer is a business (or even a family!) Who holds the purse-strings, and who influences the decision?

From a Marketing perspective,  an effective CRM system can:

• Help you tailor your marketing message depending on your customer's profiles. For instance you might want to target different products at different groups, or only offer a promotional voucher to long-term customers to reward their loyalty. You need a decent marketing database to do this, but you also need to link it to your sales information. In particular if you can segment by decision-making unit profile you are on to a winner, but to do this efficiently you need to automate. 
• Simply building your mailing list is simpler if you have a proper CRM system - it will save you a lot of time in the long-run!  
• With data protection and anti-SPAM regulations becoming more high-profile even small businesses need to make sure they are complying. A well organized CRM system should allow you to set marketing communication preferences and also to ensure you can provide data easily and efficiently if required to by Data Protection officers. 

Strategies for Getting More Twitter Followers

So you want to increase the number of followers you have on Twitter? Well in that case you have what I think are really two main options, which I classify as the slow and steady approach vs. the fast and slightly spammy approach.

Increase your Twitter Followers slowly but surely

For this approach you need to rely on the quality of your content to do your marketing for you. Make sure you post relevant links, do reply @ strategically amongst possible brand advocates and cross-promote your Twitter presence via your other online channels. The advantage of this approach is that you are more likely to get better quality leads over time and will also maintain a very positive Following to Followers ratio. It tends to be the case that if you follow fewer people on Twitter than Follow you, you get more kudos as an authoritative source.

Increase your Twitter Followers fast and without prejudice

This is really a case of being a lot less discerning about your approach to Twitter. You still need to be Tweeting quality as your new followers won't stay, but this method gets you more followers fast, but at the sacrifice of a poor Following to Followers ratio - i.e. you end up following more people than follow you in the short term.

So how do you get more Twitter Followers fast?

Step 1. Find Tweeters in your target market with a reasonable number of Followers - a few hundred should do.
Step 2. Check out the lists they have been listed on and determine if these match your target market - e.g. Jeff's list of Paperclip Purchasers, if you are selling Paperclips.
Step 3. Follow the members of those lists!
Step 4. Watch and see how many people follow you back - if you have chosen a list that matches your own profile quite well then they should be interested in following you too.
Step 5. A few weeks later you should go back and use a tool like Twitter Karma to cull those people you followed but then didn't follow you back.

This is an effective but slightly spammy way to get more Twitter followers - so you use with care!

How Often Should You Blog

If  you write a blog for your business then you may wonder about how often you should blog. After all it may seem like  a lot of effort and possibly a distraction from your core business activities. Also it can sometimes be difficult to come up with ideas about what to blog about.

But if you want to seriously engage an audience online blogging is a core part of your online marketing resource pack. Blogging is an ideal way to build a rapport with your customers and to provide a means of communicating with them which isn't just about selling and promoting. You can actually use your blogging activities to provide a value-added service to your market, which means that their opinion of your business will increase and therefore they will be more likely to buy from you in the future.

So that's the why should you blog element covered. The big question is how often. My advice would be to blog as often as possible, and that means at least once a day, but more if you can.

Why should you blog so often?

1. Search Engines favour regularly updated websites. In particular the new Caffeine search engine used by Google favours recent content and content that is updated on a regular basis. If you want to get top hits on the search engines then you need to be posting regularly (as well as getting good inbound links and working on your keywords of course).
2. The more content you have on your blog then the more there is for people to read - the more hits you will get and the more likely you are to find an interested audience.
3. Practice makes perfect, or the more you do something the easier it becomes. I think this is really true. You find that if you get in the habit of blogging at least daily then it becomes just part of your routine - a bit like reading your email or checking your sales figures. It's just a business function that you do. Also you tend to get quicker at it and pick up ideas more easily - you will actually find that one idea leads to another. 

Happy Blogging!

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