Author: Bill Freedman

How Efficient is Your Marketing?

By Bill Freedman

The famed retail pioneer from the late 19th century (and fellow Philadelphian) John Wanamaker reportedly said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” Marketers of all stripes wrung their hands while reluctantly accepting Wanamaker’s findings for nearly a century after his rise to success.

Marketing has come a long way since Wanamaker. With online advertising such as Google AdWords, all sorts of advanced bidding strategies and closed-loop click tracking, the new mantra is “43.745% of my advertising is wasted; but tomorrow’s experiment will give me the insight to improve conversion rates and reduce spend.”

So the question on my mind today is: are today’s marketing expenditures more efficient than a century ago?

The ability to measure digital advertising and customer behavior provides marketers with an extensive array of data on customer behavior and advertising effectiveness. But let’s not kid ourselves: having data is different than using the data to improve outcomes, and few marketers have the combination of quantitative skills to analyze results and creative skills to devise new online experiments that improve outcomes.

Advertising and promotion budgets continue to be a significant business expense. Heck, businesses may even be spending more today than in Wanamaker’s day–but I’ll leave that question to my colleagues in academia.

The paradox is clear. Newly available data enables more efficient promotional spends. But promotional spending continues to rise.

Marketing in the Age of Experimentation

Here are a few ways you can improve your marketing efficiency in the age of experimentation:

  • Data Trumps Gut. Are you really sure you picked the optimal ad copy, keywords and subject line? I used to think I was smarter and more creative than the average marketer. Now I don’t think that at all. I trust the data to tell me, not how smart I am, but which campaign will yield the best outcomes. Gut, or should I say experience, helps your craft experiments. Data helps you make decisions.
  • Fail Fast. Experiments should last just long enough to provide you with a large enough sample to make valid decisions. What is amazing is that a test could be completed by running an AdWords campaign for a few days and costing only a few hundred dollars. This represents a dramatic shift from the the old “reach and frequency” methods of designing ad campaigns.
  • Focus on Outcomes. In Wanamaker’s time, advertising generated awareness, brand preference and (occasionally) immediate revenue. Measuring the revenue contribution from advertising was difficult. In the age of experimentation, advertising generates clicks and conversions. These clicks and and conversions can be tracked all the way to revenue. When you can find a campaign that consistently produces more revenue than it costs to create a customer, you are simply printing money!

Data is a marketer’s friend, but it has limits. Before you start replacing the copywriters and entrepreneurs in your marketing department with mathematicians, remember that translating product features into customer focused benefits, creating messages that resonate with customers and producing images that inspire action are powerful skills. John Wanamaker, if he were alive today, would probably hire the same marketing professionals he did in the past…as long as they traded in their egos for calculators.

What Does a Sales Funnel Look Like?

By Bill Freedman

A sales funnel is an essential management tools for visualizing the status of sales and marketing operations.

Sales Funnel

The funnel is an apt visual metaphor for virtually every sales process. Many inquiries will enter the top of the funnel. Along the way, some prospective customers abandon your solution while others engage more deeply. In the end, a precious few exit the funnel as paying customers.

But because buyer behavior and sales processes vary greatly across industries, companies and product lines, generic funnel diagrams are of limited use. Think about it: are you satisfied by a picture showing that 1,000 inquiries eventually convert into $199 of revenue? Of course not. The funnel needs to begin with assumptions about your business. From there it needs to be validated, optimized and improved against the reality of buyer behavior and the competitive marketplace. It longs to be a beacon of competitive advantage for your business. It needs to be both predictive and believable.

Eventually, you’ll be able to use your funnel as a model for sales and marketing investments such as sales staffing, lead generation and product roadmaps. It can also become an early warning system for changes in the competitive marketplace, buyer behavior or operational effectiveness.

So what does a sales funnel look like? It looks like your business.

Ideas in the Social Media Era: I’ll Get It Right the 5th Time

By Bill Freedman

I love this chart. Not only is it funny, it gets to the core of how the social media era is disrupting creativity.

The chart puts its focus on article length (and perhaps the quantity of postings and/or impressions). The chart is silent on quality.

Great ideas have always been distilled to their essence through pity catchphrases. With social media, any idea, even before it’s refined (let alone great) is distilled for social network impact. The network for disseminating ideas is becoming more powerful than ideas themselves.

This is a new challenge for the creator and innovator. When is an idea ready to be published? What are readers’ expectations for quality and accuracy of new ideas? Does it help or hurt your reputation to publish many unrefined ideas? Is your idea sharing risk tolerance dependent on the size and nature of your social network? Are facts and accuracy destined to become endangered species during the social media era?

I don’t know, but I’m going to publish this now and refine it later. My sense of optimism suggests that we’ll muddle through.

Earning a Handshake 2.0

By Bill Freedman

Building trust starts with the first web visit and with the first impression of your brand.

Such is the idea behind “2.0” thinking. Products, services and brands now have “online,” “interactive,” and “collaborative” elements so that consumers and users play an active, anonymous and early role in creating relationships with vendors. Twitter, Facebook and Wikipedia are halmarks of Web 2.0 success.

handshake 2.0In the olden-days of Handshake 1.0, a handshake was a precursor of bilateral communication. A protocol of acknowledging a peaceful relationship and mutual trust with the idea of building upon the status quo. An initial meeting between a vendor and a prospective customer. A politician building a coalition. A suitor wooing a debutante. Two or more people carve out a sacred space for a live interaction in the hopes of a mutually satisfactory outcome. Stakes are reasonably low with a first handshake; and the budding relationship can quickly go in any direction. Compare this to two people who pass in the street with nothing more than a glance. No rapport. No communication. No goals for advancing an agenda.

The Internet meets Humanity: Handshake 2.0

With that introduction, I’d like to introduce the new concept of—taa daa—Handshake 2.0. As we have more and more interactions online (defined and measured through web visits, cookies and registration forms) there is a new process for establishing bilateral communication. No outreached hand. No touch. No real-time conversation. No progress or even an action plan. Just a web site that seeks rapport and a visitor who is willing to offer personally identifiable information. It’s easy for users to navigate away. But it’s also human to hope that each visited site succeeds at fulfilling the information hunt.

What is interesting is what happens next: a fast exit or an attempt at rapport building. Credibility and effective design by the site owner conspires with desire and perhaps laziness by the visitor to earn a second and a third click.

Like with off-line interactions, there are false-starts and bad first impressions in the online world.

At this point the the user (and laser-focused vendors) chooses whether s/he will try to extend the anonymous glance into rapport and ultimately into a Handshake 2.0. This is so very different than the past. Information collection required numerous human interactions. Now, anonymous web surfers can learn and make some initial decisions without consulting another human. Likewise, the human managers of web sites can look at analytics reports, IP addresses and email domains to determine if the prospect warrants attention.

Creating The Conditions for Handshake 2.0

I argue that earning a Handshake 2.0 is the first job of a web site in the Web 2.0 era. It may not happen on the first day you launch a web site. And the web presence frequently need to be forged with the help of outside forces…reputation, brand, economic forces and individual behavior. So what attracts (and alternatively repulses) visitors from choosing to grant a Handshake 2.0:

Earning a Handshake 2.0 Raising Doubts
  • Hygienic design
  • Empathy
  • Relevance
  • HTML accuracy
  • Browser compatibility
  • A way to offer a Handshake 2.0
  • Jarring or amateurish design
  • Out-of-date information
  • Breaking web conventions
  • Overstepping trust
  • Any of many kinds of errors
  • Asymmetry…asking but not giving

Following the principles above will result in more and faster Handshake 2.0s. Supplementing your web site with other rapport-building tactics makes sense too. This is why marketers are looking for any and every way to build relationships. Facebook, Twitter, MeetUps are the new tools which have earned a place beside reliable standards: press releases, trade shows, advertising and good ole salesmanship.

Did this article make you think? Leave a comment!

…Ten Months Later…

By Bill Freedman

Its very hard to believe, but “Soon to Be a Major Trend” hasn’t fed any new ideas to the blogosphere in the past ten months.


First off, its good to see the Web in general and the blogosophere in particular has survived without my contributions. Whew.

Second, there are so many other distractions in this world. Family is a great one. Twitter and Facebook are effective distractions but less great. I do admit to dabble with each on a professional and social level.

Third, I still have ideas–lots of them–worth blogging about. Marketing automation is a recent fascination for me. I have a lot of great stories (fact-based, of course) as a result of the success of Appcelerator’s use of compelling content, one to many communications, and measurement of web behavior. Enterprise software moving to the cloud and business models moving to subscriptions are other important topics. And, content, as always, is key. During the year I have toyed with video, audio and javascript to augment the written word.

One final thought for all of you: the fuel for blogs are comments. Think about it. If you have a nice meal with good service in America, you leave a tip. Now extend this metaphor to blogs.  If you read a blog that informs, inspires or amuses, please leave a comment.

So, kind readers, join the conversation. What do you want to hear about?  Comments welcome.

It’s a Great Time to Be a Professional Marketer

By Bill Freedman

I just read an inspiring blog post by Megan Heuer at Sirius Decisions called Five B2B Marketing Surprises From 2009. It inspired me to reflect on what I learned in 2009.

The biggest take-away for me is how great the marketing tools and techniques are today compared to just a few years ago. Consider:

  • Twitter (free) to quickly inform and inspire your network
  • WordPress (free) to quickly publish blogs and websites. Additional shout-outs to the vibrant community of WordPress developers contributing plug-ins and themes.
  • Marketo (pricey, but valuable) which teases out the marketing automation functions and processes from general CRM/sales force automation
  • Salesforce.com (pricey, but valuable) for providing an easy to deploy, easy to manage and sales-rep-friendly tool for automating corporate processes for managing customer relationships and the sales process.
  • Microsoft Office (not free), especially Word and Excel, for creating content and managing campaigns. I certainly enjoy using many of the newer tools, but, let’s face it, most of us document the bulk of our original thinking and planning using these tools.
  • Google Analytics (free) to measure and analyze your web traffic and visitor trends.

Not as neat as the tools listed above is the emergence of multi-media publishing. The web is no longer just a medium of the written word. Podcasts, videos, photos, illustrations–even animations and web apps are increasing in popularity among prospects and customers. More on this topic at a later date…

Improved tools are important, but only when combined with a solid foundation of marketing professionalism. Great results are equally dependent on your sound (and stable) strategy, enduring processes and measurements.

The bottleneck in marketing continues to be the pace of creation of relevant, timely and persuasive content. I guess this means that the pace of marketing is limited by the imagination and creativity of the marketing team….a very nice thought.