Author: Bill Freedman

Google: the Local Business that Permeates My Life

By Bill Freedman

Many of you know that I’m a big supporter of local businesses. Recently I’ve noticed I’m doing a lot of business with a company that is fifteen miles from my home. That company is Google.

Google has a number of great products and employs many of my neighbors. They are also a pre-eminent global business with users and customers in every corner of cyberspace and the globe.

As I upgraded my Grand Central account to Google Voice, I took inventory of the Google Products I use every day. They include:

  • Google Adsensegoogle_logo
  • Google AdWords
  • Google Alerts
  • Google Analytics
  • Google Chrome
  • Google Mail
  • Google Maps
  • Google Reader
  • Google Search
  • Google Talk
  • Google Toolbar
  • Google Voice
  • Google Webmaster Tools
  • 800-GOOG-411

The interesting thing about my relationship with Google is that I pay them for one product (Google AdWords) they pay me for one product (Google Adsense). Everything else is no charge. Privacy advocates point out that I’m “paying” for these services by disclosing personal information about myself. My position is a bit different. I’ve accepted that there is no meaningful privacy on the Internet.  Everything we do on the Internet is closely monitored and analyzed so that someone can make an incremental buck.

In most parts of America and the world, Google is not a local business. It is a global competitor that is out-competing local institutions from newspapers to software companies with a unique business model. I’m able to reconcile my buy local bias with heavy usage of Google technology. Their products are good, they feed the local economy and they inspire innovation and excellence. I guess I’m comfortable living in a very competitive neighborhood.

Drilling Down on Web Marketing Statistics Through Profiles

By Bill Freedman

(updated in May 2016 with deeper information on types of web marketing metrics. The article continues to use the term “profiles,” though “personas” is the current rage.)

I envy the statistical information available to baseball managers. Elias Sports Bureau provides major league teams with clean and consistent data for every single pitch: who’s pitching, who’s hitting, pitch thrown, inning, count, temperature and much more.

Not so with marketing analytics statistics. The main limitation Web marketers face today is that the analysis data set available in aggregate form. I’ll leave it to others to debate merits of Internet privacy protection and marketing analytics. My focus is getting the most out of the available data.

Web marketing metrics drill down

The antidote to aggregate data sets is to build profiles of target buyers, perform drill-down analyses on the profile’s data segment and disproportionally attract users to your site that are within your profile.

Profiles in Success

Consumer marketers have managed to profiles for years focusing on statistics like gender, age, income and geography. These profiles remain critical today for print and television advertising efficiency. They are less useful on the Web and with B2B purchases. As Peter Steiner’s New Yorker cartoon famously states, “On the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog.” In other words, you need to create profiles based on the data you have, not the data you choose.

When defining profiles, remember the goals of your analytics efforts:

  1. Ensure you are attracting a sufficient number of visitors who match your profile to your web site in a given period

Earn conversions in the mind. Measure web marketing metrics on your site.

  1. Measure visitor satisfaction with the information on your web site.
  2. Excel at persuading visitors in your profile to provide you with contact information. In marketing parlance: convert.

For B2B enterprise software purchases, sales and executive teams have learned to appreciate profiles based on the following web statistics:

  • Geography/locale
  • Visit Source
  • New or Returning
  • Conversion

Work up-front to get consensus on your profile from the executive and sales teams. This should be an exercise in strategic success, not an internal effort by and for the marketing team. Executives in particular will have greater confidence in funding marketing programs that continue to drive measurable improvements.

More and more brands are embracing 3D product animation nowadays as another marketing medium. Business owners hire animation companies to bring their products to life, highlighting the unique features and functions of each one to help customers better grasp their value and understand how they work.

Drilling into Metrics

Web marketing metrics fall into one of three broad categories.

  1. Magnitude metrics. Magnitude metrics provide an accounting of outcomes. Examples include number of visitors, number of conversions, and duration of visits (pageviews or time on site).
  2. Trend metrics. Trend metrics look at a single magnitude metric over multiple time periods. The focus is to explore changes over time. Percent change ( [new value – old value]/old value) and Compound annual growth rate are two examples of trend metrics.
  3. Productivity metrics. Productivity metrics measure, among other things, whether you are improving at your goals. Among the most important productivity statistics are % of visitors who fit a profile and conversion rate. But there are others like bounce rate, time on site and depth of visit.

What should you measure? The’s no single right answer. It’s a rare company that grows through a singular focus on one statistic. Good marketers, like good baseball players are (at least) five-tool players.

And remember, the goal isn’t the numbers in the report; its improving the business. Focus your efforts on performance improvements and use the metrics to prioritize and keep score.

Winning Customer Reference Programs in the Internet Age

By Bill Freedman

Virtually everyone can agree that customer references are critical tools for B2B sales efforts. In my career I’ve headed up numerous customer reference programs, interviewed a number of heroes at customer sites and written a lot of success stories. The sales team could never get enough customer stories.

Did these programs drive sales results? Yes. Were they what the prospective customer wanted? No.

The plain fact is that prospective customers want to hear directly from current customers…without any vendor involvement, filtering, positioning or influence. None. Nada. This is simply because:

  • End users generally trust each other
  • Customers are far less trusting of vendors

Can you earn a prospective customer’s trust while you are selling? Of course.  But that doesn’t change their preference for communicating directly with each other. With social networks and other Web tools, it has never been easier to bypass the vendor when checking references.

Try Peer-to-Peer Customer Reference Programs

Peer to peer conversations between prospects and customers isn’t a problem to solve but a fact to accommodate. Below are best practices for leveraging your installed base to create a winning customer reference program:

  1. Keep publishing success stories on your web site. They are extremely useful for establishing the facts around the business you serve and problems you solve. Accept the limitations of written endorsements and do more.
  2. Embrace transparency. Enable customers and prospects to share their experiences. Affinity groups on social network sites like LinkedIn are a start, but public forums and wikis running on your web site are better for customers, prospects and your brand.
  3. Don’t fret a few negative reviews. Everyone knows that your company and product aren’t perfect. Negative reviews give your prospects a chance to see how your business relates to customers. You may also use the Delighted platform if you want to create free customer surveys.
  4. Keep things lively. Nobody likes to show up to a dead party. Assign a community leader who contributes authoritatively and consistently, and who inspires reciprocity from your customers.
  5. Achieve critical mass. You want to get to the point where there are enough customer “ambassadors” who can and will respond on your behalf.

Points 3, 4 and 5 are very important as a whole. The biggest negative for any peer-based customer reference program is indifference.

1 Strategic and 6 Tactical Marketing Practices for Recessionary Times

By Bill Freedman

We’re all thinking about it: how can we excel at our profession as we settle in for a prolonged period of economic challenges. I approach this topic with optimism, which means that I see many ways that the future will be better than the present. ch-in-us-gdp-q1-2006 Before drilling down into the tactics, I need to climb up on my strategic marketing soapbox. While your tactics might change during a recession, your value proposition, message and target ought to be reasonably stable. Much of marketing is about the medium to long term. While your customers may have reduced budgets, their needs, their trusted vendor/channel relationships and your product benefits ought to be reasonably identical in good times as well as bad.

6 Tactical Marketing Practices to Start Right Now

Stepping off my soapbox. …Here are my contributions to the tactical marketing practices useful during recessions:

  1. Play offense—You still need to win the minds of customers.
  2. Innovate — There is no recession on new and good ideas. All other things equal, better mousetraps sell. SEO is essential for your business to grow, but you do not have to abandon your responsibilities and spend too much time on it. You can always outsource the management of your SEO to a SEO Sydney professional. And you can focus on addressing other business matters that need your immediate attention.
  3. Listen to stakeholders—Communication is a two way street. You have two ears and one mouth. Listen twice as much as you talk.
  4. Execution excellence—Nothing derails progress more than execution blunders. Meet or exceed reasonable expectations for timeliness and quality. This applies to everything from terms of service in contracts to typos on your Web site.
  5. Focus—Resources are now tighter, so you need to focus in areas where you are abundantly talented.
  6. Outward optimism—Not everything in the world is gloomy. The sun comes up. Stephen Colbert tells funny jokes. You meet new and interesting people. Be mindful of the gloomy environment and make it part of your inner calculations, but be positive when interacting with others…it really helps.

Is your marketing strategy in order? Are you innovating? Are you already working with companies like therankway.com? Which tactics are relevant for achieving your goals? Share your comments below.

Pure Fun: Wordle.net

By Bill Freedman

I’m a little late to the Wordle party, but happy to find this gem of a toy.  Wordle generates a stylized “word cloud” from provided text. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text.

wordle_bfstbat1

Above is a Wordle rendering of Bill Freedman’s Soon To Be A Major Trend.  It takes text, RSS or a URL as input and provides countless variations of fonts, colors and alignments for hours of family fun.

Enjoy.

A Fresh Look at Conversion Rate

By Bill Freedman

Conversion rate is the one of the most critical macro-level statistics and trends monitored by Web marketers. Simply put, conversion rate is the relationship between two easily measured quantities:

conversion rate formula

Tools like Webtrends, Omniture and Google Analytics simplify the collection and calculation of raw Web traffic and conversion rate. Investment decisions on lead generation campaigns and programs are now based on hard numbers such as conversion rate and program cost.

The easy job for the marketing team is establishing a “natural conversion rate” for your brand, products and company. Just implement an analytics tool, create conversion forms on your site or e-store and measure the results. The harder job, and the true measure of marketing success, is to steadily improve your conversion rate over time.

Improving your conversion rate at the macro level means that you’ve improved your effectiveness in one or more of identifying prospective customers, creating affinity with your brand and changing the individual behavior of Web visitors.

brain_image

Conversions happen in buyers’ heads and are only measured on your web site. Changing people’s behavior by getting them to consider and purchase a new product is a difficult and worthy marketing task. Think about it: do you give out your email address and name with each and every site you visit? Do you want site owners to contact you after your first visit to the web site?

Improving Conversion Rate: the Real Job of Marketing

Knowing your conversion rate is one thing. Having the skills to improve and optimize conversion rates over time is the real job of marketing. Communicating information of value, establishing trust and persuasion are the critical and harder tasks that require significant attention, deliberation and skill. Without an analytics tool hard-wired to customer brains, skill, experience, artistry and tenacity remain essential marketing skills.