Conversion Marketing Strategy | - Page 13 of 14

Personas Can Mean Bigger Online Projects

Personas provide three powerful points that will help you focus your marketing and advertising dollars, and justify more spending.

This is why Personas can mean bigger online projects.

The power of fake people

Imagine your most important customer, let’s call her Melissa, walking into your meeting room and laying the law down to your manager, telling them exactly what she wants from your Web site.

Now imagine that she’s not just your most important customer, but a representative of hundreds or thousands of your customers. Would she be able to change minds and influence decisions?

This is the power of Melissa. She is your Market Segmentation Study personified. She is your analytics report in a skirt. She is legal counsel for your creative team and a force to be reckoned with.

Melissa is an example of a persona. She represents the desires and fears of a large number of your prospects and customers in the most human and compelling way.

She isn’t real, but she will seem more real than any chart you can concoct.

Personas provide three powerful points that will help you focus your marketing and advertising dollars, and justify more spending. This is why Personas can mean bigger online projects.

Why Personas Have So Much Power

Roy H. Williams puts it best.

“Your business has three or four customers living at thousands of different addresses.”

Get to know them and they will lead you in the right direction.

Personas provide three powerful points that will help you focus your marketing and advertising dollars, and justify more spending.

1. You can Relate to People More Than Data

Melissa has a name, a face and a story. She is the perfect age, has the right income, and the ideal home environment to represent large numbers of your customers. With each little decision that marketers and business people make each day, you can ask, “What would Melissa do?” Each time you’re asked to make changes to your messaging, media, or offers, you can ask, “Would Melissa want this?”

You will relate to her as a marketer, manager, owner, CEO, Vice President or agency. This means better decisions, defendable positions, and consistent execution. Melissa is good.

2. Personas Create Consensus

The process of creating personas must involve anyone who would “know” Melissa. She is the personification of data, sales experiences, product research, customer support calls and personal experience. To make her whole, you must involved these functions in her creation.

Then, when budget time comes around; when knee-jerk initiatives seek to copy a competitor; when programs are proposed that are questionable, everyone will remember Melissa when you invoke her name.

3. Personas Turn Your Focus Outward

In any organization, it is easy to turn inward; to focus on the next product or the next campaign. Too many marketing conversations begin, “How can we get our message out more?”

Melissa changes the conversation.

“What could we do to get Melissa interested faster?”

“Why isn’t Melissa visiting the site?”

“What does Melissa need to know to go ahead and buy?”

These questions are fundamentally different. They are outward looking. Everything from strategy to copy to design will open to Melissa like a flower, and she will react.

The Key Components of an Online Persona

I’ll be covering the key components of an online persona in my SXSW Panel, provided you vote for it and it gets accepted.

I’ll also show you some of the decisions personas have influenced for my clients.

Give the panel idea your vote and then attend SXSW Interactive.

Meanwhile, check out Best Buy Customer Profiles or Personas.

August 26, 2009/by Brian Massey

This is How You Prioritize Your Social Media Strategies

Conversion Marketing Strategy

Social Media is not just about creating more Awareness.

There are some very specific things you want to accomplish when you engage your prospects and customers.

You want them to use your product, service or communication.
You want to help influence their opinion of your product, service or communication.
You want to help them talk about your product, service or communication.

This is the Social Media Cycle as defined by Dave Evans. It has two distinct parts:

The pre-purchase funnel
The post-purchase funnel

The Social Funnel includes both the traditional and post-purchase funnels

It is important to define “purchase” for the sake of our conversation. Your customers may only have “purchased” a communication, paying with their time, attention and contact information if they want to continue the conversation. So, downloading a sample is modeled as a “purchase” in this scenario.

Just as it takes a series of “conversions” to move a prospect through the traditional sales funnel — to Awareness, then Consideration, then Action — you must likewise move them through the post-purchase funnel.

This is How You Prioritize Your Social Media Strategies

Yes, you have to convert a buyer into a user.

Then you have to help them form an opinion. Social media is great for this, because others’ opinions will shape their opinion. Focus on strategies that reveal what others are saying about your service or brand.

Finally, you must convert those with an opinion into talkers. Provide ways for them to share their experience. They will, in turn help you:

1. Convert more users into opinion holders
2. Direct new prospects to your funnel, often starting them in the Consideration stage

Would you like to know which social strategies lend themselves to each of these conversions? Would you like to know how to measure your success in the post-purchase funnel?

Vote for my SXSW Panel “What is your Social Conversion Rate?” Then attend.

Your vote will help educate business owners and marketers on a model that will make social media more helpful and interesting for all of us.

August 23, 2009/by Brian Massey

The First Thing Your Customers Buy From You Isn’t Your Product

Conversion Marketing Strategy

They buy your “communication product” first.

Look at any product description on any website. Peruse any brochure. You will find a list of features designed to tell you why the product will do the things you need it to do to solve your problem.

Imagine a marketing department run like a product development department. How would that change the focus?

Communications Products are the first purchase

They will probably have a check mark next to them.

What you will not find on these lists are features like these:

A helpful website so you make the right decision
Informative reports and white papers offered free of charge
An active Facebook page full of the opinions of our users
A well-labeled box placed in the right part of the store so you can easily find it

How a product or service communicates is not considered an important feature. This is why marketers — who develop the communication features — struggle to keep their staff and budgets during a downturn. This is why Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) don’t have a seat at the executive table with the CEO, President, COO and CFO.

To the executives, marketing doesn’t create products or sales. Marketing is a cost center.

Prospects actually become customers when they buy your communication products

The first purchase a prospect makes from your company is a communication product. It is the flyer, brochure, website, report, article, press announcement, blog post, webinar, etc. that you provide, ostensibly to help them understand how your product will help them solve a problem or entertain them.

They only occasionally pay with money. More often, they pay with their time, their attention, or with their contact information to continue the conversation. Since they don’t pay with money, marketing never shows up on the bottom line. It’s always seen as a cost.

Now, if a customer is satisfied with their “purchase,” they become a repeat customer taking more communication products. They also buy your company’s offering — for real money. Sales will get credit for the latter.

The mistake marketers make is creating communication products that are only focused on persuading prospects to buy the money-based products. How would things change if they focused on building great communication products instead?

The New Marketing Department

Imagine a marketing department run like a product development department. How would that change the focus?

Marketing Department	Communications Products Department
Develops campaigns	Develops products that communicate (educate, inform and entertain)
Creates promotional content	Creates relevant, educational, or entertaining content
Targets product users	Targets influencers, approvers and gatekeepers as well as product users
Watches marketing metrics and buzz	Watches time spent with the “products,” customer satisfaction, repeat “buys”
Has a website	Provides online services to help prospects solve their problems
Creates a competitive matrix	Creates better communications products than competitors (who are stuck with a marketing department)
Prepares “messaging” and approved copy matrices	Discovers new ways to help their communications product customers
Stays “on brand”	Improves the brand with great communication experiences
Bases budgets on the cost of campaigns	Bases budgets on the feature set needed to win in the communications marketplace
Builds brand with frequency and relevance	Builds brand by frequently helping prospects find information they are looking for
Segments the marketplace and creates targeted messages for each segment	Creates buyer personas for their communication products, and then delivers the products that serve them

This list could go on. What would you add? Tell us in the comments.

I’ll be talking about how buyer personas drive bigger marketing budgets at ProductCamp Austin on Saturday, August 15. Come out and let’s talk about great communications products.

Photo courtesy lusi

August 13, 2009/by Brian Massey

Using Notifications and Confirmations to Engage and Convert

Conversion Marketing Strategy

Six mistakes that you can turn into opportunities

In a post on the American Marketing Association blog, I’ve presented my list of best practices for notification and clarification emails. These are golden opportunities to continue the conversation with an engaged prospect and move them closer to becoming a customer or a user of what you offer.

Notifications are sent when someone requests something from your web site. They can be triggered by a download, registration, demo, webinar, signup, contact inquiry, service request, or customer support call.

Each one should move your conversation with this person further along.

We see these as simply informational, but they should also provide additional value.

Using Notifications and Confirmations to Engage and Convert

Send early, send often, and make sure each one leads back to your Website.

The Top 6 Mistakes

Mistake #1: Not sending notifications and confirmations

What are you doing to continue a conversation with your trial prospects, new buyers and new Web leads? Do not miss a chance to experience amazing open, read and response rates.

Transactional email has more priority than promotional or educational email. The confirmation, verification and follow-up messages relate to a specific transaction initiated by the receiver. They pay more attention. Plus, these emails can be sent within 24 hours of the transaction, the time that a prospect is hottest.

Mistake #2: Not sending enough notifications

Consider this scenario: A visitor to your site completes a registration form and downloads your white paper. They receive a verification email and click to verify their email address. SCORE! What additional notifications and confirmations could be sent immediately without pestering them?

Get creative. What else could you be sending that is specifically tied to this otherwise innocuous lead generating transaction?

Mistake #3: Not helping new users get started

As we’ve begun to understand the complete marketing cycle, we’ve extended the standard marketing funnel — Awareness, Consideration and Action — to include a post purchase process: Use, Opinion and Talk. The implication here is that you have to convert a purchaser to a user.

Mistake #4: Not tracking the performance of your notification and confirmation e-mails

Notification and confirmation e-mails are measured the same way a newsletter or promotional e-mail is: deliverability, open rates, and click-through rates. However, your notifications are usually not sent via an email service provider (ESP). Most notification email will be sent by the IT department.

Consider taking your notification and confirmation emails away from IT and using your ESP to give you the metrics you need.

Mistake #5: Not sending quickly

Send early and send often.

These emails should be automated. Confirmation and verification emails should arrive within minutes. Follow up e-mail should arrive within 24 hours. After that, the transaction begins to take on a “so yesterday” feeling for the recipient.

Mistake #6: Not offering that next piece of information

Each transaction is just a step in the journey of your new customer or new lead. The new user needs to know how to best use their purchase. The new lead needs the next piece of information that will help them feel comfortable buying from you.

Show them their next step.

Originally published in the AMA blog.

July 17, 2009/by Brian Massey

The Great Marketing Business Card Scratch-off

Conversion Marketing Strategy

Marketing people aren’t important, so let’s call ourselves something else

Jeffrey and Bryan Eisenberg make the point in their book Waiting for Your Cat to Bark? that the average tenure of a marketing executive is less than the gestation period of an elephant. WiderFunnel has summarized some of the findings of an Ernst & Young study confirming that CMOs and VPs of Marketing don’t have a seat at the executive table. Anecdotally, many of my friends in marketing roles found themselves to be among the first to go when layoffs became popular in 2008 and 2009.

What would the title on your marketing business card be if it reflected reality?

What would the title on your business card be if it reflected reality?

Clearly, marketing people aren’t all that important.

And then there’s the family reunion blank stare. Your cousins, aunts, uncles and some-how-relateds ask, “what are you doing these days?” You say, “I’m in marketing.” Long pause. They want to respond positively, but suspect that you may have just revealed that you’re being treated for some sort of incurable skin disease.

So, they just smile and stare.

Clearly, if we’re good at communicating, we would pick a word that, well, communicated what we do.

So, let’s call ourselves something else, something that reflects the value we add.

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I’m not a “Web Marketing Strategist”

If you were to look at my career, you would find the word “marketing” in most of my corporate titles. However, when given the opportunity to give myself a title, I always chose something that communicated what I did. When I was responsible for marketing at my own company, Soft Reality, I put “VP of Customers” on my cards.

Today, if you analyzed what I do for a living, you might call me a “Web Marketing Strategist” or “Internet Marketer” or “Online Marketing Strategist.” I do lots of marketing-ish things. But, I want my practice to survive the gestating elephant syndrome, so I call myself a “Conversion Scientist.”

Now, no-one knows what a Conversion Scientist is, but the word “scientist” delivers the message that I’m probably smart and most likely know a good deal that the listener doesn’t. That’s the truth. The lab coat seals the deal.

And I can explain what I do in one sentence. “Conversion is the science of turning Web traffic into leads and sales.”

Can you explain what you do without using words like “messaging,” “brand,” “demand generation,” or “campaigns?”

Send Me Your Business Card

If the title on your business card has the word “Marketing” in it, I want you to scratch it out, write in a better description of what you do, and post a picture or scan of it in the comments. I’ve added the ability to upload images to your comments.

Image courtesy vivekchugh

June 30, 2009/by Brian Massey

Deciphering Behavioral Marketing Web Sites

Conversion Marketing Strategy

Why your Website may not be helping visitors choose you

As a Conversion Scientist, my job is to cast a critical eye on the sites of my clients. In my recent ClickZ columns, I’ve turned that critical eye toward behavioral marketing vendors. “The Language of Behavioral Marketing” parts one and two are designed to help readers understand what behavioral vendor Web site mean and to underscore some of the mistakes they make.

I think any B2B marketing team could learn a bit from these columns.

In Part One, I highlight why these sites weren’t helpful to me in my quest to better understand the industry. Are you making these mistakes?

Is your Web site confusing your readers or clarifying things for them?

Everyone’s the “Leader”

There’s something we’re trying to say when we say we’re the “leader,” but rarely do we say what it is. Are we the highest volume provider? Are we the low-cost leader? Do we have the most market share? Or are we just trying to look bigger than we really are? If it’s the latter, pick something that defines your leadership and say that.

Let your participation in industry events help you define your leadership. Be the thought leader with helpful, smart content.

Shooting at the competition

The sites that I reviewed took great pains to define who they are not. This is understandable as there are hundreds of competing ad networks joining the industry, many of which don’t hold themselves to a standard that big brand advertisers want. Nonetheless, it is far more powerful to tell the story of who you are than to throw stones at your competitors. It just takes more work to define and tell that story.

Everyone does everything

Pick your place in the market and be willing to walk away from the rest. The companies whose sites I reviewed are capable of applying behavioral targeting to a wide range of industries, and don’t want to limit themselves. However, I think they would be well served to select some turf to dominate, and be willing to concede some part of the market in the short term.

Pick the bucket you want your visitors to put you in, or they’ll put you in their own buckets, which may be the “not sure what they do best” bucket.

Valueless value propositions

The power of picking your bucket is that you can create a value proposition that differentiates you and establishes you as a desirable partner.

The businesses I reviewed clearly wanted to work with major brands, but don’t want to walk away from small and medium-sized businesses. Picking one might reduce their appeal to the other, but it doesn’t have to. “We’re Big Brand Behavioral Marketers” appeals to big brands, but offering a white paper on the site entitled “Why the Big Brands Win in Behavioral” would appeal to smaller brands without undercutting the basic value proposition.

In short, use powerful positioning statements to establish your ground, but use innovative content to finesse your offering.

Playing it Safe with Content

Once you’ve stepped out onto the skinny branches of defining who you are as a business, you’re content has to reinforce that. It should do it emotionally, passionately and without compromise.

There is little copy less emotional, passionate and compromising than “corporate communication,” and this is where most Web copy is drawn. Corporate communication is for proposals, the prospectus and the quarterly report. It is not appropriate for marketing communication.

Add a little attitude to the video. Title your reports and white papers in unexpected ways. Have some fun with your executive bios. Remember business people are humans.

Image courtesy nighthawk7

June 26, 2009/by Brian Massey

Behavioral Targeting Lullaby

Conversion Marketing Strategy

What if George Carlin had riffed on behavioral targeting?

In doing the research for my new ClickZ column on behavioral marketing, I became fascinated by all that could be measured and inferred about me from the simple act of visiting a Web page. The agents at work when you visit a Web site are an invisible Pixel and something called a Cookie. Then the marketers, advertisers, publishers, scientists and statisticians go to work on the data, divining what they can from it about you and what ads you want to see.

The list, which you will find on ClickZ.com, is long, ironic, funny and sometimes disturbing. It’s exactly the kind of thing that needs a Carlinesque treatment.

Download | Subscribe | On iTunes

Try as I might, I’m no George Carlin. Here’s the real deal. Warning: Explicit Language

February 4, 2009/by Brian Massey

We Are Actively Dismantling Your Trusted Marketing Strategies

Conversion Marketing Strategy

From the Society of Word of Mouth comes this little podcast about the change in marketing. It’s more serious than you might think.

“It is no longer sufficient to communicate powerfully, you must say something powerful.”

Download Audio | Subscribe to the Podcast | Subscribe via iTunes
| Read the Post

We Are Actively Dismantling Your Trusted Marketing Strategies

January 17, 2009/by Brian Massey

Getting Started with Behavioral Marketing

Conversion Marketing Strategy

My New Series for ClickZ

I’ve begun a series on ClickZ on Behavioral Marketing. If you follow my writing, you may realize that I don’t write about behavioral marketing — at all. This is new ground for me, and that may be my advantage. I’m not a Behavioral Marketing expert. I’m willing to ask the dumbest of questions, and to do it in a public space.

If you’re not a behavioral marketing expert either, you may find my “beginners mind” approach helpful; you’re the business owner or marketer that I am writing for.

My special thanks goes out to Chris Vanderhook of Specific Media, who patiently listened to my questions for this first article.

January 7, 2009/by Brian Massey

Drilling in on Social Conversion Strategies

Conversion Marketing Strategy

Dave Evans is one of the smartest guys in Social Media today and has the ability to ask questions that make you stop and think. Really think. So, when he asked my opinion on where social media meets conversion strategy, I really had to think.

The result of our collaboration is his latest ClickZ article Social Conversions: Taking Step Two. For me, the process crystallized the reasons that so many of us have trouble seeing the ROI in social marketing. We’re looking at it wrong.

I will expand here on how we use inappropriate strategies for our social marketing campaigns. In subsequent posts, I’ll drill down on some of the strategies mentioned in the column and show you how they work.

The Flaw in our Social Marketing Model

Dave’s article hints at the way we use old measures of success in new paradigms. We see social media as simply another way to drive traffic to our traditional conversion funnels.

With this model, we try to cram our social strategies into the Awareness portion of the marketing funnel. While this is a valid use of social marketing, it is it’s most limited.

When we realize that there is a whole world of conversion after the purchase we begin to use our social marketing more strategically.

Strategic Social Marketing

We can use social media strategically when we apply it to the post-purchase portion of the funnel

This expanded model for social media let’s us use social channels more strategically.

Instead of asking, “How can we use video to drive more traffic to us?” we can instead ask, “How can we use video to increase use of our offering?”

Instead of asking, “How can we use Facebook to build a list of prospects?” we can ask, “How can we use Facebook to get people talking about our product?”

Can you see how we would apply social marketing in a more purposeful way when we change our point of view? Doesn’t it become clearer how we would measure the success of our social campaigns beyond just traffic and page views? If you answered “Well, kinda,” don’t worry.

I’ll be exploring best practices for some of the strategies mentioned in the Social Conversion article, including:

Use of notification emails which “are among the most overlooked opportunities for engaging new product users.”
Designing a blog that converts buyers to users, users to opinion, and opinion to talk.
B2B implementation circles

For a complete understanding of the marketing funnel, read Dave’s book Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day.

21 Quick and Easy CRO Copywriting Hacks

Keep these proven copywriting hacks in mind to make your copy convert.

43 Pages with Examples
Assumptive Phrasing
"We" vs. "You"
Pattern Interrupts
The Power of Three

"*" indicates required fields

December 18, 2008/by Brian Massey