How do you do you impress (stand-out, be remembered) when you look the same as everyone else?
That’s our question about PPC marketing.

If every company only had to generate awareness and then directly sell product — then we understand the logic.

But what about all those offerings that need more to generate a conversion — let alone a sale.  Things like brand trust, credibility, differentiation, value

Now social impressions on the other hand — you’ve got a chance there …
The difference between an social impression and a SE impression:

• context for your messaging
• knowing what the audience is thinking
• all competitors do not look the same
• more real estate to deliver a complete message

Want to really make an impression? Go social …. We can help.

Most companies believe that they are left with few other options and must compete at this level.
Not true.

No more Gorilla … think Guerilla
Reaching prospects in smaller groups isn’t always a less efficient exercise.  Remember, its the bottom number (number of conversions) not the top number (number of impressions) that counts the most.  And what about the quality of those impressions.

Stop waving that sign….
Its just not natural to fit your entire marketing intro into tiny text boxes.
Leveraging a social guerilla strategy has tremendous advantages:
1. Easier targeting
2. Less competition
3. Brand building
4. Less pricing / discounting pressure
So what’s stopping your company?

What does a social guerilla campaign look like?
1. A strong research effort including a market map which captures audiences, messages and platforms (More)
2. Developing a strong credible persona in social groups.
3. Posting actively from a audience centric perspective
4. Interjecting marketing / education content occasionally in a steady stream of messaging.
We’ve helped apply it in many industries and the results are remarkable.

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A recent client case: The MD at a multinational services company had called a meeting of senior executives to discuss a lingering strategic issue — one that came up at every management meeting but still hadn’t been resolved.  It had become so nagging an issue that now it was the subject of its own meeting.

What problem was that? It was the website.

Many words could be used to describe the company’s online efforts: stalled, detached, underutilized, trailing the industry, low ROI, hurry up and wait.  The MD was finally sick of it and demanded a workable plan to get the website up to speed with the rest of the business.

Why do company websites stall so badly?
Lets look at the problem in reverse — what makes successful parts of a business run effectively?
A few key things come to mind:

• a clear goal / focus
• expertise
• connection to the main goals of the business
• key decision supported by research and an abundance of ideas

How does that translate to a website:

• a defined role (or roles) for the website in the marketing and sales function
• online expertise in the team
• supporting critical business success factors like brand, competitiveness and growth orientation
• industry and competitor research
• strong options for each decision about the web strategy

How did this company change its website operations?

When we got the call from the MD, the executive team had spent a good amount of time looking at everything that had gone on in the past year, including what key factors had stalled the website initiative.  The first call was pretty smooth because, more than anything, we were able to create structure around this nagging challenge and create something which had been absent until that moment: a believable action plan.

As a large multinational, the stakes were high in this process, so we undertook our Advanced Package of Services to get the website initiative back on track.  What that meant was 10 stages before we even talked about web design and technology.  This included deep market research, brainstorming with key team members on which customer segments were key and harvesting and prioritizing brand dimensions, competitive advantages and value angles.  All this created a pool of ideas to choose from and allowed a more aligned and ROI centric website plan — which led to a full integrated online and offline business within 1 year of our 1st call.

The key steps to getting your website on track will need a few key steps:

1. Define your website’s role in your business
2. Add online expertise to your team
3. Focus your online efforts on the same business impact areas as your offline team: brand, competitiveness, targeting growth and reaching opps
4. Use research and experience to generate strong industry understanding and a pool of ideas to choose from in your key decisions.

Sometimes the answer is right in front of you: its a MARKETing strategy — why not centre it around the key aspects of your market?

Why be market (prospect) centric?
In the end, your marketing efforts have a central goal: to reach, connect with and convert your key prospects
By being prospect centric, the purpose of each program is front and centre.  And its defined by:

1. who you’re trying to reach and
2. how you’re reaching them

Its makes everything easier, including:

• creating messaging
• prioritizing campaigns
• getting a blog of the ground and keeping it running
• getting your team aligned around your marketing
• running an active social marketing effort

How do we become more prospect centric?
A few steps are key:

Market research / Prospect mapping

• Defining (to the whatever degree you can) the distinct market segments you’re targeting

• Defining what stage of your marketing life cycle each segment (on average) has progressed to

• Developing an understanding of their “marketing” location — where are they looking for the answers you can provide?

Targeting

• Defining and focusing on key market segments

• Creating content which

1. speaks their language
2. looks at your offerings from their perspective
3. answers their questions about your company and competition

Reaching prospects:

• Based on your prospects “marketing location”

The main point;
What makes a company’s marketing efforts scattered?  A lack of focus.
The shift to customer centricity has a two level benefit:

1. solving the focus problem and
2. making a lot of your messaging efforts much easier

As part of our client projects, we conduct a detailed assessment of key areas of clients marketing engine.  As a way to get our readers started on the process, we offer a lite version of the assessment at no charge.   Go here to request it.
We’ll help you to understand how far you have to go to become customer centric in your marketing messaging. That’s a good starting point for thinking of your entire marketing process in a focused and more manageable way.

Often, things start to fall apart at the first or second meeting to execute on a new initiative.   These so-called “bad meetings” tend to bring to light a series of hurdles which can seem unsurmountable to the team involved.

Experiences suggests three major reasons:

1) Lack clearly purpose

2) Shortage of ideas or options

3) No plan or process

It may sound easy to start a blog, launch an email campaign or build a new section of your website.    But, more often than not — something is missing or lacking that sidetracks the effort.    Instead of figuring out what the actual roadblock is, the easy approach is taken and the once-loved idea is now dismissed as “a waste of time” or a “misfit with our strategy”.

The truth is we often start new things with very little to back our ideas and ensure our success.   That doesn’t mean that the initiative lacks value — it just means we are not prepared to undertake it.

What does it take to successful launch a new web initiative (or any business initiative for that matter):

A clear understanding of the goal / purpose of the initiative

A solid set of options / ideas for each stage of the initiative

A clear but simple process for deciding which ideas to incorporate

It’s a lot like lighting a campfire — you need lots of areas which you’ve packed with kindling to get the fire burning and someone has got to feel so cold that they’re willing the blow on (or fan) the fire for a while at the beginning so it really has a chance to catch.

Your website has the potential to be a key contributor to your core business foundation but undertaking a new initiative on your website is as challenging as an offline business initiative.

Not if you understand the challenge before your company and “chip away” at it in a steady and systematic way.

Is a brand a single entity?

That’s an important question as you consider how to go about pursuing a large competitor.

In most cases its not — rather its a combination of dimensions built either by careful effort (less common) or time and customer perception (more common). Either way, it’s not an insurmountable hurdle.

As with every business strategy, its best to not to centre your brand thinking around yourself or your competitors. Rather the central focus of your brand strategy should be your key customers — the market segments or customer groups which you and your competitors are fighting over.

A strong brand and competitive positioning analysis depends heavily on the analysis of your key target segments and their specific preferences in terms of brand dimensions. For example, a smaller or midsize company may be more concerned about your reliability as a company (since they can’t afford to have more than one company supplying to them in each product category). Larger companies may be more focused on your ability to deliver unique impact because time is a bigger factor for fast moving public companies. Its a simple example but the point is clear — not everything matters to everyone — and brand is no exception.

A good starting point is to assess your current branding efforts on your website. AftertheNet offers free website assessments in critical areas including branding. You can request it here.

Here’s a few that we hear often:

• can’t disrupt the team too much
• needs to be really good since its been delayed so long
• It needs to be like   (company)    ’s website
• we don’t want it to be like _____

With all the conflicting pressures, its tempting to find a way that gives you a safe head start on the project.
A very common option is to use a template:

• it might be an existing website of a similar company OR
• a true website template

Sounds good right?

• Its already been tested by another company
• Fewer revision sessions
• No starting from scratch

You’ll find that design firms will love the idea too:

• keeps the project easier for them
• increases their margins at whatever budget since they can build off the existing template

So is there a catch?

There is a catch.  Its all about your website’s potential impact on your business

A 2 dimensional (2D) view of your website suggests that its just a collection of pages and content with visual design used to create visual appeal and impact.  So a template can sound like a good option to get a running start.

But the top websites are built on a 3D view of web strategy.

• AtN’s 3D webstrategy considers the different viewpoints of each audience you are trying to reach, the stages of each key content message and the multiple roles that each web page plays in that content flow
• Design is not a layer on top of the content, it is very vehicle in which the content is delivered. Its role is to ensure the visual design, flow and interactivity of the content lends itself to the unique nuances of the your business.

We’re not saying that using a template doesn’t save you time.  But lets call it what it is: a shortcut.

So what are you cutting?

The step where you define your website’s mission, audiences and key impacts.  Instead, you build your website on a template designed around either:

• another company’s mission, audiences and impact priorities OR
• generic website missions, audiences and impact priorities

And as we all know, shortcuts save you time but usually you pay for it later somehow.  In this case, its in the ability of your website to really integrate with your business and deliver critical impact.

In general we try to keep shortcuts for the less critical parts of our business and focus on the optimal approach for more critical components of our business like our website.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on this topic — please use the comment box below.

This subject is first big “a-ha” (wide-eyed) moment we have with most of our clients.  Your website isn’t about your company or its products.   Its about your potential customers and their needs.

So what does this all mean?

When companies start to build (or rebuild) their website, they usually draw a site plan map which has the company’s name at the centre.    Big mistake — erase it and put a descriptive title for your key customer segment in the middle.  Then start brainstorming on all the information / content they might need to decide to contact you or buy your product online.

We do this everyday at AftertheNet and it transforms the websites of our clients into client centric lead generation machines.

The funny thing about this paradigm shift is that it isn’t just about content.   That mindset shift makes everything easier in building a new web presence.    Many more ideas and a greater degree of focus come from putting a firm image of your target customers at the centre of yourwebsite planning.

Try it out and tell us what you find.   Of course, we can help since we do this everyday in a variety of industries.

You’ve had an SEO expert optimize your site and you’re getting traffic but the conversions on your site are way below your targets. Congratulations – you’ve impressed the search engines — now its time to impress your prospects

Getting traffic to your website is a fairly mechanical exercise in optimization (meta tags on your web pages and keyword rich content are two big factors).  But getting that traffic from landing to conversion (contacting you or purchasing online) is a completely different challenge.

The same rules apply online as offline:

• a visitor needs to see content which connects to them directly — either via needs, pains, features or product needs or their demographic / industry.
• Most importantly, the perception of value must be built and the obstacles to conversion must be removed

Creating the value perception among website visitors is an exercise in targeting each segment’s unique needs, perspectives and doubts with precise and time efficient content.  If you look at your website visitors, one way to divide them up is by their relative knowledge of your product category, company and products.  Depending on their level of awareness and connection to your products, visitors will need varied treatment and content.

On the surface the most knowledgeable visitors would appear to be the most promising prospects.  But they come with a price — a competitive sales cycle.  Prospects who already know what product type they want will typically already be talking to competing companies when the reach you.

To avoid the pressures of competitive sales, reaching prospects when they are searching for a solution rather than a specific product can represent a less competitive scenario.  Converting that traffic can take more time and a more targeted and optimized online experience.

Using an approach which we call targeted value selling, our company creates separate envrionments on clients’s websites for each key customer group. Taking advantage of more specific buying criteria for a specific segment, we create a deeper understandng of the value proposition, brand strength and compelling reasons to convert for each customer group.

At that point, our clients are putting as much effort into impressing their prospects as they’ve put into impressing the search engines

We’ve written on the subject of packaging before but we wanted to bring the issue of pricing and packaging to the forefront for companies.  The tendency to think of packaging as a way of offering discounts without cutting your prices reflects the narrow thinking we find in many companies.

Packaging has power far beyond discounting.

One of the things that pricing experts will tell you is that the first goal of pricing and packaging is to shift the customers perception from a cost mindset to a value mindset.

So what’s the trick?

We’ve successfully used a combination of segment targeting and packaging to create a higher pricing opportunity.

The game here is to get as close as possible to the centre of a prospects value “nexus” … the needs or pain areas which they are most focused on and are willing to spend the most money to fix.

In a training context, often a single course or program will only represent a partial solution to an overall challenge faced by a prospect.

The right approach: multi course packages targeted to specific market segments and their specific “pain” areas.

The question is how should you segment and how should you package.  We’ll touch on the packaging part here and get into segmenting in another future article soon.   Here are few steps that will help in your packaging process:

1. Start with your segments (industries, job roles, other)
2. Identify their critical pain areas
3. Create packages of courses which will more completely address those pain areas
4. Price with value to customer in mind rather than cost + or a discounting mindset

The central power of this approach to packaging is that it shifts your packaging mindset towards solving prospects problems rather than giving them unnecessary or excessive discounts.  I always notice clients are surprised to be told of this approach to packaging and they quickly find that it empowers them to overcome the initial defensive position on price that prospects try to put you in.