by Francois Muscat | Mar 1, 2012 | Articles, Lead Generation, Online Marketing, Social Media Marketing
Last year I made a commitment to myself – looking for a new career. I decided that I will focus on speaking, training and consulting in the Digital space.
I joined the Professional Speakers Association of South Africa in October and started volunteering to speak at every opportunity. Being a speaker can be hard work and I have already learned from some of South Africa’s greatest speakers, like Stef Du Plessis. He presented a couple of months ago and the one-thing he said that stuck in my mind was “80% of the time, speakers speak for nothing, and 20% of the time they get paid”. He went on to say that the 80% is the experience that you earn as a speaker. He also said “speak whenever you can, even at old age home, as practice is most important.” So Here I go earning my 80% experience as quick as possible.
On 13 March, The PSASA have a arranged a “Fire up Your Business” talk with an impressive line-up of speakers. I am honoured to be on the same stage.
3 Reasons you should attend the Fire Up Your Business Seminar:
- You’ll learn how to instill a positive culture that will truly motivate your staff to greater heights
- You’ll finally really figure out how to harness the power of Web 2.0 to grow your business
- Position yourself as an expert and discover how to become a master influencer in sales & negotiations
Here is the Agenda
Stef du Plessis– How to Motivate Your People and Create a Winning Workplace Culture
Francois Muscat – Leverage the 15 Web 2.0 Dynamics
Douglas Kruger – How to Position Yourself as an Expert in Your Industry
Ian Rheeder – The Neuropsychology of Persuasion
- Do yourself a favour and get the best ideas to supercharge your business
- Its not often that you can attend a great line-up of speakers for just R697.
Book now with Simone Scholtz admin@psasouthernafrica.co.za Cell: 079 680 2573
by Marianna Muscat | Dec 19, 2011 | Online Marketing
As 2011 winds down and you find yourself thinking about everything that is good about the holidays, it’s also time to consider the 2012 marketing trends on the horizon as put out by’ Marketing Profs’—and how to take advantage of them in your marketing plan.
For my money one 2011 trend will continue to be huge in 2012, and all marketers need to embrace it and harness its power. That trend is Customer Data.
Here are some of my favorite picks for the Top 5 marketing trends for 2012, and all five are related to Customer Data.
1. Customer Data
When you think about it, every marketer accumulates data every minute–whether from the Internet, from sales conversations in their customer relationship management (CRM) tools, or from ongoing service or sales history. Every minute you are not using your Data means a lost buying opportunity plus you stand the risk of it rapidly becoming outdated.
A recent IDC study found that digital information is doubling every two years. That kind of information growth is what Data is all about. The information available from buying behavior across all your communication channels including the new ’Social Media’ channels constitutes real opportunities to engage potential buyers in different ways to drive revenue at every stage of the customer lifecycle at the right time.
2. Marketing Automation 3.0 (or the Rebirth of the Marketing Data Mart)
Marketing Automation 3.0 is about the rebirth of marketing data marts and their integration into your marketing automation platform. That integration creates a true closed-loop sales-and-marketing system that will harness and extend the capability of your Data.
Why? When you use today’s marketing automation platforms, you generally only have the functionality for surface-level segmentation. The marketing data mart enables you to go much deeper on segmentation based on customer interaction, and hence really drive revenue performance from your campaigns.
3. Customer Intelligence
We’re not talking about marketing analytics, characterised by static dashboards that typically report on campaign performance and basic levels of buying behavior.
Real customer intelligence makes your customer-interaction history actionable, enabling you to conduct more sophisticated forms of segmentation and profiling that drives new customer acquisition and creates up-sell and cross-sell opportunities more efficiently.
4. Customer Lifecycle
Customer lifecycle has new implications in the age of improved customer intelligence.
Just as the cell phone revolutionised telecommunications with anytime, anyplace communications, the application of customer intelligence to the customer lifecycle now creates marketing opportunities that have never been realised before. Marketers can now use the customer lifecycle as a dynamic means to engage prospects and customers at the right time, with the right offer, in the way they choose to buy.
5. Right-Time Multichannel Marketing
Right-time multichannel marketing takes conversations and customer interactions—obtained via social media listening platforms and marketing data marts— and makes them part of customer profiles that can be used in campaigns that drive the right offer to the right buyer at the right time.
What marketers need is a commitment to a closed-loop sales-and-marketing system that treats marketing automation, customer intelligence, CRM, social media listening platforms, and any data source as a holistic environment all driven on the basis of the customer profile.
* * *
The drivers of these trends in 2012 will be the economy (The need to unlock profit at every turn) and global markets that have become extremely accessible through the Internet.
Together, they will be the force behind the most important trend in 2012 that’ll ultimately drive marketing strategy: Customer Data transformed into customer intelligence, and then used across right-time multichannel marketing to drive revenue throughout the customer lifecycle.
(Image courtesy of Bigstock, Business Vision)
by Marianna Muscat | Nov 29, 2011 | Online Marketing
These days, buyers are more likely to take the initiative. Long before they talk to a sales rep, buyers go online for product information, comparison-shopping, and peer recommendations via social media. If you’re going to engage with those potential customers, you must win their trust and build a relationship by providing objective, informative content.
Once you’ve generated content, use it across different channels and touch points. Consider writing a case study, opinion, or best-practices piece, and then repurposing it for your website, blog, Twitter stream, and outbound email.
Remember, this isn’t the time to sell! Instead, focus on answering the questions prospects may have early in their buying process, and position your company as the helpful expert. Offer independent research or third-party thought leadership that supports your solutions. And encourage a permission-based ongoing dialogue so that you can stay in touch (and stay top-of-mind) as the buyer gets closer to a decision.
Embrace measurement, analytics and use dashboards
Go beyond email marketing to ensure you are reaching your targets via their preferred channels. How do you determine the right marketing mix and cadence of communications? One word: test.
The optimal mix of the best message, channel, and timing depends on your company and its customers. Start with a baseline, and work in easy A/B tests (challenger, champion). As the program matures, you can add multivariate tests—but keep it simple in the beginning.
Set up a measurement plan before executing any marketing program. Nothing is worse than realizing after the first campaign has gone out that measurement was left off the table and you now have to scramble to answer that ever-important question: So how’s the campaign doing?
Many marketers recognise that they face challenges. For example, you might have the vision and the organisation for success, but legacy systems limit your ability to market effectively. Or, you have data, but no data strategy to determine what to keep, what you’re missing, what’s of value, and how to derive insight. Or maybe you want to be more customer-centric, but you organise around product lines or channels.
By ensuring that your B2B marketing evolves, you can…
- Identify gaps in customer information.
- Decrease marketing expenditures and waste.
- Improve the quality and deliverability of campaigns.
- Invest in customer segments based on value.
- Improve the return on marketing investment.
Moreover, you will seem a more critical and vital partner – with Sales and the rest of the company – in generating top-line revenue growth while being accountable for the costs of generating that revenue. That perception will make it easier for you to justify additional investments in marketing and protect you from cutbacks in tough times.
by Marianna Muscat | Nov 25, 2011 | Online Marketing
If you’re like most B2B marketers, you diligently plan and execute campaigns to drive new opportunities and, ultimately, increase revenue. But unless you’re ready to rethink marketing’s role, you may be throwing precious budget dollars out the window and missing opportunities to drive real customer value.
Customer buying behavior is evolving, and demand management is evolving along with it. Today’s B2B marketers can’t focus only on generating leads and turning them over to Sales. They need a new process for creating effective, targeted programs that hit the right people at the right time.
Develop a lead-management process
Marketing and Sales must work together to design a more integrated – and collaborative – process that addresses goals, metrics, and activities at crucial lead stages.
That process includes…
- Identifying key business drivers to optimise demand generation
- Mapping out the customer lifecycle (from suspect to prospect, lead, and customer)
- Building marketing programs for nurturing and qualification
- Defining a Sales-ready lead
- Determining how leads should be passed to Sales and tracked
Making customer data and segmentation work for you?
Organisations might have thousands, of contacts from promotions tradeshows, partner events, and website leads. And data from social media monitoring and capture have added to the volume of data that organisations have to sift through. Developing marketing initiatives for an unwieldy database results in wasted budget and resources – and, more important, missed revenue opportunities.
You need a data strategy to develop a comprehensive view of your customers and their interactions. That means starting with a clear understanding of what customer data you have today – from all available sources – and where there are gaps.
The sources of information that feed the database are critical; just as critical, however, is how that information is collected, stored, and managed… because that’s what will help you make decisions about to whom you should market.
Define your customer
Who in your customer’s organisation is the buyer of the services that your company sells? Who influences the sale? Who approves it? A multilevel view will help you target messaging and better arm your sales force with the information it needs.
Cleanse and standardise your data
In B2B marketing, obtaining prospect information, such as company, title, contact name, and email address, is paramount. Use reference libraries to standardise mailing addresses. Implement email address formatting and domain validation to ensure higher deliverability.
Match the data
Data-matching is about creating links between records from various data sources to create a richer, more accurate customer profile. B2B matching is complex because of the variations in company naming conventions and sites that can span addresses. As a best-practice, you should continually refine and test your matching rules based on results.
Generate insight
Once you have the data, you’ll need to generate insight on the following.
- Whom to target
- What stage of the cycle your target is in
- What products or services your target is interested in
- How your target likes to be contacted or receive information
by Marianna Muscat | Jun 20, 2011 | Online Marketing
Remarketing is telling your potential customers that “I care enough to follow you around until you notice me! I will take the time to mildly stalk you because my product/service is just what you need – you simply may not know it yet!”
Typical remarketing campaigns feature “Come Back to (Insert Client Name) – And we’ll give you a great deal!” type of messaging. This directly acknowledges that the user has visited your site, they didn’t convert, and you’re willing to give them a special offer to come back.
If you are confident with your marketing and don’t mind trying this possible slightly creepy/caring tactic, give it a try. Monitor your click-through rate and conversion rate. If it works for your campaign, keep doing it! If it doesn’t work, try another method.
Similarly, you want your audience (and clients) to feel like your ads are everywhere. You want your potential customers to say at some point, “Who are these guys? I see them everywhere online!” With that thought, hopefully the user clicks on your ad and converts.
Remember, a moment of relevancy can occur for many reasons, such as:
• An ad may display a keyword that is important to someone.
• A familiar product image may appear in the ad.
• There may be a compelling offer that grabs their imagination.
• An ad may highlight a brand or website that they are familiar with (your website!) to grab their attention.
There are numerous ways to make your ads noticeable, actionable, and relevant to your audience.
If at First You Don’t Succeed – Try Something Else
The possible reasons that someone doesn’t convert on your site are countless. However, with remarketing, you can get in front of these non-converts again and try to re-spark your relationship. Try to understand why someone didn’t convert on your website – and determine how you can address this issue with your remarketing campaign.
For certain remarketing campaigns, you can propose the conversion action that the user didn’t originally complete like, “Buy our stuff!” Or, if your conversion action is lead generation focused, you can drive users back to your contact form to see if they will convert upon a second or third encounter with your brand.
However, one strategy that has worked well in the past is mixing up your conversion actions.
For example, a particular company sells high-end, high-cost security software. This isn’t the kind of purchase you make on a whim therefore users may not convert simply because the product is so complex; they don’t know what to choose.
With remarketing, rather than send users back the product page, send these return visitors to a lead generation page with a headline similar to, “Still Need Security Software? We can help you choose the right system!” This way, visitors could request a follow-up from a sales representative.
You may be able to send users back to your product page for another shot at getting them to buy, but you may want to test getting more creative in order to engage your return visitors again.
Pictures Really Are Worth a Thousand Words
After someone visits your site, they should be relatively familiar with your company logo, brand, product, and perhaps even other graphic features. This is why image ads work very well with remarketing campaigns.
For example, if you sell organic dog toys, and you remarket to visitors who didn’t purchase on your website, your ad may follow this rough concept (for a skyscraper ad):
1. Company logo
2. Headline: Come back to Chewy Puppy & Get Free delivery!
3. Short list of two benefits
4. Show images of organic dog toys
5. Call-to-action (“Buy Now!”)
6. Company logo
The images in this ad are going to convey so much more than words. The user should be familiar with your logo, company name, and product – so display all of these elements in your image ad and this will be relevant to the user because they have visited your website previously.
Summary
These are just a few tactics you can use with your remarketing ads. You can get really creative with your content and conversion action with remarketing ads.
Honestly, you will try strategies that are successful and some that aren’t – but you have to keep on testing to find those new strategies that give your campaign a lift. Give some of the strategies in this article a try! Happy testing!
by Francois Muscat | May 27, 2011 | Online Marketing
A website call to action (CTA) usually refers to elements on your website that urges a visitor to take action. One of the first steps when you are in the process of planning your website is to establish a clear call to action. What do you want to achieve with your website? What action do you want your website visitors to take when they are browsing your website? If you have an e-commerce website, you most likely want your visitors to purchase now.
When you are busy planning your website, think about the three most important things your visitors can do. Always choose one of these as your primary call to action and the other two, secondary actions. This will help you establishing focus and clarity on your website and then your visitors can easily follow the path (eg: sales funnel) you create.
Choosing the best call to action
This is the central and main purpose for your website. Examples that are most used are call us now, email us, get a free quote, buy now, apply now, subscribe and donate now. These “actions” can be used with phrases that adds importance such as for a short while only, offer expires end of the month or get a free copy of our latest ebook when you sign up today.
Implementing the best call to action
Your call to action on your website should always be visible on the home page. It should also be above the fold, in the center of the page and in a different colour so that it stands out. With Web 2.0 becomingv more used for online marketing methods, use big buttons. Write compelling and interesting content that will drive your visitors to take action.
Measurement
Analyze and examine your website analytics to check your visitors behaviour. What pages did they first arrived on? What other pages did they go to? What is your conversion rate? What pages were the top exit pages? This will help you see where you need to make changes to get the results that you want.
