Marketing Always Has Risks, So Take Them!

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Marketing Always Has Risks, So Take Them!

November 29, 2018 by matthew Marketing Carpenter 0 comments 1483

Whenever you decide to paint a room very few people just pick up a roller and start painting the entire room without looking at multiple swatches, or painting small spots of paint to see how it looks in the room.

I myself definitely need to use a bunch of samples before painting.

Being colorblind I am very unsure about what color I am actually spreading across the wall and how it looks to other people.

In my most recent painting project, I decided that a dark red would look good in the basement with a light tan. (I am a person that values a level of class in my man cave.)

After painting a couple spots on the walls, I invited my brother to come over and give his “full color” opinion.

What I thought was a beautiful khaki color turned out to be a delightful light pink accented by a bright blood red.

My basement basically would have looked like I was inspired by Hello Kitty, but yet the kitty may have been part of a murder scene.

 

So how does this relate to marketing? Although, in our personal lives we commonly mitigate risk we do not in marketing.

Marketers commonly say no to numerous ideas, saying that trying something new has too many risks. This fear of failure gets us to follow the worst phrase of all time, “This is what we have always done!”

In doing so, we actively avoid opportunities for growth and do not pursue great ideas.

Like this photo? Here is where you can buy it

What marketers should be asking, “how do we mitigate risks?” Looking for ways to continually try new tactics but minimizing their exposure or reach to test their value.

So how do we make little paint swatches instead of going all in? Here are the top ways through marketing segmentation.

 

Slow rollouts

Marketing professionals commonly think about rollouts for brick and mortar retailers, utility, or communication companies.

For them, it makes a lot of sense to move new products or grids to one geographical location before moving it to a national or worldwide scale to save money and to accurately measure the demand of a target audience.

Although this is the most common application, it is not the only one. This strategy can be applied to any business.

For online retailers, maybe you only wish to put a new product in one distribution center and do not want to ship across the country. By using geo-tracking and/or customer data, only show that product to people in your targeted area.

If the product sells well, think about rolling it out to the next DC. If it fails, you have invested minimally and had a very little negative impact.

For software or service companies, maybe you have local salespeople or consultants.

Utilizing a new service where they are would minimize the exposure and risk compared to a national or international release, while also the potential of increasing market penetration and decreasing travel cost to those services acquired.

 

Email sends

After you have spent years continually collecting emails and other contact information you want to talk to them, but that does not mean you need to talk to all of your prospects/customers at once.

It’s not always “all or nothing!” You do not always have to SEND IT to all your contacts.

If you are trying something new, or something that seems a little outside of your typical branding why not just do a small send and see how your contacts react to it?

Now don’t just send out 10 emails and call that a test. With that small of a sample, all your data is irrelevant.

Aim to have at least one thousand recipients to make an adequate test. Compare your stats next to your typical engagement, if the numbers are similar maybe test the emails side by side with an A/B test.

 

Testing messaging through other mediums

Do you have some new messaging that you wonder how your prospects will respond to?

The typical response is for people to change their site and cross their fingers,

“Hope this works!”

The thing is, your website is prime real estate. Although it is a great area to test messaging it is also the one that comes with the highest risk if it goes south.

So, what are some safer, less risky options? Try remarketing ads through social media or through display networks. Use visual ads to target people that have previously been on your site with a variety of different messages.

As the ads increase their impressions, you will be able to notice trends as to which messages are preferred by the audience by seeing the higher click-through rates and conversions.

The best performer may be the best fit for your website messaging.

 

A/B Testing

A/B testing is by far the most common test and one of the most decisive ways of testing. This is because it compares two separate mediums at the same time, eliminating many of the variables that may play a role in the metrics (like sending a test email during the week vs. a weekend)

If you are testing email, A/B tests are a standard functionality for most email providers, if you are testing landing pages A/B test can be done on WordPress though a plugin and executed through other landing page creators like Unbounce or Hubspot.

Keep in mind, when you do A/B tests. Do not change a lot. The goal of the A/B test is to see what elements your target audience prefers.

If the two mediums are COMPLETELY different, you will have no idea what the actual preference is. Whether the CTA color, overall messaging, background, images, etc.

 

Customer Surveys

It is funny that most marketers don’t think of asking their prospects/customers for help.

We are not all Steve Jobs, who had a natural instinct for what consumers wanted –


Source

Before launching a new campaign or product release ask your current customers if they feel the messaging would have attracted them in their buying process, or ask them if this new feature would be a benefit.

This step is commonly not executed for what I believe to be due to pride. Sometimes businesses do not like to actively ask for help and want to portray that they know it all.

Asking customers is not a sign of weakness it is a sign of caring. This test helps to gain valuable insights while also driving more loyalty through your client base, simply because people LOVE to be heard.

 

MVP – Minimum Viable Product

The budget is a quick reason for people to say no to new ideas. Whether it is the creation of a new software product or implementing a new platform.

Take for example B2B companies now moving to eCommerce.

A lot of distributors that do not have an online presence are talking immediately to SAP, Netsuite, Magento, Insite, or other very expensive eCommerce platforms.

Moving to platforms like these cost thousands of dollars, massive consulting fees, a long implementation, and a dedicated staff to maintain it.

This approach is an all-in approach through Waterfall project management.

Meaning you are spending a lot of time and money to create something, and you hope to all god it will meet the needs of your customers at the end.

The less risky option is to create a minimal viable product (MVP) through platforms that are far cheaper – WooCommerce, 3dCart, BigCommerce, or Shopify.

Create a basic site, invite a few customers and diligently listen to and observe what they want. If they don’t want eCommerce at all, then you only wasted minimal capital and resources.

 

Conclusion

As marketers and business owners, don’t say no to change due to risk or fear of failure but find out ways to mitigate the risks through tests and minimizing the repercussions of failure.

And of course, stay away from:

“THIS IS WHAT WE’VE ALWAYS DONE!”

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Marketing to Millennials with a K.I.S.S.

November 20, 2018 by matthew Marketing Carpenter 1 comments 2633
My kitchen is absolutely hideous, like Jake from State Farm Hideous, my cupboards are painted dark green, which is probably the 5th layer of paint covering them at this point.
The instant I moved into my house I ripped off a cupboard door and decided to start sanding and stripping. (not stripping myself, but using stripper).
It was a long process to get the paint layers off, sanding the door was like sucking on a jawbreaker… lots of time to peel away one colorful layer at a time.
Once I got past the paint, I came across the unwanted present of a laminate layer.
I then waged war on that piece of sticky plastic using a gallon of stripper accompanied with blood, sweat, and tears.
After hours of work. I finally reached a single cabinet door that was just wood, no paint or laminate.
Perfection!
So what did I do in celebration?

I gave up.

If you walk into my kitchen today you will still see the one single cupboard door that is unpainted, unfinished, and out of place.
Why is that? Because the time needed to invest into this remodeling it was far more than the value I perceived from it.
I decided that I would rather pay a lot more and remodel the entire kitchen than work on any more of those trashy cabinets.
I know what you are thinking:

This rant is getting long, get to the point or I am gonna stop reading!

Which is exactly my point! The more time it takes someone to complete a task, like reading this blog, the less likely someone will complete the desired action.
Now, this statement most likely did not surprise you!
But yet this common knowledge is rarely applied, especially with complex products.
When a business loves their offering or are too close to the product, their homepage is littered with long paragraphs on how it works, every minor detail is outlined, and an enormous amount of industry jargon is spread through all the pages.
In the process of trying to explain their product, marketers spit out so much information that nobody bothers to read it.
It takes too much time and investment to truly understand what your company does. So they give up and leave.
This is so prevalent that millennials have actually created a term around this exact problem “Too Long; Didn’t Read” (TL;DR)
Millennials actively avoid long paragraphs or anything that takes an extended time commitment – whether it is through a website, or through any communication.
Millennials attention span is getting less and less and to address them you need to be as concise as possible.

So how do you do this?

Any business can test their marketing materials with the 3-second test:
Show an advertisement to a person for 3 seconds, then ask them what you do. – If they do not know, then it failed.
But truly what marketers need to do is to base their marketing off the following:

K.I.S.S.

Keep

It

Simple

Stoopid

K.I.S.S. is a common term used in advertising to help copywriters and creatives speak to their audience in the shortest and most comprehensive manner. How do you apply it?
  1. Always look to shorten sentences – After you write copy, look through it and find ways to say the exact same thing but in fewer words.
  2. Is it adding value? – Understand where your copy is going, if you are describing product details on the homepage, most likely you can delete it and move it to the product pages.  Be sure to check all your writing and find repetitive information and eliminate it.
  3. For those of you with very complex products, use other means of communication – Look into other ways of communicating, common ways of doing this would be through diagrams, product images, plainer videos or product demonstrations.

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^ Simplicity #ForTheMillennials

Marketing the WHY and not the WHAT

November 15, 2018 by matthew Marketing Carpenter 0 comments 1894

When you host a dinner party and want to spread the word, how often do you say:

come over to my collection of piping, wood, metal, and wire to have dinner?

 

I would assume you would not have many takers. Most of your guests and maybe even some family members would offer the quick response of, “I got plans on whatever night you are talking about!”

It’s weird to be that descriptive so, let’s instead be less descriptive in this invite:

You have been cordially invited to a 4 bedroom, 2.5 bath for dinner

 

This invite is better than the first, but yet… I am sure all the guests will be expecting you to make a sales pitch on why they should buy this amazing property you have invited them to!

Ok. One more time, let’s get even less descriptive.

Dear friends, please come over to a building to drink to our heart’s content and devour an ungodly amount of food.

 

The ending completely sold me.. but still, most of the guests will still be a little wary of attending because of “a building”.

The point I am trying to make is that in our personal lives we always speak about purpose. You would always tell people to come over to your house or home for dinner.

What the word house or home adds though is the “Why” it is there.

Why is there a collection of piping, wood, metal, and wire? Why is there 4 rooms and 2.5 baths? why is there a building?

Answer: You live there!

House or home, makes it clear that it is for protecting residents, it is a residence, and that there is most likely furniture inside.

By knowing the WHY of something people are comforted and it drives an emotional connection.

Yet, in marketing, we do not always follow the same practices.

Commonly, businesses get so caught up in their offering or what they are creating, that they forget why they are doing it.

To make things even worse industry trends play a big role in this too:

  • blockchain
  • big data
  • artificial intelligence
  • cryptocurrencies

These terms are so popular that companies just drop them into their product descriptions out of nowhere.

By adding these keywords companies are getting further away from why they do what they do and making the product less comprehensive to the end user.

For example, one of my favorite content marketing tools Atomic Reach.

The What – Big Data and Ai for Content marketing

The Why – Grow traffic and conversions using data pulled from your audience

As you can see “the what description” may tell me what the product is, but it has not told me the benefit of having it.

The why gives me a reason to try the new technology in order to boost my marketing performance.

This all seems like basic knowledge, but when you are a business that is so proud of what you have created, you tend to want to tell every person every detail.

The truth is, most people simply do not care.

I use Atomic Reach all the time, not once have I asked them their algorithm, how information is gathered, or how content specifics are scored.

The only thing I care about is that the performance of the content I create increases and that I can produce high-quality marketing with more precision.

Now before the technical people start freaking out!

I am not saying that companies need to delete all your product details or remove “the WHAT” from all your website and marketing materials.

What I am saying is that “the what” should never lead your marketing or sales pitch.

At times, especially for complex products, specific details are needed to make a final purchasing decision.

This is a great use for a product specifications page, a table on the website, a one-pager, or a brochure.

Anything that the user can quickly obtain to get the more information once it is needed, this is preferably distributed without the need to contact personnel in the company; eliminating sales friction and speeding up the sales process.

To engrave this thought a little bit further, I leave you with Simon Sinek. For a further deep dive into this topic, I would also recommend his book “Start with Why.”

Why subscribe to Marketing Carpenter? Because I want to grow with you.

Romantic.. right?

How Price Transparency Builds Trust and Sales

November 8, 2018 by matthew Marketing Carpenter 0 comments 2335

After a large rainstorm, it became very evident that my gutters were no longer doing what they were intended to do.

Unless water spilling over the edge of the gutters and filling a 5-gallon bucket like it was a shot glass is normal.

I did what every rational person would do, jammed a long 2×4 to raise the gutter up to stop the leak.. and it worked! Well, in that specific location.

As great of a solution that was, I decided maybe it would be better to get a professional to do a more “Long-term” fix.

I called a specialized gutter company to give me a quote,  the salesperson arrived on time and was incredibly kind.

He went around the house for an hour and a half measuring stuff and looking at his tablet in a state of confusion, like he was handling some really tough trigonometry.

Eventually, the numbers must have come together and he came to me with the quote.

The cost of the job was definitely higher than I was expecting, especially since I looked up the cost of materials at Home Depot.

After the sticker shock, he asked if he could do a couple more measurements. Whatever he found must have been good, because he came back with a cost that was $200 more than the original quote.

Oddly enough, he did not explain the reasoning for the sudden price hike, and yet he was shocked when I did not want to buy immediately.

The thing is when his pricing jumped for no reason, I moved from thinking that this company was calculating labor and materials to give me a standard price, to thinking –

he is just trying to rip me off.

Because of his inability to explain the pricing structure, he lost any chance of a sale due to my newly found distrust in him and his company.

What does this mean for your business?

Be upfront with your pricing, and your customers will trust you more and buy from you more.

 

How to build trust through Price Transparency

To build trust with your buyers you must be clear about what your pricing is, and if it is a service, how the price is calculated.

For B2C, this comes as no shocker. Although for B2B, the typical response is:

Trust me, I get it! B2B is complicated, it involves a lot of variables, volume pricing, service tiers, etc.

For this reason, many businesses have said it is not possible for them to show pricing to the general public, and their exact reasoning is most likely one of these:

 

1. We do not want competitors to see our pricing

In the past years, I have researched thousands of B2B eCommerce sites from a variety of industries and I am always shocked to see how many of them choose either:

A. Lock their site from the general public; or

B. Hide pricing from non-logged in visitors.

This behavior is very common in heavily competitive markets that are selling very similar goods.

Their focus relies so heavily on competitive pricing for their current customers, that they do not offer pricing to visitors on their site.

Source

Sadly, the main reason most people go to eCommerce sites is to find something they have an immediate need for, and demand a streamlined digital commerce experience that will allow them to accomplish that.

By not showing pricing, you have added a lot of friction to the sales process that will most likely end up with the prospect leaving the site and purchasing from a competitor that offers a function website for their needs.

So what is the best tactic?

Show standard pricing for a single product purchase, if you wish to encourage larger orders from new buyers, include volume pricing.

On top of that, include a large call-to-action mentioning lower prices can be accomplished through an established customer account to encourage repeat purchases and more buyer savings.

 

2. Our pricing is too complicated

Pricing is not always straightforward and exact, but this is not an excuse to not be transparent.

Like the gutter explanation told previously in the blog, my issue with the company was not based on the price, but the fact that the price seemed to be randomly chosen out of a hat and had no explained reasoning.

For those companies that have these complex pricing structures, the best thing to do is honest on how your pricing structure is equated.

So what is the best tactic?

Show how you quote your customers.

Do not focus on how to be exact, but focus on the variables that play a role in your pricing, these could be: cost of labor, goods, customer service, etc.

You just need something that can help your prospects generate a pricing range for your offer.

Whatever these costs are, they should be clearly shown on your website. Events that expose customer later in the sales process to hidden fees or unexpected costs will be a sure cause for distrust.

 

3. Not displaying pricing is a lead generation tactic

Commonly businesses feel like mystery is a great tactic for lead generation. I am not one to judge, I have created a lot of content that are questions to provoke engagement and form submissions.

Source

This tactic is excellent for content marketing, but not for your business’s pricing.

Recently, I have experienced this tactic on the Dun & Bradstreet website (dnb.com).

I found myself wandering around their site looking for any identification of the pricing, but I did not find anything!

So what do I do? I go back to Google and search for a website that is not DnB.com to give me their pricing.

As you can imagine, I stumble upon a lot of negative reviews, a very complicated outdated pricing sheet, and their competitor Experian.

Due to the fact that DnB.com can not tell me ANYTHING about their pricing structure, I have immediately perceived them as a company that intends to charge me as much as possible.

This experience led to me losing all trust in Dunn and Bradstreet, and if a time to purchase this service arose, it would lead me to immediately purchase from Experian instead without thinking twice.

So what’s the best tactic?

Be upfront with your pricing, but you can leave a small hint of mystery for lead generation.

If you have a complicated pricing structure, explain it to your best ability, but use a CTA of “Contact Us for a Quote” that will be more precise based on the customer’s inputs.

These articles can be sent directly to your mailbox!  Well your digital mailbox.

aka – Your email

4 Reasons To NOT Hire Search Engine Marketing Services

November 1, 2018 by matthew Marketing Carpenter 0 comments 2071

In home ownership, you always run into situations or small problems, that may be a simple fix but you are too scared to do it yourself.

For many homeowners, this is electrical work.

Having an old house, I had a lot of electrical work to take care of.

Although the thought of paying an electrician scared me more than electrocuting myself.

So instead of opening up the pocketbook, I removed outlet plates, switched off the circuit breakers, cracked open a beer, and got my hands dirty.

Yes, I may have shocked myself once or twice, but to this day all my outlets and lights work better than ever before!

The point I am making is that on the surface some projects look like they need a professional.

Although undoubtedly an electrician will do a slightly better job, make fewer sparks (but they are pretty), and doesn’t drink beer while on the job, their improvement to the project is incremental and not worth the cost for simple projects.

The same goes for businesses that are looking to grow through Search Engine Marketing or specifically Ads.

I will tell you why you should take on this project internally, and how to plug this marketing channel into your toolkit.

 

Why Small Businesses Should Not Outsource Search Engine Marketing

1. The ease of implementation

If you talk to any consultant in SEM, they will tell you how complex Adwords is.

The truth is, it is in their best interest to tell you how tough and tedious it is to make sure that you do not try to implement it yourself, and instead pay them.

But is this really the truth?

What if everything you knew about Adwords is wrong? And Adwords was actually quite a simple channel to learn?

If you took the red pill keep reading – If you took the blue pill, keep reading too but I am disappointed.

Let’s leave this consulting world and look at this scenario from Google’s point of view.

It is in Google’s best interest to make SEM as easy as possible, because the more people use it, the more money they make. Also, the more conversions you get, the more you will spend your budget on it.

To make this dream a reality for Google and their shareholders, they structured their Search with a simple user interface and streamlined the campaign creation process.

Just to help you get started – I included a little crash course at the end of this blog.

 

2. Who knows your customers best?

In the past whenever I have hired an agency, it always kicks off with a “getting to know your company”

These meetings are usually super creative and fun, but it makes something very evident.

Rarely does an agency or consultant have an in-depth knowledge of your customers, prospects, or buying behaviors.

Just recently, I trained marketing personnel on how to run an effective SEM campaign. The first time looking into their campaign was shocking.

I knew what was wrong structurally, but because I did not have knowledge about their business I was unable to create appropriate ad groups, figure out which search terms were negative, or which terms should be added.

The people that know this information best are the people in your company.

Your sales and marketing teams deal with customers every day and are the most qualified to create an outstanding campaign.

 

3. Who knows your business best – Promotions, new products, etc

At work, how often do things change? If you say never… I am so sorry, that sounds incredibly boring.

If you said all the time, then let me hit you with a little scenario.

You are an electrical wholesaler (sticking with the electrical vibe) and you sell a wide variety of parts. Each part you sell is being actively bid for through Google Search.

Sadly, your inventory manager, Larry, messes up and there are a couple of parts that go out of stock.

Image Source

While you are yelling at Larry:

“YOU HAD ONE JOB!”

You are still paying for clicks to these product pages that say out of stock, wasting your marketing budget and giving potential customers a bad user experience.

How do you fix this?

When you keep the program in-house you have more control for quick changes to turn campaigns off, or to quickly adjust campaigns to meet the needs of temporary promotions.

 

4. How do you know if it is working efficiently?

Typically, when companies decide to outsource their SEM they say they know it is working because it brings in leads or revenue.

But if you yourself don’t know how to correctly use Adwords, how do you know if their campaigns are structured appropriately? And since you are not running an AB test, how do you know you are not capable of performing better internally?

If you work for a digital agency or are a consultant in the area, my apologies.

I have had multiple occasions where I had to inspect or fix a consultant’s work in Google Search.

On every occasion, I have been stunned to see the absolute slop that went into structuring their campaigns and maintaining their keywords.

I am not implying that all SEM consultants lack the training or the ambition to produce great work.

But I am saying, how can you hold them to great work if you have nothing to compare it to nor have an idea what good campaigns should look like.

Therefore, even if you wish to outsource, please review the actionable items below, because of course:

 

Actionable Google Ads Takeaway & Strategy

I created a nice short presentation to get you started!

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