CoolMarketingStuff

Marketing Takeaways from Delivering Happiness

admin — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 19:53:12 +0000

In Delivering Happiness, Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh describes his journey in building Link Exchange which sold for about $200 million and Zappos which was recently acquired by Amazon for about $1 billion. The book is written like an autobiography and is very honest and open. You learn some interesting things about him like how he quit his first job at Oracle basically because he was bored and walked away from 20% of his $40 million share of Link Exchange because he didn't want to stay at the company for another year. He also shares the lessons he learned and insights into his successful approach. Here are some of the marketing lessons I took away from reading Delivering Happiness:

Focus on existing customers
Early in Zappos history, the company struggled to survive and did not have money for a marketing budget. So out of necessity they focused on existing customers. This strategy worked very well as the company grew to over a billion dollars on sales, mostly from repeat purchases. According to the book Flip the Funnel by Joseph Jaffe, 75% of Zappos' sales comes from repeat customers.

Get PR by continuously wowing your customer
Zappos gets a tremendous amount of good PR, but Hsieh says that they did not actively try to push their messages into the news. Often someone would report on something that Zappos had been doing for years and it would spread like wildfire. By doing remarkable things for their customers, employees and even vendors they received a ton of attention, even though some members of board sometimes referred to Zappos' unique approaches as "Tony's social experiments".

Surprise your customer by overdelivering
One way that Zappos provides exceptional service is by providing customers with surprise overnight shipping. Some customers' orders are delivered to their doorstep the very next morning which provides a remarkable experience worth sharing.

Create a great customer experience
Early on, Zappos made most of its profits from drop shipping products to customers, however this could result is dissatisfaction if an item on the website was not available from the manufacturer at a given time. So Zappos made the decision to halt its profitable drop shipping segment and only sell items that are held in their warehouse.

Create a great culture
Working at a call center is not typically a glamorous job and as a result many companies have disengaged employees who are directly interacting with customers. Zappos created a great culture that focuses on the people of the company, which has helped create highly engaged customer service agents that provide superior service to customers. Employees are encouraged to take company sponsored courses so that they can grow and get promoted, and Zappos consistently demonstrates that they care about their employees by paying for a funeral reception or giving every employee a Kindle when they sold to Amazon.

Ultimately people want to be happy
Tony is interested in the science of happiness and integrates findings from the field of positive psychology into his business. By providing employees with a greater purpose and opportunities for growth rather than focus on monetary rewards, Zappos employees are highly motivated. He also understands that experiences contribute to happiness more than material possession, thus the focus on customer experience. Towards the end of the book he asks the simple but often overlooked question "what is your goal in life?". If you follow up that question with a lot of "whys", you will eventually get to the answer that is essentially "because I want to be happy". This revelation has lead to the latest iteration of Zappos' brand promise, "delivering happiness".

Transforming Organizations With Social Media: Review of Open Leadership

admin — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 08:02:13 +0000

How do you make your company more open using social technologies? That is the challenge that Charlene Li discusses in her latest book Open Leadership. She discusses how social media can help organizations become more open and transparent and also share ideas more effectively within the company. She also discusses how to overcome the challenges of implementing an open strategy including changing company culture or executives who view openness as too risky.

According to the book "Most organizations don't feel they can trust employees to use social media at all in the workplace. A survey by Robert Half Technology of 1,400 CIOs of U.S. companies reported that 54 percent of them block use of social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and MySpace in the workplace."

This demonstrates that many companies still view social media as a time waster and counter to their business goals. However there are many ways that an open strategy can help a company be more effective and profitable.

"I've spoken with hundreds of leaders about their desire to tap into the power of social technologies to transform their businesses. They like the idea of being able to hear instantly what their customers are saying about them. They're curious about the ability to obtain new ideas from customers or to lower their support costs by having customers solve each others' problems."

Social media can help develop deeper relationships with customers by showing that there are real people behind the corporation.

Charlene Li writes: "At the core, marketing and communications is about building relationships, but the key is knowing how to do it in a way that feels relevant and "authentic" to someone."

The book also gives a good argument against focusing too much the ROI of social media which inevitably comes up at large organizations.

She writes: "An undue emphasis on hard ROI does no one any good...Inevitably, we base many of our decisions on just the thinnest sliver of information and evidence or, even more likely, our gut feeling...what's the ROI of a handshake?...companies invest an inordinate amount of money on relationships...In most cases more than half of a company's operating expenses are likely to be spent on activities that have an indirect impact on the bottom line. We may not be able to link the ROI of these expenses to direct sales, but we know there's some incremental benefit that makes them worthwhile."

However to convince leaders who still need ROI justification, there are some great cost/benefit breakdowns with ROI estimates.

Li also goes beyond theory and provides action plans for an initial openness audit, creating social media guidelines, executing the open strategy, and preparing for failures. She explains different models that organizations can adopt such as organic, centralized, and coordinated because the level of openness will depend on the organization. I would encourage any business leader to read this book, especially if you are a leader at a medium or large organization.

Full Disclosure: I received a review copy

How to Set Up A Self Hosted Marketing Blog In About An Hour

admin — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 21:09:12 +0000

If you are starting a marketing blog, or any blog, there are several benefits for self hosting your blog on your own domain. You own the domain and control it, including all the Google authority that it builds up over time from people linking to you. You have more flexibility is changing the site appearance or adding features to your blog. You can potentially sell the site in the future or automatically redirect visitors to a new location. Advertisers can check the estimated amount traffic from sources like Compete, which is not available if your blog is marketingblog.blogspot.com or wordpress.com. You're not reliant on the blogging service to do what is in your best interest. For example Geocities recently shut down all their users' sites and Ning started charging its users.

Here are the steps that you can follow to get your self hosted blog set up in about an hour or less.

Step 1. Register your domain

The first step is to register your domain. If you have not already done this you can buy a domain registration for 1 year for about 10 bucks. The most popular site for this is GoDaddy, but I prefer Netfirms because it is slightly less expensive.

Step 2. Get a Hosting Account

A website hosting account is needed to store the data of your website and serve the data to people who come to your site. I recommend getting a hosting account at Host Monster because it is about 6 or 7 bucks a month and that is what I'm basing this tutorial on (full disclosure: affiliate link). Other hosting providers include Host Gator or An Hosting.

Step 3. Point your Domain to your Hosting Account

In order for your site to show up to people who go to your domain, you must first point your domain to your hosting account. To do this log into your domain registrar account and change your DNS settings of your domain so that your nameservers are changed to NS1.HOSTMONSTER.COM and NS2.HOSTMONSTER.COM. (When using netfirms you have to click on the security tab first and unlock the domain to make changes to the nameservers).

Step 4. Add On Your New Domain at Your Hosting Account

Now log into your hosting account and you should see the control panel which displays all the options for your hosting account. Find and click on "AddOn Domains". Now just type in your domain in the appropriate field as shown below.

It should say that ownership of this domain is verified because you just changed the nameservers to point to the hosting accounts servers in the previous step. Then just click on the "Add Domain" button at the bottom of the screen. If the form is accepted then the new domain has been added successfully.

Step 5. Install WordPress

You should still be logged into your hosting account. Go to the home screen that shows all the options (cpanel). Find and click on "WordPress". Click on Install a brand new version.

You will see the Installation Preferences. First under "Where would you like WordPress to be installed" select your domain from the drop down menu. Under advanced options you can give your site a title, and set your user name and password. Make sure "Automatically create a new database." is checked. Check the box to agree to the terms of service and hit "Complete".

After you hit Complete it will show the following success screen.

Click on the link for Login URL and it will send you to the WordPress login page, where you can enter your username and password you just set to log into WordPress. Your site is now live.

Step 6. Changing your Site Appearance

Now you can start adding new blog posts or new pages or you can change the theme to something you like. Log back into WordPress by going to yoursite.com/wp-admin and go to "Appearance" and then click on "Themes". Click on the tab for "Install Themes" and click "upload". From here you can upload themes that you find online. There are thousands of free and paid themes that you can find on the web.

The install didn't work for me (probably because my theme Zip file was too large) so the alternative is uploading the Zip file of the WordPress Theme directly into the file folder in the domain that was set up by going to the control panel of your hosting account and clicking on "File Manager". You can navigate to your theme folder (yoursite.com/wp-content/themes) for your domain and upload the Zip file.

After you upload the Zip file, you will need to select the file and click on "Extract".

Once the files have been extracted you can now log back into WordPress and go back to the theme section. It should show the new theme that you just uploaded.

Click activate, and your site will now reflect your new theme.

Now you just need to add all the content to your site and you now have a new website.

Feel free to ask any questions you may in the comments or you can email me at csipe84(at)gmail.com.

This post has been republished from Sparkplug Digital. Image credit totalAldo

How Marketing Can Make The World Better: Rory Sutherland at TED

admin — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 08:56:12 +0000

Advertising executive Rory Sutherland gives a brilliant and humorous talk at TED about how marketing creates intangible value and why this is good for society. He points out that while creating tangible value requires raw materials, energy, and labor, creating intangible value just requires a good idea. Marketing often involves changing the perception of a good or service so that it has a greater perceived value. Sutherland points out that changing the perception of something can be just as satisfying as changing reality.

Sutherland makes a good argument for why marketing is not evil as it is often portrayed, but can instead help solve some of society's important problems including the growing scarcity of natural resources, waste, and public safety. If we spend a larger portion of our total dollars on intangible value, the result may be a reduction in waste and burning of fossil fuels. This is because it takes no more physical resources to make an Apple computer than it does to make an Acer, but the Apple has a higher perceived value. This added perceived value can create greater wealth in the population, even as physical resources become more scarce. In public safety, we can apply the rules of persuasion to nudge people into making healthier decisions. Sutherland says that persuasion is often better than compulsion when describing how speed signs like a flashing happy or frowning face sign is about 10% of the cost of a speed camera, but prevents twice as many accidents.

Pepsi Moving Away From Traditional Marketing

admin — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 23:41:25 +0000

Pepsi recently announced that they plan to move away from traditional marketing and toward a new strategy that involves leveraging social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook to "become a catalyst in the culture" and "add value to a community". Tom Asacker discusses this in the following post from his blog, AClearEye.com.

I've just read that PepsiCo is evolving away from traditional mass market advertising towards an approach that connects with its audience in a direct and more meaningful way (WARC News).

According to Frank Cooper III, chief consumer engagement officer for PepsiCo's US beverage arm, "We want to become a catalyst in the culture rather than act like a big brand announcing something."

This is big, big news. It may be a sign that the ship of big brands has finally become aware of the changing environment and is beginning to turn.

In Better than Rational: Evolutionary Psychology and the Invisible Hand, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby explain that “form follows function: the properties of an evolved mechanism reflect the structure of the task it evolved to solve.” So what is the structure of today’s marketing task?

Yesterday’s marketplace was a much simpler environment. People were easy to find, easy to reach and easy to persuade. The marketer’s task was simply to make people “aware” of their new and improved offering. And they did just that, primarily through mega spending on mass media advertising. But the marketplace has evolved. And it appears that it has changed faster than most marketers have changed.

While the marketplace pendulum has swung from a fascination with image and consumption to a preoccupation with experience and value, marketers continue to focus on exposure, messaging and other extinct concepts. But mere awareness is not the nature of the task today.

The marketer’s new task is one of clarity: “How do we make it clear to our audience that we’re in business to help them (and not to hunt them)? How can we get a clearer view and understanding of our audience, so that we can design a business that best feeds their hungers? How can we provide them with a clear view and appreciation of the value of our offering? How can we make it clear to our people that their activities define our brand?”

Clarity should be the guiding principle behind every marketing effort. Clearness of thought. Clearness of appearance. Clearness of purpose. Clarity should inform every campaign, drive every question, and rationalize every dollar spent and every piece of data captured and analyzed.

Whether you’re launching a large scale branding effort, producing an event, or simply crafting an email message, follow these two steps to marketing clarity:

1. Discover -- Ask yourself; are we truly clear about our purpose and how to create superior value such that customers are continuously attracted to us? And by value, I mean the qualities that render your product or service highly desirable by your audience. It may be financial value, time value, social value, identity value, or some combination.

2. Execute -- Now that you understand how to create superior value, you must clearly and precisely align all spending and activities to both communicate and deliver that value. Note: If you can’t find the value in an activity, it does not exist.

That’s it. Until marketers understand and embrace the concept of clarity, we’ll continue to witness millions wasted on new logos, goofy ads, irrelevant viral campaigns, et al. Open your eyes marketers! Your marketing plans are a smorgasbord of expensive and misguided tactics that collectively fail to add up to a clear and compelling idea -- a reason to believe and to choose. We can see it. Why can’t you?

You can read more marketing discussion by Tom Asacker at his blog, A Clear Eye. This article has been republished from A Clear Eye and is licensed under the Creative Commons 3.0 License.

How Marketers Take Advantage of Cognitive Bias

admin — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 08:59:54 +0000

This is a great presentation by Scott Berkun, who is the author of the book Confessions of a Public Speaker. The talk which is titled "How to Call BS on a Social Media Guru" makes some interesting points about marketing and cognitive bias.

SMC Seattle May Event: How to Call BS on a Social Media Guru from SMC Seattle on Vimeo.

Berkun discusses how marketers take advantage of cognitive bias to persuade consumers to want to buy things without them knowing why they want to buy it.

"It's research that has been done over the past 10-20 years...that basically points out how flawed our brains are... at making decisions about things. There's all these inherent kinds of bias that we have that influences us in ways that we don't notice. Good advertising and marketing take advantage of these things" (9:40 minute mark of video).

He describes the example of a car commercial which shows a good looking guy driving a car through a beautiful valley next to an attractive woman, but the ad tells us nothing about the car.

According to Wikipedia's definition:
A cognitive bias is the human tendency to draw incorrect conclusions in certain circumstances based on cognitive factors rather than evidence.

There are a long list of almost a hundred cognitive biases that can be seen at Wikipedia.

Some biases that are really interesting are:

Confirmation bias: the tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions

Negativity bias: the tendency to pay more attention and give more weight to negative than positive experiences or other kinds of information.

Herd instinct: common tendency to adopt the opinions and follow the behaviors of the majority to feel safer and to avoid conflict.

Basically, Berkun wanted to raise awareness of how cognitive bias influences us to encourage us to make decisions based on evidence. I agree that we should be aware of how cognitive bias can influence our decisions, however I would point out that there are many situations where cognitive shortcuts are very helpful. If you are making routine decisions like which brand of soap to buy, it would be very time consuming if you conducted research on the empirical evidence on which brand is best for your skin. You will probably base your decision on which brand you have had positive associations with in the past with and go with that one.

Is focusing on eliciting emotional feelings in ads rather than focusing on the hard facts manipulative? It does appear to be a more effective method of marketing, but I believe that while marketing can influence people to have a stronger desire for a product or service, the individual always has the freedom of choice to not make a purchase and save the money.

40 Cool WordPress Themes For Small Business Marketing

admin — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 01:19:38 +0000

For many smaller businesses, WordPress can be a great website solution and an effective marketing tool. There are literally thousands of great designs that are available, with hundreds of designs costing less than $40 at a site like Themeforest.net. In addition to the low cost, WordPress website themes can run on the WordPress content management system, which almost anyone can learn how to use in about a day. This makes it easy for business owners to change information on their site and more importantly, create content that will attract targeted traffic.

According to Nielsen Online, fewer than half of all US small businesses have websites or advertise online. If more business owners knew about what WordPress can do, this would certainly increase.

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By the way. If you need help setting up a WordPress site. You can contact me at csipe84(at)gmail.com.

Marketing Like Drug Dealers: Marketing Ideas From Rework

admin — Thu, 27 May 2010 08:56:08 +0000

Rework is a great book from the founders of the successful web company 37 signals. I really like the contrarian ideas from the book like "how drug dealers get it right" because it is great to get a fresh perspective on business. I also like how Jason and David get straight to the point and don't waste a lot of pages with fluff like most business books. There are a ton of great ideas in this book and some ideas that you will probably disagree with, but it will definitely get you thinking and possibly lead you to question some of the widely accepted ideas in business and marketing.

Take the Anti-Position
Several companies have been successful by taking an adversarial approach to their competition or the entire industry. Apple vs PC and 7-Up, the Uncola are a few examples of companies who have taken an opposing position. The authors also point out that people tend to like conflict and this can get people to pay attention.

This idea goes way back to Al Ries and Jack Trout's classic book Positioning. When you separate yourself from the competition is helps consumers form a better idea of how you are different from others in your industry.

Marketing Is Not A Department
Jason and David say that marketing should not be a function of the marketing team but a part of everything the company does from answering the telephone to the quality of the product.

This is not a new idea but an important idea that is not talked about enough. Most companies tend to hand off responsibility of marketing to the marketing team after the product has been developed. This is wrong because if you are not thinking about marketing from the start, building a strong customer base can become infinitely more difficult.

Market Like Drug Dealers

"Make your product so good, so addictive, so "can't miss" that giving customer a small free taste makes them come back with cash in hand...You should know that people will come back for more. If you're not confident about that, you haven't created a strong enough product. "

I agree. Of course this helps if you have a really addictive product like Twitter, but if you don't, sampling can be a great way to get people to step into the door and break down the barriers preventing people from trying something new. A mistake that a lot of companies make is that they make sampling too difficult with credit card requirements or forms with too many required fields.

Target Smaller Niche Publications

The authors advise that you shouldn't try to spam the Wall Street Journal with press releases but rather focus on smaller niche publications.

I agree with this because niche publications typically have followers who are passionately interested in a specific topic or are the right audience for your product or service. Focusing on developing relationships with the top blogs in your industry seems like the best way to get in front of people who will likely use and recommend your product.

Marketing by Teaching

This is a great concept that suggests that by teaching your target customer about your craft or your industry you can build an audience that keeps coming back and are likely to seek you out when they have a need for your product or service. Here is a video of Jason's presentation on this topic. "Instead of trying to outspend, outsell, or out-sponsor competitors, try to out teach them. Teaching probably isn't something your competition are even thinking about...As a business owner you should share everything you know too."

Don't Listen to Your Customers

The authors argue that you shouldn't listen to suggestions that just come from a few vocal customers. If you change because of a handful of unhappy customers, you could lose many more customers who were happy with the way things were before. "Your goal is that your product stays right for you. You're the one who has to believe in it most". They advise that you shouldn't record what customers say about your product. If you hear something over and over again, then that's when you know that is something you should pay attention to.

Why Apple’s Marketing Is Different by Simon Sinek

admin — Sun, 16 May 2010 07:36:16 +0000

This is a great presentation by Simon Sinek about how some organizations are able to achieve so much more than others with seemingly the same amount of resources. Why did no one buy Gateway's flat screens or Dell's MP3 players? The following video, which I think marketers should watch over and over, explains why.

The most important Simon makes is that "people don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it". I love the following quotes:

"If Apple was like everyone else a marketing message might be: We make great computers. They're user friendly. Want to buy one? ...Here's how Apple actually communicates: everything we do, We believe in challenging the status quo, we believe in thinking differently. The way we challenge the status quo is by making our products beautifully designed, simple to use, and user friendly. We just happen to make great computers. Want to buy one?"

"The goal is not to do business with everybody who needs what you have, the goal is to do business with people who believe what you believe."

So start with why instead of what when you are rethinking your marketing strategy, and this flip can change how people think about your company and why they should do business with you.

People do business with companies that believe what they believe because of our strong tendency to want to align our actions with our self perception. This is why people who identify themselves as Republicans or Democrats, will vote against their self-interest. We don't want to experience what psychologists call cognitive dissonance - "the uncomfortable feeling of holding two contradictory ideas simultaneously" (Wikipedia). Therefore companies that have a strong identity often become very strong brands.

Marketing Takeaways from Flip the Funnel

admin — Sat, 08 May 2010 10:01:49 +0000

Prolific podcaster, writer, and all around nice guy, Joseph Jaffe recently released his third marketing book entitled Flip the Funnel. This book mainly focuses on the idea of flipping the sales funnel to focus marketing on existing customers. The reasoning for this shift in marketing strategy is sound: existing customers are far less expensive than acquiring new customers and highly satisfied customers can become a powerful sales force that will attract new customers.

My Review of Flip the Funnel

This book provides a solid argument changing your marketing strategy, although I found it somewhat tedious to read because Jaffe would often switch between straight talk to a overly complicated and corporate-like writing style. I personally think this book could have cut out a hundred pages and been equally effective. I would say about half of the case studies have been beaten to death, but there are also some fresh case studies that you probably haven't heard of like how CEO Bill Marriott's blog has earned more than $5 million for Marriott from people who clicked through to the reservation page after viewing his blog.

Key Takeaways:

Shift marketing spend from acquiring new customers to wowing existing customers

Jaffe describes the current norm where disproportionate amount of marketing dollars is going toward acquiring new customers, even though existing customers account for about 65 to 75 percent of revenue. For example just 12 percent of shoppers account for 80 percent of Coke sales. Jaffe writes:

"We pull out all the stops to woo a stranger to sample our wares, yet we ignore the very people who essentially fund our acquisition efforts"

Enthusiastic customers often increase new customers through their recommendations, which could be a more effective acquisition strategy than what Jaffe calls "fishing with a wide net that is full of holes".

Reward customers for generating new customers

Jaffe advocates rewarding customers who provide referrals or spread the word about your business. This can be a monetary reward or a virtual currency like points. Jaffe writes:

"For the most part - the existing investment into customer referrals has until now been essentially zero."

"You'll need to figure out ways to formalize structure and ultimately incent people who are inclined to talk about you."

Customer service should have its priority elevated

Customer service is often neglected and treated as a cost center even though it is one of the best opportunities to have a direct conversation with your customer. Jaffe talks about the remarkable insurance company USAA, where 95 percent of customers plan to be lifelong members. One employee worked 600 hours of overtime in a year and customer service reps have been known to help customers with totally unrelated issues.

Jaffe writes:

"Give them [employees] the freedom and confidence to go beyond the manual or playbook" to describe how companies can improve their customer service.

Full disclosure: I received a review copy