They realised that the landscape of personal data availability online has changed hugely in a very short time and despite hysterical outcries about Facebook privacy settings, it is an important area that both brands and consumers should be knowledgable about.

Their concept of “personal data stores” is a really interesting concept that is being built out – imagine you, the consumer, setting the ‘terms and conditions’ for a brand to access your personal information?

It’s called Vendor Relationship Management read more here and here.

But see their great Personal Data infographic published in full with a brief snapshot below showing the 2012 situation…it describes the landscape for legislation, technology, entrepreneurs, corporates and consumers and looks forward in scenarios for each to 2017.

Ctrl-Shift the Personal Data Landscape future

Marmite shortage "Marmageddon" by Global Culture

And so I think we’ve changed some of the ways we shop and how we socially engage while shopping and afterwards how we talk about our experiences.

Have you done these things in a shop:

• Photographed an item you like but aren’t ready to buy yet
• Compared prices in store with online websites
• Recorded price or size information on your phone rather than writing it longhand

I nearly got kicked out of a furniture store yesterday.

Wanna guess why?

He was caught red handed photographing some of the merchandise.  Not with malicious intent but with a view to comparing it to the space available in his house to fit it into.

The storm of commentary proves that this is not an isolated case.  I’ve done exactly the same thing – photographed price tags or descriptions in order to get dimensions or colours or to show it to friends before deciding to buy.

Retailers – When you review your mobile marketing strategy (see our posts here and here) think hard about how you can encourage your customers to buy and share the experience all the steps along the way through photography.

P.S. have you noticed how Pinterest is full of boards about things people want to buy in the future?

easy.  Today we showcase a client and their challenges and a book and a blog post.  Together they give you the one principle you need to write a B2B online brand strategy.

How to get customer community integrated into your marketing

Three things we read and discussed coincided this week:

1. Planning with the Silver Fern Farms marketing team
2. Reading The B2B Social Media Book
3. Commenting on Confused of Calcutta’s blog post – Musings about communities and prices

Start with the blog post - there are three main points: Everyone in the community is a customer; Communities expect a range of prices for each product or service; A connected community converges to act as a single, composite customer.  

Take the range of prices – some customers are happy to read free offerings; others will contribute to comments or test purchase items while others are avid fans.  The Silver Fern Farms team were discussing how to organise messaging across different geographical marketplaces – not all their range is sold in each country. [They sell lamb and venison in supermarkets.]

Treating all the customers and prospects as a single, composite customer enables us to deliver into separate marketplaces with variable messaging.  Yes, we do not use the same message to each group.  BUT we know the customer is smart and can read.  Being clear about what products are available in which supermarkets matters.  It builds awareness of the wider product range and helps customers appreciate the global nature of the Silver Fern Farms business.

Is B2B any different for online?

Slant these ideas into the business to business B2B world. This is where I find clients have the greatest problems “coping” with a singular community.  And ironically, this is where the greatest opportunities exist for B2B.

Read this quote from the Book

Most B2B companies live with fear. The fear of giving away too much information, saying something wrong, giving competitors an advantage.

But I know B2B companies have another fear. Integrated messaging.

This is perceived as hard to do.  Mainly because of the territoriality of the agencies and staff who service the brand.

Each market, each customer, each group of buyers fits into a hierarchy of customer-types. From the inquirer who wants to read for free but not participate up through to the possible purchaser.  Your brand needs to set up its marketing to allow and

enable each customer type to engage at the participation level the customer chooses.

I wrote that in bold because this principle is the key to your strategic marketing plan.

How does engagement work in practice?

Set up a range of marketing activities that allow any customer from the vast pool of possibles to enable customers to get what they need.

Think of it as a staircase, each step has an increasing level of engagement and possibly a higher price.

When planning your online messaging think of your brand’s online presence as if it were a niche magazine.  You should aim to be the best ‘trade journal’ magazine you possibly can be.  Dominate your niche and the customer will figure out which of your offerings (from free to paid) she wants and where/how to acquire for herself.

How would you address this tricky database marketing challenge?

A B2B marketer relies heavily on postal mail to promote their offerings. They use email marketing but have yet to see results strong enough to justify a reduced reliance on the Postal Service. Each purchase secured via postal mail averages $1,500; average lifetime customer value exceeds $6,000. The call-to-action is “buy now” (not lead generation), so response rates are fairly low. In fact, one purchase per thousand pieces mailed is an acceptable response rate. Customers and prospects in the marketing database receive no more than 20 mailings a year. Offerings are highly specialized, so the mail quantity for most offerings is relatively small. The marketer has not studied how different segments of the marketing database have performed over time. They know a significant percentage of the database is waste, but with a minimum of a .001 required response rate (a rate they often achieve), and insufficient frequency to study how recipients behave after many mailings, they’re reluctant to delete many records. (i.e., They’re concerned about deleting a non-responsive record after the 20th mailing that could produce a response on, say, the 21st mailing.)

Have a solution or know anyone who may?

Here’s our response:

I may be wrong but it sounds like marketing and sales don’t work together here – in fact there may not be any ‘sales’ folks in the business. I would also suggest having a discussion with sales to see if they’d consider moving to a lead generation model rather than direct response as that will almost certainly improve the metrics. Get Brian Carroll in to give an overview??

A bit of telephone customer research about historic purchase decisions that got insight into why they bought and when they bought may aide creating database segments and also migrating some people onto email; off the postal mailing altogether and improve the metrics of this offering in the long term.

The Customer Experience Deficit White paper

Online retail experiences have to become brand specific, highly relevant and personalised to each shopper. Retailers need to make better use of existing resources, skills, people and technology.

Their thesis is that by failing to provide an integrated customer experience, brands are losing out on possible sales.  The main sectors losing out are groceries, electronics and fashion and the leading edge are in Wines, stationery/books and entertainment.

Read the full blog post and report.

When it comes to hooking a customer and encouraging them to speed down the marketing funnel by way of a website landing page, your greatest tool is your wording, your language, how you communicate.

How to get started planning your landing page

A client of ours was recently re-creating their website (no small feat), and commissioned the Creative Agency Secrets team to write the content. Our task was to a create a series of landing pages specifically designed for different types of prospective consumers.

Certain features of our client’s product are appealing for different groups, so rather than bombarding visitors with all of the product features at once, we wanted to focus specifically on their unique needs.

Customers as individuals

No one likes to be viewed as just another number.  You have to know your customers, know the different types of customer and speak to their individual needs.

To show our customers right from the start that we acknowledged them as individuals, we made it so that from the main web page they had the choice of clicking on one of five different tabs, identifying themselves.  How did we achieve this?

Take a look at Dell - they ask you to self-identify when you first visit their site, showing products “for home”, “for small office”, “for education, government, and healthcare” etc.  Dell had the right idea but again, it’s all about wording.  If they had phrased their options so that they identified the consumer rather than the product, (are you a student? work in a small office?) the effect would have been more powerful.  After all, it’s expected for a salesperson to know their product, but it’s much more impressive when they know their customer.

In order to do something like this, background knowledge is a must.  That’s why we spent hours researching the five main groups of consumers that our client’s product catered to.  We studied their lingo, learned about their needs, and recognized their goals, so that we could better tailor our wording for each landing page.

Single focus landing page

Landing pages are meant to have one main focus, which, in marketing, is often “you want to buy our product: here’s why”.  But that’s boring, plain vanilla, and doesn’t give a visitor a compelling reason to purchase.

There are many different ways to go about writing content for a landing page, but the major components that we included for each were

• what a customer wants, needs, and expects out of this service
• how our product addresses those wants
• testimonials
• pricing info
• the final promotional push

Road map in place, it was time for the real task: tailoring content to each specific consumer audience.  This is where our research paid off.  With our background knowledge we were able to highlight product features and market persuasively to each group.  

Calls to action on landing pages

Calls to action are another key feature for any promotional work- they are a way to speak directly to a consumer.

In this age where just about everything can be done online, (social communication, purchasing, publishing, and more) it’s of the utmost importance that a market does whatever they can to keep the sales relationship personal.  A call to action (“tell us your experience more about your needs, contact our excellent customer service”) is personally asking a customer to take part in something.

But what is the most important call to action that you could have?

Let’s take a moment to look more closely at that final promotional push listed above.  If you’ve reached this point, you have given out all of the information showcasing why your product is right for a customer and now there is only one thing left to say: “Click here to begin your 30 day free trial”.  It’s not too blatant to say something like this, and, so long as you’ve proven why a customer should buy your product, they won’t mind hearing it. It’s expected.

So…

Get personal! Speak directly to your consumers and they will respond, by purchasing your product.

Get one for yourself:

I’d like help writing landing pages that work

If you think that that was a coincidence, think again. It was newsjacking.

Interview with David Meerman Scott

On an episode of the radio show Internet Marketing for Smart People, Copyblogger interviewed David Meerman Scott, marketing strategist and author of Newsjacking: How to Inject your Ideas into a Breaking News Story and Generate Tons of Media Coverage.

So what is newsjacking?

Newsjacking is a marketing technique where a company strategically coincides a product development, company promotion, etc. with a larger-scale news-worthy event. Essentially, a company rides the wave of another news piece, gaining coverage and promoting their product with minimal effort.

Meerman Scott identified the insurance company TIO as a prime example of a newsjacking success story. When the company heard that President Obama was visiting Australia for the first time in his Presidency (an event sure to gain extreme media coverage), they decided to offer him an insurance policy against crocodile attacks. It may sound ridiculous, and in truth it is a little, but it worked. For the short amount of time that it took TIO to announce that they were offering Obama the policy, they gained a huge amount of media attention.

But why does it work?

During his interview Meerman Scott explained that there has been a shift in journalism. Where it used to be that companies would seek out journalists for coverage, journalists now venture out themselves and seek news. Their search includes a variety of sources, including blogs, twitter, and more. That’s how a company can release one snippet of information into the cyber tide pool and have it become viral, often gaining a second paragraph nod.

The benefits of newsjacking are enormous…

• minimal time input
• avoidance of through-the-roof PR expenses
• viral media coverage
• anyone can do it

All it takes is a post and well-planned timing!

Have a listen to this show and decide for yourself: is newsjacking the PR technique of the future?

Take a look around the other books written by David Meerman Scott - yes that’s an affiliate link.  Thanks for supporting Creative Agency Secrets.

We all get loose ends and links that break on websites. It’s a fact of online marketing life.  So don’t stress – take our 3 steps and make the most of a bad situation.

How to make the most out of an error

Accept that these things happen. Now try and put it right for your readers.

• Apologise – first things first, say you’re sorry that the visitor has been inconvenienced.
• Signpost – send them to other places where they might be able to find the content they want e.g. your archive or a search box
• Be wryly humorous, if you can. Take a look at all these excellent page designs- many will not be suitable for your brand (some are downright obnoxiously rude) but they have a common theme of originality, humour and reinforce the site’s brand values.  Like these two below
  

  Mock-Microsoft error page

  .

Urban Outfitters errorHumorous error page text

Here are our top 5 tips

1. Write a blog

in advance to say that you’re going and what you’re looking for e.g. researching new suppliers or getting price quotes to buy new equipment

2. When you write this blog make the title H1 header something people will search for in google in future.  This makes it really good SEO for your brand.  ”Seeking new sports equipment for our retail enterprise” or “Looking for document management software applications” or “Researching new web design agencies”
3. When you physically visit or arrive at the event.  Find the hashtag#, tweet that you arrived and are free to meet anyone. Check in on other social apps if you use them.
4. While browsing the trade show and you are there in front of each stand, take 2 minutes to tweet that you’re with XYZ co looking at their product ABC at the #showhashtag.
5. Ask folks on the trade stands what their twitter id is so you can personally follow and mention them as well.

In this way you’ll get traction from anyone else at the show who sees you using the show hashtag, the brands themselves wil pick up on your mention, and probably the show organizers too.  Many will RT your work and show off your twitter ID in association with their own.  And hopefully your advance mention will bring in some messages from businesses who want to trade with you or supply to you or use your company to supply them as well.

Go forth and conquer trade show twitter promotion.

Check out our other blog posts about Profile Raising for new business development.

They do the grunt for you.

Now all I need is to go register the name…. there’s a handy text download file option that gives you the URL you could get for each one.

Just don’t expect me to know what they all do!

NameCheck social media name availability