Category Archives: Business

Oh You’re Selling – What – is the ROI?

I need to start counting the number of people that contact me selling something. The count over time would amaze me.  That might not amaze you but the amount of people that have to call me back with the conversion rates or ROI for the investment is truly amazing.

I guess this is a guide on how to sell to me.

I don’t care about:

  1. Your company history.
  2. Who your CEO is and what other companies they have started and sold.
  3. How long you have been in business.
  4. How many employees you have.
  5. The number of years of combined experience.
  6. the amount of time that you have spent in R&D on the product.

What I care about:

  1. How the product works.
  2. How it applies to my business.
  3. Who else is using it.
  4. Average past results of others.  Conversion rate, etc.
  5. Parallel industries that are using the product.
  6. Cost.

That’s about all. If you can put aside the first list and give me the stats we’ll forgo the point of me starting to look at email, out the window, cutting you off to ask the second list or writing a blog post about this during a conference call at which point you’ll realize I’m not paying attention to you when you ask me a question.

Rogue Marketers – Everyone Thinks They Are In Marketing

Do you have Rogue Marketers in your organization?

Without sounding like an evil tyrant that wants to crush anything outside the corporate standards it is important to know if you have people speaking for the company or coming across as if they are speaking for the company online. If you take a look at your webstats you might be able to uncover some of these people as they drive traffic to your corporate site while others are hiding out.

Corporate standards are important whether dealing with on or offline marketing. When someone is out there on their Myspace page telling people that they work for your company while putting unprofessional pics of themselves on the page containing info on your company it can hurt your brand. I recently took a look at the stats for a company and realized that one of the larger referrers to the site was someones Myspace page. This caused me to take a look at the page and it looked fine but others that I found after this were not so flattering.

How to handle Rogue Marketers.

Before you begin to deal with these individuals it is important to make sure that you have your plan together. Begin by approaching the overall issue of why they are taking the actions that they are taking. Why are they creating their Myspace page(For Example)? Is there something that the company’s corporate online presence isn’t doing for them as an employee or the customer? Are their actions online more related to their personal activity that just happens to coincide with some mentions of their professional life?

Once you have established why they are doing what they are doing you know how to formulate your plan. If you found that something is lacking in your corporate presence then you know what to do. No matter what it is time to lay down the rules of engagement for employees.

Pownce Closing – Sold to Six Apart

After reading the Six Apart site and seeing that they are “welcoming the Pownce team” and that the site would be shut down it was time to remove my Pownce link from my signature. I wonder what else is going down.

I know that the economy is down and the government announced today that the U.S. is officially in a recession and has been since Dec. 2007 but does that really slow that amount of traffic to microblogging sites? Does the ability to generate revenue change for this type of organization? I would think not. What does that mean for sites that have more traffic and activity than Pownce?

I love Twitter and am not suggesting that there is something wrong with Twitter and other micorblogging platforms but is there a business formula or path to a formula for success that they are following that others can’t find?

I believe it is more of a first mover advantage along with the Tweeting to be seen scene. You know you tweet just to be seen on the scene sometimes.

Online Attitudes Change in a Down Economy

So should you’re online marketing. If you think that online percetions of brands and products don’t change then you haven’t been working in this space long. If you think about your online marketing for a moment and the amount of information that you are continually taking in and trying to optimize for then you can get a good picture of the pace at which the online marketing landscape changes. If stop and blink your target has moved and you need to recalculate where and when to get it back.

When the market takes a downturn and perhaps your specific vertical people start to change how they approach their decision making process. The typical consumer begins to act with less emotion and more with the facts and figures opf what the purchase will mean to their bottom line. With the contraction of the economy the pockets of the consumer have less disposable income. They tend to take longer in their purchase process. The emotions that they felt before when they thought about the status or imagining their family with a particular product and how they saw their family using that product will change to less of an enjoyment factor and more of a need factor.

What to do? Start thinking about why someone would need your product or service. Make sure that your online marketing states these reasons as quickly and most concisely as possible. You are used to pointing out the promotion or benefit but make sure that you pay attention to the true need.

If your product or service is not a need, it may be time to reach a new segment. Find the segment that still has disposable income and reach them. This can be done by more closely picking the placement on sites and sections of sites or perhaps the more segmented use of ad networks.