pmwarner.com

Category: marketing

  • Want to know more about that website? Use these free tools.

    For Free Insights on Digital Market Intelligence

     SimilarWeb is a fantastic digital market intelligence tool. Get an idea of how other websites are doing with a quick traffic overview and similarweb-logosnapshot of any website’s referrals. The free version also inlcudes search, social, display, content, audience, similar sites and mobile apps.

    Now, thanks to a heads-up from the folks over at Meltwater, here’s another great tool to discover impressions/reach on a site. It’s called Hypestat. Plug in the website and it pulls the daily/monthly breakdown of Unique visitors, pageviews, Alexa ratings and the value of the site in ad revenue dollars.

    Pro tip: For a quick average of reach you might get by placing content on the site. Simply take the number of unique visitors and multiply by 30.

    Here’s to numbers!

  • Marketing: How to step outside the ‘bubble’

    Marketing: How to step outside the ‘bubble’

    Countless times in marketing strategy meetings, I have heard sentences beginning with and/or containing “I” or “my.”

    “I wouldn’t respond to/click on that.”

    “My friends and I thought the idea was great.”

    “That’s how I would do it/buy/respond.”

    Not wanting to invalidate a personal POV, especially from a boss or executive, many stay silent. And then carry out marketing plans according to the leader’s —sometimes personal— experience and wishes. [The ‘marketing’ department is then basically relegated to the role of a Kinko’s store – taking orders and creating collateral].

    You can see the problem here.

    We’re not marketing and selling to our (I’ll borrow Kissmetrics’ term here) “HiPPOs” (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion), we are attempting to message our customers. They are sometimes two very different things.

    [Or Avinash Kaushik coined the term. See also: Digital Marketing Analytics: Avinash Kaushik]

    Jamie Oliver’s story about trying to change eating behavior outside his cultural norm is a perfect example. It took some time to get to know the customer. And, of course, so should you.

    SO the next time you hear an “I” or “My” in a marketing meeting, try to see if you can’t change the subject to the customer, based on objective research.

    Referenced article is Eat Your Peas: A Recipe for Culture Change via Strategy+Business

    Photo: First Time Bubble by Serge Melki

  • Content may be king (but maybe not)

    Content may be king (but maybe not)

    You create great content. Incredible content. You spent hours putting together your website page, social platforms, compelling photos, well written articles. In short, you’re a content genius.

    But where’s the traffic?

    Turns out content isn’t king, or at least it isn’t the whole picture. (There is more by Blog Tyrant on this and I’ll share a link to the article in a second.)

    I think most of you know exactly what I mean.

    There’s a ton of noise out there. Unless you get a kick-start, such as a spend (that perhaps you can’t afford), or a chance mention on a popular website, it’s a whole different art to get folks to visit your creations.

    [See also Outstanding Free Marketing Tools…]

    So we post and post and look at our Google Analytics and still no traffic.

    Look, I don’t resort to click bait, I don’t believe in headlines that promise one thing then lead you into an unexpected page for the sake of traffic.

    However, to get more folks interested in what you are promoting it needs to be direct and catchy without too much detail. If you’re successful in getting their attention (or, stopping the scroll, as I put it) than you just might have a little more success in directing folks to your valuable content.

    We’ll go into more detail on that in another post — your landing page is also another discussion.

    Here is the link to the article I mentioned earlier, The Biggest Myth in Blogging: Why Content is Not King

  • Use big data to create value, not just targeting

    How Can We Best Use Big Data

    Another great article on big data from the folks (Specifically Niraj Dawar) at HBR. The gist? Targeting provides a short term advantage, creating value is long term. Read more.

    Big data

    Big data holds out big promises for marketing. Notably, it pledges to answer two of the most vexing questions that have stymied marketers since they started selling: 1) who buys what when and at what price? and 2) can we link what consumers hear, read, and view to what they buy and consume?

    Answering these makes marketing more efficient by improving targeting and by identifying and eliminating the famed half of the marketing budget that is wasted. To address these questions, marketers have trained their big-data telescopes at a single point: predicting each customer’s next transaction. In pursuit of this prize marketers strive to paint an ever more detailed portrait of each consumer, memorizing her media preferences, scrutinizing her shopping habits, and cataloging her interests, aspirations and desires. The result is a detailed, high-resolution close-up of each customer that reveals her next move.

    But in the rush to uncover and target the next transaction, many industries are quickly coming up against a disquieting reality. Winning the next transaction eventually yields only short term tactical advantage. It overlooks one big and inevitable outcome. When every competitor becomes equally good at predicting each customer’s next purchase, marketers will inevitably compete away their profits from that marginal transaction. This unwinnable short-term arms race ultimately leads to an equalization of competitors in the medium to long term. There is no sustainable competitive advantage in chasing the next buy.

    Read the rest HERE

    Niraj Dawar is a professor of marketing at the Ivey Business School, Canada. He is the author of TILT: Shifting your Strategy from Products to Customers (Harvard Business Review Press, 2013).

  • Core metrics for measuring marketing’s financial performance

    Core metrics for measuring marketing’s financial performance

    On Marketing Metrics

    This is an excellent white paper on marketing metrics. It applies to any industry (paper’s focus is on healthcare). Developed by the  Society for Healthcare Strategy & Market Development, it’s worth your time. Below is the intro and link.

    [See also Analytics: Let’s Defer to Avinash Kaushik]

    HAVE YOU BEEN IN THIS MEETING? IT’S BUDGET TIME. Marketing says it is contributing financially to the organization. Finance asks, “How?” After 30 minutes of back and forth, the meeting ends in less than a draw. No one wins. But even with over thirty years of contributions, the marketing profession has yet to develop standard guidelines for measuring its financial performance. In this time of accelerated accountability, it is a fact that the absence of measurable standards is no longer acceptable—for any discipline. Fortunately, efforts are underway to establish both basic standards and advanced metrics for healthcare marketers. This white paper focuses on efforts to date to achieve both.