Moving My Blog to www.robertbrecht.com

I am moving my blog postings from www.rbrecht.wordpress.com to www.robertbrecht.com. This site will feature all future blog postings by me.  Sorry for the inconvenience.

Regards,

Robert M. Brecht, Ph.D

Internet Marketing: Become My Customer Part 2 of 2

Earlier this week I discussed some general issues about how important it is to get into the “head” of our probable customers. See Part One.  There are number of strategies that we can utilize. They include:

• Document Existing Knowledge
• Interview Current Customers
• Interview Your Employees
• Intelligence from Existing Websites
• Use Others’ Research
• Conduct Your Own Research
• Utilize Focus Groups
• Test, Test, Test with Targeted Customers

Document existing knowledge: You should have learned a lot over the years about your customers. That information just needs to be documented and classified so it can be more meaningful and useful to you. This is the best place to begin. You might end up by being surprised by how much you know or by how little you know about your customer base. If you aren’t already, you should be capturing geographic, demographic and psychographic information. The latter can be extrapolated from occupation, user experience data, campaign data, etc.

Interview Current Customers: Hopefully you have a number of customers that you know well enough that they will gladly give you some time so that you can ask them some fundamental questions. What problem or need did your product or service address? Why did they choose your company? What benefit was the most persuasive in convincing them to take action. Why did they buy when they did? How could you have made the product or sales process better? You get the point. There is a lot to be learned from you current customers. The more of them you ask, the greater the confidence you can have in the results. Talking to enough customers may enable you to see if there are themes that come through in the interview process.

Interview Your Employees: There is a lot of information about your customers in the minds of the employees who interact with them. Talk to your sales people if you have them. Customer service personnel are critical to this process as well in that they have an important perspective on the issues of customers after they have purchased the product or service. Anyone who interacts routinely with the customer should be considered for interviews. Find out why customers buy and what issues  they have with your product or service.

Intelligence from Existing Websites: Websites provide a good source of intelligence. If you already have a website and have enough traffic, there are tools you can use to gain insight into the people who visit it and those of your competitors. Yes, take the time to learn from your competitors. One caveat though….only target successful competitors for this intelligence. The third party applications, e.g., Quantcast and others like them provide inference data on visitor profiles. The better ones use large panels made up of millions of Internet users who previously provided their profile information to the service and allowed them to passively view their online behavior. This information is supplemented with direct visits to tagged websites and plugged into an algorithm that makes inferences about the profile of people visiting a website, or what websites a certain profile visits. The latter is important to Media Publishers and the creation of effective affiliate advertising campaigns. Most sites have too little traffic to be profiled without adding tags from one of these services to the website.

Visiting successful competitor websites can also provide insight into the customer. What value proposition are they marketing? What emotional gratification mode and purchase preference modes dominate the site? If they are very successful, they probably know the customer and how to position their product in the mind of the customer.

Obviously, your own web analytics application can provide a lot of information about the source of your traffic. If you have website goals, it can also help you identify from where the most qualified traffic is coming. Customer insight can also be gleaned from the search keywords that resulted in visitors to your site. Once there, what were they looking for….what visitors searched for (site search) or what content they interacted with while on the website. All can provide valuable insight about our customers so that you can become your customer.

Use Others’ Research: Don’t reinvent the wheel. If there are resources that already provide insight into your target market, use them. This is known as a Secondary Research Resource. There are many organizations that provide both demographic and psychographic information about a particular target market profile. These reports can be purchased and may cost several thousand dollars. Many times a brief synopsis of the paid report is available and that in itself may be valuable. There are also a myriad of free resources. One that should be always addressed for demographic information is the Census data from the federal government.

Conduct You Own Research: You can create your own survey of current customers. If you have a large enough sample and have surveyed all of them or a random sample of them in an unbiased way, you can gain confidence in the data discovered in the survey. This process is termed “primary research” because you are doing your own research. The difference from interviewing your customers is that you are surveying a much larger sample and are using research protocols that can provide you objective and subjective data with confidence limits attached to it. You can do the same with a random sample of people from your target market.

Conduct Focus Groups: Focus groups are a tried and true way of interacting with probable customers to glean information that will help us define our product, price, marketing message, marketing strategies, etc. Focus Groups are both an interviewing and brainstorming process involving group dynamics that you don’t get in a one to one interview.  Results are better if whoever conducts the session is trained in leading focus groups. This will help assure a better outcome of the experience.

Testing With Targeted Customers as Part of the Development Process: Whether it is a website or some other Internet marketing campaign, soliciting feedback from existing or probable customers as you develop the website or campaign will result in a better website or campaign. It reminds me of that old adage of never having the time to do it right, but always having the time do do it over.  Doing it right requires that you  involve your targeted market profile in the development of a website or campaign by “running it by them” in a structured (testing) way.

If you do the above, you are well on your way of Becoming Your Customer!

If you like what you are reading on this  blog, please subscribe to the RSS feed. I welcome your comments, insights, etc.

Internet Marketing: Become My Customer: Part 1 of 2

In my last blog post, I discussed the: “So What?” Question I keep on my desk to remind me to keep asking it. The second note I have posted at my desk is: “Become Your Customer.” They embody some fundamental issues we need to address as we plan our efforts in Internet marketing or any other marketing medium. You would think that organizations would spend a lot of time “becoming their customer.” My experience is that, despite the lip service to the contrary, very few small to medium size organizations spend the effort needed to really understand their customers and what drives them. Without this understanding, our online marketing efforts are going to be less effective than they could be. I have previously addressed the need for Customer Insight. In this blog and the one to follow later this week I am going to discuss strategies to obtain customer insight, i.e. how to become your customer.

I will have considered this blog to be successful if I can convince someone out there to take more time at the front end of a project to do the homework necessary to better assure a successful outcome of their online marketing efforts. For those of you contracting with other organizations for your Internet marketing efforts, make sure they are providing adequate customer insight as part of their efforts and don’t hesitate to approve the budget to do it.

This goes double for website development. There are lots of website development resources out there who will build you a website and even provide search engine optimization services. They may have you fill out a form that gets at the various functionality, themes, pages, etc. you want as part of the website. That is all fine and good, but they are completely dependent on you to understand the customer and what makes that customer take action. If yours is a sophisticated organization that has the research at your fingertips and if you want to be heavily involved in the development process, then this is not a problem.

However, if your knowledge of your customer is anecdotal at best, then someone should take the time to “become the customer” and make sure that information is incorporated into the design of the website. Notice, I said design. That means that both the graphic image portrayed as well as the copy are all part of the “message” to reach that target market. I would not let anyone design a website that doesn’t first fully understand the customer. Either you educate them or they provide a “research” component to their services so that the information needed is acquired before website development begins. Later in this blog series I will discuss a comprehensive approach to website development that assures that customer needs and wants drives the process. Until then, here are some strategies you should utilize in your approach to online marketing. I’ve listed them in the order of increasing complexity.

• Document what you already know
• Interview current customers
• Interview those in your organization who interact with customers
• Intelligence gained from your existing website
• Acquire information from others’ research
• Survey current customers
• Conduct focus groups
• Incorporate “customer” feedback in the development process

In my next blog, Part 2 of 2, I will discuss each of these approaches in more detail.  Please provide your own insights and comments on this topic.

If you like what you are reading, please subscribe to the RSS feed for this blog.

One Powerful Question: “So What?”

While it is my intent that this blog be about Internet marketing, it is impossible to separate Internet marketing from the general field of marketing itself. Online marketing is a subdomain of marketing and has its own attributes, requirments and strategies. Much of it is taking what we have learned in the field of marketing and applying it to the medium of the Internet. The Internet medium is different than any of the traditional media channels utilized as part of a typical marketing plan. Where it is similar is in the “Message” component of whatever medium we utilize to reach and persuade our target market to do business with us. After all, the medium is just a vehicle to carrry our message to a particular target group. When the medium becomes the message we have lost our way and, soon to follow, many of our customers.

I find that one of the most profound questions in Internet marketing or any other kind of marketing is:

So What?

Think about this for a moment. While it sounds so trite, it holds the meaning of life itself.  Certainly on a much less grandiose scale, the fundamental question to any marketing efforts.  Let me give a couple of examples:

• I have a good product…. So What?
• I have been in business a hundred years…..So What?
• We are open until 9:00 p.m……So What?
• I attend church every Sunday…..So What?
• We have offices in 50 cities…..So What?
• I love my wife…..So What?
• Our product processes data at the speed of light…..So What?
• Traffic to our website has increased 80%…..So What?
• Our YouTube video has had 400,000 views…..So What?
• Your website has won creativity awards…..So What?

I hope you get the picture. I will leave it to you to contemplate the non marketing use of the “So What? question. Instead I will address why it is important in marketing and our approach to Internet marketing. It is a question we should be asking as we approach the development of marketing campaigns and strategies. It can help us focus our thoughts and efforts.

This question has two great meanings for me regarding marketing:

1. It helps me translate product or service attributes into meaningful customer benefits and a value proposition
2. It helps me focus on meaningful outcomes when planning Internet marketing campaigns

Let’s begin at the beginning. Remember our marketing efforts are focused on probable customers, i.e., our target market. That target market consists of individual people who are bombarded with marketing messages. How can we make ours stand out and how can we differentiate ourselves from others in the marketplace? The So What? question is one of the most important ways we can do that. Remember, marketing is in the mind of the customers. Customers view marketing messages through the prism of the conscious (rationale) mind and the unconscious (impulsive) mind. They are looking for: “What’s in it for me?”

“What’s in it for me?” translates into “So What?” Potential customers should not have to spend time trying to figure out what’s in it for them. That “So What?” question is part of their thought process. Unfortunately for us, unless it is readily apparent, they will not take the time to do this thought process unless they are very highly motivated. That means that you should do it for them as part of your message development. What’s in it for them is called a “BENEFIT.” Translating attributes or specifications into benefits is a marketing 101. Yet, take a look at websites and other marketing campaigns on the Internet. How many of them are using benefits to market their services or products?  How many of them have honed their benefits to match the needs and desires of their target market? How many have addressed the emotional needs of their market?

How many have a Value Proposition that is prominently displayed in all of their marketing? How many of them have a Value Proposition that is the succinct statement of the greatest and specific benefit? In my experience….NOT MANY!

One way to arrive there is the: “So What?” question. Asking this question about each attribute, specification get us to a benefit. Asking this question about each benefit can help us hone that benefit to the best benefit in the minds of our target market. Keep asking it until there is not another answer. We can easily see how the: “So What?” question can help us create benefits.

The second area where this question is important is in the planning for online marketing campaigns. Asking the: So What? question gets us to focus on meaningful OUTCOMES of our efforts, rather than the marketing strategy itself. Internet marketing lends itself to tracking lots of outcomes, many of which have no real meaning to the organization.

Which is more important?

• getting lots of traffic to a website or getting less, but more qualified, traffic to a website
• getting people to a website or getting them to take a favored action once they get there
• the click through rate or the conversion rate of keywords
• a good website or lots of traffic
• High search engine rankings or more sales

I hope you now understand why: “So What?” is one of my favorite questions in the world of Internet marketing.

What’s your favorite question?

If you like what you are reading, subscribe to my RSS feed!

Online Marketing: What Colors Should I Use

Today I would like to address the issue of color in Internet marketing. I have discussed in a previous blog the fact that “buying” decisions are primarily made at the emotional gratification level. Once made, the decision is supported at the rational level based on the attributes and benefits of the product or service. We know that colors elicit certain emotions and associations. Based on this, it is logical to conclude that our choice of color can either enhance or detract from our online marketing efforts.

We have also previously discussed about how important insight about our probable customers is to our Internet marketing efforts. The more  we know about the demographic and psychographic factors of our target markets, the more focused are efforts at reaching them with a message that will resonate with them. Color is part of our overall message.

I do not intend for this blog to be a treatise on the psychology of color.  There are many websites and books that can provide more information on this subject. One I like is:

http://websitetips.com/color/tutorials/#meaning

The colors we use in our online marketing efforts should reflect:

• Our Company, products and services
• Our target customer

Colors Should Reflect Who We Are: The colors we use in our efforts to get our message across to our target market should be reflective of who we are.  For example, if our business is building playgrounds or selling toys, the colors we use are going to reflect “fun and excitement.”  Use of primary, saturated colors, including yellow and green, are appropriate to reflect these emotional associations. If, on the other hand, our business is buying houses from those who are entering the foreclosure process we probably don’t want to reflect “fun and excitement.”  A better emotional connections would be “trust and credibility” and our color scheme should reflect it. Likely blue would be the predominant color, highlighted with blacks, etc.

Colors should reflect our customers: Our online marketing color choices should reflect the customer insight we have gained by researching our target and flanker markets. Depending on who are probable customers are and where they are located, the choice of color can be a fairly complex process. The more focused our marketing efforts at the most probable customer, the easier it is to decide on a color palette for our online marketing efforts.

Colors Elicit Emotional Associations: Our Internet marketing strategy should be to associate our organization’s products our services with positive emotional associations in the mind of our target probable customer. Color selection is part of that strategy. Specific colors have been shown to be associated with specific emotional feelings and can have an impact on the actions they take. Blue, for example, is associated with trust and reliability. Careful though…it is also associated with sadness and coolness. Red is associated with excitement, danger, passion, speed, strength and sex.  Black is associated with sophistication, seductive and mysterious emotional triggers. Any wonder why adult websites utilize red and black as their dominant color scheme? Remember though that the emotional associations of colors are culturally based. Another reason why you must know your customer.

Customers Have Color Preferences: Another factor in the selection of color for e-commerce is the preferences of our target market, i.e., our most probable customers. We can be more effective utilizing colors that reflect what our customers like than using colors that our customers do not like. There are gender, age and cultural differences that must go into the selection process. I believe that many online marketing designers default to “blue” as a dominant color because it is that it is the most favorite color as a whole. I am reminded of a former client that had a product specifically targeted to women in the 21 to 59 age group. They chose orange and brown as the color scheme for their marketing and  product packaging. What they failed to take into consideration is that orange and brown are the least favorite colors of their target market. That fact worked against the remainder of their message.  A little research could of saved them a lot of wasted effort.

What do you think?

Customer Satisfaction Issues: Poorly Understood

In My last Blog, I discussed how important it is to any kind of marketing, including online marketing to know your target markets, i.e., understand who and where they are as well as how they think and make decisions.

Today I want to talk about customer satisfaction factors and their impact in our approach to e-commerce and online marketing.

Customer Satisfaction is a Moving Target!

Customer satisfaction factors are in the mind of the customer, i.e, their expectations. Customer expectations of what affects their satisfaction evolves over time. I will give an example later in this blog. The factors that influence customer satisfaction can be classified as:

1. Dissatisfaction Factors
2. Satisfaction Factors
3. Neutral Factors
4. Core or Critical Factors

Dissatisfaction Factors influence customers negatively. They are factors that customers have come to expect as part of the product or service. Customers have a perception of a product or  service and if your product or service fails to meet that expectation you will have a customer or a potential customer who will not purchase the product or service or who will not buy from you again. Actually that is the least of your problems. Dissatisfied customers will spread the word much more than satisfied customers. The Internet and social media sites make spreading the word easy with a few keystrokes. The good news is that research indicates that one only has to meet, not exceed, customers’ expectations to eliminate it as a Dissatisfaction Factors.

Satisfaction Factors are perceived as valuable things that motivate a customer. They may actually work at both the rational and impulse (emotional) level to to move a customer to purchase a product or service. Satisfaction Factors differentiate you from the competition. An organization should focus on its core competencies and customer benefits, along with good marketing communications to turn them into Satisfaction Factors. The result is a competitive advantage for your organization.

Neutral Factors have no impact one way or another on customer perception and satisfaction. Expending marketing and sales efforts touting attributes or benefits that are neutral in the customer’s mind is wasted effort.

Core or Critical Factors usually deal with the core or generic aspect of the product or service we are marketing. They can influence customers positively or negatively. They are fundamental issues with the product or service and the perceived need for it.  This is where an unreliable product or poor customers service will overwhelm all of the Satisfaction Factors associated with it. Similarly a product that addresses a critical perceived need will influence a customer positively towards it.

Over time there is an evolution of the satisfaction process. Once a attribute of a product or service penetrates the market, potential customers come to expect that attribute and it becomes a de facto standard. That means that what was once a Satisfaction Factor or product differentiator is now expected (Core Factor) and will someday become a Dissatisfaction Factor as more advanced attributes are part of the market. Customers’ expectations change over time as the market changes. That is why any organization must undertake continuouos efforts to improve their products and service if it is to maintain a competitive edge. Successful companies are continually developing new Satisfaction Factors as part of the process of doing business.

Let’s look at a car accessory as an example of this process. During the last couple of years we have seen car navigation systems as a significant Satisfaction Factor for customers. We are seeing more and more market penetration and the advent of relatively cheap portable navigation units. The result is that navigation systems are no longer the Satisfaction Factor they were three or four years ago. In time, they will become a Dissatisfaction Factor in that customers will expect them and will be unhappy if they are not part of the standard car package.

We have seen the same thing with website design. Take for example including a Privacy Statement. Such a statement at one time was a Satisfaction Factor. Today such statements are an industry standard and not having one is a Dissatisfaction Factor. Customers expect a website to protect their privacy and to so state what information is collected and how it will protect it. The same could be said for usability issues such as intuitive and consistent navigation within the website.

As always, your thoughts are welcom

Customer Insight: Key to Online Marketing

Whether we are talking Internet or traditional marketing, understanding our “most probable” customers is the basis for our positioning and messaging decisions.  If we don’t spend time gaining this insight we will dramatically reduce the success of our Internet marketing efforts. I am amazed at the lack of time spent researching target and flanker markets as well as competitor issues prior to launching an online marketing initiative.  I am often told that clients aren’t willing to pay for it. Often they are in a hurry and see such research as slowing down the processes of getting their website up and running.  It reminds me of that old adage: “Not enough time (money) to do it right, but enough time to do it over and over because it is not achieving its goals.” Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) processes have taught us that taking the time and expense to do it right is really less expensive and time saving than moving quickly and not doing our home work.

It is important that we understand our existing and probable customers on two levels: demographically and psychographically. Demographics are the objective, directly observable characteristics that describe people and organizations. They are the tangible facts that describe your prospective customers and help you identify them. In a consumer oriented business we are interested in things like age, employment, location, gender, education, race, occupation, marital status, income, etc. For a business, we are interested in demographics dealing with industry, product line(s), size, type, location(s), geographic coverage, financial status, sales volume, etc.

The other thing we are interested in is how prospective and existing customers think and make decisions. Remember, it is the  Mind” where marketing happens. Website design and Internet marketing strategies must be geared to positioning our product and service in the mind of those who view our efforts. Remember that “minds” are not a blank slate. Prospects will view our message in the context of their experiences, emotional associations, what stimulates emotional pleasure and the way they arrive at a decision. This process occurs at both the conscious and unconscious levels within the mind. This is the key to communicating with your customers and prospective customers. Think of it this way. Our conscious mind is concerned with “reason” and our unconscious mind is concerned with “impulse’ during the buying process. If you are to be effective in your online marketing efforts you must communicate with both. Often a website and other Internet marketing campaigns “reason” with the prospective customer though product or service attributes and benefits at the tangible level. They forget that the reasoning mind is not the decision maker. Research  has shown us that individuals buy based on “emotional gratification” issues and then justify the decision based on “reason.”

Often the emotional connection is made on first impressions that take place early in the purchase decision chain, even before there is any purchase motivation on the part of the prospective customer. Customers have what is termed “selective perception” in that subsequent impressions are viewed through the prism of the first impression. “You never get  a second chance to make a first impression” holds for Internet marketing efforts as well as other interactions.  Perception is reality. What is in the mind of the customer regarding the attributes of your product or service, rather than the innate properties, specifications, etc. is what drives the product acceptance. Remember every tangible need has a more powerful emotional need that underlies it.

Effective online marketing requires that we bring the insights we have gained about our customers and prospective customers in positioning our product or service. Understanding what drives a person to take action, what emotional associations might exist and what would trigger them, what gratification mode is dominant and the more dominant reason he or she may use to justify the purchase should be the way we approach our Internet marketing efforts.

While there is much to discuss regarding the purchase decision chain and how your customer mindset influences it, I will leave that to another time. I next want to discuss the website design factors and the process for designing an effective website in the context of what I have been discussing in this and the previous blog. We must have defined our customers and probable customers in both demographic and psychographic ways in order to effectively design a website or other Internet marketing strategy.

As always, any comments or suggestions to improve Internet marketing efforts are appreciated. There are no absolutes. That is why we “test” our efforts.

http://www.globalimb.com

Internet Marketing: Begin with the Customer

Believe it or not, but I have seen so many Internet marketing efforts undertaken without the fundamental knowledge necessary to make these efforts as cost effective as they should be. It is the old adage of using a shotgun approach when a rifle approach will do less damage to the client’s pocket book. It is amazing to me that many people who design and market websites don’t understand that Internet Marketing is a subset of “Marketing.”  We must understand the marketing environment of the client. I surely wish every organization that needed Internet marketing either already had a marketing plan or would create one prior to implementing Internet marketing strategies. I rejoice when asked to create a marketing plan because it should provide all of the information needed to design a website and implement Internet marketing strategies. Unfortunately that is a rare occurrence. Even large organizations often have a disconnect between a marketing plan (if it exists) and their online efforts. So let’s assume, that a marketing plan doesn’t exist. Like I mentioned in the last blog, I assume that you have a good product or service and that their is a market for it for the purpose of this discussion.

Where do you start?  You start with the customer!

Marketing starts with the customer and an insightful understanding of who they are (demographics); where they are (trading area); and how they think and behave (psychographics).  Our goal is to spend our efforts targeting those who are most likely to “buy.” Hacking our wares to the most probable customers for our  product or service increases the return of investment (ROI) for our marketing efforts. This is our target market. While we may also market to other markets who may also buy, so call flanker markets, it is our target market that is where we get our most bang for the buck. Not enough is typically done to understand the customer, including others who might be involved in the buying process. In most larger organizations someone recommends the purchase of a product or service while someone else must approve it. Everyone in that buying process is the “customer.” and we must have a good understanding of them if we are to devise marketing strategies. These larger organization have a longer sales cycle and we will need to nurture them through that process (future discussion).

Our deliverable should be profile, i.e., a description in both demographic and psychographic terms of the typical or average person in a market segment. We should do this for the targeted (primary) market as well as any identified secondary (flanker) markets. We can use primary (our own) research and understanding of the market or secondary (research done by others) to gain access to the information we need.  In the Internet world we often see the term “personnas” as a sustitute for profile.  In most cases I have seen, the personnas is typically a demongraphic profile, rather than the complete profile needed to formulate a marketing campaign.

In my next installment we will discuss demographic and psychographic profiles and their impact on getting people to take the online action we require.

Welcome to the World of Internet Marketing

In the coming days we will discuss Internet marketing strategies from effective website design, targeting profiles to create website traffic and meaningful metrics to determine the effectiveness of your online marketing efforts. Our assumption is that your organization has something meaningful to offer to online visitors. You need to start with a good product or service and excellent customer service. Once you have meaningful feedback that what you are supplying fills a need, then the Internet marketing dance begins…

And the website is where it begins. Bringing traffic to a website that  is not designed to fulfill its goals is like selling sheep to people living in apartments. You might find a few highly motivated takers who have some deep connection with sheep, but you have a high likelihood of failure in your marketing efforts. You would probably be better off selling those sheep to people who own grazing land. Yet, time and time again, we are asked to generate traffic to a website that was designed by the brother-in-law of the President who had a knack for “graphic design” and little else when it comes to website design.  We have all seen those sites…lots of graphics and flash, no value proposition, no persuasive copy, confusing navigation and no clear indication of what “call to action” is most desired. If there is copy there is lots of it without clear headlines and subheads and white space. Just the kind of tedious copy you want to read while surfing the web or looking for the right vendor or product.

Even a good website is of no value if no one ever comes to it. So part of what we must do as part of our online marketing efforts, once we have an effective website, is to drive traffic to it through the use of Internet marketing and traditional marketing strategies.

In the coming days we will have a lot to discuss. While there is a body of knowledge of best practices for various approaches to website design and online marketing, there is a lot of trial and error to the process as well. That is precisely why testing and metrics are essential to the process of Internet marketing. On-going testing, measurement and process improvement should be a part of our efforts to creating an effective website and profitable marketing strategies.