Tag Archives: Marketing

Do you have the skills of the modern marketer? [infographic]

With the incredible advances in technology, the modern marketer needs both art and science to win. As the infographic below shows, you’ll needs skills in writing, graphics, and social media as well as hard science skills such as analytics and performance tracking to be successful.

But having the right mix of both art and science are skills in short supply. So if you’re a traditional marketer or ad man, brush up on analytics, budgeting and operational prowess. And those of you who are happier with Excel and CRM’s like salesforce.com, think about picking up copywriting, email marketing and photography techniques.

Regardless of which camp you’re in, you’ll need all of the skills below to be successful in today’s marketing department.

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Modern Marketing over Traditional Marketing

Marketing is going through a revolution. From the days when sales people used some form of advertising or traditional marketing methods to modern marketing strategies like online marketing, SEO and E-mail marketing. Traditional or non-traditional, marketing is a widely used method to inform potential customers about products and services and to establish a customer base. Whichever method, marketing will enable you to engage with your customers in every way possible.

Technology advances have forced companies to change their marketing strategies. From traditional methods, they get to embrace modern ways to carry out their marketing campaigns. Companies have spent billions to strengthen their marketing strategies. They have adapted several new methods of promoting their products and services to compete with the rising market. Although many have relied to modern marketing today, there are still businesses who opted to use the traditional methods to do their marketing.

Traditional marketing is used by businesses to get the word out about their product or service, whether it is by pushing a cart load of wares around, distributing flyers or advertising in newspapers. Anyone that is trying to sell something used some sort of these to get their products noticed.

Door to door sales also constitute the traditional marketing. In some industries some form of knocking on doors is the best way to do business even today. Another one is by using Yellow Page. The yellow page is a very thick book filled with thousands of business listing of business owners throughout a specific area. People would often look through the book to search for businesses that interest them.

Now, there are a lot of other traditional marketing methods that people use to market their businesses, yet because of the emergence of new technologies, they don’t respond to these methods like they did before. Instead of a business spending millions on television advertising or on other traditional marketing strategies they can save on using some modern marketing strategies like SEO, B2B telemarketing and email marketing and promote just as effectively.

E-marketing is another name for web marketing or online marketing. It is a business strategy that is increasingly being adopted over the traditional forms of marketing. For businesses that aim to establish an online presence in a cost-effective way, then this is a much preferred solution. One of the advantages of e marketing is that it can reach a wider client base for it uses Internet as medium to connect with millions of potential customers. Unlike with traditional marketing strategies, e marketing can undertake all sorts of tasks like customer service, information management and public relations at low costs.

Some businesses die because of their weak marketing strategies. Success in business requires careful and longer research of the market, product and service. Really it takes time to learn what method works for your business. You will constantly need to find and adapt methods that will meet your needs. Take a step now. Outsource your marketing activities to reliable call centers before your competitors eat their way into your potential customers.

The Marketing Equation

Most business owners typically focus on either one or two aspects of their business: total revenue or net profit. The common mindset is increase one, and you’ll increase the other. But total revenue and net profit are results. The only way to change a result is to influence the components that make it. Think about it: you can’t bake a better pie with the same recipe – you have to change some or all of the ingredients.

There’s a better way to grow your business – it’s called The Marketing Equation. With this simple formula, I’ll show you how to change end results, such as net profit, by focusing on the variables that influence each one.

The only numbers you’ll ever need to know:

Prospects X Conversion Rate = Customers
Customers X Transactions X Average Sale = Total Revenue
Total Revenue X Margin = Profit

It’s important to understand that results cannot be changed. Everything before an “equals” sign is a variable to improve upon; everything after an “equals” sign is a result. The only way to influence a result is improve upon the variables that make up the result.

So, if you’re a business only focusing on Margin, you’re missing out on several other ways to improve your bottom line.

Step 1: Prospects X Conversion Rate = Customers
Let’s start with the first variable, Prospects. Since this is technically a result, we can influence and increase Prospects by marketing directly to a select group of suspects (people who demographically match your typical customer). You’ll also save money on wasteful “image” advertising, which cannot be tracked and only serves to make your advertising sales representative more commissions.

Successfully implement a unique selling proposition (USP) – the reason why someone should buy from you – and you’ll instantly improve upon the Conversion Rate of prospect to customer.

When you multiply Prospects and Conversion Rate, your result is Customers.

Step 2: Customers X Transactions X Average Sale = Total Revenue
When marketing to your Customers, maximize your follow up marketing, community relations and direct mail to make your business the obvious choice when Customers are looking for what it is you sell. Along with your USP, this is the only surefire way to increase both Transactions and Average Sale.

Multiply Customers, Transactions and Average Sale together and your result is Total Revenue.

Step 3: Total Revenue X Margin = Profit
In the final step, multiply Total Revenue by Margin, to calculate your Profit. If you’ve implemented all 7 steps of my marketing system, you’re no longer competing on price – you’re competing on value, and can easily increase your Margin.

The Marketing Equation, Illustrated
Let’s take a look at how slight improvements in one area to small improvements in all areas stack up:

This example shows how small improvements dramatically change your bottom line.

Let’s say your business has 100 prospects, and you convert 20% of them into customers. You then sell them 10 times throughout the year an average of $10 per transaction. You’ll make $2000 in sales. On your 10% margin, this results in $200 of profit. Not bad.

What happens if you improve just one variable?
If you’re like most businesses, you’re really only focusing on one area for growth. If you look at the second column, we’ve increased only the number of Prospects by 10%, to 110. This results in an additional $20 net profit, for a total net profit of $220. So, by improving just one variable by 10%, you’ve added an additional 10% in profit. Pretty good.

Minor improvements in all variables = dramatic results.
But you’re not just any business. You’ve gone through and implemented all 7 steps in the marketing plan, and you’re able to increase all factors by 10%. This returns greater than 61% in profit! It’s incredible to see the power of making minor improvements work together and build upon the small success in each variable to return a sum greater than the individual parts.

Email marketing technique or interesting mistake?

Mistake? Or purposeful technique?

I received an email from Google the other day. It was a pitch on how to make my AdWords campaigns more effective. Normally, when Google messages, you read it. But what caught me off guard was how the message was delivered.

If you think about your inbox, all of your messages are lined up nice and neat, all justified to the left hand column separator. But the Google email had a blank space before the first letter in the “Subject” line. It immediately caught my eye and was the first message I clicked on.

Either way, it worked.

I’ll test this on email lists I manage — since I know our typical open rate, I’m curious if this tactic creates a lift.

What do you think?