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Jacob

Mar 20
3

Where Are Your Customers Hanging Out?

By | Uncategorized | No Comments

Hang OutMany businesses have trouble understanding how and where to look for new customers. The difference between mediocre marketing and exceptional marketing is based on how well businesses understand their customers, and the forces that drive them to make purchases.

It’s important to take a step back and develop a clear understanding of what customers are actually paying for. In most professions there are tens of businesses that all provide a very similar product or service. Why then are some businesses so much more successful than others? There are thousands of factors that play into successful marketing but one of the most important and most frequently misunderstood is what the real value proposition is.

I’m going to use the foundation repair niche as an example. I live in Winnipeg, and we experience a lot of ground shifting here, so foundation repair is a fairly big industry. Let’s make a few basic customer profiles of people that may be interested in foundation repair.

  1. George is 32 years old and has two children both under the age of five. The basement of his house was finished 40 years ago with indoor outdoor carpeting and gets seepage along one wall every spring. He’s been planning to renovate it himself ever since he moved in, but he’s hesitant to put in drywall or nice carpeting knowing they’ll probably get ruined by the seepage. He’s considering hiring a foundation repair company to fix the underlying problem.
  2. Janelle is a 72 year old widow, and has lived in the same house for the past 30 years. She’s planning on moving into a condominium, but she knows it’s going to be difficult to sell her house because it is severely slanted to one side. She suspects that there is a major crack in one of her foundation walls, and she’s willing to pay whatever it costs to fix as long as it will get her a good return on investment when she sells her home.

Both of these potential customers are considering buying foundation repair services, yet each one is paying for a completely different value proposition.

George is really buying protection for the investment that he’s going to put into his basement. He’s buying a place for his children to play which will result in him and his wife being able to have dinner guests and play a game after supper with no interruptions.

Janelle is really buying some extra money to live on in her retirement, or maybe a nicer condo that she can only afford if she gets a reasonable price for the house.

George is trying to save on costs but at the same time he’s planning on staying in the house for at least 10 years, and it’s important to him that the job is done properly, and there will be no leaks in the future. Janelle on the other hand wants to hire a company that knows about the housing market and can tell her what amount of investment she should put into her house to get the maximum return on her money. It’s also important to Janelle that the job can be completed in a short time frame so she can sell during the summer months.

Using customer profiles can really help to understand where to find potential customers and how to appeal to them.

It’s important to differentiate between advertising channels and customer profiles. I often ask my clients “where do you think is the best place to find your customers online?” The answers I usually get are Facebook, Google, Youtube etc. These are the channels used to find people, but customer profiling is necessary to find ideal customers within these channels.

Unfortunately most people that need foundation repair aren’t going to go on Facebook and like foundation repair pages and join foundation repair groups. Customer profiling is used to determine what pages different target customers are liking, what groups they are a part of and what words they are searching for in Google.

Of course some customers do know exactly what they want, they’re ready to buy, and they will go onto Google and type in the exact search term they are looking for such as “Winnipeg foundation repair company.” These are the people that are at the research and buying phases of the customer decision making process. The truth is this is an incredibly valuable segment to target, and many of my SEO clients are making massive returns from only targeting these buyer keywords, so I’m definitely not saying not to do this. What I am saying is that by only doing this you’re leaving a large number of clients on the table.

Thanks to the forms of targeting and tracking available with internet marketing it is possible to target the Georges and the Janelle’s in completely different ways. They can be shown different advertisements, different value propositions, different landing pages and different calls to action.

With well segmented target markets and marketing campaigns, while all of your competitors are fighting over being the best and the cheapest, you can go in and be the perfect fit for George by being thorough and high quality, while at the same time being the perfect fit for Janelle by being knowledgeable about real estate value and helping her maximize her return on investment. People are always willing to pay more for a specialist than a generalist, but up until recently businesses that wanted to specialize were forced to commit to one or two specialties. Now it’s possible to specialize to each market segment and be the custom solution for every customer profile.

Mar 04
0

Where is your advertising budget going?

By | Internet Marketing Training | No Comments

Internet Marketing TrackingMost owners of small to medium-sized businesses have a good handle on all of their costs and expenses, with the exception of one major area. A dentist, for example, will likely be able to tell me how much revenue each of last week’s patients brought in, and how much he spent on labor, dental equipment and office supplies, but when I ask business owners what per cent return they are making from various marketing channels, the answer is usually, “I’m not exactly sure but we’re doing well so it must be all right.” Why are scrupulous and intelligent business owners who are diligent about every other aspect of their businesses willing to spend large sums of money each month on advertising with no mechanisms in place for tracking results?

The answer is that small businesses try to imitate big businesses. The type of advertising that most people are familiar with, and that most marketing books discuss, is advertising to change attitudes rather than to change behaviors. While this has proven to be incredibly successful for big businesses, it takes a lot of time, a lot of money, and requires repeated contact with consumers. The truth is that what is best for a big business is not necessarily best for small to medium-sized businesses, and can actually be quite harmful.

Small to medium-sized business owners should be able to know with certainty that every advertising dollar spent will return at least two dollars in profit. Moreover, they need to be able to track results campaign by campaign. Knowing only that, on the whole, a business’ advertising budget has a positive return on investment, but not knowing how each campaign is performing, makes business owners afraid to make changes lest they upset something that is working. Yet a closer look would reveal that most advertising campaigns getting an overall positive return on investment are made up of some profitable elements and some elements that are losing money. By eliminating the losing elements and scaling up the profitable ones, the return on the entire campaign can be driven up drastically. Below are three easy-to-implement methods for tracking the profitability of advertising channels such as SEO or PPC.

  1. Conversion tracking: There are many software solutions available that can do conversion tracking, including Google Analytics, which is a free service. A conversion goal can be set up on any page of a website. Any visitor to that page would then count as a conversion for that conversion goal. For example, a home contractor may consider that a conversion happens when visitors submit their contact information in a “request a quote” form. Once the submit button is clicked, the user will be directed to a page that says, “Thank you for requesting a quote. One of our representatives will be in contact with you to schedule an appointment within two hours.” That thank you page serves two purposes. From a user perspective, it tells the visitor when to expect a call, and from a conversion tracking perspective, it tells the business owner that a visitor on the website has converted into a lead.

It is then easy to see what percentage of website visitors convert into leads. More importantly, tracking software can track the route by which each visitor arrives at the website, making it possible to compare the percentage of visitors that convert into leads based on the keywords in their search, which advertisements they clicked and which landing pages they saw.

  1. Call Tracking: To continue with the example of the roofing contractor, only some people will fill out a “request a quote” form and some people will pick up the phone and call directly. This is where call tracking comes in to play. Honestly, I’m surprised how few businesses are utilizing this service, considering how easy and inexpensive it is to implement. Phone numbers can be rented for as low as $1/month, so having even 10 phone numbers is a nominal expense. Every advertising campaign should use a different call tracking phone number. These can be used for offline or online advertising, and they make it possible to track exactly how many calls are generated from a specific advertising campaign.

 

Okay, so call tracking is great for offline media, but what about traffic sent to a website? Everyone sees the same website, so they’ll all be calling the same phone number regardless of the acquisition channel, right? Wrong! Every advertising channel or keyword group should send people to a custom landing page that is designed specifically for the customer segment being targeted. This will help not only with tracking, but with conversions as well. There are also dynamic call tracking services that replace a phone number field with a call tracking number site-wide and display a different phone number to website visitors that are acquired through different acquisition channels.

 

  1. Split Testing: No matter how profitable a campaign is, it is always possible to further optimize it. Internet advertising allows for extremely agile advertising. In the digital environment it’s easy to run five different advertisements on five different advertising channels, and test each across five different landing pages. Inevitably, certain combinations will perform better than others. Once identified, the poorly converting campaigns can be discontinued, the high-converting campaigns can be scaled, and new campaigns can be created to split test against the high-converting campaigns. The best advertising brains in the world can’t write perfect ads and create perfect landing pages on their first try. It’s impossible to perfectly predict how different segments of people will react to different offers. The important thing is to start with a few best guesses and then continually test to maximize each campaign’s return on investment.

If you can’t tell me exactly how much a lead from any given channel costs, and exactly what percentage of those leads will convert into customers, then you are essentially gambling with your advertising budget. By implementing tracking techniques, you will be able to identify exactly where you are making money and where you are wasting it and ensure that the overall return on investment from all advertising channels will go up month after month.