Analysis Archives - Strategic Digital Marketing with CNC

Looks good, talks the talk .. Does NOT perform. Change or Get Rid !!

May 24, 2013 By chrisw 1 Comment

If you are a business owner or a Sales Director then you know EXACTLY what I mean when I talk about a salesperson that you had working for you who looked the part, said all the right things but did NOT actually DO THE BUSINESS.

What do you do with them?

Well, the first thing you do is start agonising over them. What are we going to do with George or Jane? What’s the issue? Why don’t they bring in the deals? Can we fix them? Are they a lost cause? Should we just cut our losses and get rid?

When I was in IT companies it was actually a pretty big deal to get rid of a salesperson. We used to talk about it being a loss of £50-100K if we got it wrong hiring a salesperson. Of course on the other hand there was an ongoing loss taking place if they weren’t bringing in enough business to cover themselves and more.

Actually, when you break it down, there are only a few reasons why they don’t make it: Not enough ACTIVITY, Not enough (SALES) SKILLS, Not enough KNOWLEDGE, Not enough DESIRE – being some of the top ones.

How do you find out where the problem is ???? You ANALYSE the data.

If it’s ACTIVITY it will show in things like number of phone calls, meetings, proposals etc If it’s in SKILLS or KNOWLEDGE then it will show in lack of CONVERSIONS. If it’s in DESIRE – you will probably know already – but you could do tests to back up your gut feel and experience.

Eventually you will work out whether that sharp suited , smooth talking salesperson has to go or will stay.

Now, you see lots of sharp suited, smooth talking websites and Internet Presences around; slick looking websites that say all the right things …..

I don’t care for them much …

They cost a lot to build. They cost a lot to maintain. My question is, ‘What’s the Return? How many Visitors, Leads and Orders are YOU actually bringing in? – you flash piece of software you!’

To me a website is just like a salesperson (actually it is an ‘always on’ salesperson) and I have no time for a salesperson that just sits there looking good and saying all the right things.

Just like when I ran sales teams and sales forces I have ways of finding out (analysing) how virtual salespeople are performing and I also can tell whether it is an ACTIVITY issue (not enough traffic ) or a CONVERSION issue (it’s the same thing).

Either I will show you how to fix it or I will tell you how it needs to change.

The only thing you have to do is to realise that your website is just like a salesperson ……

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Commuters might not want traffic but we do – lots of it !! Go Fish !!

May 21, 2013 By chrisw 6 Comments

Traffic is the life blood of leads and new clients or customers

Once you have created that fine piece of content – go and PROMOTE it

If you are commuting in and out of town the last thing you want is lots of traffic – it clogs everything up and if it rains as well …. well you know what happens then !!

However, for Digital Marketers TRAFFIC is vital. When we produce CONTENT – a blog post, a video, a piece of research, a white paper etc etc we PROMOTE it wherever we can in order to find Traffic that we can CONVERT into visitors.

We are basically going Fishing!

We think about where we might find a likely school of fish and we drop in the baited hook. As I am not actually a fisherman I don’t want to get too technical on the analogy but we have various tools and our knowledge and experience – just as the deep sea fisherman has sonar and his knowledge and experience – to help us find these schools of fish.

However, for the fisherman and us it is not a precise science.

If we know what sort of fish we are looking for then we know roughly the best place to fish. However, like the oceans the Internet is a big place and sometimes the numbers are not there or if they are they are not the right type of people.

Also, we don’t really have big nets to catch people with – we have something more like a rod, line and bait.

So, before we get too caught up in this analogy the way it turns out is that you have to PROMOTE your Content and yourself in a number of different places and in a number of different ways before you get the visitors, leads and orders that you want.

You may have heard of the terms Owned Media , Paid Media and Earned Media? Basically it means that you use your own digital assets to promote something e.g. your social media accounts; you pay for promotion e.g. on Facebook or you ‘earn’ promotion e.g. somebody takes your blog and refers to it in theirs – just like I am going to do with this blog from Matt Gratt over at BuzzStream who goes into more detail about Content Promotion. Here’s another blog post for you on the same subject.

We often use the HubSpot phrase ‘Get FOUND, CONVERT and then ANALYSE how you did it’.

Getting found in Google searches for relevant search words and phrases is certainly one way of getting traffic. Recently we blogged about how we got top positions in Google searches for Wealth Management related searches where the amount of traffic is huge (20-55 million responses ).

One of the primary objectives of the Digital Marketing Ecosystem is to build you a platform from which you can dominate almost any search term. It is, in some ways, a little strange to think that we can dominate ‘Wealth Management‘ with our Digital Marketing orientated Internet Presence.

Getting found in Google searches is just Option 1 of many promotion options. Within this option there are many potential sub-options e.g. different ways of getting a natural or organic listing – using websites or blogs, Domain Name Optimisation (DNO), Google Maps etc. We could also resort to Pay per Click or Adwords if we wanted to.

Another way of finding traffic is to buy or rent an email list and send out a Solo Advertisement . How effective it is depends on many factors but it is certainly an option.

Also options are the use of the various Social Media sites and again in various ways. Each of the of the Social Media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Google +, YouTube, Pinterest etc) have different options for promotion and advertising. Some of the promotional options are not as expensive as you might think – at least once you have worked out how to do them cost effectively they aren’t anyway.

There are many other options for where you can find traffic,some mentioned in the blog links I included.

We have not really spoken about the ‘Path to Conversion’ i.e. once your promoted content has been found how someone becomes a lead and then, eventually, a client or customer.

This is deliberate because what I want to talk about here is TRAFFIC.

TRAFFIC in many ways overcomes shortcomings in content quality. This is a hotly debated topic. Some people think that you have to have ‘High Quality’ to get the ‘right traffic’ or visitors. It is , in fact, only partly true. Actually there are many, many examples of ‘good enough being good enough’. Your blogs don’t have to be perfect they have to be good enough. Your videos don’t have to be perfect, good enough will do it. In some cases too high quality can work against you and mediocre quality can work for you.

Whatever the truth of this what I want you to do is to think about TRAFFIC and PROMOTION.

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It’s the only way to do it !!

January 31, 2013 By chrisw Leave a Comment

Yesterday I was sitting in on our presentation to a client who had an interesting background – CEO of a social music start-up, social media expert, R&D senior exec., writer and engineer in the VoIP world. We had been through our initial fact finding questions and had had a couple of sessions where we researched further into what his main goals were and what we would set as gates and targets against which we could measure our progress. We were getting on to ” actions ” – what we would actually do to help him to reach his business objectives – his real, specific objectives.

We had also talked about the fact that we had the technology to predict what sort of return we could expect from specific marketing efforts on a particular objective and therefore we could measure what we were achieving against what we should achieve and if necessary adjust and improve what we were doing to hit the theoretical targets. Oh ‘estimate what should happen and then compare the results’ he said – getting what we saying straight away.

We also talked a lot about who we were trying to reach and how we would reach them. There was debate about the best way to reach a particular demographic. There was a difference of opinion which was resolved by the idea of split-testing the campaign to see which worked best and then homing in on that approach.

This was one of the best collaborative skype discussions I have heard (although we actually have been having some good ones).

At the moment we are ending our conversations by getting feedback on what we have said and done and checking that this is in line with what is expected. Good practice anyway but we are really trying to get our processes right before expanding our client and partner base further.

When we asked our client about the session he said ‘Well, it’s the only way to do it!’ .

This gives me great confidence that we are on track to a process that CEOs will relate to because it really focuses on the achievement of the business objectives through Digital Marketing methods and shows the CEO what the Return on Investment (ROI) of particular aspects of the Digital Marketing process is and what the overall ROI is.