But I think big data has big implications for small and growing companies as well.

Small and mid-sized organizations can also benefit from big data insights. Small companies can generate their own big data. Most companies are generating some sort of industry niche data. Collecting it, and making the data available are the next steps.

Given the growing importance of sharing quality fresh content, I think it’s important for all of us to investigate what type of data we’re generating, what it means, and how we can appropriately share it with our prospects and clients.

• The McKinsey big data report cites retail as an industry sector that can realize substantial savings by leveraging big data. Retail is an industry where big data can be used both internally and is also something that can be shared and acted on internally.
• Any company that processes a high number of transactions, or monitors changes in niche data is capable of generating its own rich sets of big data. If the data reveals a window into a niche industry trend, or an insight that your company can offer, it’s potentially valuable and could be part of building lucrative business partnerships and attract new types of customers who see value in your insights.

In the past, we used to rely on market research companies to deliver data and insights. While companies may still need this type of third-party support, I think many of us are now in a position to leverage increasingly larger sets of data, and wrap our own qualitative insights around them.

Nerdy But Neat

More and more sources of data become available each day. And many data sources are available via an API (application programming interface). In turn, this data can be used in a separate program, manipulated automatically, and displayed on the web and smartphones.

For example, Google makes their charts API publicly available for free. This allows you to display a graphical representation of live data on your Web site. You store your data in one place (you could use a free Google Docs spread sheet), or you grab data from somewhere else, then point the Google Charts API at it. Voila, you’ve got a cool-looking chart that automatically gets drawn on your Web site.

The Google Charts API is quite easy-to-use, fun, and potentially very interesting to your clients and prospects. Along with a little wrapper of what it means, you’re starting to provide data-backed insights for your clients. Do it on a password-protected portion of your Web site for clients. Provide a scaled-down “free” version of it on the public-facing portion of your Web site.

Conclusion

Whether it’s information about their FedEx order, aggregated data about their industry segment, or just the most popular-selling items, you can use a combination of big data and readily-available APIs to create extra value for your clients. Big data is a big trend wave that small business can ride as well.

But the Post Service is getting long in the tooth, and they’re bleeding out. They ended their Fiscal Year 2011 with a $5.1 billion loss. Whoa. That’s some serious coin.

The United States Postal Service is desperate

I know it’s easy to arm chair quarterback. But they totally missed the boat on email. They could have been, in my opinion, the definitive source of federated “First-Class Email.” Instead of everyone having a personal email address with Yahoo!, or Gmail, whatever, we could all have personal “official” usps.com email addresses. The Postal Service could have been the world’s largest data center for managing email, combating spam, hiring engineers to come up with innovative new ways to deliver information to customers.

Who knows? The Postal Service could have been leading the charge on mobile. So much for that pipe dream.

The Tipping Point

The tipping point was in 2006. That’s when the amount of email whizzed past the amount of First-Class Mail being sent. Given the Postal Service’s reliance on First-Class Mail as 49% of its revenues, this is a grave situation.

What do you do when you can’t increase revenues? You cut costs. And that’s exactly what the Postal Service is doing. They’re trimming wherever they can. And it’s not pretty, because the number of addresses to which they’re delivering is increasing. Simultaneously, the Postal Service is pulling back on the number of hours it works, and closing down large Post Offices. They’re trying to stop the bleeding.

In order for the Postal Service to become profitable again (perhaps another pipe dream), it needs to cut tens of billions of dollars in annual costs. That’s no easy feat. It would require aggressive slashing of $20 billion in costs over four years to achieve profitability.

Sorry to be cynical. I just don’t know if they can do it.

Direct Mail

The Postal Service is struggling to keep up with the surge of online advertising and marketing that is eating them alive, byte by byte. Meanwhile, the Postal Service is encouraging direct mail campaigns. Why? Because direct mail is growing and it’s effective. In 2010, American advertisers spent $44.9 billion on direct mail, representing a 2.3 percent increase over the previous year. Direct mail is forecasted to grow 3.6 percent annually through 2014.

• Catalogs: 4.92% response rate
• Postcards: 3.99% response rate
• Letter-sized direct mail: 3.42% response rate

Even though direct mail is effective, and the Postal Service is justified in spending resources to encourage direct mail, some would claim they’re only rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

My 2 Cents

I say continue to use snail mail as part of your marketing mix. It’s still effective to send a creative direct mail piece. Innovate, and use direct mail as a complement to your larger, more effective digital marketing efforts, like email marketing.

When we draft a single email to a single recipient it’s most relevant. We’ve crafted a message intended for one, specific person. It’s hopefully going to be right on target. But once we start sending the same email to more than one person (cc) we run the risk of the message becoming diluted. And when we use email campaign software to send a “blast” we run the risk of being totally irrelevant for an uncomfortably large number of people.

So how do we remain relevant while embarking on an email marketing campaign?

What Triggers An Email Campaign?

We build email campaigns for different reasons. Most of the time they’re on our content calendars.

• Monthly newsletter
• Product announcements
• Summary of blog posts

But we can also define certain events that will trigger an email campaign:

• Product inquiries - Gathering the email addresses for each of the product inquires during the course of a month, week, day. Send them an email that is contextually relevant.
• Purchases - Same as above, except for purchases. These are real, live customers who could potentially be ripe for an up sell or cross sell.
• Downloads from Web site – What happens when someone downloads a case study, whitepaper, or anything else from our Web site. Does it generate a prospect list for sales? It may be more appropriate if it generates an email campaign. Once the prospect has been softened up, then they can be thrown over the wall to sales.

Software For Making Email Campaigns More Contextually Relevant

There are increasingly more software solutions for managing email marketing. Marketing automation is a relatively new buzzword out there. Check out Marketing Automation Software Guide for cogent breakdowns on who’s who. Marketing automation software is going to cost more money. But if you’ve got budget and people to manage it, it may well be worth the effort.

Still, a lot of contextual relevancy can still be baked into good old-fashioned (inexpensive) email marketing. It simply takes some planning and creativity.

Anecdotally, I’ve noticed an impressive uptick this past year. At the beginning of 2011 I was seeing about 20% of my email campaign subscribers opening up my emails on mobile devices. Towards the end of 2011 that number has risen to 31%. My sample size is small at around 500 subscribers. But, still, it’s easy to see that mobile is quickly taking hold.

The take-away is that we need to be designing our email campaigns so they look great and perform well on mobile devices, as well as other email clients. When someone clicks on a link in your email, there’s a good chance they’re reading it on a smartphone. And that means they’re going to click through to see the landing page in a mobile Web browser. What is your mobile Web site exprience like?

Ultimately, we have to examine our own subscriber lists and meet people where they’re at.

• What do our subscribers use to open email?
• Can we segment our email campaign subscriber lists based on email client usage?
• Is there a special experience we can design for our growing mobile customer base?

What does the smartphone market penetration look like? This recent graphic from Nielsen gives us a quick breakdown:

I’m the same way. Whenever I hear about how much something costs I instinctively try to think of a way to do it for less – less budget, less time. The United States is a consumer society. We’ve been trained to watch for sales and get a good deal. And we want instant gratification.

But sometimes our appetite is bigger than our budget.

What are some some of the ways to save budget and still get high quality?

Like many others, I’m starting to think about all of the things for which I’m thankful. The list goes on and on.

One of the things we have in the United States, and the First World, for that matter, is abundance. Sometimes I’m thankful for abundance. Other times, it’s too much. Too much is unhealthy. Indeed, extremes on either end of the spectrum can leave us feeling uneasy.

As humans, we naturally gravitate towards homeostasis. But if we find ourselves on one extreme end of the abundance spectrum we tend to overcompensate, because we’re seeking balance.

In September 2008 I went to China and saw what too much looked like. I saw too many people, too much pollution, too much poverty. Abundance was everywhere, but not the good type of abundance.

When it comes to marketing and advertising I think we all agree. Too much is rarely good.

As a consumer, too much advertising and marketing cheapens the experience. It makes us feel like we’re being sold too hard. When we’re exposed to an inordinate amount of advertising from one source, it makes us feel like they’re trying too hard, as if they’re desperate.

Too much advertising can make us numb. We start to ignore the advertising from that brand. If it’s a “special” offer, and we’ve seen it a million times, we’re not exactly motivated to jump off our seats and rush to buy. We know we’ll get another offer in a week, or so.

So it goes with growing businesses. We need to gauge how much we’re messaging our clients and prospects. What is the right amount?

Finding the right balance is a discovery process that leads to a good abundance—an abundance of happy customers!

I realize there’s an increasing number of growing companies that have aspirations of doing their own corporate videos. But it can be a daunting and sometimes intimidating task.

That’s why I decided to ask Marc Silber for some tips on how companies can approach the idea of creating a corporate video.

Marc provides some helpful production tips in the video. Also, he’s published a free E-book on the topic.

I hope you enjoy this brief interview. It was a lot of fun to do and taught me a lot about the preparation process. My advice is to follow Marc’s main theme you’ll hear: prepare.

One of the interesting stats it highlights is that more than 1 in 5 social media messages include links to content. Our social media strategy doesn’t need to live in a silo. Social media can be woven into our overall content strategy.

Click on the infographic blow. Then, expand to the full screen version by clicking in the upper right-hand corner.

]]> http://gregjordandesign.com/blog/content-marketing-infographic/feed/ 0 http://gregjordandesign.com/blog/content-marketing-infographic/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/GregJordanDesignBlog/~3/xIAsyz-SQnw/ http://gregjordandesign.com/blog/web-site-functionality-and-seo/#comments Wed, 12 Oct 2011 16:24:43 +0000 Greg http://gregjordandesign.com/?p=1751 We’ve all experienced frustrating moments when we’ve visited Web sites. Maybe it was slow to load, or we couldn’t quickly find what we were looking for. But did you know that a Web site’s design can affect search engine optimization (SEO)?

While content is still king, your Web site’s structure can also play a role in your search engine ranking. Your site can feature amazing content, but if it’s difficult to navigate and it’s not immediately evident where the content is located, it’s not ranking as high as it ought to in the search engines.

Google, Bing, Yahoo!, and the other search engines keep their search algorithms top secret. But some of the core SEO principles have been cracked. And some of these core principles have to do with design.

Here are some of the basic (and easy) design principles that will automatically put you head and shoulders above many other Web sites. While some of these pointers may seem intuitive it’s surprising how many times they aren’t there:

These are just a few tips. Some of the easy ones. I hope some of these quick tips are helpful. Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions.

You can talk about your products and services until you’re blue in the face. But if you believe in the old adage that a rising tide floats all boats then you’ll benefit from content marketing. It’s a way to develop leads and simultaneously position yourself as a market leader who can be seen as a valuable source of information.

Think of content marketing as when you provide your prospects and customers with something of value, regardless of whether they are buying something new or extra. You’re helping them by providing them with knowledge, tools, and insights that make them better in their own marketspaces.

Give And Ye Shall Receive

As a business-minded professional it’s natural to question the sanity of giving something away, other than throw-away swag with your logo pasted all over it. But the valuable content marketing pieces you distribute as a part of a content marketing strategy are more like software. Yes, it’s something of value. But hopefully it’s something digital, and hopefully it’s something that has a marginal cost of close to zero. Realistically, the content marketing pieces you distribute will probably cost less that the tchotchkes you commonly think of as promotional items.

Content Marketing & Lead Nurturing

If you require a brief amount of information to download the goodie (and I do mean brief, like just name and email address) you’re venturing into the realm of lead nurturing. There are many ways to harvest lead information, and requiring simple registration information for a content download is only one of them.

Keeping track of how a prospect has interacted with your company, how to score leads, and how to systematically nurture those leads along the pathway to purchase can all become quite sophisticated. There are enterprise software companies like Eloqua, Marketo, and others that specialize in developing lead nurturing platforms. But the

Integrating Content Marketing

The whole idea of content marketing is to provide value to your prospective buyers. In turn, you’re going to organically grow your sales leads. Marketing can continue to nurture those leads through all appropriate marketing channels until they’re ripe and ready to pass on to sales.

Once you first get someone’s contact information from content marketing piece, that’s only the beginning. Decide on how to score that lead (what’s their value as a potential buyer) and what types of marketing makes sense for that lead. Can you use mobile marketing tactics to appeal to them? Are they interested in whitepapers? What is it that you can give them and provide more value.

Ultimately, quality content marketing is going to help your whole industry sector. If a prospect ends up buying from your competitor, perhaps you have a chance to woo them away. Since you were a source of high quality content and you interacted with them during their decision-making process you’ve got a better chance at that. And if they do buy from you you can continue to use content marketing to enrich the customer relationship.