The key question that you always want to start with is…

WHAT IS A WIN FOR ME?

What is your business goal?

Launching a new product?
Capturing market share in a specific segment?
Setting a revenue target for a certain business unit?
Cutting down customer support costs by 25%?
Getting more from the advertising campaigns?

Identify these key metrics. This is the foundation to design of all marketing campaigns. It also plays a central role in using web analytics as an intelligence tool.

THE ROLE OF YOUR WEBSITE

Once you have clarity on business outcomes, the next step is to understand where and how your website can help you in achieving those outcomes.

A few examples of what your website can do –

1. Sell the product(s) online.
2. Answer questions, facilitate discussion forums and cut down support costs.
3. Capture leads for the sales funnel.
4. Build a database of prospects by getting them to sign up for a newsletter.
5. Engage customers and others before and after the trade show.
6. Promote and support sharing of your content on social media portals and RSS feeds. This can pull targeted prospects to you, and/or improve customer support and lower the cost.
7. Credibility that helps in closing deals in the sales process.

Each of these adds economic value to your business. Quantify that.

If you are in a B2B model, what is the potential value of a lead? How many leads do you need on average to convert one customer? What is the lifetime value of a customer?

If you are in a B2C model, how many coupons have consumers downloaded? What is the revenue from that?

If a prospect subscribes to your RSS feed, you have a very effective real time channel to distribute information. With quality content, this becomes a nice customer relationship development channel that helps the sales force in converting leads and quantifying the gains.

How many fewer phone calls did you receive since you launched a technical support portal? Did it help in cutting down support costs?

If you did email marketing before a tradeshow, how many leads did it produce? Did it provide value to your business?

Design information architecture of your website to help this asset realize its full value.

WHY DO THIS?

When you think of your website and the whole marketing program in terms of desired outcomes, it helps you in a number of ways.

1. You know what to measure. And as Peter Drucker says, “What gets measured gets managed.”
2. You know what your marketing is contributing to the business bottom-line.
3. It forces you to think in terms of different market segments. Organize and plan for each segment. This is a key to capturing market share and sustaining revenue targets.
4. It guides your focus to customer behavior, and not aggregates. The website gets 10,000 visits a month – so what? What does it mean to the business bottom-line, if anything?

What is your experience with the website design? I would love to hear your ideas on it as well.

WISE Web Intelligence Series – Measure and Achieve Business Outcomes

1. WISE Part One – Role of Website
2. WISE Part Two – Implement System to Measure and Test
3. WISE Part Three – Segment the Data
4. WISE Part Four – End Customer Behavior

1. We all have persistent thoughts, emotions, and reactive patterns that control us unless we are aware of it. It is conditioned by our upbringing, culture, family background …etc. Tolle calls it our ego.
2. Our thoughts, our actions, our emotions (expressed or not) create an energy field – positive and negative. And this energy field is connected with that of all others in the universe wielding tremendous influence on our thoughts, relationships and direction. Eckhart Tolle calls it the Pain Body. It’s also called Maya or Karma. I have read about the being part of the universal energy field in a number of sources – Shakti Gawain’s Creative Visualization, Jon Kabatzinn’s Wherever you go there you are, Swami Chinmayananda’s Self Unfoldment, Herbert Benson’s Relaxation Response, Dr Andrew Weil’s Spontaneous Healing to name a few of them.

The book showed me how to be aware of the ego and the Pain Body, and how to create consciousness that my ego and my Pain Body aren’t me. I am part of the same universal energy that brings life to everything on the earth. Being aware of it, and tapping into the positive energy by consciously guiding my thoughts and action in a positive direction helps me bring the joy from inside.

The book introduced three ways in which to think of everything we do.

1. Accept – I am stuck in pouring rain with a flat tire in the car. There is no help to call on, and I need to replace the tire in middle of the rain. Simply accept the situation, be at peace with it, and do what is required. Getting frustrated, angry, upset, worried, tense don’t help. And it creates negative energy that adds to the ego and the Pain Body. Simply avoid that.
2. Enjoy – Think of routine tasks that I do – brush my teeth, take shower, make coffee, drive, chores that I do at home or work, routine tasks at work that are part of everyday life. Be in complete awareness while doing these tasks. Simply remain mindful, pay attention to them without thinking about other things, ideas, and worries from the past or future. Enjoy them. While practicing this, the natural joy from inside comes out, and brings new inspiration, ideas, dimension and meaning to routine life. I have read a few things about mindfulness, and how it heals, enriches us. I know there is a lot of medical research now in Psychineuroimmunology (Psycho-Neuro-Immunology – PNI) that emphasizes mindfulness, and how it unblocks inner powers of healing and growth. The book showed me how to implement it in a simple way.
3. Enthusiasm – when there is goal or vision from inside that is propelling action, there is an additional energy and positive tension. That’s enthusiasm. When that happens you are in a zone, or a flow. Things become effortless, and a lot of energy and drive take our effectiveness to a completely different level. We can do, achieve things, we never knew or thought we were capable of. Stephen Covey taught me about having a vision and a mission that infuses life to everything in life; that is when I read The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. The point had driven home then, and this reinforced it for me.

A New Earth – You realize that you are that higher self. Your mind, your thoughts, your emotions aren’t you. When you develop that inner awareness and you start being part of the collective consciousness you see the world in a new light – it becomes a new earth.

Tolle drove the point home so well in the book that developing this consciousness is the next in human evolution. The problems we create as individuals, societies, nations are from the ego and the Pain Body. Whether we recognize that, and whether we become part of universal consciousness will define whether we – the human kind – will go to the next higher plane of existence or become extinct. That is because worries, fear, ego, wars, conflicts, destructive mindset can last only for so long. The book has a nice analogy – some of the reptiles were forced to evolve or become extinct – and they learned how to fly becoming birds. Some others didn’t, and the species became extinct.

Where do I start? Be in the moment – the present moment – completely. It will recreate that connection with the Higher Self, and bring out the flow of energy again.

Stay in the flow. The book has a nice quote that has stayed with me… The fourteenth-century Persian poet and Sufi master Hafiz, “I am a hole in the flute that the God’s breath moves through. I enjoy the music.”

Here are my tips on it.

1. Have a professional presence. Have a Facebook page that is consistent with your logo, branding and marketing message. Facebook has a number of options and technology support to customize the presence.
2. Have conversion architecture. Extend the same ideas that you incorporate into your website and other media to Facebook pages as well. Have specific goals, define clearly what you would like your page visitors to do, and guide them to the desired calls to action.
3. Create marketing campaigns – Use promotions, giveaways, surveys, user groups …etc. Answer questions, provide insights about your product or service, or share value-add information.
4. Integrate Facebook page into other marketing channels. Email marketing and social media go really well hand in hand. Weave in social media in your website design as well. Link Facebook with your business accounts on LinkedIn, YouTube and Twitter. Blog posts should go to your Facebook page, automate that and add value to your Facebook followers.
5. Add, update content consistently. Content is the currency of digital marketing. A good content strategy helps you leverage content on a number of media and channels maximizing bang for the “buck”. Also, it helps you with effective public relations AND cutting down customer support cost.

Download whitepaper and learn more about how to make the most out of your Facebook page.

Now, it’s your turn. Have you used Facebook for your business? What is your experience with it? I would love to hear more from you.

1. Make sure your business is listed on local online portals.
2. Keep your information consistent across all different online identities.
3. Build your social media capital using online reviews. This is a lot simpler now with the range of automated tools and services that are available now. Ask us about it, if you aren’t sure how.
4. Get a competitive analysis to understand clearly what your competition is what they are doing.
5. Have a clear plan to make sure your target prospects see you when they are looking for your product or service.

Would you like to learn more about it? Download this whitepaper on Local Business Listings.

How well has marketing worked for creating exposure for your local market? I would love to hear more about that as well.

John does three things so well; I can’t wait to learn them myself –

1. He is an amazing story teller.
2. He connects with heart.
3. He brings out his personality so naturally.

John Madden – a consummate storyteller

I got to hear him first time in 1991. He was giving a sports interview. His every answer had a story. What captivated me right away was the way he told the stories. Since then, I have heard him zillion times as NFL commentator. Whether it’s about scouting a team, or visiting a player, or giving comments on the game action, he always showed flair for bringing out vivid stories.

That makes him memorable and fun to watch and listen.

Connects with Heart

When he speaks, it creates that intuitive feeling in me to like him, to believe in him. It’s a fun experience, and never an exercise in long explanations.

In sales trainings, and in public speaking workshops, I always hear that people buy with the heart, and rationalize with logic.
John has that knack of connecting with/to heart. Maybe, that’s part of the reason he has created such a powerful brand for himself.

A Natural

I get to see and feel what he means in his voice, gestures and humor. I have never seen a speaker and communicator being so good in bringing his personality out so naturally.

He played football. He coached football. And then, he gave commentary on football. Maybe, that gives him that platform to put it all together. But, the way he puts it together every time he speaks, blows me away completely. He brings out his ingenuity, his natural self. He is so at home with himself, and makes you feel at home around him as well.

Communication matters so much no matter what we do. Almost everything we do involves others, and being able to relate and connect naturally is such a big asset.

I would absolutely cherish and love an opportunity to have a coffee with him, and enjoy the moment.

How inspiring an opportunity that would be!

The humongous volcano under the park creates variety of geothermal effects of geysers, hot springs, and mud pots. The plateau that is at the elevation of 7000 feet, and the mountains, rivers and lakes around it make for the incredible splendor and stunning natural beauty.

We started our trip at the Grand Teton National Park. There is a huge lake surrounded by mountains all around, and the clean water creates incredible effects with reflection.  The reflection of snow covered Grand Teton peak literally took away my breathe. The word that came to mind while looking at the view was serene.

The Old Faithful at the Yellowstone was at the top of the list, as we had heard so many legends of it. The geyser shoots up more than 100 feet in the air every 90 minutes or so. Seeing it irrupt was quite an experience. The hot water and micro-organisms create amazing colorful patterns on the ground.

We went to the Mammoth Hot Springs. The hot water is flowing down the mountain rocks. The kaleidoscope of colors and patterns on the ground have created the landscape that is so hard to imagine. I was looking at quotes from different people at one of the visitors center inside the park. I saw words from Fred Remington in the list, and they have stayed with me, “Paint can’t touch it and words are wasted.” Couldn’t have said better than that….

It’s like the Mother Nature bringing out her artistic side, and painting the land and sculpting the mountains in to an incredible piece of art – a piece that spreads over more than two million acres. That’s how big the park is. The last time the volcano had irrupted was 640,000 years ago. The kind of forces that created the natural wonder of this scale are beyond my imagination.

But, here we were right in the middle of all of it.

One visible proof, the iconic symbol of Mother Nature’s power and majesty, is I think the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. The fault activity of the earthquake, the thermal effects of geysers and heat on the rhyolite rocks , and melting of the ice after the ice age created the canyon. The high iron content of the rock on the canyon walls is literally oxidizing even today giving them incredible range of colors.

The Mother Nature’s mesmerizing mosaic evolving and showcasing ever so new vivid colors everyday…

Walking early in the morning along the Madison River was a very soothing, heartwarming experience. The ambiance is so quiet early in the morning, the only sounds you hear are music of flowing water and birds greeting the morning with their sweet voices and songs. Sun comes out creating incredible range of colors around mountain edges and surface of the river. Looking at the soothing flow of water, listening to the natural music, and soaking in colors of the nature took me in completely.

Nathaniel Langford has powerful words, “There is a majestic harmony in the whole.”

Harmony is the word. Nature always has that power to soothe and heal. Isn’t it? The vacation gave us an opportunity to take a pause from hectic pace, and be close to the nature. Albert Einstein once said that the world has one collective conscience, and being in harmony with it, embracing all of the things and living creatures in it, and tearing down our walls of narrow perceptions and attachments is very liberating. I feel blessed to be part of that harmony in my moments at the Yellowstone.



How therapeutic and invigorating!

We feel recharged. We are rejuvenated. And now,  even more inspired to focus on the world we want to create.

1. Communication, such as advertising, workshops, customer-user groups, trade shows, whitepapers, brochures, case studies, and customer support.
2. Networking, such as the sales force speaking directly to prospects and customers, business channels development, industry events, and focus groups.

How does the communication and networking help?

1. Answer a question.
2. Solve a problem.
3. Fulfill a need.
4. Establish thought leadership.

Or, simply put – it is the quality content and conversations.

Now, the internet and social media provide you with a unique opportunity leverage this content for an effective marketing strategy.
It can help you with:

1. Customer support and service
2. Manage your reputation
3. Branding
4. Generate leads
5. Networking. You can spread your word of mouth 24/7.

Content Strategy – Content

Use competitive analysis to identify relevant market niches. A specific industry or group of users, certain demographics, geography, or an age group are examples of market niches.

Who is the prospect you need to reach in each niche? What would you like that prospect to do? Is there anything calling the prospect to action, such as a request to call, download a whitepaper, buy a product online, or sign up for a newsletter?

Your website should provide the information a prospect needs to act.  Choose the kind of topics that will help them do that. Customer-use cases will demonstrate to them how you are solving their problems today.

Focus on creating optimized content that is specific to what your target audience is searching for.

Content Strategy – Conversations

Use the content to build interactivity with your customers, prospects, and target audience.

Social Media Strategy

A social media strategy can help expand your reach while saving the cost.

How can it help?

• Support customers.
• Augment your networking and word of mouth – reach out to and pull new prospects.
• Expand your reach using the power of syndication.
• Save cost.
• Create synergies with other marketing initiatives.

A social media strategy can expand your reach through syndication, while saving money. It can also help with customer support and augment your networking and word of mouth to pull in new prospects.

Email Marketing

It can help by:

• Cultivating relationships with customers, prospects and people in your industry.
• Introducing new ideas and gauging their effectiveness.
• Synergizing with other marketing initiatives such as advertisements and trade shows.

Search Engines

Eighty-nine percent of the people using search engines are looking for answers early in the buying cycle. Be the one to answer the questions and you’ll do wonders for your branding, lead generation and public relations.

Website

Your website is the glue that holds your marketing together. It’s a key component of a content strategy. Use its 24/7 presence to leverage advertising, social media interactions, email marketing, tradeshows, or any other offline marketing initiative. Your website is a critical piece in your search engine strategy.

Use analysis based on real data before deciding which media will be the most effective for your content strategy.  Don’t go by hunches.

How much time do you invest in creating customer support documentation, and answering calls? How well are you able to leverage it for branding, leads generation and relationships? I would love to hear more about it from you.

1. Get actionable insights for selling your product or service.
2. Cut down support cost.
3. Maximize the return from marketing investment.
4. Optimize allocation of the marketing budget between different channels and campaigns.
5. Uncover business potential.

In this series, I will introduce the different pieces that make up an effective web analytics system.

Before, you go and implement the system, make sure to keep the bottom-line business objectives very clear. What are your desired business outcomes?

1. Launching a new product?
2. Capturing market share in a specific segment?
3. Setting a revenue target for a certain business unit?
4. Cutting down customer support costs by 25%?
5. Getting more from the advertising campaigns?

Identify these key metrics. This is the foundation to using web analytics as an intelligence tool.

Four pieces of the puzzle – WISE

Website
Implementation of the system
Segmentation for refined understanding of customers
End customer behavior metrics

WISE Part One – Role of the Website

Your website is a focal point of your digital identity. It ties in ALL of your marketing initiatives. It can help you maximize the business resources.

A website can help:

1. Sell products
2. Generate Leads
3. Cultivate brand value
4. Build reputation and credibility
5. Support customers
6. Communicate a lot more easily inside the company

Define the desired outcomes for the website.

WISE Part Two – Implement System to measure and test

The web analytics tools like Google Analytics capture a lot of data. Key is to filter it and distill it to presentation that brings out actionable insights. Interpreting the data and tying it to the business bottom-line is crucial for web intelligence.

Also make sure that the data is clean.

Use the website and analytics to unify all marketing channels – online and offline.

WISE Part Three – Segment the data

How do the acquisition channels compare for pulling in targeted prospects?

How do different market persona/segments behave?

What does it take to sell a specific product or service?

Answers to questions like these give specific feedback that can be used for improving sales. And segmentation helps in zooming into these specific answers.

WISE Part Four- End Customer Behavior

Raw data metrics such as number of visitors, aggregate bounce rate don’t mean much. When you focus on meaningful customer behavior, you get to see how the customers behave and think. You also get clear understanding of how well the marketing campaigns are working to deliver the desired outcomes.

Wise Web Intelligence Series – Measure and Achieve Business Outcomes

1. WISE Part One – Role of Website
2. WISE Part Two – Implement System to Measure and Test
3. WISE Part Three – Segment the Data
4. WISE Part Four – End Customer Behavior

What are your challenges in understanding customer behavior? What has worked for you? I would love to hear more on it.

Go no further than your current customers, and pool of prospects.

Are you maximizing your potential from them?

Where do you start?

Retain your current customers.  Grow your relationships with them, expand your engagement  and augment business potential.
Convert your existing pool of prospects.

Develop a database with all of these contacts. As Seth Godin explained in his book Permission Marketing, this is the most important asset a business can have. Implement a system to follow through and track them.

How can you achieve that?

Think about how you can add value for them. Educate them and establish your leadership and credibility. Cultivate interactivity.
Does this sound like a lot to do? It doesn’t have to be if you use the right technology, tools and organize your business. When done right, this actually can cut down your marketing budget and free resources that you can leverage for other business initiatives.

Email marketing

Email marketing is the most effective and the least expensive marketing tool when used in the right way.

How can it help?

1. As a channel to introduce new ideas. Test new products and concepts.
2. As a guide for your customers and prospects with answers to frequently asked questions. This will cut down your support costs as well.
3. In creating synergies with other marketing channels such as trade shows, promotions, social media channels (link to that post), and other off-line marketing channels.

Social media channels

Social media channels help create synergies and cultivate interactive relationships.

How?

1. They provide cost-effective, automated channels to distribute information that can go viral. They can help pull prospects to you and also convert them.
2. By bringing down customer support costs while using the same content and channels to build branding and credibility.
3. By interacting with your customers and prospects directly. You can use their experiences and feedback for business insights.

Some of the channels you can use right away include YouTube, blogs, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, SlideShare, and Squidoo.

Maximize returns from other marketing channels.

Create opportunities for synergies among your ongoing marketing initiatives. Get more out of them. The internet and social media provide unique opportunities for that. Stay tuned for more on this in another post in this series.

Measure, test and learn

With web analytics and testing, you have a system to understand what works and what doesn’t in your customer service, marketing and business development. It shows you ways to delight your customers and improve the way you sell.

Use that to refine your business strategy, and get more from the investment.

Think of your total market as a combination of different segments. Each of these segments has its own “personality”. This is continuation of my thoughts from the previous blog in this series – create and capture niches.

Bryon and Jeffrey Eisenberg coined the word “persona” in their book – Are You Waiting for Your Cat to Bark?: Persuading Customers When They Ignore Marketing. They also brought up three questions to ask for each persona. I keep that nugget with me all the time.

Who are they?

What would you like them to do?

What information would make them comfortable in taking that action?

Your website is the glue that holds your marketing together. Design your site’s information architecture with this in mind. You can never spend enough time on this critical piece of your marketing strategy.

Use the website to then launch different marketing campaigns and to capture and measure results.

This leads us to the point of using web analytics.

Web Analytics

Web Analytics will explain to you what works and what doesn’t in your marketing.

Analyze each target market by segment. You should be able to clearly see the effectiveness of each marketing channel. How many visits does it take for a website visitor from a given segment before taking the desired action?

Do user experience analysis using A/B and multivariate testing.

These analytical tools, when used on your website, give you a powerful way to understand your prospects and pull them to you. Stay tuned for my last post in this series on this.

Create and Leverage Synergy among Marketing Channels

Off line marketing can still be valuable. Trade shows, workshops, direct mails, TV/radio/magazine advertisement make sense in many business cases.

When you use these channels, use your website to maximize your gains. Guide people to specific action before a trade show, for example. Then have landing pages on your website that include calls to action – it could be a special offer, or a whitepaper to download, or answers to their specific questions.

Web analytics helps you in tracking your integration. With this you can also measure and maximize your returns from off-line marketing channels.

If you look at different acquisition channels, you’ll be able to understand how your target audience behaves and thinks.

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Website and web analytics are critical to the marketing strategy of any company, whether it’s B2B or a B2C business case.

How do you use website as part of your marketing strategy? I would love to hear your thoughts and see your questions and concerns.