Image by Frank Gruber via Flickr

From time to time there are interesting marketing pieces that I come across. One such example comes your way from AwayFind.

In case you haven’t used it yet, AwayFind is a very useful service that alerts you via SMS/voice when emails deemed important by your own criteria hit your inbox. The service delivers the benefit of affording you uninterrupted time to focus without the distraction of having to constantly check your inbox. I love efficiency applications and I’ve found AwayFind to be a very useful tool for me.

Recently, I received an email message from AwayFind that caught my attention.  From the short personal and informal subject line to the unexpected content, it incited a reaction from me.   Read the copy of the email and see why I think this email was so effective below.

From: Jared Goralnick (AwayFind)
Date: Wed, Jul 6, 2011 at 1:15 PM
Subject: You and me…
To: The Marketing Tactician

Hi Scott,

I may not know you personally.

You don’t know me from any other tech geek with a web service or techie startup.

And we’ll probably never get the chance to meet.

But let me tell you a quick story, and ask you a quick favor…

I’m not just someone at a tech company.  My name is Jared.  I have several passions in life including swing dance and photography.

But my real passion, and what I’ve devoted my entire career to, is helping people to use technology as a vehicle rather than an obstacle to getting stuff done.  For the past 3 years, I’ve been consumed by AwayFind and helping people to escape their inbox— not just to help them become more efficient at their jobs or run their business better, but to allow them to spend more time with their family or whatever it is that makes their lives more whole.

So that’s my passion and the reason I created AwayFind.  I think that we offer a pretty good service.  But I know that it can be better.

And I know you can help me figure out how.  If you could spend two minutes and fill out a quick survey as a favor to me, it’d really help me to understand how we can do a better job…for you.

<<Thanks in advance for taking our 2 minute survey.>>

Here’s to time well spent,

Jared

AwayFind.com

Things I really like about this marketing effort are:

• The From: line includes a person’s name and their company so it’s easily identifiable
• The subject line is short (only 13 characters!) and seems directed to me… I’m the “me” in the “You and me…”
• The body copy is easily scanned and the bold text tells me what the message is about
• Jared tells an authentic story that helps me understand why Jared needs my help
• The content is unexpected. Most emails won’t walk me through my internal dialogue like this email has done. And it doesn’t come across as a marketing email to me. Jared is just asking for my opinion like a friend would ask me.
• The email has one call to action… Fill out a quick survey.
• Its marketing message is on point. AwayFind is all about saving time and the closing really hits the mark by tying in the survey with “time well spent“

Kudos to Jared and the AwayFind team for a great product and a fantastic example of email marketing!

What do you think about this email from AwayFind?

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When dealing with data, be smart. Apply a SMART dashboard to your metrics and data analysis efforts.

Much like SMART goals, SMART metrics ensure you measure the right data and that it is actionable.

When looking at web analytics and marketing campaigns I define my SMART metrics as:

Specific – To be useful, data needs to communicate something meaningful. Data that is not specific enough might as well be inaccurate. Decisions based on inaccurate or non-specific or overly broad data can lead to bad decisions. Be specific with the data you need and test your data collection’s quality.

Manageable – Metrics by their very nature are measurable so with SMART metrics, I aim to collect manageable metrics and digest them in a dashboard format. The curse of knowledge plays a role here. By reporting too many measurements your decision-making can get cloudy, distracting you from acting on the most important metrics. Keep your metric dashboard manageable by limiting it to the most important metrics. You can always use separate more detailed reports for deeper dive analysis.

Actionable – Data are most powerful when they are actionable.  If you can’t act on a metric, don’t waste time collecting, analyzing, and reporting it.  Ideally, your metrics will trigger an immediate action that will improve your bottom line. For example, you can test the subject lines of the emails you send.  Measure the open rates for a group of your emails with different subject lines.  Once you find which version has the best open rate, use this subject line for the rest of your emails to your email list.

Replicable – When starting out, you need to check your data for accuracy. Test data quality by seeing if its measurement is replicable.  For example, if you have traffic monitoring software you like, take another monitoring tool for a test drive and compare the two. Do your numbers match up? If not, find out why and make sure you are collecting accurate data.

Trending - Identify significant movements in specific metrics and determine the cause. Take the appropriate action. If you find that a program or campaign is doing particularly well driving a metric, see where else you can employ that tactic in other programs.

SMART metrics can improve your company’s bottom line.  Use them, see which work best, and monitor them in a digestible format. Your turn, what criteria do you use for your metrics dashboard?

As more companies go down the road of emphasizing the bottom line, emotional marketing is often discounted as a viable strategy for marketing spend.

However, for those interested in capturing higher margins for their company’s services, emotional marketing can be a sure fire way drive up value.  The beauty of emotional marketing is that it works on so many levels.  Emotional marketing increases the value of your service by positioning it in a way that lets your target customer experience a bevy of emotions.

B2B companies often ignore this type of tactic, but it can be very effective.  For example, many business services or products aim to save time for their customers. Capture that time savings and show how it can lead to spending more time with family or a hobby they love. Doing this can induce an emotional response that increases the value of your solution.

Experiencing the joy and anticipation of more time to do what you love is a winning proposition in an any environment. Inject some emotion into your marketing and drive up the value of your business.

How have you used emotional marketing in your marketing efforts?

With the Academy Awards last night, I’m reminded of how persuasive awards can be to prospective clients. Winners on Oscar night will forever be referred to as an “Academy award-winning” actor and companies can also capitalize on noteworthy awards.

From a marketing perspective, awards can be very powerful statements of strength. Awards serve as strong measures of validation for your company and its services. An award is a signal to prospects that what you are selling is deemed as best in its class.

So how do you get an “award-winning” product? It’s often easier than you might first expect. There are many organizations and events that give out awards. Much like the actor and movie guilds offer many opportunities to win awards in showbiz, most industries have multiple forums or channels that give out industry specific awards.

To get started, first you’ll want to research industry associations, magazines, websites, and tradeshows to see what awards exist. Then identify award categories that your customers and prospects will respect and focus on winning those. Apply to all the awards you think can help your company or service gain respect. For newer products, there are often newcomer awards that can give you a higher likelihood of winning, but still carry a lot of weight. The best part is that you only need to win one award to have an “award-winning” company or product.

Once you win an award, spread the word!

An award offers you the opportunity to share your success through multiple platforms and formats. Pepper the award into your marketing collateral and all your marketing channels. Share your press release with influential blogs, local business chronicles, and news outlets. Put your achievement on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and in your newsletter. Interview company executives about the award and create a podcast and or video to share internally and externally.  An award is noteworthy and should be shared to your heart’s content.  Be creative and spread the word!

How have you used awards in your marketing efforts?

In some organizations, branding is a bad word.  If your company needs marketing to prove their branding efforts and you find yourself fighting the view that marketing is only synonymous with advertising, listen up.  While branding may include marketing managing advertising, it is so much more than that. Branding delivers value across the company and it is crucial you speak of branding value in terms that non-marketers understand.

One tip in talking with executives resistant to “branding” is to talk about branding using different terminology.  I suggest you use reputation management instead of branding to better explain what marketers are striving to do for the company. Building and protecting your reputation really gets to the heart of branding for non-marketers.

An executive who thinks about branding in terms of reputation management will often be more supportive of what marketing can do for their company and place a higher value on these efforts. When a company and an executive’s own reputation is at stake, attention to how marketing can help will heighten.

So the next time you face resistance to branding initiatives, try to talk in more personal and grounded terms by talking about how your branding efforts will protect and build the company’s competitive position through reputation management.  That’s a bottom line we all can live with!

Thoughts?  How have you communicated what marketing can do for your organization?

As the year comes to a close, I can’t help but reflect on the year of 2010 – the year of the Tiger.  2010, you have been a good year, but at the same time, I know many of us are ready to see what 2011 has in store.

In my 2oo9 marketing year in review, I predicted, among other things, that 2010 would see a growth applying social media and mobile communications in the enterprise marketplace.  I was surprised at how quickly some companies adopted new marketing mediums.  Even more surprising to me was how many were still dragging their feet.

For 2011 my prediction is simple.  I expect a return to sanity.  What I mean by this is that I saw a lot of claims of social media and mobile marketing being a silver bullet for marketers.  I also continue to see some misinformed souls claim these mediums are just fads.  The reality is that new marketing mediums lie somewhere in between.

At the end of 2010, I’ve seen companies beginning to understand that these new marketing mechanisms aren’t just fads.  These platforms can be important components of marketing strategies.  And with the economic turmoil and uncertainty in the economic direction behind us, I expect companies to inject new digital/social/mobile technologies into an overarching marketing strategies.

To implement programs on these new mediums, marketers can learn from hundreds of case studies but I still go back to my mantra of “go where your customers are.” Equipped with this knowledge, it’s just a matter of using the appropriate tactics in your overall marketing strategy.  Whether it’s Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, FourSquare, Groupon, Apps or whatever platform that could be used to reach your customers, marketers need to keep thinking how marketing efforts can be integrated and leveraged on these platforms.

Good luck in 2011!

Aside from the timing and growth trajectory of the market you enter, defining the type of market you enter may be the most important thing you do to set your company out on the right foot.   Essentially, there are three types of markets you could potentially enter: existing, resegmented, and new.

Each require a different marketing approach and depending on your resources, some are better environments for your new business to succeed.  First, let me define these three markets.

Existing Market
The existing market is characterized by multiple competitors and has been around for a while, perhaps more than seven years.  If you are going to compete in this space you must differentiate yourself from others and have a huge bank account.  You may also compete on price by lowering your cost structure, but this is generally a silly way to enter the market. Expect to pay more than twice as much as the smallest viable competitor does on marketing to get noticed and carve your piece of the market.

Resegmented Market
I like to describe this market as an existing market that is experiencing a fundamental shift of needs that most competitors can’t accomplish.  So if you are marketing your new company in a resegmented market, you’ll need to both educate potential customers on the new issues of the market and explain how you solve these issues.  Fortunately, you’ll be more readily able to compete against smaller subset of competitors in this niche market that is a smaller piece of the overall pie.  Understanding how to develop demand for this resegmented market is crucial to your success.

New Market
A new market is easy to start in, but very difficult to make any money in unless you have some serious staying power.  You are constantly educating prospects on why this market exists and need to get some alpha customers to fine-tune your solution and market.  Demand creation is tough and even if you are successful in creating demand, other startups and competitors will be able to jump into the market and have the advantage of seeing what customers like and will benefit from all the education you’ve provided. Adoption of your new product will be limited and while you may have a few early case studies with more innovative customers, demand won’t likely ramp up until year three or four. Be prepared to persevere for many years before realizing the fruit of your labor.

While all these markets have their pitfalls they do have some advantages as well.  But if you don’t have a ton of resources and need customers to fund your business, there is a hybrid market you should consider targeting.

My Ideal Market
My recommendation is to find a resegmented / early market that has high growth, proven demand and a few first mover companies competing for growing customer demand. Your advantage in this market is that you’ll be able to learn from the first-mover’s mistakes and success to develop a position in the market that meets customers needs but also avoids pitfalls. Stake your claim to this positioning and ride the demand development your competitors have so graciously provided and find success faster.

The key to this ideal scenario is timing your entry into the market.  Enter during the initial ramp up of growth should provide you with sufficient customer demand.  Enter at the tail end of growth and you may get boxed out by entrenched competitors of a market that by now is more like an existing market.  Attempt to enter this market by year three (i.e. – by three years after the first product for this market was released) so you can be known as a primary player in the space, set your company up to hopefully ride the wave of demand that should ensue, and realize the fruits of your labor more quickly.

What growing markets would you consider ripe for starting a company?

How do you come up with a winning idea?

The most obvious way is to recognize a problem and postulate solutions for it.  These type of ideas are great, but often after researching the market, many of the great solutions I come up with already exist or there isn’t enough of a market to launch them into a full-scale business. In other words, they aren’t “winning” ideas.

So how can you find an idea that is more substantial if you can’t find one that works with identifying  a pressing problem?

Transformative ideas are sometimes spontaneous ‘aha’ moments, but more often than not I believe they are the result of connecting common practices and ideas used in disparate industries and functions and applying them to new industries and functions..  You may have all the ingredients for an idea right in front of you.  Can you see it? The key is connect disparate ingredients to solve problems.

To find these ideas you’ll need to look at how something in one industry works and see if applying it in another industry or function makes sense.  An idea for one industry rarely fits perfectly in another industry. But you have an advantage…

The first advantage you have is a good case study of the working idea in action to reference.   The second advantage you need to have is the knowledge of other industries and functions.  You can find the sweet spot where tweaking an idea will meet the different needs of another industry.  You still need to know if there is a market for your idea and you can do this by adding or minimizing aspects of your idea and testing it until you confirm it is easily adopted in the new target market.

So, get out there and look at processes and ask yourself if that process could be used in another industry.  If not, ask if it could be used after some incremental improvement.

What idea can you connect from one industry or function with a problem another industry or function?

For more than a year now, my posting schedule has been three to four posts a month.  However, it’s been a busy couple of months so posting has been light recently. But fear not, I’ll be back posting soon and will share with you some nuggets from my busy month culminating with a action-packed trip to Europe!

I’ve learned a lot this summer and look forward to posting new insights soon. In the meantime, I’m very excited about my progress on various work fronts.

On the GivingPal front, we inked some promising new partnerships and are looking forward to sharing some big changes coming soon.  Stay tuned!

On the College Football Observer (CFO) front, we launched some awesome new features including a College Football Pick’em platform and a Forum for our college football community.  Lastly, I was invited to do a guest spot on ESPN Radio where I discussed college football and gave listeners my Week Four preview. What a blast working on something I enjoy so much!

More to come…

There are few constants in this world. However, change is one constant you can count on. How you perceive and address change impacts many things in your life.

From a business perspective, the hyper-competitive, information at your fingertips competitive environment we live in continues to push changes in your industry.  With new technologies and trends popping up on an almost daily basis, opportunities to implement new ways to reshape your industry exist. Adapting to changing trends and technologies is a crucial if you and your company are going to stay competitive.

Before you do anything, take a look at industry changes with a fresh perspective.  Use an open mind that is unencumbered by the paradigm you know and consider how this change could play out in your industry’s landscape. Consider the following when addressing change:

• If the change’s impact has far-reaching implications, embrace it completely.
• If the change’s impact is speculative, but could be a game-changer, at the very least get a game-plan ready to roll.
• If the change’s impact is minimal and is the type you can easily adapt to when necessary, pencil out a plan for action and take a “wait and see” approach.

Adapting to change can make or break your business.  Embrace change and continue to push your own changes on your industry.  Ignore change and risk falling behind your competition.

My advice – be proactive.  Implement technology and systems that will differentiate and position your company at the forefront of your industry.  Leave your competition in the dust.  Let them play catchup to the changes you are leading.  To be sure, this is the most enviable position for you and your company.

Are you a change agent?  How are you leading change in your company?