Make it Easy for Customers

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The other day I was helping a new client plan out marketing materials for an upcoming event and asked if he was using QR Codes on all of his materials.  I explained that many people are now scanning them and then using them to do research or deal with retention issues associated with information overload.

The items in your QR Code should be:

1. Direct link to the landing page for the event or product promoted at that event so the visitor doesn’t have to hunt down what they were interested in.
2. Your phone number
3. Your Email Address
4. other pertinent information that you wanted stored in their contact list
   1. hours of operation
   2. Your name
   3. Your Address
   4. Other web sites you want them to know about (blogs, product micro sites, etc.)

Oh, and if the back of your business card isn’t already in use, put a QR Code there.  It shows you respect their time by having them avoid manually typing the data into their contact database.

Is It Important?

Well if  you don’t think this is important enough to add to your marketing material, maybe this article might change your mind:

Half of U.S. shoppers rely on phones for in-store research

Good Hunting!

Related articles

• How to use QR codes at events (clairesouchet.wordpress.com)
• 9 Unique Ways to Generate Leads With QR Codes (hubspot.com)
• QR Codes Aren’t Sweet Without Strategy (stargroup1.com)
• How To Create A QR Code [VIDEO TUTORIAL] (seanclark.com)
• Are We Really Ready for QR Codes? (forbes.com)

Marketing Lesson: Smartphones Outsell PCs

According to IDC, smartphone manufacturers shipped 100.9 million devices in the fourth quarter of 2010, while PC manufacturers shipped 92.1 million units worldwide. Or, more simply put, smartphones just outsold PCs for the first time ever.

via Smartphones Outsell PCs.

The above quote should not come as a surprise.  Change happens.  The real question becomes, “How are we preparing our clients, or shaping our projects/campaigns for this shift in the marketing landscape?”

Nostalgic Deja Vu

I was just telling one of my classes yesterday that even though the assignments are focusing on 8×11 documents they need to keep in the back of their mind the fact that their message might be seen on a small screen so always plan ahead.

This problem seems to be resurfacing constantly in the technology sector.  I can remember, in my brief stint in development, which now seems like three lifetimes ago, the revelation that the developers I worked with all had power user machines: top of the line CPU’s, memory maxed to capacity, every bay in the tower loaded with the largest hard drives that could be purchased, the biggest fasted monitor and video board that was sold at the time.  Not a real problem unless you consider the average ‘consumer’ of these developers were running on machines three generations behind, and were loaded with the least possible equipment to save costs for the company purchasing the hardware.

At least we were lucky to have a great software development manager, my brother-in-law, who demanded no code go into production unless it passed a speed test on a machine comparable to what the user base was currently using.  So we always kept a box in the corner of the office with the current configuration our clients had.  This created some awkward moments when the entire development team would watch as one of the developers would run the cpu/memory/video gauntlet with a piece of code that ran like greased lighting on his box.

Some Possible Action Items

Here are some things you should do right now:

• Test your existing site: get a smartphone, get several with different size screens, and test what you currently have out there being viewed by visitors to your site.
• Update Project Requirements: only accept work that can be used on a smartphone screen.  It will cost more, but if your site works and your competitor’s doesn’t, well that’s just priceless.
• Update Your Marketing Plan: Think mobile.  What items in your plan can change now as this wave begins to form, rather waiting until is past you and you are playing catchup.

Let me know if you’ve encountered feedback from your visitors about your site not working on smartphones and what you did to fix the problem.

Good Hunting.

Start, Stop, Continue – Reviewed

When I hear in meetings that people don’t know why they are doing something or why a certain policy is in place I begin to wonder how much time is wasted on things we are just doing because we’ve always done them that way.  This post was triggered after reading “I can’t believe we’re still doing that” which brought back a lot of memories about team meetings that I facilitated and the frustration I had because there was such a resistance to change when confronting obsolete work.  Now I want to admit that I thought I had posted on this exercise in the past but after searching my archive I didn’t find it referenced.  Sorry about that.

Setting the Stage

This exercise is great when change occurs naturally in the workplace.  It does not need to be forced.  But I must admit, when I am called in as an outsider to facilitate change meetings it is very natural for me to use this tool.  If you are managing a team or organizations, there are still may opportunities to use this tool:

• New Leadership – often a great time to realign your department or team when a new leader is ready to add a new twist or their own perspective to the role of the organization.
• New Management – this is a great time to review ‘why’ we do things.  There are times when the past choices are allowed to be questioned as to why we are doing something.
• Direction Change – often with new management or leadership comes a direction change and a time to evaluate past traditional work and possibly make changes.
• New Team Member – sometimes a new set of eyes brings a new perspective.  And remember, those new team members have past experiences for you to gain from as well.
• New Competitor – nothing can be more jarring than a new threat in the vicinity.  This change is ideal to reevaluate what the team is doing and make some needed changes.
• New Capability – learning something new is a great time to make changes.  Sometimes it’s as simple as learning a new lens or gaining new tools or skills that allow you to reevaluate past norms.
• Measurement Changes – remember always “you are what you measure” and at times those measurements tell you that something is wrong or something unexpectedly went well.  This is a great time to pull the team together and analyze the outlier.

Pick your change.  For the most part any change that occurs in your normal business cycle becomes an opportunity to evaluate your norms and possibly make some changes.  My only word of advice is that you don’t use “Start, Stop, Continue” too much.

Facilitation Instructions

You will need three surfaces, I tend to use three large tear off sheets taped to a wall, with each one title with one of there topics: START, STOP, and CONTINUE.  You will need sticky notes and writing materials, and sticky dots handed out to each person attending the meeting.

You will provide the participants a problem to solve  in which they must come up with ideas on how to improve something by stating things they would START, STOP, or CONTINUE doing.  Here are some suggestions for problems to solve:

• How can we make this department better?
• How can we reduced the total elapsed time of a specific process?
• How can we reduce the duration of a specific task?
• How can we improve the customer experience?
• How can we reduce the returned product / restocking percentages?
• How can we decrease the Account Receivable averages and improve cash flow?

Have the team write their ideas on the sticky notes and place it on the correct START, STOP, or CONTINUE sheet.

Facilitation Tip: This brainstorming session is sometimes best SILENT. As a general rule if there is a superior in rank or position in the room and someone may try to “impress the boss” by controlling the session, or an (opinionated) person who naturally commands all the discussions, then make this part of the exercise “SILENT ONLY” and limit the damage.

If the STOP page seems sparse after the activity is underway, then stop the team and force them to evaluate that specific area alone.

Facilitation Tip: If you have a process map already created for a specific process you are asking the team to improve then make sure the process is visible somewhere in the meeting room.  If you don’t have the process thoroughly mapped out then begin first by mapping the process into a swim-lane chart so everyone can understand what they are being asked to improve.

Group and Rank Suggestions

Have the team go through a nominal grouping exercise where they attached similar ideas together.  Allow the tam to challenge each other.  If an idea seems to fall into two groups then create a second sticky note and have the team move on with other groupings.  Then identify any associations between the grouped items (i.e. Item 2 can’t be started or completed without Item 1 having been accomplished first).

Then have the team vote on which items they think are best.  Give each person 5 or 10 sticky dots.  They can place dots on any of the grouped items.  They can place multiple dots on any one group if they feel strongly that a specific items needs more attention.  (Don’t let them place all their dots on one item though).

This will produce a list of items the group either believes are low hanging fruit or very important and need to be addressed.

We are looking for

STOP Sheet

• Redundancies
• Obsolete Steps
• Eliminate Points of Failure
• Reduce Inter-Departmental Hand-offs
• Reduce Elapsed Times

START Sheet

• New tasks in an existing process
• New processes
• Purchase new software / tools
• New classes to educate staff
• New Hire orientation updated lists

CONTINUE Sheet

• All existing items not found on the STOP / START sheets that the team is already performing.

I hope you enjoy this exercise.  Let me know how it went.

Good Hunting.

Marketing Civil Rights: Impression’s Inequalities and Injustices

At  some point with each of my clients the question will come up; Should I advertise here?  The client, having seen how effective internet marketing can be, now begins to ask the age old marketing question of REACH.  How do I expand my reach with this wonderful tool or environment?  And if so, where?  And if I stumble across somewhere, is this a good place to advertise?

Inside the question lies a misconception, a costly one.  This misconception has been the death knell of many small business marketing plan’s attempts at internet marketing.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all ads and the locations they are found are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Attention, Re tension and the Guarantee of Profit.

Each failed attempt at increasing reach creates the awkward self-fulfilling prophecy that Internet Marketing doesn’t work in my business.

Russian Proverb: “Trust, but Verify”

The advice is simple, and profound.  With each instance of advertising activity you must build in the process of measuring effectiveness.  Internet Advertising has a distinct advantage over several other forms of advertising: rapid feedback.  I think this is one of the reasons I like to work in the space.

Over time you will come to realize that certain activities produce results and others do not.  The trick in moving forward is to build feedback loops into the campaigns so that your team and clients can understand the effectiveness of the new cost.  Even more importantly, you will have the ability to answer the age old question; Should I advertise here?

NO Life-Time-Value ALLOWED!

What do you do if you are not allowed to use customer life-time-value in the campaign planning when working with e-commerce sites. We met with a company, which we are helping with search engine marketing, to review options to increase sales with an e-commerce site which they are running for a third company. Sound confusing? It is! This is not our normal mode of operations, but we wanted to help this new up-start company with this project and help get their feet on the ground. After all, hunting ROI is sometimes done better in packs!

The site owner’s focus is clearly on sales volume. There is no desire to form long term relationships with his new found clients. He is treating his site just as it is a vending machine on a crowded corner and simply by being there with the right product they will make their millions.
Here are things we are not allowed to do:

1. Follow-up email campaign
2. Monthly or special newsletters with promotions and new news
3. Follow-up phone calls

This impacts our ability to perform retention and referral marketing. Faced with this problem we are focusing on getting more visitors to the site. Search engines remain a long term strategy. But, this client wants visitors NOW! We are forced to look at PPC type activities and this means more dollars. With an increase in new customer acquisitions, the strategy will quickly be seen as too expensive and the site owner will decide to drop this and focus on the next strategy of the month.

At the time of this post, the site owner decided to drop the internet strategy work and move all of his eggs into the TV marketing basket. Another agency came in and showed them how much more they will make with TV. Our up-start friends, which we were helping, was given a perfect opportunity to let this client go.