Tag: online marketing campaigns

Consistency is Key in Online Marketing . . . Repetition, Not Necessarily

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Consistency is often the lacking feature in an otherwise solid online marketing campaign.  Strategizing and planning tend to be what trainers, consultants, and professional coaches want to tackle but consistent execution can be elusive.  That said consistency can become repetition which is a sure way to lose audience interest.

Consistency is born from a marketing calendar and a company brand outline.  Following the template and schedule generate consistency.  The content can also help generate cohesiveness through follow on topics or offers that build on one another. Consistency is a proven advantage in that many potential clients will need many touches (for most people it’s 7 or more) before credibility is built up to a point where they will consider calls to action.

Strive for consistency but be wary of message repetition.

A client of ours ran monthly events.  They had a particular topic and a set way of doing their event.  Truthfully, it was a powerful topic and an impressive presentation.  The problem was that the marketing material was just as repetitive.  The description and the bullet points would change some but the title and calls to action were always identical.  What was initially a very successful promotion became tired.  By the 10th time they ran the event the email list and social followers completely tuned it out. Registration was poor and something needed done to rejuvenate their attendance levels.

So the event was revamped.  We didn’t go back to the drawing board, we just modified it: New title, new incentives, new target audience.  The consistency remained in that the landing page, email invitation, and social posts were all recognizable as part of our clients campaign but interest was renewed because the audience perceived it as something different.

Consistency is good but it can lead to a lazy approach which results in repetition.  Have a close eye on metrics and if you see interest has plummeted in a recurring offer or message, it will need to be revamped.

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Marketing Over-Strategizing

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If there is a number one offender on why consultant’s, trainer’s, and professional coach’s marketing campaigns don’t work it’s over-strategizing. The best plan ever conceived is worthless if it’s never put in place.  Over-strategizing revolves around one central problem, too much thinking and too little action.

Admittedly marketing consultants and contractors contribute to this problem. Talking about a great idea has more appeal than getting in the trenches and putting the plan in place.  This can get even more problematic for true consultant that will outline a plan but don’t fulfill the suggestions.  In these cases, going from plan to implementation is often challenging or never gets enacted.

Over-strategizing comes in 3 forms:

Inconsistency

Make a plan and then see it through.  Seeing it through requires a good faith effort on results.  If you put a new campaign together then you’ll likely need at minimum 3 to 6 months to gauge results.  If you keep making changes or running too many tests you’re not establishing a base line to measure effectiveness. Unless a campaign starts and causes a noticeable negative impact, a consistent approach is necessary.

Detail Over-Analysis

A strategic plan needs to identify what, to who, when, and how the marketing campaign will be rolled out.  Once that plan is set and responsibilities are assigned, don’t get bogged down in the details.  Laboring over a particular button color should not delay a launch.  Mark it as something to test once the campaign is established but don’t waste time obsessing over small details until you are ready to test.

Emulation

Copying other marketing ideas does not make a strategy.  It results in a mish-mash of ideas without the cohesive strategy to tie it all together.  Emulation also tends to lead down a path of starts and restarts.  One month the strategy copies this, the next it copies that.  Taking ideas and incorporating them into your existing strategy is beneficial, reworking what you are doing to emulate someone else, undermines a strategy.

Keep it simple. Set a plan and then put it in place.  For most web, email, and social strategies that will likely be at least 3 months to get data and trends.  Set a fixed time to discuss strategies, then don’t talk about it again and go do tactical execution.

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Consistent Online Marketing Activities Are Required for Consistent Results

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There seems to be a common misconception among trainers, consultants, and professional coaches that once you get your online marketing campaigns rolling that it then runs itself.  There is never a time where you should be asleep at the wheel.  Every online communication channel requires consistent activity and a lull in activity will almost guarantee a lull in results.

Online marketing is like any job.  If you stop showing up, you’re not going to get paid.  A relative of mine has been running a blog for several months and is just starting to get some traction.  He was asking about blogs and how difficult it can be to get off the ground.  I commented, “People seem to think once the blog is established that it runs itself.  It’s still hard work creating content consistently and maintaining relevancy.  And try not writing anything for a short period of time and see your stats fall off a cliff.”

He laughed and said, “It’s funny you say that.  I went on vacation for a week, when I checked my analytics my traffic sharply dropped.  By the end of the week my daily traffic was only at 25% of where it had been.  The numbers didn’t rebound to their previous state for another two and a half weeks.”

We’ve not done strict testing on his numbers but it appears to be a good rule of thumb.  If there is a period of inactivity on your online marketing, it will take twice that amount of time to recover.  This isn’t just for blogs.  It applies across the board to websites, social media, and email marketing.

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B-to-B Online Marketing Around the Holidays

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As the holiday season grows closer, many of us associate it with the busiest shopping season of the year.  But for B-to-B the inverse is often true.   While consumer shopping spikes business to business transactions often lag.  Consultants, trainers, and professional coaches need to modify some of their online marketing plans to account for the decreased activity without abandoning the time period as a lost cause.

There are two bad plans for your B-to-B marketing over the holiday period (late November through the early part of January in the US).

The first is pretending the time of year does not matter.  While you’ll want to schedule any informative content that you regularly provide, sales or offer emails are unlikely to convert well.  For example, if you run a monthly event to find new opportunities, it’s likely that registrations will suffer.  Instead of forcing your regular events an alternative “gift” incentive might be more appropriate.  For example, offer a free whitepaper download or training webinar as a thank you to people that subscribe to your email newsletter.  Make the offer simple to redeem.  Prospects don’t even need to leave their office to take advantage of either example.  The holiday period is a challenging time to get people to take advantage of more elaborate or expensive offerings, so find ways of providing simple value add incentives.

The second bad plan is giving up the holidays as a lost cause.  This plan abandons regular communications because “no one’s paying attention now.”  Your regular informative emails or newsletters are a given.  If you publish monthly or bi-weekly, then you need to meet that expectation.  True, rates will likely be somewhat lower but being consistent with your offer assures your audiences that you will deliver on your commitment.  Furthermore, this time frame is not a total lost cause for B-to-B.  Some businesses might have put off a decision until the end of the year.  If their budgeting cycle will reset, they might be primed to close a deal with a consultant, trainer, or professional coach.  Keeping your online marketing churning through this time period provides an opportunity to stay top of mind with prospects and clients.

Take the holidays into account for your online and email marketing.  It’s not the boom time that consumer businesses experience but it can be fruitful none the less.

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Online Marketing Campaigns: Have a Target

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A common mistake in online marketing is not having a clear client target for individual campaigns.  The thinking behind it is usually,  “cast a wider net to have more opportunities to catch something.”  The problem is there are a lot of nets in the water, so the people that know how to catch a particular fish stand a much better chance of landing them.  Every online campaign should be built around attracting a particular target.

The first step in making a target is the overview.  Consultants, trainers, and professional coaches usually focus on executives or business professionals of a certain job role.  Let’s use sales training as an example.  The overall target could be sales professionals, sales managers, customer service professionals, business owners, and service professionals.  This is the businesses target focus but not specific enough for a single online campaign.

The second step is picking out a subsection of your target market that is suitable for your call to action.  Let’s use sales managers from the example above.  If a manager event is coming up then the campaign should be built around problems that a manager faces.  Topics of making prospecting calls or dealing with budgets will have less impact than building a sales team and sales debriefing because these are topics that sales managers directly deal with. 

The third step is identifying group subsets.  The event might be centered on managing a sales team in a particular industry.  If this is the case then targets should be related to that industry with a certain size sales force.

The point is that every online campaign should have a very clear target.  Ideally communications via email will be segmented to that group.  For web and social media communications, (or in cases where email segmentation isn’t possible) communications should clearly define who the offer is for.  This casts a smaller net by eliminating poorly suited people but adds credibility to the message for the target group.  A side benefit is that people outside the target group can quickly see it’s not suited to them and are more likely to take notice when they fall into a target segment for a future campaign.

There’s nothing complicated about defining a target.  It’s simply a matter of taking some extra time to focus the campaign and having the guts to let people know who is and is not a good fit for the offer.

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Online and Email Marketing: There’s No Magic Bullet

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I’m often asked, “What should I change in my approach?”, or “What best practice should I adopt to improve performance?” I always struggle to answer these questions for 3 reasons.

The first is that it’s usually asked before I have a chance to understand the online and email marketing campaigns. The second reason is because the answer is always different for different people/companies. The third is that there is often an assumption that one thing will revolutionize the online and/or email marketing which usually is not the case.

The first 2 reasons are just circumstances of reality. But the third is a pitfall that leads to frustrations when expectations are unreasonably high. Sure, there are some common mistakes that can be easily corrected, but generally great online and email marketing campaigns evolve from a series of small improvements. It’s rarely a quick change that causes a major improvement.

Even when we read/hear/experience stories of drastic improvement, it’s rare that these major benefits are retained immediately. Rather there is a drop off that stabilizes as the change is integrated into ongoing efforts.

Email and online marketing is a marathon, not s sprint. Don’t look for a magic bullet that will dramatically improve performance but rather focus on continually making small improvements. If your effort is consistent over time you’ll see that your online and email marketing campaigns have become best-in-class without even noticing the change.

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Know Where Your Online Marketing Spikes Are Coming From

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In analyzing online marketing  results people make two broad-sweeping common mistakes

  • Blaming poor performance on outside factors
  • Take credit for positive performance without verifying the conclusion.

If only these assumptions were true in reality, we’d have nothing to worry about.  We’d cause only good and any negative outcomes couldn’t be helped.  Of course, that’s not true  and in analyzing you online marketing campaigns honesty is critical.

The more prevalent of the two mistakes is taking credit for spikes without doing any research to verify that an online marketing campaign deserves the credit.  This can be a costly error because it’s confirming false data.  If we believe something created a positive reaction but in reality it did not, we waste time recreating that situation even though it doesn’t provide proven results.

Here is an example I ran into recently.  In checking site analytics for a fairly new client of mine I discovered the site experienced a 400% increase in month-to-month traffic.  I instantly assumed that the search engines had indexed new keywords which were driving exponential growth.  I started preparing an analysis of what keywords were performing best so we could further refine the site’s SEO.

As I looked through the search keyword data the numbers weren’t adding up.  The site had much more direct traffic than in previous months.  Upon further investigation I saw that the search engines had not registered the new keywords we had worked on.

I informed the client of the spike but had no clear explanation of why the direct traffic would have shot up.  Fortunately the client did.  They do a yearly event which took place during the month in questions and the attendees for this event were the likely cause of direct traffic as they visited the site after the event.

As much as I’d have liked to take credit for the spike, it would have set our efforts back.  Analyzing the data and seeing that the spike was not a result of the SEO, means that we can’t bask in our genius.  Rather we need to monitor what actually happens when the search engines index the site and see how that effects search traffic so we can see real SEO improvement.

Always investigate any website or email metric spike.  While it’s nice to believe that our efforts were the catalyst, that always needs to be proven by the data.

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