Successful Corporate Strategies

But another familiar issue with corporate strategies is that they stay nothing but boardroom talk. (Don’t take me wrong here; there’s absolutely nothing wrong with talking about strategies at boardroom level.)
Yet you don’t want to end up with too many employees even failing to name the mission and vision statement of their own organization.

What you do want is your company’s strategic vision to become successful.  This is only possible if your company’s vision is translated in practical plans that work.

Where Are We Heading At, Captain?

Could you imagine how a ship set sail with a crew which isn’t aware of the location they’re heading at? Probably not.
Let’s use this metaphor to describe how you managers will execute your vision for building your organization.

Preferably a ship has only a single captain who decides about the direction.
And you don’t want to have any of the crew members interfere the wheel, because it this will make the ship drift about.
Also it’s important to keep the ship on speed, so the crew should set the sails properly and the process of  raising the sails should elapse flawlessly.
Besides, there should be proper communication in a way that the captain can adjust the direction based on physical conditions like the depth of the water or the weather forecast.
And finally, sometimes there’s just a need to set anchor and get all resources filled up again.

Visualization Can Make People Move

If you want to get people enthusiastic for an idea, one of the most powerful ways to do so is to describe in detail how the future could look with that dream realized.

This illustration part is so important, because it makes it possible to put things in context through comparison (this is actually one of the first topics covered in Predictably Irrational – you should read it).

“We are all beings of habit and we tend to repeat what we are comfortable with.
This constrains our creativity, prevents us from exploring new ideas, and hampers our dealing with the full complexity of new issues.”
- Noel Tichy (1983)

Visualization is one of the most powerful ways to break through the comfort zone.

Are you using it already?

Post from: Conversion Stream

Breaking Through the Comfort Zone

Traffic to coupon sites increased an incredible 38% from March 2007 to March 2008. And the popularity increases even further as a result of the economic crisis.

There’s an overwhelming acceptance and use of coupons by the consuming public. Advertising Age reported that 87% of all shoppers use coupons. And Nielsen revealed that 95% of all shoppers like coupons and 60% actively look for coupons.

Advertisers enjoy a tactic which is easy to test and near to free in distribution costs. They are also measurable (you can see what’s working and what’s not), make the promotion source traceable (especially interesting for offline transaction) and they are on the end of the conversion funnel (which means: high conversion rate and high ROI).

Why Do You Need Coupons?

Coupons make it possible to use price as an instrument within the marketing mix. Since coupon codes create price differentiation, they are a scalable way to offer different prices to different people.

Why Are They So Powerful?

Coupons are extremely tempting to consumers because they are exclusive. If you don’t have the coupon code you won’t have the benefit of a discount or free shipping.
It also forces a decision making process, because a coupon can expire or get lost. So not using the code also means losing the value of something a customer got.
Finally, it can reduce buyer’s remorse, because the coupon helps us to reduce the anxiety that we purchased the product for the wrong price.

Where Are Online Coupons Different From Offline Coupons?

As an advertiser you will lose the medium tracking partly, because the coupons get widely distributed or go viral. That may decrease the ability to target specific groups and the possibility to make use of scarcity as a promotional tactic.
Furthermore the tangible aspect of the coupon will be lost which means you don’t have the trading ritual, ‘totem’, anymore.

Where Can You Use Online Coupon Codes For?

You should use coupons to:

(For offline coupons you might also have had the objective to get personal customer data.)

What You Don’t Want To Achieve

If you don’t want to end up with low margins or an eroded brand be careful when applying coupons.

1. Don’t Make It Too Easy To Get a Lower Price

Coupons shouldn’t be easy to find or redeem. By trading effort for a discount, you say: “if you care about price I’ll sell it to you cheaper, but you have to prove it”.
You don’t want to end up with customers who use coupons for the bargain only. And you don’t want to have them used for something what’s regularly being bought anyway.

2. Don’t Use Coupons for Premium Brands and High-End Products

Don’t apply coupons for premium brands or high-end products or you might hurt the brand or destroy where your product stands for.
(In that case you better should create a separate channel where you offer a different service level and/or different products, like from previous collections.)

So, What Should You Do?

But coupons can provide a steady stream of new customers. So if it is so powerful; what is a good couponing strategy?

1. Create Barriers to Increase Exclusivity

People enjoy the feeling of gaining a bargain and being treated as special. Don’t remove this thrill by offering coupons everywhere, because it takes the fun to get a discount away.
For example, you could use of a viral game which makes it possible for customers to win a discount.

2. Increase Personality To Stimulate Social Shopping

Let your customers send a coupon to a friend, for example by adding “send this coupon to a friend” buttons. But you could even think of offering personalized and limited coupons to existing customers which they can share with friends.

Two Final Coupon Marketing Tips

By the way, you should always:

1. Create Urgency

Set an expiration date to entice the visitor to redeem the coupon.  Why not have coupons which decrease in value over time to push the buying decision?

2. Hide the Benefit From Regular Visitors

You don’t want to confront customers with the coupon form if they were prepared to pay the higher price anyway. Always create separate landing pages for the promotion and get the coupon form out of your regular order funnel.

Are you still planning to add coupons to your marketing mix?

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Where Did You Use Coupons For, Again?

Why Your Bonus Structure Might Be Wrong

A manager will probably receive the credits for the excellent results his unit has reached. The question is: does he really deserve them? Or was it the previous manager who set the basis of the success? Or were there certain members of his team who stood up to set the way which lead to success?
Same for the marketer who conquered the heart of the customers with his brand. He received the credits, but the excellent operations, friendly and proactive support might be even more important.

(Please note how recent developments lead to heavenly discussion on this model.)

Smart managers and marketers do understand that there were probably more events involved before the conversion happened.
A conversion is just the event which receives the credits for a goal. So they focus on the process which leads to conversions.

Keywords Are Just People

In online marketing, often a keyword gets the credit for a specific conversion. Wouldn’t it be great if we could put more weight on keywords earlier in the path to conversion?

Click here to view the embedded video.

Balance Your Credit Distribution

Your branded keywords are probably your ‘best converting’ keywords. But what about the keyword who were used by customers who are early in their consideration life cycle?

In fact there are great metrics in your web analytics tool which you could use as correlations, trends or micro-conversions to value your upper funnel keywords:

Which marketeer does not know the AIDA model? This keyword funnel is no different than the well-known Awareness, Interest, Desire and Action stages. (Tip for PPC campaign managers: create separate campaigns for each type of success metric and optimize on different criteria per campaign).

The only difference shown above is a fair way to measure the success of keywords. But feel free to apply it elsewhere in your organization.

It is different, less save. Do you dare to change?

Post from: Conversion Stream

New Insights on Conversion Allocation Tactics

The Editor within the Corporate Strategy

As the campaigns of largest advertisers are (partly) managed by the AdWords Editor, it would be quite useful to think of improving the tool in a way that it supports the business goals both Google and the advertiser want to accomplish.

The following points are the low hanging fruit in making changes that make sense, are useful and can be easily applied:

1. Add Valuable User Data

Although it may look like there is a superior integration between AdWords and Analytics, in fact things are worse. It was just recently that AdWords goals could be connected to Analytics goals.
Furthermore, it seems that the AdWords team is really focusing on hard conversions (like sales or leads) while keeping away from soft conversions (to manage campaigns based on micro-conversions).

Not only is this bad from a marketing perspective, also it effects Google negatively from a financial perspective. For example, many advertisers who work on a CPA basis are driven away from category keywords (which are higher up in the AIDA funnel) as the conversion rate is lower for those keywords.
However, those keywords do support consumers in making their buying decision later on so can be really valuable. Actually some advanced bid management tools do recognize the value of those keywords but Google’s AdWords Conversion Tracking doesn’t.

This pushes advertisers away to the end of the funnel, which is crowded – drives up the CPC, but lowers the number of clicks on ads overall. Adding integration of soft user metrics from Analytics would be the solution (yes, that’s all). So what about adding:

1. Bounce Rates (BR)
2. Pages/Visit (P/V)
3. Time on Site (TOS)

And yes, that would make a real big difference already.

2. Add Functionalities

One of the most important reasons to visit the web interface is the visuals. The new interface makes it really great to have a quick overview of the trends in terms of clicks, impressions, conversions or whatever from an overall level down to a specific keyword.

That would be something really nice to have in the editor.

Also, I’m quite convinced that sorting on alphabet is obsolete so why not giving me more opportunities to sort keywords within ad groups in a way that makes sense?

I could even imagine using taxonomies to segment, create and sort keyword combination in a totally new way.

3. Improve Keyword Usage

Talking about keywords, conversion data in relation to keywords is really valuable information. How could Google help advertisers leveraging this data?

• Import External Conversion Data
  Every website I’ve come across so far has great converting keywords from organic, which aren’t advertised on yet.
  While the Search-based Keyword Tool should fix this, we are really looking for easy ways to get those keywords in our campaigns!

• Import Search Queries Suggestions
  Bidding ‘broad’ is really a great way to discover new keywords and keyword combinations. Google has even enhanced the reports recently. But unfortunately, we’re missing a great function: an easy import function.
  

4. Synchronized Content Network Campaign

By the way, who doesn’t use the same campaign in multiple ways like:

• Duplicate campaigns to target multiple geographical locations
• Duplicate campaigns to differ between Google search and search partners
• Duplicate campaigns to differ between search and content network

We would be really happy to have synchronized campaigns which copy any changes made to the ‘main campaign’ on-the-fly, but do apply only specific changes like targeting or bidding options.

It could just be a small thing like the domain extension www.ConversionStream.com for US and www.ConversionStream.co.uk for UK in the ad texts (we are all a little bit lazy, right?).

5. Campaign Tracking With the Pound Sign

Any SEO should have a preference for clean, short and user-friendly URL’s. Although the priority of these uses have been significantly lowered since the search engines have helped us by introducing a specific link element it can still bother, i.e. in the case when users link to URL’s with parameters and generate duplicate content.

If you integrate AdWords data with Analytics, you’ll recognize the gclid-parameter in the URL. In fact this is a new URL, but I won’t go in details on that point now.

While there is a small change to your tracking script necessary, you just need to understand a pound sign (#) is much sexier than a question mark sign (?).

Share Your Thoughts

It would be great to list up more requested features here. What is it that you would like to add?

Post from: Conversion Stream

How You Could Have Made More Money with the AdWords Editor

The Importance of Advertising

While Google’s mission states:

Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

Hopefully, they are using a somehow more enhanced version of this statement internally.

The most important change I presume that have been made is the Who part. This would bring things in a more ‘consumer-centric’ perspective, i.e. a marketing perspective. Especially since the switching barriers are so low on the web.

Advertising Is Essential

Anyway, as 97% of Google’s revenue is from Ads and 67% of the total revenue is being made on Google’s websites they should be really focused on making the ads a valuable addition within the user experience.

And that is what they do.

So, What Is It They Change?

And they improve the system:

1. Increasing Customer Satisfaction
   Making top positions more expensive, to make them only affordable for websites with high conversion rates;
   
2. Improving Trust
   Adding branded elements to increase user trust and gain more control on the advertisers websites;
   
3. Leverage Existing Brands
   Offering premium services for free to large advertisers, to improve the visibility of brands in the search engine;
   
4. Creating Experience
   Experimenting with features to improve the attractiveness of the ad area, while promoting other Google services like Product Search.
   

They offer quality tools for free:

1. Google Analytics
   By offering a great a web analysis product like Analytics for free, they help website owners to improve their websites and thus improve the resources they send traffic to from the search engine results;
2. Google Website Optimizer
   Another great example is Website Optimizer – their free A/B and Multivariate testing tool – which of course has the intention to improve conversion rate and is another way to improve the user experience.

Where Is Google Heading With Search?

Most, if not all, changes Google is going to make to both the paid and organic part of their search experience does have the intention to increase perceived service quality.

Let’s have a look at a marketing services model (Grönroos, 2000) which shows how to manage the perceived service quality:

Expected Search Quality

So far, Google has relied heavenly on consumer needs and word of mouth. It was recently they started experimenting with television as a communication medium.

It’s quite common for Google to push products through users, like they did with invitations for Gmail while playing with the attractiveness of scarcity by limiting the number of invitations.

They push their image in many ways:

1. Implementing tons of small features and communicating them aggressively to support the perceived innovative character of Google
2. Decreasing product launch time by offering services and products in beta to users to increase consumer loyalty
3. Offering access to services like Google Labs to stimulate word of mouth
4. Imitating features launched by competitors or suggesting they study algorithms as if they can copy, improve and use to keep their product superior
5. Put forward that the impossible is possible, for example by putting a ticking inbox size counter on the homepage of Gmail

Sometimes there are rather subtle ways of communication, like the Google Doodle which has of course the intention to visualize change and progression.

Experienced Search Quality

Technically, it’s of course about the search results. Which is in terms of quality ambiguous: the same result can be good for the one or bad for the other. So far there have been two notable ways they’ve introduced to improve the results:

• Presentation of Search Results
  For example by introducing Universal Search while pushing their vertical search engines (Google Images, Maps, News, Blogs, Books, Products, etc.)

• Personalization of Search Results
  Using the Google-account to aggregate user data which is useful for both personalization of search results and targeting options for advertisers

They seem to spend as much time on the process side of the experienced quality:

• Way of Searching
  The exacter (in terms of context and interpretation) a search query, the better results can be presented. So Google has changed the way we search, especially by moving us away from broad search terms by listing related searches and of course by the slow introduction of suggestions.

• Speed of Searching
  Google has almost an obsession for speed, probably because users currently associate speed with the quality of a search engine. Sometimes leading to ridiculous propaganda, like keeping the number of words on the homepage at 28. Sometimes by technical changes. They even offer free hosting of AJAX libraries to webmasters to improve the speed on external websites.

The Lack of Google Brand Power

While Google’s brand a top or maybe the highest valued brand in the world, the basis seems to be pretty small.
But please understand that:

1. Their customer’s loyalty is nothing more than a habit
2. The switching costs for web services are nil

They are actually missing high-level symbolic associations to their brand now. The current technical proposition is weak in terms of customer behavior and that’s precisely the reason why I believe Microsoft’s $100 million budget for Bing can make more possible then respected search engine experts or great marketers think.

Profitability Is Not A Short-Term Objective, Branding Should Be

A click on a result, organic or paid, is in the perception of the user Google who endorses this specific resource.

Therefore, it would be short sighted to think Google is raising the bar (for example in terms of CPC) to increase their profit. They really do understand that’s not to way to go to survive on the long term.

While Google works on customer lock-in methods by conquering the browser market and developing a mobile phone operating system, I believe they should understand that customer behavior is not rational.
Luckily, you do know though.

Post from: Conversion Stream

Google’s Search Strategy Uncovered

In general there are three ways how this can be managed:

1. Playing Safe
2. Try New Things
3. Beat The System

1. Playing Safe

Most managers spend their time by only keeping the group pleased. It’s by far the safest option, but has the lowest chance of getting the group to come up with something that matters as well.

2. Try New Things

Some managers choose to ‘put the music on’, i.e. they initiate a change.

On one hand this feels comfortable to the group as everybody is moving at that moment. On the other hand there’s this issue when the music gets shuts off: you have the risk of getting a chair which is worse than the previous one. Or even worse: losing your chair at all.
This feels uncomfortable and scares the group off. The manager probably experiences resistance. And since he had to stand up to put the music on he might be the one losing a chair.

(Most of the time you’ll see external consultants or interim managers who initiate this kind of change. The reason why they have to get in is simple: they can’t lose a chair.)

3. Beat the System

Leaders play the game different.
How? They simply change the rules. Why struggle for chairs if there’s enough space on the couches?
It takes leadership to create a movement which will follow you to the new seats, mostly because you have to go through the dip to get to the unknown.

What kind of manager are you?

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Changing Chairs