The hidden magic of the triggering event

The hidden magic of the triggering event

Jan 31, 2019 | Communication, Marketing, Sales, Strategy

What is it that acts as the catalyst that initiates the journey a customer will undertake that may end up with a transaction?

If you knew this, you would be in a situation to be very specific about your marketing, both the nature of the offer, the way you make it, and to whom you communicate it.

Customer personas are a great way to focus resources in a manner that delivers productivity of your marketing efforts. The more details and representative the persona the  better.

It works, and works well, but is not the whole story.

There are events and interactions that occur in peoples lives that are not logically accommodated within a persona. There is a point in the journey a customer makes towards that purchase not considered with anywhere near enough weight.

That is the situation, the event, the ‘thing’ that acts as a catalyst to create the beginning of the customer journey. The event that suddenly creates an awareness that there might be value in considering options, and that the current solution, whatever that may be is inadequate.

This is a ‘triggering’ event. 

A friend is a real estate agent.

She knows the market cycles very well, not just the economic ones, the seasonal ones that tell you that there will be a lull in activity in the market over Christmas, which will pick up again when things get back to normal in February.

Seasonal.

However, over Christmas lots of people will find themselves with family and friends staying over, for the night, for a week, and suddenly, the house they have is too small, the kids no longer can sleep two to a bed,  and one bathroom is no longer enough. That becomes a triggering event for some to start the process of thinking that perhaps a bigger house is necessary, or that they really need to do a tree change. As a result they start being unconsciously sensitive to any real estate ads that may pop up, where before they would not have even seen them.

Is my friend better off starting her advertising in February, when all the other agents are starting, in the expectation that the market is waking up? Or should she advertise in January, when there is  no activity, nobody else is advertising, but the possible users of her service are in the middle of their ‘triggering event’ and highly sensitive to suddenly relevant messages?

I know where my money would be.

 

 

 

The cost of a fact free media

The cost of a fact free media

Jan 29, 2019 | Communication, Governance

EEEERRRRHHHHH

Excuse me, I just threw up on myself after being assaulted by another ad by a fat billionaire exhorting me to ‘Make Australia Great Again’ by voting for him and his dodgy party.

That nasty experience got me wondering about the nature of advertising in the digital world.

While we have people in Canberra who still think that regulating for diversity in media ownership is a thing on which they should  be spending time, Google, Facebook , and Alibaba (the latter almost exclusively in China) have sucked up 62% of the worlds digital ad spend of US 327 billion, last year.  Bringing up the rear is a rapidly improving Amazon, aggressively chasing a bigger share of this largess. These huge numbers leave what is left of the rest of the media, particularly the ‘old media’,  scrabbling to pay the rent.

The owners of the ‘Old’ media which interrupted me with the ad that started this thought are no doubt pleased to have the fat billionaire as a paying customer. Their priority is to  get the dollars in any way they can, to pay the rent, not make judgements on the veracity of the claims made by their advertisers. Facebook also faces this problem of fact neutrality, magnified geometrically by the reach and ‘stickiness’ of the platform, combined with its capacity to target and deliver messages to a very specific audience . 

However, our society has been built, at least to some extent, on the foundation of a free and diverse press that has the funds and bottle to be the ‘policemen’ of the standards and performance of those in power, political and corporate.

These media businesses have largely disappeared in the last decade, overwhelmed by the shift of advertising dollars, the foundations of their business, to digital outlets.

This has left the place without any police.

Look no further than the 2 recent Royal Commissions for any evidence you may need. If it was not for Kate McClymont, and a very few other investigative journalists with a passion for the truth, and the now defunct Sydney Morning Herald, these two rocks would not have been kicked over. The roaches hiding underneath would still be free to engage in their brand of hyper-hypocrisy, with most of us unaware of their corrosive and immoral activities.

Advertising funded investigative journalism via a neutral and responsible press is almost dead in this country. Without it we are deprived of the major driver of publicly minded behaviour.  We want, and need corporations to be publicly minded, to act in the best interests of  the community they serve. However nice those words may be, the officers of corporations are charged with the responsibility to deliver shareholder returns, and generally they do so without reference to the long term public good. The corollary is that personal agendas, and greed,  also get a very solid run.

We have conferences and forums where these corporate officers and politicians tell us what they are doing for us. However, the reality is they are mostly reading from a PR script, while attending a firefighting conference that only invites arsonists.

Advertising is increasingly becoming a tax on the poor, those who cannot afford to pay to be ad free. All this does is add weight to the confirmation bias we all have by removing any contrary voice that we may have seen and heard in the past.

That emasculation of media, the demise of a broad based, investigative and community minded press has consequences for the amount, type and quality of public debate, none of which I like.

Cartoon credit: Hugh McLeod at gapingvoid.com

Australia Day 2019

Australia Day 2019

Jan 25, 2019 | Leadership, Personal Rant

Comes around quickly doesn’t it!

Tomorrow!

2018 was a pretty ordinary year, with the revelations of the Financial Services Royal commission after the government was dragged screaming to the table, sandpaper making its (public) debut in test cricket, utter chaos and turmoil at all levels of Australian politics, house prices in Sydney taking a dump, and my previously resilient 92 year old mother being verbally bashed and left babbling by some scammer bastard on the phone demanding money.

2019 should be better, after all we are Australians.

Sometimes I do not know what that means any more.

As I look forward, I am filled with cynical anxiety at what is becoming of the Australia of my childhood, now long gone.

We can look forward to being molested by politicians and aspiring politicians over the next 3 months, desperately applying layers of lipstick to whatever pig turns up  that day in an effort to  buy our votes. The prevailing sentiment seems to be ‘to hell with them all’ as it relates to the major parties, but then you have the loonies, amongst a few gems turning up as independent options. I suspect a few will find themselves elected, then have to check where Canberra is located.  So much for the intelligent, long term and visionary policy planning we so desperately need in a whole range of areas affecting our daily lives, and those of our children and in my case, grandchildren.

On top of the politicians, we have the usual suspects bleating about the date. ‘Jan 26, Invasion Day’ seems to be the core issue. It is perfectly reasonable that a number of the descendants of the indigenous people  of the late 1700’s feel aggrieved, but let’s be serious, it was 220 years ago, and even if we pull it forward 150 years to capture the appalling, by our current standards, treatment of  indigenous people up until recently, it is still in the past.  The argument about Australia Day does not have to be a binary one. It is the day everything changed, for better or worse, let’s just get on with continuing to build resilient communities and a caring, successful, inclusive nation.

We all wait with baited breath for the announcement of the Australian of the year. Last years AOTY Professor Michelle Simmons was inspired. How she got through the selection processes that strongly favours male sports stars who have not yet featured in the popular press for bad behaviour is beyond me. Perhaps a sign of maturity in the selection panel? Hopefully that level of maturity prevails again this year, and we honour someone who has made a real contribution, rather than just being well known.

Have a great day tomorrow, enjoy the barbie a few beers and your friends and family, but also give some consideration to what you want this country to look like, and how you can make a contribution.

Happy Australia Day!

Header cartoon is from the ‘First dog on the moon’ series in the Guardian. Rarely politically correct, always biting!

The 1,700th blog post: What I have learnt about writing!

The 1,700th blog post: What I have learnt about writing!

Jan 23, 2019 | Uncategorized

 

This is the 1700th post on the StrategyAudit site , and nobody is more surprised at the longevity of the effort than me. The first post was in March 2009, almost a decade ago.

I am not a writer, at least I used not to be, but now I am not so sure.

Over the course of the decade taken to reach this benchmark, I have learned a lot about the process of writing constantly, beyond what  I have learned from the process of formulating the ideas and organising them in a manner that is publishable.

This blog started as a marketing tool for StrategyAudit, but has become much more, and writing it delivered a number of lessons, mostly unexpected. 

 

Curiosity.

Formulating and ordering my thoughts and views on the topics I cover, then having to ensure they make sense, at least to me, has made me very curious. As a result, everything becomes research.

 Notes are assets.

I now make notes of all sorts of things I stumble across. Ideas, references, half-baked ideas that might become posts, information that may be of use somewhere. There are all kept in One note recorded into one of the 25 odd categories I have. This is an ever expanding resource from which I take all sorts of bits and pieces, and sometimes make  something new happen. There are thousands now in the file, and it constitutes a substantial bank of Intellectual Capital.

 Pencils are still valuable.

I still read with a pencil in my hand, and a highlighter not too far away. This serves to enable me to scribble in margins (of books, remember those) and highlight  bits worth referencing. Often these are then transferred into one note for further use later. There are thousands of tools out there, new fangled, digital things,  but for me, the simple act of writing something serves both the clarify the message and set it into some context in my brain, so I just might remember it when the time is right. (I also assume I forget some, but who knows)

 Revisit.

I cruise around my one note files on a regular basis, often looking for something I dimly recall, sometimes for an idea worth adding to something else I am writing, and sometimes just to refresh the memory. This cruising often sparks ideas as connections not seen before emerge.

 Assemble bits.

There are always a number of posts in production, with lots of notes, thoughts, and references, attached as well as drafts of what the final thing might look like. Some linger and evolve  for years before they get published, others get absorbed into other posts, while others are chucked when it becomes obvious there is no original idea in there, and I am just digging old ground.

 Raid a lot of banks.

Books are idea banks, the more you read, the greater the chance you will stumble across things that will be useful. I have always been a voracious reader, across a range of genres, and that has not changed, if anything,  become a bit more obsessive. It also pays to dump a book as soon as it demonstrates there is no value in it. Sometimes it hurts, I like to finish what I start, but where there is no prospect of a return on the investment in time, stop. The only caveat is that I do not throw them out, and therefore the prospect of moving at some point from the house where I have been  for over 30 years terrifies me.  

Marketing tool.

Finally, this blog has evolved as my primary marketing tool, which was the initial objective, but took a long time to evolve into anything meaningful. Overnight success after 10 years of effort.

The blog serves three vital additional functions:

Firstly, it is a repository of the ideas, views, checklists and tools I use in the consulting practice. This has become a critical function, and is not one I had anticipated at the beginning.

Secondly, it provides  a foundation of credibility to potential clients who may stumble across it, are referred to it, and to whom I send specific posts after a conversation of some sort. What I think about, how I approach marketing, strategic and enterprise improvement  assignments, and how I communicate can be easily seen by browsing a few posts.

Lastly, it offers thoughts, opinions, information, tools and insight based on my experience, and hopefully it is of value to some out there. When it is, I have added something to someone else, unknown, unpaid, but that knowledge of being able to help, is to me a an enormous reward.

 

Thanks for reading, commenting and sharing my musings, and I am enormously gratified that they are of value to an increasing number of people.

Have a great 2019, I know I will.

 

How to quantify your Customer Value Proposition

How to quantify your Customer Value Proposition

Jan 21, 2019 | Customers, Marketing, Sales

 

 

The value proposition to a customer is the means by which you converted them to being a customer.

Unless you can demonstrate value to them, in excess of any alternative, including doing nothing, you will not convert.

When you think about it, there are some pretty consistent variables that can  be massaged into some sort of quantification of a proposition. While it will never be perfect, it will be better than nothing when assessing the power of your marketing collateral, or perhaps assessing alternative wording.

Having a powerful value proposition is not enough, you must communicate it clearly and effectively to those who may be interested. You also must understand that ‘Value’ is a qualitative term, and will change with context and circumstances.

There are 7 variables I commonly see:

  • The strength of the purchase intent of the lead. This will vary enormously on a whole series of parameters, and will vary from time to time. For example, a need expressed to convert IT processes to the cloud from your own server might be a good idea, whose time has come, but when your server blows up, the need increases geometrically. The better you understand the drivers of the purchase intent the better able you will be to make a judgement,
  • How closely your proposition matches the need being expressed. When you are trying to sell a 4X4 and the lead is a single bloke who hates camping, you will have a challenge on your hands. Better to offer him the sports car.
  • Differentiation. When you are the only one in the market niche, selling to those who need your product becomes easier. When you are one of a number of undifferentiated alternatives, price becomes the major distinguishing factor, and that is never good. Conversion becomes a race to the bottom, and the greatest risk is that you win too often and go broke.
  • The clarity of the value proposition to the lead. This is where most fall down in the execution. Look at 100 websites, and see if you can locate the value proposition. While we are learning, the clarity of the proposition to a visitor to a website, which is now the first port of call in almost every purchase beyond the regular and mundane, will be terrible. The key to remember is that the lead, after reading the headline copy on the site, must be able to tell you why they should buy from you, and not someone else, assuming they are in the market you service.
  • The level of friction in the sales process. Increasingly as we go on line, friction in the process is becoming more and more important. Off line purchasers are increasingly expecting on line frictionless processes. In B2B sales, the friction is often institutional, the bureaucracy of procurement simply gets in the way. Effective Key Account Management is essential in these circumstances.
  • The incentives used to counter the friction. Most often financial incentives are the primary ones used, but tying them to another is common, for example ‘this special lasts only until Sunday’ or ‘Only 5 left’
  • Uncertainty caused by the purchase process. Human psychology seeks safety, and that resides in the known, and with the crowd. Asking a lead to do something different increases the risk to them, and the riskier they perceive the solution, the less likely they will be to convert.

So, to the equation.

Conversion potential = Purchase intent + need satisfaction + Differentiation + proposition clarity + (process friction – incentives) + uncertainty.

The way to put numbers on each of these parameters would be to weight each of the parameters in your particular circumstance, then score your lead on a 1-5 scale. The ‘w’ in the formula is the weight you give to each of the variables.

CP = wPI +wNS +wD + WPC + (wPF – wI) + U.

As an exercise, look at your own landing page and score it as a potential customer would when seeking a solution to an itch.

Image credit, again, to Gapingvoid.com