8 factors to ensure your website delivers value

Feb 23, 2015 | Branding, Marketing, Small business

 

8 factors to build a great site

8 factors to build a great site

First thing you need to do is decide what you want the site to deliver. Once you have that, you can build the site around the objective. A website has really only two possible purposes: first, it may be commercial, second, it may be a hobby.  If you decide that the latter is your sites purpose, save yourself  some time, and  stop reading now.

However, should it be a commercial  objective, the following will have some value for you.

  1.  A headline with a hook. You may get a couple of seconds at best or catch a visitors attention, you must do it with the headline. There are plenty of posts around that tell you how to write a killer headline, but however you do it, you need to be able to hook and engage a casual reader.  A great headline focuses on a problem that the reader needs solved. It can be a list, question, or many other forms, but is must be about them, not you.
  2. Visual and text alignment. The image on the page must reflect what the page, and site are about. Humans are visual animals, we impute a lot of information from visual cues, make sure they are all aligned.
  3. Logical progression. Being visual we run from headline to sub head, to sub-sub head, and expect there to be a logical progression if information. In the event  we do not find it, our minds meander off somewhere, and a visitor will “bounce”.
  4. Uncluttered clarity. Unclear, disorganised content is death to a casual visitor. They want  to find what they are looking for with a minimum of fuss, trouble, and clicks. Make it hard to navigate and they are gone before you know it, probably never to return. In many ways this is similar to the point above, but clarity is more than a logical progression of headlines, it is also the layout, and visitor centric journey through the levels of information.
  5. Visitor centric page names and headers. A site should be all about the reader, not the site owner. “About us” is perhaps the most common, as well as  the worst page name on the web. A visitor does not care about you, they care about them, and what you can do for them. For heavens sake call them “how we can help” or “problems we solve” or something, anything other than “About us”. (perhaps you can hear a hobby horse)
  6. Relevance and clarity.  Irrelevant material must be banned. Just having a video for the sale of having a video, because somebody told you humans were visual animals, or because the bloke down the road has  one is stupid.
  7. Clear, easy to use, call to action. Does  not matter what it is, click here for info, download the research, even like us, it has to be clear what you want a visitor to do.
  8. Mobile editing. More than  just “mobile friendly” you site needs to be “mobile edited”, Mobile sites play a different role to desktops. Mobile fills a more short term role satisfying an immediate information need, rather than being a tool for research. Therefore much of the information and links that are usually on a website are superfluous to a mobile, just serving to slow down delivery and extend the “finger-flicking” necessary to get the answer.

 

None of this is easy, a website that delivers commercial value rarely happens by accident, particularly now when there are over a billion sites plus the social media platforms vying for the limited attention of your audience.

There are many opportunities to vote for the worst website of all time, this is mine as it combines unsurpassed zealotry with a psychedelic “sicko”  design that is a stomach churner.

 

The 9 imperatives for small businesses when building a brand.

Feb 17, 2015 | Branding, Customers, Marketing, Small business

 

 

Build your brand on solid foundations if you want it to last.

Build your brand on solid foundations if you want it to last.

This is the fourth on the series focusing on how to beat the supermarket gorillas at their own game, by building a brand that has a loyal and evangelistic group of customers . The original summary post, here, followed up by the expanded first post on the supermarket business  model, the third advising to be savvy with data, and the most recent suggesting some ideas to leverage category management for the benefit of small businesses.

Reaching consumers via supermarket retailers remains a tough game, one in which the supermarkets  set all the rules, own the referee, and choose who can play with them. In other words, they are holding all the cards, so to remain in the game, you have to be smart, focused and innovative.

Building a brand is not something that happens overnight, rather it happens over an extended time, and requires vision, patience, and investment. However, the fantastic opportunities for small businesses to play with the big league opened up by digital technology has bent the rules a little.

So, following are the key considerations in your brand building challenge:

Know your starting point.

As with any journey, knowing where you are now, where you want to be, and having some idea of the road in between those points is vital to success. Therefore the logical starting point is a review of your current competitive and strategic environment, along with a critical review of your own capabilities, distinctive or otherwise, and the points that differentiates you from your competitors. A part of your starting point is a clear understanding of what drives success in your business, what drives costs and  revenues, how the business model works, and reacts to stress. Being self aware is as important in business as it is in personal relationships.

Have a clear picture of your customer in mind.

“Customer profiling” is for small businesses one of the opportunities they have that can differentiate them from their bigger competitors, but it takes the will to be able to say “No”, to define who you want to attract, and build your brand offering and communications to appeal to those people specifically. It makes little difference if you are B2B or B2C, the same rules apply. The closer you come to being able to define your ideal customer as a person you know, the better. A real part of this exercise is to be able to think like a customer. Some large companies now employ anthropologists to spend time in the homes of their target customers to see how they operate in the context that they are seeing as an opportunity to offer a branded product to deliver value of some sort

Have a clear view of your brand as a person.

Similarly, defining your brand with human traits is of vital importance. People relate to people not brands, therefore to build empathy, a consumer has to be able to impute behavioural characteristics, beliefs, and personality to your brand.

Build a brand differentiated from competitors in some ways of vital importance to customers.

There is little point in being the same, or very similar to everyone else when dealing with supermarkets. Negotiations then just becomes an auction between suppliers for shelf space, and once you have succeeded there, you face a reverse  auction for the consumers dollars. Neither are winning strategies. Small businesses by their nature do not have the scale to serve everyone, so having a clear offer to a small group, sufficiently powerful that they are not  prepared to accept a substitute is the desired outcome. If you can sit in front of one of the gorillas, knowing you only want distribution in one, and knowing that at least some of your customers will be prepared to either change their store choice to get your product, or build a bit of loyalty to their current store because it stocks your product, you  have some leverage in the discussions. It is all about negotiation leverage, and differentiation that delivers value to consumers gives leverage.

Aim for the long term.

‘Lifetime customer value” has become a  bit of a cliché in recent times, but that does not mean it is of less value as an idea. Building in the triggers that will bring our existing customers back time and time again is a far better way of building a brand and a business than to be constantly out fishing for  new customers. The digital tools now available have given us a wide array of tools that assist in the calculation  of the cost of acquisition and retention of customers. Marketing expenditure can be now absolutely accountable for results, and sensitive to even very small changes in tactics, and this is a potent  tool small business can use against their bigger rivals, and to build brand loyalty. Knowing what sorts of marketing activity engages existing customers is of way more value than going fishing for new ones.

 Consistency and predictability.

These two words are factors that always come up in consumer research seeking to identify the foundations of good brands. Consumers know what they stand for, know they will have those things delivered with  no surprises. However, the notion of consistency goes further, to the way the brand is packaged, advertised, an positioned, they are all consistent over  along period of time, change coming as evolutionary rather than revolutionary. Consumers also want to be entertained, intrigued, and engaged with their brands, and that will not happen if they are boring, so the communications have to walk that fine line of being consistent, while being constantly fresh and interesting. Few succeed, but those that do become significant players in their niche, weather that niche be a global market, like Apple, or a local market.

Differentiation.

Whatever else you develop your brand to be, and to do, make it different to everything else out there that could fill the same customer need. Without your own distinctive identity, you will be simply one of the forgotten brands that fight for shelf space on the basis of price, and then all you do is deliver profits to the supermarkets. However, differentiation does not mean a different pack size, or colour scheme, it means genuinely solving the consumers problem or addressing the “job to be done” in a different way, one that adds value by reflecting the job. You must however be very focused about what value you add to who, and why they should buy your brand over the other guy. The final implication here is that you know your competitor well, well enough to counter their obvious and logical competitive responses in the manner in which you build your brand.

Communications must be in the customer language.

Brands that communicate in the language customers use in the context in which the product is used have a chance of success, as the customers relate to the context and language. Many years ago I was a part of the team, an observer really as I was just a young graduate,  that created the “you ought to be congratulated” advertising that gave Meadow Lea margarine a stranglehold on the Australian market for 30 years. In a market with many heavily   advertised brands, Meadow Lea held a share of more than three times its closest rival for many years. The line, and the ads themselves spoke in the language of the primary customer, busy, smart women with families who were juggling multiple roles and responsibilities.

Plan and integrate your marketing activity across platforms.

In the “old days” the scope of available marketing activity was limited to the paid media, paid public relations, sales promotions and a few others. Now, that has changed, and the menu of available marketing tools has exploded. This huge array of options also makes life for the marketers complicated and dangerous, so great care must be taken to be consistent in your message and positioning across the whole array of marketing tools that are employed, and you need to be employing a range of them, rather than  a few, depending on the behaviour of your customers. These days, social media platforms play a huge role in the development of an opportunity to sell, but in fact they do not yet do much in the way of brand-building.  The core of much brand building activity is your website, to which you drive potential customers so they can check you out, and existing customers to reinforce the value of your brand in more “long form” ways like recipes, hints, detailed information, whatever is relevant to the consumers relationship with the product category and your brand. However, the most common problem with websites is that people “set and forget”. They need to be living creatures, fed and nurtured like the family pet if they are to deliver a return.

 

Two final thoughts.

  1.  Even if you do all the above right, better than anyone else, but your product sucks, you will have wasted all that effort , time and money. The consumer is not a fool, they will not mistake good marketing for a good product, at least, not more than once.
  2. If you want your brand to last, to stand the test of time and competition, build it on solid foundations, but make it flexible enough to adjust to consumers as they evolve.

Making  content work for you.

Jan 20, 2015 | Branding, Marketing, Small business, Social Media

Interactive content adds greater value

Interactive content adds greater value

The mantra “Content is King” is now  about three years old, geriatric in web years.

Now almost everybody is doing it, certainly almost everyone small businesses need to compete successfully against to survive.

Content is rapidly becoming a commodity, something to be “sourced” as you would a new printer cartridge, or replacement part for a bit of machinery, the only real challenges left are to know where to look, how to sort through the options, and how much to pay.

Given this is the case, how should forward thinking marketers, particularly those on small budgets set about  differentiating themselves amongst the welter of competing attention grabbing options available?

The answer is pretty easy to say, but not so easy to execute.

Find ways to actively engage the individuals in your market with your content . Just getting them to read a post, or even download a white paper is no longer good enough, you have to find the means to put their brains into gear, rather than just letting them operate on autopilot.

Turn a white paper into an interactive performance measurement tool,

Build a quizzes and games into your infographics,

Create questionnaires to complement your best practise databases,

Throw out the product brochure, and let customers design their own product and add the extras.

There are a few services evolving to assist the process, several tailored for specific social media platforms, but the hardest bit is to find the creativity, imagination, and market insight that will allow you to understand the interactions with your product and its competitors sufficiently well to know what sort of activity will engage them.

Get it right, and you will also get to gather an extraordinary array of customer behavioural data that can be leveraged, delivering value to your business and your customers.

13 strategic trends that will drive small business performance in 2015

Jan 5, 2015 | Branding, Change, Customers, Governance, Innovation, Marketing

2015

Small business is at a crossroads as we move into 2015.

Either they embrace the opportunities and tools presented by the disruption of the “old ways” by digital technology, or they slowly, and in some cases, quickly, become irrelevant, obsolete and broke as customers move elsewhere.

Your choice, as much of the technology can now be relatively  easily outsourced,  and at a very reasonable cost, certainly less than most would expect. The two major challenges in outsourcing, snake oil salesmen and not knowing what you want and need,  are little different to any other category of purchased service.

So, to the trends that will influence your business in 2015 that you need to be at the very least aware of, and in most cases take some sort of pre-emptive action.

 

  • Marketing technology will continue its rise and rise. The thousands of small marketing technology players who are currently emerging will be forcibly integrated, as the big guys buy “Martec” real estate. Adobe, Microsoft, et al will spend money, and the little guys will be swallowed as the gorillas fill the holes in their offerings, and new segments emerge. At the other end of the scale, there will remain plenty of options for smaller businesses to step into the automated marketing space. The current rash of innovations to make life easier for small businesses   will continue and as those smaller single purpose tools gain traction, and more are launched to fill the niches that exist to service small businesses.
  • Peer to peer marketing  will continue to grow at “Moores law” type rates. Jerry Owyangs honeycomb diagram and data tells it all. Almost any service I can think of has the potential too be disrupted in some way by the peer to peer capabilities being delivered by technology.
  • Content creation as a process. The next evolution in marketing, the move that I think “content” will start to make from being individual pieces of information produced in an ad hoc manner to being a process that is highly individualised, responsive to the specific context, and informed by the behaviour of the individual recipient scraped from the digital ecosystem. It means that content creation needs to be come an integrated  process, more than a “campaign” . The term “content” will become redundant, it is just “marketing”, focussing on the individual customer.
  • Marketing will evolve even more strongly as the path to the top corporate job. Functional expertise is becoming less important, what is important is the ability to connect the dots in flattened organisations that work on collaborative projects rather than to a functional tune. This trend is as true for small businesses as it is for major corporations. There will still be challenges as many marketers are really just mothers of clichés, but those relying on the cliché and appearances for credibility are becoming more obvious as the marketing expertise in the boardroom increases, and the availability of analytics quickly uncovers the charlatans. This will make the marketing landscape increasingly competitive on bases other than price.

 

  • Recognition that marketing is the driving force of any successful enterprise will become accepted, even by the “beanies”. Seth Godin has been banging on for years about the end of the industrial/advertising model, the old school of interruption, but many enterprises have continued to deploy the old model, but  I sense that the time has come.  2015 will be the year that sees marketing finally  takes over.
  • Video will become bigger part of marketing, particularly advantaging the small businesses that have the drive to deploy it and the capability to manage the outsourcing of the bits that they either cannot do, or cannot do economically. The old adage of a picture telling a thousand words is coming to life in twitter streams, instagram shares, and all social media platforms. The video trend will be supported by increasing use of graphics in all forms, but particularly data visualisations as a means to communicate meaning from the mountains of data that we can now generate. The density of data on the web is now such that new ways to cut though, communicate and engage need to be found, and I suspect those will all employ visuals in some form, perhaps interactive?

 

  • Pay to go ad free is a trend that will evolve suddenly, to some degree it is an evolution of subscription marketing. Free to date platforms will charge to be ad free,  whilst new platforms and models such as the Dollar Shave Club will probably evolve.
  • The death of mass and the power of triibes will become more evident. The “cat pictures ” nature of  content of social media platforms will reduce as marketers discover smart ways to package and deliver messages that resonate and motivate action. The agility of digitally capable small businesses will open up opportunities for them their bigger rivals will not see, or not be compatible with their existing business models.
  • Local,  provenance, and  “real”. Marketing is about stories, so here is a trend made for  marketers, and you do not have too be a multinational, just have a good story, rooted in truth and humanity. ‘Hyper-local” will become a significant force. Marketing aimed at small geographies, such as is possible by estate agents, and “local” produce, such as the increasing success of “Hawkesbury Harvest” in Sydney, and the “Sydney Harvest” value chain initiative.
  • Paid social media will evolve more quickly than any of us anticipate, or would be forecast by a simple extrapolation. Twitter will go paid, travelling the route Facebook took to commercialize their vast reach. Some will hate it as it filters their feeds, others  will welcome the reduction of the stream coming at them from which they try and drink. Anyway, twitter et al will set out to make money by caitalising on their reach.
  • Social will grab more of the market  in 2015 than it has had, even though the growth has been huge over the last few years. Small businesses will either embrace social and content marketing, in which case their agility and flexibility will put them in a competitively strong position, or if they fail to do so, they will fall further behind, and become casualties.
  • The customer should always be the focal point of any organisation, but often they fail to get a mention. It is becoming more important than ever that you have a “360 degree” view of your customers, as the rapid evolution of social media and data generation and mining is enabling an ever more detailed understanding of the behaviour drivers of consumers. The density of highly targeted marketing, both organic and paid is increasing almost exponentially, so if you do not have this 360 degree view, your marketing will miss the mark.
  • Treat with caution all the predictions you read, keep an absolutely open mind, as the only thing we know for sure about them is that they will be wrong, as with this ripper from Bloomberg who predicted the failure of the iphone. However, as with statistical models, quoting George E.P. Box who said “Essentially, all models are wrong, it is just that some are useful” perhaps some of the predictions you find around this time of the year will be useful, by adding perspective and an alternative view to your deliberations for 2015.

 

As a final thought, if you think your kid may be good at marketing, be sure they learn maths and statistics. “Maths & Stats”  will increasingly be the basis of marketing, and the source of highly paid jobs and service business start-ups.

Have a great 2015.

Allen

3 essential pieces of the supermarket business model

Nov 27, 2014 | Branding, Category, Change, Marketing, retail, Small business

sleeping gorillas

A short while ago, I posted “10 strategies for SME’s to beat the supermarket gorillas at their own game”  which generated quite a bit of comment and feedback. Amongst the feedback were a number of requests to go into more detail on each of the strategies,  and so this is the first of the series, focussed on understanding the business  model of the supermarkets.

I deliberately used the word “Gorillas” because of the extraordinarily concentrated nature of Australia’s supermarket retailers, with Coles and Woolworths between them holding over  70% of FMCG sales depending on the category, and whose numbers you believe.

You know the old question: “where do the 500kg gorillas sleep?”

Answer: “anywhere they bloody like”

That was the way it was, a comfy duopoly, however, more recently there have been some major strategy alterations by Coles which has dramatically lifted their financial performance, and Aldi has successfully carved out a growing niche as a third retail presence. In addition, there are still some very good independent retailers around operating out of the wholesaler Metcash, who also competes with some of  their own and franchised retail outlets.

This mix, combined with the opportunities suppliers have to sell into food service and institutional markets and increasingly direct to consumers via the net and other means makes for an environment where the agile and insightful suppliers can be very successful despite the obstacles, but it is a very challenging environment.

The concept of business models is well known, in summary, it is the expression of how a business makes money. It always involves a matrix of revenue generated, the fixed and variable costs of generating that revenue, and the choices that the business makes about its customers and how they will be serviced, and the way they incur the costs of that servicing.

Supermarkets are a great example of a number of seemingly similar competitors that have slightly differing business models. At a macro level they have strong similarities, relying on volume, price, and shopper numbers to succeed, but everyone who shops knows that Woolworths is not Coles, is not Aldi.

However, they do have some common building blocks.

    1. Revenue generation. Supermarkets generate revenue on both sides of the equation.
      • Shoppers buy products, paying at the checkout.
      • Suppliers “pay” for shelf space via a range of charges levied for every variable the retailers can dream up. Volume discounts, payment terms, promotional levies, preferred shelf positioning, promotional slots, access to sales information, and a host of others. Some are items for which suppliers receive an invoice, others are taken as discounts off the invoice price, increasingly applied automatically as a part of the trading term package.
    2. Cost management. Supermarkets work on very low percentage margins, relying on the volume to generate the cash margins.
      • Fixed costs are a significant part of retailers total costs, made up of the provision of the retail floor space, the logistics infrastructure and personnel. Supermarkets attack their fixed cost base aggressively using their scale as negotiation tools with landlords and logistics suppliers, while keeping a very substantial proportion of front line retail staff as casuals rather than permanent employees so they can better adjust staff levels to match activity. The sorts of choices retailers make are between high density shopping centre locations Vs stand alone locations. There are costs and benefits to each which are considered as a part of their strategic decision making.
      • The biggest variable cost is the cost of good sold, and they similarly use their scale to manage those costs downward. Tactics vary between retailers, but the core game is to maximise their margins while keeping prices as low as possible to attract the volume buyers. This is an extremely delicate balance.
      • Transaction costs are usually pretty well hidden in most businesses, but are really significant in the case of supermarkets simply due to the number of transactions they make.  For example, there is a cost to managing the buying relationship with a supplier, but  the larger the supplier, the less is the total costs/unit of sale of managing that relationship. This has led to a dramatic reduction of the number of suppliers supermarkets have in any category over the last 15 years or so a trend further accelerated by the increasingly common strategy of limiting the number of proprietary brands in any category  substituting house-branded products, and reducing the number of relationships to be managed. This has made negotiating shelf space increasingly hard, and because of scarcity, increasingly expensive for suppliers, in turn putting extreme pressure on small suppliers.
    3. Customer service and relationships.   The retailers have each made choices about  the pricing, location, ranging, and service strategies that sets them apart from each other, and more subtly, they have back office strategies that differ. However, their common aim is to have as much market share ass possible, as volume is the profit generator.
      • As in any market, no retailer can be all things to all people, so each makes the choice of the “ideal” customer, and markets towards them, grateful for any overlap. Increasingly the marketing is being supported by customer loyalty cards and the data mining and personalised promotional opportunities that technology is delivering, but the fundamental measures of success remain unchanged: number of shoppers, share of wallet, and basket size.
      • The two major retailers have very large marketing budgets which they spend in a wide  variety of ways, across all channels of communication with customers and potential customers, and often in joint activity with their suppliers, which inevitably, the suppliers end up funding in return  for volume.  The smaller the retailer, the less “mass market” they are, so the tactics tend to differ, although strategically, finding willing supplier partners is a core part of every retailers marketing mix.
      • Consumers generally want choice when they are in a supermarket, the more the better, in any category. Woolworths and Coles stores carry 12-20,000 Sku’s  (Stock keeping unit) depending on the size and location of the store, a typical IGA might carry 8-10,000, while Aldi carry just over 1,000. The sku’s carried in any store also reflect of the demographic and cultural mix. The Woolworths store in Auburn in Sydney has a significantly different product mix to the Woolworths of a similar size in Double Bay.
      • Every retailer uses some form of category management disciplines as a means  to monitor, adjust and locate their inventory onto the sales face in the way that best meets their customers needs and maximises impulse pick-up. This is always a data intensive mix of the volume and margin of the individual Sku, (such as Ski strawberry yoghurt 200gm) group of similar Sku’s (all strawberry 200gm yoghurt) subcategory (all strawberry yoghurt) and category (all yoghurt) and between categories. They make choices about how many brands and types to keep in stock, where they put them, on shelf and in relation to other yogurts, and indeed other chilled products. A facing of yoghurt added is a facing of some other product gone, as the sides of the stores are not elastic. At the core of the category management activities is the need to best satisfy consumers, whilst competing effectively and delivering maximised margins.

Being agile, persistent,  and prepared to experiment are about the best qualities a supplier to supermarkets can have.

Start with the things you can do.

Oct 17, 2014 | Branding, Marketing, Strategy

Majors bay rd

Majors Bay Rd Concord, Sydney.

No business can do everything, so the easy way to start is to do the thing you can do well, as long as it is at least partly the thing that also makes you different.

In a suburb not far from me in Sydney, there is a street that over the last 5 years or so has evolved into an eclectic mix of cafes and restaurants, occasionally separated by some other hang-over shop from a previous age. There must be 25 or 30 of them down both sides of the street, each vying for a share of the dollars the punters bring in from all over Sydney.

One of the cafes, on a corner, not only has plenty of outside room on the footpath, friendly service, and a good range of only mildly over priced cafe meals, and treats, they also roast their own coffee beans. This just reinforces that they have the best and freshest coffee experience in the area, supported by a blend of service, location and that aroma as they roast.

Intoxicating.

It also confirms them as “knowing their coffee” an important cache in an environment where coffee-wankery is reaching disturbing proportions, and cafe’s are springing up like mushrooms after rain.

It cannot be too hard to set up a roasting operation, it delivers a great marketing advantage to the cafe, offers an added income stream from bagged coffee sales, and, oh, did I mention the aroma?

Differentiating yourself is a must in this homogenising world, and doing it in a way that reinforces the marketing story in the way this cafe has done merits competitive success, which by my observation every time I go there is substantial.