April 2013
Digital Marketing Insider
are boys more likeable than girls? How We Sold ÂŁ250K Of Furniture Without A Website The 5 Types Of Prospect And How To Sell To Each Of Them Part 5
A Note From The Editor
About Us
First a warm welcome to Aprils edition of the Digital Marketing Insider, produced by ROARlocal.com.
We create great looking online advertising campaigns that enhance your brand, we use scientifically proven online advertising methods to drive visitors to your website and adverts and then we optimise your site to make sure those visitors become paying customers that tell all their friends and come back for more. Our team is different, we live in the UK so we understand how & what brits love to buy. We’re successful online entrepreneurs, world class copywriters, website optimisation specialists, online advertising mavericks and the geekiest SEO people! If this is the first time you’ve received this a hearty welcome to you! You’re receiving this because we want to show you what we’re all about and also give you some usable strategies to help your businesses grow. This month finds me in Sydney Australia, we’re launching roarlocal here in Oz so i’m here for the launch and to set things up with my business partner Mike. The best piece of advice I’ve ever had in business is to employ people who are smarter than you are, my wife would argue that that’s pretty easy to do in my case ;-0
Contents 01 / A Note From The Editor 02 / Are Boys More Likeable Than Girls? 03 / The 5 Types Of Prospect And How To Sell To Each Of Them Part 5 05 / How We Sold £250K Of Furniture Without A Website
It’s because of the great people we have on the roarlocal team (15 people and counting!) that we’re able to grow our business into new countries such as Australia.
07 / No Money Honey
I know you’ll agree with me that I’d rather be in the sun at 26 degrees than going through the coldest spring since 1949!
10 / Entrepreneur Insights
09 / How To Sell Your Products Online
11 / Get In Touch & credits
You can learn more about our Australian business here: www.roarlocal.com.au I hope you’ll enjoy reading this months magazine it’s jam packed with our usual level of brilliant content and as always if we can help you in any way please get in touch
01
Are Boys More Likeable Than Girls?
Using Facebook to end sibling rivalry… Boys Vs Girls – Who Wins? As part of our ongoing work for one of our clients we’ve set up some new facebook ad campaigns and I’ve been split testing the pictures not only in the ads but also on the fan page itself. For the main part pictures on the landing page had no effect at all (something else does, will reveal all another time) BUT One thing that was interesting was that it seems that women are more inclined to click on the ad if it is to do with their son than their daughter. but the same thing does not follow for men, men were equally as likely to click like for their sons or daughters.
What does this mean? Well if you’re selling to parents you’re better off using imagery of sons rather than daughters. What about if you’re not selling to parents?
Want to get us to look after your online marketing? Then check out how we can help you triple your profits online.
Here’s a tip, use facebook to test ads BEFORE you use them in your marketing (website, print media etc) this way you’ll know which pictures work best, headlines and offers. The tests are cheap to do and the results remove a lot of the guesswork and bias that we have when we put products and campaigns together. Give it a shot
02
The 5 Types Of Prospect And How To Sell To Each Of Them Part 5
by Neil Asher
“How To Bring A New Product To A New Market” In my previous posts we started the process of how to market your products and services to your prospects depending on what stage on their awareness cycle they were at, here I outlined those 5 stages of awareness for you: How to sell your products online part 1 Next I showed you how to market to your prospects online based on the stage of awareness they are at here’s phase 1: Your prospect knows about their problem and knows that your product can solve their problem. How to sell your products online part 2 Then we moved on to stage 2: Your prospect knows about their problem but does not know that your product can solve their problem.
How To Create A New Market Category
How to sell your products online part 3
This is the most difficult of all the marketing problems we solve.
Then we moved on to stage 3:
Your prospect is either not aware of his desire or his need or he won’t honestly admit it to himself without being lead into it by your ad or the need is so general and undefined that it resists being summed up in a single banner ad or it’s a secret that just can’t be verbalised.
Your prospect either knows, or recognises immediately, that he wants what the product does; but he doesn’t yet know’ that there is a product, your product, that will do it for him. AKA “How To Bring A New Product or Service To Market” How to sell your products online part 4 Now we come to the final phase 4:
An example of a product in this type of category is the ipod or deoderant when it was launched or more recently mouth wash. These products had to have the market created for them, there was no existing marketplace they could tap into and simply reposition themselves within, this meant that the marketers job was to piggy back off of another existing need and postion the product as an auxilrty to that market. For instance, before listerine was the behmouth it is now it was a little known product within the mouth care niche. The marketers had to piggy back the product off of the bad breath niche created by toothpates and chewing gum (which originally piggy backed off the tooth-paste market when it was launched). There is no easy way to do this. It requires a unique approach and thus the smart marketers who can do this get paid very well. However there are some points to note that will stop you wasting your money should you ever need to create a new market. 1.
Price means nothing to a person who does not know your product, or want your product. Therefore, eliminate all mention of price, or price reduction, in your ad and on your website home page.
2.
The name of your product means nothing to a person who has never seen it before, and may actually damage your ad if you have had a bad model the year before, or if it is now associated with the out of date, or out of fashion, or something unpleasant. Therefore, keep your product out of the ad, and be extremely wary about breaking the mood or disguise of your ad with a prominent logo.
3.
And this is the hardest fact of all to accept. At this stage of your market, a direct statement of what your product does, what desire it satisfies, or what problem it solves, simply will not work.
03
So there you have it, how to sell to the 5 types of prospects, I hope you’ve enjoyed this 5 part series, if you have leave me a comment so I know and I’ll write more for you.
Want us to look after your online marketing for you? Then why not check out our new “Outsourced Digital Marketing Department” service here
Your product either has not reached that direct stage, or has passed beyond it. And you cannot simply shift from one desire to another. You are not faced here with a problem of sophistication, but one of complete indifference, or unacceptability. Therefore, the performance of your product, and the desire it satisfies, can only be brought in later. You cannot mention them in your initial advert. Now I know what you’re thinking… BUT Neil! I cannot mention price, product, function or desire. What do I have left? Your market, of course! And the distinct possibility that by broadening your appeal beyond price, product function or specific desire, you can reach the maximum limits of your full potential market; consolidate splinter appeals; and increase the sales of your product at a fantastic rate. To truly crush it with a product like this you MUST focus 100% on the state of mind of your market at this particular moment. What you are doing in this stage of the game is letting your market know you are one of them. You are selling nothing, promising nothing, satisfying nothing. Instead, you are echoing an emotion wether that emotion be latent or explicit. An attitude, a satisfaction that picks people out from the crowd and binds them together in a single advert. In this type of ad, you are telling them what they are You are defining them for themselves. You are giving them the information they need and want, about a problem still so vague that you are the first to put it into words. Here, above all, is the type of headline that never attempts to sell a product or a performance, but simply tries to sell your prospect on clicking the ad and reading the rest of your website (careful attention must be paid to what you put on your website for this product too).
04
How We Sold £250K Of Furniture Without A Website
by Neil Asher
Step 2: We setup wordpress on the main domain. We created a simple blog about the bed. It had 10 posts with bed information and details as well as a few articles we had written specifically to sell. I also used wordpress to setup a simple contact page and privacy policy. We did some SEO magic to get the site indexed and ranking very quickly with Google before going live with the campaign. Step 3: The offer page needed to be created. We’ll go into what I did with the landing page a little later. Step 4:
This is a kinda weird case study about How We Sold £250K Of Furniture Without A Website for one of our new outsourced marketing clients. Here’s some background info so you can better understand the marketing problems to be solved.: “Best Furniture (fictitious name to protect the innocent) has a significant overstock of a particular model Bed. Let’s call the bed the Best French Bed. All of these beds are brand new, same style but they do have a variety of colors in stock. Best Furniture picked these Beds up dirt cheap from other retailers around the country. Here’s the catch. The Best French Bed is a niche bed that does not sell well. Best Furniture was baffled about how they should sell all of these Best French Beds that were sitting in their shops collecting dust. Newspaper Ads, Direct Mail, TV, Radio would all be a waste of money since these Beds do not appeal to most bed buyers. These Beds needed to be moved fast and when you need to move inventory fast, you call ROARLocal!” This case study is about the steps we took to generate highly qualified leads and move these beds.
After speaking with the owner of Best Furniture I found out that there was some demographics data that I could use to our advantage (we always start with the customer). The majority of the prospects who would be interested in purchasing this Bed lived in high net worth areas outside of London, so Cheshire, Surrey, Kent etc. Best Furniture had made it possible to deliver these Beds affordably to any of these areas, meaning that a deal could be closed over the phone. We proposed that to get the most highly qualified traffic we do some Search Engine Marketing in conjunction with a landing page designed and conversion optimisation for this campaign. Since Google Adwords has by far the most advanced regional targeting capabilities, we decided we would concentrate our effort there. Step 1: I bought a domain. We wanted something that would make it appear that we were associated with the manufacturer. Since Best Furniture is a licensed franchisee of the manufacturer this isn’t a huge stretch. I got lucky and picked up a great targeted domain. We picked a domain that would look good in a google adwords ad so we could essentially use it as a fourth line of ad text.
I setup a Google Adwords campaign targeting the geographic areas that I was told were particularly good. I made 1 ad group and within that ad group bid on a few broad keywords. Heres the general concept of what I did •
Best french bed cheshire
•
French style beds Surrey
•
Baroque bed shop in kent
My goal here was to be bidding on only a few very relevant keywords and use negative keywords to get rid of the junk that would be searched for. I started with the obvious negative keywords and then added to the list as I watched the sitelogs of what searches were leading to the site. Here are some obvious negative keywords I used: • sheets • linen • used • ikea
What this keyword method accomplished was generating large volume traffic that was still relevant, and increasingly relevant as I got more data of what keywords paired with my main keywords converted.
05
The ads used in the campaign were pretty straight forward. Since we were enticing people with a rather large discount off of MSRP to sell the product quickly, that was mentioned in the text ad. We split test a bunch of ads to see what got the best click through rates. Overall the campaign had 3.7%+ CTRs. The landing page being used was a “thin” data collection page which is why we setup the wordpress blog earlier. When I set the ads up, I directed all of the ads to the landing page. I then set all the keywords at the keyword level to the domain and replicated the sell page to focus on the given keyword – This resulted in very high quality scores which lowered our clients ad costs substantially. Those are the 5 main steps used to create this campaign. Let’s talk a little bit about the landing page. I can’t show you the landing pages due to our normal confidentiality agreement with our clients but that doesn’t keep me from drawing you a rough diagram of what we did.
Landing Page 2: This was the style of the winning landing page: The above style of page is the one that generated the most leads and ran for the majority of the campaign. Leads were tracked through the form as well as the tracking 0845 number. Below are the stats of the campaign: Total Ad Spend: £3,133 Clicks: 1953 Email Leads: 400
Landing Page 1:
Phone Calls: 270
My original thought was just to let the visitors get a quote on Best French Bed. This would leave negotiation leeway between the shop and prospect. Here is my first thoughts on the style of landing page we’d do for them:
beds Sold: 250 Approximate bed Sale Price: £1000 Total Revenue: £250,000 As you can see for a total marketing budget of just over £3000 our client had £250K in sales and more importantly for our client he was able to move some slow moving stock that he thought he’d have to write off. Essentially for our client this was windfall money into their business and as you can imagine they’re very happy. Want us to get to work on your business?
We found that a lot of the prospects were not as qualified as we may have hoped. ie. virtual tire kickers. The new idea was to just lay all of the information out there and if someone responded, they would surely be qualified:
Then check out our digital marketing services here
06
No Money Honey
by Neil Asher
Don’t try to sell what your market doesn’t want to buy The most common — and painful — mistake I see entrepreneurs (myself included) make is to develop a product that no one has any interest in buying. This is why so many inventors spend decade after decade without any commercial success. They’re passionate, yes — but they’re passionate about the product — about their brilliant new invention that they’re sure the world needs. Gary Halbert said a smart businessperson falls in love with the market, not the product. Fall in love with your buyers. Watch them, listen to them, cherish them. Figure out ways to surprise and delight them. Famed direct marketer Gene Schwartz wrote that copywriting was like sailing a ship. Your market’s desire for a particular product or service is the wind that propels that ship. A smart marketer can take a faint wind and make the best of it. And in the internet age, you can collect bits of breeze from all over the globe, and combine them to make a strong business. But even the best marketing technique will only take you so far. The desire has to be there before you start trying to sell. Where there’s no wind, there’s no movement. That’s actually why the very first thing I suggest you do is to identify a profitable market. Not a market of enthusiasts or fans — a market of buyers. What’s a buyer? Someone who deeply desires a certain result, AND (important distinction) will pay to get it.
Step 1: Get analytical There’s a lot of analysis you can do to unearth a solid market. The simplest is just to watch for a topic with lots of competitors. The “blue ocean” strategy, where you look for a market without competition, is attractive in theory, but more often a lack of competitors means a lack of buyers. Instead, look for markets driven by the basic human desires that never change. People will always look for sex, status, or a really great lunch. They want to look cool, to feel safe and secure, to create better relationships with their kids or spouses, to make themselves more attractive. We always have wanted those things, and we always will. Then you figure out where the holes are. What are the slivers of the market that aren’t being served well? What’s missing in the other offerings, good as they may be? What can you do that’s different in a valuable way, in a way that better serves a slice of the market? Innovation is great, if you’re innovating in the right direction. Instead of dreaming up a product or service no one has ever seen before, innovate better ways to serve a robust market. Step 2: Get empirical But analysis only takes you so far. There are all kinds of business ideas that should work … but don’t. Maybe you’re not a great fit for the market you’ve chosen. Maybe you’ve figured out what your customers need, but it turns out they don’t want it. Maybe what worked last year (or last month) doesn’t work today, for any one of a thousand reasons, think of businesses built on other peoples platforms like Google or Facebook for instance, working great now but if they fall out of favour you’re screwed. There’s one way to find out if your idea will work or not, and that’s to fire off some bullets and see if they hit a worthy target.
07
You’re not trying to pay the mortgage with this one You’re just firing a bullet. You’ll learn more, and gain more confidence, in putting a simple product together this weekend and launching it next week than you would in five years of market analysis. And you might even come away with a few quid in your pocket. And if you don’t sell a single copy? That’s good data.
Step 3: Create a bullet and fire it off This weekend, put together the smallest product possible that will deliver a benefit for your customer. It might be an 8-page special report. It might be a 30-minute webinar or teleseminar on a basic concept. Whatever it is, make it good enough to pay for since it’s going to be a small product, the price will be in line with that. Not a lot of risk for you, not a lot of risk for your audience. And it’s a priceless way to gather intelligence about what works and what doesn’t. What your audience values enough to pay for, and what they don’t. Put your new product out for sale next week. If you wait any longer than that, you’ll get sunk in analysis paralysis and a week will turn into three months. Rather than getting it perfect right now, let your audience know it’s a beta version — that you guarantee it will have some flaws. Create a simple website or landing page, then email your list (or someone else’s list if you don’t have one), write a blog post, get your friends to talk it up on Twitter or pay for Facebook or Google ads (my preferred strategy).
Figure out if the problem is the product (doesn’t solve a problem people care about), the market (cheapskates who think everything should be free), your list (if you have 9 people reading, it’s going to be hard to hit that first sale), or your copywriting technique… in my experience you can sell a good product to hot buyers with crap copy but you can’t sell a great product with amazing copy to the wrong people…. the market is FAR more important than the copy. Then start at step 1 and do it again.
This isn’t always an easy process, but it’s a straightforward one, and it will reveal the cause of your lack of sales. Fixing it can be tricky, especially if you’ve been trying fruitlessly to sell to a market of non-buyers, or your topic just doesn’t have the potential to support your business goals. You’ll need to have the courage to face the facts, and make the changes you need to make. But knowing is, in the end, always less painful than not knowing. My advice, fail and fail FAST! Then move on and test the next product. P.S by the way BFF is Isabella speak for best friends forever P.P.S Want to see a detailed step by step how to of this? Then check out my business building bootcamp here
Don’t launch a cannonball until you’ve fired enough bullets A single minimum viable product may give you enough data to build a much bigger project. Or, more likely, you may need to fire some more bullets. Try different angles. Different customer types. Solve different levels of problem (simple, moderate, or really ugly). Take different approaches. Try getting out of your comfort zone a little with a stronger copywriting approach. Figure out who you like to sell to. Who really gets you. Who benefits the most from your product or service. Who actually has the money to spend on what you’re selling. Then, observe. Watch what people go for. (It’s often very different from what they’ll tell you in a survey.) Keep track of your conversion rates (what percent of people buy) and your total profit. Keep working to nudge those two numbers up.
08
How To Sell Your Products Online
by Neil Asher
I read a lot. I once heard Bryan Tracey say that leaders are readers and it’s stuck with me ever since. I figure it takes 20 solid years of work to get enough great info to write a good book that I can read in a week, that to me is knowledge leverage! I tend to read a lot of biographies and books by the masters of marketing. I saw that most of todays marketing guru’s have simply plagiarised from the great marketing books of the past so I tend to read and re read those. One of my favs is David Ogilvy, he was the king of advertising and pioneered direct response into the mainstream, very very smart guy. Anyway, in his auto biography he has a “rules for advertising your product in print” that is brilliant and still applicable to today. I like distilled wisdom and check lists, must be the geek in me.
Neil’s Rules For Marketing Online! •
Measure everything
•
Not all searchers are created equal
•
Boring Banners ads don’t sell
•
Let the numbers make the decisions (but the client has the last word)
•
This is actual tested principles that we have used to make our clients a lot of money.
Marketing has to be consistent across the search and sales cycle
•
This is not an exhaustive list by any means but it’s a great place to start if you’re selling online.
Pictures sell online but they must offer a benefit
•
First get the click
•
You won’t sell anything until you put your offer in front of the right audience
•
Benefits sell features tell
•
Don’t try and be creative or funny, focus on selling instead
So inspired by that I’ve started my own “Neil’s Rules for marketing online” This is not some theoretical BS that we think might work but we’ve never actually tested. I hate that stuff.
•
Use the language of your prospects, go to forums and read reviews to get this
•
Great information that is easy to understand will outsell great presentation (ugly sells)
•
Be honest and truthful with your marketing, lies and bullshit always catches up to you
•
Put news into the advert and you will make it contemporary and relevant and have a greater chance of catching the zeitgeist of the day
•
Any demonstration of the product will always do well
•
As will (believable) before and after pictures
As I think of things I’ll add them and no doubt when the mood takes me I’ll expand a little more on the points I’ve made above. For now though it’s a great start and a suitable homage to the great men and women who’ve gone before.
09
Entrepreneur Insights
This month we are interviewing Piers Mummery, CEO of BrightMove Media, a dynamic London based company bringing near&now digital outdoor advertising on the roofs of London Black Taxis. Having started 11 businesses over the last 20 years, I am passionate about entrepreneurialism and have learned a thing or two about what it really takes to get a business off the ground. I have a combined range of experience in startups including both successes and failures and am best known for Shoots, a boutique chain of garden centers that I built and sold in 2011. And here is my very own metaphor (copyright myself!!)....... Business is like a river. It can flow in and out of your life; at times in raging torrents, bursting with energy and life. At other times it can drift slowly along and sometimes sit in still pools and even dry up! Interestingly, there is always a bank on either side and a river always leads to the ocean, unless you build a dam!!!
How did you do at school and what did you most love or hate about school? I had a mixed education and spent a combination of years at school in South Africa, Hong Kong and the UK. The disruption this caused meant that I lacked stability in my school years and I left prior to any further education with almost no qualifications and subsequently attended the university of life, where I qualified with honours!! I wasn’t exactly compliant at school. I made many friends at school and still have great close friendships with people I met 40 years ago at school. What would you say was the ONE THING that made the difference with your success with BrightMove Media?
What one thing about your childhood, personality or upbringing do you think had the biggest influence on your becoming an entrepreneur? I have always been very driven and steered by the courage of my own convictions. I’m not sure there has been one specific event or factor that has influenced my entrepreneurial career, other than a huge self belief in everything that I do. I was always an excitable youngster and I still today feel the need to be enthusiastic in everything I do. I find it hard to do something that I don’t believe in. I think balancing that belief with reality is critical.
The success of BrightMove Media is down to the team. The combined skills of the team is what has built the company and created the fantastic opportunities that lie ahead. Without doubt, the people in a business is what creates success. I have never been in a business where this has not been the case. What ONE THING would you do differently, knowing what you know now? In all of the businesses I have been involved in, the common factor that appears in hindsight is the need for more resources (time, money and people).Very often, things that you expect to happen, will cost more and take a lot longer to achieve. What really gets you buzzed NOW about being in business? What fulfills you most? I love the challenge of startups and growing businesses. The innovation is a huge motivator to see if something that does not exist can be created, nurtured and built into something sustainable. Creating progress is one of my main motivators; I don’t like to stand still; I get bored quickly and thrive under pressure.
10
Get In Touch
Contact www.roarlocal.com/contact Fill in the form to contact us at any time. We need your name, the domain name of your existing site (if you have one), your preferred method of contact (phone number or email address) and we will get back to you as soon as possible.
☎
01273 78 21 44
Monday - Friday 0900 - 1800 Admin Office The Sussex Innovation Centre University of Sussex Science Park Square, Falmer Brighton BN1 9SB CEO / Neil Asher COO / Nicola Cairncross
www.ROARlocal.com/twitter
www.ROARlocal.com/facebook
www.ROARlocal.com/linkedin
www.ROARlocal/google.com
ROARlocal on RSS With thanks to Matt Cox - Graphic Design mattcoxmail@yahoo.co.uk Photography Cover - Anna Tesar / Flickr 2 - Homini / Flickr 3 - John Seamans / Flickr 4 - Jason Cartwirght / Flickr 5 - Frenchfinds.co.uk / Flickr 7 - Michela Simoncini / Flickr 8 - Longhorndave / Flickr 9 - David Ogilvy Back - Humbert 15 / Flickr