Three Survey Questions for Quick Feedback

If you want to improve your website and increase web sales, but can’t afford web analytics tools to measure customer response to your site, try a short website survey. In his blog, Occam_ Razor, Avinash Kaushik recommends including at least three questions in your survey.

Why are you here today? Ask the purpose of your customer’s visit to your Website, or what task they are looking to accomplish. This will provide you with information on why people are visiting your website and what they hope to achieve by doing so. That way, you can better tailor your website to meet the variety of needs your customers cite.

Were you unable to complete your task today? If customers are unable to complete their task, you’ll know immediately if your site is not working up to its full potential. This question will eliminate some of the guesswork involved in analyzing data to determine whether your visitors had their needs met or questions answered.

If you were unable to complete your task, why not? Ask your customers how you can improve your website to enable them to meet their needs. This question allows the customer to directly tell you how you can improve your site to help them accomplish their mission. Listen to your customers’ reasons for being stymied and their suggestions on how to adjust your site to make the visit quick and pleasurable.

Think of more questions you can add to get the information you want. You might also want to ask customers about their overall experience, if they had difficulty completing their task, or what they would like to see changed on the website. This will provide input on whether your site needs a few minor tweaks or a major overhaul. For those of you with more time or resources, longer surveys and/or web analysis may be optimal, but don’t discount the power of a few simple questions. It is certainly better than doing nothing at all.

For more information on Avinash Kaushik’s article and reader feedback, visit www.kaushik.netlavinash/2007 /O4/the-three-greatest-survey -questions-ever.html.

As a business advisor and coach I frequently run into businesses that have no consistency in their business approach. That could their marketing, advertising, planning, problem solving, delegation and so on.

I advise them to get a systematic approach to all their endeavors, when you systemize processes they become stable, consistent, repeatable and duplicatable.

I found the following list while reading Guerrilla Marketing by Jay Conrad Levinson. While reviewing the list it struck me that many (most) could and should be applied to every aspect of your business.

The Thirteen Most Important Marketing Secrets
1. You must have commitment to your program.
2. Think of the program as an investment.
3. See to it that your program is consistent.
4. Make your prospects confident in your firm.
5. You must be patient to keep a commitment.
6. You must see that marketing is an assortment of weapons.
7. You must know that profits come subsequent to the sale.
8. You must aim to run your firm in a way that makes it convenient for your customers.
9. Put an element of amazement in your marketing.
10. Use measurement to judge the effectiveness of your weapons.
11. Establish a situation of involvement between you and your customers.
12. Listen to become dependent on other businesses and they upon you.
13. You must be skilled with the armament of guerrillas, which means technology.

You must…
Have commitment
Be consistent in your approach and processes
Be patient at all times
Be confident in your outlook
Have an assortment of tactics and strategies
Make it convenient for all stakeholders
Measure your progress
Be involved in internal and external forces
Be dependent on others (and visa-versa)
Be a master in your skills

It doesn’t matter what your working on, most of the list will apply.
 

Advertising, as well as prospecting new clients, is not a one-and-done kind of thing. You have to break through the daily clutter to get noticed and then you have to reinforce it again and again. If you don’t, you are just wasting your time.

As a business advisor I recommend that when you decide on a campaign, be a prospecting campaign or a marketing campaign, make sure you understand that it is for the “long haul”.

I have had this list for many years (I think it is from the 1930’s, but it holds true today) and I recently saw it on the internet somewhere so I dug it out of my archives and wanted to share it with you.

ADVERTISING
1. The first time a man looks at an ad, he doesn’t see it.

2. The second time, he doesn’t notice it.

3. The third time, he is conscious of its existence.

4. The fourth time, he faintly remembers having seen it.

5. The fifth time, he reads the ad.

6. The sixth time, he turns up his nose at it.

7. The seventh time, he reads it through and says, "Oh brother!"

8. The eighth time, he says, "Here’s that confounded thing again!"

9. The ninth time, he wonders if it amounts to anything.

10. The tenth time, he will ask his neighbor if he has tried it.

11. The eleventh time, he wonders how the advertiser makes it.

12. The twelfth time, he thinks it must be a good thing.

13. The thirteenth time, he thinks it might be worth something.

14. The fourteenth time, he remembers that he wanted such a thing for a long time.

15. The fifteenth time, he is tantalized because he cannot afford to buy it.

16. The sixteenth time, he thinks he will buy it someday.

17. The seventeenth time, he makes a memorandum of it.

18. The eighteenth time, he swears at his poverty.

19. The nineteenth time, he counts his money carefully.

20. The twentieth time he sees the ad, he buys the article or instructs his wife to do so.

I was reading an article I had in my files on email subject lines, for the life of me I wish I could find where I got the article.

The article was mainly about email marketing but I believe it applies to all emails. The jest of the article was that according to Doubleclick.com you have 3 seconds and 40 characters to grab and hold the recipient’s attention with the subject line of your email.

Why 3 seconds – well with as many emails as we all get these days, generally we skim – not read – subject lines. This includes emails from people or entities we know. So the Subject Line must be clear, concise and pithy.

Why 40 characters? (And this is something I didn’t know) most email applications only show that many characters for incoming emails Subject Lines and that’s about 6-7 words (and spaces).

So the bottom line is your first impression is the subject line, so make sure it’s accurate and compelling. How many times have you gotten an email (usually in an email thread) where the subject line is no longer relevant to the discussion taking place in the body.

This very frustrating to the recipient and diminishes your email stature. I personally try to change the subject line as often as I can.

Sales and selling is the next logical step after Marketing, you have generated the leads, now what are you going to do with them? Convert them of course!

To me Sales and selling are much more tactically oriented that marketing, while there are subtle steps to can take to become a much more effective salesperson, sales is very tactical.

Remember, Tactics are defined as actions, methods or techniques used to implement a specific mission and achieve a specific objective (converting the prospect), or to advance toward a specific goal.

Strategies are differentiated from tactics (or immediate actions with resources at hand) by its nature of being extensively premeditated, orchestrated and often practically rehearsed. Strategies are used to make the problem easier to understand and solve.

So that if you have honed your company’s sales skills and the methods and manners in which you sell are consistent and orchestrated – then they can be considered strategic.

What are the steps in selling? Do know them? Well, there are seven steps in the sales process and they are:
Building Rapport
Qualifying the Buyer (Finding the Need)
Building Value
Creating Desire
Overcoming Objections
Closing
Follow Up

Now, most business owners believe that they should concentrate more on the back end of the process (Building Value to Closing) and spend the majority of their time and effort there. And they often ignore the follow up step.

But sales experts will tell you that Rapport (at 40%) and Qualifying the Buyer (at 25%) is where the majority of your time should be spent. If you can become masterful at these two steps the other four – follow up is so critical that it is a whole other subject for another day – steps are much easier.

If you can build significant rapport with your prospects, qualifying them is much more simple. They’ll open up and tell you just about anything – about their buying criteria, how you can change it, what they value and so on.

Once you have qualified them (deciding whether they are the buyer your looking for), again assuming your were masterful at building rapport, they have already told you how to build value and create desire in them. From there, overcoming objections is very simple – isolate the objection and annihilate it with your logical conclusions.

Closing is now simple – if they don’t ask you, just ask them – “So, lets write that up right now”.
 

Okay, in the last entry we defined Sales, Marketing, Strategies and Tactics. Let us now delve into these a bit deeper.

Marketing tactics are such things as
Direct Mail
Cold Calls
Warm Calls
Brochures
Flyers
Advertisements
Referrals
Presentations
Promotion Pieces
Etc.

These all fit into the seven general components of marketing – Advertising, Direct Mail, Corporate Literature (Flyers, Brochures, etc.), Public Relations, Personal Contact, Market Education and the Internet.

These tactics are the specific action steps or techniques that you would employ to generate interest in your company, your product or your service. Where most small business owners fall down is that they just throw these out there and if they don’t work immediately, they stop.

The first thing I see that is constraining them is that (I believe) they are not sitting down and thinking strategically – on many different levels. First of all, are of their tactics done in a unified, cohesive and coherent manner? Do they have the same look, feel and texture? Are they sending the same message to the same specific target audience? Have they thought about, quite simply, what the point is? What is their overall strategic objective of marketing? Is it to generate leads; is it to get Top of Mind Awareness (TOMA) or what? If they haven’t clearly thought this through, what is the point of doing any marketing at all? After all you need to have an end or a purpose in mind before you set out.

Second, even if they have done the above, they have not gone through this exercise on a tactic by tactic basis. For instance what do I want this direct mail piece to accomplish? What are its objectives? (Notice I used the plural here). Every tactic should have more than one strategic objective. Most tactics should have at least three objectives and a truly powerful tactic will have as many as ten.

In my next entry I will discuss Sales – the process, tactics and strategies.
 

As a follow on to my last entry. I have been thinking a lot lately about small business owners and how most are so deficient in Sales and Marketing. First of all most small business owners treat sales and marketing as one and the same thing. What?

Marketing at it most basic level is simply Marketing Strategy, Advertising and Lead Generation. Sales at it most basic level is simply Lead Conversion and Client Re-conversion. The two disciplines do not overlap, they are distinctly different. Yet most small business owners treat them as the same process.

Sales and Marketing must be considered and dealt with as entirely separate activities that intermingle but are not one and the same. I doubt that one out of ten owners can define the seven steps in the sales process or the seven components of marketing. If they could they would certainly see the difference between sales and marketing.

To make things even worse most business owners concentrate way too much of their time and effort on selling or marketing tactics while virtually ignoring strategies. So what is the difference between the two?

Strategies are defined as:
A Strategy is a long term plan of action designed to achieve a particular goal, most often "winning".

Tactics are defined as:
A tactic is an action, method or technique used to implement a specific mission and achieve a specific objective, or to advance toward a specific goal.

Strategies are differentiated from tactics (or immediate actions with resources at hand) by its nature of being extensively premeditated, and often practically rehearsed. Strategies are used to make the problem easier to understand and solve.

I hope you understand the marked difference in the two.

In my next entry I will delve deeper into sales, marketing, strategies and tactics, in the meantime give some thought as to how you spend your time (are you tactically or strategically oriented) and do you look at sales and marketing as separate disciplines?
 

I went to the Oceanside Chamber’s Business Success Series’ opening presentation by Ursula Mentjes on “Selling with Intention”. It was very good. Ursula showed the audience that they need to not only reset their Goals and Objectives but also they need to figure out what was stopping them from achieving them.

It was an interesting presentation and dealt with some of the issues I am interested in…

“Just what is your (strategic) objective of your sales (and marketing) efforts?”
“Have you really identified your target market, your target client?”
“Have you defined the attributes of your target market and your target clients?”
“Have you clearly set your ultimate objectives for your business?”

I watched the audience as much as possible and it was very interesting. As I observed, some of them had an “aha” moment. That dawning of understanding, that time when someone presents them with something that should have been so obvious but was so hidden.

I hope the audience members will follow up on the exercises in the workshops and build their businesses on a stronger platform.
 

As with the seven questions for the strategy summary, there are seven basic sections or elements of a marketing plan:
 The Benefit to the consumer
 Your positioning in the marketplace: Just what business are you in?
 Your target market
 Your marketing / advertising strategy and positioning
 Your marketing budget
 The tools and techniques (weapons) you will use to reach your audience
 A month-by-month implementation schedule

In this article we will look at Your Marketing Budget, Your Marketing Weapons and the Implementation Schedule.

Your Marketing Budget
When developing your marketing budget, and yes everyone needs a marketing budget for the following reasons.
 There is a natural ebb and flow of the business cycle for every business. Spending your marketing dollars at the wrong time, becomes a double whammy – a) you’ve either spent marketing dollars you could have conserved or didn’t spend enough and b) the return on those dollars will not be as effective as they should be.
 Unless its on paper, it’s a concept not a plan.
 Without setting down a concrete budget you won’t have the road map you need.
 Without setting down a concrete budget it’s too easy to forget, rationalize and justify changing the dollars spent.

When starting your budgeting process the number one thing you need to do is determine what percentage of revenue you are going to spend on marketing. 10% is a good starting point. Review your annual business plan (you have done your annual plan haven’t you) and spend accordingly. Reviewing your annual business plan will also give you an idea of the ebb and flow of your business cycle and tell you when to increase or decrease the percentage.

Another option is to figure out the life time value (and the annual value) your customers and figure out what it is worth to retain your current customers and gain new customers. Gaining new customers is more expensive than retaining current customers. Figure out your current customer base and their annual value to extrapolate your current customer base value. Next, review your annual business plan if your sales are more than this (and it better be) figure out the new customers you are going to acquire. This will tell you, in a bit finer detail how much to spend on marketing and when.

Marketing Weapons
In Jay Conrad Levinson’s recent writings he has come up with 200 Marketing Weapons. These range from Mini-Media (Business Cards, Stationary, Brochures, etc), Maxi-Media (Advertising, Direct Mail and so on), E-Media, Info-Media, Non-Media, Company Attributes and Company Attitude.

Go through these and decide which ones are cost-effective for you to reach your market. Make a list of tools, their cost per use, monthly frequency and monthly cost. Review and refine the list until you have a finely honed batch of tools and weapons.

A month-by-month implementation schedule
Next, layout a 12 month grid with months across the top and the weapons and tools down the side. Determine which weapons you’re going to use and when you’re going to use them. Stick to the plan, review it monthly and revise as necessary.

Now you have a well thought out, coherent and cohesive plan. It’s time to implement it, go get going!!

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As with the seven questions for the strategy summary, there are seven basic sections or elements of a marketing plan:
 The Benefit to the consumer
 Your positioning in the marketplace: Just what business are you in?
 Your target market
 Your marketing / advertising strategy and positioning
 Your marketing budget
 The tool and techniques (weapons) you will use to reach your audience
 A month-by-month implementation schedule

In this article we will look at Marketing / Advertising Strategy and Positioning.

Marketing & Advertising Strategy
The key components to determine a Marketing & Advertising Strategy are:
1. Product or Service
2. Target Market
3. Competition
4. The Product’s Benefit
5. How is it differentiated from the competition?
6. What impression would the consumer get from the strategy?
7. What action would the consumer take after being exposed to the Strategy?

We have covered Product or Service, Target Market and Benefits components already so we will concentrate on remaining components (Competition, Differentiation, message or impression and Action by the consumer) in this module.

Competition
Who is your competition? For our liquor store it would be everything from the local liquors stores to Beverages and More, Upscale Wine Cellars in San Diego, Wineries, Super-markets and to some extent the Big Box stores.

Differentiation
How is your product/service/presentation different from your competition? Describe your position and your competitions position. For our liquor store our position was described in Part 3. For the competition’s position it is either an upscale competitor that is a great distance away (inconvenient) or a regular liquor store in close proximity (low knowledge of wines & liquors and poor customer service).

Impression or Idea
What is impression you want the customer to take away from your marketing and advertising? What is the one idea you want them to get out of your ad?
For our liquor store it could be, you don’t have to go a great distance to enjoy a fine wine cellar and stellar service.

Call to Action
What action would you want the reader to take after being exposed to your ad or marketing piece? For our store it would be “don’t drive 30 miles or more, come in and enjoy superlative wines and service here in town”.

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