Category Archives: Marketing

Understanding Consumer Behavior: Signaling

The way people make purchasing decisions isn’t always logical. Consumer behavior is determined by a great number of factors. One of the challenges of good marketing figuring out the best methods that appeal to how most people think when they’re shopping.

A recent article in the New York Times takes a look at some of the eccentricities in how people choose their favorite brands. The basic argument of the piece suggests that for most consumers, decisions are made via a mix of reasonable research and emotional impulse.

The writer, Davidson, offers the example of his decision to purchase a more expensive baby formula, largely because the company’s been around longer than many of its competitors. This signals to him that they care about their reputation enough to consistently offer a quality product. This is an assumption based on little evidence, yet one many other consumers are likely to understand.

For certain purchases, especially for items that influence the health of your family and more costly purchases, people want to feel confident that they’re choosing an item of the best quality. Whether or not they know that the product’s the best matters less than how they feel.

For many small businesses, it isn’t too complicated to ensure that your company is well represented in the research phase of consumer shopping. Any business that cares about its reputation knows already to only offer quality products and consistently excellent customer service. It’s the more emotional side of consumer behavior that can present a challenge.

Many of the examples the article cites of successful signaling by brands consist of larger companies demonstrating their success by spending lots of money on advertising. If they’re already successful, the thinking goes, clearly they’re already doing something right and consumers should have confidence in their product.

So how can a small business use this knowledge of consumer behavior on a smaller scale?

  • Include customer testimonials on your website, to give people confidence that you’ve provided quality products and services in the past. If one of your customers is known and respected in the community, all the better.
  • Are you a member in a trade organization? Have you earned any awards or received favorable reviews? Show that on your website. It lets visitors know that your business cares about its reputation and as such will strive to offer quality goods and services.
  • Make sure your website looks professional. If it looks sloppy or poorly designed, people are less likely to trust that it’s a legitimate business. It’s worth it to spend a little money on a good graphic designer.
  • Don’t go too low in your pricing. Some people will always take what looks like the better deal (and little by little learn that this often means having to replace the original purchase soon thereafter), but others will choose to look for the higher quality product rather than the cheapest one.
  • Offer a money-back guarantee or warranty. It’s much easier to feel confident in making a purchase if it doesn’t feel like an obligation.

When in doubt, think of your own shopping tendencies and talk to friends and family about their consumer habits. What turns them off to a potential purchase? What helps them decide to go ahead with it? Consumer behavior is varied, but there are enough trends and tendencies to help businesses make effective marketing decisions.

Marketing Strategy: Positioning

The first step to developing an effective marketing strategy is determining the positioning of your products. You might know your product in and out and be able to make a convincing case to someone that they need it, but in order to understand the best approach to take in your marketing, it’s important to have a good grasp of how your product’s strengths measure against those of similar products in your industry.

The questions you want to answer are:

  • Just what void in the market does the product fill?
  • How exactly does this product match up against others that offer something comparable?
  • What features and benefits does the product have that others lack?
  • Is there something that the product’s the best at? Is there a way to offer evidence of this?
  • How does your pricing compare to that of similar products?

Although you might feel you know the answers to some of these right away, it’s likely that in the course of doing further research you’ll find some surprises.

To get a clear, comprehensive sense of a product’s positioning*:

1. Create a list of your closest competitors. In addition to those that easily come to mind, do some Google searches for relevant keywords to find those you might be overlooking.

2. Start a spreadsheet that lists the features and benefits of your product

3. Visit the websites of each of your competitors to fill in which of the features and benefits listed they have, and which they don’t. Add additional features and benefits to your spreadsheet based on those they have listed.

4. To make it easier to identify the comparison, make the spreadsheet color coded so that all of the features and benefits a product has are in one color, and all those they don’t have are in another.

Once complete, you have an easy visual analysis of just how your product compares to those of your competitors.

Are you the most experienced, do you offer the most features for the price, have you been voted or called the best by a third party?

Try to figure out a positive superlative that fits your business and make it your new tagline so people will see right away what makes you unique, and why they should consider you over any competitors.

The spreadsheet you’ve put together can be used as a powerful sales tool when a potential customer can’t decide between your product and another.

More importantly, having a clear understanding of your company’s positioning helps with every other step in an effective marketing strategy. It helps you know the greatest strengths to emphasize and allows you to develop the best marketing strategies to draw customers towards what you have to offer.

*Thanks to Ted Finch at Chanimal.com for tips on the process.

PPC (Pay Per Click) Basics

There are two main types of search engine marketing: PPC (pay per click) and SEO (search engine optimization). I’ve already covered some of the best introductory tips and resources for SEO, but PPC marketing is another one of the best sources of ROI in marketing available, especially in the period in between implementing SEO techniques on a website and beginning to see the results.

What is PPC?

To understand PPC, you first need to understand how organic search results and paid ads differ:

Organic search results – the websites that show up in the main listing of results when you perform a search in a search engine

Paid search results – the ads you see, normally located above the organic search results and to the right of them

SEO aims to get a website listed at the top of the organic results. It’s a slower and more difficult process than getting a website noticed through paid PPC ads, but it can yield huge results in the number of relevant visitors to your site.

PPC ads are much easier method to get on the first page for a search term faster, but they have a clearer immediate cost than SEO, where most of the cost comes through the time spent optimizing a webpage and linkbuilding.

Why PPC?

PPC ads are valuable in that they appear to people who are already looking for what your company has to offer (assuming you do a good job in targeting the right keywords) and you don’t have to pay every time someone sees the ad, just each time someone clicks on it. Chances are, a person who chooses to click on a PPC ad is someone coming to your site already equipped with an interest in buying the kind of product you offer, or at least doing some preliminary research into the options available with the intention of buying later.

Therefore, in comparison to other forms of advertising, the clicks you’re paying for will in most cases be fairly solid leads.

Even better, if you find that any of the ads you’re using or keywords you’re targeting tend not to produce solid leads, you have easy access to data that helps you shift your tactics and money towards the ads and keywords that provide the best results. In other words, the longer you use PPC as a form of marketing, the better your results are likely to be.

How to Get Started with PPC Marketing?

As the most commonly used search engine, Google’s the best place to start. Create a Google Adwords account and a Google Analytics account. Google provides ample information to anyone getting started with Adwords. The Google Keyword tool is an especially valuable resource for determining the best keywords to target in your ads.

Google’s not the only search engine to consider, Yahoo and Bing also offer paid search programs that can be well worth the investment.


Helpful Resources:

I’ve collected a few links for further reading that do a good job of providing useful introductory information.

Introduction to PPC

17 Most Common PPC Mistakes

7 Steps to a Perfect Pay Per Click Campaign

If you want more information, browse this page, or do some further exploration on the websites linked to above. You’ll quickly find a surplus of information to get started with a PPC campaign.

Great Customer Service as Marketing

Marketing is about reputation. Creating one amongst those not yet aware of your business, and maintaining a positive one for those already familiar with you. Hands down, the number one thing a company can do to ensure a consistently good reputation is to provide exceptional customer service.

People remember their best and worst customer service experiences and are quick to talk about them to friends, colleagues, and sometimes a much larger internet audience. Companies can now be made and ruined according to their reputation in online forums.

Social media and online review sites have made what was always true much more so: customer service is crucial to good branding and marketing. While providing acceptable customer service will help you to avoid the PR disasters of bad online reviews and social media rants, if you want to really stand out from the competition and turn customer service into a form of marketing, you’ll have to resolve to go above and beyond.

One particular example of a company that’s gained a lot of positive attention based purely on their reputation for customer service is Zappo’s.

When it comes to buying shoes or clothes online, some may still be skeptical, concerned about finding the proper fit or paying for shipping. Zappo’s alleviates those concerns with free shipping on many orders and a free 365-day return policy for all items. In addition, many customers have publicly shared stories of Zappo’s going above and beyond to help them out, fueling one of the best word of mouth branding successes in recent business memory.

How did they achieve this success? For one thing, company CEO Tony Hsieh has acknowledged that the company made a decision early on to treat customer service as a top priority. They’re picky in hiring service positions, making sure not only that the candidate is qualified, but also a good fit for company culture. Perhaps most importantly, in contrast to many large companies, Zappo’s is willing to spend more on customer service to get better results, rather than seeing it as an area to cut costs. As a result, customers can get ahold of a competent, friendly representative anytime they need help, and the company inspires articles like this and this, without having to put money into marketing.

If your customer service is good enough, your customers will do the marketing for you.

SEO Best Practices: Networking

One of the primary tenets of good online marketing is ensuring that your small business carves out a visible space in the larger community. This applies both to the online community as it relates to your industry and the geographic community that you’re a part of, the latter in particular if the goods and services you offer are primarily targeted at local consumers. In terms of search engine optimization, building positive relationships is important as it’s likely to lead to more links to your website.

By establishing positive relationships with bloggers, publications and other businesses and organizations active within your industry and community, you can help expand the reach and awareness of your own business. The value of networking to business is nothing new and certainly not exclusive to the benefits it provides to search engine optimization, but there are new techniques and venues to explore for developing beneficial relationships for your business.

In person networking is still one of the best means of creating new contacts. Local networking events and conferences provide valuable opportunities for meeting people in your community and industry who can help with an exchange of ideas, projects and links. You can learn about services and products being provided that can help your businesses, while also raising the profile of your ability to help other businesses and individuals with your own goods and services.

Moving more into the online sphere, there are multiple useful strategies that can be deployed for online networking. Social media is in some ways an ideal tool for this. LinkedIn was developed for precisely this purpose. It offers an easy means to stay connected to those contacts you meet at the live networking events, as well as an easy to use solution for seeking out new relationships with individuals doing work of relevance to your industry. There are many industry specific groups you can join on LinkedIn to stay informed of and contribute to conversations occurring of importance to your profession.

Though in many ways less direct, Twitter is another tool many are coming to find useful for networking. You can follow prominent industry leaders, journalists or bloggers with an emphasis in your area, as well as other local businesses and organizations to stay afloat of any events, updates and notable comments or articles they’re likely to highlight. By contributing thoughtful and useful information via your Twitter messages, you can gain more attention for yourself and your business and cull a following of your own. Much of the value of Twitter lies in interaction: showing that you’re listening and interested in what others are saying and also willing to provide valuable information as well.

While it involves a little more time and work, developing a presence on industry blogs, listservs, forums and message boards provides another venue for increasing your online profile and getting the attention of those in your field that could serve as productive networking contacts. Following the most pertinent online resources and adding insightful comments where appropriate will demonstrate your value to the community and ensure that people are more likely to think of you and your business when a need arises for the services you offer.

One of the themes that appears commonly in discussions of what makes for good SEO is finding opportunities to add value. Use the knowledge you’ve developed in your industry to provide helpful information to others and it will go far towards raising your profile in your industry and helping you develop and maintain the kinds of relationships that are crucial for long-term success. All of this will help lead to a growing awareness of your business and a greater likelihood of others to link to your website and increase your page ranking.