If you can get your organization and partners to “live” your value proposition it can do wonders for your customer happiness and business model.
Tag Archives: Growth Strategy
Why Cleaning your direct mail list matters
In a digital marketing world of shiny new options in digital media, we underestimate the power of good old email. 60% small businesses do not use email marketing primarily because of all the glamorous talk of other forms of digital marketing. Compared to all other forms of digital marketing email marketing is most cost effective. One estimate puts $42 return on 1$ investment in email marketing.
Privacy: Direct Customer relationship data is more important than ever
Mailing list providers were the original third party cookies. They gathered contact details of different demographics and you could buy lists to mail (junk mail) to them.
Why Authentic Value Proposition ?
The lingering pandemic, the Ukraine war, supply chain problems and inflation has all types of organizations reviewing their “value” proposition. The idea of an explicit contract in B2B and an implicit contract in B2C used to involve fewer parties. If there was a serious dispute there was arbitration, courts or government regulators who would step in and try to sort things out. No longer true in the world of instant social media. Think of Elon Musk’s Twitter purchase situation.
For everyday business it’s simply keeping your promises to your customers. To be fair, our experience is that Elon Musk is pretty good with Tesla in keeping customer promises. No matter how the Twitter acquisition plays out.
Since marketing is about customer value, it’s important to clarify the idea of value proposition in these challenging times:
AIDA sales funnel and the buyer’s journey to purchase
Businesses tend to wonder about the effectiveness of their advertising spend in terms of what they actually sold that could be attributed to advertising.To understand how advertising works its useful to look at the hierarchy of effects AIDA sales funnel credited to Advertising Hall of Fame member Elias St. Elmo Louis in 1898. No that was not a typo and check out the history of this kind of thinking called Hierarchy of Effects in the article by Barry (1987).
This post was originally published on April 22, 2014. We have many readers asking about the connection between the AIDA sales model and the Digital Customer Journey or Digital Buyer’s’ Journey. We are delighted to update the original post on March 5, 2021. We hope that this will help all businesses come back after COVID as customers go through their AIDA process online.
What Advertising Media should you use? Media by ELM Appeal
If you are an advertiser, then you need to consider how your customer is likely to process the advertising message that you want to give them. The Media by Appeal graphic with this post is a simple way of looking at what media is best for your message
The “S” Curves of radical and incremental innovation
What are the “S” curves? Each of the above S curves represent a technology platform. Movement up an “S” curve is incremental innovation while stepping down on a lower new “S” curve now, may lead to radical innovation, as the new “S” curve surpasses your existing “S” curve.
The Cost and Performance Y axis, Time on X Axis: If you look at the Y axis you see performance going up and cost coming down. Just as time goes on. In other words over time a particular S curve and technology platform gets improved. This improvement is through factors such as experience, techniques like 6 Sigma, more adoption by customer. The adoption by customer mean higher sales volumes and costs keep going down. However there is a catch for each S curve.
Market Segmentation and Targeting: Why Trump did not go to California in 2016
Market segmentation and targeting is probably the hardest concept in marketing. Strangely once understood even the savviest marketers seem to flip-flop in their marketing execution. For those dear readers who followed the 2016 US Presidential election the map below (Source : Philip Bump, Washington Post,Donald Trump spent more time in the states that handed himContinue reading “Market Segmentation and Targeting: Why Trump did not go to California in 2016”
“Getting found on Google” – how does Google think?
[Note: This post was originally published on September 5, 2017 and is updated with a new image and some edits on March 31, 2021 due to the interest of our dear readers. We also published a new post Google results are not organized alphabetically on March 31, 2021 given reader interest in the topic]
Instead of trying to second guess the latest algorithm that reportedly contains over 200 factors, it is far easier to intuitively understand the business of Google. And that’s not a secret and reading the Google founders story makes things clear and here are some quotes from the story- with some explanation
Are they looking for an answer to a problem, a specific service or your business?
Business owners tend to be fighting so many battles that they don’t seem to have the resources to figure out how their customers find them on Google. This post helps you understand your customer’s journey.