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When hashing out a marketing plan, most small business owners struggle to decide where to focus their efforts. Email marketing or social media? While both on their own are great, utilizing them together is where many SMBs find success.
A recent Constant Contact study analyzed data from small businesses that combined their email marketing with social media marketing and compared it to those who use email marketing alone. It’s clear that SMBs should do both. Smallbiztechnology.com summarized the study’s key takeaways:
Faster list growth: From June 2010 through August 2011, those using both social media and email marketing saw 14.43 percent list growth, while those using only email marketing saw 8.96 percent list growth.
Larger average list size: Those using both tactics have email lists that are 53 percent larger on average than their email-only counterparts.
With a larger list, you can begin engaging more contacts that are aware of your brand which in turn will help your click through rates:
The average click-through rate for those using both email and social media marketing was 59.3 basis points higher than for those using email only.
It has become apparent that focusing too much on one aspect of your marketing can limit your potential. Why exclude one outreach channel when you put extra KAPOW! in your marketing by using email and social media?
Holy return on investment, Batman!
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John Jantsch, author of Duct Tape Marketing, recently wrote a great blog post about the 5 Types of Content That Every Business Must Employ. Providing relevant content on a consistent basis, Jantsch says, will promote brand awareness and help you earn trust among your prospects.
Strategically, the word content must mean more than a blog post or a blank sheet of paper each day. You must begin to think of your content as a total body of work that is being built to serve your business over time.
Of course, it’s not easy to create great content that builds awareness and trust. In a recent study noted by Search Engine Land, three out of four marketing professionals said “creating original content” and “having the time to create original content” were their top content marketing challenges.
So how do you overcome these challenges? Check out John’s full article for some ideas to get you inspired. And get out there and start writing!
See also: Content Marketing Is the New Black
Over at Copyblogger, Danny Iny calls bullshit on split-testing claims (and indirectly gives a lesson in snappy headline writing).
Everybody says they’re doing it. Everyone likes to pretend they’re an expert. Buzzwords and rumors abound … stories about increasing conversion rates by an order of magnitude by changing the color of a checkout button (but nobody shares the magic color!). Most importantly, nobody wants to admit that they don’t really know what they’re doing, or (gasp!) have never done it themselves. Many join the conversation without wanting to let on that they don’t even know what split testing is!
Fact is, real split-testing is hard. It’s time-intensive work that requires great precision and patience — as well as the super-human ability to overcome confirmation bias. (Continuing with his clever high-school-sex analogy, Iny says that people who are in fact split testing probably aren’t doing it very well…)
If you feel like experimenting and are willing engage in some legit science, split-testing can pay huge dividends. The key is to start with one variable at a time. (And we recommend using Google Website Optimizer — it’s free and relatively easy to use.)
But before you starting tweaking things, head over to Copyblogger to learn how to avoid making rookie split-testing mistakes. Like ending your A/B experiments, um, prematurely.
Writing for the Times, MP Mueller examines the “surprising power” of branded schwag:
Promotional products are, some say, the oldest form of advertising. American businesses spend $20 billion a year giving away stuff with logos, according to Jerry McLaughlin, president of Branders, one of the largest sellers of promotional products online. Which is pretty good evidence that it works. Mr. McLaughlin credits the effectiveness of promotional products to centuries old cultural norms around the rule of reciprocity. “If you give something, the recipient is honor bound to give something back,” he said. “In every language and culture, research has found there are really pejorative words for people who get and don’t give back. We humans are hard wired to respond if we get something.”
The Times interviewed Robert Cialdini, author of “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion,” for the story. (The book is one of Kevin’s faves.) According to Cialdini’s research, small giveaways can trigger generous givebacks.
A well-known veterans’ nonprofit group, the Disabled American Veterans, is a case in point. When the group sends a mailing for contributions, Dr. Cialdini said, it gets an 18-percent response rate. When the same letter is sent with personalized address labels, which cost about eight cents, the response rate goes up to 35 percent. “For the cost of the address labels they get almost a doubling of return,” he said. “It’s very powerful rule and very small things can trigger it.”
But you have to pick the right promotional material to make it work—something memorable that complements your product and matches your customer demographic.
Have it underscore your marketing message and differentiate your company. Mr. McLaughlin recounts a computer software client who makes antivirus software. The client put its logo on boxes of condoms and sent them to information technology types with the message, “Protect yourself, protect your computers.”
Heh.
In advertising, the term ‘effective frequency’ describes the number of times a person must be exposed to an ad before responding. Although he didn’t use the term effective frequency, Thomas Smith, London businessman and author of ‘A Guide to Successful Advertising’ (1885), observed that it usually took twenty attempts to gain a new customer with an ad:
The first time people look at any given ad, they don’t even see it.
The second time, they don’t notice it.
The third time, they are aware that it is there.
The fourth time, they have a fleeting sense that they’ve seen it somewhere before.
The fifth time, they actually read the ad.
The sixth time they thumb their nose at it.
The seventh time, they start to get a little irritated with it.
The eighth time, they start to think, “Here’s that confounded ad again.”
The ninth time, they start to wonder if they’re missing out on something.
The tenth time, they ask their friends and neighbors if they’ve tried it.
The eleventh time, they wonder how the company is paying for all these ads.
The twelfth time, they start to think that it must be a good product.
The thirteenth time, they start to feel the product has value.
The fourteenth time, they start to remember wanting a product exactly like this for a long time.
The fifteenth time, they start to yearn for it because they can’t afford to buy it.
The sixteenth time, they accept the fact that they will buy it sometime in the future.
The seventeenth time, they make a note to buy the product.
The eighteenth time, they curse their poverty for not allowing them to buy this terrific product.
The nineteenth time, they count their money very carefully.
The twentieth time prospects see the ad, they buy what is offering.
The point of Smith’s slightly tongue-in-cheek observation is that repetition is integral to the success of an advertisement. (He even uses repetitive language to make his point.) You could go one step further and say that repetition is integral to marketing overall. Why is repetition so powerful?
Repetitio est mater studiorum (repetition is the mother of learning)
What’s eight times six? If you know the answer, you’ve harnessed the power of repetition, one of the oldest and most effective pedagogical tools. There’s a neurological basis to those multiplication flashcards you used as a kid: repetition transfers information from your short-term memory to your long-term memory.
“Talk to anyone well versed in learning psychology, and they’ll tell you repetition is crucial,” says Brian Clark, founder of Copyblogger.com. “It’s also critical in persuasive writing, since a person can’t agree with you if they don’t truly get what you’re saying.”
You’d be surprised how frequently people don’t get what you’re saying. We all know our businesses inside and out. We all know our products. We know our strengths. And we know that we’re vastly better than all of our competitors in every way. It’s obvious, isn’t it? Well, no. Not to everyone else. Not to your prospects. You’ve got to educate them. They must learn. Which brings us back to today’s Latin lesson: Repetitio est mater studiorum. Repetition is the mother of learning. It’s up to you to supply your prospects with flashcards (figuratively speaking).
Repetition has a bum rap. It’s often equated with boring teachers and mindless memorization. “Of course, there’s good repetition and bad,” Clark clarifies. “To stay on the good side, make your point in several different ways, such as directly, using an example, in a story, via a quote from a famous person, and once more in your summary.” And you should go beyond words: use photographs, cartoons, songs, videos, webcasts, slide shows, etc.
“The more senses you engage, the greater the potential for retention and recall. Even having a bowl of just-popped popcorn or the smell of freshly-baked cookies while learning, can make a difference,” says former video game designer Kathy Sierra.
Can you recall a time when a patient teacher explained something in class for the 47th time and — Eureka! — the light went on? Maybe he or she chose different words, or used an image or analogy to help explain it. Maybe it just took a bunch of times to get it. The takeaway for businesses? By repeating things — the same message but delivered differently — you stand a much better chance of penetrating your prospects’ prefrontal cortexes and persuading them to press the purchase button. (Did you catch that alliteration? That’s the repetition of a particular sound in the first syllable(s) of a series of words and/or phrases.)
Careful!
“Strategic repetition isn’t the same thing as content flab,” says copywriter Sonia Simone. “Repeat yourself for a reason, not just because you’re too lazy to cut pointless redundancy.” The wrong kind of repetition can annoy your audience. Worse, it can numb them to your messaging — and that’s bad for business! Again, be sure to mix things up while sticking to a consistent theme.
The ancient Greeks knew the value of repetition in oratory and rhetoric — they even went as far as to classify nine different kinds. Anaphora, for example, is the repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of every clause. Here’s an example of anaphora from Winston Churchill: “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills, we shall never surrender.”
Here at Kutenda, we operate on a modified version of Churchill’s call to arms, and we suggest you do the same: “We shall market on the beaches, we shall market on the landing grounds, we shall market in the fields and in the streets, we shall market in the hills, we shall never surrender.”
P.S. It should be obvious that repeating a flawed or ineffective message won’t do your business much good. Effective repetition requires knowing exactly who you are, what you’re good at, how you’re different, and how you want to be perceived. For help on positioning, start with this short article from Bloomberg Businessweek: The Power of Positioning.
P.P.S. Repetition is the mother of learning.
