Customer value = competitive advantage?

Customer loyalty, customer satisfaction, customer value, etc. This "marketing literature" has been forward that customer loyalty and customer value is a source of competitive advantage. 

Marketers have always been insisting and promoting the notion that in order to compete in this competitive market – one must provide superior customer value relative to competition. But really what is customer value?

I found this simple formulat on Google. What are your thoughts?

Customer Value = (Quality + Emotional appeal + meet expressed needs + a hosts of other benefits) / Price.

What would you do when something negative is said about your brand?

It takes years to build your brand to what it is today. A lot of hard work but really it only requires one minor incident to bring it down. Similar to the notion of "trust". Trust takes a lot of time to build but when the trust is lost, it drops by leaps and bounds.

My view is though one may completely take control of its brands in the online space, one can minimise these negative effects, for example you can control the negative spread of viral marketing. Here are some of my tips:

1) Draft an internal social media plan for everyone in the company - this would signal to your team that your actions offline and online concerning your brand name is made answerable - of course most companies does not have a plan like this in place. But since the social media is growing at an exceptional rate don't we all need a plan like this? Ideally you should be on the online space listening to what's going on in the market place.

2) IF it does happen, you have to make sure we quickly respond to the problems. In the online word, speed is the most important:

- If you know the originator of the spread for example a blogger, you can perhaps contact the blogger to have a link back to our official response. Most readers/customers appreciate the other side of the story.

- If you don't know the originator (in most cases), you can draft a response on our website and submit that page to SEO. This would ensure that viewers/customers would be able to see your response on the first page of Google. 

- By using Twitter as an advantage. 

That’s all I can think of for now. But I am really interested to hear of what you would do or have done to control the negative bad mouthing of your brand name.

Social Media...what are your thoughts?

What are your thoughts? How do we use the technologies within social media to further promote our business? Why do we even bother about social media when there are so many other technologies we marketers could use?
 
Two questions to ask ourselves:
1)    What are our business objective of using social media?
2)    How do we measure social media according to our business objectives?
 
But really, the main question for me is...Is social media suitable for all companies? Are companies just following the band wagon? 
 
I feel that it ultimately boils down to the company’s objective and its means of competition and how they view social media. If the culture of the organisation is pretty much conservative and bounded by heaps of regulatopms perhaps social marketing is not the right platform for them.

But this is just my opinion. Let me know what you think..

Online Marketing Decisions for 2010/2011

I am trying to develop some online marketing strategies for this new financial year. I have listed below here some online marketing decisions that we have to make for this year. They are as follows:

• The best way to engage our customers and to be more relevant to them.
• How to maximise "behavioral targerting" in direct marketing/email marketing, search and social networking efforts.
• What is the budget or ratio budget contribution for online media such as affliate marketing programs.
• The best way to leverage social media.
• What are some of the other emerging technologies to include in our online marketing plan.
• Best methods to measure sales and movements, proving it's ROI. 
• How much of the other offline marketing budget should be shifted/moved to online marketing plan.

So do share with us your thoughts. Which of these do you think is the most important and what other online marketing decisions do you feel that we need to consider for this financial year.

Tips To Strengthen Your Online Ad Campaigns

Here I have some tips to strengthen your online ad campaigns without streching too much of your budget. I am sure you have heard about some of the amazing ROI which can be made through PPC advertising on Google, Yahoo and even Bing! I have heard return of up to 300% or even higher with this form of advertising. But there are other ways we can use to trim the fat from our search advertising campaigns.

1. PPC is not for everybody

When PPC works, it really works. But you can lose your entire ad spend if you don't monitor your PPC campaigns properly. As with everything else in business it's always best to be realistic about your chances of success in all your marketing campaigns.

2. Use Web Analytics
It is very important to know how effective each of your keywords and advertisements are really driving traffic to your website. Non-performing keywords should be cut and removed, conversely pay more for your best placements.

3. Website Optimisation

If you do not have a tracking on your website and haven't been optimising your website's ability to convert visitors into buyers, your ads ranking will appear infrequent, buried within search result pages Most importantly you will only be capturing the actual buyers but missed all the potential buyers.

By understanding website optimisation and conversion optimisation, you can easily double the return of all your ad spend. You probably won't be able to compete for the best possible placement for your ads. As a result, your ads will appear infrequently, buried deep within the search results pages.

4. Don't Use Budget Caps

In one of my previous consultancy role, I was given a very strict budget on Google AdWords. I was given a $50 budget clicks per day. On the surface, it was an excellent way to ensure that we did not overspend on the campaign..but I learned to realise that it was a bad idea.

What I was doing was forcing Google AsWords to decide on my behalf about where my ads will appear. For some weird reason, they ended up "optimising" my campaigns so that all my ads appeared in places where it no one seemed to look. The result? I got to stay within my budget but my campaign performed poorly.

So my advice is not to use it. A much better practice is to set your bids conservatively and of course by monitoring your spend.

5. Let Your Competitor Take The Top Spot
Bigger companies and brands tend to be more aggressive about bidding for certain terms. As a result, they bid aggressiely to ensure their ads appear near the top of the search results. I have read somewhere that advertisers appearing at the top of the side search results pay an additional 50% per click, which results in far higher campaign spends for what amounts to a small amount of increamental traffic.

So my advice is to let your competitors to have their spot. By bidding a little lower and spending a lot lesser you will probably drive nearly the same amount of traffic.

That's the 5 tips I have learned and discovered and hope that you find them helpful. Do share with me what other tips you use to further strengthen your site's presence on the internet.

Websites And The Tools You Can Use

Creating a great website and promoting your business via search engine optimisation and social medias can be really interesting. Through my experience in managine websites online, I have realise that its a painstaking learning process to start and market and online business.

I love social media marketing. It's an extension of search engine optimisation and represents a powerful medium - us. I hope that by sharing my journey of discovering SEO and how it works you can shorten your own learning curve.

I am not a slick, savvy e-marketer, but I have learned by eavesdropping, experimenting, googgling, reading and mostly participating in blogs and forums. As I have struggled past the first few mile markers on this apparently endless path, I've frequented wished someone could have guided me. I was looking for a simple, step-by-step, everyday language guidance. So, I have decided to leave a few of those trail markers on my blog to help my readers.

First, a few quick definitions (according to Wikipedia):

• Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) - is the practice of maximizing the volume or quality of traffic to a web site (such as a blog) from search engines via "natural" or un-paid ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results as opposed to other forms of search engine marketing ("SEM") which may deal with paid inclusion. The theory is that the earlier (or higher) a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, video search and industry-specific vertical search engines. This gives a web site web presence. As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimizing a website primarily involves editing its content and HTML and associated coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines.
  
• Social Media Marketing (SMM) - is a recent component of organizations' integrated marketing communications plans. Integrated marketing communications is a principle organizations follow to connect with their targeted markets. Integrated marketing communications coordinates the elements of the promotional mix—advertising, personal selling, public relations, publicity, direct marketing, and sales promotion—to produce a customer focused message.[1]  In the traditional marketing communications model, the content, frequency, timing, and medium of communications by the organization is in collaboration with an external agent, i.e. advertising agencies, marketing research firms, and public relations firms.[2]  However, the growth of social media has impacted the way organizations communicate with their customers. In the emergence of Web 2.0, the internet provides a set of tools that allow people to build social and business connections, share information and collaborate on projects online.[3]

• Viral Marketing - The buzzwords  viral marketing and viral advertising refer to marketing  techniques that use pre-existing social networks to produce increases in brand awareness or to achieve other marketing objectives (such as product sales) through self-replicating viral processes, analogous to the spread of pathological  and computer viruses. It can be word-of-mouth delivered or enhanced by the network effects of the Internet.[1]  Viral promotions may take the form of video clips, interactive Flash games, advergames, ebooks, brandable software, images, or even text messages.

• Search Engine Marketing (SEM) - is a form of Internet marketing that seeks to promote websites  by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs) through the use of search engine optimization, paid placement, contextual advertising, and paid inclusion.[1][2]. Usage of the term "search engine marketing" has been inconsistent. The trade association Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO) includes search engine optimization (SEO), and SEO is also included in the industry definitions of SEM by Forrester Research, eMarketer, Search Engine Watch, and industry expert Danny Sullivan.[3]. However, the New York Times restricts the definition to 'the practice of buying paid search listings'.[4][5]

OK, I can already imagine the old-school, traditional marketers out there shaking their heads. Right, why should we care about social media like Facebook and Blogs? Because according to Social Media Statistics, more than 50 million visitors have logged into Facebook just end of last year. In early this year, more than 10 billion photos appeared on Facebook and photo traffic peaked at more than 300,000 images served per second. So you see now why a little SMM might be a very good idea?

I asked myself, "If I am a customer in search of my product/services, how would I find me?" I started searching Google and there I was. Seeing me on Google was a strange and wonderful experience. Unfortunately, I appeared nowhere near the top of the list and people rarely click beyond the second page of the Google listings. So how to work my way up to the top of the charts?

SEO my friends, SEO. Listening to conversations with my classmates (who mind you are all top of the notch marketers)..I hear "SEO, the strategies, tactics and techniques for driving our business to to tp of the search engines' list".

Honestly, SEO is so simple its almost frightening. Always use a keyword-rich domain where possible. Place your keywords in the top portion of you page and iclude them in th the title of the page. Then, use variations of the keyword phrase naturally through the copy.

Drive more traffic to your site. I installed site meter web analytics on my new website. Then, I set the site meter to e-mail me each week, sending me detailed reports about my visitors, their locations and what they'd viewed.

Blog about your passion, and do it consistently. I discovered Blogger.com, a site owned by Google. Setting up my blog there, I found how frighteningly easy it was to establish a second web presence--three clicks and I was there.  Following the advice of Problogger, I knew I needed to update frequently and stay consistent. I began updating the blog continuously and developed a great little network of loyal readers who became regular visitors. The counters on my site meter increased, and I saw more visitors per day and a longer stay for each visit.

Get connected through social media sites. Everyone in my family has a Facebook, MySpace or Twitter page. From what I've seen, I'd bet even dogs are setting up "walls" on Facebook and are using them to meet French Poodles. Heck when I was a dog owner, I set up a profile for Mikey in Dogbook, in fact I participated in several forums and blogs as Mikey. 

Facebook is more than a big wave; it's an internet tsunami--in a good way. Most important, Facebook gave me a tool for connecting to old friends, and friends of friends, and friends of their friends who used to be friends. You get the idea. A couple of my Facebook pals had downloaded its mobile application to their PDAs, and they got text messages each time I put up a post on my page. So, I added Facebook posts to my daily to-do list. Right after I blog, I post something on Twitter and Facebook. They both alert my multiple networks that there's something exciting happening in my world.

Stay in Touch. Be helpful, and give simple but useful answers. Twitter asks you simply, "What are you doing?"  I keep things fresh at the website and Twitter when I can. Twitter also helps me begin word-of-mouth promotions--the internet equivalent of whispering, "Hey, have you heard . . . ?"

Update or redesign your original website to include tantalizing new features. The word-of-mouth concept posed a tiny little conundrum: Whispering campaigns require salacious little secrets. If there's no sensational, useful content that's helpful or interesting, there's really no point in whispering. Nobody wants to know that you just had lunch. Therefore, I found myself scratching my head and wondering how to create something interesting and useful. For me, video was the answer, and a simple one, too. Try animoto.com, and you'll see what I mean about video creation being easy. You can upload it directly to YouTube, adding more content to your channel; JingProject.com and ScreenToaster.com are a little more work, but very powerful. They're tools to create new videos of your desktop tutorials, presentations and personal videos.

Obviously, the internet gives us a lot more tools for inviting and engaging traffic, but all our technological sophistication must not carry us too far away from the basics: People still want good products at fair prices, delivered by trustworthy and charming characters who know their stuff and how it works.