5 more top takeaways from my 2018 reading list

In follow up to previous post here 5 more insights that struck me as unique from this year’s reading list.

1. Seven brief science lessons by Carlo Rovelli

2. Mindfulness by Bhante Henepola Gunaratana

3. Rich dad poor dad by Robert T. Kiyosaki

4. Learn or die by Edward Hess

5. The right and wrong stuff by Carter Cast

• what’s one thing you did you are happy about?
• Here is one thing I think you did well: xxx
• What’s one thing you would do differently?
• Here is one thing i think you should do differently: xxx

3 digital marketing trends to focus on. And 3 to forget about

As anything technology-driven, digital marketing is evolving fast, so it makes sense to review what’s working and what’s not presently. 

1. Seeing is believing 

A bit over the top but gets the message across. 

This entails all sort of advertising that is performance-driven. This could be PPC (e.g. AdWords), affiliate marketing, display ads, online and offline. What makes an ad campaign perofrmance-driven? You need to be able to quantify both the involved expenses and the involved returns. This sounds easier than it really is. Focusing on the online world, most products have long purchase life cycles which involve many visits to the same website before finally making a purchase. This creates a dilemma, which visit should the purchase be attributed to? Is it the last visit that ended up in the purchase or the first that introduced our company to the customer or the middle ones that worked the customer up in order to finally decide to purchase? To address this dilemma various “attribution models” have been devised and depending on which one you decide to go with, you get a different ROI calculation per acquisition channel. As far as offline advertising goes, assigning ad campaigns to purchases is even more challenging, but it can be done. One way is communicate exclusive coupons in the offline ads and then assign all sales from those coupons to those offline ads. Another way is to measure traffic and sales spikes during offline advertising bursts and whatever is higher that the baseline to be attributed to the offline ads. This works well for TV ads which is powerful enough to produce well-defined spikes and there are cases where TV advertising has produced positive direct ROI. A third way, is to use specific phone lines and assign sales from those phone lines to the ad campaign. There is also step two to get to ROI: calculate the returns. Here there are two options: take into account the net revenues of the purchase or the customer’s lifetime value provided you know the retention rate per acquisition channel (and mind you retention rates vary based on acquisition channel). If ROI works out positive then that channel is a keeper. If not, then one might find another reason to keep it live, e.g. for branding reasons. 

2. Being relevant 

This is what you become without customisation, or at least her eCommerce equivalent.

Mass marketing and one-size-fits-all grows old. Not that it is not out there, it sure is out there very much so as companies are slow to adapt, but emerging technologies give us the tools to use data to create customised experiences. There are two ways to go about this. One way is to customise what you say to customers based on their direct past behaviour. This means that if i have purchased a SONY laptop, then next time i visit the site, show me laptop accessories or SONY products in general. Another more sophisticated way, is to create cohorts and work out habits. This involves doing some pattern recognition to come up with a the most probable next purchase per each customer or customer cohort. The algorithm can take into account the customer’s past purchases, age, gender, address and even name (yes name) and work out which products he or she might be looking for next. Once you have this info, then this should populate all possible customer interactions be it website content, email, remarketing ads, call centre scripts, loyalty scheme bracket etc. And what this achieves is you become more relevant when you speak to the customer. Without this you are like a blind sales person suggesting running shoes to a 75-year old woman suffering from arthritis. Another great way of becoming extremely relevant is via marketing automation. The most famous cases usually involve emails, like the ‘welcome email’ sent out upon email subscription and the cart abandonment email sent out as soon as a customer enters the payment steps and abandons prior to completing the purchase. Effectively, these are event triggered communications. There are tools that can provide this and once set-up these emails get fired automatically without the need of a person to operate them. Excellent for ROI.

3. Becoming an expert

Inspire as much trust as Jean Luc Piucard does to Trekkies.

The product purchase lifecycle has extended thanks to the internet. Instead of visiting a few shops before making a decision, now customers can browse endless websites, forums, youtube videos, customer reviews, price comparison sites, etc. before deciding to make a purchase. This creates an opportunity to assist your potential customers with this journey by providing useful content to assist customers with their buying decisions. For example, if you are selling home entertainment equipment, useful content could be an article on “how to select the ideal surround system for your living room”  or a wizard where customer enters his living room specs and the engine returns suggestions such as arrangement, products, etc. If you are a B2B company, same thing applies. Say you supply companies with toner for printers. A nice a content would be addressed to the people responsible for office supplies aiding them on how to be proactive, how to save company’s money, how to select the ideal toner for each printer type, how to get employee feedback on their work etc. This content once produced, can then be distributed via various ways be it via a blog, social media, slideshare, youtube video, etc. ideally all of them at the same time.

What to forget about:
SEO. And Social Media. And Email marketing. Not that one should not use them at all, quite the contrary. All three are very powerful tools that can get a lot of business, it is just that one should not think about them separately.      Ideally the company should address the three priorities on top, work out a content marketing strategy and then implement it using all the tools available such as Social Media and Email Marketing. Sure there are some best practices, e.g. how to write SEO-friendly content or how to optimise your newsletters, but performance will be mainly affected by having a well-designed content rather than optimising each channel separately. 

Trends above have been produced mostly having the eCommerce business in mind. If i have left out anything, please feel free to comment. I will reply promptly.