by Pat LaPointe , Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Brilliant Web strategy? Check.
Sophisticated analytics package? Check.
Compelling business case? Check.
Closing that one big hole that could torpedo your career? Uhhhhhhh……. Most new marketing initiatives fail to achieve anything close to their business-case potential. Why? Unilateral analysis, or looking at the world only through your own company’s eyes, as if there was no competition.
It sounds stupid, I know, yet most of us perform our analysis of the expected payback on marketing investments without even imagining how competitors might respond and what that response would likely do to our forecast results. Obviously, if we do something that gets traction in the market, they will respond to prevent a loss of share in volume or margin. But how do you factor that into a business case?
Scenario planning helps. Always “flex” your business case under at least three possible scenarios: A) competitors don’t react; B) competitors react, but not immediately; C) competitors react immediately. Then work with a group of informed people from your sales, marketing, and finance groups to assess the probability of each of the three possibilities, and weight your business case outcomes accordingly.
If you want to be even more thorough, try adding other dimensions of “magnitude” of competitive response (low/proportionate/high) and “effectiveness” of the response (low/parity/high) relative to your own efforts. You then evaluate eight to 12 possible scenarios and see more clearly the exact circumstances under which your proposed program or initiative has the best and worst probable paybacks. Then if you decide to proceed, you can set in place listening posts to get early warnings of your competitor’s reactions and hopefully stay one step ahead.
In the meantime, your CFO will be highly impressed with your comprehensive business case acumen. Check.
It’s been said that out of all the affiliate marketers out there tauting products and services, only about 2% make it to Super Affilate status - the elite income generators. Why? It’s their Mental Attitude. The lack of motivation, or losing motivation hurts the other 98%. So how can we keep motivated?
I read an interesting post today from Ted Murphy. In it he ponders on his home’s buying/gutting/refurbushing experience. Most of the work he did himself, and he did a fanstastic job. His quandary deals with being bit hard by the construction bug and wanting (needing) to keep building, albeit not knowing what. I don’t think that appetite may ever be satisfied, as he is always building, be it houses or business, and he’s very good at it.
Which brings me back to performace or affiliate marketing. Are we always building? If we are to grow our IM businesses, we need to set bigger goals. Amit Mehta describes a very powerful technique for doing so as “Shooting For the Moon”, which focuses on setting “impossible” goals, instead of “realistic” goals. Some would argue this sounds like nourishing the propensity for failure. But that’s not it at all. The idea is to set a goal that motivates you to excel by pushing you out of your comfort zone. For example, after evaluating your present income stream, “shoot for the moon” by setting a goal that is 10X your present revenue. The “impossible” becomes possible because we tune our minds to believe the impossible is realistic, which breeds a new level of success that is fueled by forcing our minds to think at a higher level.
Too bad only 2% of affiliates think this way…
It seems like a daily ritual: a client calls me wanting assistance with his SEO initiatives and asks me what keywords he or she should optimize. I, of course, appreciate the vote of confidence, but I’m not his SEO consultant. Which brings up a good question - what are the best keywords?
This same question comes up as a PPC Affiliate Marketer. You start a campaign and now need to generate an Adwords keyword list to send traffic to your landing pages. This can be tricky, as many newbie affiliates loose their shirts in PPC, because they THINK they have a great keyword list when in fact, it’s too deep, and not wide enough.
One of the 1st things Amit teaches in his affiliate training is that effective keyword research is one of the most important skill sets you’ll need to develop as an Affiliate, especially if you are to reach Super Affiliate status. So lets go over going Deep vs. Wide.
Suppose you’re a newbie affiliate, promoting a hypothetical virtual car dealer. You know nothing about cars, so you head over to wordtracker to come up with a bunch of keywords to bid on Google.
Your “thorough” list includes all the fathomable keywords with the root “car”. So you take your list thinking you’ll make a killing, only to find out you generated very litle traffic and consequently zero commissions. Here’s why: When you are searching for a “car” on google, more than likely you won’t include the word “car” as part of your keyword, but probably will use sports sedan, convertible coupe, Lexus IS250, Cadillac Escalade, SUV, etc. These are descriptive or synonimous keywords (as Amit describes them) that people will search for. That’s the difference between going deep vs. going wide. So always go wide first. When when you find which of these keywords provide the best traffic, THEN go deep.
I have this conversation multiple times each day with clients. Hmm, maybe I am their SEO consultant.
I need to charge more…
I’ve been following Super Affiliate Marketer Amit Mehta for quite sometime now. He was a guest visitor on the Black Ink Project that Jeremy Palmer masterfully (seriously!) put together earlier this year and I was captivated by his success and his wealth of knowledge in the space. Affiliate PPC marketing is something I’ve always been intrigued with and wished to learn. Amit is a PPC guru and his blog posts consistently provided tips of the golden nugget variety.
As it turns out, Amit decided to teach others what he knows in an online coaching program called PPC Classroom2. The course offers a series of in-depth modules on becoming an affiliate shogun. The course teaches students how to:
- Find & evaluate Affiliate offers and niches that will perform
- Create effective keyword lists
- Create profitable Adword campaigns
- Create presell landing pages that convert
- Do split testing and bid optimization
I joined the course to test the waters and it reached capacity right after I enrolled. I’ll periodically post about my progress and setbacks (gasp)…
So if you haven’t heard, my team at the illustrious co. I work for, IZEA, launched a blog outreach/social media campaign for Kmart a few weeks ago with enormous success. (You haven’t heard? WHERE have YOU been?). The campaign had some compelling elements: A few influential bloggers were given a $500 gift card to Kmart and they chart their buying experience at the store and create sponsored blog posts about it. They then hold a contest to give away another $500 gift card to one of their readers, who is chosen at random from either a comment left at the post or from retweets done on twitter, mentioning the item they wold buy at Kmart if they won and linking back to the post.
Thousands of tweets were done, pushing the brand Kmart into the dynamic realm we call social media. A huge amount of buzz was generated for Kmart, encouraging consumers to give Kmart a shot for their business this holiday season. Take a look at the graph that displays Kmart’s SMI (Social Media Index). SMI is a tool which provides a snapshot in realtime that helps measure conversations about a brand. Notice the huge jump after we launched the campaign.
So why does this work? At IZEA, we strive to drive deeper and more connected relationships between Brands and consumers. This in turn builds brand and product advocacy resulting in what really matters - growth, competitive differentiation and affinity. In this economic climate, it’s something ALL brands need.
