Wow. I’m so excited about Google Places that I’m blogging about it RIGHT AWAY. That doesn’t happen often. No sticky note to remind me on this one, it’s just too good.
Have you set your business up on Google Places yet? Do it right now if you haven’t. It’s free and easy. Google it!
You can tell people what you do, where you are, your hours, site, offerings, post your logo and best of all, COUPONS! You can link Google Ad Words to the coupons too. Here’s one I just set up. This is free, but it’s not very easy for people to find. When they find you through a google search, click on your “places” listing on the top of the page, they can see coupons in your listing.
If you want the coupon visible right from the Google search, you can pay for “Tags.” Like the one below.
Have you had any luck with Google Places Coupons? Or Tags?
BrainSell has recently started using Pardot, a marketing automation and lead management tool. One of the coolest things is the simplest feature; lead tracking by reverse DNS look up. A cookie tracks a visitor’s every move on your site. If they fill out a form, you can track them by name. It’s a little creepy, but it’s a great tool. Before you call the prospect, you know exactly which pages they’ve visited and and for how long. You’re one step ahead.
But some companies are taking this to the next level. A New York company, Lotame Solutions, can profile Internet users by inspecting their participation on various social media outlets. Once people are profiled, they are sold for as little as a tenth of a cent. This kind of business is booming, it’s one of the fastest growing in fact.
Julia Angwin of the Wall St. Journal explains it well.
“Ms. Hayes-Beaty is being monitored by Lotame Solutions Inc., a New York company that uses sophisticated software called a “beacon” to capture what people are typing on a website—their comments on movies, say, or their interest in parenting and pregnancy. Lotame packages that data into profiles about individuals, without determining a person’s name, and sells the profiles to companies seeking customers. Ms. Hayes-Beaty’s tastes can be sold wholesale (a batch of movie lovers is $1 per thousand) or customized (26-year-old Southern fans of “50 First Dates”).”
Creepy, right?
Would buy leads that way? How much value do they hold?
Being a very cutting-edge software business, it was natural for us to get immersed in social media. However, we quickly found ourselves missing some vital links in our social media routine/adventures. The blog gets LOTS of hits, but from who and how do they find it? Are they potential leads? Gallivanting on our web site without leaving a trace behind? The idea has un-nerved some of us.
So we’ve tried several different programs to convert those visitors to live leads.
Hubspot was first. I liked it, but didn’t completely understand the value. We already track our analytics through Google, retweets and mentions are easy to find. I couldn’t grasp why we should spend $9000 a year on a tool that aggregates what I already do for free. Sure, it will save us time, but not $9k of time.
The real value of Hubspot is in it’s landing page builder. So what if people are looking at your blog, you need them to fill out a form. My Hubspot consultant didn’t concentrate on this feature, and that’s where she lost the sale. I know how amazing landing pages can be. Offer a free white paper and watch the names filter in. Then nurture that lead and hope it converts.
LeadLander was next. It’s a neat tool, but incomplete. LeadLander tracks visitors IP address when they’re on your site and creates a list of those addresses. They’re names of companies, not people. Neat, but then what? It’s a HUGE tease to see a company come back again and again and not convert them. That’s where landing pages come in. You need conversion tools that are tempting and easy to use.
Lead Lander is over $1000 per year. Not bad, but I’d rather get forms filled out than see who’s playing on my site. Plus, Hubspot tracks companies that visit your site anyway.
Is $9000 worth it? What kind of returns can you expect if executed correctly?
A point of sale (POS) system can be a big investment, both time and money-wise. When is time to make that investment? Let’s start from the ground up… What exactly is a POS system? Point of Sale systems are packages of software and hardware that run the selling process in a business. Think bar code scanners, inventory, layaway.
Ok, but when is it time to invest in one of these systems?
Inventory Overload: Taking inventory cannot be done by hand. You just have too much stuff to count.
Buy the Right Items: Do you know what your best sellers are? Why not stock more of those items? If you don’t know what’s selling well, you aren’t stocking your store correctly.
Theft: If you don’t know what you have, you don’t know what’s been stolen. If you have NO clue if things have been stolen, assume they have. Taking inventory and seeing what’s missing will answer your theft question… and you’ll be able to CLAIM that number!
Marketing: Do you know who your best and worst customers are? Want to send mailings/email promotions to them? Ever thought of a customer loyalty program that can be tracked by a computer? You can with many POS systems.
Employee Automation: Are your employees “clocking in” with a pen and paper? Stop inaccurate hours with a time clock on your POS system. Employees simply sign in and out on the computer. Payroll can happen right from there too. Piece o cake.
Layaway: Do you have piles of items in the back room with sticky notes declaring who they’re for and how much is owed? This can often be a disaster. Automate your layaway process with POS, you can take deposits and payments from the computer and keep track of aging items.
Our Duct Tape Marketing friend Dan Kraus cited an amazing web site this morning on his blog and Twitter. I got so excited about the new site that I’m dropping everything to write about it. That’s right, everything.
The site is fiverr.com. Regular people post services they’re willing to do for $5, no more, no less. There is a huge spread of offerings. Some are silly, “I will put a live tarantula in my mouth for $5″ and some are exceptional deals “I will make you a beautiful website or blog for $5″
I’ll take that!
Besides business stuff, there are great gift ideas, “I will draw a picture of your pet for $5″ or “I will make a custom greeting card for $5″
Social media also shines on the site. People are offering to post comments on your blog for $5, get you Twitter followers and even Facebook fans.
I had a fuzzy feeling looking through the site. People connecting and offering services they love to do for a very fair price of $5.
Filippo Passerini knows that a customer who likes to lather up with Pantene shampoo is probably in the market for Olay moisturizer products too — and as Chief Information Officer (CIO) at Procter & Gamble, a growing part of his job is making sure that the company makes both sales.
“We connect the dots with the information we have,” he says.
After a year of hunkering down and slashing costs, many corporations are growing again — and technology is leading the way. A recent Gartner survey found revenue growth trumped cost cuts as CIO’s’ top priority for 2010.
Data mining is the process of extracting patterns from data.
Humans have been “manually” extracting patterns from data for centuries, but the increasing volume of data in modern times has called for more automated approaches.
“Pattern mining” is a data mining technique that involves finding existing patterns in data. In this context patterns often means association rules. The original motivation for searching association rules came from the desire to analyze supermarket transaction data, that is, to examine customer behavior in terms of the purchased products. For example, associations rule “beer ⇒ chips (80%)” states that four out of five customers that bought beer also bought chips.
Data mining in ERP applications can contribute significantly to the bottom line. Rather than randomly contacting a prospect or customer through a call center or sending mail, a company can concentrate its efforts on prospects that are predicted to have a high likelihood of responding to an offer.
Instead of sending an offer to all people, a company may only want to send offers to customers that will likely take the offer. It may also want to determine which customers are going to be profitable over a window of time and only send the offers to those that are likely to be profitable.
Is your ERP and CRM software helping grow your revenue and profit? Does your staff know how to data mine the tons of the historical customer data you have been accumulating over the years? Do you see your accounting staff and software as just an Expense Center rather than a Revenue Growth Center?
As I look around I’ve noticed competitors selling their businesses, closing their doors or simply getting small. It’s not just my competition, it’s the business world around us. Whether you’re starting a business or want to build your business in this economy, here’s 7 simple ideas to consider.
1. Acquire: Growth through aqcuisition could be your key to future growth. Find businesses within your industry that are distressed or tired. Or stretch a bit and add a business that has synergy with your core business. But don’t wander too far from your core business. Look for a business that adds to your cross-sell initiative since new customers are hard to find in a tough economy.
2. Inbound Marketing: Invest wisely in marketing. Although traditional marketing still has it’s place, use your spare time or consider getting your marketing folks onboard with Inbound Marketing initiatives. Become a thought leader within your industry. Use the web to get found by your buyers. Today, people want to buy rather than being sold too. Using Inbound Marketing (blogs, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Social Media like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and more) help your potential buyers find your company when they are ready to purchase. Inbound marketing creates credibility with your buying audience and it’s cost effective! It’s also timely since people who find you are already in the buying /sales cycle. Read the book Inbound Marketing. It’s full of ah-hah moments that will get you rolling with new marketing strategies. Check your web site grade against your competition with this free tool; website grader. Here’s a shout out to our friends at Hubspot for a great product too!
I’ve recently discovered the beauty of bit.ly, a simple URL shortener. URL shorteners are good for many things, but especially for Twitter. When you’re limited to 140 characters, you can’t waste them on a long URL. When you shorten with bit.ly, it keeps track of your moves. Create a free user login and you can track how many hits your shortened URL gets and from which source.
Bit.ly makes you rethink Twitter. Why does one tweet get your URL 25 clicks and another gets ignored completely?
Tips for tweet clicks…
Keep it short
Get sexy! I know you just read that, use some catchy words.
Get creative too! Say things in that appeal to a wide audience.
Don’t get too specific, that’s the beauty of having a bit.ly URL for people to follow, they can get the details there
I’m supplimenting my google analytics obsesion with Bit.ly now. Use your tweets to see what grabs peoples attention. It works!!!
Ross Jones, VP of Sales Engineering at BrainSell, lectured at Harvard University’s Extension School of Management last month. Jones has been feature as a guest lecturer for three years at Harvard.
Jones’ lecture, The Need for CRM, is part of the graduate course, MGMT 6060 Customer Relationship Management. The course, led by Paul Olean, teaches how to develop a successful customer relationship management (CRM) program.
Jones’ two hour presentation addressed why CRM is needed in business, the benefits and implementation tactics. Jones also discussed why social media is now an invaluable facet of CRM.
“Social media can no longer be ignored,” said Jones. “Using social media as a means of inbound marketing is a very cost-effective way of increasing sales. CRM can handle all the extra data that is a product of social media. It’s a win-win.”
Jones has been a VP with BrainSell for eight years and is an expert on CRM implementation and service.
For more information on Harvard University’s graduate management program, visit the extension Website.
Hubspot founder Dharmesh Shah related outbound marketing to killing kittens at our Accelerator event last month. We don’t like doing it, but it’s necessary sometimes. Depending on your business, you may be able to use inbound marketing so much that you’re running an animal shelter. Others aren’t so lucky.
BrainSell still finds outbound marketing valuable. It’s a way to engage customers who aren’t buzzing on social media sites all day. With the right pitch and implementation, outbound marketing can work.
A method we favor is still email marketing. However, you have to be careful! Getting blacklisted is easier than you think. Using an automated email program can build consistency, leads and follow-through. You can also integrate these programs into CRM systems so the correspondence doesn’t get lost.
However, you have to be careful! Getting blacklisted is easier than you think. Using an automated email program can build consistency, leads and follow-through. You can also integrate these programs into CRM systems so the correspondence doesn’t get lost.
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