I read the news and it makes me sad for businesses today. It’s no news that we are in the midst of one of the worst economic crises ever, while working our way through one of the greatest periods of change ever. These two things are not unrelated. We are undergoing a revolution in commerce, logistics, and communications as disruptive as the Industrial Revolution.

Some gurus will self-assuredly tell you it is the “social media revolution.” That’s just one strong signal of the revolution that is occurring. In our book, “Waiting For Your Cat to Bark,” my brother Jeffrey and I explained his concept of the evolution of commerce. We wrote that in the history of sales and marketing, the need that drives this evolution is reducing friction in the customers’ buying process. As changes in technology, communications, and logistics become possible, market forces push businesses to evolve strategies that entice customers to buy.

So what is this revolution that we can all readily observe? Ubiquitous connectivity has brought us to the tipping point where the customer is now largely in control of their experience. Where that isn’t true yet, it’s only a matter of time till it is – no business will be exempt. From now on, customers will increasingly seek experiences that meet or exceed their expectations and let them buy the way they want to. Companies that don’t choose to be authentically customer-centric and learn to quickly communicate, iterate, and adapt to change will struggle.

Think about how much has changed in the last five years on the consumer side since the book was written.

Hey Retailers! Offline Is the New Online

For the past decade, people have been announcing and still waiting for the year of mobile. It never came because of the limitations of mobile technology. Enter smartphones (e.g., iPhones, Android) and now we are an “always connected” customer. Applications like RedLaser and ShopSavvy give consumers the ability to walk into stores, scan bar codes, read reviews for products, and find the best value either locally or online (logistics make the differences minor). If the ability to gather information before buying products online made customers harder to sell, what do you think having that information at their fingertips while in your store will do?

Still buying on a little phone isn’t easy, and most retailers’ mobile apps are no better than websites from 1995 to 1996, but just imagine when women who control the spending have their 7 inch iPad or similar device in their purse and the experience is far smoother. It’s coming!

The problem: Is your organization ready to handle this change?

Is Your Corporate Metabolism Sluggish Like the Economy?

Corporate metabolism is the term I use to describe the speed at which organizations can make decisions, adapt, and evolve. Things are progressing at a faster pace today than ever before, yet corporations struggle to empower themselves to change with them. An example of why Amazon was able to capture about 25 percent of the e-commerce transactions in the U.S. is how two hours after the death of Michael Jackson, it had reconfigured its MP3 store. That’s right; in two hours most companies couldn’t even coordinate a conference call, yet Amazon reconfigured the home page of one of its most important businesses. At any given time, Amazon has almost 200 tests running on its website and it was among the first to leverage social commerce effectively by harnessing the power of ratings and reviews. Jeff Bezos proclaimed early on that advertising as we know it was dead and that he was better off investing his millions in advertising budget into building a better experience. He understands the dynamic forces that are driving commerce. Does your organization? Can your organization keep up?

This is not exclusively a retail issue. It’s hard to imagine the number of companies that were innovators in a technology that were able to capture a significant portion of the marketplace because of their first mover advantage, who then lost that “startup” edge. What happened is that their corporate metabolism slows and then they struggle to grow. If you need a cautionary tale, think about why Yahoo failed versus the speedy and agile Google. Will Skype be the next poster child for a slow corporate metabolism killing a company?

The Management Bureaucracy Must Evolve

Think about the typical command and control corporate bureaucracy that exists in most companies. All those layers of management were best suited for the Industrial Revolution’s factory model of doing business. For over a century that worked fine, but that model is ill-suited to today’s environment.

Change is the one business concept you can count on. Whenever you’re feeling comfortable, fat, and happy there is somebody who will eat your lunch and they’ll do it quickly and inexpensively. How quickly you handle change depends on how much your employees are empowered to make decisions and how fast you can shift your entire organization. You can leverage technology that helps speed up your organization and that gives you the flexibility to test, target, and personalize across channels the experience the way customers want it. If you haven’t made significant changes yet, you better find ways to change and speed your corporate self up rapidly.

Technology, logistics, and communications are coming at us faster than a meteor. Remember that it was a meteor that killed the dinosaurs but allowed mammals (smaller, speedier, and adaptable) to survive. I hope dear reader that you’re not a dinosaur.

Remarkable -adjective – Worthy of being or likely to be noticed, especially as being uncommon or extraordinary.

“You want great marketing but nobody can be creative enough to compensate for the problem you have. The product you have been offering for the past 10 years just isn’t that remarkable, in fact, very few people truly even care if it exists.” When I told this to the new CEO of a company I advised on a call this past week, I knew he wouldn’t like hearing it. I also knew that he was intellectually honest enough to agree. Would you be?

We were reviewing new marketing collateral his company had just developed. My question: “Who cares?” I wasn’t being callous. I was truly asking how this addressed a deeply felt need of his potential and actual clients. His marketing staff’s copy came off like the teacher in the Charlie Brown cartoons, “Wa wa wa wa wa wa.”

There were at least three historical issues wrapped in this company’s marketing woes:

1. The old management’s communication style preference
2. Who they spoke to in their target market, dicated by that communication style
3. The product and story they told about it were not remarkable

Your Story Gets Told the Way You See It

The founders of a company tend to set the company off on a trajectory that they envision and set. They see a need in the marketplace or come up with a product idea and set a story in place on how the market is going to receive it. Too often, they tell the story from their inside-the-bottle point of view and they never really get the proper results they desire. It’s often hard to take your customer’s point of view and tell them the story the way they need to experience it.

Great marketers and sales people have the ability to craft great stories. However, this company was extremely people oriented, founded to help companies better understand their customers. The founders’ communication style was highly “humanistic;” they were all about understanding and caring for people. I consider many of them good friends today and they are among the nicest people I know. So, they took their humanistic type product, told their story in a humanistic style, and the only people who cared or ever responded to their pitch for the most part were other people who preferred a humanistic approach.

There is nothing wrong with that per se. However, the majority of the budget for their product category was in the hands of decision makers with “competitive” and “methodical” personality preferences. While they kept developing their product to be more humanistic, their competitor took their equally less than remarkable “humanistic” product but told the story in a “competitive” point of view. Guess which one has the larger market share?

You Can’t Be Remarkable by Imitation

It’s often not enough to recognize you are speaking to the wrong persona or segment and just change your communication style. It typically won’t come off as authentic and your marketplace will see that you are just trying to copy your competitor. You still need something remarkable to share.

The new CEO of this company came in and had the development team work on an improved solution. The new solution is excellent and has the potential to be remarkable, depending entirely on how they decide to craft their narrative now. This one change can move this company from being a boring competitor in its current market to a natural leader in a new and emerging marketplace. However, it must make the change internally and externally to tell a new story and share it in the right voice. No amount of great marketing will resurrect a lousy story and unremarkable product, but in today’s world of “word of mouth,” where social media is a top priority for marketers and the board room, you need your customers to share how remarkable your solution is. Will they want and be able to share your story?

Planning for Word of Mouth

My good friend Kevin Ertell did a fabulous job in his blog this week describing how planning for word of mouth may be the missing link forgotten about by marketers in the customer engagement cycle. He recommends that marketers plan for “satisfaction” and “referral” steps. As his post says, “Satisfaction is simply the foundation, and the minimum requirement, for a continuing relationship with customers.”

Aiming for “satisfaction” isn’t enough. It’s more effective to have marketers think in terms of “delight.” By adding “referral” as a step, it might misalign marketers into thinking they can trigger the referral if they just enable it, where we both know that when a customer is delighted (or angry) they share it today.

If you truly want to persuade people you must first delight them. We can learn a lot about this from Apple’s marketing. Seth Godin offers 10 tips on how to be remarkable as well.

How to Trigger Word of Mouth

When delivering a keynote presentation last week about social media to small and medium sized businesses, I told them nothing different than what I tell larger clients. Hopefully, they can now turn their agility into an advantage. Remember, it’s important to be remarkable! Think of it like Dorothy in the “Wizard of Oz”; the power to capture social media attention didn’t rely on the wizard (social media gurus) or the ruby slippers (the social media tools), but rather that they had the power inside them the whole time – they just needed to be “remarkable!”

Advertising guru, Roy Williams likes to say “Advertising only accelerates the inevitable” today I would add that “Social media only accelerates the inevitable.”

The point is simple, if you have a good business, with strong values, a great product/service, that takes good care of employees and customers, advertising will help amplify your great story and your results.

If you have a lousy product, treat customers and employees without respect, with advertising you’ll soon be out of business (although some airlines and banks have consistently managed to defy this rule).

Used to be if you had a lousy business you could fool some people in to buying from you and word of mouth would eventually catch up with you as the expression went one person who would then tell twelve… But that was another day. Today one person Tweets, updates their status, creates a YouTube video, post a review or blogs and thousands if not millions might see it.

It’s All About Me, The Customer

Peter Drucker said the “The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer.”

Notice the focus on the customer, not the product or service. The point of your business should be to fill needs and create value for your customers. Too many companies still practice accidental marketing. They hope that social media marketing is their magic blue pill to great results.

An Apple a Day Keeps the Social Away

You don’t have to be social, but you do need to provide value for your customers. Apple is not a social company, it is not open to having a dialogue with everyone, nor does it need to. As long as they continue to fill needs and bring value to customers. Some die-hard social media “experts” will argue with me, but you can’t argue with Apple’s results. Being social is not part of their corporate metabolism and it doesn’t look like they need to change that anytime soon. But you are also not Apple.

The Social Values

The social media revolution though does signify certain cultural and societal values shifting. We expect a business to have respect for the customer, create good products/services (or we’ll review them negatively), have good customer service, and we expect some level of transparency and authenticity from the organization.

Being social is about values, beliefs and attitudes. Values and attitudes you have or don’t or would like to have. Keep in mind if you don’t have them changing attitudes and beliefs can be difficult, un-natural and you will resist it. As much as change is a constant, as humans we seek to keep the status quo.

You can’t fake social. Just because you post some YouTube videos, put up a fan page, start a blog or twitter account, does not mean you are “social.” If you are not prepared to walk the talk and align your values don’t believe the tactics will bring results.

Do not believe the tactics can replace the strategy. However, if you are prepared for real change starting down this path to social commerce can be transformative.

You can always put lipstick on a pig, but at the end of the day you still have a pig, although possibly a pretty pig.

In my last column, I shared with you my efforts on how I set out to reclaim my personal brand and start ranking on Google for my name, with my new Web site, “bryaneisenberg.com.” One strategy was to plan a “link bait” post, 69 Free (or Low cost) Tools to Improve Your Website, to create a blip on Google’s link graph of my Web site. Let me explain.

Planning Your Link Bait Strategy

Unfortunately, the term linkbaiting has some negative connotations. Its best use can be anything worthy enough of grabbing people’s limited attention and causing them to link to, share, or otherwise promote the content you generate. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve seen people get overly excited about something they produced and how “viral” it is, only to be forgotten before it’s even shared. Here’s how to avoid that problem.

Six Steps to Linkbaiting Nirvana

1. Define your goal.Is the goal of this piece of content to persuade or sell people to take an immediate and measurable action or is it more long term, to develop links to improve your search engine rankings or brand awareness? You shouldn’t only think of link bait as a short-term fix to a long-term problem; it doesn’t usually work.
2. How will you measure success?Once you have your goals in place, you now need plans to make sure you’re tracking your outcomes effectively. Start by defining the key performance indicators (KPIs) you want to monitor. Here’s a list of 35 social media KPIs to get your thinking started. You should also consider sentiment analysis, such as that offered by Radian6 or Scout Labs. Remember, it’s still quality that matters more than quantity, not only in what people say, but also in who links to you.Knowing what you will measure should define how you measure. Will you be tracking the number and quality of links, comments, tweet or retweets, social bookmarks, positive or negative votes, etc? What tools will you use to measure your outcomes? Will it require specialized tagging? Will you make it easy for your content marketing team to tag your content properly, to make sure you’re tracking as effectively as possible? For example, if your content is on YouTube, are you optimizing and measuring it properly?

   It used to be much simpler when all you were measuring was links, but now that everyone can share content with social media and bookmarking sites, measuring effectively is more of a challenge.

3. Develop your personas.Know your audience. There are two parts to your audience you must define: your connectors and your final audience. Your connectors are individuals you hope will share your content with their network and thus, lead to greater reach than you have on your own. Hopefully, you have a prior existing relationship with some of them because it does make this process easier.Please understand, no one will share anything with their network that they don’t believe elevates their self-perception. They want to know that people in their network will think more of them for sharing this piece of content. Ask yourself: Will your content make them seem funnier, smarter, more generous, etc? What will motivate people to share your content? Do you know what social networking and bookmarking sites your content will appeal to most? For example, some content works better on Digg, over Reddit or Delicious.

   My friend, Sverre Bech-Sjøthun, shares how to be sure your campaign tactics match your audience, while he does a great job explaining how he implemented these audience strategies in a link bait campaign for Crestock.com.

4. Develop the content.Two simple rules your content must follow:
   1. It must be relevant to your audience; and for your success, relevant to your business.
   2. It must be compelling to engage with and to share.

   Depending on your audience, you must also decide which form your content will take; should it be a post, an e-book (white paper), a video, a contest, etc.

   Your headline must be incredibly remarkable. It’s worth spending extra time to make sure you have it right or to test it out with your connectors or original linkers list (much like the Huffington Post does).

   If you’re stuck coming up with ideas for content, Darren Rowse from ProBlogger shares 20 linkbaiting techniques to use when planning your content.

   Without a doubt, a content strategy that matches your objectives and meets your audience’s needs is essential.

5. Make it easy to share.Plan to add elements to make it easy to pass your content along. Use ShareThis or AddThis tools to your posts or pages, add a retweet button to a PDF, etc. For example, YouTube offers 13 ways to share content. How many ways are you offering? Double check to make sure they’re tagged properly for your analytics.
6. Share and refine.Send out your content to a few of your connectors and see how they respond. What feedback do they give you? Do they share it with their network? If not, what can you do to refine it before you send it out to other people? Remember, you can change content after you launch it, if it will help your success.One example of someone who has been publishing great content for the past 15 years is Ralph Wilson of Web Marketing Today (celebrating its anniversary this week). He emails his 101,000+ newsletter subscribers about a new article, product, or service, then specifically asks them to bookmark his content using AddThis.com, a gadget that makes it easy for people to bookmark using their favorite social bookmarking service. Subscribe to his newsletter and check it out.

Best of luck scoring more links!

In my last column I covered the first three of seven online marketing challenges. Marketers often find they need to:

• Reach more people.
• Reach better people.
• Have more resources.
• Improve testing and usability.
• Redesign.
• Obtain better metrics.
• Improve conversion rates.

Let’s consider the latter four challenges:

4. “We need better testing and usability.”

• Evaluate how easy it is to buy from you.
• Determine if your visitors quickly can find what they’re looking for.
• Check out the ease of your check out process.
• Collect feedback from visitors.
• Set up tests to watch how visitors actually behave.
• Isolate which variables are most important to visitors.
• Determine which offers work best.

That’s a start. Next you must ask yourself the bigger questions:

• What motivates people to buy even when a site isn’t usability-friendly?
• If usability is the only critical factor, why haven’t our conversion rates kept pace improved usability?
• Are we testing the wrong things?
• Is the solution to our problem in a metric we haven’t looked at yet?
• Which variables really matter?
• How can we tell whether pages up or down the click-stream are affecting the page we are testing?
• Do our tests include a hypothesis for the outcome?
• Does a viable theory support our hypothesis for the outcome?
• Do we use a statistically meaningful sample size to validate (or refute) our hypothesis?
• Do we have a framework for evaluating our results so we can make informed decisions?
• What can we learn from a test that we can apply to other situations?
• Can we create different click-through paths for different audience segments so we yield a cumulatively higher conversion rate rather than the best average conversion rate?

5. “We need to redesign.”

• Isolate what isn’t working and what is.
• Write copy that is more persuasive.
• Use illustrative and persuasive images.
• Refresh your company image.
• Update your technology.
• Determine whether you need to re-conceive your site because too many elements bog down the original design.

That’s a start. Next you must ask yourself the bigger questions:

• Do we need a redesign or can we work with what we have?
• Exactly how would a redesigned site better serve our visitors?
• If the best-converting sites are often boring in their design, are we willing to design our site with that in mind?
• Can we achieve the same goals with incremental changes?
• Will we incorporate a scientific testing methodology into our redesign so we can optimize click-streams based on a prediction of how different audience segments engage with the site?

6. “We need better metrics.”

• Measure the impact on conversion of every element on your site.
• Determine if your Web analytics program is set up correctly.
• Turn all your data into knowledge you can act upon.
• Measure whether your predictions of visitor behavior are accurate.
• Identify the campaigns, keywords, site elements and audience segments that give you the best return on your investment.

That’s a start. Next you must ask yourself the bigger questions:

• Can we better implement the Web analytics program we currently use?
• Do we understand exactly how each metric affects our financial statements?
• Are our metrics based on our visitors’ buying cycles and personalities, or on the design of our Web site?
• If our metrics don’t tell us how to refine our Web site to meet visitor expectations, are we gathering the wrong data?
• Have we designed an intentional path so our metrics can separate the signal from the noise, or are we simply trying to divine order from randomness?

7. “We need a better conversion rate.”

• Define the minimum acceptable return on investment from your traffic.
• Remove obstacles to conversion.
• Reduce shopping cart abandonment.
• Design lead generation forms so more visitors complete them.
• Improve your content’s ability to persuade.

That’s a start. Next you must ask yourself the bigger questions:

• How will our conversion rate affect our advertising and promotional budget?
• If we attract a smaller audience that converts better, we’ve increased our conversion rate. Are we prepared to reduce our conversion rate if we can generate more sales at a higher net profit?
• Could a strategy that increases the conversion rate fail to produce the most overall sales or best results?
• Assuming our offering is good, have we identified all the reasons why a visitor wouldn’t convert today, in seven days, in 30 days, in 60 days, etc.?
• What percentage of visitors would we expect to lose to each of those reasons?
• If we identify the reasons why a visitor wouldn’t convert and the projected conversion rate remains 20 percent, why would we set an even lower goal? (Answer: In the absence of data to the contrary, you have no reason to set a goal lower than that. Surprised?)

Meeting Your Challenges

Answering the bigger questions requires:

• Objective, critical self-appraisal.
• Intimate knowledge of your business.
• Detailed knowledge of your marketplace.
• Familiarity with your audience and their objectives.

In review:

1. Begin with a new set of assumptions: The problem is systemic, not granular.
2. Embrace a new perspective: See what customers see. Understand the questions customers ask as they try to solve their goals.
3. Ask a bigger question: Why do customers buy?
4. Develop a new strategy that reflects this perspective. How can I answer questions the customers ask and help them buy?
5. Remember, it’s too early for tactics. Understand the big picture and how it affects the customer’s system for buying.

These are the ingredients of success online.

We hope they help guide you through the process or help you reconsider your strategy.

Marketers like to ask: How do I increase my sales? How do I get more leads? How do I drive more traffic to my site? How do I achieve better search engine rankings? How do I keep customers from abandoning their shopping carts? How do I use the data I get from my analytics software? How do I move to the next level?

These are important questions. Over the last decade we’ve challenged hundreds of clients to reframe their questions. For instance, instead of asking, “How do I increase my sales?” marketers should address, “We need to reach more people.” Jeffrey, my brother and partner, and I put this list together to help you consider those in this two-part column.

There Is a Bigger Question: What Makes People Buy?

Focus on this question and everything else falls into place. Understanding “What makes people buy?” requires more than a simple change in tactics; it requires a significant change in perspective.

Your perspective dictates your strategy.

Without the correct strategy, you can win all the battles and still lose the war.

Without the correct strategy, you can get more leads, drive more traffic, rank high in the search engines and still fail to increase sales.

This isn’t theoretical. We see it happen all the time.

Tactics: The Unspoken Assumptions

When you tackle site optimization, design, or redesign, you begin with a set of assumptions. Usually, your assumptions reflect a granular, detail-oriented view of the problem as the business sees it.

This leads you to imagine the solution lies in the application of “best practices” — a series of tactics. But Sun Tzu explains that tactics, applied without effective strategy, are “the noise before defeat.”

To answer the question “Why do customers buy?” you must approach the problem as the customer sees it. Until you understand the customer’s perspective, you can’t talk tactics. For now, put those tools back in the box.

When you ask, “Why do customers buy?” your view of your situation zooms out. You see the larger picture that will help you systematically connect your tactics.

You must fully understand the answers to the buying question before you can begin choosing the system’s components. We’re not talking about your system for selling. You already understand that system. We’re talking about the customer’s system for buying.

In review:

1. Begin with a new set of assumptions: The problem is systemic, not granular.
2. Embrace a new perspective: See what customers see. Understand the questions customers ask as they try to solve their goals.
3. Ask a bigger question: Why do customers buy?
4. Develop a new strategy that reflects this perspective. How can I answer questions the customers ask and help them buy?
5. Remember, it’s too early for tactics. Understand the big picture and how it affects the customer’s system for buying.

The critical answers to this new perspective — the answers that meet your specific needs — can only come from you.

Seven Online Marketing Challenges

Sometimes you really do just need answers to the questions marketers ask — just not as often as you’d think. We don’t doubt you put in a lot of time; we do suspect you’re not asking yourself the more complex questions. However, when you do have the challenges below, there are ways to solve them — and frame them as bigger questions.

1. “We need to reach more people.”

• Improve your search engine rankings by adding more keywords to your content.
• Find new places to advertise.
• Grow your mailing list.
• Advertise offline.
• Initiate a viral marketing effort.
• Increase the number of links to your site.
• Create an affiliate program.

That’s a start. Next you must ask yourself the bigger questions:

• Are the people coming to our Web site satisfied with what we present? Or does our presentation set up obstacles to buying?
• What does our conversion rate reveal? If less than 10 percent of the visitors to a page are not taking the action we want them to take, we’ve got a problem.
• Do we provide enough information so people return even if they are not ready to buy right now?
• Is our rate of repeat visitors increasing? If it’s decreasing, we’ve got a problem.
• Are the people who buy from us sufficiently delighted to buy again, or are we always looking for new customers?
• What does our repeat customer rate tell us? If our business is at least two years old and less than 30 percent of our customers aren’t repeat customers, we’ve got a problem.
• Are we marketing to the search engines or to the people who visit our site?
• What does our transaction rate tell us? Are our visitors taking the actions we’d like them to take, or are they just “visiting”?

2. “We need to reach better people.”

• Find more appropriate publications to target.
• Explore better keywords.
• Identify a better list to source.
• Define the characteristics of the most qualified buyers.
• Reach your competitor’s customers.
• Insure shoppers can find you when they’re ready to buy.
• Create the right content to attract search engine traffic.

That’s a start. Next you must ask yourself the bigger questions:

• If we’re reaching the right people, do we have relevant content that meets their needs in the early, middle and late stages of their buying process?
• Is our offering so narrow that there are few qualified people?
• Is the decision cycle for this purchase so short that we must win buyers before they’re aware of their need?
• Is our message strong enough to persuade the “wrong” people we reach to pass it along to the “right” people?

3. “We need more resources.”

• Decide if more money might solve the problem.
• Decide if more time might solve the problem.
• Determine if your staff is sufficiently skilled to solve the problem.
• Perform a vendor/consultant evaluation.
• Define the opportunity costs in terms of return on your investment.

That’s a start. Next you must ask yourself the bigger questions:

• Do our resource allocations match our priorities and our goals?
• Are our resource allocations based on predicted rates of return?
• When we allocate resources, do we hold decision-makers accountable for the returns?
• If we don’t have the time or resources to do it correctly now, when will we?

Next time we’ll cover the last four of seven strategic challenges that marketers must consider. Are there other challenges that marketers must tackle? Let me know.