Every company has to make choices when it comes to how it markets and sells, and, in some cases, who it is and what it sells. In an email exchange, Tom Grimes, the owner of a Culligan dealership in Amarillo, TX and a brilliant friend, shared with me what he’s thinking about in terms of business choices. I thought about it and based on his thoughts, here’s a list of the many high-level choices businesses typically make every day. It…
If you do business, online or traditional business, I hope you took the time to read Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos’ 2013 shareholder letter. In it he shares this tidbit: “Our heavy investments in Prime, AWS, Kindle, digital media, and customer experience in general strike some as too generous, shareholder indifferent, or even at odds with being a for-profit company. ‘Amazon, as far as I can tell, is a charitable organization being run by elements of the investment community for the benefit…
“Almost any question can be answered cheaply, quickly and finally, by a test campaign. And that’s the way to answer them – not by arguments around a table. Go to the court of last resort – buyers of your products.” “Scientific Advertising” was published in 1923 by Claude Hopkins, who began to evangelize the need for testing and experimentation in marketing and advertising. 40 years later David Ogilvy a huge disciple of Hopkins was quoted as saying that “Nobody, at…
In my last column, I shared recent research about how CEOs have lost trust in CMOs’ ability to be focused on business performance. Hopefully, when asked how your company currently measures its digital initiatives you don’t get an answer like this (LOL, well done Adobe): Seriously, the issue is that most analytics frameworks don’t tie all essential marketing metrics back to financial statements. We have been preaching about how this needs to be done since 2001. I suspect, that I…
Did you see the startling statistic shared last week that 70 percent of CEOs have lost trust in marketers? If you’re a marketer, like I am, that should alarm you. According to the recent Fournaise 2012 Global Marketing Effectiveness Program, which has interviewed more than 1,200 CEOs across North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia, CEOs have lost faith in their marketing departments with their inability to prove ROI on campaigns: Furthermore, they have: Made the conscious decision not to expect more from marketing…
According to the recent Fournaise 2012 Global Marketing Effectiveness Program, which has interviewed more than 1,200 CEOs across North America, Europe, Asia and Australia, CEO’s have lost faith in their marketing departments with their inability to prove ROI on campaigns: Furthermore, they have: made the conscious decision not to expect more from marketing than branding, look/feel good ads and promotions… CEOs feel marketers “live too much in the brand, creative and social media bubble”. This is a frightening statistic! What can be…
Increasing sales conversion rates offers a greater ROI than what you can get from optimizing your traffic; either from paid or earned media. The math is simple – even if many never do the calculations. Companies with higher conversion rates almost always have better marketing efficiency ratios (net contribution/marketing expenses.) The upside is that these companies make more money and that’s a good thing. The downside is that it’s hard work to accomplish better marketing efficiency ratios. These companies are…
I rarely get new questions I haven’t written about before in this column – as I approach my 11th year as a ClickZ columnist. Yet, at SES Chicago this week, one of the attendees asked me how you go about building out a marketing optimization team. What kind of people do you need? What kind of backgrounds should they have? I know I’ve discussed this with clients but I haven’t written about it before. First, please notice that, I did…