Its no news that the economy has put a damper on new construction the last few years. Despite a slow down on the construction front, contractors still command significant control in terms of spending.

Residential contractors spent an estimated $25 billion on building products last year and are expected to spend $4.6 trillion by 2015, but marketers who want to capitalize on that growth will have to navigate an increasingly complex and fragmented customer base,  according to a new study recently conducted by Point to Point. Also during the downturn, we’ve seen a shift in demographics among contractors.

“With the profound shift the industry has encountered over the past few years came a division of the contractor audience,” said Aylie Fifer, V.P., account director for Point to Point. “insights into how these segments have emerged, how they are absorbing media, and the technology they are using is critical to the success of manufacturers who want to market to contractors. You can’t talk to them the same way you did 5 years ago because the landscape has changed.”

Read the news story and learn more about this shift in our latest white paper Best Practices for Selling Building Products Through Contractors.

Image courtesy of http://marcheawards2011.blogspot.com/

If you own or run a business that relies on local traffic, you need to pay attention.  The proliferation of connected mobile devices – specifically smartphones, tablets, and others such as iPod Touch – means your customers and potential customers that are on the go are always connected. No more need for a laptop or desktop to look up your product or service. Forget about the Yellow Pages. We’re talking real-time, hyper-local search.

Here is a jaw-dropping statistic -last year, over 50 percent of all local searches were conducted from a mobile device. More than one out of every two searches that have local intent were made on a mobile device. Most business owners and marketers don’t realize we’ve reached this tipping point and what it means to them.

Imagine this consumer scenario. You (consumer) are driving home from work. Your car breaks down. You need to a) find a ride home or a tow home and b) find a repair shop to fix your vehicle.

What’s that? You don’t own a car. Okay then, here’s another scenario. You go out to have dinner at your favorite restaurant. You arrive and learn that there is a three hour wait for a table. Being hungry enough eat an elephant, you decide not to wait three hours and start looking for other options.

In each case, what do you use to find what you are looking for? You guessed it, your smartphone. Remember that statistic above about more than 50% of local searches being made from a mobile device? You are in the majority.

So, why is all this important if you own or run a business? Say you are a towing company, an auto repair shop or a restaurant. You not only want to be found at that moment when someone is looking for your product or service, you need to be found.  But are you being found?

To get the answer, you need to look at the search results on your smartphone. Do some test searches based on the keywords someone would be searching for when in need of your product or service (not just your company name but a search query that is topical about your product). This is not a complex test. Don’t believe the results? Ask your customers to look on their phones. Ask your friends. Your employees.

If you are not being found you quickly need to fix this problem (again, remember that statistic above about >50% of local searches on mobile devices).

There are a few ways to go about getting your business found on mobile search results. The solution that will get you to the top of the search results for the examples above is setting up a paid search campaign that targets mobile devices. Put your paid search ad square in the face of the consumer at the very moment they are looking for a tow truck, a repair shop or a place to eat. Even show all your surrounding locations and your phone number to allow them to determine how far your business is from their exact location and call you with the tap of a thumb.

Other ways to get more visibility include optimizing your website for search engines (SEO), and making sure you are in all the relevant local directories including Google Maps/Places as well as inclusion in sites such as yelp.com.

Regardless of what path (paid vs. SEO) you choose to be found in the mobile search results, don’t wait. You need to take action now and put your company front and center. If you are not showing up in the mobile search results, chances are good that your competition is there or will be soon. If you need help developing and implementing mobile, local search campaigns, consider using a search marketing agency and give me a call.  I’ll get you there.

Image courtesy of missdv8

If you are thinking of developing a mobile app, you have several important choices to make. By far, the most important choice you’ll make is the platform you use to develop. The question comes down to whether you develop a native app or an HTML5 based web app?

With iOS as a leading operating system having strong market share, I’ve given the comparison between HTML5 and iOS. There are many pro’s and con’s to consider. Keep in mind that developing in one vs. the other is not a right or wrong question. There is no solution that works universally. Each app, each case is unique and there should be careful thought given to these variables.

Here is the where you should begin. (click the image for a larger view)

Keep in mind that if you develop an HTML5 app, it will require less time and development resources to run across the majority of devices and systems. There still needs to be consideration given to the form factor and how it renders on each device.  Testing is a must as you can’t assume what you build once will work everywhere. Alternatively if you are going to develop an iOS app, you’ll need to do more development work to get your app on other devices and operating systems such as Android, Blackberry, etc.

By no means is this an exhaustive list of criteria. It is meant to outline some key considerations. If you are curious about other criteria that should be considered as you embark on developing a mobile app, give me a shout.

In today’s marketing environment, the customer controls the terms of the engagement more than ever and screens out anything that lacks relevance. This means that it is more important than ever for marketers to connect with customers using surgical precision — to know their customers well enough to tailor both the context and the messaging to them as individuals (what we refer to as Pinhole Marketing™). If you spray and pray your marketing dollars, you’ll waste a lot of valuable money and time and won’t get the return necessary to generate growth or profit.

An interesting working example of how this is being done well can be found in how politicians are targeting you for your vote. After all, its an election year and there is going to be no shortage of political spending.  A recent NY Times article explores the use of highly targeted political advertising. So, which party are you affiliated with? Which candidate appeals to you? Don’t worry if you don’t know. Because the folks running political campaigns can answer these questions for you. It wasn’t always this way though.

Consider this quote from the NY Times article:

“Forty years ago, you’d watch the same evening news ad as your Democratic neighbor,” according to Kenneth M. Goldstein, president of the Campaign and Media Analysis Group at Kantar Media.

In contrast, today:

“Two people in the same house could get different messages. Not only will the message change, the type of content will change” said Zac Moffatt, the digital director for Mitt Romney’s campaign.

The article goes on to describe the process of microtargeting using digital cookies and matching up your online footprint (cookie crumbs) with offline data about you, such as your credit information, the organizations you belong to or support, possibly even the brand and model car you own.  This is matched up with voting data (excluding the candidates you voted for).  Your data is combined with other similar profiles and candidates are buying access to you as part of an audience profile.

The big advantage here is that the candidates can buy ad placement that targets people they care to target rather than everyone that visits a particular website which may be a wide range of audience segments including many eyeballs they will never convert into votes and therefore don’t want to pay to advertise to.

Underscoring the importance of targeting in a political campaign, consider this statement:

“We want to hit the people who can actually go out and vote,” Blaise Hazelwood, the president of Grassroots Targeting.

So, how can a marketer selling windows, cars, homes, insurance or otherwise make use of this type of targeting? Profile data has been available for some time and has become richer as consumers spend more and more time online and share information. Using third party sources such as Clearspring or Quantcast or even through Google, an advertiser can designate a specific type of audience they wish to target and advertise to only that audience. Offline data from companies such as Experian, or Axciom, can be supplemented with online data to make ads even more laser targeted.

If you want to sell more windows, you would target your ads to an audience profile that possesses the demographics you desire, in the geography where you wish to sell more windows and at a time when they might be in the market for windows. All this is accomplished using the type of data profiling described above.

You can also make your ad dollars work harder by using the insights you gain about the audience to help shape your messaging and offer. Knowing how to target an audience using media is the first step. We’ll cover the messaging discussion in a future post.

For now, remember that you are leaving a trail of personal information everywhere you go online and offline from websites you visit to the stores you shop and buy goods. You’ll be seeing more political ads this year than you likely care for, but remember they should be targeted to you. Unless, that is, you happen to be on your spouse’s computer.

Contact us if you’d like to learn more about audience targeting or how to make your ad dollars work harder for you.

Image courtesy of thegreenkey.net

In business and in marketing, it is critical that you know your customer. That’s why we’re sharing our latest research and insights with you. Connecting with the A&D industry has grown more challenging in the past few years. Driven in large part by the proliferation of media choices and technology advancements, coupled with the turmoil in the overall economy, you have a very unstable landscape in which to connect and be pulled through the Pinhole.

The market dynamics behind Architects, Designers and Specifiers has shifted as these variables have changed the game of connecting with and marketing to architects and designers. In our latest white paper update: Connecting To A&D, we explore trends in the A&D segment and provide insights into the newest best practices to connect with this audience.

By reading the white paper, you’ll find insights about how the economy has forced many architects and designers either out of the profession or into areas of architecture and design that they had not focused previously. You’ll also learn about the growing trend of mobile app usage and the important role it plays in positioning your brand in the A&D community.

Read the white paper to learn how 55% of Architects use mobile phones for downloading apps, 73% of Designers use the Internet for product research, and half of all product and brand decisions are made by Specifiers.

We’d love to hear your feedback on the white paper and discuss the insights we’ve uncovered. Contact us today.

Flickr image courtesy of PhOtOnQuAnTiQuE

There is a growing trend among moms. Soccer moms as many of us have affectionately come to know them have gone mobile. It’s time to set aside what you previously knew to be the modus operandi for this segment. Moms today are highly connected, highly informed and extremely app-driven. I like to refer to them as Mobile Moms. Here is why you need to take a fresh look at today’s moms and rethink how you are communicating with them.

According to Nielsen, 1 in 3 Americans own a smartphone. Combined tablet and smartphone sales will exceed desktop and notebook computers in 2011 based on a Morgan Stanley February 2011 research study. According to Babycenter’s 21st Century Mom 2011 Mobile Mom Report, Moms are 18% more likely to own a smartphone than the general population. Moms are mobile power users according to the Babycenter Report. They find value in their smartphones for entertainment (games, social, music), information (weather and health) as well as shopping on her mobile.

The Babycenter report also indicates that when it comes to health, Moms are 50% more likely than the general population to use apps for tracking health and fitness. 80% love looking up wellness information on their phone. If you are a healthcare provider, you need to understand this and get your brand on their smartphone in the form of an app, an ad or a text message. Somehow you need to connect with moms on mobile.

Take a close look at your website on a smartphone. Do you have to zoom in to read it? Can you easily tap links to navigate using your thumb? Answering no to either of these questions means you need to think about a mobile-ready website.

Moms love to shop and their smartphones prove to be a shopping utility. When on the go and at retail stores, moms rely on their phones to aid in the shopping. 46% of moms find the most convenient time to get information about a product is when they are right there shopping for it. Of those that shop with their smartphones, 62% are using shopping apps (data from Babycenter Report). Are you a retailer or e-tailer? What is the experience you are providing moms when they visit your site on their phone? How are you connecting with them in store using technology and mobile devices?

Moms rely heavily on their mobile phone to access their social networks. They are 38% more likely than the general population to use their smartphone for social networking. They use their social networks to socialize and for entertainment as well as to listen to what other moms are discussing and to aid in making decisions. Have you begun reaching moms via social networks? Have you thought about how to integrate social and mobile to get your brand in front of moms and their social networks? If not, you are missing incredible opportunities.

So what are the implications? If you are a marketer and you need to connect with and win over the mom community, you need to factor mobile into your mix. This can take many shapes. It can range from mobile ads to apps to mobile optimized websites. It could also include SMS messaging and many other ideas. The bottom line is this audience segment is prime for a mobile connection. How can a marketer act on this? Begin understanding the types of tools that a mom could use to help improve her life when on the go. She does not have a lot of time to do in-depth research. Give her an app to help aid in her decision process – whether looking for a pediatrician or a new pair of shoes. Of course, these are two different apps we’re talking about. The point is to begin thinking about apps. Start small and grow it.

Other actions you can take are to begin collecting opt-ins to receive text alerts. What type of an alert would your audience desire? In retail, perhaps it is an alert about an upcoming sale. In healthcare it might be reminders for appointments or flu shots. Take a close look at your website. How is it to read on a smartphone? If you can’t read it without zooming in and can’t tap the links with your thumb, you need to think about making it mobile-ready.

Give moms the mobile experience they deserve including mobile-ready sites, text alerts, apps that improve their lives and cater to their ‘on-the-go’ lifestyle. In return, moms will give you their praise, their business as your customer and their loyalty. Want to learn more? Read about our mobile application capabilities. Sign up for our enewsletter – PinPoints. Or, contact us today.

Flickr image courtesy of Fifth World Art.

A common challenge marketers face is that they have data from various campaigns that reside in disparate systems.  In order to make meaning out of the data and gain insights about marketing performance, the data needs to be merged.  To add to the complexity, marketing organizations often use different systems than sales organizations making it more challenging to connect the dots between marketing investments and sales activity that it helps drive.

What’s a marketer to do?  Here are several ideas to help create closed loop systems along with the rationale why they are beneficial.  All of the suggestions within are meant to help understand what is failing and what is working in an effort to optimize campaigns.

1. Create a system that allows all key constituents to access the same key metrics.  Use the key metrics to derive data driven insights and continually improve performance (websites, campaigns, email, seo, ppc, etc.).  I know, blah, blah, blah.  What does this mean?  Its so vague.  It means that anyone in your organization, regardless of their department, can access a dashboard or reporting system to see how marketing campaigns perform.  Within the system there are key insights that drive action.  If a campaign is failing to meet its goals, you can see it is failing.  You can drill down deeper to see what might be causing it to fail.  Same for the campaigns that work.
2. Develop a system that closes the loop between marketing and sales.  The system should demonstrate how many sales are generated and associate the sale back to the lead source along with campaign metrics such as cost, exposure, response rates, and break it down by offer, message, creative, medium, etc.
3. Focus on key, actionable metrics.  Having data and reports for the sake of measuring is a futile effort.  You need to identify the metrics that matter to your organization.  Is it time on site?  Is it videos viewed?  Perhaps white papers downloaded?  Sample requests?  Online sales?  Visits and pageviews don’t give you much to go by in terms of actionable data.  What matters is behavior.  Driving a call to action.  Making the phone ring.
4. Always test.  As marketers, we are never done tweaking, refining and making things better.  When you find something that is working, test another version or message to see whether it can work better.  Test a different list.  Test a different call to action.  Never stop testing and learning.  If you are not testing, you’ll never improve performance.
5. Incorporate anecdotal evidence of success and failures into results (customer feedback, client feedback, agency feedback, vendor feedback).  Don’t rely on empirical data alone from web analytics, third party ad serving, social media insights, call tracking etc.  Factor in the feedback you receive from internal constituents, social media comments, vendor feedback.  These data points are important to round out the results of a campaign.  They add flavor and context to the learning.
6. Did I say test.  I can’t say it enough.  Always test.  Learn from tests.  Grow.  Don’t be afraid to fail. Failing is where we often learn our greatest lessons.
7. Converse to failing, don’t only look at what went wrong.  Look at what went right and figure out how to socialize that across other campaigns, business units, tactics, etc.

If you are not measuring your marketing today, how are you making decisions around your marketing investments?  If you are measuring your marketing, are you troubled by having many systems that don’t ‘talk’ to one another?  Start small.  Find ways to integrate.  Test.  Learn. Refine.  Rinse and Repeat.

Flickr photo courtesy of OliverN5

If you use email marketing to communicate with your customer base or for prospecting, you probably pay close attention to open rates, click through rates, and most importantly conversion rates.  You know by now that changes to subject lines, calls to action and offers can make a difference in the performance of a campaign.  Other factors can have an impact as well such as send time (day/time), your list, your email service provider (ESP), and more.

So, you know all this.  What’s broken?

What’s broken is the general approach of “one to many” when sending email campaigns.  Like you (and the rest of the connected world), I am on many email lists.  I get the same emails that you all get. Okay, well maybe I don’t get the emails from Modern Plastics and Polymers or Bird Watchers Digest. But if I were on these lists, chances are we’d be getting the same version of emails.  Why are we getting the same versions?  We’re different people with different preferences.  Just because we both love birds, does not mean we love the same birds.  Or, that we both want to go on bird watching trips.

To be effective and make use of advanced segmentation, emails need to be viewed as “one to one”.  By one to one, I mean personal.  The more advanced, sophisticated ESP’s such as Silverpop make this possible.  Through preference databases and list segmentation, brands can get to know and communicate with their customers and prospects much more intimately.  No, I don’t mean that kind of intimate.

By intimate, I am suggesting that we allow our customers to tell us their preferences.  What are their likes and interests?  Why are they signing up to receive email from us?  How are they reading emails?  On a laptop? On a phone?  On an iPad?  All of the above? By collecting this information you’ve accomplished the first step towards improving your email marketing.  Now you need to do something with it.  You need to segment the data you’ve collected and craft email messages that are relevant and compelling to your segments.  Hone in on segments of your list that prefer to hear about bird watching trips and send them relevant information and offers.  For those that would rather learn about bird watching without traveling, send them videos or some other, preferred method of consuming bird content.

Why is all this important?  Because you are taking the time and energy to communicate with your customers and you are communicating what you think is important, not what your customers think is important.  If you are going to send emails and accept an industry average open rate and click through rate, then you’ll be stuck at the same performance level until you decide to make this change.  Your emails are competing for share of mind with 10-20 other commercial emails per day.  This is on top of all the business correspondence email and personal email your customers receive and respond to.  If you are not relevant to your customer, you’ll be deleted.  If you are not deleted, you’ll be ignored.  In today’s email world, ignored means being prioritized downwards.  If your customer uses an email service such as gmail, you’ll be in the bottom of the inbox and lucky to be seen.

So you are asking where to start?

Build a preference center.  Drive your email list to that preference center.  Gather information about them.  What they like, desire and maybe even their birth date.  Send an email with birthday wishes.  I bet they’ll open it.  Surprise them with a special birthday offer.  Send loyalty emails to your best customers that order from you regularly.  Find out their social media preferences and engage with them via social media as well.

You can’t keep sending “one to many” emails and expect to be successful.  If you do continue down the one to many path, all you can count on is to be extinct.

Flickr photo courtesy of emilykbecker

Several people have been credited with the saying: “Seek first to understand, then be understood.”

A quick Google search gives credit to Steven Covey, author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People so I’ll go with it here. What Covey and many others are trying to impress on us is the idea that until you understand who you are communicating with in terms of motivations, desires, interests, preferences and their overall being, you can’t expect them to understand you.

As marketers, we want to communicate what makes us great. Why our brand, product or service is better than the competition. But how do we know we’re better? Is it based on our research of the competition? Is it based on a room of marketing and product managers developing rationale for why we’re better than the next guy?

If this is how you are developing your communication strategy, your process is broken.

You need to first listen to what your customers and prospective customers have to say before you can begin to apply any brain cells towards how you’ll market your brand. The key idea here is to listen. Listen to interests. Listen to needs. Listen to motivations. Listen to dislikes. Listen to challenges. Listen to preferences.

By listening and understanding your audiences, you can then start thinking about how to position your brand. How to connect with your audiences. How to communicate with them. How to motivate them to respond and take action.

Instead of speaking in a language based on what you and your marketing team think is relevant and important to your audience, you’ll now be speaking a language that is relevant to them. A language they understand. One they want to respond to. One that understand them, their needs, their interests, their desires. Couple this approach with the competitive landscape and your unique brand offerings and you’ll be speaking a language your audience understands and will drive a return on your marketing investments.

Flickr photo courtesy of orkomedix

Do you manage email marketing campaigns? If you do, you’ll want to read this.

Email marketing comes in many sizes and flavors. There are monthly newsletters, promotional offers or coupons or special announcements. No matter what type of commercial emails you send, you can always improve the process and the results.

The focus of this post is how to make mid, to large scale programs more efficient. If you manage multiple lists and multiple templates, chances are you spend a lot of time on repetitive tasks. This is costing you precious time and creating opportunities for error. Maybe you have an email marketing agency managing this for you. How are they managing the process? What steps in the process can you remove in order to gain efficiency and accuracy?

Here are a few things you can do to improve:

1. Streamline the internal communications process of receiving email content. If you manage a monthly program for multiple store locations or internal divisions of a company, create a better process of collecting the monthly specials, offers or events. Suppose you have 50 or 100 stores that send you their monthly offers. Create an online form where they need to submit their information. Set due dates so you can manage expectations. If your internal customers are not able to submit their information by a due date, their email will not go out on time.
2. Consolidate send dates. Rather than sending 50 or 100 email campaigns per month, send one or two. This can be done by creating templates and using relational tables. There is some up-front work that needs to be done to set up the tables and load in content but this will save hours down the road by not having to deploy email sends over and over again through the month. Using relational tables allows you to send campaigns once or twice a month and the store specific images, and content will be pulled into the template in real-time.
3. Don’t be afraid of templates. Solutions such as Silverpop allow email marketers to create templates that preserve the unique nature and brand characteristics of individual stores or divisions.
4. Manage expectations. When email programs grow and need to scale, you need to introduce this type of process so you can manage expectations. If 100 sites are sending you their monthly promotional information on their own schedule, you won’t be able to keep up with timely campaigns. Chances are you will be sending campaigns late and not meeting expectations. Having scheduled send dates once or twice per month while leveraging technology such as relational tables allows you to manage expectations. Your internal customers will know when their campaigns deploy and when they need to sumbit information to allow time for writing, loading, testing and deployment.

Remember, email marketing does not have to be labor intensive. Templates are not a bad thing. Use templates and relational tables. Cut down on manual entry and inefficiencies. Create more accurate work. Use technology and smarter process to be more efficient and get better results. You’ll save time, money and have internal customers that are satisfied with your service, and the results you produce. With the internal or agency time you save, you can reinvest those budget dollars into other marketing vehicles that you’ve been wanting to test and grow your business.

Looking to improve your email marketing process or results? Give us a shout.

Flickr image courtesy of jessedybka