Marketing

Great Products Need Little Marketing

Do truly great products need a lot of advertising help? Will lots of advertising expense overcome a bad product? I intend to find out, at least in one vertical: video games.

The presentation below is a presentation I gave which outlines my research goal and motivation around how products succeed in the marketplace. Specifically Product Conception Quality, or how well a product is conceived during the Fuzzy Front End of product development, is a moderator on product success controlling for advertising expenditure.

What do you think will be the answer of my research? Will products that were better conceived perform better in the marketplace when we control for ad spend? Or is it purely a factor of how hard companies ‘push’ their bad products?

Do you have a Purple Cow? Or are you shoving a Normal Cow down peoples throats?

Great Products Need Little Advertising: New Product Development from Harlan Beverly

Engaging Social Posts that Don’t Suck

Social Posts onto Facebook and Twitter are important for companies… they serve many purposes, but first and foremost of those purposes should be ENGAGEMENT.

What the heck is engagement? This picture should tell the story.. or click it or the presentation below to learn more. Engagement, as you can see, leads to success… which is what Business is supposed to be about.

So, how do you write engaging posts on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and so forth, without them sucking?
Well I’ve put together a little training presentation on just that.

Enjoy! Comments welcome!

How to Write Good Copy or Social Network Posts from Harlan Beverly

How to Do Google Adwords and Google Adsense Marketing Right

I was speaking to my students this week at http://stedwards.edu, and realized I have never posted this short training on Google Adwords I put together.

It’s a quick read and I think highly useful… so check it out!
http://www.slideshare.net/hbombers/how-to-do-adwords-and-facebook-marketing

How to Do Adwords and Facebook Marketing from Harlan Beverly

Slideshare is Cool!

You will see a number of new blog posts coming up today, all because I recently decided to post every personal training presentation I could find in my old inbox.

I hope you will find some of these useful.

You can see all my presentations here:
http://www.slideshare.net/hbombers

Meanwhile, I am continually impressed with Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/

They somehow have figured out a way to really make it easy for people to upload Powerpoint in a useful way to share with the world.

Let the knowledge be unlocked!

Who’s with me?

What PPT have you uploaded recently?

Facebook vs. Google. Direct Internet Marketing (Advertising)

Which is better for Advertising? Facebook or Google? Hell if I know! What is better anyways? Different… would be a better way to explain Facebook vs. Google, so here goes how I see them as different from a Direct Internet Marketing perspective.

Here is the main difference: The Targeting is Different.

Facebook lets you target Age/Gender/Location/Likes, and more, because it knows “who it’s users are”.
Google lets you target Location and “Search Term Keywords” only.

From a direct marketer’s perspective Facebook might seem better. Marketers usually think of segmentation in terms of “demographics” and “psycho-graphics’, and with Facebook’s tools, you can really target a “market segment”.

The problem with Facebook Targeting is that you have no idea of “buying intent”. You don’t know if they are interested or care about your offer.

For Google, you target the key words that a person is searching for AT THAT MOMENT. There is some kind of intent implied in the act of searching. While this doesn’t jive with Marketers view of segmentation, it certainly does have an impact on relevance to the user.

The difference in the CTR and CVR between the two platforms shows what I mean.

“Averages” from some of my own Facebook campaigns: CTR: 0.025% CVR: 0.012% (yes a tenth of a percent)
“Averages” from some of my own Google Adwords campaigns: CTR: 0.6% CVR: 0.06% (yes 6 tenths of a percent).

Meaning Google is between 20x better at click-through-rate, and at least 6x better at CVR.

Another big difference is the “Ad Frequency” settings of the two tools.

On Facebook, the ads are shown in smallish quantities until one of the ads in an ad group takes off… then the others get virtually no traffic.
On Google, you can SET the system to show ads evenly (when you are A/B testing, this is really really important).

So doing A/B testing on Facebook is almost impossible… (I havn’t figured out a way to do it in a statistically meaningful way).

Instead, on Facebook, I do “Survival Testing”… ads that Survive (get impressions and seem to keep working at a decent rate) go into my “good group” and ads that do not get enough testing, stay in the testing group until I have enough data to “kill them”. It’s a very slow and tedious process.

I’m sure there is more differences as well… what differences do you think are key?

Marketing CEOs vs Engineering CEOs

There are pros and cons to both/either.

Pros:
Marketing CEOs might be more likely to inspire market/customer orientation, differentiation, and brand equity focus. This kind of leadership might seek to inspire cooperation and collaboration across departments.

Engineering CEOs may empower development teams to be more creative, have more power, and reduce “feature creep”. This kind of leadership might be more organized and measured.

Cons:
Marketing CEOs might put too much fluff into products, and not truly enable disruptive innovation. This kind of leader may also have trouble leading engineers, and other technical types.

Engineering CEOs may invest too heavily in non-market-driven ideas and be inclined to ignore customer needs in favor of their own ideas. This kind of leader may be too rigid for creative types.

Which am I?
Early in my career I would say I was definitely an Engineering CEO. I had a vision where I wanted to go; and the market be damned (disruptive technology is like that). Now, I lean more towards Marketing CEO… with a tighter focus on customer/market, and more faith in the power of brand. However, having experience in both, I think I also have a good ability to know when to be which. I can work with engineers or creative types equally well, and see a disruptive idea (and support it) when needed.

Best of both worlds? 🙂

Marketing to Whales

In the gaming business, a Whale is defined as the 2nd or 3rd sigma of spenders. This means the 95th (or 99th) Percentile of your spenders. Depending on the game, this might represent a very significant portion of your total revenue (in a Whale dominate game). Therefor, “marketing to whales” is a very important task/challenge. My good friend Bart Bohn at AuManil have developed algorithms that help identify and monitor the Whales in your game… but the key question I have is, how do you EFFECTIVELY market to these whales?

The Whale challenges are:

How do we Identify Whales (AuManil has this solved! -Thanks! :))
How do we get ATTRACT new Whales to play our game? (Acquisition)
How do we get Whales who play to STAY in the game longer? (Retention)
How do we get Whales who play to SPEND more? (Monetization)
How do we get Whales who have left to COME BACK? (Re-acquisition)

I don’t have all the answers, sadly. Each of these are very hard… I do have some ideas, and am constantly testing these ideas while running Marketing in the real game Dungeon Overlord. Obviously, I can’t share data or any big secrets, but I would love to hear from my friends/readers if they have any ideas on how to solve these problems.

Focusing on ATTRACTING new Whales; Facebook has some new “target” groups that let you supposedly target Whales with your ads. Has anyone tried this yet? I hope to try it out soon.

Targeting players of other similar games seems to work fairly well, but I wonder if “Bids” for ads effect weather or not we reach Whale players?

Thoughts?

Any ideas for the other Whale challenges?

All of Marketing by way of “Target” and “Position”

All of marketing may be explained by clearly defining and using two words: Target and Position. Learn to use these two words correctly, and your business will prosper. Fail in either or both, lose focus in either, and your business will die.

Target: The single very narrow, focused customer type you really, really want to love your product/service.
TO BE CLEAR: I mean +/- 5 years of age, a clear gender, and ideally also some “qualifying” attribute. (example: M/25-35/Hardcore Gamers.)

Position: The unique place in the mind of your target you want your product/service to occupy.
TO BE CLEAR: I mean a clear position that you can own in the mind: “The Best”, “The Fastest”, “The Cheapest”, “The Healthiest”, “The Most X”, etc. (example: “The Most Hardcore Social Game Ever”)

So, how is this “all of marketing”?
Some example questions that come up in running a business should suffice to explain:

Question 1: Where should you sell your product?
Answer 1: Wherever the Target shops.

Question 2: What kind of copy should you write?
Answer 2: Whatever would please the Target while helping your product occupy a Position in their mind.

Question 3: How should you advertise?
Answer 3: Advertise wherever the Target is likely to see it; and ideally to solidify the Position in their mind, and eventually to drive buying behavior.

Question 4: Should I have a website?
Answer 4: If your Target uses the web… usually yes.

Question 5: What features should I have in my product?
Answer 5: Those features that help you occupy the Position in the mind of your Target.

Question 6: Should I partner with company X?
Answer 6: Only if company X is appealing to the Target, and can help you solidify your Position.

Question 7: What price should I charge?
Answer 7: A price that the Target is willing and able to pay, given your unique Position.

Question 8: Should I use Social Networks?
Answer 8: If your target uses Social Networks… usually yes.

Question 9: What if I have a new product?
Answer 9: Define it’s Target and Position… and STICK WITH IT.

Question 10: What if my product isn’t doing well?
Answer 10: Perhaps you need to improve the product for a better Position, or adjust the price to match your “actual” Position in the Target’s mind.

Question 11: Should I add feature X?
Answer 11: If the Target wants it.

I could go on and on… and you may say:

With such a narrow target, aren’t you losing out on sales?
Answer: NO!

You will get sales outside your narrow target, precisely BECAUSE you appeal so strongly to your target. (e.g. imagine all the people who “aspire” to be in your target.. or who themselves uniquely identify with your message/target). You don’t turn these sales away, nor do you let it change your focus… it is your appeal to your TARGET that lets you win other customers outside the target.

I hope this makes sense and helps! I am a bit passionate about this. Email me or comment with questions/feedback/ideas. I’m always open!

Proof that Marketing needs an engineering REMAKE! Only 25% of Marketers add measurable value.

This survey, while not perfect, highlights the need for a Marketing Revival. We need to apply engineering and science to marketing, or this number (only 25% of Marketers add measurable value to organizations), will get worse and worse. What exactly do I mean?

I mean this: imagine an engineer who “adds not measurable value to an organization”…. while technically possible, it certainly ought to be quite rare! Why? Because an engineer KNOWS that what he works on does X for the company: creates a new product. improves the quality of a product. etc… And they know X numbers of product, or Y% of quality improvement.

Now, what about a marketer? If you write a report, does it add value? If you “make an ad” does it add value? If you build a website, does it add value? If you write Facebook posts, do they add value? If you write a blog post, does it add value? If you organize an event, does it add value? If you manage a print ad, did it create value? Did the brand you invented add value? WOW. If you say no to any of those… you are in trouble. But the hard part is “how much value did you add?”.

Here is the beginnings of how to measure Marketing Value:

First, establish the fact that eyeballs have a value. (call it $0.001 or something).
Establish the fact that an Email or Like/Follow has a value (call it $0.10 or something).
Establish the fact that an “engagement (comment, review, etc)” has a value (call it $0.25 or something).
Establish the fact that a “sale” has a value.
Establish the fact that market data (if used) and brand creation (if used) adds product value.. how much? Call it 10%.
Establish the fact that we CAN measure the above (except for #5).
Now, focus on 1-4.. measure, and see if the values need adjustment.

IF YOU DON’T DO WORK in 1-4… you are not adding measurable value.
Go do 1-4.

Meanwhile, consider #5… how can you measure that? (I’m still thinking about it; but the answer lies somewhere in the “Price” of your products relative to competition).

Now, Marketers. GET OUT THERE AND MEASURE! Don’t be a “no value added” employee.

Harlan T Beverly, PhD

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