Category: Digital Marketing

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Digital Marketing

Ten Levers of Success I Use to Build a Marketing Center of Excellence That Bring Strategic Impact

Ten Levers of Success I Use to Build a Marketing Center of Excellence That Bring Strategic Impact

I’ve always had the mindset of staying ahead of the competition, regardless of the gap in between us. And that’s the exact words I tell entrepreneurs who seek my advice. Because once you’ve established a stable business, that’s all the more you can’t stop.

One of the ways you can accelerate your business growth is by creating a Center of Excellence (COE). It’s a vital component of any organization that wants to realize digital transformation for their company.

Gartner describes effective CoEs as “concentrating existing expertise and resources in a discipline or capability to attain and sustain world-class performance and value.”

In the context of marketing, concentrating this expertise and resources in the Center of Excellence framework means you can scale your marketing efforts with more effective strategies and efficient processes that give more value to every dollar you spend.

Essentially, a marketing COE would ensure you launch your campaigns at a targeted yet practical level.

Some of the many benefits you get out of a marketing Center of Excellence:

  • Continued education
    The pace of change in marketing is a well-known challenge. Your COE creates consistency in education and learning for marketing teams and the overall organization by tracking and updating best practices.
  • More efficient use of resources
    High-demand capabilities like skills, knowledge, and experiences should be centralized to widen the reach of the capabilities and streamline their access across the organization.
  • Faster delivery
    Eliminating bottlenecks by streamlining access to critical capabilities increases the speed of delivery, research, development, and maintenance of critical business processes.
  • Increased quality of services and product
    Standardizing best practices enables uniformity of service and product delivery and quality end-to-end customer experiences.
  • Cost optimization
    You can decrease cost by eliminating inefficient practices that reduce redundancy, maximize reusable assets, and optimize the use of all resources.

Ten success strategies that drive results

Creating a Marketing COE takes a significant investment of aptitude, time, and assets. From defining clear principles to continuously improving processes and allowing room to scale, here are ten strategies you can implement to help establish your own marketing Center of Excellence.

Clear strategic alignment and well-defined vision

Every COE must have a well-defined vision that is core to the organization’s strategy and long-term goals. Your marketing should align not only with your business objectives but also with every work you do.

In order to make your solution adaptable to business changes and how marketing evolves, as well as resilient to issues that arise, you need to define clear rules on how to build your COE. Each step in your process needs to have logging, traceability, accountability, and supports your long-term goals. This sets you off in the right foot and promises longevity in your approach while making sure you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time.

Assigning completely independent and holistic team

COEs are not impacted by day-to-day business of an organization and have the flexibility to innovate. Your marketing Center of Excellence must be independent and armed with the right skills to understand and develop end-to-end technology, products, and services. This includes architects, product managers, people managers, technology researchers, etc., bringing competence and talent to the table.

For instance, a COE around content marketing must bring together a team the creates content for sales, video content, customer service, and research team to create a more effective and efficient content marketing engine. Respecting and engaging the expertise of the different disciplines is key. 

Led by trusted leadership

The success of a marketing COE hinges on a visionary leader with an unstirring passion for making an indelible mark in the craft. Creating the vision, mobilizing resources, and keeping momentum ensure that your COE can continue to create an impact. Right leadership will:

  • Create visibility in the organization and ensuring access to relevant stakeholders
  • Enable authority and decision-making that balances marketing and operations
  • Ensure the ability to align with the organization’s changing priorities
  • Facilitate continuous growth of competence and capability

Understanding customer relationship

An in-depth view of customer needs is critical when setting up a Center of Excellence. Insights on industry trends, regulatory changes, innovations, and disruptions are essential perspectives that drive innovation and let you adapt to changes. In addition, predicting potential challenges and risks that can aid customers and forge stronger relationships is an important component in a marketing COE and the 360-degree view of the business.

Enables effective resource management and stable, monitored establishments

Your marketing COE members must have access to shared resources such as tools, templates, calendars, and the like to function efficiently. At the same time, your organization must create a proactive monitoring routine that everyone adheres to for best practice and consistency. A proactive monitoring routine establishes repeated quality assurance and clear testing process that ensures your initiatives always follow best practices.

Strives for demand management and continuous improvement

Identifying execution gaps and areas that need focus and investments enables resource allocation to get work done and improve pipeline management. The fast-changing marketing environment must be foolproof, so business needs are identified and gaps are made known so a resolution can be immediately implemented for both your business and your customers.

A documentation repository for holding all team artifacts can help your COE members check information and learn as they go. This will help accelerate time-to-market and improve quality that hinges on continuous learning and adaptation. And it leaves a legacy that doesn’t rely on specific talents to function.

Promotes value and risk management and coordination across teams

I noticed when working with bigger companies how many divisions, departments, and teams become siloed in the way they work simply because there’s improper coordination across everyone. There are many solutions that allow companies to gain visibility into how work is impacting top objectives and how each body of work contributes to business objectives and KPIs.

Aligns with well-defined success criteria

Measurements drive behavior, and the correct behavior drives performance. It is critical for the organization to define success KPIs that are demonstrable to justify investments and continuous focus on a marketing COE. A centralized tracking, auditing, and reporting ensures that you are always on track of your activities and sees to it that every marketing initiative, project, and effort drives you to your COE’s goal.

Unlike implementing new technology, or redesigning your website, creating a Center of Excellence for marketing is a game-changing action. Once it’s created, it will also require diligence in its updating and enforcement. 

Using these principles to roll out your marketing Center of Excellence allows you to latch on to your business goals with a task force that enables you to do so across all aspects of the business. Each one is a critical element to establishing an effective COE. Building it right with the relevant area of focus is imperative to make sure your COE can help your company solve some of the key challenges around key talent and innovation in the long run.

It might be time for you to build your marketing Center of Excellence. Let’s talk about how you can start today.

SEND A MESSAGE

About Jeev

A serial entrepreneur with a rich history of launching disruptive online businesses and taking them to the top, Jeev owns dozens of “go-to” reviews and rankings websites. Jeev has invested more than 20 years researching human behavior and how to leverage different sales methodologies to effectively influence decision-makers.To find out how Jeev can help you, visit jeevtrika.com.

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Digital Marketing

My Insights on Rational and Emotional Skew in Marketing

My Insights on Rational and Emotional Skew in Marketing

As the coronavirus created uncertainty in industries globally, companies must figure out how to ensure business continuity. The default response of every organization when the global outbreak hit is cutting costs, laying off people, and postponing some of the plans to endure the effects of the pandemic.

But to me, from the perspective of a CEO, it also presents an opportunity to grow when the economy rebounds, as it eventually will. There’s a way to come out of the crisis as a winner. In fact, 14% of companies accelerated their growth and increased profitability during the past four recessions.

My advice? Do the same for your business and use this as an opportunity to thrive.

Shifts to expect in marketing

With the global pandemic affecting every country and industry, it was easy to predict that the economic landscape would change. Transitions like this happen all the time, and I always tell business owners I advise that sales and marketing will continuously evolve. You can easily be on top today but down tomorrow, so you need to stay ahead of your competition regardless of how large the gap is between your business and theirs. Here are important shifts that will happen in marketing.

Relationships mean everything

Your products and services must deliver on what you promise to your customers, so they trust you and become loyal. Digital marketing is one of the techniques that businesses of all sizes use to engage and build a relationship with their customers. However, customers won’t follow (and will unlikely unfollow) companies that only promote their brands and only post about making a sale.

Use your reach to build relationships by creating content that solicits emotions, provides benefits, offers promotions or discounts, and educates, so your customers value you more than just a place where they get products or services.

Customers are Watching Their Wallets

Many businesses had to file for bankruptcy during this pandemic. Consumers are watching their wallets for how they spend, especially on non-essentials. This also caused many retrenchments and changes in shifts for daily workers. Tighter budgets made customers more conscious about purchasing.

If you aren’t essential, then your products and services will likely be deprioritized. And for that reason, you need to find ways as a business to make your business relevant to their current needs by innovating or repositioning your efforts.

Understand Consumer Paradigm Shift

Creating a target audience is one of the basics of marketing. All business owners I’ve talked to know this as well. So, what’s different now?

Your audience persona has also shifted. Customers are prioritizing health more than anything today. They will choose products and services that minimize risks. And they are also watching their wallets, and they are now prioritizing short-term costs and less on quality or branding.

As a business, you must take a deeper look at what they value most in a brand, the language they connect with the most so that your brand can build a human connection with them.

Consumers focus on home for work and play

Customers today are choosing to stay at home. Despite lockdowns easing and many businesses are opening to restart the economy, the home continues to be the safe space for many.

There was a rise in home cooking and baking, DIY activities, and home improvement during the onset of the pandemic, and they remain popular pastimes today. Innovating a response that makes you a household product or activity amidst these uncertain times is one of the opportunities that you can tap.

Adjusting to new customer habits brought by pandemic

The merits of rational logic and emotional appeals in sales and marketing have been a long debate. Rational logic enumerates product benefits, facts, or statistics, while emotive marketing appeals to consumer’s emotional states, needs, and aspirations. This global outbreak proves to challenge many industries, and the question of rational vs. emotional skew in marketing is being raised.

Emotional marketing can be challenging to do right if you aren’t native to the market you are trying to engage. Several factors can affect the decision-making process—geography, lifestyle, demographics, and so on. If it involves tugging on emotional heartstrings, those factors should be known to make it an effective initiative.

Rational marketing uses facts, data, and statistics. But when faced with choosing between you or your competitors, rational marketing plays a huge part.

That’s because your products not only need to feel good, they must be good.

Use emotional marketing to complement your rational marketing. Appeal to your customer’s desire for a better future and present a proven way toward that better future.

 

The Four R’s of a sales response

Crisis can be turned into an opportunity, and you can use these four key steps to lead your teams through these turbulent times, using both emotional and rational marketing at your disposal.

Respond

Engage marketing, sales, and service teams fast and stabilize teams, processes, and pipeline plans. Actions demonstrate commitments. This also includes supporting employees and understanding immediate steps that may affect short-term efforts.

  • Support immediate needs of customers, such as products and pricing
  • Shift to digital communications and online channels to conquer physical lockdowns
  • Reprioritize sales, liquidity, and service agreements to cycle money back and retain customers
  • Equip teams with remote tools to work from anywhere

Reflect

Assess what you’ve planned in the past and what’s in your pipeline to determine the necessary shifts and steps to take next. Review if there are plans that can be moved up to help you towards your immediate short-term goals.

  • Revisit business plans and other initiatives
  • Revisit customers and reprioritize needs by segment
  • Scan competitive landscape for opportunities
  • Track the pipeline plans and deal with risks

Reimagine

Take your discoveries to transition your current offerings and improve what you currently offer.

  • Digitize your go-to-market strategies, bring rational and emotional to steer your wheel
  • Update offerings and prices and make this information act as your rational marketing
  • Track emerging trends and execute with agility, use it to your advantage when crafting relevant content

Rebound

Take it a step further to accelerate your efforts into rebounding your marketing campaigns. Use it as a springboard to pivot your business and stay ahead of the competition.

  • Accelerate digital initiatives
  • Scale e-commerce, digital sales, and inside sales
  • Personalize customer engagement to build relationships
  • Deploy agile teams and value-focused stints by balancing rationality and emotion
  • Set up artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities to support efforts
  • Create a virtual cross-functional team war room to execute rapid responses to identify, prioritize, pilot, and scale long-term initiatives

You want to use these 4 R’s and instill it in your marketing efforts as you use emotional marketing as part of your strategies. There’s no ‘better’ marketing between rational and emotional because both are needed to make your initiatives and efforts work, short-term and long-term.

How are your emotional marketing and rational marketing strategies today? Let’s discuss how you can rebound and use adverse times as an accelerator for your business.

SEND A MESSAGE

About Jeev

A serial entrepreneur with a rich history of launching disruptive online businesses and taking them to the top, Jeev owns dozens of “go-to” reviews and rankings websites. Jeev has invested more than 20 years researching human behavior and how to leverage different sales methodologies to effectively influence decision-makers.To find out how Jeev can help you, visit jeevtrika.com.

Categories
Digital Marketing

My Top On-demand Marketing Techniques

My Top On-demand Marketing Techniques

A new era of digital marketing is on the rise. Marketing is headed toward being on-demand — not just “always on,” but also always relevant and responsive to the consumer’s desire.

The way I see it, the continued evolution of technology along with customer expectations is fueling on-demand marketing. The more technology evolves to address consumer needs, the more there will be demand for the following:

  • Instant accessibility and availability
  • Effective integration of disparate activities in ways that create value
  • Personalized user experience based on available user data
  • Easy and convenient interactions with brands and businesses

To achieve this, businesses must mobilize their whole team to deliver high-quality experiences across sales, service, product use, and marketing. They also need to be familiar with tools for gathering the right data across the consumer decision journey.

Instant Experience

If you’ve been around in marketing for a while, I’m sure you recognize consumers’ desire for more urgency and ubiquity. Because of this, we marketers have gone beyond traditional and digital media to reach our audience. Cases in point:

  • We found ways to utilize virtualized media, which have become touchpoints with customers who are considering and evaluating products and services.
  • We take advantage of social media platforms to connect with our audience real-time.
  • SMS and push notifications are used to alert customers on transactions, promos, etc.

Digital information technologies are essential, as they integrate data on all customer interactions throughout the buyer’s journey. They also provide insights into the best influence pathways for the business and create new personalized experiences for consumers.

All these work together to provide consumers with instant access to products, services, and brands so that their demands are immediately satisfied.

Effective Integration

With the robust programming, data access, and interface opportunities we now have, we’re more equipped to make every digital interaction an opportunity to deliver something exceptional. In fact, digital technologies are now capable of integrating disparate sources of information at low cost and at scale for many different domains (think a smartwatch that can track a user’s health data).

The challenge for companies is to look beyond their current interactions with consumers and find effective ways to close the gaps that hamper customers’ digital experiences. This will require businesses to rethink the way they price and deliver their products. How can you effectively integrate disparate activities in ways that create value for your customers?

Precise User Experience

In the coming years, demands for more personalized experiences will intensify. With a single click, consumers can instantly personalize the offers presented to them, using information captured from their interactions online (data footprint).

Even though the privacy, security, and general trust implications are staggering, consumers still willingly provide more data when companies use the information they capture to provide truly helpful feedback, or to offer recommendations, services, and customization tools rather than just push intrusive messaging.

Simplified Interactions

The quest for simplicity has prompted leading companies to provide easy and convenient interactions with their customers. Yet many processes in a buyer’s journey still remain complex and disparate.

To address the demand for simplified interactions, companies must utilize evolving technologies to redesign complex customer experiences. Experiment with approaches that streamline processes and make interactions more inviting.

For instance, use simple gestures to allow customers to personalize their content and user experience. You can also utilize user information to provide secure access to devices and applications, and automatically customize interfaces.

Build Marketing Strategies and Marketers’ Capabilities

Soon enough, or even as early as now, consumers will demand instant and personalized experiences, effective integrations, and simplified interactions. As such, you must prepare your company’s marketing function to effectively navigate on-demand marketing.

Create Interactions Across the Buyer’s Journey

Any company that’s worth their salt is able to define and address their customer interactions across different channels. What we need to think about and create, however, is the entire process of how individuals encounter our brand and the steps they take to evaluate, purchase, and interact with it across the buyer’s journey. Marketing and customer research alone cannot give us the whole picture.

As you dive into this, everyone in your organization must be on board and gain a shared understanding of the consumers’ journey. You’ll be able to implement your marketing strategies more quickly and effectively if the whole team has a shared sense of engagement.

Analyze Data and Leverage It

To win over on-demand customers, you must understand them, their expectations, and needs. Then reach them with the right message using the best touchpoints. Data is essential to achieve this. In particular, you need data to do the following:

  • Define and contextualize trends — Having a clear view of the broad trends in your brand, category, and market is essential. If you want to leverage data trends, track what people are looking for, what they’re saying, and doing.
  • Measure the effectiveness of activities and investments at key points in the buyer’s journey — My experience in marketing taught me that it’s important to have a complete, integrated picture of where your budget goes, which interactions actually take place, and what their results are. In the world of on-demand marketing, multiple interactions happen along multiple journeys. Deploy tools that rapidly track each customer contact with your brand and push every customer-facing function to work together and form an integrated view of a buyer’s journeys.
  • Understand how and why individuals move along their customer journeys — Capturing customer data is key if you want to understand them better. You can use their data to personalize their experience with your brand, which is also an effective way to show customers that you care. They expect brands to be good stewards and users of their personal data, and their expectations for what a brand should know only increases. Information about a customer is the thread that keeps all of their brand interactions immediate, valuable, relevant, and easy.

Optimize Your Marketing Team

To navigate on-demand marketing and deliver new experiences to consumers, marketing teams should be equipped with the right skills and ready to work with other functions within the organization.

Changes may have to be introduced in ways that will transform how campaigns and communities are managed, how performance is measured, and how customer support is provided.

On-demand marketing is inevitable. Across the entire buyer’s journey, every touchpoint is a brand experience, and those interactions just keep multiplying with more marketing channels emerging. To effectively navigate and overcome the challenges of on-demand marketing, companies must:

  • Bring team members from every involved business unit to understand buyer’s journeys, predict where they may lead, and design experiences that will meet the consumer’s demands.
  • Utilize and leverage end-to-end data across trends, performance, and people to invest wisely and create relevant and valuable solutions for customers.
  • Challenge the delivery process behind every customer touchpoint. Are you making the best use of your data and interaction opportunities? Are your marketing efforts timely and do they meet brand expectations?

Ultimately, staying ahead of the design, data, and delivery requirements of on-demand marketing goes beyond compliance — it’s also a crucial basis for competitive advantage.

How effective are your on-demand marketing strategies? Let’s talk about how we can make it better.

SEND A MESSAGE

About Jeev

A serial entrepreneur with a rich history of launching disruptive online businesses and taking them to the top, Jeev owns dozens of “go-to” reviews and rankings websites. Jeev has invested more than 20 years researching human behavior and how to leverage different sales methodologies to effectively influence decision-makers.To find out how Jeev can help you, visit jeevtrika.com.

Categories
Digital Marketing

Five Proven Methods to Launch Better Marketing Campaigns

Five Proven Methods to Launch Better Marketing Campaigns

Running marketing campaigns is one of the main ways businesses can communicate with their audience and acquire new leads. But putting together a marketing campaign takes time, effort, organization, and creativity to work. On the other side of the spectrum, one misstep or off-taste engagement can lead to a PR nightmare; and a poorly-timed launch can waste thousands of dollars and time.

There are hundreds of articles online teaching you how to launch marketing campaigns. They tell you about setting objectives and budget, creating a message, drafting a media strategy, and measurement. All those are true, but outside of those steps, there’s a lot more behind the scenes that you should consider to ensure that your efforts aren’t wasted.

I’m sharing proven methods that worked for the many disruptive businesses I’ve built and acquired over the years. They are often forgotten or neglected but can impact your marketing campaigns significantly.

Get the right people to hustle

Have the right team members in every step of your plan. Not one phase should be more important than the other. Your planning, execution, measurement, and all the other stages in launching a campaign deserve experts who will give the best of their abilities for the tasks they need to do.

Don’t skimp on hiring people for roles you think aren’t essential or have little contribution to your efforts. Regardless of what they do, they are the backbone of your marketing initiatives that may or may not improve your campaigns.

I’ve also encountered instances that business owners rely so much on the number of certifications when deciding who to include in any project effort. Certifications are undoubtedly valuable at times, but nothing beats hands-on experience when turning ideas into full-blown marketing campaigns.

Improve the “how” of getting things done

Typically, the marketing campaign follows specific steps one after the other to complete. Each step of a marketing campaign is crucial to contribute to the bigger picture. However, gaps in the process can become a hindrance to launching great campaigns.

This is one of the things I remind business owners constantly. I can’t count the number of times I’ve met and coached entrepreneurs with the same mindset. When you’re a business owner, it all comes down to making money no matter what you say. You think a lot about the return on investment and how fast you can get it so your money can circle back to the company.

I constantly say that the quality of marketing campaigns is not only influenced by how great the strategy or the messaging is. The process of getting there is just as valuable as the carrot and the results you get.

Some familiar scenarios you may have encountered:

  • Your strategy team have a lot of basic questions because the campaign goal is not clear
    This may mean that the company’s objectives weren’t discussed well, or they were not asking the questions to help them better understand. As a result, they produce possibly good strategies, but they aren’t perfect.

    In other instances, if they aren’t provided with the right tools and resources to do their work, they may be less informed about finding the best way to market.
  • Your creative team may be getting the short end of the stick
    If you are working within a timeline and a delay happens, it pushes back the rest of the phases. Your creative team, such as copywriters and designers, may end up rushing the work to meet the deadline that could have been better.
  • Your data are inaccurate
    Baselines and benchmarks are the bread and butter of campaigns. It lets you know how well you performed based on historical information or how other companies in the same industry are doing. If you compare your business to another business from a totally different company, then your campaign really won’t work.
  • If you’re an agency, there’s also the tendency of clients not knowing what they want
    Or sometimes, clients want a lot of things at the same time. You need to help them dissect their goals to prioritize. And if you don’t do that, you may end up launching a campaign that they don’t need.

Prioritize the right work and improve team effectiveness

You may have the right people in your team, but are they assigned the right work that complements their abilities? Oftentimes, business owners only look at credentials when hiring. When they involve a team to make campaigns, it’s often the stars within their roles. Sometimes it’s forgotten that marketing is not just technical abilities. Sometimes you need to involve other people to make the whole campaign more effective.

Maybe you have employees that encapsulate the persona of your target market or have bought from a competitor previously when they had the same problem you are trying to solve. Their inputs can be very valuable to your plans.

From a different perspective, if you are running multiple campaigns on top of the regular work that your task force does, they may not be performing and committing their 100%. They may also be delivered just for the sake of delivering because they need to.

Prioritize what they should focus on at a given time, so their attention is not split between five different campaigns, paperwork, and other projects. This also boosts your team effectiveness because you are utilizing the correct people for specific tasks that may require their experience or expertise and getting their dedication 100%.

Personalize and customize marketing processes for greater speed and efficiency

Flawless execution and agility in a complex, fast-paced market are necessary to launch great marketing efforts. When you have personalized and customized marketing processes that make your efforts more efficient, you simplify the whole workflow for everyone.

Imagine marketing automation to help your team do work. You may spend more at the beginning but save a lot of manhours long-term. You can also reduce human errors because tasks are done by technology specifically programmed to fit your needs.

You can benefit from greater speed and efficiency when you have customized marketing processes tailored specifically to how your business functions. This is an investment that is almost always great for organizations, especially those that are growing fast and need to scale accordingly.

Gain the right visibility to deliver consistent brand experiences

There’s value in both having very select platforms to market and to being everywhere you can. Regardless of which you choose, when you meet the right audience and gain the right visibility you need at the right time in their decision-making progress, then you can deliver consistent brand experiences.

Marketing and advertising efforts are not just about inserting yourself before a purchase decision. It’s also the top of mind when they decide to purchase, no matter how far back they saw your campaign.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll repeat it. Marketing campaigns are not just about the most excellent strategy or the best campaign offer. It’s not just about who has the most enormous budget or the best channel to promote. It includes every aspect involved in it—the teams, the effort, the processes to get there.

How does your company launch marketing campaigns? Let’s talk about how to make it even better.

SEND A MESSAGE

About Jeev

A serial entrepreneur with a rich history of launching disruptive online businesses and taking them to the top, Jeev owns dozens of “go-to” reviews and rankings websites. Jeev has invested more than 20 years researching human behavior and how to leverage different sales methodologies to effectively influence decision-makers.To find out how Jeev can help you, visit jeevtrika.com.

Categories
Digital Marketing

How I Find a Sustainable Competitive Advantage in Marketing Strategies

How I Find a Sustainable Competitive Advantage in Marketing Strategies

Today’s business environment is very competitive. It’s now a lot easier and cheaper to start a business, especially with technology making every step a lot faster and more efficient. A good example is online commerce. Even brick and mortar companies had transitioned to making online sales, especially when the COVID-19 pandemic caused several businesses to file bankruptcy, and many of those operating were hanging by a thread. This causes several industries to become saturated and even more challenging to stand out from the crowd if you aren’t a household name.

The challenge is to resist becoming like every other business in the same industry. One way to do that is to set your business apart from everyone else— by finding a competitive advantage. Many business owners know the importance of competitive advantage. Still, when I talk to them to discuss the long-term such as decades from now, I’m usually met with questioning eyes or vague answers.

It’s a lot more than just tactical advantages to win now and keeping the business afloat. What you want is a superior, favorable, long-term position over competitors that uses assets, attributes, or abilities that are difficult to duplicate or exceed. It has to be long-term, or it can easily be overturned, replicated, or lose its value over time.

The most basic level includes three key types of sustainable competitive advantage:

  • Cost advantage: business competes on being the low-cost provider that can consistently build brand loyalty.
  • Value advantage: business has a differentiated offering perceived to be of superior value.
  • Focus advantage: a specific market niche with a tailored offering explicitly designed for that market segment.

However, most small businesses don’t have the buying capacity to compete on prices effectively and are not big enough to be al things to all customers in a market. To successfully compete, developing  a sustainable competitive advantage based on providing superior value to a specific niche makes the most sense.

Now to help determine a sustainable competitive advantage, here are the things I look at:

 Who are your customers?

Before diving deep into what a business’ competitive advantages are, the first thing I look it its customers.

Spray and pray doesn’t work. You need to discover who your customers are, how they perceive you, and how to segment them based on the features and benefits that they care about. The keyword is they, as in your clients. The underlying question is “what market am I trying to reach, and what specific segment am I trying to cater to?”

Examine the customer journey and the customer decision-making process. What makes them abandon their cart? What encourages them to proceed to a transaction? How were you able to upsell or cross-sell? This is also when you should assess how your audience interacts with your content at different touchpoints. What types of newsletters do they want to see? What sorts of promotions make them excited? How do they interact with your engagement campaigns?

Establish a value proposition that grabs their attention but also keeps that attention. It won’t matter if you piqued their interest if it doesn’t translate to the conversion you want.

 Who are your competition?

You may know your business entirely, but knowing who the players are in the same field can make it easy to get ahead of them. You don’t see big household names and big brands stopping their marketing efforts. Coca-Cola for example, leads the market shares but continues to innovate and advertise, despite everyone knowing who they are.

As a business owner, you should also be able to predict your competitors’ responses to the actions and decisions you make. If you put out a 5% off, will they counter with a 10% off? If you share a post about ten benefits they’ll get when they buy your product, will they share a similar post, only with twelve benefits? If you put your item on the shelf of big retailers, what would they do next? If you release a new product line, what will they do next? Being able to predict their responses keeps you prepared. It makes sure that you have thought through your decisions and know how to adapt if the situation doesn’t go in your favor.

In the same way, when your customers act, how will you respond? Remember when KFC ran out of chicken in the UK? Several companies used that opportunity to market themselves, using the shortage to their advantage. How will you act on those kinds of opportunities?

Who are you?

It may come across as unnecessary to assess who you are. You know your business well even when you sleep. You can talk about your products all day and pride yourself in building them from scratch. And it’s that exact reason that you need to do this.

All the businesses I’ve owned and managed throughout the past years were a product of my efforts. The challenges I went through, the hurdles crossed, the big and small wins, all of it. But I have come to realize that it’s also that reason that I need to be more critical about assessing my businesses. I may have become too familiar that I forget to look at it from a fresh perspective, from a different angle, or simply even from the eyes of my customers.

Analyze your business position by assessing your essential competencies and weaknesses, core competencies, digital presence, customer lifetime value, conversion analysis. Where do you excel? Where do you need to improve? How do your customers perceive the business based on these factors?

Answering these guide questions lets you determine the targets of your marketing strategy. Overall, it also influence the sustainable competitive advantage that puts your business to the top. Addressing these concerns, identifying problems, and planning next steps can help you solidify your standing to your customers and your position in the industry.

Putting it all together

In this stage, it’s essential to make sure to challenge your initial assumptions. Put on the hat that contradicts all your ideas. Typically, I play the devil’s advocate when planning this with clients. I ask a ton of questions. I challenge every idea. I grill their logic and rationale. In the end, it narrows down the strategies that can be implemented, finetunes the details, and addresses any gaps that may not have been immediately noticed.

Your strategy should be agile so you can adjust to market shifts and demands. The keyword is strategic and not tactical. Think long-term, think how it can change and adapt based on internal and external factors within and outside the industry you’re in.

Once done, this is the time I help businesses come up with convergent viewpoints to stay ahead of the competition. Bringing together what you’ve analyzed so far, along with challenges and realizations you’ve observed, will be the determining factor of your marketing strategy. How you position your brand can make or break your business.

Predicting what happens in the next decade is extremely important once you’ve determined your sustainable competitive advantage because your competitors will also think about how they can take market shares from you and get your loyal customers. If you don’t adapt and stay ahead, then it won’t take long before someone else is ahead and your competitive advantage has been countered.

With the number of businesses I’ve built and acquired over the years, these strategies are proven and tested formulas to create a legacy that disrupts and sustains.

Want to find your business’ sustainable competitive advantage? Let’s discuss how we can turn your business into a disruptive one.

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About Jeev

A serial entrepreneur with a rich history of launching disruptive online businesses and taking them to the top, Jeev owns dozens of “go-to” reviews and rankings websites. Jeev has invested more than 20 years researching human behavior and how to leverage different sales methodologies to effectively influence decision-makers.To find out how Jeev can help you, visit jeevtrika.com.

Categories
Digital Marketing

Four Strategies to Achieve Omnichannel Success

Four Strategies to Achieve Omnichannel Success

Modern entrepreneurs, myself included, have grown to realize the value of having omnichannel presence for their business. Making this move is essential to compete in the modern retail landscape and to create a sustainable business model that meets the needs of customers.

When you successfully integrate online and offline sales channels to create a cohesive customer experience across different touchpoints, your business becomes optimized for growth. You’ll also be in a better position to overcome unforeseen commerce crises, such as black swan events like a global pandemic.

Now when I say “omnichannel,” I’m not just referring to the practice of selling in multiple channels (which is what you should definitely be doing). It’s also about meeting customers in their platform of choice and making sure that you deliver a consistent brand experience.

Managing different facets of your business across every touchpoint can be challenging. It requires a holistic approach to sales channels, marketing and advertising, operations, and shipping and fulfillment — the pillars that make up the omnichannel success.

1.   Identify Your Sales Channels

Sales channels are the platforms where consumers interface with your brand. That could be through ads, website forms or chatbot, e-commerce sites, social media, or offline channels (eg. retail and pop-up stores).

When I develop an omnichannel sales strategy, the first thing I do is identify the channels where my customers are present. Then I figure out the best ways to market through those channels so I can set my business up to gain more traffic, sales, and loyal customers.

My experience as an entrepreneur has taught me firsthand that putting all your efforts in one sales channel at the expense of others isn’t wise. This can cause problems for your business when that channel suddenly becomes unavailable. However, that being said, spreading yourself thin over every possible sales channel in an effort to diversify is also not the best solution.

Instead, train yourself to choose the right sales channels for your business — this is the foundation of a strong omnichannel strategy. With the right mix of channels, you can expand your customer reach, increase awareness for your brand and offers, and ultimately, increase your revenue.

To make sure that you’re choosing the right sales channels, you need to know who your target customers are. Analyze the data you have from your existing channels (eg. your website, online store, and social media pages) and look for common factors among your audience. These could be details like the time and day when they engage or buy more, which platforms your audience spends a lot of their time and money on, and what products or services they purchase most often.

1.   Develop and Implement Marketing and Advertising Strategies

Marketing and advertising play an important role in driving brand awareness and sales to your business. In fact, 87% of shoppers now begin their product searches online. This consumer behavior is something you can leverage for your business.

Omnichannel success is more attainable when you deliver what your target audience needs at their current stage in the buyer journey, and you meet them in the right touchpoints. You can achieve this through strategic marketing and advertising.

One of the most valuable things I learned from my business is that I need to make an effort to create a specific marketing and advertising strategy for each sales channel I have. So this is the same advice I’ll share with you. Be purposeful and intentional in what you deliver, as our goal is to meet the specific needs of the consumers we’re targeting.

Take note that the more marketing channels you have, the more complex your campaign management and budget allocation can become. You also have to consider the ever-changing algorithms of the platforms you use. That’s why it’s important to have a dedicated marketing and advertising team, and to invest in the right tools that will help you reach your goals.

2.   Optimize Your Operations

An accurate, reliable, and connected operational process is key to an efficient, end-to-end omnichannel approach. Your product catalog data and inventory should always be aligned, and each sales channel must reflect these accurately, along with the shipping information (turnaround time and cost).

If you want to have efficient and optimized operations, you need to automate your systems, integrate your processes, and create a streamlined workflow for your business.

Invest in software solutions that allow integration and give you complete visibility over multichannel inventory. Take it from one entrepreneur to another — it really makes your business easier to manage.

For instance, using a listings solution, you can automate your product publishing to new sales channels, optimize the product content you show for each channel, and unify order management. With an inventory and order management system, you can manage complex workflows around order routing, inventory, shipments, and procurement, as well as support third-party logistics solution integrations.

3.   Strengthen Your Shipping and Fulfillment Capabilities

To complete your customers’ experience and succeed in your omnichannel efforts, ensure that your entire operations is able to properly support every step of the buying process, including shipping and fulfillment.

If you think that shipping logistics are challenging, you’re not alone. One study revealed that 53% of retailers identified shipping and order logistics as a significant challenge.

If you’re leaning towards providing in-house shipping and fulfillment, make your work easier by using a shipping software that provides customers with delivery options and takes care of calculating shipping costs. There are also third-party logistics solutions available for outsourcing which handle everything from inventory management, warehousing, and fulfillment.

Other omnichannel strategies worth looking into are:

  • Creating an excellent mobile experience for your customers
    • 57% of consumers say they won’t recommend a business with a poorly-designed website on mobile
  • Providing self-service options for your customers — Organizations realize the advantages of automated customer self-service, so they’re now investing in virtual customer assistant (VCA) or chatbot technology across engagement channels.

As you plan for and navigate the omnichannel sphere, always keep in mind that your goal is to deliver a satisfying customer experience. Remember, a seamless and convenient customer journey leads to conversion.

Expanding to new channels drives growth for your business, but to ensure that you manage them all well and gain ROI from each one, you need a comprehensive plan that addresses each omnichannel pillar. The four tips I shared with you will help you create a unified channel strategy that meets the needs of your customers at the right time and place.

Always be Prepared

Let’s talk about how we can use omnichannel to bring even more success to your business.

SEND A MESSAGE

About Jeev

A serial entrepreneur with a rich history of launching disruptive online businesses and taking them to the top, Jeev owns dozens of “go-to” reviews and rankings websites. Jeev has invested more than 20 years researching human behavior and how to leverage different sales methodologies to effectively influence decision-makers.To find out how Jeev can help you, visit jeevtrika.com.

Categories
Digital Marketing

How I took on Google and won!

One of the Goliath’s of the digital universe, Google pioneered a whole new business model. Instead of getting users to subscribe to their services and pay with money, Google created a new currency—data. Users pay Google by leaving their dataand metadata behind, which Google then contracts out to advertisers who make a fortune out of it. The services Google offers are just lures. Once you take the bait, they’ve got your data and use it to grow their empire.

As the gatekeeper to your data, Google knows more about you than you may think.In 2010, Google’s former CEO, Eric Schmidt, said,“we don’t need you to type at all. Because we know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less guess what you’re thinking about.”[1]

But with its own agenda and aggressive protectionism, Google isn’t afraid to go after anyone who follows their example in trying to turn data into revenue—especially if it threatens to affect their revenue streams.

Ask me. I came up against Google and won! Well, at least I think I did.

Unfair competition and tortious interference

In 2014, my company, E-Ventures, owned 366websites marketingSEO services that help users increase search visibility. The problem was that we use SEO to help users improve their PageRank on Google’s unpaid search listings instead ofpaying for Google AdWords—Google’s primary source of ad revenue—to achieve the same result.

Well, instead of our falling foul of Google’s algorithms or webmaster guidelines, Google received an anonymous tip from one of our competitors and decided to take radical action. We were notified that all of our websites had been identified as “pure spam” and would be removed from Google search results, with no opportunity for review or redress. And that’s precisely what they did. They delisted all of our URLs,and all of the new submissions we made were rejected by Google.

It appeared as though I waspersonally targeted by Google. I  would purchase a brand new domain, post nothing more than “Bye-bye world,” and within minutes Google would de-index it, so it had nothing to do with the content. It was a case of Google vs. Jeev.

As you can imagine, we lost a lot of our clients and revenue overnight, causing irreparable damage to the company.

So. In November 2014, we took Google to courtfor unfair competition and tortious interference.

Changing the rules and upping the game

Initially, our lawyers didn’t hold out much hope. Up until that time, courts in the US had consistently upheld that—under the First Amendment of the US Constitution—search engine ownerslike Google had total discretion over their ranking algorithms and how they chose to police and enforce their web page content policies. It was a legal defense used repeatedly and successfully against companies that sued Google for financial losses following changes to their ranking algorithms or SEO-related policies.

So we tried something different. Instead of basing our claim on PageRank—which other companies had unsuccessfully done—we claimed that Google delisted our sites for capricious, anti-competitive reasons because it impacted their AdWords revenue stream. As far as we were concerned, that contravened Google’s mission to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” We also argued that their actions were inconsistent with Google’s removal policies and that their“public statements about [their] removal policies were false, deceptive, and misleading.”

My lawyer, Alexis Arena, submitted in her brief that, “under Google’s definition, any website owner that attempts to cause its website to rank higher, in any manner, could be guilty of ‘pure spam’ and blocked from Google’s search results, without explanation or redress.But, if Google bans 366 websites from all search results because they are affiliated with a particular person or company, then that is a very different thing than anything the courts have addressed previously.”

After we filed suit, Google relisted our sites, probably hoping that would be the end of the story.

But it wasn’t.

Getting Google in a tizz

We didn’t withdraw the suit, determined to press ahead and make sure we weren’t the victim of Google’s protectionist policies in the future. We also hoped to recover some of our losses and create a precedent that would help other SEO companies.

Google’s submitted a motion to dismiss the suit, accusing us of “search engine manipulation” and stating that they removed our sites because “bad behavior” had to be deterred. Their lawyersargued that 47 U.S.C. 230(c)(2) of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 protected Google from liability for delisting our sites and preventing them from appearing in Google search results.But our complaint alleged Google delisted our sites in bad faith, taking it outside the realm of 230 protection. The federal judge in Florida dismissed their application, siding with us on almost every front and ruling that Google must answer the complaint—a radical departure from previous legal cases.

In his ruling, US District Judge John Steele, wrote “While a claim based upon Google’s PageRanks or order of websites on Google’s search results may be barred by the First Amendment, plaintiff has not based its claims on the PageRanks or order assigned to its websites. Rather, plaintiff is alleging that as a result of its pages being removed from Google’s search results, Google falsely stated that e-ventures’ websites failed to comply with Google’s policies. Google is in fact defending on the basis that e-ventures’ websites were removed due to e-ventures’ failure to comply with Google’s policies. The Court finds that this speech is capable of being proven true or false since one can determine whether e-ventures did in fact violate Google’s policies. This makes this case distinguishable from the PageRanks situation. Therefore, this case does not involve protected pure opinion speech, and the First Amendment does not bar the claims as pled in the Second Amended Complaint.”

We would have our day in court, and that in itself was a major victory. It was the first time Google would be required to defend SEO results, page rank, or delisting in court, challenging the precedent and opening the door for other companies to challenge the giant.By its very definition, Google’s definition of a “search engine manipulator” meant any SEO tactic—including those generally accepted—could be accused of manipulation. If they won the case, it would have far-reaching effects for anyone involved with SEO optimization.

The final act

We went back and forth over the next two years—winning, losing, and appealing—and finally, in February 2017, we lost.

The judge issued a summary judgment stating that “The presumption that editorial judgments, no matter the motive, are protected expression is too high a bar for e-ventures to overcome. Google’s actions in formulating rankings for its search engine and in determining whether certain websites are contrary to Google’s guidelines and thereby subject to removal are the same as decisions by a newspaper editor regarding which content to publish, which article belongs on the front page, and which article is unworthy of publication. The First Amendment protects these decisions, whether they are fair or unfair, or motivated by profit or altruism.”

So why do I say, “I took on Google and won”?

Well, maybe I did cross the line and violate Google’s guidelines with some of my sites, but certainly not with all of them. And Google’s spam police definitely overreacted. But if we hadn’t done anything, I might never have got my sites back and had the opportunity to correct things. Moreover, many other SEO companies might have been bullied into submission and suffered the same fate.

We took Google to court, got our case heard, and even if they won in the end, they’re a lot more circumspect as to how they go about things, hopefully making decisions based on website content instead of ownership. They’re also more transparent about what they consider to be “white hat” vs. “black hat” SEO, making it easier for me to promote my companies and my clients more effectively and efficiently.

For me, that’s a win. 

PS: If you want totrack what happened in the case, E-Ventures Worldwide, LLC v. Google LLC (2:14-cv-00646), you’ll find all the relevant info on Court Listener. You can also read about it in the books Free Speech in the Digital Age, edited by Susan J. Brison and Katharine Gelber, and The Perilous Public Square: Structural Threats to Free Expression Today, edited by David E. Pozen.

About Jeev

A serial entrepreneur with a rich history of launching disruptive online businesses and taking them to the top, Jeev owns dozens of “go-to” reviews and rankings websites. Jeev has invested more than 20 years researching human behavior and how to leverage different sales methodologies to effectively influence decision-makers.To find out how Jeev can help you, visit jeevtrika.com.