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You’ve probably been inundated recently with macro forecasts on the growth of digital media, artificial intelligence, mobile communications, videos, drones and more. But, as a small or midsize B2B, B2C or nonprofit marketer, what forecasts should you actually pay attention to, and which might be used to improve your profitability and ROI?I believe 2018 will be a bumpy ride and hope that my forecasts will smooth out the journey for you. Here goes:Improving Marketing And Marketing Communications By Paying Attention to These1. Considerable thought and time will be spent creating new website language to meet the explosive use of voice activated Internet searches. Voice activated searches, using “personal assistants”, accounted for twenty percent of searches in 2016 (ComScore) and are projected to reach fifty percent in 2020. Your website pages need to understand and reflect how people actually speak.2. Greater attention to brand transparency, complete truth and face-to-face interaction with customers and prospects will take center stage. Cybersecurity breaches, as well as eroding trust in media and institutions, has led to a significant and wide spread quest for truth. Events and interactions at the point-of-purchase provide opportunities to build (or re-build) brand trust.3. Reducing merchandise returns by e-commerce consumers will receive increased focus and require new strategies. While online sales are growing at about three times the rate of those for brick and mortar stores (in part, because of free shipping), almost one-third of e-purchases are sent back (versus nine percent for stores). As shipping is twenty to sixty-five percent of an e-retailers cost of goods (UPS), it’s all hands on deck to reduce this cost.4. While digital marketing will continue to grow, there will have to be significant improvements made for its continued development. Consider the following:- P&G has challenged Google, Facebook, YouTube and others to adapt safeguards against the existing fraudulent traffic reporting and inappropriate content by the end of 2017 or they will stop advertising with them; P&G has already pulled $140 million from them in 2017.- Walmart is also no longer advertising on YouTube.- Facebook claims it can potentially reach 101 million 18 to 34-year olds, but the Census Bureau counts only 76 million of this demographic.- The ANA is attempting to start a six-month, $50 million pilot study with 35 marketers in a test of 30 premium online publishers to determine their actual value.- Added to these, there have been accusations of social media kickbacks, while over 600 million consumers worldwide have ad blockers installed.It is clear dramatic improvements must be made and made quickly.5. As another outgrowth of the mistrust in the marketplace, employees, reps and distributors will become the new marketing communications “influencers”. Of necessity, these people will become “the brand”, and management will recognize the importance of an engaged workforce. In their quest to develop brand champions at every level, savvy leaders will foster authentic and open internal communications.6. Although it might seem to be a throwback, direct mail will receive renewed emphasis. According to Compu-Mail, average response rates for direct mail (5.1%) is far higher than for email (0.6%), paid searches (0.6%), social media (0.4%), or online display ads (0.2%). In fact, direct mail is even stronger among millennials, with response rates of 12.4% among those aged 18 – 24. Data also suggests that direct mail is better than email for generating longer term customer engagement.7. Bloggers will continue to be a factor, but writing longer posts, spending more time crafting them, and publishing less frequently (Orbit Media). Specifically, posts went from 808 words in 2014 to 1,142 words in 2017, with the average post taking nearly 3 ½ hours to create. The current regimen shows 3 percent posing daily, 22 percent posting weekly and the majority posting only several times a month or less often.Changing Your Strategy, Planning And Tactics1. Marketers will recognize that – in the face of a changing marketplace – the most important aspect of profitable growth and improved ROI is developing a meaningful marketing and marketing communications strategy. Having experimented in recent years with a vast variety of tactical resources (in large part because they’re easy to grasp), marketers have learned that, without any realistic measurement of their worth, these efforts may have been counterproductive. Putting tactics before strategy never works… “ready, fire, aim” comes to mind.2. Marketers, in fact, will spend much more time determining whether their marketing communications tactics are working. Admitting that clicks don’t inherently lead to increased profitable revenue, they will establish strict measurement and ROI of digital marketing the same way they do with traditional marketing.3. Beyond a focus on the efficiency of an advertising medium, considerably more thought will be built into selecting a specific medium based on consumer trust of the medium. A recent study of 1,030 consumers by Clutch showed television/broadcast video as the advertising medium most trusted (61%) and social media and online mediums as the least trusted (38% and 41%, respectively). Trust of all mediums is strongest among millennials and weakest among baby boomers.4. There will be a focus on transitioning from a marketing specialist environment, to generalists who can integrate and lead these specialists into an ROI driven team (Korn Ferry). This will be challenging as there is a shortage of marketing talent with broad experience, leadership and capability that can gain the trust of specialists who work together for the brand and not their specialty.Using Consultants For Improving Marketing And Marketing Communications ROIMost probably you’ve already put a lot of hard work into developing your 2018 plan. But perhaps these forecasts have raised some questions and concerns that you may not have thought of, and perhaps you don’t have the experience, time or staff to address them. If you’re concerned about marketing, you’re not alone. In fact, Infusionsoft surveyed 1,000 small business owners and found that nearly two-thirds feel that they “don’t know if their marketing strategies work” or “know that their strategies aren’t working”. So, what can you do?Consider tapping into an established, media neutral consultancy or person, with broad experience across industries, companies and nonprofits, both large and small, who are also willing to “tell it like it is”. Don’t settle for someone selling you one particular marketing discipline or experience in just your niche or industry. What is needed in these complicated times is not a “this is the way we’ve always done it” mentality, but rather a broad view of your business and opportunities.Like trained accountants and lawyers, a marketing professional will bring you fresh eyes, apolitical candor and a disciplined approach to today’s uncertain and untrusting marketing environment. Trust is the new black, and a knowledgeable consultant can help you build a meaningful and profitable business.But remember, “Ideas are a dime a dozen. People who put them into action are priceless.”

The concept of any online business is to create sales. In this ecommerce solution we look at the importance of letting the customers review their order before completing. As there are more and more customers online every day the goal for any ecommerce store, eBay store or Facebook store is to make the buying process as enjoyable and pain-free as possible for the customer. Creating an ecommerce solution that is user-friendly as well as successful needs certain fundamental marketing techniques for it to succeed.New ecommerce software has the ability to put the online business in full control of each customers experience and record what each customer does within the website. Having certain goals set within your ordering process is crucial to the recording and customer review, so that the online business knows what is working and not.We look at what is the most crucial stage of the ordering process, the confirmation page. This should be the last step of the ordering process and asks the customer to review their order. The review should include all of the customers details, product information, payment information and delivery information. This last step is the last chance for the user to ‘drop-out’ of the ordering process and leave the website without converting to a sale. This makes this page very important in terms of design and content.This page must have options of either to place the order or cancel the order. Using ecommerce software will have these options installed and how the information is displayed on the page. Give the customer all the details they require on the page so that there is no need for the customer to go searching for it or have unanswered questions.Once the customer has clicked upon the ‘order’ button then a confirmation page should be shown which gives the customer extended information such as expected delivery date, order number and tracking information is available. The ecommerce software should then store all of the details and have the customers details stored for further contact.Having an ecommerce solution that has an automated system to process orders is the best way to cut out mistakes and save time and money. Using a solution like this will make your system more user-friendly and ultimately more successful. The less time spent on chasing orders and answering customer issues the more streamlined and effective your ecommerce solution will become.Creating a high-end ecommerce solution doesn’t have to be expensive as new high-end ecommerce software is available with all the latest integration to new markets such as social networking. Having the right online business strategy from the start will save a business huge amount of time and money, so by going through these guidelines an ecommerce store, eBay store or Facebook store will have the best possible opportunity to become successful.The customer should be the main focus for your ecommerce solution so look at it from their point of view and what they will expect from buying online. If the online business takes into account the customers wants and needs then the possibility for success will increase and generate the business the most profit by offering exceptional customer service online.

These Six Questions Tell You How to Make the Answer “Yes”Direct response radio advertising is an amazingly under recognized way to grow a business quickly and profitably. For one thing, it’s fully accountable, so every dollar spent can be tracked to the revenue it generates and unprofitable spending can be eliminated. In addition, it’s extremely scalable. Once you figure out what works, you can increase your revenues and profits simply by increasing your media spend. It’s nearly as easy as stepping on the gas pedal. Direct response radio advertising is truly a powerful engine for profitable growth.When it is done properly.Most of the time, radio advertising is not done right. The first step in “doing radio right” is not to do it until you’re ready. The questions in this article will help you determine whether you’re ready to take advantage of direct response radio advertising. If you’re not ready, this article will tell you the steps you need to take to get ready.Do you know how you will define success?How much, in profit, is each customer worth to your business over the course of that customer’s relationship with your company? This is the customer lifetime value question and it is vital to know this before you go into direct response advertising. Why? Because the definition of success in direct response radio advertising is acquiring a new customer at a cost that allows for a profitable relationship with that new customer. If you don’t know the lifetime value, you cannot know how much you are able to pay to acquire a customer.Think about the day when you run your first ad schedule on a station. The results come in. How do you know whether they are good or bad? Are they good because there is revenue? Are they good because the phone is ringing or because visits to the web site went up? These are not sufficient to understand and evaluate the performance of your advertising. You can only evaluate advertising performance within the context of your customer lifetime value.But knowing your customer lifetime value is not enough. You have to break this down into the metrics that you’ll use to evaluate and manage your campaign. These metrics are part of the formula for lifetime value, metrics like “cost per lead” (CPL), cost per order (CPO, also known as CPA or cost per acquisition), conversion rate, and average revenue per sale. Do not begin a direct response radio advertising campaign (or a business of any sort using any kind of demand generation tactics) until you know your business profitability metrics very well.Are you prepared to test? We have often heard people say “We tried radio advertising and it doesn’t work for us”.Here’s the problem with that statement: Developing a profitable direct response radio advertising campaign isn’t something that is accomplished with a “trial”. It is far too complicated an endeavor, with far too many variables, to assess its effectiveness for your business with a “trial”. There are creative variables and media variables, and together they present a daunting number of possible combinations to achieve success.To properly assess the potential for direct response radio advertising to generate profitable new customers for your business, you must approach direct response radio advertising with a testing mindset. That calls for a patient, methodical approach.What does this mean for you? It means that you need around $20,000 to test multiple ads over a 4-8 week period before you’ll know which approaches will (and won’t) yield more profitable results. Don’t go into direct response radio advertising with a “dabble” mindset. Go into it with solid business goals: a) To assess the potential of direct response radio advertising to drive profitable new revenues, and b) to understand which approaches – both creative and media – produce the best results for your company. While you’ll generate revenues and profits during the test, the real benefit of testing is in the learnings that can be applied to a larger campaign over a long period of time to drive significant sales and profits.Do you have a compelling offer? The offer in your direct response radio ad is one of the most important elements for success. But why do you need to be thinking about that before you even approach radio advertising? Isn’t that something your radio advertising agency should come up with? Well, yes, but… The “but” here hinges on the fact that any offer must be something that’s possible given the business profitability structure, and possible given the systems and processes that run the business. These are constraints that only you know about. It will take time to alter existing systems or processes should that be necessary to support a compelling offer in your advertising. Your agency might recommend you give away a free DVD player with each order. That would drive a lot of orders, but would they be profitable? You need to define the playing field for the agency and then engage in the dialogue of getting the most out of what’s possible given the constraints.What is a compelling offer? It’s different, it’s relevant, and it’s meaningful. A free complimentary product or service is a good example. For example, if you’re marketing a skin care product that fights acne, you can give away a skin softener product as a bonus. Others use free trials with conversion mechanisms. These can work well provided the product performs as promised. Still others employ the ‘risk free trial’ approach, which essentially positions the 30 day money back guarantee as an offer – a “risk free trial”. The possibilities are many.Is your business infrastructure set up to support direct response advertising?The most important aspect of preparing for direct response radio advertising is ensuring you’re ready for the volume of leads and orders that can result. The easiest way to project this is to know your CPL and CPO projections (see above) and then assume a specific weekly media spend. For example, say you’re running $25,000 in media per week in direct response radio. This is considered a relatively small campaign. If your business model shows that you expect a CPL of $15, then you’ll be driving 25,000/15 = 1667 calls per week. Can your sales call center and fulfillment center handle this volume? More importantly, can they handle more, because when you’re profitable while running a $25,000 weekly radio campaign, chances are you’ll soon want to grow to five to ten times that size as soon as you can.There’s another vital piece of infrastructure you absolutely must have in place before you begin direct response radio advertising. It is a firm requirement because without it you’re wasting your money and ruining your reputation with the vendors you’ve hired to help you build the campaign. That requirement is excellent data collection and transmission to the radio media buying department at your radio agency. By this we mean that you absolutely must have a mechanism for capturing the lead, order, and revenue data by the unique identifier (such as the toll-free phone number) for the media buy that generated the call. If you’re sending calls to a call center, this is no problem. They understand this need and are already set up to accommodate it. If you’re trying to take calls in house, most of the time you’ve got work to do to ensure you can provide your media company with the information they need on a timely basis (usually first thing every morning). If you are sending leads to a web site, which is happening with increasing frequency, you must set up data capture and transmission mechanisms via a web tracking software program like Google Analytics before the campaign begins, preferably before you even contact a direct response radio advertising agency to get started. It’s amazing how many times we’ve been told that this tracking mechanism is in place and that we’ll get daily data exports from the web tracking software, only to begin the test and find out we won’t be receiving data for many days and what we do receive will not be complete.Are you aware of your biases and assumptions?This question probably sounds a little different than the rest but it’s well worth spending some time on. What you must understand is that you, the client, lead the show. As the agency, we will tell you want we recommend based on our expertise in the field of direct response radio advertising. It’s up to you to make sure we’re making those recommendations with all of the necessary information. Biases and assumptions can damage this important aspect of the client-agency relationship.Biases and assumptions underlie beliefs you have about key campaign questions like why your customers buy from you, or what appeals in advertising will resonate with the target audience. If you inject these into the process as facts, your agency will likely take them as such. The agency is unlikely to argue strongly with you – - it’s just the nature of the “the customer is always right” tendency in client-agency relationships (as well as many others).Let’s say you’ve been advertising online with banners and pay per click (or with TV or with print – the medium doesn’t matter). You want to test radio. One common mistake is to do a survey of your existing customers and ask them why they buy. The results show that the reasons these people buy match up very well with the appeals in the advertisements that you’ve been running. You conclude that the exact same approach will work in radio and you require that approach be followed by the agency. But you’ve overlooked the fact that your survey was very biased. Why? Because the people you surveyed were prompted to become customers by the ads you ran. Of course you’re going to find people who validate the ads you’ve run – they responded to them to become customers! The non-biased way to do a survey is to collect data from a random sample of people (not current customers) matching the target customer profile.Notice the point is not to eradicate your biases or assumptions, but to become aware of them. It’s nearly impossible to get rid of biases. However, if you’re aware of them you can then test them methodically and you won’t be in danger of leading your agency down the wrong path – one that often leads to the failure of radio campaigns.Are you different? Me-too products or services don’t work, period. In direct response you find this out quickly. You must be different. One important twist to this is that you can be different in any one of a number of different ways. As a certain marketing professor liked to say “you can innovate anywhere in the value chain…the more places the better”. Did Dell Computer make innovative new computers? Not at all. Dell found a way to put computers together faster, with higher reliability and at a lower cost than any other PC maker. That, among other things, translated into a super low cost structure which meant Dell could beat competitors on price and still make more money than those competitors. There are other examples. Maybe you’re marketing a product in the diet aid category. There are “support” food programs (Weight Watchers), pills (Trimspa) and informational/diet regimens (the Atkins diet).Do you have to have the latest breakthrough pill to compete? That would be nice but there are only so many of those to be discovered. So you can be different in another way. Your spokesperson could be a celebrity. Your marketing angle could be radically different. Your offer could be unique. Your cost structure or overall business model might allow for an incredible free gift or a very low price. Your customer retention program might be so strong that you can give away a free trial to acquire large numbers of customers. There are many, many ways to be different. How you’re different – while important – is still second to the fact that if you’re a me-too product you’ll not last long.