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Marketing Strategies Examples That Drive Sales

Every business owner looks for opportunities to grow their business, increase their audience, and thrash the sales. But as Antoine de Saint-Exupery said, “a goal without a plan is just a wish.”

Business owners must have an effective plan to meet their targets. A marketing strategy is such a plan that enables them to outreach. It helps in setting up clear, manageable tasks and objectives for achieving a particular goal. In addition, a clear sales process is critical for a sustainable business model.

Moreover, it helps in allocating the resources correctly and gives an estimate of what resources you may require in the near future. So if you want to drive sales and make progress in your business, it is time for you to have that outstanding marketing strategy. Have a look at some of the best examples.

Advertise and Get Popular

A classic example of marketing is advertising. Many times business owners think that paid advertising would not bring much luck. But that is just a myth. Advertising plans require proper structure. You can easily track your progress in advertising through analytics tools available today.

Some popular examples of paid advertising are LinkedIn sponsored posts, Facebook sponsored posts, paid search, and banner ads. Reach the right audience at the right time and make a difference in your sales.

State Your Benefits

Why should someone use your product or hire your service? You must tell them what they would gain from your service. People want results nowadays. They want to see how many lives you have changed with your work and if your services hold the potential to change their lives too.

Consider another website, MailChimp. They clearly state what all can the customers do with MailChimp. This gives the visitors a good reason why they should opt for their service.

Target Your Audience on Social Media

First of all, be there on social media platforms and find your target audience. Share as much as you can but share only valuable content. Establish yourself as a leader in your niche. Put up posts that can be shared across to spread your word. If you want to know what I am saying, have a look at #Breaking2 campaign of Nike to launch their product.

They live-streamed how Eliud Kipchoge running in their brand new shoes, which then became a sensation all over. It was not all because of the famous athlete neither the Facebook tag; it was the rigorous live demonstration of their product that made it a huge success. 

What Problems Can You Solve?

Can you help your customers learn a language? Or can you guide them in becoming a professional photographer? What are the problems faced by your potential customers that you are going to solve? Make a list and flaunt it off. If there are no problems to solve, then why would someone buy your product?

Find Some Influencers   

If you want your brand to stand out, find someone who can promote it for you. Influencer marketing has gained momentum nowadays. The battle is all about how you approach the influencers and convince them to promote your biz.

Want a hint? Take a look at how Sony launched its new smartphone, Sony Xperia Z5. They created a new account for that and promoted a highly detailed photograph thorough 30 influencers. These influencers helped the pictures through a competition. The campaign was a huge hit.

Not everyone might be able to afford an influencer. Also, what value your brand is bringing to the customers, what is your message, everything plays a huge role. If you can make your influencer believe in your brand, half of the battle is won.   

Provide Valuable Content

No one can deny that content is and will remain the king. There are so many ways to spread your message. You can use your own website, your blog, and social media platforms. You can connect with people in more apparent ways through these means.

Content can help in building a strong reputation for your brand. People love reading recommendations and testimonials about a service before actually using it. The content that you publish helps in showcasing your authority in your niche, double your sales, and build trustworthy relationships with your customers.         

Landing Pages can do Wonders

Landing pages can help you increase your sales to a great extent. A landing page is not your homepage. It is a dedicated page created for a particular purpose. This page generally contains something valuable for the visitor like a free eBook or a coupon code.

Experts suggest that a website should have multiple landing pages targeting different types of audiences for various purposes. Landing pages may also differ based upon the location of the audience.    

Strengthen the SEO

SEO enables you to establish a strong foundation for your website. A website when ranks well prove the fact that it is credible.  It is the SEO that is going to bring traffic to your site. So here is what you have to do.

Build a sitemap, build your blog, submit guest posts, and create valuable content for your website. Take a look at your keywords as well. Focus on long-tail keywords, use long-form content, and focus on the speed of your site. 

Are you appealing your visitors to take action? Don’t let your customers wait or think about what they have to do next. Show them the next step so that there are no delays in your sales. Your marketing strategy plays a crucial role.

When you have planned every step, you get a better understanding of how your business should be. Last, but not least, a marketing strategy makes your business look professional. So are you ready to build your marketing strategy?

Guest Contribution by Elliott Smith, a correspondence supervisor for GoAssignmentHelp. He likewise deals with author’s teams, instructors and tutors who provide assignment help services to students. He is a writer who composes articles, on the most proficient method to deal with the weight of studies, tip to build up your business and so on.

Read next:  How To Build A Digital Marketing Strategy For Long-Term Success

And: SEO Guide: How To Grow Your Blog With SEO

Resources for your business:

What Is a Business Model? 30 Successful Types of Business Models You Need to Know
The Complete Guide To Business Development
Business Strategy: Definition, Examples, And Case Studies
What Is a Business Model Canvas? Business Model Canvas Explained
Blitzscaling Business Model Innovation Canvas In A Nutshell
What Is a Value Proposition? Value Proposition Canvas Explained
What Is a Lean Startup Canvas? Lean Startup Canvas Explained
What Is Market Segmentation? the Ultimate Guide to Market Segmentation
Marketing Strategy: Definition, Types, And Examples
Marketing vs. Sales: How to Use Sales Processes to Grow Your Business
How To Write A Mission Statement
What is Growth Hacking?
Growth Hacking Canvas: A Glance At The Tools To Generate Growth Ideas
Distribution Channels: Types, Functions, And Examples

The post Marketing Strategies Examples That Drive Sales appeared first on FourWeekMBA.

SEO Tips To Build An Audience For Your Business Online

Every business thinks of popularizing their products and services and expand the digital presence. The quality content is the most crucial driver of the traffic, and the search engine ranking becomes more critical as most of the people click over the topmost searches of the first page.

And SEO becomes a critical distribution channel for your business model.

At the same time, for the business owners who hire digital marketing strategists, it becomes easy to fight with the competition, but still, a good strategy to equip yourself first by understanding at least the basics.

The search engine optimization of the website can be a daunting task for the businesses, and therefore, we have prepared actionable tips to bring the traffic. 

Timely Monitoring 

Monitoring the change can give you a vast knowledge of the market. When you observe the changes, the sudden shifts of trends get to harm your website less. The key is to decide the metric for monitoring the traffic. Whether you run a website, question forum, chatbot, or newsletter, it is crucial to track how many percentages of people are returning to your website?

There are many SEO tools available in the market, which helps your site to grow faster and make it compatible with SEO rules. You must take the help of at least one readymade SEO tool. Alongside, all of a sudden, several changes do not let you understand the impact of certain factors. Implement one change at a time and monitor what works best in your case.

Content is (still) king

In the current scenario, creating good quality content is one of the most popular tips for every business, whether its small or large. Some of the essential tips encompass the potential opportunity of augmented visibility of your website on search. It comprises long-form content which uplifts your ranking more than short form.

Furthermore, Google algorithms pay more weight to the quality of content that extends its compatibility with your keywords, meta descriptions, and headlines, so it becomes highly suggestive of creating content that is engaging and free from keyword stuffing. The ideal content would ensure the efficient traffic of visitors and the quality of websites according to its niche.

Pay attention to link-building

The fantastic use of high quality internal and external links is one among the best SEO tips for allure visitors traffic. It’s a comprehensive and consistent process of using internal links and external backlinks.

In the case of internal links, it’s essential that every content should be organically associated with the entire website. Otherwise, Google crawler considers it as an isolated content and finds it implausible to find. It instead extends to the awful degrading of the rank of your website, which seems hapless.

Furthermore, interlinking pages of your websites helps crawlers to understand and rank your website high. On the other hand, these meaningful links rack up the high probability of accomplishing visitors objective through easy navigation. Apart from internal links, the quality backlinks also play a significant role in the evaluation of your website by a search engine.

Make your website lighter

Speed matters in digital marketing. Research says that even a delay of half a second in the loading of a page would decrease the traffic to your website by 20 percent. In the broader co, the elimination of the factors that slows down the speed of the website becomes peremptory for successful search engine optimization and visitor satisfaction.

The best practices comprise compressed images, elimination of unrequited elements in CSS, and restrain from using JavaScript.  

Mobile responsive websites:

With the proliferation of mobile devices, designing mobile websites became crucial, and one of the most effective requirements of marketing. Now in 2018, Google came out with mobile first indexing, which fortified the significance of designing mobile responsive websites, placing more accentuation on mobile UX.

In simple words, developing mobile responsive websites would be another critical factor which would influence ranking over Google. The optimization of your website may be huge at once, but addressing issues concisely and dedicatedly would make sure a successful digital presence of your business.

Key takeaway

The website development comprises the focus over different options but among all SEO demands great attention and strategy. The excellent SEO needs a comprehensive mixture of all compatible things and actionable tactics.

Breaking the SEO down into specific segments helps you achieve online business goals. Adherence to the best practices of SEO and sticking to the algorithm updates help in increasing the business rank and increasing the leads and transforming into the conversion rates.

Guest contribution by Apoorv Gehlot at Matellio

Read next:  How To Build A Digital Marketing Strategy For Long-Term Success

And: SEO Guide: How To Grow Your Blog With SEO

Resources for your business:

What Is a Business Model? 30 Successful Types of Business Models You Need to Know
The Complete Guide To Business Development
Business Strategy: Definition, Examples, And Case Studies
What Is a Business Model Canvas? Business Model Canvas Explained
Blitzscaling Business Model Innovation Canvas In A Nutshell
What Is a Value Proposition? Value Proposition Canvas Explained
What Is a Lean Startup Canvas? Lean Startup Canvas Explained
What Is Market Segmentation? the Ultimate Guide to Market Segmentation
Marketing Strategy: Definition, Types, And Examples
Marketing vs. Sales: How to Use Sales Processes to Grow Your Business
How To Write A Mission Statement
What is Growth Hacking?
Growth Hacking Canvas: A Glance At The Tools To Generate Growth Ideas
Distribution Channels: Types, Functions, And Examples

The post SEO Tips To Build An Audience For Your Business Online appeared first on FourWeekMBA.

A Framework To Get Organic Traffic For Your Online Business

The next wave of retail technology is bringing with it digital brands and online marketplaces. With 87% of shoppers now starting a purchase with online searches, e-commerce is reaching new heights.

The race is on between online businesses to see who can grab the most customers. The focus is on providing customers unique products through a speedy, personalized shopping experience. Amazon is topping the charts (accounting for 44% of online sales in the U.S. last year), alongside others like eBay and Alibaba.

Wondering what tactics successful companies are utilizing to drive organic traffic to their sites? Here’s everything you need to know.

Generate more traffic

In the world of business, whether retail or online, everyone knows that you’ve got to build a strong customer base and keep it growing. In e-commerce, the attention shifts to increasing traffic to your website. More traffic equates to more leads, which in turn means more revenue.

Essential sources include search engines, social platforms, referral/link traffic, PPC, and bookmarking. Businesses can tweak these elements to boost their e-commerce traffic. Many like to hand over this responsibility – and headache – to SEO agencies.

Not only do they have the experience to manage all aspects of generating traffic to a website, but it also allows entrepreneurs the opportunity to focus their time and money on other essential facets of the business.

Why focus on organic traffic

Organic traffic refers to visitors who land on your site through search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. It’s driven by current SEO practices using competitive keywords. And since the algorithms for search are constantly changing, businesses must stay on top of the latest trends to maintain online visibility. Here are a few ways to get organic traffic for your online business:

1. Produce great content

One of the easiest ways to increase the organic traffic to your website is to publish quality content that is relevant to your business regularly. Companies with active blogs receive 97% more links to their website than those without active blogs.

Despite popular belief, there is no magic formula for a successful content marketing campaign. Some may find that the length and format of the content matter. However, it is better to provide a variety of content so that you have the chance to appeal to a broader audience.

Longer pieces with in-depth information may be the best approach for technical blogs, while shorter ones may be ideal for news-based or entertainment niches. Trends are indicating that video and images are gaining a substantial amount of traction in the SEO department.

2. Focus on catchy headlines

People are busier than ever and rarely read anything that doesn’t grab their attention. So just like you dress to impress, write headlines that will make readers instantly curious for more. Though it’s not an easy task, it is essential.   

3. Utilize long-tail keywords

The realm of search is entering into voice tech, so keywords will have to change. Voice search tends to follow a conversational style. Therefore longer phrases will now replace shorter ones.

4. Implement schema

Schema markup is a type of microdata that is applied to the content of a webpage, making it simpler and more accessible for search engines to crawl and interpret information on the page.

Though it may not increase traffic to your website on its own, it can, however, facilitate search engine bots to locate and index your pages. Another benefit is better rich snippets. They help people to understand more about your website, thereby improving click-through rates instantly.

5. Acquire referral links

Links are pretty powerful in the SEO world. Even though people do not click on every link they see, it does get your content out to a new audience.

This helps to boost conversions. But it all begins with exceptional content. Give consumers a solid reason to click through to your site. Similarly, according to Google’s standards, external links help to determine the relevance and authority of your site.

6. Provide internal links

The use of internal links is another way to strengthen your profile. This is exceptionally important for e-commerce. It helps to improve user experience, a crucial factor for increasing traffic.

Simple ways to incorporate internal links include providing viewers with links to related products or product reviews on your site.

7. Don’t forget about getting social

As any entrepreneur will tell you, you have to be proactive to succeed. Even if you have a superb product and great content to back it up, you still need to get your brand out there. Using social media is one of the most effective and easiest ways to increase website traffic.

For instance, anyone with a large number of Instagram followers can become an influencer and has the power to drive a spike of social referrals. Remember to build a rapport between all visitors to create substantial return traffic, possibly with the aid of newsletter signup prompts or loyalty reward programs.   

8. Use custom images and visuals

Utilizing custom content is a passive way to generate backlinks. Since the use of visuals has dramatically increased, any material that uses custom images and visuals will create a valuable link. Other companies will cite and mention your brand. You can consider it a form of free publicity.

9. Optimize your website

No matter how much effort you put into content and SEO, if your site is sluggish, you are not going to see a high conversion rate. People are always on the move. They demand quick responses. Make sure that your site has swift loading times- the faster, the better.

Moreover, your website needs to be mobile optimized, allowing access to your products and services from anywhere, at any time, from any device. More importantly, it should promote more tapping and less typing, preferably with the use of CTAs. 

10. Do more research

You’ve got to study the competition. It’s a valuable practice that helps you gauge your brand against others. Find out what they are offering that is making them popular. Emulate that standard of content and divert traffic to your website.

Simultaneously, utilize analytics to keep a close watch on the various aspects of your website. Examine visitor data, identify the demographics, and comprehend the specifics about the traffic that is landing on your pages.

Key takeaways

Retail technology is revolutionizing. Machine learning augmented reality (AR), and artificial intelligence (AI) are already adding a personalized touch. Future trends will revolve around customers using voice tech, sensors, and blockchain technology.

It’s vital to note that shopping experiences and expectations will change. For those who desire to stay ahead of the competition, you need to embrace, invest, and implement this new technology.

Guest contribution by Alma Causey is a Freelance writer writing for agencies such as SETalks by day and sports fan by night. She writes about tech education and health-related issues. Live simply, give generously, watch football and a technology lover.

Read next:  How To Build A Digital Marketing Strategy For Long-Term Success

And: SEO Guide: How To Grow Your Blog With SEO

Resources for your business:

What Is a Business Model? 30 Successful Types of Business Models You Need to Know
The Complete Guide To Business Development
Business Strategy: Definition, Examples, And Case Studies
What Is a Business Model Canvas? Business Model Canvas Explained
Blitzscaling Business Model Innovation Canvas In A Nutshell
What Is a Value Proposition? Value Proposition Canvas Explained
What Is a Lean Startup Canvas? Lean Startup Canvas Explained
What Is Market Segmentation? the Ultimate Guide to Market Segmentation
Marketing Strategy: Definition, Types, And Examples
Marketing vs. Sales: How to Use Sales Processes to Grow Your Business
How To Write A Mission Statement
What is Growth Hacking?
Growth Hacking Canvas: A Glance At The Tools To Generate Growth Ideas
Distribution Channels: Types, Functions, And Examples

The post A Framework To Get Organic Traffic For Your Online Business appeared first on FourWeekMBA.

What Do Investors Look For In A Business Plan?

A venture capitalist is an investor that provides capital to start-ups which have high growth-potential. In other words, for a potentially high return, the investor endows the company of equity for a stake within it.

It is important to highlight that not all investors and venture capitalists look for the same things, or focus on the same aspects of a business.

Indeed, some investors focus on a longer-term strategic approach, while others might primarily look for growth opportunities that might make a good exit.

In general, though most investors look for interesting opportunities that would represent a good long-term investment.

How those opportunities might look like? It is crucial at this stage you get acquainted with the market you’ll be operating.

This means you’ll need to understand three key concepts: TAM, SAM, and SOM:

[image error]In short, you might want to start by understanding the size of the Total Addressable Market.

From there you might want to understand the size of the Serviceable Addressable Market.

And what your Serviceable Obtainable Market will be.

Once you have defined he SOM you can make a five-year projection of the expected sales (assuming you don’t have revenues yet).

Based on that projection, you will be able to apply a 3-5X multiplier on the revenues, based on the market and business model you identified. 

Quick case study

Imagine you are evaluating how much is your marketplace idea is worth.
You operate in a market where the TAM is $10 Billion. 
That your SOM is 0.5% of that market at the year 5th. 
This means at the year five you will have a volume of transactions on your marketplace of about $10 million. 
As a marketplace, you might make money through transactions fee.
Assuming a transaction fee at 3%, you will have a turnover of $300K at year 5th. 
Considering that a marketplace business model is highly scalable and that the TAM is pretty big, you might want to apply a high multiple, let’s say 5X on the revenues. 
This means that at the 5th year your company will be worth $1.5 million. 

Therefore, if the business angel invests: 

10% = $150.000
20% = $300.000
30% = $450.000
And so on…

Keep in mind the example above is just a simple case study.

The estimates will depend on what assumptions you’ll start with from evaluating your company.

So how big is the TAM? How much of that market can you service in 3-5 years? How will you make money? And so on.

Also, the ability to convince the business angel might depend on how good you will be in communicating your idea, the so-called pitch.

And if you’re looking for a business angel, venture capitalist or investor that means you might need a strategic figure able to help you scale your business, as quickly as possible.

Resources for your business:

What Is a Business Model? 30 Successful Types of Business Models You Need to Know
The Complete Guide To Business Development
Business Strategy: Definition, Examples, And Case Studies
What Is a Business Model Canvas? Business Model Canvas Explained
Blitzscaling Business Model Innovation Canvas In A Nutshell
What Is a Value Proposition? Value Proposition Canvas Explained
What Is a Lean Startup Canvas? Lean Startup Canvas Explained
What Is Market Segmentation? the Ultimate Guide to Market Segmentation
Marketing Strategy: Definition, Types, And Examples
Marketing vs. Sales: How to Use Sales Processes to Grow Your Business
How To Write A Mission Statement
What is Growth Hacking?
Growth Hacking Canvas: A Glance At The Tools To Generate Growth Ideas
Distribution Channels: Types, Functions, And Examples

The post What Do Investors Look For In A Business Plan? appeared first on FourWeekMBA.

What Is Programmatic Advertising And Why It Matters For Publishers

Programmatic advertising is a process of buying and selling ad inventory through automated processes, which enable publishers to sell their ad inventory and advertisers to buy impressions at a satisfying bidding price.

Publishers’ revenue model is primarily based on selling ad inventories to advertisers.

In the old days, publishers would sell most of their ad inventory through salespeople. However, most of the digital ad inventory is now managed via ad exchanges which are based on automated processes.

Often those programmatic processes also use sophisticated systems that tap into data to qualify the audience. Usually, that data comprises demographics, location, interests, and behaviors of the users, on the publisher‘s platform. 

At the same time, a programmatic advertising network might use artificial intelligence to better target and match audiences with advertising. 

Therefore, in theory, a programmatic advertising process can leverage on a more complex system to provide better-targeted ads, which might be more engaging, and relevant for users, and bring a higher ROI for advertisers.

In general, the data collected via programmatic advertising can be first-party data (if gathered from the owned platform) or second, third party data (if gathered on outside platforms).

Why does programmatic advertising matter?

Since programmatic advertising is an automated process of buying and selling ad inventory, this usually channels in two ways:

directly
Or through real-time bidding

As adexchanger.com explains, there are four main categories of programmatic advertising:

Automated Fixed Price, Reserved Sales, executed directly between a single buyer and seller.
Fixed Price, Unreserved Via Deal ID, executed at fixed-price deals with a given buyer, on a nonguaranteed basis. 
Private Exchanges, based on a bidding protocol and limited participation.
Open Exchanges nonfixed, without price floors or limits on buyer access.

Business resources:

What Is a Business Model? 30 Successful Types of Business Models You Need to Know
The Complete Guide To Business Development
Business Strategy: Definition, Examples, And Case Studies
What Is a Business Model Canvas? Business Model Canvas Explained
Blitzscaling Business Model Innovation Canvas In A Nutshell
What Is a Value Proposition? Value Proposition Canvas Explained
What Is a Lean Startup Canvas? Lean Startup Canvas Explained
What Is Market Segmentation? the Ultimate Guide to Market Segmentation
Marketing Strategy: Definition, Types, And Examples
Marketing vs. Sales: How to Use Sales Processes to Grow Your Business
How To Write A Mission Statement
What is Growth Hacking?
Growth Hacking Canvas: A Glance At The Tools To Generate Growth Ideas
Distribution Channels: Types, Functions, And Examples

The post What Is Programmatic Advertising And Why It Matters For Publishers appeared first on FourWeekMBA.

What Is Waterfalling And Why It Matters For Publishers

Waterfalling is an ads inventory mechanism that publishers use to unload the remaining inventory they could not sell at a premium price. Thus, with waterfalling publishers sell the remaining inventory at subsequent lower price tiers to maximize profitability. 

In short, this is a technique that publishers use to maximize their profits on otherwise unsold inventory of impressions they have on a web property.

Why do publishers use waterfalling?

Publishing business models primarily make money by selling impressions or clicks to advertisers. However, medium to large publishers, handle millions of impressions each month. Optimizing the processes of those “inventories” is critical to maximizing profitability.

Waterfalling, therefore, is a process where publishers manage to sell the remaining inventory, which could not be sold at a premium slot. Indeed, only a fraction of the overall inventory can be sold at a premium slot, and if the publisher didn’t manage to sell the remaining inventory, this would account for lost money.

How do publishers use waterfalling?

Waterfalling consists of a process where ad inventories are divided in tiers, based on the bidding of advertisers:

[image error]

Source: In your Waterfall – How Publishers Monetise their Ad Inventory

When Publisher A could not sell the whole inventory through the primary ad network, the unsold impressions will go through a second partner ad network, to sell that inventory at a lower price to consume the remaining part of the unsold impressions. If not all impressions are consumed at that tier, the waterfall moves to the next partner ad network, until consumption of the inventory.

Simple, isn’t it?

Waterfalling is a complex optimization process

While this process might sound simple in theory that is complex in practice. At this stage, publishers are trying to maximize their income by looking to sell at the highest rate possible per CPM and to make sure most of the potential ad inventory gets sold.

Therefore, publishers use this method to squeeze as much money as possible from several ad networks. Usually, as a small percentage of an ad impression is sold at a premium price, publishers look for alternative ad network where they can sell the remaining chunk of the inventory at a lower floor price.

Read next:  Distribution Channels: Types, Functions, And Examples

Business resources:

What Is a Business Model? 30 Successful Types of Business Models You Need to Know
The Complete Guide To Business Development
Business Strategy: Definition, Examples, And Case Studies
What Is a Business Model Canvas? Business Model Canvas Explained
Blitzscaling Business Model Innovation Canvas In A Nutshell
What Is a Value Proposition? Value Proposition Canvas Explained
What Is a Lean Startup Canvas? Lean Startup Canvas Explained
What Is Market Segmentation? the Ultimate Guide to Market Segmentation
Marketing Strategy: Definition, Types, And Examples
Marketing vs. Sales: How to Use Sales Processes to Grow Your Business
How To Write A Mission Statement
What is Growth Hacking?
Growth Hacking Canvas: A Glance At The Tools To Generate Growth Ideas

The post What Is Waterfalling And Why It Matters For Publishers appeared first on FourWeekMBA.

How To Build A Digital Marketing Strategy For Long-Term Success

Let me tell you a few fundamental principles to build a digital distribution for your digital business, which I’ve learned at a costly price over the years, after many trials and errors (you don’t have to).

There are seven via negativa (not to do!) principles I’ve learned:

Don’t build a business based on product features.
Don’t wait to have a product to build an audience.
Don’t focus on what you can’t control.
Don’t procrastinate on testing your assumptions.
Don’t give up control over your pricing strategy!
Don’t rely on an OPP as your primary distribution strategy.
Don’t forget to tell your story.

Let me explain point by point.

This is a “Don’t Do List,” and if you avoid those mistakes, you’re on your way to building a robust digital business.

And eventually, I’ll give you also my “hedging distribution strategy” for success.

Don’t build a business based on product features

One of the most common misconceptions is that if you do have an advanced and more technological product, you win!

That’s completely off. And business history shows over and over again that often products that succeed are those that have been able to control distribution processes at the point of becoming market leaders (except a very few cases). So if you’re still holding to this belief, you might want to reconsider.

Don’t wait to have a product to build an audience

Most entrepreneurs wait the moment they launch to build an audience around a product or service. However, that is a colossal mistake and risk. A launch relies on something that needs you to be right to work out.

What if you are wrong? (as most time happens). All the effort and time in building that product and service will be wasted. Instead, you need as early as possible to build an audience, learn from it, and gather as much feedback as possible.

Don’t focus on what you can’t control

Do you have control over your strategy? If yes, focus all your attention to it. If not, give it up and focus on what you can control. This is a simple principle, yet a few can execute it.

Think when your business depends primarily upon something that is out of your control (a single large customer that can break it). It means that a single event can break it quickly. So how do you cope with it? You need to gain some level of control where you can.

Don’t procrastinate on testing your assumptions

While it might take a few hours to draw a business model, especially with business model tools, like the lean startup. It might take a few years to find a successful model. That is why you need to experiment a lot, discover and combine the building blocks and assemble them, so you have a scalable business.

The cases in which you might stumble on a successful business model, right away are very few.

Another big misconception is about monetizing your business.

Taken by the start-up frenzy, many might make up excuses such as “I’ll focus on users’ growth for the coming years.” Yet the monetizable side of a business model is among the riskiest pieces of the puzzle. Thus the sooner you start experimenting with it, the better.

Don’t give up control over your pricing strategy!

Most entrepreneurs that are starting out (especially in digital) might give up control over the pricing of their product or service, due to a lack of proper distribution. Think of the case of a store built on top of Amazon.

Or a Hotel that joins in a large platform where other hotels are showcased (like Booking).

Or an online instructor that starts out on Udemy.

While it does make sense to expand your customer base.

Those platforms are interested in pushing as much as possible transactions, without caring for the single distributor. Thus, they will push on pricing, commoditization of your product, and aggressive pricing policies to promote their business agenda.

If you didn’t take the time to build proper distribution, chances are you’ll have to follow the agenda, of the platform that has a strong distribution network. That platform will squeeze your prices (and eat your margins) and make your service a commodity until it is too late!

Don’t rely on an OPP as your primary distribution strategy

When you lose control over your distribution strategy, you also end up commoditizing your product. That happens because you need to rely on OPP (other people’s platform) for distribution, which makes your long-term strategy very vulnerable, and your positioning extremely weak.

Don’t forget to tell your story

I didn’t list this as last because it’s less important. Instead, this is one of the critical ingredients for building long-term success. People want to relate to your business story; they want to know its “why,” and its reasons for existing.

This is the distinctive nature of your digital business and what makes it unique among the others. To make sure a story isn’t just about you. It’s about your community. Indeed, a business is often the result of a real problem and discomfort you might have experiences in the first person.

I started FourWeekMBA because I had a discomfort about how the whole model of traditional business schools and higher-level education worked. That discomfort gave me the vision to build this community. It’s what drives me, and surprisingly, many people part of the community share my same pain, and they can relate to my story.

Yet, as an entrepreneur, I also offer a solution, and the is where value is created. Without a story, you might have a company that makes (momentarily) money, but do you have a long-term business model? I doubt it.

Are there shortcuts?

I wish I could tell you so. While there are some hacks, you can test along the way. Most of it is hard work combined with vision, focus, and strategy.

Building your distribution platform is hard, and it requires time. But once you’ve taken the time to do that, that is when you have a solid business, a reliable brand, and an active audience and community ready to support you in the long-run.

The digital distribution strategy

Author Nicholas Nassim Taleb proposes what he calls a barbell strategy. I like to call it a “hedging strategy” for building up a robust distribution for your business.

Let me articulate. In investing, when you make a risky investment, you want to hedge that with another that has a negative correlation or at least has the potential to cover up for the high risk you’re taking on the other hand.

In other words, the premise of this strategy is that you can take as much risk as you want if you’re properly hedged against it.

A hedging strategy for digital distribution

On the digital distribution side for me, a hedging strategy is about investing on two opposite distribution channels, that might well seem disjointed, but instead are highly related:

SEO on the risky side.
And email marketing on the hedging side.

Why is SEO the risky side? You don’t control that channel. If tomorrow Google comes up with an algorithm update, or it decides that suddenly your site isn’t worth it, or better yet, it determines the time is on for it to take over your niche (take the example of Google Travel) your whole distribution is in jeopardy.

That doesn’t mean SEO is not a proper distribution channel. Quite the opposite, Google is still among the best channels to grow your business quickly. However, betting on SEO alone has high potential rewards but also high intrinsic risks as you can’t and will never control Google.

So how do you hedge that?

Simple, you attract as much organic Google traffic as possible and convert that in email subscribers. Over the months, those subscribers will become your community, to which you’ll be building a long-term relationship.

Therefore, SEO will help you with:

gaining initial traction
Building up a brand
Building up a community by tapping into an existing distribution channel (you don’t control)

While email marketing will serve you as:

a hedging strategy to avoid to base your whole distribution strategy on Google’s algorithm changes.
A way to build your community from scratch through direct conversations.
The channel that enables you to convert non-paying subscribers in repeat customers for your business.

You do have control on your email list because you can set the pace of the conversation, decide the stories to tell and have meaningful interactions with your audience. This is critical.

We’re missing a last piece of the puzzle for a successful long-term distribution strategy.

Over time reduce the dependence from channels you don’t control

It’s fine to use SEO to build up traction for your business. Or to use a single distribution channel for that. In the end, initially, you need to be highly focused, and you can’t afford to master too many channels at once.

Thus, having all your eggs in one basket is risky, but okay. Many digital businesses have 70-80% of their distribution strategy based on SEO. Yet, over time, you need to balance the other channels. Why? You’ll have financial resources, and the competence to expand and broaden your focus.

Thus, when SEO or the other main distribution channels has become a flywheel that requires less and less of your attention. You can finally spend your effort in balancing up other channels (for instance, social media or video marketing).

But remember, if you don’t control those channels you’re broadening up, you still need to hedge them against your newsletter, or anything where you have complete control over. Never forget that!

Key takeaway

A successful digital distribution strategy is based on a set of things to avoid:

Don’t build a business based on product features.
Don’t wait to have a product to build an audience.
Don’t focus on what you can’t control.
Don’t procrastinate on testing your assumptions.
Don’t give up control over your pricing strategy!
Don’t rely on an OPP as your primary distribution strategy.
Don’t forget to tell your story.

And based on my experience building up FourWeekMBA, it’s based on a hedging distribution strategy, where you put all your eggs in one basket initially, but hedge that by pushing as much as possible on building an active community via a channel you can control (like email marketing).

Read next:  Distribution Channels: Types, Functions, And Examples

Business resources:

What Is a Business Model? 30 Successful Types of Business Models You Need to Know
The Complete Guide To Business Development
Business Strategy: Definition, Examples, And Case Studies
What Is a Business Model Canvas? Business Model Canvas Explained
Blitzscaling Business Model Innovation Canvas In A Nutshell
What Is a Value Proposition? Value Proposition Canvas Explained
What Is a Lean Startup Canvas? Lean Startup Canvas Explained
What Is Market Segmentation? the Ultimate Guide to Market Segmentation
Marketing Strategy: Definition, Types, And Examples
Marketing vs. Sales: How to Use Sales Processes to Grow Your Business
How To Write A Mission Statement
What is Growth Hacking?
Growth Hacking Canvas: A Glance At The Tools To Generate Growth Ideas

Case studies: 

How Amazon Makes Money: Amazon Business Model in a Nutshell
How Does WhatsApp Make Money? WhatsApp Business Model Explained
How Does Google Make Money? It’s Not Just Advertising! 
The Google of China: Baidu Business Model In A Nutshell
How Does Twitter Make Money? Twitter Business Model In A Nutshell
How Does DuckDuckGo Make Money? DuckDuckGo Business Model Explained
How Does Pinterest Work And Make Money? Pinterest Business Model In A Nutshell
Fastly Enterprise Edge Computing Business Model In A Nutshell
How Does Slack Make Money? Slack Business Model In A Nutshell
Fastly Enterprise Edge Computing Business Model In A Nutshell
TripAdvisor Business Model In A Nutshell
How Does Fiverr Work And Make Money? Fiverr Business Model In A Nutshell

The post How To Build A Digital Marketing Strategy For Long-Term Success appeared first on FourWeekMBA.

Key Lessons In Lean Analytics With Alistair Croll

Alistair Croll is an entrepreneur with a background in web performance, analytics, cloud computing, and business strategy.

In 2001, he co-founded Coradiant (acquired by BMC in 2011) and has since helped launch Rednod, CloudOps, Bitcurrent, Year One Labs, and several other early-stage companies. He works with startups on business acceleration and advises a number of larger companies on innovation and technology.

Alistair is a sought-after public speaker on data-driven innovation and the impact of technology on society, Alistair has founded and run a variety of conferences, including Cloud Connect, Bitnorth, and the International Startup Festival. He’s the chair of O’Reilly’s Strata + Hadoop World conference. He has written several books on technology and business, including the best-selling Lean Analytics.

With Alistair, we went through a set of key questions to understand how start-ups can use data to understand the impact their actions bring to the growth of the organization.

What brought you to the study and research to writing Lean Analytics?

Alistair Croll: I was running a startup accelerator called Year One Labs in Montreal, and it was based on the lean start-up principle, so we did a few things very differently from how a normal accelerator would work.

For example, we made the accelerator a whole year instead of 90 days because we kind of believed that in 90 days all you can learn how to do is pitch your product.

We told our companies they weren’t allowed to code for the first month of their participation. As you can imagine, that’s a very different thing to tell people when they’re used to writing software.

We were starting an accelerator based on lean principles, and we realized that there was no good set of ground rules about which metrics to watch for your business model and where they should be, and that led us to go out and start doing research.

What’s the difference between being data-driven and data-informed why is that important?

Alistair Croll: Most algorithms, most A.I. is what we call normative, that is it’s based on past, existing data. People talk about A.I. being biased. What they really mean is we’re biased, and an algorithm trained on what we do exhibits biased behavior.

So, when you’re data-driven, you’re using the past. You’re trying to find trends and patterns in the data you have, and sometimes that’s useful. But it’s very hard to be truly disruptive or innovative if you’re in a world where everything you do is based on the data you have because you’ll only ever do the norm. You won’t really sort of break the rules.

If you’re data-driven, because most of the data that you have is data from your existing business or your existing industry, it’s very hard to sort of innovating and disrupting. Whereas if you’re data-informed, what you’re doing is starting out with a hypothesis and then using data to validate or invalidate that hypothesis.

In that case, your human creativity and your intuition and your domain expertise is the start, and then you use data to very quickly reduce the risk of that assumption.

What are some of the common pitfalls that entrepreneurs should avoid when collecting data or actually trying to understand what kind of data they need?

Alistair Croll: There are lots of things you need to think about. I think the overarching rule is you need to think critically about data, and what I mean by that is ask yourself why was this data collected? Is it accurate? Is it precise? Can I use it? Should I use it? Am I going to use it?

There are obviously legal and ethical constraints around data use like GDPR, and that in fact affects some of whether or not you can collect data.

But there’s also the question of maybe you have access to a bunch of data to start your business, but you may not have ongoing access to that data, so is the data source sustainable? Is the data source repeatable? Is it trustworthy, if your business model is based on that?

If you’re just doing research, primary research, then data is fairly straightforward, and then you get back into ethical issues. I’ll give you a good example of how complicated data can be.

In Boston, the City of Boston wanted to know where all the potholes were, so they built an app called Street Bump, and Street Bump looked for potholes on the road by using the accelerometer on your smartphone as you drove to and from work. It turns out the app was incredibly biased.

Why? The data subject to the experiment was from people that had a late model smartphone with an unlimited data plan and they have a passenger seat to put the phone in. In Boston, that tends to be a rich, white person.

So, even though the app worked really well, and everything about the data science was good, the fact that they used smartphones as a measurement process biased their data, so they were only analyzing potholes for rich, white people’s neighborhoods.

That’s a really bad thing. That’s a real problem. So, what they did is they went back and fitted it to buses and garbage trucks, and they got a much more accurate picture of the world. That’s the real problem here, is that if you’re trying to collect data, oftentimes that data is wrong or biased or inaccessible for reasons you don’t really know until it’s too late.

Thinking really critically about the data and ask “Can I get the data? You may have a thing that happened, you have to ask yourself can I get the data? Am I allowed to have the data? Am I allowed to act on the data? Should I act on the data? If I do so, can I build something sustainable and repeatable atop that data?”

So, thinking about data critically is really hard, and this is at the core of analytics. You have to ask very good questions about what metrics you care about, what stage of growth you’re at, what kind of data you have, and that informs how analytical you can be because it’s important not to suppress your sort of death instinct.

The Chrysler minivan and the iPad, none of the data would have told people directly that you needed that, but a lot of the data adjacent to that worked. For example, nobody said they wanted a minivan, but everybody knew that parents were picking up their kids, taking them from activity to activity and so on.

And so, you could predict that a minivan would be a useful addition. A lot of times a founder isn’t going to find someone to say, “Build me this product.” They’re going to find trends, and they’re going to extrapolate from those trends to their new product or service.

How important is data cleaning?

Alistair Croll:

The dirty secret is that 80% of the money being spent on what we call big data is actually extract, transform and load, or ETL data, cleaning and that being done at a large scale.

That’s still true with all the modern advances.

As a start-up, thinking about what data you collect and how you’re going to use it, dumb stuff like normalizing the data, making sure that you’re always entering peoples’ Twitter handles the same way instead of entering “acroll” (my twitter handle) at one point, @acroll at another, Twitter.com/acroll at another.

You have to assume that everything you do, you’re going to wind up using that data somewhere else, and that’s a good argument for having an analyst on the team.

There was a post a while ago from Dave McClure who came up with the concept of Pirate Metrics where he said, “Every good founding team is a hacker, a hustler, and a designer,” and I argued that you need to add an analyst to that to keep the other three honest.

What’s the key difference between qualitative and quantitative data?

Alistair Croll: Qualitative data is anecdotal. There’s an old saying the plural of anecdote is not data. So qualitative data tends to be kind of messy. If you have a form and you ask people an open-ended question, “What’s your favorite food,” it’s going to be very hard to analyze that because people will spell foods differently, they won’t structure their data in a way that makes it easy to crunch, but you may find an insight. You may go through that and find, hey, a lot of people like sushi. I didn’t know that.

Whereas if you’re quantitative, you may give people seven things that you can choose from. You’ll never see the eighth answer of sushi, and you may miss a business opportunity, but you can very easily analyze that data.

What we found is that qualitative data is where you get insights and form hypotheses that you can then research with more precision, but you can’t really analyze it at scale or automate it, and that’s somewhat true.

Machine learning is getting better at natural language processing and extracting meaning and so on. Sometimes the machine learning algorithm can help you with that, but the reality is that you’re going to want to start with qualitative stuff to find insights and hypotheses, and then you’re going to want to start with quantitative stuff to validate it at scale.

And then finally when you automate a system, you’re going to want to take that quantitative algorithm and you’re going to want to automate the process so that you’re managing by exception.

I’ll give you a good example. If you had an e-commerce site, you might ask people in a survey form, “What were you unable to buy here?” Then a human goes through that and finds out that everybody really wanted bags to go with whatever product you were selling.

So now you add bags to the checklist when someone is checking out and now you have quantitative information. You can crunch that and go, “Here’s the checklist. We can find out what things you’re looking for.”

Here’s the checkout, and you can do the math on that, and then you can actually analyze how that works. The third step is once you now know everybody wanted those things, you can go ahead and just make that a normal part of your checkout process, and only alert me when sales go down.

So, the third step is you start with qualitative, then you go to quantitative, and then I would say you go to automated, managing by exception because by then you’re on to the next metric. You’ve maximized shopping cart checkout, and now you’re onto the metric for improving the way in which retention happens or the frequency of returns.

Why vanity metrics are so dangerous and what are some examples?

Alistair Croll: I don’t think you should make a list of vanity metrics. The reality with vanity metrics is:

If you can’t tell me how this metric will change your behavior, it’s a bad metric.

So if you say a number of followers, that’s a vanity metric. But if you tell me that 10% of your followers will subscribe to your product, that’s not a vanity metric because I have a meaningful correlation with something that changes my business model.

So, vanity metrics are those where you don’t have good confidence that they will affect your underlying business model. If the number doesn’t change something that you report to your accountant, it’s probably a vanity metric. That’s the real challenge is finding metrics that are correlated with an outcome you care about.

What about cohort analysis, and why does it matter so much for start-ups?

Alistair Croll:

A cohort is any group that has something in common. The reason cohorts matter so much is because as a start-up if you’re doing things right, you’re launching a new version of your product every week.

The version that you downloaded last week is probably not as good as the version I downloaded this week which is not as good as the version my friend downloads next week.

So, if I take your experience with a very early beta of my product, where it’s not so full-featured, you’re kind of dissatisfied, and I calculate the math for your retention and how much you paid and your satisfaction. And I do it alongside the experience of someone who used a product that was much more mature and much more advanced and three things later and so on, three versions later, I don’t want to pollute your horrible experience into their wonderful experience.

What you’ve got to do is you have to analyze each cohort, meaning each group, separately because you should be seeing improvements across those cohorts. Maybe in the first version of your product, you had 20% churn and the second you had 10% churn and in the final one, you only have 2% churn which is wonderful.

It would be horrible to say, “My product on average has an 8% churn.” What you really want to do is say, “I brought churn from 20% to 2% in three releases.” If you don’t separate the individual released using distinct cohorts, then you have a real problem because you’re ignoring improvement.

What about the multivariate analysis, why is that so important for startups?

Alistair Croll: If you are Google, you have so much traffic that you can do a test on any one thing and very quickly get statistically significant results.

You change a search, you’re going to get thousands of results very quickly. If you are a mere mortal like us with your new start-up, you probably need to change many things at once just because you don’t have enough traffic to properly test every individual tweak and change we’ve made.

Instead of doing split testing or AB testing, what you’re going to do is change a bunch of things, and then you’re going to try and find out which package or which bundle of features deliver the outcome you want.

Again, you need to know what outcome you want. That’s why you need one metric that matters more than anything. If your metric is conversion, you need to know which bundle of things, the social network that you approached them on, the offer that you made, whether you include shipping, whether they saw the green or the blue button, all those things.

With multivariate analysis, you’re going to try and use statistics to predict which bundle of things delivers the result you want. So when you don’t have a ton of traffic, you need to use clever stats to deal with some of those issues.

And the reality is you don’t need to be really good at stats because a lot of the analytical tools out there do that stuff, but you need to be aware of stats.

A lot of people will draw a conclusion after talking to 20 customers. Well, basic stats tells you that even for something with a normal distribution, you need 30 or more data points to have a good confidence interval. If that sounded confusing, you need to go find a friend who took statistics and buy them dinner.

What’s the one metric that matter (OMTM) and why is that so important?

Alistair Croll: When we first put the book out, we actually got a lot of grief from people. They said, “There’s no way you could have one metric. There are 10 things.” The analogy I always use is when you’re trying to park a car. Let’s say you’re backing up your car into a parking spot.

Your car has dozens of metrics that are always talking to you. There’s the position of your hands on the wheel which is called proprioception. There is the sound and there is the vibration.

There’s pull on your body from g-forces. There are so many different dials and dashboards and numbers, but when you’re parking your car, the only thing that matters is the distance from the thing behind you.

That’s your one metric, right? Once you’ve parked the car, maybe your metric is how close am I to the curb? Or how far is it for me to walk to the store I want to go to?

But your metric when you park the car is a distance from the thing behind you. If your car runs out of gas, there’s a light that’s going to come ongoing, “Hey, you’re out of gas,” while you’re parking, and that’s great because you’ve automated uninteresting metrics; because you need to be able to make decisions about them, but you’ve told the system, “Only bug me about this when it changes.”

Early on, you might have said, “Gee, how much fuel is in my car is an important metric,” but as I mentioned earlier, it’s very easy to quickly automate that.

One of the jobs of modern data managers, in addition to thinking critically about the data, is to be able to know which metrics to automate and which metrics to test and explore and then what metric is the most important metric for the organization right now.

That’s very much a factor of a start-up culture.

What’s the key definition of a start-up?

A start-up is an organization designed to search for a sustainable, repeatable business model.

Once you’ve found a sustainable, repeatable business model, your job is to execute on it. The act of searching is basically a constant distraction, so having a focus is a very good countermeasure or counterweight to that constant distraction which is a necessary part of any start-up.

How can we classify the various business models?

Alistair Croll: In order to figure out which metric you should care about, there are two things you need to worry about.

The first is the stage you’re at:


Early on, companies are at what we call Empathy Stage where your job is to figure out what your market wants.
Then as time goes by, you need to get to what we call the Stickiness Stage which is simply can you get people to keep doing the thing you want?
Either to stay in the shopping carts or to subscribe and come back. Once you’re past stickiness, you get to the Virality Stage which is will those people tell their friends? There’s no point to doing virality until you have a sticky product. If I tell all my friends about something, and they all go there and don’t use it, what was the point of me telling them?
Once you’ve passed virality, then you get to the Revenue Stage which is where you say, “Can I make enough money to either buy ads or hire a sales force?“
After the Revenue Stage, you ask, “Can I scale? Can I grow the business without growing the costs? Can I maintain margins while I grow?”

That’s the first thing you need to know. We offer some rules for knowing which one of those you’re at.

The second thing is we have to figure out what business model you’re in.

The business model is really a question of how do you acquire your customer, extract money from your customer and deliver value to your customer?

We came up with six business model archetypes.

An obvious one is a transactional business model. E-commerce is a good example of that.

But another one might be a two-sided marketplace where you and the customer. The buyer and the seller are coming together on your platform. There’s still a transaction, but what matters is things like inventory and how many searches resulted in something someone wants to buy and stuff like that.

There are these five stages, and then there are six business models we talked about.

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Source: leananalyticsbook.com

1. The two transactional business models:

e-commerce
shared marketplace

2. There are two media business models: 

One is a traditional media site like CNN or BBC
The other is a user-generated content site like a Reddit or a Facebook. They both make money from ads

3. The third category is really where you’re getting into a subscription business, so either consumption-based stuff like cloud computing or tendency stuff like SalesForce.com SaaS.

We put those six business models in, but there’s a bunch we left out.

We didn’t put in, for example, donation-based businesses like a Patreon or a Kickstarter or even Wikipedia which makes money off those things. Because we didn’t go into all those things we had a very hard time figuring out how many models or how few models.

The underlying idea here is that if you know which stage you’re at for a company and which business model you’re in, you should very quickly be able to figure out what metrics matter to you.

What is the number one metric that it’s really critical for subscription business models?

Alistair Croll: I can tell you which metric matters at different stages, but I can’t tell you which metric is critical.

I would say for SaaS, customer retention or what’s called residual lifetime value is the best metric in the long term.

Again, early on, are people telling their friends? Do they go from trying the thing to subscribing? But there’s a talk by Roberto Medri of Etsy where he talked about residual lifetime value as the measure of choice for any customer-facing product in a mature organization.

I’ll explain how residual lifetime value works. Imagine that I have two visitors to my website. The first visitor has come five times in the last month and spends $200 in total.

The second visitor has come ten times in the last month and also spent $200. Which of those two customers is more valuable to you, the one that came five times or the one that came ten times, assuming they cost the same to acquire and they spent the same amount of money? Which one of those is more valuable, the customer who’s been five times or the customer who’s been ten times?

My initial answer to Roberto’s questions was the one that’s been ten times because I get to run more experiments on them and they’re more engaged, right? Even though their shopping cart total is small.

Now let’s assume that a week goes by, and you haven’t heard from either of those customers. Normally, they come once every week or two.

One guy comes ten times in a month and one guy comes five times in a month, and you haven’t heard from either of them for a week.

That the guy who comes ten times a month, if he doesn’t show up for a week, you may be dead to him. He may have found another vendor, he may have died, he may have changed his mind. But the guy who comes once a week, he’s coming five times a month, he just maybe a couple of days late, right?

It’s more likely you haven’t lost the person who comes less frequently, and that means that the residual lifetime value, the remaining value of the customer is actually much higher for the second guy who’s only been five times.

That’s a weird concept, but this idea of residual lifetime value, of measuring the remaining value of all your customers and whether that’s increasing or decreasing is probably the master metric to SaaS.

I’m actually running a workshop at Start-Up Fest which is a big start-up conference in Montreal. It happens in about two weeks. I’m teaching an opening class at something we call a Founding Workshop.

The class is all about finding your business model because a founding stage entrepreneur, someone who has not yet found product-market fit, in start-ups the mythical thing you’re looking for is this idea called product-market fit.

What’s the key difference between the problem/solution fit to having a business model?

The reality is that if I’m running a hair salon, for example, what is the problem I’m addressing?

If I run a hair salon, the problem I’m addressing is peoples’ hair grows. What’s my solution to that problem?

The problem is peoples’ hair grows, and the solution is I cut peoples’ hair. What’s the business model?

The business model is how many seats can you fill. That’s the actual business, right? If I’m investing in a hair salon, I don’t care whether they can cut hair or whether peoples’ hair grows.

I care how many of the seats can you fill throughout the working day because if I can fill all the seats, hairstylists will beat a path to my door because they want customers, right? A lot of founders start a company with a problem and a solution but no business model. For example, a problem is hair grows.

The solution is I cut the hair. The business model is how to fill seats. The biggest mistake that early stage founders make is they don’t know how to separate the problem and solution they’re trying to offer to the market from the business model.

So, they go to a start-up accelerator pitching them a problem and a solution. People get cuts, and we make Band-Aids. Everybody needs that. Sure, I totally agree. What’s your business model? I don’t know.

That’s the biggest danger for any of these companies is they mistake having found a problem and a solution which is often a problem for themselves. I used to have a t-shirt that said your mom is not a valid test market because a lot of people are like, “Well, I talked to my family.” The reality is that you have to find a way to create a business model, and if your business model is a new, sustainable, repeatable business model, then you’re a start-up.

A lot of entrepreneurs who want to take an existing business model call themselves start-ups. They are not. And a lot of founders who found a problem and a solution but no business model yet call themselves successful start-ups, and they’re not. Once you have a business model hypothesis, that’s when data can help you understand whether it will scale properly and so on.

Key takeaways

Beware of vanity metrics that don’t add any value to the business
Algorithms are not biased, rather they are trained on what we do exhibit as biased behavior
Thinking about data critically means asking very good questions about what metrics you care about and that have an impact on the business
Qualitative data is where you get insights and form hypotheses that you can then research with more precision
Instead of doing split testing or AB testing, startups can use multivariate analyses which enables them to understand which features deliver the outcome you want.

Three key highlights

I want also to point out and emphasize three key things that emerged from the discussion:

A good metric has to change behavior: this is extremely important! Metrics that do not change behaviors do not count and cannot be considered as good metrics.
A start-up is an organization designed to search for a sustainable, repeatable business model: this point also needs to be stressed. A business model isn’t just about creating a company. That is about creating a business which is sustainable in the long term (thus all the building blocks have to come together), it is repeatable, thus it is prone to become scalable over time.
The business model is really a question of how do you acquire your customer, extract money from your customer and deliver value to your customer? As it came up from the discussion, a business model can be reduced to key things such as how you acquire customers, extract money from them while delivering value!

Suggested reading

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Related interviews: 

How To Design A Winning Business Model With Adam J. Bock [Interview]
Breaking Down Digital Transformation With David L. Rogers [Lecture]
A Guide To Disruptive Business Models With Thales Teixeira [Lecture]
Discussing Business Model Innovation With Felix Hofmann [Lecture]
Lessons On Running Lean With Ash Maurya [Lecture]
Dissecting Platform Business Models With Nick Johnson [Lecture]
Pretotyping: How To Find The Right Idea To Avoid Business Failure With Alberto Savoia [Lecture]
Innovation Strategy Lessons With Greg Satell [Lecture]

Related business resources:

What Is a Business Model? 30 Successful Types of Business Models You Need to Know
The Complete Guide To Business Development
Business Strategy: Definition, Examples, And Case Studies
What Is a Business Model Canvas? Business Model Canvas Explained
Blitzscaling Business Model Innovation Canvas In A Nutshell
What Is a Value Proposition? Value Proposition Canvas Explained
What Is a Lean Startup Canvas? Lean Startup Canvas Explained
What Is Market Segmentation? the Ultimate Guide to Market Segmentation
Marketing Strategy: Definition, Types, And Examples
Marketing vs. Sales: How to Use Sales Processes to Grow Your Business
How To Write A Mission Statement
What is Growth Hacking?
Growth Hacking Canvas: A Glance At The Tools To Generate Growth Ideas

Case studies: 

How Amazon Makes Money: Amazon Business Model in a Nutshell
How Does WhatsApp Make Money? WhatsApp Business Model Explained
How Does Google Make Money? It’s Not Just Advertising! 
The Google of China: Baidu Business Model In A Nutshell
How Does Twitter Make Money? Twitter Business Model In A Nutshell
How Does DuckDuckGo Make Money? DuckDuckGo Business Model Explained
How Does Pinterest Work And Make Money? Pinterest Business Model In A Nutshell
Fastly Enterprise Edge Computing Business Model In A Nutshell
How Does Slack Make Money? Slack Business Model In A Nutshell
Fastly Enterprise Edge Computing Business Model In A Nutshell
TripAdvisor Business Model In A Nutshell
How Does Fiverr Work And Make Money? Fiverr Business Model In A Nutshell

The post Key Lessons In Lean Analytics With Alistair Croll appeared first on FourWeekMBA.

How To Perform A Market Segmentation By Using Facebook Ads

Are you a digital manager struggling with micromanaging? Are you a marketing team leader worried about new strategies? Are you a Chief marketing officer looking to increase efficiency and reduce costs?

Well, well, well, Facebook is here to save the day.

The brainchild of Mark Zuckerberg with 2.32 billion monthly users has emerged as a marketing leader in the past decade, moving from just a social media platform to an all-around digital services provider.

Facebook had garnered $ 16.6 billion advertising revenue in the last quarter of 2018, a 30% YoY increase. Why do you think that happened? Nothing but a worldwide realization to leverage the massive user base that Facebook boasts, happened!

Facebook Ads is the marketing division of the company, which caters to a vast range of marketing features like leads, reporting, remarketing, and even carousel ads. Everything you need, in just one place.

Yet, the best feature isn’t anything mainstream or trendy that primarily focusing on digital trends. In fact, what sets your firm apart from the rest is the use of Facebook Ads as an old school market segmentation tool to understand your audience better.

Read: The Ultimate Guide to Market Segmentation

Market Segmentation – Jargons explained

It might seem like a very fancy word, but at the end of the day, it means exactly what it says, no loopholes whatsoever. So, a market, in physical terms, is the place where buyers and sellers interact, which has also turned online or social in the modern world. On the other hand, Segmentation means to divide or to segment into different small components, making it easier to understand or work with a large group.

When you combine these two words, you get the process of segmenting/grouping your overall market (consumer base) into different parts based on a plethora of criteria to ease your journey as a market seller.

Segment and conquer 

Market segmentation is a different process for different companies depending on factors like scale, size, operations, genre, and mainly, customer base. Take a look at a few options that you could consider –

1) Demographics

This is where you divide your customers based on factors like their age, income, marital status, gender, culture, or education. A very vast range, it gives you a compact idea about each user via their profile information. For example: – If you are a company catering to home furnishing, your plan of action will vary according to the age or the marital status of your users. A young customer will be attracted by a different kind of discount or would prefer online newsletters while a married couple might look for something highly authentic and a physical store. Similarly, if your brand only caters to high-end customers, demographics on income is the best way to know exactly who to conquer.

2)  Geographic

For brands with multiple branches or store ranges, especially in a diverse country say, India, Geographic market segmentation works quick and easy. You divide consumers based on their country, state, zip code or even districts to analyze their problems as a group and work towards solving them. For example – You could be a clothing store range with a national presence, yet your style of clothing collection, the behavior of employees and offline marketing strategy will be only fruitful if it varies as per the location. I mean, you cannot have a billboard in say, the Bengali language while you are in Dubai.

3) Psychographics

Lastly, you could also look at ‘who a person is’ to group them better. Covering all aspects of any individual personality like interests, hobbies, opinions, and values, this segmentation process has evolved. Using the concept of behavioral economics as well, it allows you to market your good to those who will buy it. For example, – If you are a company that sells coffee online, you would not want to be targeting individuals who dislike caffeine or if you are a sports store, targeting art enthusiasts makes no sense.

Just letting you know, using market segmentation for your marketing emails can increase your clicks by 100.95% as compared to zero segmenting.

Now that we are clear, let’s try to understand how Facebook ads help you do all of the above, hassle-free and extraordinary.

Read: The Ultimate Guide to Market Segmentation

Geographic comes up quick – Facebook ads has the feature of Audience Insights, which works like a charm for any marketer in the 21st century. Take our previous example of having a clothing store and want to use your online data to revamp your marketing model in different locations.

1.       So, Go to Facebook ads manager.

2.       Select the Audience Insights tab

3.       Choose the ‘Everyone on Facebook’ option.

Now, say you have a store in London and another in India. So first, you select London, and you can get demographics for the individuals located there like age, education and gender details. Now you choose India and go through similar data. Furthermore, you can be more specific or filter out data by using the side panel on your left for various divisions like age or gender. For example, You are a female clothing store, so you choose the female gender option as well for a cohesive approach.

With Facebook Ads manager, it not only fetches you geographic data immediately, but it also becomes easier to compare and analyze them for conclusive results.

Demographics all the way – Again, the audience Insights tool is here to save the day. You can log in to

Facebook ads and find all sorts of demographic data available. Say, you are a fast-food restaurant planning to introduce a new advertisement targeting the young adult crowd, so you would need a number, age or education details to understand how to market your product better among such a vast group of customers. Here, Facebook ads give you options to select, get as many demographics details you want and even allows you to use past customer emails to find similar potential customers. Facebook adds 500,000 new users every day; 6 new profiles every second, which makes the amount of information available on the platform, too vast to fathom but amazing to utilize.

Psychographics changing the game – Once again, all you need to do is filter out the Audience insights tool by adding a few specifications to find psychographics of your users or potential users. A separate interests option is available with multiple opinions to filter and a behavior option to what marketing schemes would attract what kind of prospects. Say, In case you are looking to target customers via marketing via discount coupon schemes on a website, you can search for ‘Discount coupons’ to know where to go about it. Over 2 billion people being reached with Facebook ads, you do not want to miss out on the opportunity to select your potential customer groups amongst them.

Go beyond with Custom Audiences – There is a reason why Facebook is preferred by 62% marketers and it isn’t just the basic features mentioned above. It’s the knowledge and tools available to you once you have mastered those basics. Use the custom audience tool to understand your existing customer model better and accordingly predict your potential consumer market segmentation. A couple of pointers to help you navigate –

1) Website Traffic

If your business has an online presence, a blog, or an official website, you can use the data collected there via Facebook ads. Create segments for the people who have visited your site in the past few months, people who have visited a specific page like a particular article or product, people who have been inconsistent with their visits and so much more. This way, you get a whole different mode of market segmentation by putting in zero additional efforts.

2) Customer files

You might not have a website in place, but high chances are that you register your customers before purchase, even in offline mode. So, why let all that information stay unused? Add the data to the customer list section here and map out your audiences based on various segments. To help, there are various identifiers like Email ID, City, Gender, Age or Name which help in inputting data and narrowing down segments.

3) Engagement strategy

A new feature by Facebook ads that hits really close to home. It stands on Facebook‘s own social media platform as a base and uses the data collected on it to help you with market segmentation. The tool divides viewers of your Facebook content, posts or Ads to help you understand their level of interests and the need for improvement in your game plan. You can segment users in categories like, people who watched 50% of your videos, people who stopped watching within 10 seconds and so on. With people spending an average of 35mins per day on Facebook, you would want to know how much of that time is being spent on your brand.

Quick pro tip – Once you know your approach and you understand the importance of Facebook ads for market segmentation, you should opt for A/B testing.

The benefit of A/B testing is that it allows you to use the segmented data collected via Facebook ads to incorporate the best on your blog, website or advertisements. It allows you to test two different approaches (A and B) as an input (say a website article title) and use the statistical analysis to find what works best for your user base (number of likes, clicks, and hits).

There are various ways to perform it.The easiest way to do it by capturing screenshots of your different input versions. 

Facebook Ads allow you to find needles in a haystack, customers among billions of people and solutions among tons of problems.  So, don’t forget, Market Segmentation via Facebook is feasible and fruitful.

Business resources:

The Ultimate Guide to Market Segmentation
What Is a Business Model? 30 Successful Types of Business Models You Need to Know
The Complete Guide To Business Development
Business Strategy: Definition, Examples, And Case Studies
What Is a Business Model Canvas? Business Model Canvas Explained
Blitzscaling Business Model Innovation Canvas In A Nutshell
What Is a Value Proposition? Value Proposition Canvas Explained
What Is a Lean Startup Canvas? Lean Startup Canvas Explained
Marketing Strategy: Definition, Types, And Examples
Marketing vs. Sales: How to Use Sales Processes to Grow Your Business
How To Write A Mission Statement
What is Growth Hacking?
Growth Hacking Canvas: A Glance At The Tools To Generate Growth Ideas

The post How To Perform A Market Segmentation By Using Facebook Ads appeared first on FourWeekMBA.

10 Lead Generation Strategies to Grow Your Customer Base

In today’s highly competitive business world, it has become challenging for businesses to generate leads. On the one hand, some marketers are struggling to generate leads while on the other hand, there are marketers that manage to generate leads, but most of them are unqualified.

Leads are the lifeline of every business. They are the prospects that become the customers if they are nurtured in the right way. So if lead generation is useful, then why marketers struggle to generate leads for their business? Well, it is because they don’t use the right strategy. 

Some businesses are still using the old traditional marketing strategies. Here we are not saying that all conventional strategies are worthless these days. There are a few conventional strategies that even work for companies.

But if they want to grow their business in this modern digital world, they have to step up their game. Luckily, in this blog, you will learn the top 10 lead generation strategies to make your business successful. Let’s get started!

Landing Pages

A landing page is pages where you send your prospects to communicate with them, get their emails, and convert them into customers or clients. They are a great way to capture leads.

The more landing pages you have, the more leads you will be able to capture. Hubspot research has also shown that the companies that have increased their landing pages from 10 to 15 have seen an increase in the 55% in leads. Here are some great ways to generate leads from your landing page:

Offer a personalized demo of your products or services
Offer exclusive membership for discounts
Make prospects signup for newsletters by giving them a special offer or discount
Provide free downloadable guides
Crowdsource product name or development input
Make use of forms to collect information
Add real testimonials on your website
Create limited offers



Content Marketing

No matter what type of business model you have, content is still a king. Creating interesting and valuable content can help you in attracting more prospects to your website, social media pages, or any other platform you are using to promote your business.

There are a lot of ways through which you can generate leads through content marketing. Some of them are:

Blogs
Case Studies
eBooks
Newsletters
Infographics
Testimonials
Videos

If you are looking for professional website design for your business, then solutions like Designhill could be an excellent option to get started. The platform lets its users to get connected with thousands of professional graphic designers from all over the world.

Email Marketing

As we said above, not all traditional marketing techniques are outdated. Email marketing is one such technique that still holds a high position in this digital era.

Nowadays, everyone uses email. Sending persuasive emails not only help you in generating new leads but can also help in retaining old customers or clients. Here are a few tips to generate leads through email marketing:

Offer an email newsletter with high-value, appropriate content
Set up autoresponder emails
Divide your emails according to subscriber behaviors
Make your emails shareable
Keep your CTA clear
Avoid using ‘no reply’ in the senders’ email address



Webinar

Webinars are a type of video marketing that helps businesses to communicate with the prospects directly. They are a great way to generate qualified leads by providing valuable information and answering the questions of the attendees.

They are the most economical tool because it saves traveling and accommodation costs. To have a successful webinar, you need to approach to the right audience and market appealingly.

This way, you will get the registration of qualified leads, thus allowing collecting the relevant information during the registration process. After the webinar, you can get connected with the attendees, thereby converting them into leads.

Social Media Marketing

These days, social media platforms are ruling the marketing world. They are not only helping businesses in building brand awareness but also generating leads. So if you are not making the use of social media, then you are losing an opportunity to reach a larger audience.

However, the success of generating leads through social media largely depends on the type of social channel you use. For instance, if you have a business of online clothing, then promoting it on channels like LinkedIn will be of no use. LinkedIn more of a professional social channel is suitable mostly for B2B companies.

Tip: To win the confidence of the audience, keep the profile image the same on all social channels. 

Backlinks

Backlinks are the links that one website gets from another site. They are an essential part of SEO. Backlinks can help in faster indexing, referral traffic, and improving organic ranking. To get the quality backlinks you need to write great guest posts, replicating competitor’s backlinks, submit we directories, use the broken linking method.

Add a live chat feature on your website:

According to the latest reports, 44% of visitors have said that having a live chat feature to assist them during their online purchase can be one of the best features the websites can have. 63% of the visitors have claimed that they are more likely to visit the sites that have an online chat feature. 38% of visitors have purchased after getting assistance through an online chat session.

What does that mean to you? Well, live chat feature on a website can help the businesses in generating leads and converting those leads into customers or clients. Here are a few tips for using live chat for lead generation:

Avoid using ‘offline’ chat
Make your live chat available 24*7
Custom greetings
Reply to the visitor within 2 seconds on the start of the conversation
Add the name and avatar of the agent so that customers feel like they are having a conversation with a real person



Lean on influencers:

Influencers are those people that have a substantial social following. Their audience trusts them enormously and follows their recommendations. Instead of marketing directly to the prospects, pay to the influencers, and let them spread the word about your company.

Most of the people have the misconception that an influencer has to be a celebrity. But the fact is it can be a regular person as well. The only condition is that they should have a huge social following, and impact on the audience. Every industry has different influencer. So, to generate the qualified lead, find the right influencer for your business.

Google Ad words:

Google Ad words is a great online advertising platform provided by Google. The platform is used to display ads on other websites within the Google display network. The tool has become one of the favorite tools for businesses these days.

With the right strategy and little investment at the right time, you can attract a lot of prospects and convert them into customers or clients. When advertising with Google, there are two things that you need to take care of:

Create Google friendly landing pages
Don’t break Google’s site policies



Printing Materials

We all know that printing materials are for ages, and in this digital era, they still hold a lot of importance. They are still considered as one of the powerful content media for marketing. Brochures, business cards, catalogs, letterheads, are some of the accessible printing materials.

Key takeaway

Generating quality leads for business is not as difficult as it seems. All you need to do is to follow a good strategy.  You may find a lot of other strategies for generating leads, but the above mentioned are the top strategies that are being used by many businesses. So try them and let us know what was the result in the below comment section.

Guest contribution by Campbell Joef, graphic designer and blogger associated with Designhill.com, a custom designs marketplace, I generally write on topics concerning design and clothing industry like as 3/4 sleeve shirts, e-commerce, start-ups, small business.

Business resources:

What Is a Business Model? 30 Successful Types of Business Models You Need to Know
The Complete Guide To Business Development
Business Strategy: Definition, Examples, And Case Studies
What Is a Business Model Canvas? Business Model Canvas Explained
Blitzscaling Business Model Innovation Canvas In A Nutshell
What Is a Value Proposition? Value Proposition Canvas Explained
What Is a Lean Startup Canvas? Lean Startup Canvas Explained
What Is Market Segmentation? the Ultimate Guide to Market Segmentation
Marketing Strategy: Definition, Types, And Examples
Marketing vs. Sales: How to Use Sales Processes to Grow Your Business
How To Write A Mission Statement
What is Growth Hacking?
Growth Hacking Canvas: A Glance At The Tools To Generate Growth Ideas

The post 10 Lead Generation Strategies to Grow Your Customer Base appeared first on FourWeekMBA.