Search Engine Marketing: ROI vs. Profits

by Eric Tsai

Search Engine Marketing: ROI vs. Profits
In SEM (Search Engine Marketing) ROI is a safer metric, at the end of the day, than profit.

The pros of going with ROI outweigh profit in the immediacy.

Profit is almost always the primary goal in the long term, but marketers have a lot more control over ROI so programs are designed around this KPI first.

This is a guest post from my good friend David Chung, who used to work with me in Search Marketing and now works for Google in Korea:

Everyone’s getting smarter. Everything’s getting smarter, too.

I recently swapped out my Android mobile device for a traditional flip phone and it took no longer than ten minutes to feel the smart-ness sinking away into a dumb oblivion.

It took ten minutes to feel the urge to enlighten myself with the latest tidbits of wisdom from my social network.

Just ten minutes, and I was already fumbling around with T9 Word trying to reply to a SMS dinner invitation. Instead of “if I’m home by 7” my phone kept trying to write “he im good by p”. So dumb.

Marketers are getting smarter, too. With best practices scratched on every virtual wall, it’s hard to tell which marketing professional has the true edge. I don’t blame you.

We all look and sound the same lately, flaunting tons of white paper lingo like quality score optimization and ROI focus.

Every article, blog, RSS feed, and tweet I’ve read lately talks about making sure your SEM campaigns are maximizing their return on investment.

Here’s my response: Save the white for summer.

Here in Q2, as we start planning our marketing budgets for 2012, we have a responsibility to jump off our “high level” thrones, and start defining viable strategies that will maximize the one thing better than looking good in person—looking good on paper.

Bottom line profits.

But What’s Wrong With Maximizing ROI?

It’s a fair question.

I’ve been asked about this numerous times, and I found the following analogy to help.

Imagine you’re a soda salesperson. Now, you pride yourself on being an amazing salesperson. You can sell ice to an penguin and run of network display media to a direct response marketer.

Your price for a bottle of soda – $1. Now, you can sell that bottle for $100 (because you’re that good), but the problem is, it’s going to take you a long time to move product.

People are getting too smart, and their phones are even smarter. Just one snapshot with Google Goggles, and they’ll know every soda price within a 20 mile radius and the cheapest gas stations to fill up en route to boot.

So, for the sake of example, let’s just say it takes, on average, 3 months of good ol’ fashioned hustling to sell that bottle for $100.

But hey! You just got a ONE HUNDRED to one ROI! Amazing.

In the meantime, your counterpart down the street is selling bottles at $1.25. He isn’t even close to a 2 to 1 ROI. However, it doesn’t take much to move product at this price, and it turns out that your competitor can easily sell 5 bottles a day.

After 90 days of consistent 1.25 to 1 ROI execution, you meet and compare numbers.

The 100 to 1 ROI sounds good, but at the end of the day, the second salesman ends up netting more profits. The first guy made a profit of just $99.

The second guy finishes the same 3 months with more than 10% higher profit—a handsome $112.50.

The moral of this totally, oversimplified story is even simpler.

A campaign’s success is ultimately dressed in black. Black ink bottom line numbers. Profit.

The Difference Between ROI vs. Profits

ROI is a great KPI for monitoring overall campaign health, but it’s just a rate.

So how do we evolve from an ROI-focused approach to one that’s profit-maximizing?

The first step is to understand the relationship between operational profit and your advertising budget.

Your media spend is essentially one of many line items that add up to COGS (Cost of Goods Sold), or the cost of goods sold. Once you’re able to determine average margin of profit on your goods, then factor in ad spend, you can come up with a rough estimate of what your COGS percentage is.

The next step involves some calculation, using the square root rule to predict when you’ll hit diminishing returns on an advertising buy.

Here is an example:

Assume you spent $1,000,000 on marketing last year, generating $3,000,000 sales.

Your profit factor is 35%, yielding profit of $3,000,000 * 0.35 – $1,000,000 = $50,000 .

What would happen if you cut 20% from your marketing budget.

Step 1: Sales = (($800,000 / $1,000,000) ^ 0.5) * $3,000,000 = (0.894 * $3,000,000) = $2,683,282.

The “0.5” number is the square root … you are taking the square root of the ratio in change of marketing spend.

In this case, a 20% reduction in spend yields a 10.5% reduction in sales.

Step 2: Profit = $2,683,282 * 0.35 – $800,000 = $139,149.

In other words, you’d lose a little over $300,000 in sales, but profit would increase by nearly $90,000.

Using the square root rule enables marketers to model hypothetical scenarios, which then enable senior management or your clients to make informed decisions.

Are you losing out on potential profits by depending too heavily on brand keywords, albeit at a 20 to 1 ROI?

Perhaps it’s time to explore non-brand search terms.

Maybe this is an opportunity to expand your program into other channels, such as contextual targeting or a another search engine.

Even if your expansion efforts, on their own, were to yield an ROI of 2 to 1, this still pads your overall profit margin.

Yes, your 20 to 1 ROI will suffer because of the new “inefficient” campaigns entering your mix.

However, at the end of the day, both top line and bottom line revenue increase incrementally.

3 Steps to Getting More Traffic and Higher Conversions

by Eric Tsai

3 Steps to Getting More Traffic and Higher Conversions

If you had to pick between getting tons of traffic or having a high conversion rate, which one would you pick?

Most marketers churn out content for SEO rankings, build backlinks for offsite optimization and may even invest in PPC at some point.

Whether your objective is to get people to buy, opt in to your list or download your content, you need to understand the significance of both.

All traffics are not created equal

It’s surprising to me when I hear business owners and bloggers ask the question, “how do I get more traffic?”

Sure, traffic is important and with lots of traffic you won’t need a high conversion rate. It becomes a numbers game.

On the other hand high conversion says you’re selling to the right people at the right time at the right place. It’s how well you’re able to connect with your customer.

So why can’t you do both?

That’s precisely what successful businesses do when it comes to Internet marketing. They drive highly targeted traffic to relevant content that leads to rapid conversions.

So how do you go about getting quality traffic? Simple, here is a three step process to get you started.

1. Start with the right expectations

The art of getting traffic goes back to the roots of direct response marketing.

Specially the why, who, what where and how of your target. It’s often referred to as the Five W’s and one H. You can see an example of this concept in the post Social Media Science: The Five W’s of Twitter Marketing.

In the case of traffic you need to start by asking the right question that solves the right problem.

It’s like going to the doctor’s office when you’re sick and you expect the doctor to ask you how you feel not what your favorite TV show is.

Pinpoint the right problem is how you can make meaningful assumptions to achieve your desire outcome. This calls for a bit of critical thinking.

Getting on the first page of Google won’t mean much if you don’t get any clicks. After all there are a bunch of ads all around it fighting for attention and clicks.

Here are some questions you need to consider to get started:

Why would someone click on it? (you’re not the only one with relevant title)
Who should click on it? (are you talking to the right prospects?)
What would clicking on your link do for them? (what do they really want?)
Where does the link take them? (what click path are they on? What are the options?)
How would you maintain a visitor’s interest? (how do you stay relevant?)

These questions serve as the foundation to help you identify your main objective of getting traffic: What’s the desire outcome?

Think holistically. Then think specifically.

What is the end goal that you have in mind? In other words, you need to have a real, tangible result in mind.

You want sales? Great, how much sales? From where? When?

How would those statistics stack up again what’s going on now?

By setting the proper expectations you get altitude on what matters in your pursuit to traffic. It brings clarity to how your traffic generation tactics fit into the overall strategy.

Then it all comes down to executing and measuring the effectiveness of each tactic you employ.

2. Convince people with compelling content

Measuring results is hard to do and often the results will manifest themselves into insights other than the website. This is why you need to realize that traffics are actually people.

And people want to be treated like a human being regardless of what campaign you run. At some point you will need to use a combination of words and images to grab attention and understand the psychology of your customers.

People often think they know what they need, but they don’t take action to fulfill those needs because they simply can’t justify the benefits of buying.

Why buy this now? Why should I buy it from you?

Aim for emotions that matters to people. People are more likely to buy from those they trust and like so show them who you are.

What are your values? Bring some social proof and authority but also show your personality. Be human.

Once you establish some level of rapport, you need to make sure that they “get” the immediate impact that you can make going forward.

You can do that by showing them why they need what you have right now using effective content and marketing strategies.

3. Measuring performance and results

It you sell stuff online it’s relatively easy to assess whether things are working or not. You can get to the bottom line with total sales, orders and customers or you can use metrics like the conversion rate to give you a sense of how effective the site is in turning visitors to customers.

That’s measuring results.

But if you run non-transactional websites, you need to have a different perspective to measure your return on investment. Specifically you will need to look at the activities that happen on the site.

This is measuring performance.

These are probably the best way to gauge your conversion rate which requires a level of scientific assumptions.

Does the number of visits have an impact on the awareness of the campaign?
How does pages views relate to the amount of information being consumed?
How many people took the action that you’ve put in place? Such as download a PDF content or request for moreinformation via a contact form.
Where are people “going” on your site? You can craete a visual of your visitor’s click path by using Google Analytics content Drilldown and In-Page analytics

Basically you can make some pretty reasonable assumptions using web analytics system, but it simply can’t tell you exactly what the visitors ended up doing at the end.

This is why it’s important to measure results not just performance. Results bring you insights that will tell you more about your target audience than your website.

It therefore requires a lot of thinking and coming up with the right hypothesis for testing.

Free vs paid tactics

Most of us don’t know what we don’t know that’s how we end up wasting hours on tactics that will never work.

This is especially true when it comes to implementing your traffic generation strategies.

Here are some “free” tactics to get traffic:

Submit your site to search engines, content directories, news sites, social bookmarking sites, RSS aggregators and share them on social networks
Publish quality content (articles, videos, podcasts, infographics) that embeds the keywords you want to rank in mind
Guest post on blogs in your niche area that ranks high, you can start with Google contextual search
Comment on other people’s blog by elevating the conversation not spamming with your links
Start conversations in social media and make sure you include links to your website on your profile page. You can start by answering questions on Linked or respond on Twitter
Build an email list if you don’t already have one and direct them to your web properties
Sign up for HARO and participate
Submit content to free press release websites, check out this list of paid and free ones
Include links in your outbound documents to clients such as invoices, postcards, RFPs, reports, make it fun and interesting (has to be done tastefully)

Although those are considered free tactics, they may not be free if you don’t get the results you want. And don’t forget your time isn’t free!

Now here are the no so free tactics:

Advertise on websites where your target audience visits the most (e-publications, web portals, forums or blogs), this can be in the form of banners, sponsored content, endorsed links or joint venture promotions
Contribute (recycle) content to partners, affiliates and complimentary products (make sure you arm them with tools to market your name)
Sponsor events or better yet start one, even a Twitter chat is a start
The good’o pay-per-click on Google still works but also checkout Bing and Facebook, both have less competition and spam
Hire writers and bloggers to help you create content using services such as Junta42 or use the Problogger job board
Join a paid networking group both online or offline, you can find some via Ning or Meetup
Submit content to paid press release website, check out this list of paid and free ones
Publish an eBook, write a report (whitepaper) or webinar
Start a giveaway

The take away: As I write this I know there are new ways to get traffic such as hiring people on Fiverr to fabricate you arbitrary social proof.

Just remember that black hat tricks such as the ones BMW and JC Penney did will ultimately hurt you in the long run.

So be honest with what’s working and what isn’t, what was smoking mirror and what wasn’t. Keep doing what’s working and stop doing what’s not. Done right, getting traffic is a lot like selling water in the desert.

Remember, the quality of your traffic has a direct impact in the rate of your conversion.

Not only will you need to understand why they’re here, you need to be able to convince them to take the action you want them to take.

So stop focusing on obtaining large amount of unqualified traffic.

Instead focus on collecting and profiling your prospects and customers. There is no excuse now with all the advance tools you can profile just about anyone using a combination of social CRM and behavior targeting techniques.

How To Keep Customers Coming Back: 6 Trends You Should Know

by Eric Tsai

Living in southern California I love going to restaurants, cafes and retails stores to experience what companies are doing to attract customers.

From merchandising to customer service, I’m gradually seeing three popular marketing trends that everyone is doing to spread their brand voice.

First, almost every company is in on the social media bandwagon specifically leveraging Facebook and Twitter to engage with their fans and broadcast their offerings.

Second, companies are finding ways to collect your contact information to build their email list by offering discounts, coupons or customer loyalty programs.

And third, businesses are aware of their reputation online on places such as Yelp, Consumer Reports, OpenTable, BizRate, Amazon and CNET.

Some of using these information as a way to improve products and identify service gaps.

All three marketing tactics are proven to be somewhat cost-effective in terms of managing their reputations online while funneling leads and converting sales.

There is enough free information out there that business owners and marketing managers can find to start immediately so I’m not surprise that everyone is doing it.

In fact, I always check out the Twitter or Facebook page of where I’ve visited to see what level of engagement and following they have as well as to identify how the platform was utilized.

The result I found is that companies fall into two categories of social media marketing buckets.

First are the highly engaged profiles with regular updates and a large following that creates instant social proof. Second are the uninspiring profiles with the lack of updates and little to no interactions.

This is the same observations made by Jeremiah Owyang, who recently posted on his blog that, “many brands are jumping on the social media bandwagon, without giving proper thought about the impacts to their marketing effort. In particular, many brands are putting ’social chicklets’ on their homepage to “Follow us on Twitter” or “Friend us on Facebook” without considering the ramifications.”

This is the problem with low barrier to entry tools such as Twitter and Facebook that many brands are using without a real deliberate strategy.

I encourage those of you that are serious about your digital marketing efforts to use Jeremiah’s matrix to help make your decisions.

Keep in mind, you must understand not just the rules of the game but also how it applies to your specific industry, your customers and your organization.

There is no doubt that the internet has made it easier to find what you’re looking for while connecting you with like-mined individuals from networking to referrals, relevant information is available in abundance.

The questions is where do people get those information and how will these content providers be perceived?

First you need to realize that all of the answers have changed.

Same Questions, Different Answer

Although the internet has forever changed our expectations in media consumption and in communication, one thing remains constant for businesses today: the question of how do we attract more customers to us?

How do we get customers to spread our brand? How do we get customers to buy more and buy often?

As a marketer today you must realize that we’ve been asking those same questions for decades and in order to answer them now you must first understand the following 6 fundamental social change in customer perception and behavior:

1. Choice overload: Customers are bombarded with choices; the market is saturated with selection.

And people get frustrated when they have to make a decision from tens and thousands of product categories, brands and price points.

Everything looks the same, everyone sounded alike and it doesn’t help when people have shorter attention span as we become more distracted everyday.

2. Conflicting information: We’re in a hyper-connected marketplace where people are using social media to discuss new products, do their own research, cross referencing information in the blogosphere and everything goes from frustration to confusion.

There is simply too much information and how can an average consumer know who’s right and who’s wrong?

3. Customers know marketing: Over time, customers understood the game of marketing regardless of B2C or B2B.

Described by Tom Asacker: We’re no longer passive consumers but active discerners participating in how products are marketed at us.

This is why there is an increasing trend in banner blindness and average web users will give you only 8 seconds to decide if they’re going to stay or not.

4. Lack of trust in the marketplace: There is a sense of distrust in the marketplace. People simply don’t trust individuals let alone corporations.

We’re conditioned to identify the tactics such as sense of urgency (buy now and save!), risk reversal (money back guaranteed!), or scarcity thinking (for a limited time!).

Watch any TV infomercials and you’ll find those tactics in most of them.

Simply put, these tactics are losing their effectiveness and even if they worked that led to engagement opportunities, you must meet the customer expectations otherwise it’s hard to fool them twice.

5. People define your brand: Brand messages only sets the initiate expectations of your target audience and ultimately people make meaning out of things themselves.

When push comes to shove, people go with what feels right not your product features or service benefits.

It’s how you make them feel, not what you tell them how they should feel. If they can relate to your message, it only means they’ll give you a few more seconds to keep going down your path to purchase.

Your brand is defined by how you make people feel about the decisions they’ve made not just your messages.

6. The shift towards frugality: This is the simplest concept to grasp as the recession has permanently changed the way consumers behave and perceive value.

It goes beyond pricing strategy and product promotions.

Whether you’re a retailer, a B2B service provider or a marketer, this means extracting deeper customer insights to build meaningful, differentiated messages that communicates relevancy.

This is best described by a recent article “The New Consumer Frugality” in Strategy+Business, by Booz & Company, in which the authors defined six frugal consumer segments.

After a thorough understanding of the above trends, you should also be aware of the fact that brands are becoming publishers creating opportunities that’s leveling the playing field.

And in order to be successful moving forward, you either have great content strategy or you have unique customer experience (in product or service innovation).

Content Marketing Creates Relevancy

Recently Joe Pulizzi of Junta42.com, a content strategy evangelist published a post after speaking at the Online Marketing Summit 2010 on how companies focus solely on Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and social media that produce without a real content strategy.

Specifically he noted that “any online marketing, whether social media, email marketing, search engine optimization, landing page conversion, etc., does not work without first having content strategy.”

As a brand strategist that focuses on marketing integration, I couldn’t agree more.

I’ve heard business owners and marketing executives realize the need to change their strategy, but it’s often due to the need to “keep up” with the current trend. “We must get into social media because everyone’s doing it,” or “We need to engage our customers on Facebook and Twitter.”

But what does engagement mean to your organization? How will that benefit your bottom line or increase sales?

It’s easy to setup a WordPress blog, a Twitter account, a Facebook fan page or a LinkedIn Group.

The key is what will you be pushing out to generate meaningful conversations?

How will you provide value that sparks engagement?

Why would people spread your idea or pass on your name?

What’s the call-to-action when people get to your website, your blog, or your social media pages?

Product Innovation Creates Loyalty

The other way to win in the marketplace is to deliver awesome products or services that build brand loyalty via innovation.

An easy example would be what Apple is doing with their continuous innovation in products from iPod to iPhone to last weekend’s release of iPad.

Amazon’s endless pursue to have everything available, fast and easy via their online store regardless what you’re looking for.

Zappo’s unmatched customer service in finding and delivering not just the shoes you ordered but what you may also like.

For restaurants, it’s the food you cater, the service you provide, the price tag you put on as the total experience that says “we’re different.”

Customers will automatically go on to Yelp and OpenTable to give you reviews and recommendations. Your customer will decide what quality is and what value means to them.

I love what James Surowiecki wrote in an excellent piece in The New Yorker: “the more information people have, the tighter the relationship between quality and price: if you can deliver a product or service that is qualitatively better, you can charge top dollar. But if you can’t deliver the quality you can’t get the price.”

You’re going to struggle if you don’t deliver brand experience that’s worth talking about.

Everyone have access to the same tools and resources, if you can deliver a mix bag of value using content marketing strategy on your innovative products, you win.

The take away: Brands must adapt to the new realities that everyone is a content producer and we are no longer competing on eyeballs and clicks only, but value that builds long-lasting relationships in a trust-driven era.

It is essential to establish clear, integrated marketing strategies for various media channels in order to deliver personalized messages that properly aligned with your business objectives.

If you don’t know your desired outcome, why are you implementing tactics where you can’t see what success means to you?

If you don’t have exceptional products perhaps its time you should rethink your product strategy.

Are you re ready to get actionable to integrate your marketing efforts?

Reprioritizing Your Brand Value Propositions

by Eric Tsai

We’re almost midway through Q1 of 2010, if your business is still going through a tough time, you’re not alone. Perhaps it’s time to review your cost cutting measures or reexamine your value proposition to your customers.

McKinsey Quarterly recently published “The downturn’s new rules for marketers,” which suggests new ways to look at marketing in this post-recession era. Here are some key points from the article:

– To weather the storm, it will be necessary to identify anew who and where the profitable customers are and to prioritize the most effective marketing and sales vehicles for reaching them.

– The old tactic of focusing on historically profitable regions and customer groups will miss the mark. Instead, marketing and sales executives must reprioritize geographic markets and customer segments at every shift of economic fortune.

– Business-to-business (B2B) companies must go a step further. A fresh look at segments isn’t enough; instead, such companies must reexamine their opportunities and risks on a customer-by-customer basis.

– No matter how a company arrives at its quality assessment, the real power comes from combining that analysis with data on the reach and cost of an advertising vehicle. This combination of reach, cost, and quality helps marketers compare the impact of different vehicles on an “apples to apples” basis—the key to effective prioritzation.

– Companies that follow the playbook from past recessions will probably chase markets and segments made less attractive by the present downturn and focus too many resources on traditional marketing vehicles and frontline salespeople. To avoid these costly mistakes, marketing and sales executives must dynamically reassess their geographic, customer, advertising, and sales force priorities, with constant attention to the ever-shifting economics of this downturn.

The take away: It’s time to check under the hood of your marketing vehicles. Not just from a marketing perspective but from a brand’s perspective to focus on customer-centric strategies in order to improve the overall brand value. What’s your value to your customers? Can you differentiate? How do you stay relevant? How will your reprioritize your business opportunities? Marketing is no longer owned by the marketing department only, consider a more fluid approach in coming up with your new marketing playbook. We must adopt a marketing strategies that mimic the lives of our consumers and how they choose to interact with brands.

Love and Hate, Buying and Selling

by Eric Tsai

i_love_hate_you

Sales is a process regardless of selling necessity or not, it requires communication and understanding on both sides of the fence. It’s especially true if you want to build up your credibility so you’re not a one hit wonder. Many infomercials fall into the one hit wonder category. They are what they are: a fast, effective and unique tactic for rapid volume sale – a infomercial. I have to admit, I enjoy watching them for the simple tactic and amusement reasons especially the “but wait there’s more”!

They are successful because they make everything look simple, easy to understand with presenters that have a strong personality. They do everything they can to communicate and create the perception of value with entertainment. Checkout this Inc. magazine interview on Ron Popeil, who sold over $1 billion in infomercial products to see what I mean.

It’s a bit different in real life with prospects and clients. Obviously there are limitless sales strategies, techniques and tactics out there but fundamentally you must gain their trust by solving their problem. In many cases what’s been identified as the problem may or may not be the real issue, but the client has to perceive you as an expert to change his or her perception. They must believe that you are on their side and that you are capable of solving their problem.

Most of the time a consultative selling approach works well as the starting point. Start by asking the right questions to uncover and discover the bottom line. The goal is to invest the right amount of time and resources without wasting theirs. Then do your homework and present your solution that addresses their unique situation. You’ll earn more perceived value as you gain more trust through the sales cycle, similiar to the love and hate relationship: buying and selling has the same emotion just different direction.

5 Steps to Start Building your Marketing Messages

by Eric Tsai

Proper marketing messages are the foundations of your brand’s success. Whether you are selling a product, a service, or yourself, you must communicate the value of your brand precisely and to the point.

Here are 5 steps to start building your marketing messages:

1. Define Your Target Audiences And What You Offer Them

What exactly do you do? What is being offered? Who is the customer? What problem are you solving? Why should they care? This should tie to your mission statement, which should be tailored to your audience. Your offer is positioned based on the target audience you are pursuing.

One way to start is to narrow down the demographics and prioritize your targets into different buckets. For example: if you sell cookware you can identify the primary targets as at-home mothers, restaurant chiefs, or people that just like to cook. However, you need to be able to describe them with details like: “stay at home mothers age 25-45 that cooks 4 days or more a week for at least 3 people with household income of $100K that lives in major metropolitan cities.”

Then you identify second and third groups because each targeted group will require a different marketing message. Remember, you must sell them on what’s in it for them while realizing that what is important to one group may not be relevant to the other.

2. Map Out The Feature Sets

Create a list of features. For every feature there should be at least one major benefit to your customer. For example: “GPS navigation features – turn-by-turn voice navigation with live traffic update benefits – driver does not have to take eyes off the road to view the screen, and up to the date traffic to steer you to your destination in the shortest time.”

A feature is not something technical (although it is that way for most products and services), but that’s because they are selling points that will result in benefits. Without benefits they’re useless features that nobody cares ABOUT. It should be black and white and easy to identify for your target audiences. Say, as “automatic windows” for cars, “centralized AC unit” for houses, or “track your package online” for shipping services. They are all features that will bring meaning to benefits.

For someone selling themselves with “personal branding,” it should be about the elements that delivers the outcome. Example: “Read my books or subscribe to my blog features – weekly newsletter, discount on future books, or access to free videos, benefits – newsletter summaries certain benefits for the readers, or the video makes it easier to learn whatever the person is providing.”

3.Create your brand nomenclature

Once you have the description of your company, products, features and benefits, you should brand them with unique and yet easy to remember names. This is part of creating the personality for your brand to enhance your differentiation. The idea is to get your sales people and your customer all speaking the same language – your brand’s language. It’s part of creating a cult, a reference to your marketing messages. Example of company names that integrated into our everyday vocabulary: “Just Google it to find out,” or “I am going to eBay all my old stuff.”

4.Develop an elevator pitch

Try to come up with a short elevator pitch without using any big words like “innovation” or “quality.” It should be simple, short, and to the point. If it’s a complicated product, use metaphor or competitor examples like “Netflix is like Blockbuster except you order online and we mail you the DVD.” Or better yet (my favorite) “Google would provide access to the world’s information in one click.” That’s Google’s actual elevator pitch when the founders first started to approach investors.

2 min video clip of putting together an elevator speech – watch here.

5. Review, refine, rethink, refresh

At this point you should have all the building blocks completed to start wordsmithing your messages. Review your messages with other team members and obtain feedback from a wide range of demographics first to see if it’s easy to understand. Then test it on people in your field or industry.

There is no perfect message for everyone – just the right message for the right people, so it’s important to have multiple targeted messages even though you may have the same product or offering. It needs to be aligned and presented in a way that reflects who you write to and why it’s beneficial to your readers. For example, if your customers are technical people you should focus on selling key features. For business owners, sell the desired outcome, not the features.

You also need to refresh your message periodically to take advantage of ongoing market psychology. When the economy is bad (which it is now), focus your messages with words like bailout, stimulus, and recession. This will work to your advantage since those are relevant attention grabbers.

Essentially you are selling an idea. The goal is to maximize every opportunity you get to expose your brand’s marketing messages. There is no better time than now to start or renew your marketing messages because more people are leveraging internet and social media tools as resources during this recession.

The great advantage about social media is that your message will get passed around over and over again, so crafting the right message will literally take you a long way. And as you progress through those channels, continue to revamp and refine your message.

I will discuss about “field messages” next.