Marketing Automation is often talked about in terms of moving a new contact through the sales funnel until they become a customer while, of course, minimising the chance of them falling out of the funnel! Lead 'nurturing'. It's equally applicable when maximising income from existing customers. We've all heard the saying that it costs more to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing one.

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is a prediction of the net profit attributed to the entire future relationship with a customer, adjusted based on when one might expect to achieve that profit. It's purpose is to reflect the value today that the future business with that customer has to the organisation. It's a complicated subject and at the end of the day it's a prediction - not a fact.

One thing is clear though. Increasing the average CLV of your existing customers will be easier than acquiring new customers. Assuming you exceeded their expectations on that first purchase then you already have a [read on]

How to develop a strategy to grow sales and profits  

Here we look at one of the key speakers from the CIM conference, Professor Malcom McDonald and his talk on how to develop a strategy to grow sales and profits.  As always Malcolm is pragmatic, easy on the ear, and fond of debunking a few marketing myths here and there, including questioning the focus on digital marketing. 

Professor McDonald started his talk with this quote:

“For many companies, the greatest threat is not being out of touch with digital developments, but losing sight of the fundamental needs of their consumers and the underlying long-term drivers of their business. (Forward 50. Nicola Kemp, Marketing, Nov. 2013, p.52)” 

Key to this talk was the importance of digital being part of the whole marketing strategy, not the be all and end all of itself.  We couldn’t agree more.  Traditional methods of marketing are still highly relevant.  But it does ma [read on]

From 21st April, Google has expanded it's use of mobile friendliness as a ranking signal. This means that the more mobile-friendly your site is, the more likely it is to appear higher in the search engine rankings.

According to the BBC, SEO specialists are seeing this as the biggest change since the Panda update which saw top ranking websites on page one slip much further down the SERPs.

We've known for sometime that Smartphone penetration and visits to websites from Smartphones have been rapidly increasing. But does everyone need to worry about the latest Google update? Here we guide you through some key analytic stats you should be looking at to see how you've been affected.

How much of your traffic comes from mobile devices?

From Google's own advice to webmasters we read that the change will mainly affect searches from mobile devices. It isn't clear to what degree the same applies to those searching from a PC. You may therefore assume that if your organisati [read on]

Talk to many organisations about what they think constitutes digital marketing and a not uncommon response will be email campaigns. Email though is only a small, albeit vital, cog in something that should be a well thought out, well oiled lead generation and nurturing engine (I'm an engineer, I think in terms of engines!)

Contacts or 'leads' fuel your email marketing engine. If you don't feed your engine sufficient fuel then it will stall.

Let's take a step back from the email itself and look at the broader picture of how you can use email as part of a broader content marketing strategy to acquire, convert and nurture new leads.

Step 1: Build Relevancy to get Noticed

To get noticed above your competitors you need to build your digital reputation and reputation is built on knowledge. People need to know you are an expert or that 'go to' place for the product or service they are looking for.  Search engines are often the middle man here. Very few people do anything these da [read on]

Selling products to people when you first meet them is like going up to an attractive person in a nightclub and asking them to marry you. It is just far too great a commitment.

Especially in B2B environments there needs to be trust. When businesses purchase, those decisions have an impact on their own success. They need to now that they are making the right choice. They need to know, like and trust the people they are buying from. You're unlikely to make many sales on the first meeting.

Just taking a look at our own customer base, there is a strong correlation between our clients and how we met them. Some contacts go back 30 years. We've met them through colleagues in previous careers, relationships and voluntary work. In almost every case we've known these people intimately enough for them to trust us to do business with.

May I posit the idea that if you make sure that your product is king that the content will follow.

If the product isn't right our customers will certainly start to talk about it. And after all it's the content that the consumer produces, not that which we push out to the marketplace that holds most value.

We are all talking about digital marketing strategies, search marketing, content marketing, dynamic pricing. In my case I'm running around talking about automated marketing. But let's not forget the all important product. In it's greatest sense the product is closely linked with the customer experience. The two become intertwined in a way that is hard to decouple. Product surely is King!