Marketing and Sales Tips – The Results Are In!

Posted on 07. Jun, 2008 by Kris Nickerson in Marketing Tips

Hi Everyone,

First of all, a word of thanks to all of you who filled out my survey last week. I found out quite a few things, including your dislike for the courier font I was using in our last few newsletters. I hope this one is better for all concerned. I personally liked the courier font; it felt a bit old school, like the manual typewriters I learned to type on in the year of the flood (the 1970’s for those who don’t remember the good old days), but being a marketing professional and knowing this newsletter is designed for what you need and want, have changed it to this nifty Arial font. I guess I should have known better. I don’t wear polyester anymore either. Let me know if this is better for you.

As far as the newsletter goes, some of you wanted more basic information; some of you wanted more in depth information.   At this point I’m going to keep the newsletter somewhat basic, but those of you who are interested in a more technical newsletter, please e-mail me and if there is enough of a need, I will start writing one. I also found out that you guys are interested in marketing thru video, mobile devices and blogs as well as any insider tips I can give you to do better. I plan on doing that in the coming weeks, but today, I want to go over what I found out from the research we did last week and my personal realizations from analyzing the information.

Now, I hope you do get a bit excited about that information, maybe not as much as I did, because I’m not only a marketing Goddess, but a geek deep down.

First of all, I don’t know if you realize this or not, but I had a tough time getting more than 30 responses when I was doing this at In Touch. I knew if I was really going to get a real understanding for my own marketing needs, I needed to get more than 30 responses.

So, I used my linkedin.com network as well as posting it to the questions area of linkedin.com. What I got was almost 200 responses between you guys and them. The information was great, especially since we had responses from all types of businesses and budget categories. One of the things I found most surprising, was the various ways people were marketing and their relative success.

Here you can see a sampling of people with budgets of $2,500.00 a month or less

Now, here are the results for those with a monthly budget of more than $5,000.00.

I found a few things surprising, one of which is that businesses are still finding e-mail marketing successful. You should take a look at what other people are doing and find successful as I’m finding things like traditional direct marketing might be right for some of you.

Additionally, I found out that 82% of all people looking to hire someone like me, would first go to a friend or associate for a referral before looking on the Internet. That makes sense to me as I’ve found that about 80% my business comes from referrals.

So, why this exercise?    Well, I’ll tell you, I have to apply to myself that which I suggest to you readers.

Market research works. It gives you the blueprint needed to market anything. I’m going to end with a success story of one of our clients, who did what we recommended. Market research, and then design and copy based on that. Here’s what happened:

Advocate Auto Claims
Advocate Auto Claims had experience in their industry of recovering money from insurance companies when a vehicle had diminished in value as a result of an accident. However, their experience was exclusively through businesses and fleet owners and had not offered this directly to consumers.

When they contacted us, they had very tight timelines in which to get a new company that was geared directly to consumers up and operational.

We did extensive online competition research, set up a Google Adwords campaign including keywords and ads, created a corporate website and a lead generation page. Additionally, we did a survey of general consumers and found information that was critical but not known by AAC as they had never worked directly with consumers. All of this was done in under three weeks.

With survey results in hand, copy changes were done so that consumer objections were directly handled at the start. After completing a final quality control process for both the site and the lead page, we turned on the campaign and started driving traffic to the lead generation page using Google Adwords.

The campaign went live on April 18 in a few, local test markets. By April 21, the campaign had already generated $20K in contracts and more in the pipeline. They are experiencing a 10.8% conversion rate of clicks to leads with a cost per conversion less than $35.

Needless to say, the client is overjoyed with the results and is opening up the marketing area as well as increasing the budget.

Anyway, that’s it for this week.

Thanks for reading.

Best,

Laura Betterly

President

Yada Yada Marketing, Inc.

www.yadayadamarketing.com

727-442-5888

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