Push or Pull?

With SEO initiatives trying to wrestle with the ubiquity of search engine dominance in our daily quest for information… it turns out that if you really want to succeed in promoting and selling products online, you need both push and pull strategies in place before you launch.

OK, sure, social networking technologies have raised the bar even further so that pull strategies are no longer an option… they are a must have for online marketing success. So, let’s start with some brief definitions and then move into a few suggestions.

Marketing theory distinguishes between two main kinds of promotional strategy – “push” and “pull”.

Push marketing is where you develop advertising and promotional strategies geared toward your marketing and distribution channels to entice them into promoting your product. As consumers, we rarely see this type of marketing because it is directed to the importers and distributors. It might include wholesale discounts, kickbacks, bonuses, and other types of support. It’s all designed to have the retailer promote your product to the end users instead of promoting a different or competing product.

Pull marketing on the other hand is when you develop advertising and promotional strategies that are meant to entice the prospect to buy your product or service. Some classic examples are Sales Events such as “bring in this coupon to save 25%” or “buy two get one free” etc. With pull marketing, you are trying to create a sense of increased, time limited value so that the Customer will come into your store to buy something today. When companies encourage happy Customers to spread the word to their friends and families – that’s a type of pull marketing also known as referrals or word of mouth (WOM) marketing. When companies produce ads that are controversial, edgy or downright shocking, they create a ‘buzz’ – and that’s another type of pull marketing. The ad pulls prospects into the distribution channel and if done well – right into the retailer’s arms.

It can be inferred from the above descriptions that Push is generally used by larger organizations with minimal if any direct contact with consumers (thus B2B) and Pull is preferred by the retailer (B2C) who deals directly with consumers and needs more sales this week. As technology provides increased and direct access to the consumer – larger organizations are starting to see the light – they too want to own a piece of the consumer’s attention.

Until recently, TV was the medium of choice for launching pull campaigns but the costs are high and the metrics are delayed so success can only be measured months later – much too late to change tack. Most large firms lack experience in communicating with consumers online and given their sloth like execution speed, achieving success with cost effective pull strategies can quite a challenge.

Online, this is a different story as long as the pull strategy is process based, systematized and supported by a team of experienced online marketers. Yes… online, large firms can help foster communities, create buzz, influence the winds of change and even view the success metrics of a pull campaign in close to real time.

The questions are:
Are large firms ready for real-time interaction?
Are they able to read the metrics, see the wind changing and then tack in time to catch the next breeze?
or do they still wish to act like supertankers heading toward the same destination with no regard for wind and weather?

Let’s dig a bit deeper… before responding.

Push

A “push” promotional strategy makes use of a company’s sales force and trade promotion activities to create consumer demand for a product. Typically this involves a reasonable investment in materials to get things rolling and placed in the right hands for maximum effect along the chain of distribution. The producer’s cost for push campaigns is often complemented by wholesaler’s and retailer’s advertising campaigns that are used regularly to drive traffic and leads into their shops.

Following the distribution chain, the producer promotes the product to wholesalers, the wholesalers promote it to retailers, and the retailers promote it to consumers.

A good example of “push” selling is mobile phones, where the major handset manufacturers such as Sony Ericsson and Nokia promote their products via retailers such as Carphone Warehouse. Personal selling and trade promotions are often the most effective promotional tools for companies like these – for example offering subsidies on the handsets to encourage retailers to sell higher volumes.

A “push” strategy tries to sell directly to the consumer, bypassing other distribution channels. With this type of strategy, consumer promotions and advertising are the most likely promotional tools.

Pull

A “pull” selling strategy is one that requires high spending on advertising and consumer promotion to build up demand for a product.

If the strategy is successful, consumers will ask their retailers for the product, the retailers will ask the wholesalers, and the wholesalers will ask the producers.

A good example of an effective (but expensive) pull strategy is the intense advertising and promotion of fast food restaurants and also kiddie toys – mostly on TV. Fast food restaurants often use children’s toys as a hook in order to target the primary influencer (the child) and insert desire into this very vocal and assertive segment of the population. Parents find it very challenging to resist visiting the restaurant that their child talks (and often sings) about day after day and hour after hour.

Thus, in this example, the producer creates demand using a loss leader to lure their target into the retail shops. Ten years of research has revealed that the more memorable and emotional the promotion is – the better the ROI.

In the online world, there are many different ways to create demand including leveraging social networks, viral tactics, videos, mobile phones, software applications and utilities like Twitter and community forums. The online difference is that the internet is quite transparent to feedback (both positive and negative). Marketers need to be aware of and plan for damage control to minimize the impact that potentially disruptive individuals can have on their pull campaigns.

Sure, you can filter out negative comments and such but, with social networking… the consumer really has a voice in this medium and the marketer’s task is often to convert the negative input into something more neutral should it occur while driving more and more traffic toward the core promotional message and thus the distribution channel.

Over-delivering on promises and flooding the media with video testimonials has helped many of our Clients overcome undesirable input by drowning out the noise of negative feedback or converting it into something more positive and constructive.

The focus of an effective online pull promotion is to create consumer demand for a reasonable cost and have consumers pull the product into a given online or OFFLINE distribution channel.

With careful planning and best practices pull campaign success is easier to achieve today than ever before. Please feel free to contact us if you are interested in creating, launching or maintaining pull campaigns online. We have an entire library of process maps dedicated to serving our Clients with proven methods to achieve pull strategy success.

Did you know this about SEO?

Here are a few facts that most people don’t know about Ranking their sites in the Search Engines:

1 – Any Page that you make and publish creates Google Page Rank that is greater than ZERO.

This violates the 1st Law of Thermodynamics
“Matter (Page Rank) is neither created nor destroyed”.

Google doesn’t care. Every time you publish a web page and it gets crawled, it gets assigned Page Rank just for existing.

That means that the more legitimate, non-duplicate pages you have on your site, the more you can affect your OWN rankings with internal links!

2 – Duplicate Content “OFF-SITE” is practically irrelevant.

“ON-SITE” Duplicate Content will kill your rankings.

3 – Your Web Page Template (Navigation Links, Footer Content, Side Bar Content) counts in the Duplicate Content calculation.

That means if your Web Page Template’s content has 200 words, and the rest of the content on your page is 50 words, you probably have Duplicate content issues.

4 – The Google Cache Date of any web page can indicate the relative power of the links on that page.

The more CURRENT (Fresher) Google’s Cache date of a web page is, the more likely that the links on that page are getting counted. If the page cache is CONSTANTLY getting updated, that’s a pretty strong sign that the links are getting counted MORE than a page where the cache date is OLD.

Want to optimize your site for the search engines so that you improve your position and ranking?
Then let us know about your needs by clicking here

Meetings don’t have to Waste Our Time

In order to make sure that your meetings are both effective and efficient, here are a few suggestions that have worked well.

1. Create and distribute an agenda in advance and be sure that the meeting’s objectives are clearly stated.

2. Begin on time, end on time and stay focused to accomplish your goals.

3. Increase retention by eliminating distractions – require that email and other forms of text messaging be turned off during the meeting and do not tolerate distractions caused by mobile phones – simply turn them off and use voice mail.

4. Respect attendees time – If a person is only needed briefly – no need for them to sit through the entire session.

5. Accomplish the primary objective during the meeting’s allotted time.

6. Use technology. You have a phone, you have your agenda… set the phone to vibrate every 10 minutes so that you have a physical reminder that the meeting needs to move forward.

7. Have a person take notes and follow up with distributing the meeting protocol.

That’s it folks… it doesn’t get much easier than that.

email Policy

The Problem

E-mail typically takes too long to respond to which results in continuous inbox overflow for those who receive a lot of it.

Given that our Time and Attention (two of our most valuable assets) are finite, we strive to find a way of responding to email effectively while managing our projects and building success stories for our Clients.

One Interesting Solution

Treat all email responses as we would SMS text messages and use a fixed number of characters per response – instead of counting characters in our emails, we count sentences. In addition, we do not check email more than 4 times each day.

To increase productivity and deliver the results that our Clients expect from us, we now spend less time checking email and have adopted the policy that all email responses regardless of recipient or subject will be five sentences or less.

At BoxOnline, we believe that how you spend your time and attention says a lot about who you are.

Investing… When is it ‘the right time’?

I decided that NOW is the best time to invest…
and you can quote me on that one.

Hey, it beats the heck out of Clients calling to cancel projects because they decided to act like
blinded deer at night standing in front of a speeding truck full of ‘industrial disease’.

I don’t care what anyone says… now us the time to invest… if not in the markets, then in ourselves.

Get out there and learn something new.

shameless plug: we give exciting courses on how you can dramatically increase your sales even in slow markets – hack, we even back it up with proof from our Clients and a money back guarantee… are you brave enough to challenge yourself?

Features, Advantages and Benefits

Hey there,

Why is it that most people in business think that they are going to sell what they have by delivering a list of features along with a few reasons why someone should buy their product?

The truth is that there is a much deeper psychological process behind making a decision to buy something than most business people realize.

When selling to Consumers, the pitch must appeal to a buyer’s emotions or the sale is simply not going to take place. When selling B2B, keep in mind that the buyer is still a human being with needs and a strong desire to succeed – a benefits oriented approach has been proven to be more successful than any other technique we tested during the past 20 years.

If you’re ready to sell something, we are ready to help you create a winning pitch.

The first step is a bit of homework so grab a pencil and some paper and get ready to answer a few questions:

• Write down a list of your competitors and their websites
• Write down what they’re doing, what they’re offering etc.
• List their product’s benefits

Ahh, now we come to the core purpose of this article…

Do you know the difference between features, advantages and benefits?

A feature is what a product has. In essence, the core components of your product or service; sometimes referred to as the bells and whistles or buttons, knobs, levers, switches, format, platform etc.

An advantage is what the product does or how it performs against a competitive product. A vacuum for example, is a product that might have the advantage that it doesn’t need bags. Another advantage would be that it can clean the floor in a room without you being present. In a services business one advantage would be the number of years of experience you bring to the table or your level of certification. Some common advantages include words like fast, easy, simple, cheap and good.

A benefit is what a given feature means to your prospect in terms of emotions and passion. A true benefit goes really deep and says something about how it makes you feel – a really great benefit gets a consumer excited because it means something special to the buyer.

Here’s a good example. One of my Clients sells a facial cream online and she called it something like, microderm abrasion emulsion – essentially it is a cream that helps reduce wrinkles.

On her website she listed several features such as ‘it reduces wrinkles’, ‘it comes in an easy to use home care kit’, ‘it is pH balanced’ etc etc etc.

When she came to me to help increase sales, conversions and traffic… I asked her to:
Take a piece of paper and create three columns.
List as many features as you can in the first column.
In the second column, list what you believe are the top benefits.
She wrote down ‘because it reduces wrinkles, it makes you look younger’ and ‘because it comes in a home care kit, it is easy to use at home’ and the third one was ‘because it is pH balanced, it’s gentle on your skin’.

As politely as possible I let her know that those are really advantages not benefits so we continued the exercise and I asked her to list in the third column what she felt the ultimate end result for her Customer was going to be – in other words, ‘the ultimate benefit’.

Here is what she wrote:
‘If it makes you look younger: then it means you’ll be more attractive, you’ll get that promotion at work, you’ll feel more confident, nobody will know your true age, you’ll fall in love all over again and you’ll be able to attract that person you’ve had your eye on.’

‘Since it’s easy to use at home: you won’t suffer embarrassment by going to a doctor’s office, you don’t have to waste time, it’s like a face lift in a jar in the comfort and privacy of your own home.’

‘Since it’s gentle on your skin: there are no risks, no pain, no healing periods like surgery or those harsh chemical peels people usually buy.’

We had arrived…
These were descriptions of how Customers would feel before, during and after they used the product.

In a very short time she was able to list several of the true benefits her product offers to her Customers. She took this piece of paper and changed her website to reflect the benefits. She also adapted every piece of marketing material including all advertising (online and offline), all landing pages, sales letters and Customer communications and within 2 months her sales doubled. One month later sales doubled again. Then she adapted the packaging to reflect the new text and sales doubled again. Sure we did some work on conversions and 6 months later, she was not able to buy as much traffic as she wanted – not even from Google ,Yahoo and MSN combined… Folks, this stuff really works! I’ll let you guess if I am referring to the creme or the marketing process here.

Remember, real benefits go deep. They live within the emotional and passionate sweet spot of the person wanting or using your product. In order to increase your sales you will need to tap into that sweet spot and then use the real benefits in everything you produce to help sell the product.

What is Lateral Thinking and Do I Need It?

Two of the services we frequently use with our Clients are Idea Generation and Problem Solving. We approach both challenges with very different, process oriented methods but there is one thing that remains constant – Our ability to think laterally and come up with novel concepts by looking at situations in new and different ways. Many of our Clients are so deeply involved in an issue such as their daily business that they find it hard to change perspective and see things from an alternative angle. This is where we come in… we tend to see things that are ‘outside the box’.

Vertical thinking, also known as logical thinking, takes an idea and carries it forward. Lateral thinking, on the other hand, provokes fresh ideas and essentially changes the frame of reference in almost any situation. Vertical thinking tries to overcome problems by dealing with them head-on, lateral thinking attempts to bypass obstacles using a variety of different approaches.

In essence, Lateral thinking is a tool that helps us change our way of thinking about something often by modifying our perceptions.

With logical thinking you start out with certain given components and boundaries wrapped in a process. This is similar to the situation in chesswhere you start out with specific pieces and are expected to play by the rules. The issue is that in most real life situations, we can not use the chess model or logical thinking to solve problems because you don’t know what the pieces are, what they represent or how many pieces actually exist… knowing the rules is almost irrelevant to solving a problem or generating new ideas.

Throughout our lives we are handed several different rulebooks (cultural, social, business oriented etc). When we get these rulebooks we just assume that the components that the rulebooks refer to, simply exist and we tend to accept that certain boundaries and limitations are present because they were mentioned in the rulebook. Lateral thinking throws out the rules and assumptions as well as the boundaries and limitations so that we are free of our social, cultural, geographic and demographic bonds.

Lateral thinking focuses on changing some element to enable a new and fresh perspective of a given situation. Lateral thinking deals primarily with perception. By using lateral thinking techniques we can organize the external world into the pieces that we can then process. Perhaps more importantly, by observing lateral thinking in others we can generate new ideas and better understand how they perceive the world around them.

The brain is a self-organizing information system that forms asymmetric patterns. In such systems there is a mathematical need for moving across patterns. The tools and processes of lateral thinking are designed to achieve such lateral movement to accomplish a given result.

A famous person once said that you can’t dig a hole in a different place by digging the same hole deeper. Think about that for a moment… If you were driving in a car on the highway but your intended destination is behind you, driving faster while keeping the car on the same heading will not get you to your intended destination.

If you were to continue thinking about a problem or a solution in a given way, this may not be as useful as changing tact and trying something completely different. Additional effort in the same direction will not necessarily help you get the results you were after but applying some proven tools designed to turn the car around, may offer you options that you never knew existed. It’s a format of thinking ‘out of the box’ and our Clients believe that we are very good at it. It may be because we do it frequently.

If you have a challenging problem or need some new ideas, please, fill out our form and allow us to get in touch with you today.

Is Identity Theft a Real Threat?

Friends, this article is serious. Based on a study conducted by Paypal in 2008, Internet users in the UK are much more likely to be victims of identity theft than their peers in both Europe and the USA.

The recent survey by PayPal and Ipsos Research of 6,000 online shoppers in 6 countries revealed that 14% of respondents in the UK admitted that they have had their identities stolen online. This can be compared with only 3% in Germany. More than half of respondents said that they used personal dates and names as passwords, making it relatively easy for hackers to gain access to accounts through manual efforts of trial and error. The French are particularly bold – two-thirds of the respondents claimed to use easily guessed passwords such as birthdays and telephone numbers but the icing on the cake was that over 80% of the French post this sort of personal data on social-networking sites. Unfortunately, the hackers enjoy trolling the very same social media sites too.

The article did not reveal how users could protect themselves so, in an effort to provide some form of public service… here are my recommendations:
1) Do NOT reveal detailed personal information on a public internet site such as myspace, facebook etc
2) If you have already ignored recommendation number one, check all of your passwords and ensure that they are at least 10 digits long and that they contain a combination of uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers and symbols such as # $ % ( ^ ) etc.
3) a strong password is something like RtY7f*e#2U and a weak password is something like 041277. To check the strength of your passwords, try using the Password Meter – you can even download it to increase your security based on what I am about to reveal to you in the next recommendation.
4) You may have already inadvertently downloaded some sort of spyware that is recording what you type and then transmitting the result to a hacker, a hacking community or an online thief. If you are running Microsoft windows without anti-virus or firewall protection, you might as well raise the white flag and surrender today. Even with both anti-virus software and a leading firewall installed, if you were teased into clicking on some sort of advertisement that downloads a file or more to your computer, chances are reasonable to good that your machine has been infected. One last comment on this topic before we move on – many people have a free version of an anti-virus software installed and they somehow manage to forget to update it regularly thus leaving their machine susceptible to attack. Solution… get a Macintosh and don’t click on links that promise ‘free porn’ or music downloads. For the paranoid among us, add anti-virus software to your Mac and then get back to work
5) Change your password regularly. Do not keep the same password for more than 60 days
6) Create a secure place to store all your passwords and keep them protected with encryption. Put them somewhere safe but easily accessible. My suggestion is to create a secure email account and use their document repository service to give you access from any location. Here is a leading secure email service that offers a free secure email address.
7) Review ALL of your passwords for online banking, email, secure web sites etc and change the password to something stronger today.

enough said, now let’s get back to our regularly scheduled broadcast ;-)

A Financial Maverick @ Work

Once upon a time in a jungle village not so far away, a man appeared and announced to the villagers that he would buy live and healthy monkeys for $10 each.

Since the villagers considered the monkeys a real nuisance, many of them went into the jungle and began setting traps to catch them. The man bought thousands of monkeys at $10 and, as supply started to diminish, the villagers reduced their efforts. When this happened, the man announced that he would now buy monkeys at $20 each.

This reinvigorated the villagers efforts and they started trapping monkeys again. Gradually the number of free monkeys diminished even further making hunting efforts much more challenging and time consuming – people started going back to their farms. The offer was increased to $25 each, until it was difficult to find even a single monkey, let alone catch it!

The man then announced that he would buy monkeys at $50 each! However, since he had to go to the city on some business, his assistant would now buy on his behalf. As soon as the man was off on his journey, the assistant let the villagers in on a secret. He invited all the hunters and their relatives to have a look at the monkeys in the big cage that the man had paid for. And then he made them an offer that they simply could not refuse.

“I will sell them to you for $35 and when the man returns from the city, you can sell them to him for $50 each as he promised.”

The word spread like wild fire and before long, most of the villagers gathered their savings and managed to buy every single monkey held captive in the massive cage before releasing them into the jungle so that the hunt could begin anew.

They never saw the man nor his assistant again.

In the above article the names were changed to protect the innocent. The ‘financially sound’ structured products were represented by monkeys in the story but the facts remain the same; this was no accidental occurrence it was simply a version of the now popular Ponzi game. You probably already know this but, a ponzi scheme is a scam where the perpetrator collects money from new investors and uses these new cash inflows to pay high returns to past investors, so that these influencial existing investors believe that their capital is intact and working for them. All the while, the scam artist has been spending the initial capital on himself rather than investing it as advertised. To attract a special breed of greedy investor, such schemes often are promoted as exclusive clubs as in ‘by invitation only’ thus toying with the wealthy and famous have-it-alls psyche to the point where they absolutely must be part of this exclusive ‘winners circle’ in order to maintain their image.

What Exactly is Marketing?

Marketing is: The science of finding prospects and turning them into profitable Customers for your business. Let’s have a look at the 3 core elements in this statement:
– Science:
When I use the word ‘science’ here, I am referring to the methods and approaches that have been carefully tested and refined over time that deliver successful results. In marketing, doing things right incorporates metrics to measure results, testing to understand what works best and ROI accountability to know what elements and methods deliver a better return over time.

Here at BoxOnline we have been testing and retesting hundreds of approaches since our launch in 1999. We have followed the scientific method to eliminate all sorts of approaches that do not work well. We have also identified a few amazingly good approaches that seem to deliver exactly what our Client’s want time and time again. These sort of methods are what we refer to as proven methods. Today, we only offer proven methods to our Clients.

– Finding Prospects:
We often start by building a profile of your prospect(s) so that when your sales message reaches one, it connects with them and they find your offer irresistible. If we did not do this, the sales message would likely fall on deaf ears.

– Turning them into profitable Customers:
Our objective is to persuade prospects to act in a measurable way. We want to be able to measure our performance and know how well a given approach is working and what the difference is after a change has been made to a campaign.

Our marketing formula is based on something that has been dubbed the Business Friendship Model.

Consider how people make friends. The actual process is:
1) Get someone’s attention
2) Connect with them based on a common theme
3) Emotionally commit to do something with each other in the future
4) Act on the commitment by getting together again or doing something thoughtful for them such as buying a gift.

Often a business owner wants his business to appear larger and mightier than it actually is and thus they try to create an image of being a large corporate firm. We rarely support this sort of thinking because our experience has shown that when you try to behave like a big company, you de-personalize your relationship with prospects. In our research, small businesses grew faster when they were fueled by relationships rather than by expensive image campaigns.

So, what does a business typically do when they want to build a relationship with a new prospect?
1) Run Ads to get their attention
2) Relate to the prospect in the Ad
3) Get prospect to respond and commit emotionally
4) Get prospects to act

Well, Consumers don’t necessarily want to follow this process because they have needs of their own and based on our experience here is what prospects actually want:
1) that you, (the business) pay attention to them
2) that you, want to connect with them
3) that you, want to make a commitment to help them
4) that you, want to act on that commitment and are ready to deliver a desirable result to them

Does this make sense to you? If you are able to think like a prospect, it should. If it doesn’t, let us know… We’d love to hear your opinion – especially if you have a product to sell.