Category: Managed Services

Let’s pretend we run a B2B website where management is not certain about the Return On Investment (ROI) from Internet marketing. One way to protect your company’s investment and build support for your marketing is create daily Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Instead of explaining Daily KPIs step by laborious step I’m going to toss us into the deep end of the pool and explain how to swim.

Here is the deep end of the pool:

You may want to Zoom in since I couldn’t make the type larger and not have the page take forever to load (an SEO sin). Daily KPI numbers are divided into:

• Building Blocks – Base numbers such as unique visitors and visits that feed other important calculations.
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• Stickiness – Measures critical website “heuristic” measures, or how the site is being used and liked (or not).
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• Conversion – Is the website doing what you want it to do. Note I assigned a $2,400 value to each conversion based on internal numbers. The value of your conversion may very.
  . 

Daily KPIs: Building Blocks

Date & Day
When comparing Yesterday to the Same Day Last Year including date and day helps. Most B2B websites go to sleep over the weekend. Knowing what day your comparison is comparing against is valuable. In the example above we would expect Monday’s numbers to beat a Saturday.

Uniques
Unique traffic to your website created by planting a “cookie” (little piece of code on a visitors computer). A person can only be “unique” once. There is a “cookie erase” controversy. People who erase cookies can appear as a “unique” visitor twice. Don’t sweat a detail that fine BECAUSE it is true across your model.

Web analytics are NOT a search for absolute mathematical truth. Web analytics are a search for marketing truth. We create models to find Internet marketing truth. In our Internet marketing models consistency trumps absolute accuracy. Don’t trip over million dollar bills to pick up nickels.

% – The % gain or loss vs same day last year.

Visits – How many visits were made to the website. Visits will always exceed uniques because some visitors visit more than once.

Pageviews – Aggregate of pages served for the period (in this case for a single day).

Daily KPIs: Stickiness

Stickiness is how well your website engages visitors. Stickiness metrics are sometimes called “heuristic” measurements. Heuristic measures are beyond important after Google’s Panda and Penguin algorithm changes. Google’s changes place high value on engagement. Website engagement is measured by heuristics.

Visits per Visitor – Calculation: total visits / uniques.
Sometimes called “repeat visits” or “repeat visitors” this metrics tells you how often visitors return to your website. You want this number to go UP and it will do so very slowly over time if your engagement metrics improve. In our example Visits per Visitor is down slightly from 1.14 last year to 1.10. Not down so much that I would panic, but worth watching as we expand out to weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly numbers.

Pages Per Unique Visitor – Calculation: Pageviews / Uniques.
Pages divided by unique traffic provides a sense of if each unique visitor is engaged MORE or LESS. You want this number to go UP. This is a “nice to have” metric that confirms other metrics, so I don’t calculate a % to see a trend here. I can get the trend from other more important metrics such as Visits per Visitor, Pages and Time.

Pages
Comes from Google analytics on the Audience – Overview page. Number is pages viewed per average visitor with repeat pages counted. This means if a visitor travels down a menu and returns to the homepage the homepage is counted twice. There is a ratio between pages and time. Average pages per visit in the 3 to 6 range is good. Anything above 6, remember these are AVERAGES, is astronomical. This metric moves SLOWLY. You want to watch its trend over time and hope that your number is moving UP.

%YoY – Since Pages is a major “trending” heuristic it is a good idea to divide current by past to see how you are doing.

Time (seconds)
I convert Google’s minutes on our website to seconds for ease of math purposes. This is another major trending metric especially after Panda and Penguin, so divide current by past.

Bounce Rate
Google wants your website to be sticky, so you want bounce rate to trend DOWN. Bounce rates in the sixties are not uncommon. A bounce rate below 50% may mean your don’t have enough traffic visiting your website. Bounce rate exposes the two sides of web metrics. You want your metrics to IMPROVE, but improve too much and something is WRONG (lol). Welcome to Internet marketing.

Daily KPIs: Conversion

I can’t know your “conversion” points, but they are always “triggered” events. You want visitors to take some action such as: subscribe to your email list, fill out a form, request a call. These actions are “conversions” and can be tracked in Google Analytics as “Goals”. Goto  the Conversions – Goals – Overview tab. This will show a summary of the goals you’ve created off of triggered events (clicks = a “triggered event”).

Goal 1 – 3 – These are goals we’ve defined.

Total – Summary of the defined goals.

Conversion Rate – Calculation: Total Conversion / Visits. Use visits not unique because every visit can produce a conversion.

Value
Value of a conversion * total conversions (a simple way to create “value” is take gross sales last year and divide by conversions). I realize such a fuzzy metric will make some financial types nervous. Value COULD BE ANYTHING. Since we don’t care as much about accuracy as consistency, the TREND of value is more important to Internet marketing than its “dollars to the bank” accuracy. Yes some websites will have the financial acumen to figure the model to 10 digits of Pi. I could care less and would argue such absurd uses of time end up costing money instead of making it. Slap a value on your conversions and then trend it over time. You can debate the CFO on how accurate you are later.

Daily KPIs Example Conclusions (the green and red boxes)

A single day evaluated by itself doesn’t say much. The discipline of looking at KPIs daily is what creates insight. On balance May 6th looks good. Uniques were up, Visits Per Visitor was down and that deserve a “watch”, more people visiting looked at more pages and spent a lot more TIME so we didn’t sacrifice heuristics to bring in more traffic.

We are comparing a Monday to a Saturday and such a comparison is almost useless in a B2B website.  I would connect to weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly KPIs to know if the “watch” on Visits Per Visitor is an alarm or an anomaly.  Since I brought up connecting to weekly KPIs let’s dive a little deeper into our KPI pool and look at Weekly KPIs:

Week over Week Analysis

Does our “watch” on Visits Per Visitor need a “deep dive” to figure out what is going on? Probably not based on comparing a week in April / May to the same week last year. We see an average of 1.12 for Visits Per Visitor and we know this metric moves SLOWLY and in tiny increments, so our single day 1.10 isn’t so dramatic as to call for a deep dive.

In the weekly data our unique traffic is down by 17%. I know the source of the difference. We had a promotion last year we didn’t repeat this year. I don’t panic about unique traffic UNLESS other numbers are trending down too. Use numbers like Pages Per Unique Visitor to know if your website’s engagement is UP even as its traffic is DOWN.

The other reason I wouldn’t panic is this year we converted at 2.42% vs. 1.40% last year banking $163,000 to $16,800, a 871% improvement. That number is TOO GOOD, but again I know the source. I added a goal that wasn’t in last year, so if I wanted a strict apples to apples comparison I would model OUT the difference.

Keep good Notes

I am the WORST person to tell you to keep good notes (lol). If I get hit by a car there will be no note about our Curation Contest or my addition of goals. Since metrics extend over time keeping good notes about daily anomalies or special circumstances will prove helpful when you look back and forget what you or what happened last year. If your site goes down for more than a burp, NOTE IT or you may spend days trying to discover why your daily KPIs are so messed up.

Spreadsheets & Discipline

Wish there was some way to create a daily KPI log OTHER than Excel. If there is one I don’t know it. If you know of a better, less manual way please share in a comment. When I managed $6M in annual e-commerce revenue I checked daily KPIs first thing in the morning. 99% of the time daily KPIs are IN LINE with your modeled expectations. When your KPIs are in line go about your job.

1% of the time your KPIs will trend way out of line with your modeled expectations.

NEVER ignore those days. In a modeled world like the web any variation beyond a half a point of standard deviation (give or take your metrics) deserves a quick review. When you see a full point or two of standard deviation difference then you should close your door and say, “DIVE, DIVE, DIVE” because something bad is happening.

Your website is ON FIRE and it is your job to put it out.

One scary story to sink the point. One October my team found a full 3 point POSITIVE visitor number. We modeled at X and the number we got was 3 full percentage points higher WITHOUT a corresponding increase in the number of conversions. We had substantially more traffic acting like substantially LESS traffic.

We were under a “spam attack” from a competitor.

Spam attacks are when competitors hire proxies to bomb your website with “bad neighborhood” links. The result of such a “spam bomb” is a momentary increase in traffic and then a Google smackdown as your website is labeled “spammer”. We saw the source and reported the links. Now you can use a “disavow” command if you know what you are doing.

The point to my scary story is know your model.

Any movement beyond your modeled expectations should be investigated. Dramatic movements mean your website is on fire and you must put it out before it burns to the ground. Will your website be attacked as the one I managed was? Attacks are increasing and from strange sources, so watch your Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly and Yearly KPIs like a hawk on a wire looking for dinner and remember to “stay calm and carry on”.

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The Lean Content Movement

I created Anatomy of Great Ecom for one of my content marketing websites a few days ago (image below). I approached the post with the Lean Content Movement in Mind. Scoop.it’s CEO Guillaume Decugis, Founder Marc Rougier and the team at Scoop.it, a curation tool I love, and their team is  pioneering the Lean Content Movement.

Show don’t tell may be a good summary of the Lean Content Movement. Marketing influenced by MOBILE is MORE visual no. If your visuals aren’t cool and arresting no one reads the words or watches the video. Emerging content marketing ideas are forming into best practices for our new Lean Content Movement.

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Lean Content Movement Ideas
* Show don’t tell.
* Play for shares.
* Create Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that make shares more likely.
* Everything promotes more or less shares, there is no neutral in content marketing.
* Content is money, but not all content is equal.
* Create movements not campaigns.

If you think a list like this would be better presented graphically you are thinking like a lean content marketer.

If I had the graphic skills necessary I would have formed the Lean Content Movement Ideas list into a graphic. My inability to do so brings up another aspect to the Lean Content Movement – it takes TIME and the right team. If you don’t have a great graphic designer on your content team, one who can work FAST, then your content marketing team isn’t ready for the Lean Content Movement.

How Anatomy of Great Ecom content aligns with Lean Content Movement:
* Led with WordPress Gallery.
* Told the story in 3 visuals FIRST.
* Wrote the content after leading by telling the story visually.
* Used “web writing” guidelines for the words (short sentences, small paragraphs, big headers and bullet points for scanners).
* Anatomy of E-commerce fits in New E-Commerce Movement.

 

Movements Not Campaigns

TIME and COMMITMENT are the differences between campaigns and movements. Create Movements To Sell Campaigns is a ScentTrail Marketing post touching on how to create an umbrella idea, a “movement” that creates cohesion binding all other ideas together in a meaningful core.  If you sell B2B and B2C web and software development as we do at Atlantic BT, you could create movements for:

• The New E-commerce.
• Mobile Revolution.
• Hyper-Local marketing.
• Visual Marketing Movement.
• Content Marketing Movement.

Presence or absence of Blue Oceans may be the tactical reason you choose one “movement” over the other.

Blue Oceans, taken from the book Blue Ocean Strategies by Kim, are pockets of new value you create to swim in an ocean not yet infested with sharks, not turned red from zero-sum competition. Cirque du Soleil is a favorite example of a Blue Ocean strategy. Cirque du Soleil redefined “circus” stripping away COSTS (animals and travel) and leaving storytelling and acrobatics. Genius Blue Ocean strategy.

Lean Content feels like a Blue Ocean.

Karen Dietz, one of my favorite storytelling tutors and founder of JustStoryIt.com, says he who tells the best story wins. I agree and would add the website that creates movements supported by lean content will WIN BIG in our emerging connected, social and mobile economy.

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Ten E-commerce Storytelling Tips

1. Be Quiet

2. Be Simple.

3. Craft A GREAT About Page.

4. Clear Calls To Action.

5. No Talking To Yourself About Yourself.

6. Connection Economy is about CONVERSATIONS, so have some.

7. Be Consistent, avoid telling conflicting stories.

8. Easy to find “like me” signals.

9. Be SPECIAL.

10. Save The World

Storytelling Is the New SEO

Storytelling is the New SEO hit such a nerve on Slideshare with almost 8,500 views in a couple of weeks including a brief stint on Slideshare’s homepage as a “trending” presentation (fun) following up and answering questions about how to tell stories on e-commerce websites feels like a good idea.

Telling Great Stories Is Important, Here’s Why

In 1999, when I crated FoundObjects.com (now RIP) ecommerce was so new and exciting you could rack the pins almost anyway you wanted. Any ball we rolled was sure to win. Not so much any more (lol).

Why is telling great stories beyond important on your e-commerce website? Google has always been “Pro Content”. Perhaps the easiest explanation for why storytelling is key is Google wants your website to engage and nothing “engages” better than great stories and storytelling.

Google’s Panda and Penguin algorithm updates put renewed emphasis on website heuristic measures.

Heuristic Measures Include:

• Time On Site.
• Pages viewed by an average visitor.
• Repeat visitors.
• Bounce rates.
• Mobile engagement (monitor heuristics for your mobile visitors too).

Regular Atlantic BT readers know I attribute making over $30M online in large part to doing what Google “told” my team and me to do. “Told” in this context is hinted in the strange black magic that Google SEO is, was and will be. I’ve fought Google and learned to ride their waves. Surfing Google is much more fun and profitable than fighting.

Ten Ecom Storytelling Tips

The rift between content and conversion is tough. As a Director of E-commerce we could increase engagement metrics with videos and other ideas, but conversion was hurt. We could increase conversion often damaging engagement. In the old days we lucky few ecom Internet marketers would have gladly made that trade – hurt engagement for money.

Our new social connection economy is backed by Google’s algorithm changes. Abandoning engagement for money is short-term unsustainable thinking, old thinking. Yes you can hurt engagement and increase conversion for a bit, but as your engagement metrics trend bad the whip comes back around.

Your website’s traffic slows as Google punishes lack of engagement. You can’t convert traffic you don’t get. E-commerce websites must balance conversion with engagement.

Storytelling is the key to balancing LOVE and MONEY on an e-commerce website.

E-commerce Storytelling Tip #1: Be Quiet – (ZipBuds.com)

“Quiet” in website design can be destroyed by the smallest error. Here is an example of site that could be “quiet” if it did one thing:

I’m not a fan of homepage hero images rolling, but most websites roll their heroes (“heroes” refers to the largest image on a webpage). Zipbuds.com rolls their hero WAY TOO FAST. Roll too fast and is the same as shouting, “PAY ATTENTION TO ME NOW”.

Zipbuds.com is within striking distance of “QUIET”.

Ecom Storytelling Tip #2: Be Simple (ZipBuds.com)

I was going to say, “Be simple AND clear,” but simple implies clarity. Let’s go back to Zipbuds.com and ask a simple question every website must answer in seconds, “What does Zipbuds.com want me to do NOW?”

Zipbuds.com is a good example of a website created by passionate people. Websites SHOULD be created by passionate people, but our new ecommerce also needs someone equally as passionate about conversion. Conversions protect engagement.

When visitors spin back off into space because they don’t know what to do Google gets MAD and your ecom website’s Karma takes a hit. Zipbuds.com is an ecom website that looks and acts like a B2B infomercial.

Your ecommerce site should SELL SOMETHING on its homepage even if that something is YOU. The closest ZipBuds.com comes is this image:

Love that Derrick is looking directly at the Shop Now Call To Action. (CTA). Do you see the problem? That great visual directing my eyes right into the Zipbuds  CTA is all but LOST due to its muted colors. CTAs should be big RED or ORANGE unmissable buttons. There are times to be QUIET on an eCom website. Call To Actions IS NEVER one of them (lol).

E-commerce teams remember your visitors eyes GO WHERE YOUR MODELS ARE LOOKING. Direct the people in your pictures  vision somewhere important. I also like having people looking directly out at viewers on homepages. When your models look AT your visitors your website engages and welcomes.

When you enter someone’s home they look at you, shake your hand and thank you for the wine your brought to dinner. When people in your image look out at your website’s viewers you are welcoming weary web travelers.

Never have people in pictures look OFF THE PAGE:

This view drives visitor vision OFF THE PAGE.

Ecom Storytelling Tip #3: Craft A Great About Page

Who would have thought the once lowly ABOUT page would become the key to telling great stories online. As I outlined in Storytelling Is The New SEO, your About Page is where you outline the three to five themes your ecommerce storytelling will return to over and over.

Common Ecommerce Themes (many stories can be told within each theme):

• Your Creation Story.
• Your Quality Story (make sure it is distinct and rooted in your creation story).
• Elicit Joy Story (* Stengel).
• Enable Connection (* Stengel).
• Promote Exploration Story (* Stengel).
• How your products or service provokes pride (* Stengel).
• Save The World Story (*Stengel).

The *Stengel notes refer to former P&G GMO’s book Grow: How Ideals Power Growth And Profits At The World’s Largest Companies. For a more detailed look at how to use Grow to align your Internet marketing read:

How Unique Greatness Meets Customer Aspirations.

Look at ZipBuds.com’s About Page:

Ironic that such a STORY RICH team doesn’t tell a story on the most important storytelling page on their website. There are strange links AWAY from their website. Where there should be a link to take advantage of that great Derrick view right down where a CTA should be there is NO link.  There are no explanations, no story at all. What a waste of great images.

And what a story they COULD tell. Great example of how About Pages became a chore, something people think about the least. If you want to tell me a story, and stories are the key to traffic and traffic is the key to money, then your website’s About Page should be your storytelling hub. Storytelling Is The New SEO covers two of my favorite About Pages (REI and Patagonia) in detail.

When Ten E-Commerce Storytelling Tips continues tomorrow I promise to pick on someone other than Zipbuds.com. Tomorrow we tackle the social side of e-commerce storytelling. ZipBuds.com is within striking distance of greatness. Like most websites a tweak here and there and Zipbuds.com makes millions.

The distance between creating sustainable engagement generating traffic, money and LOVE is inches. Sad to think how many websites are working hard to only miss by inches.

Tina Fey’s Master Class In Improvisation

Prior to this amazing and hilarious improvisation with James Lipton (video below) from the Actor’s Studio Tina Fey discussed her 2nd City Improv roots. As Fey shared “The Rules of Improvisation” they sounded like many of  “The Rules of Content Marketing”. Keep in mind we are writing these new “rules” of content marketing almost as I write this, but see if Tina’s Palin doesn’t make you laugh and cry at the same time.

The Rules of Improvisation

• Always Agree.
• Say Yes, AND…
• After the “and” add new information.
• Focus on the Here and Now.
• Establish the location.
• Be Specific, provide details.

Fey didn’t cover all of the rules of improvisation. She went one better by turning in a masterful improvisation as Sara Palin demonstrating nearly every “improv” rule:

Improv and Content Marketing

The best content marketing follows many of  David Alger’s First 10 Rules of Improvisation. Let’s examine a few of the most important similarities:

• Always Agree.
• Agree And (add information).
• Set time, place and location.
• Be specific.

Creating Agreement In Content Marketing

Even when your content is going to disagree don’t start that way. Sentiment is everything online. As an entrepreneur and Sales Director I’ve written hundreds of letters. I like to start a letter by finding something to thank the person receiving the letter for because thank you letters really do work. Creating content is similar. Content embarks on a journey.

Journeys are better started with a whistle and smile than an attack.

Don’t lay traps or be inauthentic, but find something about even an opposing argument to appreciate. Count the agreements in the opening of How Your Unique Greatness Meets Customer Aspiration:

Clutter Marketing

Clutter describes our marketing world these days. What author Seth Godin calls our Connection Economy is creating content so fast most of your customers are overwhelmed, time stressed and short on attention. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt noted we create as much content every two days now as from the dawn of man until 2003. The world is cluttered and becoming more so every moment. When everyone has a website yours better be GREAT or why bother.

The opening to Unique Greatness demonstrates how agreement with trusted sources creates trust.

My assertion of the need for greatness in web design is bolstered by agreeing with Seth Godin and bringing in one of my favorite quotes from Eric Schmidt. The need to create great websites sits on top of two powerful quotes. The assertion of the need for great web design is my “and”, the additional information moving the “improvisation” (content marketing) forward.

Telling Stories With Time and Location

A favorite storytelling technique is to set a sense of time and place immediately. “TIME” is not clock time, but a sense of OUR time, the time of our collective consciousness. Connection happens when we AGREE and feel we walk together on this PATH now. Path is a construct of distance and distance is another form of TIME.

Easier to demonstrate with another recent example from A Rocker, A Brand Doctor and GIVE and ASK at TED:

Magic at TED

It never ceases to amaze. During a serendipitous conversation withRed Maxwell, the Brand Doctor, he did it again. The last time, several years ago, we were having lunch discussing my obsession with altruism in marketing.

Red began to share broad stokes of, “An amazing guy I just had lunch with at TED”.  I realized he was describing one of the three legs of my new altruism stool – Michael Shermer author of Mind of the Market. The other two legs (at that time) were Robert Wright’s NonZero and Richard Dawkins The Selfish Gene (turns out the selfish gene isnot be as selfish as the title implies).

Today Red shared a great story about helping rocker Amanda Palmer. Red’s latest random share comes two days after I wrote a long a long post on Google Plus, a note to Amanda (below) and thanked my friend Phil Buckley (@1918) for sharing Amanda’s TED presentation on the ASK and the GIVE (embedded below).

This intro wanders more, but on purpose.

The piece is an intimate journey down a new street – the idea that those who have ASKED (we lucky few marketers) need to GIVE more now and vice versa. I’ve discovered, after writing more than half a million words on blogs such as this one, how new ideas are scary and don’t scale (get the shares, links and likes needed).

I’ve learned to use ideas from the Heath brothers highly recommended book Made To Stick.  Made To Stick teaches how to wrap The Radical inside of The Known to create acceptance.

The Rocker and Brand Doctor introduction sets place and time without saying, “It is TODAY and three o’clock”. “Place” can be a MENTAL place, a state of mind such as the agreement between Godin, Schmidt and me in the previous example. Don’t be literal. Be open to different kinds of openings based on the content you’re creating and the messages you want your story to deliver.

Always start with agreement and work your way on. Agreement means we are brothers and sisters working together. Agreement means your reader’s minds are OPEN and willing. Agreement starts a journey that can incorporate the most RADICAL ideas especially when wrapped in the Heath brothers STICKY CLOAK. Agreement sets Shakespeare’s stage and begins the covenant of conversion. Agreement rocks as Tiny Fey explained so hilariously to James Lipton.

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Raleigh SEO Meetup Twitter Study

If you’ve never attended Phil Buckley’s “most popular SEO meetup in the country” monthly meetup held on the last Tuesday of the month you are missing a great experience. You missed a GREAT event last night.

My friend Mark Traphagen (@Marktraphagen) did a great job live blogging. He also embedded the video from the Google Hangout. Phil’s SEO Meetup is going global virtually these days via Google Hangouts with amazing help from Meeting 3.0 pioneer Nikol Murphy’s company Talking Moose Media.

Tips From Content Marketing Ninjas – = Mark Traphagen’s Live Blog of Raleigh SEO Meetup 3.26

Content Marketing Is The New SEO Twitter Analysis

Great meetings start with awesome topics. Phil created a great one for his 3.26 Meetup – Content Marketing is the new SEO. I signed on to discuss how important Storytelling is to SEO these days due to Google’s angry insistence on always improving website heuristics such as time on site, pages viewed and number of returning visitors.

Amy Lewis (@CommsNinja) signed on to share how she gets engineers at Cisco excited to create content and Casie Gillette (@Casieg) shared amazing tips from her client work as Director of Marketing at KoMarketing.

Watch SEO Raleigh Meetup Google Hangout Video From 3.26

Twitter Analysis

Great event, great audience in the room and virtually via the hangout. I wanted to deep dive into the event’s Twitter patterns to see if some “best practice” guides could be unearthed and debated.

3 Raleigh SEO Twitter Graphs
I manually created a spreadsheet of the top tweeters from the event to answer 3 questions:

1. Who put the most “impressions” into the market for the event?
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2. How many tweets did top tweeters tweet?
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3. What per tweet characteristic did top tweeters share?
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Clutter Marketing

Clutter describes our marketing world these days. What author Seth Godin calls our Connection Economy is creating content so fast most of your customers are overwhelmed, time stressed and short on attention. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt noted we create as much content every two days now as from the dawn of man until 2003. The world is cluttered and becoming more so every moment. When everyone has a website yours better be GREAT or why bother.

What Makes A Website Great?

Think of the Internet as one huge lie detecting amplifier and you won’t be far off. The web doesn’t create greatness it rewards it. The web doesn’t cure marketing problems it broadcasts them. Before creating a website or next quarter’s campaigns it is  important to know yourself, your company and your important points of distinction – your Unique Selling Proposition.

Unique Selling Proposition Video

Here is an Atlantic BT Conversation I had with Andrew Bartlett one of our business consultants about Unique Selling Propositions:

USPs should use words such as “longest”, “world class”, “leader” and “Best” painting a clear line of distinction between your company and its competitive set.

Atlantic BT Unique Selling Proposition (USP)
Atlantic BT creates cross functional teams with deep business and technical expertise to design, develop and employ unique technological processes such as Customer Quality Score (CQS), Employee Quality Score (EQS) and GoTime to develop awesome and award winning software and websites that exceed customer financial and aspirational goals helping clients save the world in some quantifiable way while creating a powerful “word-of-mouth” recommendation growth engine.

Quick Tips To Create Your USP

• Be specific (note the reference to CQS, EQS and GoTime our project time audit trail).
• Think BIG.
• Include your customers.
• Think bottom lines, but don’t be limited to money.
• Leave some mystery to explain later (such as the double meaning of the “word-of-mouth” engine).

Unique Customer Aspirations (UCAs)

Knowing yourself, while an important first step to creating great Internet marketing, is not enough. Your marketing must match your customer’s aspirations or you risk being ships who pass each other at night without ever knowing the other sails nearby. Customer aspirations are more than the resolution of pain points partnering with or buying from your company is sure to resolve.

Aspirations speak to your customers dreams, hopes and fears. Your customer are not always fully in touch with their aspirations, but you and your marketing must be in sync. Every partnership or union of buyer and seller must be mutually beneficial or scale can’t be achieved and the interaction isn’t sustainable. You both (your company and your customers) need to WIN or neither of you do.

Start With Jim Stengel’s Brand Ideals

Jim Stengel, author of Grow: How Ideals Power Growth and Profits at the World’s Greatest Companies and a fellow former P&Ger, believes brands aligned to “ideals” are more successful than those who are not. I agree and have used Stengel’s simple brand ideals definition over and over.
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Stengel’s Brand Ideals

• Eliciting Joy: Activating experiences of happiness, wonder, and limitless possibility.
• Enabling Connection: Enhancing the ability of people to connect with each other and the world in meaningful ways.
• Inspiring Exploration: Helping people explore new horizons and new experiences.
• Evoking Pride: Giving people increased confidence, strength, security, and vitality.
• Impacting Society: Affecting society broadly, including by challenging the status quo and redefining categories.

Most companies work will touch several of Stengel’s brand ideals. Atlantic BT’s work designing software and websites touches every brand ideal in some way, but our work is concentrated in creating connection. The websites and software we develop helps our customers connect with  supporters, buyers and advocates.

Atlantic BT Unique Customer Aspirations (UCA)
Atlantic BT’s customers want to understand the “inside baseball” secrets of Internet marketing well enough to be able to expand their thinking about how to communicate their Unique Selling Proposition to create the word-of-mouth and social support needed to sustain an ever more profitable company, brand or distribution of products via online marketing.

Quick Tips for Creating Unique Customer Aspirations

• Remember UCAs is about how your customers are changed by your interaction.
• Speak to universal concerns such as scale, profitability and brand health.
• Speak to what is happening now such as social media marketing and always changing Internet marketing.
• Tie in your Stengel brand ideal.
• Be specific to what YOU can impact.

Your customers have many aspirations, but focus your UCA on those aspirations you can impact. Knowing how your company aligns to Stengel’s brand ideas, articulating your USP and UCA creates an outline for great marketing online and off.

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* Image at top of this post is a painting from Shepard Fairey named Duality of Humanity and is part of his “Obey” series.