To Do List for 2010
A New Set of To Dos
I was looking at my daily to do list this morning and wondered if I was focused on the right things with the time available over the next few weeks. We've had great top line growth in 2009 and are looking even more in 2010. But, we also need to concentrate a bit more on the bottom line by spending judiciously and carefully on projects with solid ROIs.
The areas of our business where I spend the most time are Marketing, Sales and Finance. The financial side of our business is pretty stable and under control. As always, the marketing and sales side seem the most "needy". Here's some of the conclusions I reached in thinking about the sales and marketing projects that may be most able to help our business grow in 2010.
I've broken the projects into: Search Marketing, Print Advertising, Social Media, Website Design & Development, Product Feeds, Email Marketing, and Product Strategy. There's a very short comment on each relative to lessons learned from this year. This may help get some of you thinking about how these areas will impact your business next year.
Search Marketing
- Will need to monitor impact of Google Caffeine as it rolls out after the holidays and adjust SEO strategies if necessary.
- We're seeing a big growth in Bing referrals and conversions. Seems to be coming out of Yahoo's share of search. Our SERPs are strong in Bing currently.
- PPC ads for us were HUGE this year on Google, Yahoo, and to a lesser degree MSN/Bing. We invested a LOT of time with new campaigns, keywords, and ads. Need to invest even more time monitoring and add even more. Need help.....can't do bid management effectively anymore without better tools.
- Need to target and grow more online ads in other networks like Facebook and content networks that attract crafters, jewelry makers and beaders. Facebook advertising experiments have proven profitable and certainly draw many clickthroughs.
- We need to do a better job of feeding product ads to Amazon. We may need to create a different type of feed to compete with the Amazon stores selling beading supplies.
Need to see if there is an opportunity for us to use the new Google Product Ads as they roll out (extension of Google Base displaying ads for individual relevant products in search results). Worried they may make PPC much more expensive in 2010.
Print Advertising
My experiment with print advertising in one publication this fall has produced no real measurable results. We've received 1...that's right, 1 order that used our coupon offer from our investment. Business is up and may be related in some way to a few ad referrals, but our web traffic is up hugely from all sources.
Conclusion.....skip the display advertising ($1200/issue) and keep the cheap directory listings ($70/issue) for online stores in those publications.
Social Media
We need to invest more energy in every venue here. Much more we can do with Facebook, more active blogging on our blog and others, more interaction in Twitter and other channels.
- First priority will be to invest more time in Facebook. We need to get more interaction going there to do more research and cross promotion with our customers on Facebook.
The jury is out on Twitter, but as it grows up I can see potential, but we need to learn more about what we are doing by experimenting more. Once again, we need more interaction, but there is so much noise there its been hard to invest the time to make it work.
Website Design & Development.
Lots to do here on a limited budget. Doing a minor rollout of new category pages and detail pages for abeadstore.com later this month based on the success of the design we used on ChoiceJewelrySupplies.com. Expect more page views and higher conversion rate.
Want to add many new site shopping features including Product Reviews, Wish Lists, Most recent Product Views, and more. Resource and budget constraints will slow the rollouts.
Email Marketing
Great success story for us this year as we really increased our aggressiveness here. But, want to segment our list this year and allow subscribers to better opt in to the content they want. Sounds simple, but there is a lot of work involved to get that right. But, we don't want to join the email everyday crowd like some of our competitors and too many of our vendors. Eventually that causes more opt-outs and less impact on sales.
Will use more surveys both on website and through emails to get more feedback from customers this year.
Product Feeds
These are driving us crazy on paid shopping sites. Slight tweaks and recategorizations are necessary for each shopping engine and even then, they put things in ridiculous categories. Not to mention, the ROI has not been very good on paid shopping sites like become.com and shopping.com.
- Google Base is a different story. That ROI is huge (it's currently free) because of the visibility it delivers in search results. We are going to really try to nail that feed down with the right products and content starting in January.
Thefind.com is also a great success (it's also free). Good conversion rate and "ok" visibility for us there, but I suspect that will become more difficult and less free over time.
Product Strategy
This year we are going to count on new products to drive a lot of revenue growth instead of just finding new customers.
- We are adding a single major product line in January based on our competitive research that we completed last month. If that is successful, we will grow that dramatically. If not, we'll add many more incremental products in other areas over the course of the year instead.
What will you be doing in 2010 to promote growth and traffic in your stores? Love to know more about what your thoughts are out there!
4 Comments
Kerry Murdock says:
Dale,
This is a terrific, big-picture overview of what a seasoned merchant such as yourself looks at, and plans.
Thank you for sharing it.
Kerry M.
PeC
KevinShopTab says:
I agree. I think marketing is a very important tool in the fragile economy. Now more than ever it is important to differentiate yourself from the competition and show customers exactly what you have to offer. It is meeting and exceeding those expectations through customer service that keeps them coming back but excellent marketing that gets them there in the first place.
In making that conection in the customers mind it is very important to build good personal relationships. Personally I feel social media is the way of the future for 2010 and will be a valuable tool in building those relationships that will in turn increase customer loyalty and sales.
I work for a company called ShopTab that you might want to check out (http://www.facebook.com/shoptabapp) as this application helps businesses build customer loyalty through personalization and accessibility. We saw a huge opportunity for eCommerce business owners who wanted to leverage and monetize their Facebook presence. Facebook ShopTab App allows these business owners the ability to create a shop tab directly on their Facebook fan page.
We feel with the use of personalization through social media sites like Facebook companies can continue to build valuable relations through various media vehicles and keep their customers involved and happy.
Thanks,
–Kevin
Louis Camassa says:
You nailed it-Google Base has already been implemented in many SERP’s, and is demonstrating massive ROI. My time will be invested in optimizing Google Base feeds to maximize visibility. This includes; keyword rich titles/descriptions, accurate category mapping, Adwords and Google Checkout configuration, custom attributes (size, UPC, colors, etc…), feed updates, reviews, and the list goes on.
Check out coupon submission sites (retialmenot, tjoos, mycoupons,etc…) and once you get your product feed dialed in affiliate marketing.
rlover says:
I appreciated your updated comments on print advertising. I had found your blog through your discussion on "Print Versus PPC Advertising Dollars".
When I read that article I thought to myself your reasons for staying with print originally were mostly "gut feel" where your reasons for PPC were because of trackable successes.
I lead marketing for a regional office furniture dealership and lead our buying group's online marketing. One common tool we use as well is a printed catalogue we are very attached to after producing it for 20 years.
We can track activity from online. It is super hard to really track direct and indirect sales from our catalogue and other print ads. We have not tried to put our shoulder to the wheel on print-trackables - call tracking, coupons and such. I very much think we will see what you have... less and less response to print.
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