Surveilling Bloomin’ Onions, Bert, and Giant Contracts – The Sales Lead Digest
This week’s articles lean toward big picture ideas but we round everything out with potty humor so all is right in the world. We’re going to use a consultant’s deep dive into direct-to-consumer retail for some hints on B2B marketing, think about using game film to make our marketing better, think a little about Google’s new search changes, and keep an eye on a giant Pentagon contract won by Microsoft. Then we pop into Shanghai for just a bit. Enjoy!
This weeks sales and marketing news:
FMCG CEOs: 10 Thoughts About The Future Of DTC
“We believe DTC (direct-to-consumer) start-ups should really start owning first Awareness-Consideration and then only move to Purchase. As digital marketing inflation continues, it will be increasingly a winning strategy.”
Yes, this article is jargon heavy and lengthy but for us in the business-to-business marketing space, the direct-to-consumer marketing experience is like looking into a crystal ball and seeing our future. The days of buying late stage paid traffic are gone as the price per click goes way up and margins shrink. We need to concentrate on the A (Awareness) in AIDA and build audiences early in the decision process. Your company needs more writers with reporting skills today! Add them before their prices skyrocket.
At an Outback Steakhouse Franchise, Surveillance Blooms
“He compares working in restaurants to playing sports. Without surveillance tools like the ones Presto offers, managers “have to coach based on the score—they don’t know what actually happened on a play-by-play basis.”
Breaking down game film, listening to sales calls, doing post-mortems on marketing campaigns. . .we all know these are powerful tools for improving performance but we don’t do them enough. Myself included! If you’re wondering where your business’ most beneficial robots will show up in the future, it’s probably in the analysis of all this footage. An intelligent agent looking through our performance for trends can help improve our coaching immediately. However, while we wait for our tech saviors, we should probably set up a time to review events manually.
Understanding searches better than ever before
“At its core, Search is about understanding language. It’s our job to figure out what you’re searching for and surface helpful information from the web, no matter how you spell or combine the words in your query. While we’ve continued to improve our language understanding capabilities over the years, we sometimes still don’t quite get it right, particularly with complex or conversational queries. In fact, that’s one of the reasons why people often use ‘keyword-ese,’ typing strings of words that they think we’ll understand, but aren’t actually how they’d naturally ask a question.”
At LeadGen Compass we have looked at a tiny fraction of a fraction of the number of search terms Google has and we reached the same conclusion, people use search to understand how to search for. This new update will cause a lot of breathless, panic sounding emails to show up in your inbox about how you need help with SEO but don’t stress. While there are a lot of changes coming, one thing that hasn’t changed is the more relevant you are to your customers, the more you’ll show up in search results. The winners in this new age will be the marketers who are most intimate with their customers decision process.
Microsoft wins Pentagon’s $10 billion cloud computing contract
“Our thought bubble, via Axios’ Scott Rosenberg: The president’s outspoken criticism of Amazon and its founder put the Pentagon in a tough place however the choice came down. If the government went with Amazon, it might have raised Trump’s ire, but now that it is rejecting the company, it will inevitably be accused of politicizing the choice.”
News flash! Everything is politicized these days! This is a huge contract and since it’s a government contract we get to see some of inner workings of how big decisions are made. In this case, each of the big players (IBM, Oracle, Amazon and winner Microsoft) are for all intents and purposes able to deliver on the contract, so is a decision of that size really coming down to an emotional element? No matter, as a marketer it’s a good reminder for us and our sales teams to stick with 2 parts emotion and 1 part logic in our pitches.
Shanghai high school students are on the lookout for Chinglish in public places
This just made me laugh. I saw some funny ones when I was there but nothing like these!
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