Distribution & Conversion: The Fusion of Marketing and Product

Chief Marketing Officer: What’s in a Job Title?

The Product Management function for Internet companies is a Marketing function. If it’s not under Marketing in your company, it’s simply time to move it.

Marketing people can't do viral marketing.

Today’s "marketing" - viral marketing and word-of-mouth marketing - is built into the core of the product, and without the ability to design it in, marketing will continue to be expensive and sub-optimally effective, holding back the value of your business.

Today’s Chief Marketing Officer must not only straddle the fence between product specification and traditional marketing, but to be successful, remove the fence.

This isn't the Mad Men type marketer your mother warned you about - it's completely different sort:

"Marketing people can’t do viral marketing. You don’t just build a product and then choose viral marketing. There is no viral marketing add-on. Anyone who advocates viral marketing in this way is wrong and lazy. People romanticize it because, if you do it right, you don’t have to spend money on ads or salespeople. But viral marketing requires that the product’s core use case must be inherently viral." - Peter Thiel, Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup - Class 9 Notes

Marketing -- that job of creating awareness and finding new customers / users across a variety of media and channels -- is now less about paid media and more about earned media. The thing that’s changing the shape of the position is that the online product or service itself is now the biggest driver of earned marketing impact.  (Note: ecommerce remains very different - you're selling products online, not selling online products)

When people ask what I do, it’s almost impossible to communicate succinctly. As chief marketing officer, or senior vice president of marketing AND products, it’s complicated but critical to tell both stories and how they’re intertwined. And the value that I personally bring to the table is that I understand how and why they’re so intimately connected and know how to manage both sides synchronously.

If I explain that I’m in marketing, they get it the advertising part - but that’s only half my job (less these days). When I say I run product management, too, I get blank stares. I have to explain product management and that it’s not a coding position, but a general management position. (It’s somehow unique that software product managers, unlike the product managers at Proctor and Gamble, Mattel and Nestlé (who are the general managers of their products) don’t run into the same quandary.)

But, that’s changing - and it’s about time! Product Management needs more recognition as a critical function, even for startups. It’s usually the CEO or the CTO who’s the head product manager - it’s just not part of their title.

Take Instagram. Their focus on creating a passionate user network, rather than new features or platform expansion, turned that company into a tidy little acquisition. CEO Kevin Systrom understood the value of users, and [relentlessly] focused the technical team on that over all else. There were no Google Adwords campaigns, no SEO links, no paid Facebook campaigns, and hardly even a website – every bit of "marketing" was embedded the app.

As an accomplished Chief Marketing Officer for multiple Internet and software companies, building market awareness is largely reliant on a great product / service experience - and happy customers who can and want to tell their friends about it.

The customer drives marketing now. Marketing isn’t something you do. it’s what your customers and users do for you. If they like you (your product or service), it will grow (with well-executed coaxing and encouragement, and viral product design). If they think it’s OK or don’t like it, growth is slow, painful and expensive. It’s why so many companies fail – customers just aren’t delighted.

Not sure about your company? Give yourself a litmus test – run a customer survey to captive email addresses and your website to get your NPS (Net Promoter Score).  Ask just one question:

 How likely are you to recommend this product / service to a friend or colleague? 

The results will tell you how much work you have to do on your product experience with the goal of getting users completely enthused about it. (Make sure your scale is 0 to 10, not 1 to 10, otherwise you’ll be getting good information but it won’t be a comparable NPS score.)  An aggregate score of 70 or more is great - you're on your way.

Today’s successful Internet head of marketing isn’t a corporate marketing wonk, creative advertiser, or a brand builder – the traditional emphasis of a CMO. Marketing is not about paid media, brand advertising or even direct advertising. This new breed of CMO must orchestrate a blend of integrated online, social and email marketing programs that drive word of mouth and online recommendations and referrals. That means finding and leveraging happy customers as brand ambassadors and harnessing their inherent goodness. These programs are part of the product and service experience, intrinsically sharable and leverage the power of the network (and yes, the social graph). But how do you differentiate this CMO from the 'old version'?

Combining the “Chief Product Officer” and “Chief Marketing Officer” into a single role is the right call for early-stage Internet companies. My naming dilemma of the day is finding a new title for this role that encompasses both marketing and product management in a way that’s descriptive, intuitive and creative.

• Chief Experience Officer?
• Vice President of Distribution?
• Head of Customer Experience? 
• SVP of Advocacy? 
• VP of Customer Mobilization?
• VP of Customer Experience?
• Director of Social Sharing?
• Growth Hacker?

I could use your help – can you think of a job title that represents both product and marketing?

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Marketing Your Brand on Pinterest - Better Than Facebook?

There's a lot of talk about Pinterest lately due to it's crazy-fast growth (faster than Facebook): What is it good for? Why is it growing so quickly? Who's on it?  And, how should brands should use it?  Here’s a little insight into how consumer brands can use Pinterest effectively to drive traffic and sales as an integrated part of their social media marketing mix.

What does “being on” Pinterest really mean?

There are two ways for brands to be on Pinterest.  One is passive, one is active:

1. Get Pinned.  Optimize your website's content so others can easily Pin It, share it, discuss it.
2. Maintain a Pinboard.  Create and update a brand profile on Pinterest.

Get Pinned.  Optimize Your Website's Content

Even if you decide that creating a brand profile on Pinterest isn’t for you, you can and should still leverage Pinterest passively.  How?  Make it easy for Pinterest users to get your content to their Pinboard so they can share it.  All legal and copyright issues aside, when it comes to marketing, the more people talking about your products the better.

Step 1:  Identify the products on your website that people will covet.

The Power of Pinterest
(Click for Full Infographic)

That’s right, covet.  There has to be some sort of “drool factor” to get things Pinned on Pinterest.  If one person finds it desirable, many people will find it desirable and then Re-Pin it.  Re-Pins are the rocket fuel of Pinterest – the more you have, the more mindshare you've built, the more traffic you'll get.

You should treat each and every Pin as an object of desire – from the photo, to the description, to the link back to your site. Here’s where working with your web development team comes in – you need to make sure photos on your site can be Pinned.  Make sure photos are not rendered in Flash (if you’re still using Flash you’re missing out on many other social media promotions and SEO as well). Give each photo a caption (title) that is easy to select and copy (and then paste into Comments).  Make sure photo URLs are static (not on a CDN like Akamai).

Next: you can encourage visitors to create Pins.  There’s a Pinterest PinIt button (see button below the image to the right).  You should put that next to every photo or once on every page that has one or more product photos.  A good place for the PinIt button is right next to your Facebook Share and Tweet This icons in a nice red/blue/light blue grouping.

And, don't forget to include the 'Follow Me on Pinterest' button  next to your Follow on Facebook / Twitter buttons if you've set up a Pinboard.

All these buttons are getting making pages pretty crowded, so you might have to think about redesigning them into an appealing but unobtrusive graphical container.

Lastly: test it!  Make sure you can create Pins quickly and easily yourself.  If you can’t do it, then your customers and potential customers surely won’t.

Create a Pinboard.  Your Brand on Pinterest.

The discussions about whether or not to maintain a brand profile on Pinterest are ongoing.  Large consumer brands that are used to push marketing and brand marketing are having a hard time figuring out what to do.  Pinterest (and social media in general) is so…well, personal.

Does curating Pinterest content enhance a brand? Does it makes sense to do with all the other social media channels you’re maintaining?  If you represent a B2C product company - as long as you're not more than 80% male oriented - the answer is "Yes".

“For brands, Pinterest has the potential to connect inspiration to purchase,” said Matt Wurst, director of digital communities at 360i. “People know which websites to go to if they want to buy a specific product or type of product, but sometimes they need a spark of inspiration to help them make a decision…Retailers can use Pinterest to drive traffic to their e-commerce sites, whereas CPG marketers might use it to curate recipes around their products…”

Here’s a great flowchart infographic on whether or not you and your brand should bother with creating and account and maintaining content.  I can’t speak to the effectiveness of Pinterest for B2B use, but for B2C, Pinterest can be very very powerful.

The Pinterest Audience

Contrary to everything else you might have heard, marketing (and especially social media marketing) is about story telling.  Pinterest is story telling through pictures – and since 60% - 65% of people in the world prefer to take in information visually (read more about NLP) Pinterest is wildly appealing to a large part of the (female*) population.  If you’re targeting females, especially between the ages of 20 and 50, this is a great place to find and grow an new audience and keep connected to an existing one.

[* Why not males?  Like most things that require day to day attention - we can’t be bothered and we don't have anything close to a nesting instinct.  Not scientifically proven, but after talking about Pinterest with many different people, both male and female,  guys just don’t ‘get it’.]

Before you get all excited and move forward, realize that maintaining Pinterest is going to be like maintaining Twitter – you need to have multiple posts and interactions every day.  You need to share, like and comment on other people’s Pins.  It takes time, it takes creativity, and it takes dedication to maintaining the account.  An inactive account might as well be a dead account.  If you can’t put at least 30 minutes a day into it, reserve your name now but wait to use it until you have the time.

Your Pinterest Account

OK, so you’re managing a B2C brand that appeals to women between 20 and 50, and you’ve decided to create a Pinterest account – how should you set it up?  What I’ve seen work the best throughout social media is personal recommendations, rather than brand recommendations.  Even though social media brings people closer to brands, they’re still brands and not real people. Nominate an employee, use an executive, or create a persona to setup your account – each business will be different, but give your profile personality and a person’s headshot along with a logo, not just a big logo. People, especially women, want to feel an emotional connection.  You can’t do that as effectively with a corporate brand presence.

Your Pinterest Content

What should you post?  

Remember, this is story telling through pictures. Start with your company’s history and products – it’s usually the fastest and easiest.  Start pinning your own products from your website to create a visual product catalog.  Create the right topics or categories, and group the things you think people will (or do) covet.  Don't Pin every product, or every color variation.  Only Pin photos that make the item look as desirable as possible, and be selective.

IMPORTANT!  You should NOT Pin all of your products / content all at the same time!   The power of Pins is appearing at the top of your follower's feeds, and the subsequent benefit is social sharing, or Re-Pinning.  Pins show up in feeds for a moment in time – they will only be visible to your followers for an hour, a day, or a few days depending on how many people they are following.  If you Pin all your content at once, you’re throwing away most of it.  And if you don't have any followers, you're throwing away just about all of it!

Instead, create a following first.  As soon as you create your account and Pin a few products (5 - 10), start following people who seem to have the same tastes or interests as you and you’ll get reciprocal follows.  Create a base of followers this way.  Like and comment on other peoples’ Pins.  Also, link to your Pinboards from your other social media channels to get your existing followers / fans to follow you on Pinterest, too.   If you've done a good job there, you'll have a Pinterest following in no time.

Then, you’re ready to start a steady stream of Pinning – one of your products every hour or three.  Trickle the Pins in over time, and you’ll get much more traction, many more Re-Pins, and a lot more followers.

Your Story, Your Lifestyle

While you’re posting all the content that’s fit for Pinning from your website, it’s up to you to tell a story about your brand.  You're representing a lifestyle and trying to really identify with your core consumer.  Your "lifestyle" is really theirs - what else does your consumer do?  Based on your research, what else are they interested in?  Most importantly, what do they aspire to do?  What do they aspire to own?  What do they covet?

Your story is yours alone, and this is where having a personality represent the brand can make it easier (unless your brand is really interesting).  Every person has tastes and interests.  If you’ve chosen your company founder as the personality, for example, they have hobbies.  They have interests.  They have food they like to eat, cars they like to drive, shoes they like to wear.  

Create those categories and give your brand life beyond the products it sells.  Give your followers an emotional, non-sales connection to the lifestyle and tastes of your founder.  Create categories on your Pinboard for other people's content that essentially describe how those Pins reinforce your brand and messaging.

Become a Curator
Become a curator of a certain thing that is a direct benefit of your brand, educates about an area relevant to you, is focused on a charity or cause you support, or is in some way complementary to what you do.   Make it pretty broad to attract general interest.  People might not know about your company or product, but they might find you because of your lifestyle Pins.  This is hard!  Here are some examples:  

• You're an interior designer, create a Pinboard for new ways to use old things as furniture, decor, or art.
• You sell jewelry, educate your audience about gemstones, metals, and where they come from to reinforce the fact that your only use the best quality materials.
• You sell vacations, create boards about travel gadgets, luggage or recipes for cultural foods to reinforce that you're knowledgeable about travel in general.
• You're restauranteur, find all items that are trendy to reinforce your brand as trendy and hip - curate things your customers will covet.

This is storytelling at its finest.  Curating your visual story builds trust in your brand and your people in a subtle and genuine way.  After you build a base of followers organically this way, when you do decide promote that next new product, people are more likely to pay attention/.  They will like, Re-Pin, click through, and buy because they “know” you, trust you, and relate to what you represent.  In the end, you represent them.

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Private / Flash Sale Site Update: TravelTipping

New Private Sale Site for Travel - New as of March 2, 2012

TravelTipping (www.traveltipping.com) has a simple email-only registration, so it’s vaguely private, and they don't seem to email too much, but it's early days.  Prices “up to 75% off” hotels, resorts, villas, tours and cruises - this is not a room-night-only service but sells multi-day vacations.

TravelTipping has kind of a funny cow logo and alliteration in the name, but I’m not sure how cow tipping has anything to do with travel deals.  A bit of a stretch if you ask me.

The site enables you to select regions rather than showing you a list of everything, and has limited availability for hotel stays which have a set # of nights. The packages are available until they sell out, rather than being on sale for a fixed period of time. You can select the check-in date, but the length of stay is fixed. Looks like there are 10-30 packages available for any one hotel, so if there’s enough volume, deals will sell out.

Updated the growing List of Private / Flash Sale Sites for Travel.

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Travel Flash Sale News: Jetsetter, Andrew Harper, ThailandFastDeals

There’s been a bit of a retrenchment in travel private sales – not a lot of newcomers lately, but some notable news:

Jetsetter
Jetsetter continues to innovate and leverage its audience by becoming an expert travel site and moving revenue away from only flash sales. They also state they’re seeing success from non-hotel offerings (villas, etc) which is probably true. They’ve got the ear of Techcrunch anyway.

Andrew Harper Travel 
I missed this in January, but Andrew Harper, the members-only luxury travel site, announced a private sale offering. It’s different than their regular Auctions offering, which is members-only, because you don’t bid, you book directly. A bit late, but they’ve jumped on the bandwagon.

E-Booking.com
Looking very similar to everything else, e-booking.com is a very un-inspiring name for a new private sale site I first heard about through this blog's comments.  "Up to 40% off, luxury hotels you won't find anywhere else."  The company is located in Switzerland, and is already on the death row watch list as they haven't updated their Facebook or Twitter since December 2011.

I’ve updated my complete list of Flash Sale Websites for Travel here.

Thailand Fast Deals 
And last but not least, the first vertically (challenged) flash sale website for travel, created by the Tourism Authority of Thailand. ThailandFastDeals.com is a bit different because in addition to hotels, it offers flights, tour packages through Thailand’s travel partners. It also makes all pricing visible without registration, so it’s not a members-only site, just a clearinghouse for good deals.

 It will be hard to keep people engaged the same way other sites offer a broad selection of destinations to a captive email list – how often does the average American go to Thailand? But, globally this might be an interesting play, especially if they can get it to rank in organic search results and find travelers actively looking for Thailand vacations.

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How to Start a Flash Sale Website

It seems that everyone and their brother is starting a flash sale website - why can't you?

Well, there's the issue - there are SO many flash sale websites out there, how can you get another one off the ground?  It's not so hard mechanically to build one, it's hard to get mindshare, and even harder to do it profitably.  The mega flash sale company The Gilt Group (as well as Rue La La and Lot18) just did a round of layoffs as they aren't achieving profitability like they thought - even with a ton of sales throughput.  In this business, margins matter, and the margins on discounts are razor thin.

I speak to flash sale subscribers every day and more and more of them are telling me they are unsubscribing from their daily emails - essentially forgetting about the service - because they're inundated with too many mails, too many sales, too many products to buy.

When there are only a few flash sale sites, it's easier to navigate the landscape.  All the products seem good, there aren't too many emails, and the quality is high.  We've gone so far off the deep end with shop, shop shop all the time, and it's starting to reach it's overhyped peak.  How many discount massages or workouts do you really need each week?

And now, even the national media companies are offering their own "local" deals, too, thinking they can get their media consumers to sign up to buy from them, rather than buy directly from the vendors advertising with them.  Why go through a media-company-middleman who has no experience in this arena?  Anyway, I digress.  If you feel you really need to jump on the flash sale bandwagon, you can make some money, or at least get your site and audience to the point where it's a nice acquisition target for Groupon or LivingSocial, who love to purchase smaller companies to grow.

#1. The first step to starting a flash sale site is:  have an angle.  Don't do what everyone else is doing - if it's not interesting and unique, don't bother.  Find a niche that has a big enough audience and is underserved by the current players.  It could be a geographical niche, demographic niche, product niche or something else, but you can't expect to win without something that's a little different in this crowded market.  You need to give people a reason to sign up for your service over everyone else out there.

#2 Your website.  People have to buy from somewhere - your website is where they will they manage their email subscription, keep their credit card on file, see their shipping status, and make those purchases.  The flash sale website is your central communications tool, so make sure it's customer-centric and customer-friendly.  My advice is find a great product manager with proven e-commence experience to design it to be simple, easy to navigate, and easy to check out with the goods.  Even though it's a single-product system per purchase, the basics of landing page optimization, user pathing and checkout optimization.

#3 Which comes first, the product sources or the audience?  Definitely the audience.  You need to start somewhere - with an opt-in email list so you have a base to start selling to.  The right lists can be hard or expensive to come by.  You could pay on a per name basis through email co-registration programs, market directly to other peoples's lists and try to gather responses, run a contest or two that you promote through social media, buy a list on the black market - there are a quite a few options.  You need a few thousand subscribers to start, at a bare minimum, assuming that you know that those people are really interested in what you plan to sell them.

#4  Decide on frequency.  You need to determine out how many deals per day or per week you're going to offer at the start, so you can align your sales team (you?) to schedule at least 2 weeks in advance of the sale.  You could go with one per week - that's not too few.  Quality is the most important factor, in the beginning, middle and end.  Volume is important when you're established, but quality is your first priority. People won't buy things they aren't interested in and aren't a good deal.  It's bad when they don't buy once, but not performing two or three times in a row will cause you will lose your captive audience - they will unsubscribe.

#5  Products.  Getting vendors to supply products for your flash sale is a true sales job - it's especially tricky when you don't have a (large) audience.  When you go to your first set of vendors with the pitch of 'We don't know how many we'll sell because we haven't tried yet.' you won't get a lot of takers. Talk it up, give them great terms - don't expect to make money on any of the deals until you have a rhythm going.  Make sure there's something in it for the vendors - give them a reason to play.

#6  There's more... but that's it for now - check back for more details on staring your own flash sale website.

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