Archive for the ‘Book Reviews’ Category
Book Review: The Perfection of Marketing
Monday, January 18th, 2010Despite it’s ambitious title, The Perfection of Marketing
The book walks through three major steps in the author’s perfection of marketing process: positioning the brand through the sales moment; rolling out the brand consistently; and return on investment marketing. In the author’s parlance, the “sales moment” is that key value proposition that makes a prospect say “yes.” They’ve done their homework. They’ve identified several alternative products or services that will solve their problem. What is the key point that makes them choose to buy from your company above all others? That’s Connors’ key sales moment, and the value proposition around which to build the brand.
The first section walks through the four main elements of branding: a company’s name, logo, tagline, and campaignable image. Nike is used an example. The name Nike comes from the Greek goddess of victory (not a bad association for a company that produces sports apparel for competitive athletes at all levels). The swoosh logo invokes motion and speed. The tagline (which former spokesperson Tiger Woods clearly took a bit too literally), “Just do it,” is both immediately relevant and highly memorable. And the image—an athlete running—reflects the aspirations of the company’s target market. Few companies tie all the elements of branding together that ideally, but its a goal every company can pursue.
The second section, rolling out the brand, properly focuses on building the brand internally first, before taking it to the market. Before a brand image will be believable and accepted by prospects, it must be internalized by employees and partners. Messages must be consistent imbued into the company’s culture. Branding is next extended to the organization’s website and communicated to the media and other key influencers through PR and social media marketing, then to prospects through advertising and promotional activities.
The final section, one sure to be dear to CEOs and CFOs (and the marketers who need to communicate with them in the language of business), explains return on investment marketing. The first key is understanding the lifetime value of a customer; from this, ROI calculations can be performed on any marketing activity to help set budget levels appropriately. Two different strategies are presented: a slow growth strategy focused on conservative and modest marketing investments, and a more aggressive fast growth strategy, “spending ahead of sales” to gain a competitive foothold in the market or launch a disruptive new product.
The book is aimed at a wide audience; C-level executives will gain a greater understanding of the role of marketing and the business justification for various levels of investment. Corporate marketers will come away with clear guidelines for an over-arching strategy, and how and when an outside agency can be most helpful. And marketing agency people will get key insights into how to speak with clients at all levels of management, and position their services within a coherent and unified strategy for marketing success. (Incidentally, The Perfection of Marketing is actually highly aligned with the business practices of the agency I’m part of, KC Associates, though with some helpful enhancements.)
So does the book live up to it’s title? For the most part, yes. My only criticism of the book, albeit a minor one, is that in its brevity, the book does a much better job with the “what” of marketing than with the “how.” This relatively slim volume would have benefited from a bit more detail on specific steps or actions to accomplish some of the objectives presented. Readers will have look elsewhere, or fill in some of the blanks using their own creativity, in order to incorporate the overall strategy presented here.
Still, The Perfection of Marketing
Other reviews of this book:
The Perfection of Marketing, by James Connor – A Book Review
Brad Shorr
My Marketing Book of the Year
Douglas Karr
Book Review: Website Optimization – Speed, Search Engine & Conversion Rate Secrets
Thursday, January 14th, 2010Author Andrew King, president of Internet marketing firm Web Site Opimization, LLC has really done it. In Website Optimization: Speed, Search Engine & Conversion Rate Secrets
Or at least almost any business. There are still some specialized skills required—it certainly helps to have some background in online marketing, web analytics and HTML coding—though King’s clear and concise prose removes a lot of the mystery.
The book is divided into two major sections: Search Engine Marketing Optimization and Web Performance Optimization. It pays for itself in the first 50 pages—two chapters covering natural search engine optimization and an organic search case study. While much of the material here is well-covered in blogs and other books, even experienced SEOs are likely to find a few new ideas here. For example, though I’ve used many keyword tools and even written about some of the best keyword research tools here and here, I somehow managed to overlook Wordtracker’s free keyword suggestion tool, which uses data from Dogpile and Metacrawler to estimate search volume across all search engines.
Here are several more key SEO insights provided by King:
- Wordtracker’s fee-based tool goes beyond free keyword tools by tracking what it calls a keyword effectiveness index. According to King, “The keyword effectiveness index, or KEI, is a comparison of the number of searches and the number of web page results. Targeting high KEI phrases with adequate search volume gives you the best chance to rank quickly on particular terms by going where others aren’t competing. Very Sun Tzu.”
- “Create your keywords tag using your master keyword list and the visible words in your page. Although you can separate keywords with a comma or space, omitting commas will give you more proximity hits between adjacet terms.” King recommends using up to 30 words, with specific key words repeated up to four times.
- “After title tags, headlines are the most important component of web pages for search engine rankings…Include the primary keyphrase of your web page in the first-level header…The main header should describe the content of the page succinctly in 40 to 60 characters.” Use real header tags (h1 through h6) rather than “fake” p-class tags in your CSS files. And keep in mind that h2-h6 tags are just as important, possibly even more important, than h1 title text.
- Bake in your most important key phrase to your home tab, so
